“Animosity? No,” Thea replied. “You people make far too much of celebrity—raising them up, tearing them down. You ought to leave poor Luke alone, though I don’t suppose you will, just as you ought to go away and allow this fine city to heal itself in its own good time. Mister Petrakis is a victim, as I and my husband and all the good citizens of Auroville are victims.”
Yelping news-hounds in suits and ties volleyed forth overlapping cries of “Madame Mayor! Madame Mayor!” until, from out of the pack, one voice broke through, an assured baritone Harold had heard many times. “Mayor Cosgrove, a victim you may be, and far be it from me to doubt the word of a public official, but I must say in all candor, Madame Mayor,” and here his brow found its ironic bent, “that you seemed to be enjoying your victimization, so much so that I wonder if it’s entirely fair to claim to be a victim!”
How extremely out of touch that poor man is.
She was right. It stunned Harold to realize it. How commanding the tube made these geeky people. And how very diminished and ordinary and oddly twisted they became when they stepped out from behind the photons and took on flesh and blood. Besides which, he was getting tired of the way they smelled; the tension, the constant brush with strife, these clung to them, confined them, made them smaller than they were meant to be.
“Sir, your insensitivity astounds me.” Thea withered the man, or tried to, with her stare, but Harold felt—as a seismologist senses tremors lost to those not as finely attuned—the faultlines in her facade as she spoke. “Did the people of Jonestown willingly drink Kool-Aid and give it willingly to their children? They did. And were they victims? They were. As I stated earlier, the effect was as powerful and overwhelming as a psychedelic slipped into a drink, but more insidious, because the transformation of the personality was so thorough and seemingly natural that it felt selected instead of imposed, as if the assurance I exhibit before you today were merely a false front, behind which the true self lay concealed. But the glaring eye of television, which brooks no deceit, has brought me back to myself. It has torn away the gaudy surface that pretended depth. It has exposed, in ways we will be hard-pressed to live down in Auroville, the lie thrust upon us that heaven on earth is an attainable goal; and it has left us tangled in shame.”
The man with the bow-tie broke in before the room had a chance to restart its yapping: “Do you seriously think you have any viability left as mayor of this city? Or in fact won’t you be forced to step down? Where, outside of the political circus in Italy a few years ago, has a woman as sexually compromised as the Thea Cosgrove we all saw on TV yesterday been allowed to hold public office?”
I’m afraid he’s right.
Harold nodded to Caroline. The looks they’d received riding through downtown and walking into City Hall did not bode well for Thea’s prospects. Even the commiseration of those officials who had bloomed guardians and then thrown them off was tempered with a holier-than-thou attitude he felt pulsating beneath their surface loyalty to her. And as the news conference progressed, those who had committed themselves to sitting impaneled up here beside their mayor and her mate seemed increasingly discomfited.
“That,” said Thea, “is for the people to decide. I have received, and gratefully so, much support from those who have been through the same ordeal. I hope to garner, and I pray for, the support and forgiveness and good will of those who have not. To them I say, That was not your mayor debasing herself on that screen. That was a woman, and her husband, and hundreds of your fellow citizens, in the throes of a trance cast so wide and so deep it did not feel like a trance. And I say it again, those responsible for this outrage will not go unpunished. Even as I speak, my staff, in consultation with law enforcement authorities countywide, is deciding precisely what battery of charges shall be levied against them. And I promise you this—the charges will be substantial and quick in coming.”
Again they surged in, and again Thea masterfully beat back the tide. There at the podium, she seemed like the commander of a battleship, or the ship itself, its blunt prow fronting wave after wave of hostility, surging ahead under punishment that would overwhelm a vessel not so well fortified as she. He admired her and stood in awe of her. Yet he did not love her. That revelation stunned but did not sadden him. He and his guardian had a brief exchange about it, one sufficiently animated to draw the attention of a reporter near the far door. “We’d like to hear what your husband has to add to what you’ve said,” he chimed in as the questions dwindled and Thea began to wrap up.
“My husband’s views accord with mine,” she said.
