“Hope is my business. Now before you walk back out on Adams Street, I want to sing you my favorite lullaby—if you don’t mind?”
“I need to hear a lullaby, Miriam.”
“Later you will wonder if any of this ever happened. Then you’ll hear the song in your head and know that something very important did happen, even if you don’t quite understand what it was.”
The song, in a language Neenan did not understand (Aramaic, maybe), was unbearably sweet, tender, loving—and hopeful. Much better than anything the noisy seraph brats had ever done. But they were not human, were they?
He realized that he was back on Adams in the ordinary world, but he was still hearing the lovely song.
Naturally she would be good at lullabies.
Later he entered his office, content, happy, and ready. For whatever would happen next.
He phoned Leonard at his office in San Francisco and said he would be flying out to Sacramento the next day and could hop over to San Francisco for brunch on Sunday. Leonard seemed delighted.
“How’s the market out there?” Neenan asked.
“Same as in New York, Dad. You’re up a bit, WorldCorp is down. You’re not going to sell to them, are you?”
“Not a chance.”
“Well,” Michael observed, “that was decisive activity, wasn’t it?”
“I felt that I might as well handle an easy one over the weekend while I get ready for the big ones next week.”
“You think Lenny will be easy?”
“Compared to the others, sure.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Michael agreed, bemused perhaps by his charge’s newfound confidence.
Then Neenan remembered that he was supposed to be careful of seraphic sensitivity. “It will be all right, Michael. Don’t worry about me. It will be all right. I promise.”
The seraph’s massive face widened in a benign smile. “First time I’ve heard you sound confident since the flight to O’ Hare.”
“I’m going to reclaim my wife and my son, Michael, that I promise you. This time I won’t blow it.”
“If you say so, Ray. You’re beginning to talk like one of us.”
“It rubs off.”
The trip to Sacramento was something he had to do sometime, if only to fend off potential raids on his cable company out there from Honoria Smythe who with WorldCorp money behind her might become a dangerous predator.
More dangerous, that is.
On the other hand, if WorldCorp gave up the battle for NE, NorthCal might be vulnerable for a takeover. Neenan did not want to get directly involved in such a fight. Leave it to the Californians.
He spoke with his Sacramento people at the airport. They seemed delighted by his energy and his confidence that they would drub WorldCorp.
Back in the Gulfstream, the pilot told him that fog was closing in at SFO.
“Typical,” Neenan said. “What do we do?”
“We’re cleared to take off. SFO says the fog may blow off and then again it may not. We’ll circle around and see what happens.”
It would be a nice irony, he thought, if he was killed out here. But he had been told on the highest authority—well, almost the highest—that everything would be all right.
“OK,” he said. “I know we’ll be careful.”
He called Leonard, spoke to Johnny, and said, “I hear you guys have some fog over there.”
“Out beyond Twin Peaks, sir.”
“I still plan to land at SFO sometime today and put up at the Fairmont. We still on for brunch there tomorrow?”
“We’re looking forward to it.”
Sounded like a nice kid. Thank God I never said anything nasty about gays to Leonard. Unlike his mother.
Michael was seated in the cabin of the plane. This time he was wearing a Forty-Niners warm-up suit.
“Where’s the companion?” Neenan began aggressively. “She’d do better in that getup than you do.”
“She couldn’t fit in it,” Michael replied nonchalantly. “She is in Chicago taking care of some problems there.”
Neenan knew that he was supposed to ask what problems, so he deliberately did not. “You guys can move almost as fast as the speed of thought.”
“My job is to see that we don’t have any accidents up in that fog.”
The plane took off and climbed rapidly to get over the mountains. The sky was blue and the valleys below were sharply outlined in winter shadows.
“It’s snowing in the mountains behind San Francisco,” the pilot announced. “The fog may lift, however. They’re giving us an hour-and-a-half estimate for touchdown, but I wouldn’t believe that.”
Gaby did appear, wearing a form-fitting Chicago Bulls warm-up suit.
“You look gorgeous,” Neenan told her as the Gulf-stream took off.
“I’m not sure, Michael,” she replied with a blush, “that it is appropriate for a human creature to leer at me in such a fashion.”
“He’s not leering, dear one,” the boss seraph replied gently, “he’s only admiring. He’s given up leering. It is impossible not to admire you in whatever form you take on.”
Gaby blushed again, this time with pleasure, as, come to think of it, she had the previous time.
“Associating with these quick-tongued Irish humans, dear one, may have a permanent effect on you.”
Preliminary love signals between the two companions, doubtless displayed for his admiration and instruction. These superbeings for all their power and wisdom had to be tender with one another too.
Interesting.
“Since I’m the only one in the pool when you swim with me, Gaby, you really don’t need your swimsuit. We can pretend it is Captiva again.”
This time she didn’t pretend to be embarrassed. “I’ll try to remember. Perhaps for a moment before I spin off in light, though only with your companion present.”
“I find the light more interesting myself,” Michael admitted, “but that’s because I’m a seraph.”
All very domestic. They were up to something. They were always up to something. It was in their nature to be up to something. Were they sometimes too clever by half? Did some of their convoluted schemes have no impact at all because they were too twisted for their human “accounts” to understand?
