Flights of Angels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “We’ll pay them.” Sally looked straight ahead. It was the strangest thing, perhaps it was the campus, perhaps her short skirt, her clean fingernails, but she didn’t feel that Ariel was her child. No longer her child, but her accomplice, her ally in some forbidden adventure.

  “If this guy knows where Dad is we are going this afternoon.”

  “I think it’s certain. I think he’s teaching at Hattiesburg. It’s a two-hour drive. We could wait until tomorrow.”

  “I can’t wait. It’s all I think about. I haven’t seen him in three years. I dream of him. I cry for him. I have to go, Mother. I have to face him and see if he hates me. If he does, then I hate him too. If he wants me to stay with him, I might do that for a while.”

  “Ariel.”

  “I’m his daughter. He’s my father. I have to have this. I can’t do without it anymore.” She looked at her mother and Sally knew it was true and she took one hand from the wheel and put it on her daughter’s hand and stroked her fine young smooth thick golden beloved skin.

  Frank was at the bar when they arrived. In his accustomed seat at the far end near the Laundromat door and within hearing range of the pay phone. He was a poet and liked to eavesdrop on people’s drunken telephone calls as that kept him from thinking he was alone in sadness and also helped him develop an ear for dialogue in case he ever gave up and started writing fiction.

  “Frank,” Sally said. “It’s Sally Donohue. Do you remember me? This is Ariel. I think you were at her christening. If you remember.”

  “My God, Sally. I saw Daniel two days ago. He’s in Hattiesburg, but I think you knew that.”

  “No. I didn’t know. We stopped speaking. Ariel wants to go and see him. Is there any reason why we shouldn’t go there? Tell me the truth. For the sake of the old days. Don’t lie to me.”

  “He’s doing all right.” Frank paused. “There isn’t a woman with him, if that’s what you mean. He’s alone. He looks old, Sally. Real old. I don’t know what’s happened to him. He’s very thin. Well, he was always thin. He quit drinking. Said he had to for some reason. I don’t know what. Don’t look like that. It isn’t AIDS. Hattiesburg wouldn’t have hired him. He wouldn’t have applied. Anyway, there isn’t any reason why she, why you shouldn’t go. Was I supposed to keep it a secret, that he’s there? There isn’t some legal thing, is there?” Frank sighed, started to retreat, then marched on. “I don’t get in the middle of things. How did you know of this?” He looked down the bar. “Oh, Redmond. He told you, didn’t he? Well, no one told me to keep this a secret. He’s got a good job. Visiting professor. He’s been teaching in Hawaii and then in Washington State. I didn’t mean he looked bad. He just looks old. I look old. We all look old, don’t we? But not you, Sally. You look wonderful. Not a day older and it’s a pleasure to see Ariel. Of course I remember her christening. Have a drink. How about a drink or a Coke for Ariel?”

  “Not for me. You don’t look old at all. You look like you always did. I hear good things about you. I hear the students love you. I hear that everywhere.”

  “Hope it’s true. I try. I always keep on trying.” He lifted his martini glass to them, then drained it. He set the glass down beside two empty ones. He had gotten away early that afternoon and had a head start.

  Sally leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. He was an endearing man, a gifted man, a very special friend and man.

  They walked back to the car and got in. “What do you want to do?” Sally asked. “It’s your call. I’ll do what you want.”

  “Drive up there now.”

  “Do you want to call and tell him we’re coming?”

  “No, I just want to go.”

  “Then we’ll go. Can we stop at the Camellia Grill and get a sliced turkey sandwich to go? I haven’t really eaten all day and I bet you haven’t either.”

  “I don’t need to eat. I’m too fat.”

  “You are not fat. You are not one bit fat.”

  “Okay, go by there and I’ll go in and you can drive around the block if there’s no parking.”

  “Get some money out of my purse.”

  “I have money. I have the money Grandmother sent me for my birthday. Let me pay.”

  Sally considered it. She came out with the best response. “Wonderful,” she said. “Treat your old mother to a Camellia Grill sandwich and I’ll split a chocolate freeze with you if you like.”

