THE
BELIEF
IN
Angels
Copyright © 2014 by J. Dylan Yates
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, as well as business establishments, events, or locales, is coincidental.
Published 2014
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-938314-64-3
eISBN: 978-1-938314-65-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013957198
For information, address:
She Writes Press
1563 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707
This book is dedicated to my grandparents.
All of them, whoever they are.
“When I am dead, and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain drenched hair …”
—Sara Teasdale
“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as
to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them
and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.”
—Teilhard de Chardin
“Last night I dreamt Moses and I were rowing underwater.
We could breathe and talk to one another.
We rowed past schools of fish
and sea anemones and Moses named them for me.”
—Jules Finn
Author’s Note
THIS STORY IS ABOUT surviving truth. It’s about surviving our connection to truth. Truth is so much stranger than fiction that, for it to be believed, you sometimes have to tell the truth selectively. Truth is gray, and there are two hundred and fifty-six shades of gray, although the human eye can only detect thirty-two.
Also, truth has a curve—a bell curve. Somewhere along that curve is my truth, and somewhere else along that curve is another’s. The truth does bend. This makes truth frightening.
And so it is that we live in a curved world and struggle to get to one point of truth, which is really nothing but a personal approximation.
Consider the theory of relativity. The shortest distance between two points in a curved world is a curve. We are all curving toward one another to find our truths together—into infinity. It is in this way that our search for truth drives our connections and, ultimately, our survival.
This story has several versions of endings. There are as many as there are dreams and nightmares in the universe. Each version depends on where along the bend of truth each of us is. All we can see is our own truth and maybe a bit further ahead and a bit further behind. The past that sits behind the bend is truth, although it’s not within our sight lines anymore. That is belief.
Belief has substance and matter. It has to, or the entire curve would disintegrate.
Physics proves that the part ahead, the part of the truth that you can’t see, doesn’t end with one truth. We curve truth toward another point. That is hope.
Maybe we all live in fractured prisms like kaleidoscopes, in encased and private worlds, yearning for light but tumbling in shadows. When we hold our worlds to the light and turn them, one truth is revealed. Turn it again, and the first disappears but another manifests.
Ultimately we connect and survive, even in death.
We do this consciously and unconsciously.
We do this infinitely and unbound.
It is in this way that truth sets us free.
—San Diego, California, November 2013
Part 1 | Unraveling
One
Jules Finn, 18 years | August, 1979
WITHENSEA, MASSACHUSETTS
SOMETIMES IN ORDER to tell a story well, so it’s truly understood, you have to tell it out of order. My story tells like this. It unravels … and ravels up again.
My name is Julianne, but everybody calls me Jules. I was named after my Great-Uncle Jules on my father’s side. That’s what my father, Howard, told me. My mother, Wendy, told me I’m named after a dead racehorse trainer.
It’s hard to know what to believe.
For now, I live here in Withensea, a seacoast town north of Cape Cod, an island that thrives on summer tourism. In two weeks I will leave for college and never come back.
Many people I went to school with will stay, however. A kind of Withensea tradition. They’ll move down the road with their high school sweethearts, who’ll become their spouses, and settle close to the homes they were raised in.
Sometimes a place can be as much a part of you as the people you grew up with. I won’t miss most of the people here, but I’ll miss this place. The ocean, for me, holds the power to turn a moment mystical. Accompanying my memories of childhood there are always ocean sounds—sometimes faint, sometimes louder, the waves crashing and beating their own score. When I picture the breathtaking beauty of our cliff, the ocean, it almost masks the memories of the things that were not picturesque. I’ve spent eighteen years soaking up every beautiful part of Withensea, hoping to crowd out the memories of the painful parts of my life—of guns, of violence, and of loss. A kind of glass-housed chaos, tolerated by the community in order to feed the starving brains bred in small towns.
My life, so far, has also been an existence filled with secrets. Two kinds of secrets. First: the kind that need lies to keep them hidden. Second: the kind our brains create to cope with sorrow.
Still, perspective offers me solace enough to not measure my own sorrow against another. What I understand now about survival is that something in you dies. You don’t become a survivor intact. Survival’s cost is always loss. This is my mourning book.
What follows is a collection of memories I’ve saved. I’ve learned memories are lost more often than objects. I will keep whole parts intact in my telling, where I feel it’s important. In a way, I think it will keep me intact to tell the truth of it this way. It’s my evidence—a way of documenting to keep the truth in my sight line. There are parts of my life I’ve been absent from. These I will tell from where I am now along the bend of truth. I will call these parts belief.
It’s all left me with this weird love for the moments after something good happens. I call it delayed joy. I hear an achingly beautiful song, and when it’s over I enjoy the immediate moment, the quiet, more than I did the sounds of the song playing. I taste a buttery lick of Butter Crunch ice cream, and after the flavor is gone I savor the loss of the deliciousness in my mouth.