I wouldn’t bet against it.
“I better get back to work,” Gaby said as she kissed her husband on his cheek and then Neenan on his forehead. “See you both soon.”
I’ve never been kissed by a seraph before, he thought.
He realized that he was supposed to ask questions about the seraphic family life, but ignored the obligation. Instead he shut his eyes and curled up for a nap.
“Keep us away from the mountains,” he said to Michael.
“It’s the humans flying around in these things that I have to watch out for.”
“You guys should have a team looking after airports.”
“We have six monitors at SFO. Two dozen at ORD.”
“Just ordinary, commonplace angels?”
“Some archangels actually.”
They were two hours late landing at SFO. One runway glowed in bright sunshine, the other was still shrouded in fog.
“Do you really have a crowd of your folk at O’Hare?”
“Working overtime. They love the job. Kind of like your chess.”
The choristers returned to action, humming soft songs of praise.
“What’s that about?”
“The choir? They’re singing one of our hymns of praise for the work angels do. You’ve never seen the hymns, have you?”
“Seen them?”
“Certainly. Our singing has color as well as sound. Let me see … Ah, that will do.”
The cabin filled with a gently changing colored glow that matched the colors of the rainbow to the musical scale. The effect was breathtaking.
“Naturally your human eyes are not capable of detecting all the nuances, nor the colors beyond ultraviolet or infrared.”
“Would you like something to drink, Mr. Neenan?” the cabin attendant asked.
“Do we have any Irish whiskey?”
“I think so. I’ll check.”
She looked around the cabin for a moment and shook her head, as if she had a vague sensation of sights and sounds.
“We do have a bottle,” she said when she returned, “of Seraphic Single Malt. Would that be all right?”
“As long as you don’t have anything else.”
Michael snorted derisively.
Neenan sipped the amber brew and coughed. Seraphic Irish whiskey, Neenan thought, might also be marketed as a cure for postnasal drip.
He shut his eyes and drifted in and out of sleep as the symphony of sound and colors lulled him into peacefulness—helped now by the water of life.
“We’ve been cleared to land, Mr. Neenan,” the pilot reported. “Please make sure your seat belt is fastened.”
It was.
Neenan looked out the window. He saw nothing but fog so thick that the wingtips of the Grumman were invisible.
“Does he know what he’s doing?” he asked the boss seraph.
“He’s a good pilot,” Michael said, not opening his eyes. “But, even if he doesn’t know what he’s doing, I do.”
“The view on landing, Mr. Neenan,” the pilot said, “will be spectacular. We’re landing on the east runway, which is cleared of fog. The west runway is still closed down.”
“Great,” Neenan murmured.
“We like to keep our accounts entertained,” Michael commented.
The scene was indeed spectacular. On the right the sky was blue, the sun was shining brightly, the Berkeley Hills were gloriously green, the Bay glittered as if it were the Mediterranean. On the left ominous masses of fog shifted in and out, sometime revealing the other runway and sometimes concealing it.
“Which is life and which is death?” Neenan reflected.
“If you can understand something,” Michael mused, “it’s no longer a mystery and hence no longer a surprise.”
Doubtless that was true.
He called Leonard on the plane’s phone.
“I was worried about you, Dad.”
“Not to worry, Leonard. My guardian angel takes good care of me.”
Michael scoffed.
“I’m glad to hear that, Dad … . You’re checking into the Fairmont?”
“And sleeping nine or ten hours. I’ll see you and Johnny at ten-thirty at brunch.”
“We’d sooner take you to brunch at the Oak Court. It’s San Francisco’s most famous brunch.”
“Great,” Neenan said, wondering whether it would be a gay scene where he would be out of place and then dismissing the idea.
“Same time?”
“Sure.”
“No hanging around at the bar after you check in,” Michael warned.
“I have enough problems as it is,” Neenan insisted, even though the idea of a drink in the bar had occurred to him.
Michael dematerialized as Neenan climbed into the limo that was waiting for him. Automatically Neenan reached for the phone in the car and then realized that there was no one to call.
He was greeted like a long-lost friend at the Fairmont and conducted to an elegant suite, the kind he told himself that one should not occupy unless there was a woman with one. He hung up his suit bag and then rode down the elevator to buy the Bay Area papers. He glanced into the oak-paneled bar. An attractive woman sat by herself at the bar, nursing a glass of white wine. She looked intelligent, lonely, and unhappy.
Without any prompting from the seraph, he rode back up to his suite.
What has happened to me? he wondered.
I signed that damn contract.
Impulsively he reached for the phone and punched in the number of the house in Lake Forest. No answer.
He then called Anna Maria’s private line there. Still no answer.
Finally, throwing caution to the winds, he pressed 312 and 642, then hung up the phone before he could punch the final four numbers of their East Lake Shore Drive apartment.
Was he more afraid that she would answer or that she would not?
He found two glasses of Baileys in the minibar, poured them into a tumbler, glanced at the local papers as he drained the tumbler, far too rapidly, and then, lonely and discouraged, collapsed into bed, hoping that sleep would come quickly.
