Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  One thing about sporting goods, they didn’t much excite people’s sense of urgency. No one rushed to the shopping mall first thing in the morning to buy a new pair of exercise shorts, so it would probably be another three-quarters of an hour before the Jock Shop saw its first customer.

  George knew this and counted on it, just as he counted on Mr. Jenkins’ morning immersion in the delights of the stock room. Once he had put in an appearance he liked to take the escalator up to the sixth floor, get a can of diet ginger ale out of the machine and have a cigarette. The ginger ale he would carry back with him, hardly tasted, and secrete it in an empty bowling bag that had gone so long unsold everyone else had forgotten it was even there. Food and drink on the premises were strictly against the rules and the ginger ale would be room temperature and flat by ten o’clock, but there was a certain pleasure in getting away with this infraction, month after month. It was a secret victory and life had few enough of those.

  The cigarette was another matter. A cigarette lasts exactly ten minutes and while he smoked it George could lean over the balustrade and look down at the first trickle of shoppers—at this season of the year usually teenage girls, hunting in packs—as they floated around on the walkways below like motes of dust. Those ten minutes were precious, a brief period of philosophical reflection, a reverie on the littleness of all human struggle which was somehow profoundly comforting. After ten minutes on the sixth floor he was ready to face anything.

  Even Mr. Jenkins, who was uncharacteristically prowling around the display area. George just had time to drop the ginger ale can in a trash can outside the store entrance.

  “It’s rather early to be away from your post,” he announced blandly. “Or perhaps we’ve opened a branch in the staff lounge.”

  Away from your post. Lovely. He made it sound like guard duty during the siege of Vicksburg.

  But George merely shrugged and allowed his eyes to drift over the deserted aisles that spread out from the cash registers.

  “There’s no one here. No one comes in here at nine o’clock in the morning.”

  “Of course not—doubtless because they know, from long experience, that there will be no one to wait on them.”

  Jenkins’ face tightened in his prim version of triumph.

  “And don’t bring any more of your soda pop on the premises. You’ve ruined the lining of that bowling bag. It will be charged against your next paycheck.”

  He turned his back, refusing even the possibility of a denial, and almost skipped away through the door to the stock room.

  George checked his watch. Nine-thirteen and he already felt as if he might as well quit for the day and go home—except that home meant Lucille and the baby. On the whole, he preferred Mr. Jenkins.

  Well, maybe things would pick up. Maybe there would be a fevered run on bicycle pumps.

  But there wasn’t. Trade was almost glacially slow. By eleven forty-five total sales in the Running Gear and Cycling Departments consisted of one paperback copy of Aerobic Training Over Forty and a pair of tube socks.

  “You want to break for lunch?”

  “Only if you come with me.”

  Sally Bronowski flashed him one of those quick smiles that make you think a woman is blushing even when she isn’t, as if you have answered the most secret wish of her heart. So maybe it really wasn’t all bliss between the newlyweds. A man was entitled to hope.

  “Then it’ll have to be the Mexican place,” she said. “I’m tapped out this week.”

  “We’ll go to the Baker’s Basket, and it’ll be my treat.”

  He half expected her to refuse—what the hell, it was a pretty naked pass—but she only smiled again, apparently pleased with the masculine attention. Life was once more luminous with promise.

  Lunch was one of George’s little indulgences. The store did not keep a refrigerator, so you were risking your life if you brought a sandwich, at least if you liked mayonnaise on your lettuce and bologna. And it was just too beastly to go across the street and stand there with the noonday sun beating down on you while you ate some greasy mess thrown into a taco. So that left Weinberg’s Deli on the second floor or the Baker’s Basket, and at Weinberg’s, which was always crowded and was in fact owned and staffed entirely by Vietnamese refugees, the coleslaw tasted like they made it out of lawn clippings.

  So at least three times out of five he went to the Baker’s Basket, where the menu was Nouvelle California, they didn’t automatically sweeten the ice tea and there were hanging plants all over the place and where, most important, you could sit down and eat in peace. Even if he didn’t go overboard on the tipping he still dropped about forty dollars a week there, which was more than he could really afford but, hell, life has to be made worth living.

  Today, George decided, he would throw caution to the winds and buy dessert. The desserts were terrific, especially the bread pudding, and Sally looked the kind of girl who might appreciate that sort of thing.

  But almost the moment they sat down he lost interest in what Sally might or might not appreciate.

  They were shown to a table next to the wall of plate glass windows that looked out onto the mall and Sally immediately buried herself in the menu. It was just as well.

  Because three tables away a pair of elderly women were arguing over the list of daily specials as if it were a disputed inheritance, and the waitress was standing over them listening with serene and carefully perfected indifference.

  Her back was to him, so George couldn’t get a look at her face. He didn’t need to. Her hair, which was a perfect white blond like no woman had a right to hope for, was gathered up in a roll so that he could see the back of her neck and the line of her cheek and jaw. On that basis alone, plus the way her body suggested itself beneath her dreadful mint-green uniform, he was sure she was the most beautiful creature he had ever beheld—even better than Joan Plowright in Kind Hearts and Coronets.

