We followed him out of the living room and through the kitchen, a fussy, bleak, single man's kitchen with an old chipped gas range. The door at the end of the kitchen was ajar.
"These were the maid's quarters," he said. "I guess everybody had a maid then. Got its own bedroom, bathroom, everything. All I had to do was put in heat. California people don't think maids need heat." He pushed the door the rest of the way open and said, "Quiet, now." Eleanor nodded soberly and we all went through the door.
I stopped in my tracks so suddenly that Eleanor bumped into my back. "Gee," she said.
It was like Dorothy stepping out of the house and into Oz. Here, everything was color. Two walls were painted bright yellow and a third was peach. The fourth, the one that held the door we'd come through, was covered with a kind of middle-earth fairyland, complete with mountains, castles, hobbits, and elves.
The entire ceiling was plastered with pictures. It must have taken Ellspeth days to paste them all up there. Illustrations cut from nineteenth-century children's books were interspersed with pictures of Disney characters, rainbows, waterfalls, an autographed picture of the Roadrunner and the Coyote signed by the genius who created them, Chuck Jones. There must have been two hundred of them.
In the center of the room was a hospital bed cranked halfway up. The chemical smell was strongest here. In the middle of the bed, lying on his back and connected to a gleaming chromium respirator, was a little boy.
He had Angel's golden hair, but his body was contorted and misshapen. His fingers clawed anxiously at the air. The respirator covered the lower half of his face. Ellspeth smiled, and years fell away from his face.
"Hello, darling," he said. "Look, I've brought you some new friends. See the pretty lady?"
"Hi, Ansel," Eleanor whispered. "What beautiful hair you have."
Ansel's fingers extended and two of them pointed toward Eleanor. Some kind of a sound came out of the mask.
"Well, well," Caleb Ellspeth said. "Well, well." Eleanor went past him and took the crooked hand in hers.
"Aren't you the lucky boy?" she said. "Your own room and your own window. I never had my own room when I was little."
It was true. Eleanor had grown up in the back room of a Harlem grocery. She'd slept in a double bunk bed with her two brothers until she was twelve.
Ellspeth picked up a glass and held it in front of Ansel's face. "Lemonade," he said. "I'll make you some lemonade in a few minutes and give it to you." He looked at Eleanor, who was stroking the yellow hair. "Maybe the pretty lady will bring it if you're good."
Ansel's fingers had curled around Eleanor's palm. She looked back at me.
"Sure, I will," Eleanor said. "In fact, why don't I stay here? You finish talking and I'll keep Ansel company. Would you like that, Ansel?" The boy blinked.
"I couldn't ask you," Ellspeth said.
"You don't have to," Eleanor said. "But if you don't think Ansel would like it…"
"He'll like it," Ellspeth said. "Won't you, Ansel?" Ansel held on to Eleanor's hand.
Ellspeth backed slowly away from the bed. "Call if he's any trouble," he said.
"He won't be any trouble," Eleanor said. She was beaming. "I've just thought of a Chinese fairy tale that I'll bet Ansel has never heard. I'll bet you don't know any Chinese fairy tales, do you, Ansel? Is there a chair I could sit on?" she asked Ellspeth.
"Sure, sure," Ellspeth said, as if embarrassed. He pushed a fragile-looking chair over from the wall and Eleanor sat down without letting go of Ansel's hand.
"That's better, isn't it, Ansel?" Eleanor said. "Now we can be closer together. Now, listen, do you know where China is? No? Well, it's a long way away, farther even than New York, where you were born. Things in China take a long time to happen, and this is a long, long story, so if you go to sleep while I'm telling it to you, you won't hurt my feelings. But, boy, this is a good story."
Ellspeth tugged my sleeve. As I followed him into the kitchen, Eleanor said, "Do you see how black my hair is, Ansel? In China everybody's hair is black, just like mine. But this story is about a very special little boy, a little boy with bright gold hair, exactly like yours, but not so pretty."
Ellspeth went to a roll of paper towels hanging on the kitchen wall, tore one off, and blew his nose on it. "The kid needs a woman," he said fiercely.
"How much does he understand?"
"The words? Not much. But he can feel her. He can tell a good person better than I can."