The reporter shot back, “The humiliation was at least as great for him, Madame Mayor, as it was for you, and the American people are entitled to know how he’s coping.”
Harold smiled and waved the question away. But Thea made too much of her rebuff, and the sharks, sensing fresh blood, thrashed about with renewed hunger until, throwing him her don’t-you-dare look, Thea stepped aside, standing behind him as if she were prepared to throttle him at his first gaffe. Caroline floated before the podium, her eyes level with the bunched microphone cables super-highwaying off in all directions. Harold was nervous and exhilarated and amused all at once, a little boy whose pockets bulged with nickels and for whose attention hordes of candy jars clamored. Under his angel’s guidance, he tentatively put up a finger and gestured toward the young woman with the luscious lips and the eyes deep enough to drown in.
Why, the young woman asked, did he seem so relaxed? What explained the twinkle in his eye, the bemused smile, the look of self-satisfaction? Was it her imagination or did he perhaps feel not quite as hostile toward a certain famous author as his wife did?
“I feel,” he said, pausing to formulate a truthful reply, pausing to listen to his angel, which amounted to the same thing, “no hostility toward Mister Jameson, nor toward the two children. On the contrary, I feel nothing but gratitude toward them.”
“And why is that, sir?” That dress belonged off her body, her ardent flesh pressed beneath his, sheets tugged taut about them like hatch marks on a topographic map. He felt his phallus begin to thicken with blood.
“Because, my lovely lady, without them, I never would have been brought back in touch with my angel, who, as you I think already suspect, is floating now in front of me—” He had more to add, but the room erupted into pandemonium, and Thea and a staffer—Brian Forrester, who always looked as if he’d just bitten into a bad apricot—took him by the elbows and were whisking him off the dais and out the side door, a frenzied wave of reporters sweeping in to cut them off but failing. And Thea lit into him, soon as that door was closed, as she’d never done in their thirty-five years together. Without Caroline, he would have felt humiliated by Thea’s public excoriation of him, but now he simply let it roll through him, nodding, and slipping in the odd word of apology, and watching the light of his love for her dim and gutter in that sterile antechamber, her colleagues and staff pretending not to be there as she raved.
*****
The worst of it for June was not winding her erratic way through town, nor was it her choiceless choice to take Bedford Avenue (there being too much uncharted forest to risk losing herself)—but rather the replay over and over of her parents’ upset. Jeannie was some help, to be sure. But Jeannie was the main bone of contention, and whenever she attempted to allay June’s anxiety, it only poured oil on her parents’ impassioned arguments. Was the invisible companion of her childhood real, a guardian angel she had lost and now recovered, and who, in conjunction with Ward and Grampa, had helped the three of them open others’ eyes to their angels? Or was she the product of an imagination gone overboard, a fantastic but illusory will-o’-the-wisp, her belief in which had been fed and encouraged by equally misguided yet mutually reinforcing souls? June could see it either way. She both believed and did not believe, her mind marveling at how easy and how tough it was to live in the confines of a conundrum; and her uncertainty, while it did not wipe Jeannie away completely, surely account
ed for the continuing waver and flicker in her image, the hollow tones her voice had taken on.
She lucked out along Bedford. Few cars whizzed by at this hour, and fewer driven by people she recognized. She turned unobserved into Mariposite Lane, passing the neatly manicured Grant place and proceeding along the blacktopped ribbon of road until Ward’s house rose to view. Vans were parked there and people standing about, one with a headset on and a curved black wire defining his jawbone and curled in toward his mouth.
Into the woods.
June backtracked, heard a vehicle turn with its tires popping pebbles into the road behind her, ducked behind an oak tree and let it pass, then angled into the encroaching woods enough to keep the house in sight but not be sighted herself and sufficiently deep that her movements would not attract attention. She used Grampa’s treehouse as a guide and an axis, homing in; when she broke through, Ward stood beside the clubhouse, one hand on it, peering hopefully in her direction. Timothy, hovering at its rooftop, turned a shade of blackened crimson, his animation dampened even as his face lit up at the sight of her and Jeannie. June met Ward halfway, gripping him tightly to her and savoring the welcome of his embrace.