In his last few conscious moments, he thought he heard again the Aramaic lullaby.
26
After Mass at the Paulist Church in Chinatown, Neenan arrived early at the Oak Court. He waited anxiously in the lobby for Leonard and his partner and asked himself what he thought about having a gay son. Politically and socially he was a pragmatist. He usually voted Democratic out of heritage and habit and the conviction that conservative Republicans were more of a threat to the entertainment industry than were “tax-and-spend” Democrats. Though he had been raised to think that homosexuals were queers who could be like the rest of humans if they only tried harder, he had learned early in his business career that talent was more important than skin color, gender, and sexual orientation.
He figured that if they were good at what they did, he did not care what kind of sexual acts they preferred. He also saw that minority rights were a fashion that was too strong to fight and that there was no point in fighting them anyway. He was tolerant because it was good business to be tolerant.
He had learned three years before that Leonard had “come out of the closet” only when Donna screamed at him in one of her more hysterical phone calls that it was all his fault.
He had shouted back that everyone knew that castrating mothers were responsible for gay sons. He had heard that or read it somewhere and didn’t particularly believe it. It was, however, a way of getting her off the phone.
Nonetheless he was shocked and angry. What the hell was wrong with Leonard, he wondered. Then he asked himself again if he should have tried to break through the wall of hatred that Donna had built up between him and his children.
There had never been enough time.
He tried to forget about Leonard, a tall, handsome black Irishman rather like himself. Sometimes he was able to pretend that Leonard did not exist. Other times he was haunted by his neglect.
Finally Vincent had told him cautiously that Len had graduated from Berkeley and was working at a brokerage and that his partner was a sergeant in the San Francisco police force. Impulsively Neenan sent a quick note wishing his son success and happiness in his work and life.
He did not expect an answer and did not receive one—until the out-of-the-blue phone call a few days before.
I messed it up, he told himself, like everything else.
“Hi, Dad, I hope we haven’t kept you waiting?”
The past rolled over Neenan like a tidal wave, pride at this son’s good looks and athletic ability, his quick wit, his easygoing disposition. Leonard had always been his favorite. Why had he felt no sense of loss when Leonard apparently cut him off?
Because he had become numb to all personal relationships. No wonder the angels were on him.
“I got here early,” Neenan said easily, and then added with all his Irish charm, “Happy to meet you, Johnny.”
Another tall, dark, handsome Irishman. “I feel that I’ve known you for a long time. Lenny talks so much about you and is so proud of you.”
Michael, seraph boss, where are you when I really need you?
“We both hope you beat that bastard Murtaugh into the ground,” Leonard said. “How’s it going? … Let’s go get some breakfast.”
Neither of them looked or acted gay. But then how does a gay man look or act?
“I don’t see why anyone thinks we can lose. I own or control the majority of the stock, I’m not going to sell. Therefore Walter Murtaugh loses. It’s that simple.”
They were conducted to the table Leonard had reserved and then began to collect food from the buffet.
&nbs
p; “Champagne?” a waiter asked when they returned to the table.
Neenan nodded. The young men declined.
“We don’t drink,” Len explained.
Oh.
“So why did poor Vinny sell you out?” Leonard asked.
“I wouldn’t call it that,” Neenan said as he dug into his eggs Benedict. “He’s actually taken a lesser job at WorldCorp, though they’re probably paying him a lot more. Moreover he was going to inherit the company.”
“Don’t go leaving it to me,” Len said with an easy laugh. “Selling stocks is a breeze in comparison … and by the way, yours is still strong.”
“It’s about where it belongs … . I think Vincent wanted to get out from under my shadow. Can’t say that I blame him. I did the same thing.”
“The hell you did,” Len insisted. “But that’s not the point. He had everything he always wanted and, poor guy lost his nerve.”
“Maybe.”
“Does Meg know?”
“Probably.”
“She’ll give him the hell he richly deserves.”
“I know it’s not a fair comparison,” Johnny chimed in, “but my dad’s a captain in the police. I have to keep ducking out of his shadow, and it’s a big one.”
What does an Irish San Francisco cop think about having a gay son on the force?
“I polled the top executives and the senior staff about who to make second-in-command. They all voted for Vincent. I should have told him that.”
“Wouldn’t have made a bit of difference, Dad. It’s the old lady of whom he’s afraid. He imagines her hovering around and whispering that he’s not good enough. What difference do all the executives of NE make when your mom is always telling you that you are no good?”
“She meant well, Lenny.”
“The hell she did. Anyway, let’s not talk about her. I hear nothing but good things about your new wife. I’d like to meet her sometime.”
So would I.
“She would like to meet you too, Len, both of you. I didn’t deserve to be so lucky.”
“Yes, you did. After your bad luck the first time. But we weren’t going to talk any more about that subject, were we? Do you think the Bulls will win again?”
It turned out that both young men were Bulls fans. Neenan knew enough about the team to carry on a conversation. He also accepted a second glass of champagne. Maybe it would help him to sleep on the long ride back to his empty home in Chicago.
Contract with an Angel Page 29