"She's a pretty good person," I said.
"Marry her," he said, "if you're in a position to do it. You're a dope if you don't."
"Well," I said lamely, "we were talking about you."
"Right." He opened a cabinet under the sink and tossed the towel into it. "The big marriage expert. Let's go back into the living room."
In the living room he reseated himself and looked down into his coffee cup. "The Ballad of Caleb and Mary Claire. Like I told you, I was in the Navy," he said after a gulp of cold coffee. "This is about four or five years after we got to L.A., and Mary Claire and I were getting along pretty good, I thought, I mean we were both in the Church and she wasn't picking at me about Ansel anymore. She seemed better, you know? Anyway, when they wanted me to travel I said okay and relinquished my hardship deferment. They sent me to the Philippines, Subic Bay. All these randy, cute little girls, all these guys going ashore, coming back with drip, syph, God knows what. I was the only guy didn't invest that ten bucks in cab fare, the only guy came home with a dry wick. I'd been writing her regular, getting not as many answers back as I wrote letters, but I figure, she's got the kids to worry about all day, and the Church, and what am I doing? Lying around reading Playboy and keeping the machine clean, so I plan this big surprise. I get home three days early, right off the boat I buy a dozen roses, a bottle of champagne, make reservations at Perino's, where I've never even been before-I mean I am ready to party Mary Claire out of her skin. Rent a limousine, get home about eight p.m., choke off the impulse to call out 'Surprise,' and stand in the front door listening to her moving furniture around upstairs. She was like that, you know? Ever since Ansel was born, too much nervous energy. Wake up at four a.m., start shoving the couch around. So I go up the stairs wondering where the bed's going to be this time, and open the door, and the bed's right where I left it, only it's fuller. She's on it with two guys. Two guys from the Church. I mean one of them was my Listener. I told everything to this guy, and here he is trying it all out on my wife with one of his buddies.
"Well, where I come from, Michigan, you don't hit women. So I took it out on the guys. I threw one of them through the window without bothering to open it, we were in a two-story apartment at the time, and the second guy, the Listener, had it easier because, first, the window was already busted, and second, he had the other guy to land on. Then I turn around to her and she's yelling, 'Don't hit me, don't hit me! I just changed the sheets.'
" 'Mary Claire,' I say, 'I wouldn't hit you with somebody else's fist.' And I shake up the bottle of champagne and pop the cork in her direction, and she's sitting there all wet, holding the sheet up above her tits, and I say, 'Welcome home,' and throw the flowers at her. 'Yeek,' she says, like I hit her with a baseball bat, and then I'm out of there. I don't even stop to see Angel or Ansel, not even Ansel. It's like I'm mad at them too, for some reason. The car's still waiting outside, although the driver's pretty gaga at these two naked guys who just sailed out the window and are now crawling for the shrubbery, and it's time for Perino's. So I go. But first I go back onto the lawn and give my Listener a good kick or two. Then I go to Perino's and drink my dinner to the point where it takes three waiters to get me back into the car, and I tell the driver to take me back to the ship. Two days later I sail for Christ knows where, and I still haven't talked to my kids."
Behind him, Eleanor came into the room. "Asleep," she said, seating herself next to me.
Ellspeth nodded to her, tilted his head back for a second in the listening position, and cont
inued. "I have talked to my lawyer, though, some jerk from the Church-I didn't know who else to ask, I'd spent all my time in L.A. with my kids and my wife and the people in the Church-and the lawyer tells me not to worry.
"So, like the world's ultimate end-of-the-line asshole, pardon me, miss-I don't worry. And then, I think I'm in Tokyo at the time, I learn that she's run up my credit cards to nine thousand bucks, which is as high as they'll go without dissolving in the hand, and she's got the apartment and four-fifty a month for her plus another five each for Angel and Ansel, and my pay is attached because I owe on the credit cards. So the light dawns in the east that maybe she's been porking my lawyer too."
"Sounds like a logical assumption," I said.
