The Hour of the Innocents

by Robert Paston

  Before she left, I gave her a French scarf, too. I had a bit of money coming in at last and had made an expedition to Hess’s in Allentown, where she’d patronized the store’s exclusive French Shop before our finances turned sour. I was still a sucker for the animated Christmas tableaux in the department store windows and I treated myself to a holiday lunch, alone, in Hess’s downstairs restaurant, where the wall murals neutered Diego Rivera’s Mexico. I remembered how it all had delighted my father.

  My mother gave me a two-pound box of Mootz chocolates, our one local delicacy, and a pair of engraved silver cuff links that had been my father’s. I did not possess a single double-cuffed shirt in those days, but my mother knew what I wanted.

  As the afternoon sank toward holiness and darkness, I practiced until I couldn’t bear to hear myself any longer. I hadn’t been abandoned entirely, but I was counting down the hours until it was time to rejoin humanity. Red and Stosh had invited me to spend the evening with them, then bunk over and stay on for Christmas dinner. The north-of-the-mountain tradition meant getting drunk before midnight mass, crowding into church—there was no ID check for non-Catholics—then getting drunker afterward until you passed out or daylight reached the manger. After a few hours of sleep, there would be black coffee and an exchange of gifts, followed by the long preparations for dinner.

  I put on an Andy Williams Christmas album borrowed from my mother’s house. I would have been disgraced had any friends seen the record in my possession. But I wanted to hear the carols, to sit by my tree and remember. Nostalgia is never more powerful than in the young.

  When the phone rang in the fading light, I rushed to turn off the stereo before picking up.

  It was Red.

  “Will, have you heard anything from Angela?” She sounded distraught.

  “No. Nothing. I was just sitting here listening to Paul Butterfield.”

  “What about Frankie? He call you or anything?”

  “No. Has something happened?” My first thought was of a car accident. My second was of Angela and drugs.

  “You need to go up to the house. To see if Angela’s okay.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Go up and check on her, okay?”

  “What the fuck, huh?”

  “Please, Will. She needs somebody to see if she’s all right.”

  “What about you? You’re closer.”

  “I can’t get mixed up in this.”

  “But I can? Where’s Stosh?”

  “Out trying to find Frankie. Before something happens. With Matty.”

  “Would you just tell me what’s going on?”

  “I can’t. Not over the phone. I’ll tell you later. Please just drive up there. She might … I don’t know, she might do something dumb, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know. Did she and Frankie have a fight? Did he hurt her?”

  “Yes. I mean, I don’t know if he hit her or anything. But she’s out of control.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She called me.”

  “And?”

  “Will, please. Stosh and me, we can’t get any more mixed up in this. You have to do this. Please. She trusts you. I think you’re the only one of us she trusts.”

  “What about Matty?”

  After a killing pause, Red said, “He’s crazy.”

  * * *

  There was no response to my knock. I stood on the front porch. The paint was scabbed. Beside me, three plastic choirboys waited to be plugged in for the evening. The house remained dark.

  On every side, Christmas lights trimmed half-a-double facades. Tiny lawns that longed for snow hosted glowing Santas, reindeer teams, and a gang of broom-armed snowmen. But the street was hushed with the start-drinking-early silence.

  Holding my ear to the door, I heard Angela weeping.

  Coming up the Frackville grade, I’d spun out on black ice, just missing the guardrail and the drop into the creek. The Corvair wasn’t meant for coal-region weather, and the studs on my tires might as well have been skates. So my nerves were already stretched.

  The door was unlocked. Frankie and Angela locked up only when leaving or doing dope.

  I could make out Angela’s form, but not her features. She sat on the stairs, bawling. I felt for the light switch. When the bulb came on, she hid behind her knees. With her limbs gathered in, she looked childlike.

  The artificial Christmas tree had keeled over. Its silver branches lay on shards of broken ornaments. Unopened gifts had been hurled about and their wrapping paper kicked in.