  “Is the chicken-in-a-basket any good? George?”

  But George was not really in a position to answer, having entirely forgotten that they served food here. At that precise moment the waitress turned her head, seemed to look past him, and then met his gaze.

  And she was more than beautiful. She was radiant. She was . . .

  She even smiled—intimately, just for him, as if they had been lovers forever.

  “George, what is the matter with you?”

  When Sally’s voice finally registered he found he was master of just enough self-control to tear his eyes away and look at her. She was annoyed, so he smiled.

  “The service is slow here,” he said. “You have to get their attention when you can.”

  “Is the chicken-in-a-basket any good?”

  “God knows.”

  The waitress began to move toward them. Even her walk was beautiful. In a moment, he thought to himself, he would hear her voice. He could hardly wait.

  She was an angel.

  5

  In the last few years before his death, James Kinkaid III had restricted his legal work to some dozen or so old clients, most of whom never bothered him except to come in once a year to review their wills. Thus James Kinkaid IV had very little to do to close out his father’s practice. A week after the funeral he had cleared away all the paperwork, moved everything that was still active into his own files and sent the rest to the archives down in the basement. None of it had brought him any closer to understanding the little mystery represented by the Four-Star Clipping Service.

  There had been ten names on the list and none of them belonged to anyone who had done business with the firm of Kinkaid & Kinkaid anytime in the last five years. Of that James Kinkaid IV was quite certain, because for all practical purposes during that time he had been the firm. Anything earlier he would have to refer to Molly.

  Every successful law firm has a Molly. Molly Scofield had already been behind her desk in the reception room for two years when the infant James Kinkaid was first carried in through the front door and, althoug
h she was not sentimental about such things, she probably remembered the color of the baby blanket. She seemed to remember everything, every case, every client, every appointment, every telephone number since her first day on the job. In fact, if she had ever forgotten anything no one had ever caught her at it.

  “Just let me die before she reaches retirement age,” James Kinkaid III was fond of saying. “A secretary that good breeds habits of dependence. You might be able to get along without Molly, but not me.”

  Well, at least he had been spared having to get along without Molly. The morning after his father’s death Kinkaid had waited downstairs to tell her when she came in to work, and they had sat together on one of the sofas in the reception room while she spent about five minutes weeping into his shoulder. It was the only time he had ever seen her cry, and when she was over the first shock she had dried her eyes and resumed her duties. By lunchtime she had made all the arrangements for the funeral.

  Her relations with her employers, both father and son, had always been an odd mixture of intimacy and reserve. Seven-year-old Jimmy had had a collection of baseball cards which for some reason excited his father’s mild disapproval, and when he had gotten tired of being teased about them he had moved the whole lot to the bottom drawer of Molly’s desk, which was the absolute best place of hide anything because Molly would never tell on him. Molly was on his side against all comers, even his dad. Yet when he graduated from college she had started calling him “Mr. Kinkaid”—had, in fact, insisted on it. “In September you’ll start law school,” was the way she put it. “You are no longer a boy.”

  For the rest she lived with her sister in Norwalk and, judging from her perfect willingness to work evenings and weekends, enjoyed no private life worth mentioning. A New England spinster and fairly typical of the breed. Her employment records gave her age as fifty-six but, slim and extremely well groomed, with hardly a trace of gray in her little cloud of brown hair, she looked about ten years younger. Perhaps, having submerged herself in her work, knowing herself to be both indispensable and completely trusted, she had come to such terms with life that it was no longer in any hurry to devour her. Or perhaps she was simply too proud to show her wounds.

  In any case, Molly was the one to ask about matters of ancient history.

  But it was necessary to put the inquiry in properly veiled terms. Kinkaid just wasn’t ready to tell anyone, not even Molly, about the Four Star Clipping Service since, after all, what were the odds that two men out of a random sampling of ten would finish up gruesomely murdered? It was possible this business could get no end of nasty and if he had to stir up the mud he preferred not to begin by noisily splashing around in it. Kinkaid had a lawyer’s distaste for revealing secrets and, besides, no one had a better claim to his discretion than his own father.

  So one morning, before the office was open, Kinkaid copied the ten names down on a nice anonymous three-by-five index card—the original list was on a sheet of the clipping service’s letterhead—and waited with his office door slightly ajar so he would know when Molly came to work.

  She had a key. Kinkaid could hear it turning in the lock of the front door at ten minutes to nine. He listened to the sound of her sensible mid-heeled shoes on the hardwood floor. Then there was an interval of silence as she straightened out the magazines on the waiting room table, then a faint creak from the top hinge of the door to the hall closet, where she hung up the jacket of her perfect suit, usually charcoal gray wool in the winter but now, in the summer, almost anything was possible, such as, for instance, a faun-colored linen. (No, that was Thursday.) Then a grinding noise from the rollers on her chair as she sat down at her desk and started going through the in-basket.

  “Good morning, Mr. Kinkaid,” she called, presumably just to let him know that his presence behind his office door had not gone undetected. “Don’t forget to look at your calendar.”

  Instead, he came out and laid the three-by-five card down on her spotless green blotter.