  “I’ll let you drink it. I’m too fat.”

  Sally let her daughter off in front of the restaurant and eased her car into a parking space in front of the florist shop next door. She watched Ariel move in and through the door like the spirit she was named for and then come back out in a few minutes carrying the white Styrofoam boxes and the drink. “Let’s go,” Ariel said when she got into the car. “You don’t know how this has bugged me. You don’t know how sad I’ve been.”

  Sally continued down Carrollton to the I-10 exit, took the ramp, and drove up and out onto the four-lane highway going north across the lake. They went over the causeway and across the long bridge to Slidell, then headed up Highway 59 to Hattiesburg. Ariel played the radio. Sally drove.

  Daniel thought he had already been saved. After two dead-end jobs with no tenure track he had been offered this job when the woman who had it was injured in a car accident. She was laid up in a New York loft with a broken back. It would be two years before she would even walk. So the big job fell open and the head of the English Department, who had been a colleague at Tulane, had called him and he said he’d come. That had happened fast. He had come in the middle of a semester. It had been tricky, but he had pulled it off. One thing about getting hepatitis. After they made you quit drinking you could get things done, what with all that time on your hands.

  I can go and see Ariel soon, Daniel told himself. I can beg her to forgive me. Perhaps she will forgive me. Perhaps she never will. Perhaps I will only get to look at her and know that she is mine.

  He was sitting at his desk in the half-furnished rented apartment with the boxes all around him and his clothes still lying on chairs in the bedroom and not a bite to eat in the refrigerator. He had been there for a week but all his time had been taken up with talking to the students and the woman whose job he was taking. She had been in New York visiting her lover when she was injured. She had to talk to Daniel on the phone using a headset, telling him where things were in her office, who the students were, what she had been doing with them. Daniel was half in love with the woman lying in the bed in New York. She was so brave, so forthright, so terribly compromised and scared and still so brave. He had begun to fantasize that he would fly up to New York and take her away from the man she was living with, a painter who couldn’t possibly appreciate a poet of her skills and talents, one who could talk so rationally on the headset when she was on all those drugs and in so much pain.

  “It’s all right,” she kept telling him. “This is it. This is what happened. It’s what I have. It’s mine. I’ll deal with it.”

  “You’ll walk again,” he kept saying.

  “Or I won’t. Now tell me if you found the folder with the autobiographies they wrote in March. Some of them may have copies but I wouldn’t count on it. We have to find it. I know I didn’t bring it up here with me. It has to be in my house or in the office. . . .”

  Sally stopped at a filling station in Lumberton and filled the car with gasoline and offered to let Ariel drive. “I’d be too nervous,” Ariel said. “You better do it.”

  “It’s your day, honey. I’m following your lead.” Sally meant it. She kept having the strange awakening. That Ariel was a grown woman, that her ideas and plans were valuable and true. That she loved herself and knew what she needed and worked in her own best interests. Ariel could take care of herself. It was a revelation of the highest order.

  Outside of Hattiesburg Sally stopped at a service station to use the telephone. “I’m going to call information and see if there’s an address,” she told Ariel. “Should I call if he has a lis
ted number?”

  “No. Let’s just go to where he is.” They went into the station and Sally called information and was given an address.

  “Fifteen forty Hazelhurst Avenue,” the operator told her. “You need anything else, honey?”

  “No thank you. Tell me again.”

  “Fifteen forty Hazelhurst Avenue, apartment ten.”

  “We need a map of Hattiesburg,” Sally told the girl behind the cash register. “Do you have one?”

  “Right over there by the newspapers.” Ariel pulled out the map and Sally paid for it and they spread it out on a table and found Hazelhurst and wrote down the streets leading to it.

  “What if he isn’t there?”

  “Then we’ll sit there until he comes home.”