  “Angela … it’s me.” It was a stupid thing to say.

  She looked up. I had never seen such misery on a face. In the wake of my father’s death, my mother’s face hardened.

  As if her tears had burned off flesh, Angela’s face seemed a skull. Her hair looked thinner, too. Even after the weight she’d lost on meth and her skin’s coarsening, she had always kept a vestige of allure. That Christmas Eve, she looked like a creature found in a concentration camp.

  “Go away,” she said. In a broken voice.

  “What’s the matter? What can I do?”

  Burying her face again, she wept on. Her pain seemed so naked and unguarded that I could not fit it to the woman I knew. She cried as if she had been hollowed out.

  I sat down beside her and put an arm over her shoulders.

  She uncoiled, sweeping me away. For a dreadful instant, our eyes met.

  “Don’t touch me. I never want another man to touch me.”

  I retreated as far away as the stairwell let me.

  “Angela … please … what can I do?”

  She turned on me. “You’re all the same. You bastards. Every one of you. You’re dirty, lying bastards.” She would not meet my eyes again. “You always cover up for him. Even you. Even you,” she repeated.

  “What’s Frankie done? What’s the matter?”

  She slapped at me. Striking my torso open-handed. Then she closed her fists and continued hitting me.

  “I told you to get away from me.…”

  I stood and abandoned the staircase. “All right, I’m sorry. If I’ve done anything to you, I’m sorry. Call me, if you need anything.”

  “Don’t go,” she said. “I don’t want you to go, I didn’t mean that.” She balled herself up and leaned against the banister. Howling again, a tormented animal.

  I wanted to touch her, to pet her. To show a basic human solidarity. But I was afraid of igniting another tantrum.

  “Should I make you some coffee? Angela? Would you like me to get you anything?”

  “No. Please. Just stay here. I don’t want anything.” Sobbing on, she sounded like an asthmatic struggling for breath.

  I sat on the stairs again, below her. She touched my hair, but her hand retreated instantly.

  “If you don’t want to talk, that’s okay,” I said. “I can just sit here.”

  She tried to muster herself. “Please, Will … don’t make any of this into one of your songs. Please don’t write a song about this. Please don’t.”

  “Angela, I’d never do anything like that. For God’s sake.”

  “But you do. You always do.” She sniffed back the wet in her nose. “You change little things, but I know. I always know. Please don’t write a song about this. I’d just die. Promise me you won’t.”

  “I promise. I don’t have any idea what’s going on, anyway.”

  “But promise me.”

  “I already did.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “I promise I won’t write a song about anything that has to do with whatever’s going on. All right?”

  “You have to mean it, though. I’m so ashamed.”

  “I mean it. Okay?”

  She bumped her backside down the stairs until we sat side by side. When she clutched my bicep, I felt finger bones through my sweater.

  “We’re all going to get out of here, ain’t? The band’s going to make a record and we’re all going to get
out of here. Tell me.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Tell me it’s going to happen. That you won’t let them leave me behind. Don’t let them leave me here. I’ll do anything you want … anything, anytime…”

  There was nothing left that I wanted from her. Skeletal fingers chewed into my arm.

  “You don’t have to do anything for me. We’re all going to get out of here.”

  “Don’t let Frankie fuck it up, Will. I’m sorry for all the bad things I ever said to you. I’m sorry for everything I ever did wrong, for being mean. I never meant to be bad. I’ll make it up, I swear I’ll make it all up to you.”

  “Angela, you don’t owe me anything. Come on now.”

  She renewed her grip. “Tell Frankie I forgive him. If you see him. Tell him it’s all right, that it’s going to be all right. Tell him I forgive him.”

  “For what?”

  She drew away, but more slowly this time. “Just tell him. He’ll know.” She began to cry again. When she balled her fists, she beat her knees, not me.

  “If you’d just tell me what’s wrong,” I said.