  “Do we know any of these people? I found their names in some notes of Dad’s.”

  Molly picked up the card, checked the back to make sure that nothing else was written there, and then glanced at Kinkaid with the faintest of accusations. Of course she knew that he was lying, but the obviousness of the lie would caution her against asking any questions.

  “We had a Ted Tipton once. You remember him—he owned the lamp store on Ridge Road. Your father did the probate work for his wife when he died in ‘86.”

  “But no George Tipton?”

  “No.”

  “And none of the other names ring any bells?”

  “Not a tinkle.” She smiled—it was as close as Molly ever came to a joke. “Do you want me to check through the old files?”

  “No. If they aren’t in your memory they won’t be in the files either. I don’t suppose it goes back to my grandfather’s time.”

  . . . . .

  It was a quiet day.

  At ten-fifteen Kinkaid met with a local builder anxious that he was about to be sued over the construction of a shopping center he had put up half a mile outside of town. The appointment lasted less than twenty minutes. Kinkaid listened politely and then informed the man that he could not possibily represent him because the case would involve a conflict of interest since one of the tenants had already discussed the case with him. He was not being strictly truthful—Jerry Seymour, a friend from high school, managed a stationery store in the center and had mentioned to him about a month before how last winter the facing on the walls had begun to crumble like stale cottage cheese—but Kinkaid thought that perhaps he wouldn’t starve to death for want of this crook’s business.

  At twelve-thirty he had lunch with his accountant at the Carriage House Inn (three minutes’ walk from his front door, erected in 1938, and enjoying no known associations with either carriages or inns). He ordered a chicken salad sandwich and listened to chapter and verse on the tax consequences of his father’s death. There were no surprises.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon working alone in his office, waiting for Molly to go home.

  “Goodnight, Mr. Kinkaid.”

  He rose from his desk and helped Molly on with her jacket (pearl gray, as it happened). They talked about the state of the front walkway, which had revealed a large crack after the spring thaw. Someone might trip and, in any case, what would the clients think? Kinkaid promised to call the handyman. It was a quarter after six before he closed the front door behind her.

  He stood in the front hall listening. Julia was occupied in the kitchen. He could hear the gurgling of the ancient iron pipes as she ran water in the sink for the ritual cleaning of the lettuce. His salad dish would be on the table in another ten minutes and if he wasn’t sitting in front of it in fifteen she would come into the office to tell him his dinner was ready. Fifteen minutes was surely plenty of time.

  The basement was divided into two small, unfinished rooms, one of which was home to some old steamer trunks, a carpenter’s workbench and various pieces of exercise equipment—Kinkaid’s efforts at physical culture tended to proceed in fits and starts—while the other was a warren of filing cabinets containing the firm’s archives, stretching back to the beginning of the century. Kinkaid found a thin folder marked “Tipton, Edward” in the bottom drawer of the cabinet marked “IIIS – T”. He took it back upstairs with him and put it on the desk in his office. It was time to eat.

  The dining room, which was filled with heavy, dark furniture, all purchased before the First World War, was somber enough under the best of circumstances, but with the table set for one it was positively melancholy. There was a clock in the room, occupying a little wall shelf which faced the head of the table, but it had stopped running sometime during Kinkaid’s boyhood and no one had ever thought to have it fixed. For years James Kinkaid III had always glanced up at the clock as if to check the time and always frowned and then sneaked a look at his watch. Kinkaid took his seat where he always had since he was f
irst old enough to be admitted into the dining room, just to the left of his father’s chair, with the clock and its ironies out of his line of sight.

  For the first three evenings after the elder Kinkaid’s death, Julia had continued to set his place for dinner—the plates, the oversize coffee cup, the cloth napkin held together in the middle by a wooden ring young Jimmy had carved in the Boy Scouts, even the water goblet half filled with crushed ice. This went on until after the funeral, when at last Kinkaid’s own depression of spirits took a healthy turn toward anger and he told the housekeeper, very gently, that it would not do, that his father was gone and that they had to stop acting as if he was about to step into the room. Julia had taken the plate and cutlery back into her kitchen, weeping furiously, but the next night they did not reappear.

  She was still in deep mourning, however. Kinkaid had only to consider the evidence of the salad, which was a very complicated affair, complete with corkscrew shaped radish shavings and four different kinds of lettuce. Cooking was Julia’s therapy, and recently the dinners had become markedly more elaborate as she buried her grief under a succession of excellent sauces which, had his father been alive to enjoy them, would certainly have ended by killing him.

  Yet after the business with the plates Kinkaid was unwilling to say anything. He would just have to take his chances.

  The situation would have amused his father. But it was a joke they would not be able to share. Sitting there, in the silent dining room, listening to Julia moving around behind the swinging door to the kitchen, Kinkaid experienced the most terrible feeling of solitude.

  For years there had been a kind of veil between father and son. They shared the surface of their lives together, but nothing more. The relationship had consisted of inside jokes and the details of whatever might be happening that moment, close but under a constraint that neither of them had felt able to remove. The past—the past that mattered—was simply never mentioned, as if, by unspoken consent, they each had agreed to remember it only in private.