It’s like I’m wired backwards inside my head.
Withensea harbors a scrabble of townies who live in salt-beaten homes scattered among swanky summer estates. Winters on this island are brutal to homes, cars, skin—anything exposed to the elements. But in the spring, after the last of the gray-brown clumps of snow have melted, and before the tourists hit town, everything enjoys a fresh coat of paint and not much more. Rather than shoulder the emotional and physical cost and energy of upkeep, all things considered non-essential are left to deteriorate or grow wild. Deferred maintenance is a practice applied to most everything in the town, including the people.
My brothers, David and Moses, and I are kind of like the town. We started out sturdy,
with a semblance of familial structure to support us and a new coat every September when we started school. But, eventually, with neglect, we were left as straggly as those other non-essential elements.
In the long run, this may turn out to have been a blessing.
From the turn of the century until about twenty years ago, Withensea was gorgeous. It used to be a summer vacation destination for Rose Kennedy’s family. But the Kennedy family seems to have forgotten about their ancestral home, which sits, in its dilapidated glory, across from a seawall by the ocean, close to where I live.
Townies call the people who come to live in the estates along the beach “the summer people” and have a general disdain for those who can’t or don’t have to brave the winter by our ocean. The ones who can, the ones who stay, manage to eke out a living working a year-round business, make their money off summer tourists, or travel inland toward Boston—sometimes by ferry—to find work.
Many of them take a nine-month detour to the bottom of a bottle. Alcoholism in this mostly Irish/Italian Catholic town is more a winter industry than an embarrassment.
When I was six, my father—a short, Irish, orange-haired, pink, and doughy-faced man—owned a bar called the Little Corporal. It did a booming business in the summer months, and the winter industry provided enough support to warrant staying open year-round.
From outside, in the summer months, the Little Corporal’s vivid green doors separated long, tall panels of clear glass windows through which you could see several pool tables. The glass panels continued on the south side of the building, turning two sides of the bar into a pool table terrarium. The tables floated, lily pad-green felted over a gray concrete pond. In winter, all the windows were covered in cheap, shamrock green-painted plywood to protect the glass.
The building squatted at the intersection of a small interstate highway and the boulevard that flows into Withensea’s one main avenue. The boulevard flows in the other direction onto a land bridge that grips it to the mainland, tight as a choke hold. This intersection is the only way to enter or exit Withensea without a boat. All the cars slow to a crawl to navigate the sharply curved, signage-laden rotary, which spits them out again in either direction, going in or coming out.
In the summertime, pedestrians paraded from the surrounding parking lots down the wide sidewalk with their whiny, strollered babies and cotton-candied children, headed for the public beaches or Aragon, the amusement park anchoring the southern tip of the town. The day trippers and the townies who worked the other bars, restaurants, and amusement park arcades, all pushed in or passed by the wide doors and terrarium windows of the Little Corporal.
In the winter, people parked their cars right on the snowy sidewalks that wound around the Little Corporal to avoid the icy winds that whipped up over the seawall and across the avenue.
Inside the bar, a long expanse of intricately carved dark oak ran the length of the back of the room; an ornate gold-leaf mirror hung on the wall behind it. Above the mirror, a late-eighteenth-century, crudely-carved, wooden ship figurehead thrust herself from the wall, her peacock-blue robe draped under the curve of her bare breasts. Serene and anachronistic in the space, she gazed with detachment out beyond the walls of the bar, beyond the cars, beyond the imprisoned stroller babies and the laddered heights of the roller coaster to the sea.
To the landlocked fishermen, the career drunks in their thiamine-deficient stupors, solitary and stranded on the stools at closing, she was a familiar meditation. For me, she served as promise of another, better, life out there, beyond Withensea. A beginning to a life that had, thus far, been mostly about endings.
Two
Jules, 6 years | Late August, 1967
THE LITTLE CORPORAL
“I’M PLAYING THE winner!” I shout to my brothers over the song on the old jukebox.
It’s “Wild Thing,” and David has pitched ten nickels in the old jukebox to play it over and over. Every time it gets to the part where they sing “groovy,” he yells it out and wiggles his butt. They’re ignoring me. David’s got Moses doing it now, too.
While my father and Grandfather Samuel have an important talk in the office behind the bar, I sit on a barstool in the Little Corporal drinking a Shirley Temple I made. It’s mixed the same way I always do it, with ginger ale, orange juice, a bit of grenadine, and four maraschino cherries. I know tons of drinks by heart, and I can make any drink out of the mixerology book behind the bar. My father showed me. I mix Rob Roys for my brothers while they play pool.
It’s eight in the morning on a Saturday, and school starts in a week. It’s one of the last big weekends of the season. Early this morning, my father packed us in the car.