  She clutched herself and wept. “I feel so dirty. It makes me feel so dirty. Don’t ask me anything else. It’s all right. You can go. Please go. You should go now. Merry Christmas.”

  I stood up. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  She raised her face and looked at me as if I were the greatest fool in history.

  * * *

  “If you must know, he gave her the clap,” Red told me. “She just found out today.” We were drinking eggnog laced with Irish whiskey. “There. Now you know. Does that make you happy?”

  It didn’t make me happy. It made me feel sick.

  “I’ll bet it was that dancer bitch,” Stosh said.

  The same thought had struck me. But Frankie had gone through a couple of strays after the Poconos gig. It could have been any one of them. Or Frankie might have shared the love with his one-night stands, Typhoid Mary with a dick.

  “Does Matty know?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Angela told him?”

  Red looked horrified. “God, no. She’d never tell him anything like that.” Red downed her eggnog like a highball. “I’m sure by now she’s sorry she told me. But she was just freaking out, you should’ve heard her.”

  “Then how does Matty know?”

  “Frankie called him.”

  “What?”

  Red shook her head. Stosh told me, “Listen, Bark … Will … those guys got something crazy going between them. It was there before Matty went to Nam, and he brought it back with him. And there’s nothing any of us can do about it. We all just have to live with it.”

  “You mean the jealousy thing? Over Angela?”

  Red grimaced and rolled her eyes. “If that was all. I, for one, don’t think Angela matters anymore. Not much, anyway. She’s just a bone at the dogfight. I mean, look at her, Will. Have you seen her arms since she started hitting up? Even when she’s covered up, I’m embarrassed to be seen in the street with her. She looks like a junkie.”

  The truth was that junkies rarely looked that bad that fast. In the myth of our time, heroin was the destroyer of worlds, but the embrace of meth took women down faster than smack.

  “Frankie hasn’t made things easy on her,” I said.

  “Like she’s made things easy on him?” Red practically spit out the words. It was not the response I expected. “I’d be looking around for other women, too.”

  I almost said something I would have regretted. Instead, I turned to Stosh. “So … I’m trying to get this straight … Frankie calls Matty to tell him he gave his wife the clap. What’s he, a dog marking his spot? I mean, this is sick.”

  “Yeah, it’s a bummer. But it’s not like it’s the syph,” Stosh said. “That rots your brain.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know these people. After almost two years of playing together, of virtually living together, I had no idea what they were all about.

  “So Matty’s out looking for Frankie now?”

  “No, no. I found him. He’s okay. He’s just waiting around to take his old lady to midnight mass, once the old man’s passed out. Don’t worry about Matty, he’ll be all right.”

  “You don’t think he’s going to beat the hell out of Frankie? Or kill him, for that matter?”

  “Why should he? You don’t none of you understand Matty like I do.”

  Red tried to help me out. “Look, Will … Frankie’s driving Angela away. That’s what Matty wants, isn’t it? Matty’s smarter than you think. A lot smarter. He knows how to get what he wants.”

  “So Matty’s happy watching Angela turn into a walking skeleton? And he’s thrilled that her husband gave her a dose? What’s he going to do, marry her corpse?”

  Stosh tried making a joke to lighten things up. “Well, at least the meth’ll keep the corpse jumping, ain’t?”

  I held out my empty glass. “May I have another, please? Double shot of whiskey this time?”

  We were on our third round together, and the two of them had been drinking before my arrival. As Red took the glass from my hand, our fingertips touched and she asked, “Will … was there ever anything going between you two? Anything serious, I mean? Did you have some big crush on Angela for a while?”

  Stosh laughed and held up his empty glass as well.

  “The only person Bark ever had a crush on,” he said, “was himself.”

  * * *

  St. Pat’s was packed for midnight mass, and the smell of mothballs fought the reek of alcohol breath. With restless young people ranged around the back of the church and stuffing the vestibule, the priest’s words were audible only in snatches, like a singer with a faulty mike cord. The statues with their bleeding hearts were awful, but the music buoyed me.