“I thought you might be Grampa,” he said.
“He still hasn’t come back?”
“Nope.”
“I slipped around the TV people.”
“They’ve been out there all day wanting to talk to me and Grampa. Joydrop’s been turning them away but new ones keep coming back and then the old ones recycle again. Mom came home from the clinic and they wouldn’t let her inside until she yelled at Joy to call the police and they backed off. They had her in tears. Or close to it; Mom’s pretty tough.”
He ushered June into the clubhouse, joining her where she collapsed on the bed. And then he noticed her angel’s translucency. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s happening to Jeannie?” There was hurt in his voice, as if he didn’t think he could endure another blow.
“Well,” she began, rising in pitch, then turning away to toy with the fringe on his bedspread. “I’m starting to have doubts. I mean obviously I believe enough that I can still see and hear her, but I’m also starting to wonder if it’s not a trick of the mind, if maybe my parents and the TV commentators and the experts they’ve been interviewing are right about how easily the brain can be fooled.”
“They’re wrong.” A simple statement of fact.
“But how do you know that?”
“Because I’ve lived all my life with Timothy, and all that time he’s been self-evident as air and earth. Maybe more so because I had to hide—from everyone except Grampa and, for a time, the Shy Friends Club—the fact that I saw him at all. He was my secret and he captured my attention on those grounds alone, apart from his personality and his love of color and movement.” The next comment he made, as flip as it was, did nothing to conceal the desolation that lay beneath: “Though he seems—yes, Mister Timothy of the drawn face, you do—to have let events pinch him down into a black funk.”
June felt a sudden alarm. Jeannie’s mouth was moving but nothing reached June’s ears. And she realized as well that as Ward spoke, she had been distancing herself enough to cast him in the role of a certifiably insane if amiable adolescent, hearing him through that filter and finding to her horror that it made perfect sense, no less than taking him as a loving friend genuinely angeled. “There’s where we differ, Ward,” she said, amazed how little of the panic now spiraling upward in her spilled into her voice, which carried on in its mildly fretful way. “I’ve lived most of my life without Jeannie. The world seemed complete before she came back into my life, and it also seems complete and certainly more beautiful with her in it but in a different way—and for the life of me I don’t know which is right.”
“Don’t you think—?”
“I mean if she’s real, how can she be fading?” Now she heard her own desperation seep into her words, though it merely hinted at the despair growing inside. “How come people aren’t trusting their own senses if the angels are real? Why is everybody lapsing back so easily into not believing, just because TV tells them they’re wrong? It doesn’t make sense.”
Ward lifted his ear to the air, where a translucent Timothy said something she couldn’t hear. “Like he says, old habits. Maybe for most folks, it’s too much too soon. It’s so great, they don’t trust it. It needs reinforcing. And as soon as the everyday world rushes in to tell them they’re deluded, they sink back into the comfort of . . . hey, are you okay?” He’d been going on, not looking while she came apart, the fear of loss rising in her so that her throat constricted and her breathing shallowed with dread.
She shook her head, blinking back tears. “No, Ward. I’m not okay. It’s real bad. Hold me.” She grabbed for him, saw his confused face, felt the solidity of his arms warm about her. “I want to believe in her. Don’t let me lose her. Help me.”
“I will,” Ward said. “You won’t lose her.” But his words were empty. He didn’t know how to prevent it, not a clue, and June could tell he meant well, but that “meaning well” wasn’t going to cut it. Printed on the air in faded ink was Jeannie’s half-face, her nose a stray brushstroke, her lips little more, and concentrated in what was left of her was June’s desperate wish for her angel’s survival.
But just as Jeannie was poised to wink out entirely, nothing but erasure in sunlight—in fact as one moist eye swept a sickled gleam about its pupil before being lidded into oblivion—the swirl instead continued on, recapturing the eye and sweeping in widening spirals to draw Jeannie’s color back, arc by arc, plumping it with substance. June saw her angel’s grateful eye fix on the door. She sensed, even before she saw, Grampa on the threshold, filling the frame with ancient assurance. And there beside him, half her body poking through Ward’s bookshelves and a smile on her face a mile wide, was Esme, brilliant, strong, and one stroke shy of wild.