Last night my father gave us all horsey rides to bed and read us fairy tales, but afterwards he and my mother screamed at each other again.
“Crooks go to jail!” I heard my mother scream.
“Idiots go to jail!” my father shouted back, and my mother agreed. But he got even angrier when she did.
“Don’t you lay a hand on me, you fucking coward. You fucking bully.”
I got scared the police might come again. When they fight like that, my stomach hurts.
The wind came out, so I listened to the bell buoy noises until I fell asleep. They sound kind of like St. Joseph’s bells except it’s not the same song every time. I like that the song’s always different. When the wind’s not out, I count the seconds between the light beams that slide across my wall. They shine from the lighthouse in the ocean and come after ten seconds if I count slow.
“Your mother’s asleep and you kids make too much noise,” my father said to us this morning. “If you behave yourselves, you can come down to the bar and play pool all day.”
We all screeched like monkeys.
“Behave!” my father bellowed, and we calmed right down.
“You all need to be good today. Your grandfather is meeting me down at the bar for a talk. A really important talk.”
I figured it must be, because my grandfather never drives out to Withensea.
“Meshugeners drive the Boston Freeway,” he always says.
That means crazy.
The bar doesn’t open for an hour, so me and my brothers have the place to ourselves. My brothers pretend to play a fair game of pool, but David’s on a run, socking the balls in with regular pock-pocks and saying weird things to himself. Pool games with David are never fair. He’s the only one tall enough to hold the pool stick level with the balls. Moses is almost four, but he can barely see over the edge of the table without standing on his toes.
“Winner. Winner!” David shouts every time he sinks another one.
We can all hear my father’s voice slam through the door; we can hear it over the music, angry like a fist.
“They’re gonna kill me if I don’t give them the money. Do you understand, old man?”
I stare up at the huge wooden woman with the naked breasts hanging above the bar.
I know you listen. If I don’t tell anyone, maybe you’ll tell me what to do? You’re the most beautiful lady in the world. I think your eyes are much prettier than the statue of the Virgin Mary at St. Joseph’s.
The Virgin Mary’s just a statue. Even Father Donald ignores her. He prays to the naked Jesus.
My grandfather’s talking, but he’s too quiet to hear. He doesn’t want us to hear what they’re talking about. He thinks we’re all still babies.
If I tell about the fights and the police he’ll take us with him to Boston for sure. But if they find out I told …
I know what my father wants. He wants more money. It’s always the same. My grandfather is a tailor who owns a few shops in Boston. My father thinks my grandfather is made of money.
My grandfather smells like butterscotch and lemons. My grandmother smells like chicken. They live in an apartment in Boston, and we visit them once a month. My mother drives us, although she hates to go. She screams at us practically the entire way.
“Shut up and sit back in
your seats. If I have to pull this car over you’re going to get a smack. For Christ’s sake, whatever you do, don’t throw up in the fucking car or I’ll kill you!”
My mother zigzags in and out of the traffic lanes on the freeway; she doesn’t use the silver signal stick, but she yells at my father when he doesn’t do it. We like to kneel on the back seats and stick out our tongues at the people who honk at us. We watch to see if anyone crashes when she cuts them off because once she made two cars crash in the same day. She kept driving both times.
When she isn’t screaming, my mother sings along to the radio songs, except she doesn’t get the words right. She makes up her own words, which never make sense.
My mother barely talks to my grandparents once we’re there. She’s always real mad at them, although once I asked and she wouldn’t tell me why. She goes because my grandfather gives her money after dinner. I like to go. I love my grandparents and they love us. I wish we could live with them.
It’s the same dinner every time. Chopped liver with lettuce and egg on rye bread, matzoh ball soup with chicken and rice. I get the poopick. Grandma says it’s the chicken’s belly button, but I know it’s something else because all the grown-ups laugh when they say it. We always have the same dessert, too. Fruit cocktail from a can.
The money to buy the bar, to pay for everything, comes from my grandfather. My father spends most of the money my grandfather gives him on things my mother gets mad about.
Scotch, horseraces, and poker games.
My grandfather doesn’t spend much money on himself, though. He never goes on airplanes like my parents. He sews all the clothing he and my grandmother wear. He lives in a Jewish neighborhood in Boston in an apartment. It has a scary monster made of cement on the roof. It watches us when we go in. He has a doessowtoe he parks on his street, but he doesn’t drive it much anymore except on Sunday.
My mother says he has lots of money. She says he’s a millionaire. I think she makes this part up, because my grandparents never buy new stuff for the apartment. They replace the plastic coverings on everything when they turn yellow. My grandfather says they never buy new stuff at all because almost everything can be used forever if it’s man-made, except the TV tubes in his old Zenith.
The Belief in Angels Page 1