"Yeah, and so forth and so on. Except it turns out that maybe it's wrong, because a couple of months later, who's the Church's new Speaker? My little girl, Angel, who's never said anything more complicated than she wants a glass of water. I mean this was a kid who didn't learn to read until everybody else in the class was doing square roots or something. Slow, Mary Claire used to say, the kid's slow. She's going to wind up scouring some clown's pots and pans, Mary Claire used to say, like there was something wrong with that, like Angel was supposed to be a nuclear physicist or translate the Bible into Farsi. And all of a sudden she's the Speaker, spouting stuff… Well, you've heard it-sounds like the Gettysburg Address in drag."
"What did you do?"
"Went down there, naturally. What would you have done?"
"And what happened?"
"They wouldn't let me see her. Like she's the Queen of England. First I get these two weight lifters at the door, guys that look like they bench-press the Arco Tower on Saturday morning, and they ripple their muscles at me like their tailors got nothing to do but fix the tears in their cute little uniforms. So I make some noise and they take me inside after they figure I'm not going to shut up, and they put me in a room. And who comes in? My shithead lawyer."
"Meredith Brooks," I said.
"Meredith Fucking Brooks. Only guy in the world who polishes his face. Eight million bucks' worth of clothes and he still looks like twenty pounds of cat shit. So what's the first thing he says to me?"
"I give up."
"He says, 'Jesus, I wish you'd been here. The judge figured you'd run off, that's why he gave her everything.'
" 'I had a lawyer,' I said. 'I thought maybe a lawyer, all that college, could manage to explain that I was in the Navy. I thought maybe "He's on a boat" was something a well-trained lawyer could manage to say. And by the way,' I said, 'she fucks pretty good, huh?' Sorry again, miss.
"Well, he got all grave-looking. You know how he rubs his chin?"
I said I knew.
"Guy loves to rub his chin. I figure when work is over he goes home, fixes dinner for his chin, and then the two of them sit around and watch TV. After Johnny Carson they go to bed and he rubs it different. Well, he rubs his chin and says I shouldn't talk that way about Mary Claire. She's the Speaker's mother, you know? So I get up to murder him and the two weight lifters pick me up and smear me across a wall and hold me there with my feet off the ground. And I'm kicking and swearing a blue streak and Meredith Brooks gives me the world's oiliest smile and tells me that I'd better be careful because all my Listenings are on tape."
"What had you told them?" Eleanor asked unwillingly.
He leveled his brown eyes at her and blinked twice. "I might as well say it right out," he said. "At least then I won't have to worry about it anymore."
"What was it?"
"That once, right after he was born, I'd tried to kill Ansel."
Chapter 19
I had about four hours to kill before I was due to turn up at Bernie's, bottle in hand, so I killed them by driving Eleanor back downtown. She was silent for the first twenty minutes or so, and when she spoke, all she said was, "That woman should be in jail."
"When she goes," I said, "she's going to have a lot of company."
Before dropping Eleanor at the Times, I parked around the corner from the Borzoi while she ran into the lobby to buy some of the books and tapes I'd seen on sale there. If anyplace in the Borzoi was safe, it was the lobby.
Nevertheless it seemed like a hell of a lot longer than ten minutes before she opened Alice's door and slid onto the front seat, clutching one of those flimsy plastic shopping bags that the cheap supermarkets now give you, the ones that manage somehow both to break easily and to remain in the environment forever. It had a picture of Angel and Mary Claire on it. It was a new picture: Angel was holding her kitten.
"The collected works of Angel Ellspeth," Eleanor said, "and one tape by the little girl called Anna. Eighty-one dollars and forty cents, if you can believe it. Who's paying for this?"
"That's a good question. For the moment, I guess you are."
"I'd better get a story out of this. I can't put all this wisdom on my expense account if I don't write something."
"Poor you," I said. "I haven't even got a client."
"Sure, you do. Truth, justice, and the American way." Eleanor spoke in series commas.
When she opened the door to get out at the Times she kissed her index finger and touched it lightly to the tip of my nose. "I'll call Chantra," she said. "It's only for a week, right?"
"At the most."
She gave me a long look. "So now who's the optimist?" she said, sliding out. She crossed the crowded sidewalk and hurried into the building without glancing back, and I headed Alice around the block and back toward the Borzoi.