  This is about our need, Sally was thinking. This is about how much we are divided, how much we need to find our missing parts. We could look inside ourselves, but only Tibetan monks know how to do that. I will help her find him. I almost said help her rope him in. Well, what he wants doesn’t matter. He fucked me and we had her and now he has to deal with it. If he hurts her feelings I will kill him with my bare hands. I will tear him apart like a cat dismembering a captured bird.

  She drove the car. She picked up speed.

  Daniel started to go out to eat, then changed his mind and called and ordered a pepperoni pizza. It didn’t matter. The main thing was to put all the books and clothes away and get some order in his life and then maybe go to the grocery store or else over to Dominica’s house and look for the autobiographies again. He got into the shower and noticed that he hadn’t had a hard-on for three or four days. That was strange. See what change and apprehension would do to a man. So thin, he thought as he dried himself. What has become of me?

  He dressed very carefully in khaki pants with pleats and a blue-and-white-striped shirt he had bought years ago in Paris. He went out to sit on the stoop and wait for the pizza delivery man. He wanted to be able to call Dominica back before she went to sleep for the night and tell her he had found the folder. It didn’t really matter. There wasn’t a student in the class with real promise but it mattered to Dominica so he would get it done. Strange, funny how we become involved with people we have never met. All he had of this woman was a voice on the phone and an office full of books and posters and desk drawers stuffed with pieces of poems and disorganized folders. “Put everything in cardboard boxes and have it stored at my house,” she had told him. “Just say which drawer it came from. I’ll figure it out when I get home. You can live in my house, you know. You are welcome to my house. You don’t have to rent an apartment.”

  “I’m seduced enough by your office,” he had answered. “I don’t think I’d dare live in your house.”

  “You’d be doing me a favor. It will fall apart with no one there. Will you think of it?”

  “I will.” She had started laughing then. He couldn’t decide why and he was seduced again, as he had been every day he was in Hattiesburg. He sat on the stoop and wondered if he should move into her house. He wondered at the power of imagination. He wondered at his love of women, their breasts, their smiles, their lovely hands.

  It was seven o’clock. Above the apartment buildings a flock of starlings were turning and turning against the clouds. “Ambiguous undulations as they sink, downward to darkness on extended wings. . . .” The clouds are moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, from New Orleans where my child lives.

  He watched the small white car pull up in front of the building and come to a stop. Sally got out of the driver’s seat and waved to him. He stood up, then Ariel got out of the passenger’s seat and walked around the car and began to run toward him. His Ariel, his lost meaning and purpose and dream. His child, that he had loved and resented and almost loved and stopped loving and feared and loved and had been afraid to write to or call.

  She kept on coming, looking him squarely in the face and then she moved into his body and he began to weep and kept on weeping. The pizza van arrived. Sally paid the delivery boy and carried the pizza into the house and put it down on a kitchen counter where it stayed untouched for many hours. No one wanted to eat a pizza on such an evening. But they were hungry and began to say so.

  “I’m starving,” Sally said.

  “I’m starving,” Ariel echoed.

  “I’m famished,” Daniel added. “And I would not say metaphor for all the iambs in the English language.”

  Sally was stunned to remember a world where men said such things and knew that they were funny. She was living in a world where people asked each other questions and gave nothing away.

  They went out to dinner in a restaurant near the campus. Waves of tenderness were all around them. They talked very softly to each other, almost in whispers. We are here, they wanted to say. Where have we been instead of this? What have we been thinking?

  “How are you?” Daniel asked Sally, when Ariel left the table for a moment. It was the first time they had been alone.

  “She says I need to get laid,” Sally said. “She says I’m a nervous wreck.”

  “So am I,” he answered. He was not laughing. “So do I.”

  “Well, she wants to stay here with you for a few days. Do you think she should miss two days of classes? I could bring her back on the weekend. Or she could drive. She has a car, not good enough to drive on the highway for any distance, but I could lend her my car. Or you could come to New Orleans. What do you think?”

  “Let her stay. She can make it up. I’ll bring her home. I can leave Friday morning after my eight o’clock class. So she could make her classes that day if they’re in the afternoon.”