  One constant over the years was that the band never accepted bookings for Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. Even at their lowest, they were too Catholic for that. Anyway, the best-paying jobs kicked in just afterward, and even the worst group in the state made a killing on New Year’s Eve.

  Beginning on St. Stephen’s Day, we were booked solid through Greek Christmas. And now I had to hope that the band wouldn’t fall apart, thanks to Frankie’s cock.

  The older people in the pews struggled to maintain an air of piety, but midnight mass was a party for everyone else. Where I stood with Red and Stosh, a huddle of teenagers grew impatient with the service. Some were falling-down drunk, but none dared leave. My own faith asked the soul’s commitment, but Catholicism insisted only that folks show up.

  Those around me whispered and squirmed until I felt alone in my need to pray. I wasn’t exactly the archbishop of Canterbury in those days, but I submissively asked Christ’s mercy upon us. I prayed for grace to descend upon Angela, upon Laura and my mother, upon Joan and Red, upon all of us. I prayed for us all to be happy. But my heartfelt plea was for the band’s success.

  EIGHTEEN

  The stars seemed misaligned. Our holiday gigs had gone well enough, with the tension between Frankie and Matty only adding fuel to the musical fire, but New Year’s Day brought more than dry-mouthed headaches. Tooker, our old keyboard player, had been killed in an early-morning car wreck, riding shotgun in Buzzy Ritter’s Corvette. Tooker went through the windshield. Buzzy was in the hospital, expected to recover, a cosmic injustice. Still resolutely unaware of much that was going on, the local cops merely charged Buzzy with drunken driving. Word on the street was that he and Tooker had been tripping their brains out on LSD laced with speed, in addition to draining a bottle of Lord Calvert whiskey.

  Angela lost her job at the salon. She did not go quietly. I heard about it thirdhand, through Red, so I didn’t know if Angela had become too unreliable or if it had to do with her fading appearance. She no longer seemed much of an advertisement for a beauty parlor.

  Drugs baffled me. Some people could do them in daunting amounts with impunity, while others became entrappe
d almost as fast as addicts in cheap films. One caste of musicians could play high, but another could not. A notorious heavy user might remain in robust health, while a different body chemistry turned his girlfriend into a leper from Ben-Hur. Some druggies got wasted and forgot to wash or work, while others, sardonic and entertained, made a profit. Fewer women fell into a drug trap, but those who did fell harder than the men. I found no moral lesson in any of it, only a stern reminder of life’s unfairness: The wages of sin were death, but only for some of us.

  An overheard remark made me suspect that Frankie had started dealing serious dope. If true, it made no sense. We had money coming in from the band, and anyway, Frankie could put in time at his father’s printing business whenever he felt short. Old Man Starkovich was doing fine, and Frankie, an only son with two fawning sisters, was set up for life. If music failed us, he still would inherit a business.

  I decided he might be dealing to skim enough meth to keep Angela supplied. Or maybe it was greed, the one sin that didn’t afflict me. I just didn’t want him to get popped and wreck the band. At least he seemed discreet. I struggled to put his antics out of my mind.

  On a Tuesday evening in January, we went into the low-budget studio in Reading to cut a trial demo. The time and effort were wasted. Claiming to be a four-track affair, the control booth displayed only a crude two-track machine barely adequate to record the radio commercials that were the studio’s bread and butter. The engineer cared nothing for music, the studio lacked sound baffles to isolate our instruments, and the first playback had a sound quality that would have embarrassed a metal shop. The engineer, a German immigrant, complained about the “Dreckwetter” outside, then threatened “consequences” when we canceled the second evening we had booked.

  I destroyed the master tape so no one would ever hear it.

  I also managed to move up our first date at the reputable studio in Philly, although Frankie still had doubts about the cost. He’d been having phone conversations with Danny Luegner, the manager who wanted to sign us, and Frankie was on his high horse about “real” record companies paying for demos if they were interested in a band.