I found what I needed only about a block away from it: the Russell Arms. The Russell Arms had never been as fancy as the Borzoi, and it might never be home to a hot new religion, but the rooms were not dirty enough to be terrifying, the place was almost empty, and the desk clerk was willing to take cash. I booked myself in for the night, ignored the unspoken question about my luggage, grabbed the change of clothes I kept in Alice's trunk, and went up to the room.
The stream of water from the shower was lukewarm and irresolute, and it took all the soap the Russell Arms was willing to provide before I stopped looking like a particularly slovenly anthracite miner. I pulled back the shower curtain and looked out twice before I finished. Nobody there but a cockroach. There was no singing in the shower.
Leaving the ring around the tub for the maid to swear at, I took the stairs down to the street and checked out the service entrances to the Borzoi again before popping Angel into Alice's cassette player and hitting the thickening traffic for Westwood.
As I drove west on Wilshire, Angel creepy-crawled her way over various hidden landscapes, offering the listener the use of a spiritual flashlight. No question about it: you had to be there. In a room full of believers she had seemed almost frighteningly potent. On tape she just sounded like an extraordinarily bright, highly articulate, and spiritually bent little girl.
But not quite. There was an odd, halting inflection in her voice, a kind of verbal limp, that I couldn't identify. It wasn't the hesitancy of someone trying to remember a long speech. Angel's trance had seemed real enough, and at the Revealing I'd attended with Skippy she'd stemmed the tide twice to respond to the audience. Her spiel wasn't memorized. The words were flowing through her in real time, and she could be spontaneous. Wilburforce had said that the first little girl was a channel. I didn't think I believed in channels.
Out of curiosity, I ejected Angel in mid-phrase and fished around in the plastic bag for the tape of poor little Anna. Jesus, even I was calling her poor little Anna. I slipped it in and turned up the volume.
Her voice was lower, more resonant, with a husky, dark edge of urgency to it and a natural, sinuous strength. Like Angel, Anna had been taped at a Revealing, in front of a large audience, and her listeners responded to her much more vocally than Angel's had. Compared to Angel she was a real spellbinder, a girl with revival-tent potential.
A phrase floated into my mind: the Burned-Over District. Something to do with revival. I put it on hold and refocused o
n Anna.
The front of the cassette box pictured an ordinary-looking little girl with long, straight brown hair. It would have been uncharitable, but true, to call her plain. She had the wishful, plaintive smile of someone who hopes that this is the picture that will finally turn out.
But there was nothing plaintive about her voice. It was as different from Angel's as a bassoon is from a flute. And much more persuasive.
I played parts of Anna's tape again and then parts of Angel's. Then, with Angel droning in my ears, I drove west, wondering what the hell the Burned-Over District was.
"The Burned-Over District?" Bernie said. "You've got to be kidding. You mean to tell me you don't remember the counties of the Burned-Over District?"
"No, Bernie," I said wearily. "What were they?" I inwardly gritted my teeth and groaned, hoping Bernie wouldn't use the question as a cue for one of his famous lists.
"Let's see, Chautauqua, Genesee, Wyoming," Bernie began. I settled in for a long winter's night. Once, in a liquor store, I made the mistake of asking Bernie why he was buying a bottle of vodka. Then I stood there, eyes glazing over and my life passing me by, while Bernie listed at least thirty drinks that boasted vodka as their elixir vitae. Lists are a weakness of graduate students.
"And the cities too," Bernie continued happily, holding up five more fingers and picking up steam. "Utica, Rochester-"
"Utica," I interrupted. "New York." Something was coming back to me.
"And New York, of course. Not at first, though."
"I mean, these are all in New York."
"New York State" Bernie corrected me. Like all born New Yorkers, Bernie only used "New York" to refer to the city. Everything else was a featureless landscape, fit only for pity and not too much of that.
"Bear with me, Bernie," I said. "It's been a long day. Why was it called the Burned-Over District?"
"The fires of revival," he said dramatically, tugging a hand through his coils of Brillo-like hair and taking some of it with him. "They burned there more or less nonstop in the early nineteenth century. Shame on you, with a degree in comparative religions. That's where it all started. Haven't you read Whitney Cross's book?"
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