  “We better let her decide. I had an epiphany today. It was after she knew you were here. I touched her and I knew, suddenly, that she was an adult, able to make her own decisions. She’s a powerful girl, Daniel. Able to take care of herself. She always has. She always will. If I can only hold that thought. I don’t know if I can. Anyway, what were we saying? Oh, I’d like for her to stay here so I can think about all this.”

  “I owe you fifteen hundred dollars. I’ll be able to pay it to you in a month. As soon as they pay me here.”

  “It’s all right. I’m doing all right about money.”

  Ariel was returning to the table. She walked slowly toward them. I ruined their life, she decided. My psychology teacher says children invade a marriage and challenge it. Mother was too young to have me. I should leave her here with him and I’ll go home. They look so good together. They look beautiful together. Oh, God, why do you treat us like you do? I hate you for your failed creation and your jokes and tricks.

  She sat down at the table. She reached under the table and took her mother’s hand. Then she turned to her father and took his hand and held it on the top of the table. Then she began to cry. “Don’t anybody leave,” she said. “I have to have you here. I don’t care if it’s crazy or not. I want our family. I want both of you. I want to stay here and take you with us to New Orleans. I want you both here.”

  “We’ll stay,” Sally said.

  “I’ll do anything you want if you’ll forgive me.” Daniel put his other hand on hers. “Whatever I can do. There’s only one bed in my apartment but I can sleep on the floor. There’s a sofa.”

  “What time is it?” Sally asked.

  “Eight-thirty.”

  “Let’s go to Wal-Mart and get some air mattresses. You’re right, Ariel. We’re spending this night under the same roof. All three of us. You and me and your father. You are our child. We are the ones who made you and we made you out of love, didn’t we, Dan? Out of the greatest, sweetest love and sex in the world and we were glad I got pregnant and we adore you. Let’s go and get those mattresses. They’re cheap. I’ve been wanting some for Mother’s summer house.”

  At the Wal-Mart Superstore they got silly. They bought two air mattresses and some blankets and a pillow. They bought a box of Sam’s chocolate chip cookies and Häagen-Dazs ice cream and cereal and orange juice and milk. They bough
t napkins and paper towels and dehydrated soup and crackers and a hundred dollars’ worth of other things they decided Daniel needed for his apartment. They went back over there and blew up the beds and made them up. They put Daniel’s clothes away in the closets. They brushed their teeth with the new toothbrushes they had bought. Ariel and Sally put on Daniel’s old T-shirts for pajamas. Sally borrowed his oldest summer jacket for a robe. They sat on the air mattresses and ate the cookies and ice cream and Daniel told about his life in Hawaii and Washington State and Ariel told about her classes at Tulane and Sally told about her welfare clients and the insanity of the Louisiana welfare system. They talked about the seventies and they told her about Merwin and Daniel searched through the boxes of books and found The Lice and The Carrier of Ladders that Merwin had signed the day before she was born. “We were waiting for you to be born,” Daniel told her. “I was dreaming of you every night. I knew exactly what you would be, how you would look, it was as if I already knew you.”

  “We will never hate each other again,” her mother vowed. “No matter what transpires between us we will not hate each other. I will not make your father hate me ever again. This is all my fault. I made him leave. I drove him to it.”

  “I want you both in my life forever,” Daniel said. “I have always loved you both. I have suffered your loss like the loss of my limbs. Forgive me, it is all my fault. It won’t happen again.”

  “It was my fault for being born,” Ariel said. “You were all right until you had me. I got Dad in trouble at Tulane.”

  “No, no, no, no, no,” both her parents said. “You are the reason. You are the good thing, the spirit. Merwin knew you would be special. He came and blessed us all.”

  “It’s God’s fault,” Ariel said. “He made this mess and all of us just have to deal with it.”

  “There isn’t any god,” Daniel answered. “There is consciousness, and the central nervous system and our desire to be whole and well. And it isn’t a mess, it’s our lives. We are alive and well, thank goodness for this day.” He went to his daughter and gathered her into his arms. “And forgiveness, for which I beg.”