*****
Esme had, despite the ache in his legs, urged him on for reasons she was unable to identify. But now he stood in the door, feeling the reinforcing faith of himself and his grandson and watching June’s crisis pass. As he felt now, and as June later confirmed, doubts which had seemed plausible one moment washed away the next in the light of undeniable truth. June couldn’t explain it—in fact they together came up with all sorts of delusional theories in the ensuing hours to explain away angels, dismissing each theory with a joke. But there came a point, and June had reached it, where the evidence of one’s senses, and of a sixth sense beneath, was so overwhelming that one trusted it over all logical objection.
As they ran to embrace him, Grampa came forward into the clubhouse, hugging them so tight their angular bodies threatened to imprint their bone-lines on his flesh. And then Joydrop and his daughter Laura rushed in, Joy having spied him out the kitchen window at the moment he emerged from the forest. He said nothing about Nemo’s absence; a glance from Laura and her chubby guardian Topsy cautioned silence. Soon after, Joydrop, having unburdened herself—in the context of everyone else’s recounting the events of the last twenty-four hours—of the story of how she’d lost Luke Petrakis and Nemo, and how Luke had been shunted off to the UN, nodded and made to leave, saying she would keep tabs on the house and the growing number of people, media or otherwise, milling about in front of it.
“You need some help?” asked Grampa.
“No,” she said, haggard but perked-up at seeing him safe and sound. Then she left, hauling her limbs up the lawn toward the house. In the near distance, a car door slammed, then another.
“So, Doctor Keeshan,” he said, hugging Laura, “how’s the baby business?”
She shrugged. “The babies are beautiful as ever. I can’t say the same for their parents, though.” She told him how wonderful things had been until yesterday, Merlin and other baby guardians manifesting in all their purity. And then how the worm turned as soon as people lost their angels, how she’d had to clamp down quickly on any mention of storks and companions—though it pained
her to have to stifle her wonder at the miracles she was midwife to—and how cold she’d been treated by moms and dads who had once trusted her but who now thought her party to her father’s game of deception.
“That’s not fair.” Anger simmered in him.
“Fair or not, my docket’s suddenly very sparse, women have decided en masse that they prefer another ob/gyn, and the cooperation I’m used to from my nursing staff seems to have snagged on the nastiness of the TV coverage.”
You need to set that right, Ted.
“Like Esme says, I need to set it right. Bring those media jackasses on and let me square off with them.”
“I don’t think you understand,” Ward cautioned, “what you’d be in for.”
June agreed, looking comically earnest.
Grampa started to brush off their remarks, but Laura chimed in again. “They’re right, Dad. I think we need to fill you in on what’s been happening since Auroville made the evening news.” And they did, describing in detail the personal fallout each of them had endured and the constant drone of news coverage that had built and spread from more staid nightly news programs to info-tainment shows to some sort of newfangled trash-tabloid crap he’d only been dimly aware existed. News crews had begun to outnumber tourists downtown, and everyone, it seemed, from the editor of the Gazette to high school kids starting to stock up on school supplies at Manning’s, were subject to the constant yammer of questioning. Ward said he’d seen Mister Gregerson from the ice cream parlor go from heavily ridiculed affirmation of angel existence, to a wounded muted uncertainty, and at last to a tight-faced denial of them, coupled with a blast at Ted Jameson as a corrupter of children.
“That’s us,” said June.
“Bring on the hemlock,” he said, rolling his eyes. A roar of motorcycles ruffled the afternoon air, a low scour of macadam that came to a halt in front of the house, then peeled back one layer at a time as each cyclist killed his engine. Where he expected silence, Grampa heard what had been there before but had escaped awareness, it had grown so slowly: the rolling mull of a crowd, not a Fourth-of-July crowd, nothing festive in their tone, but something far uglier than that, something moblike and restive.
A Flight of Storks and Angels Page 25