Flights of Angels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “You can keep it. I don’t ever wear it.” Charlotte drew herself up into a knot and Larkin left then, without kissing her goodbye, because she was sick to death of pretending things she didn’t feel and had used up her store of that the hour before on her spoiled chubby nieces.

  The governor of the state of Mississippi sat in his living room with his hands on his knees and listened to his crazy daughter, Wilma Marie, talk and beg and plead. She had gone to camp with Larkin Flowers. Larkin had been nice to her when no one else at the camp liked her. Larkin was a heroine to Wilma Marie. She couldn’t believe her daddy was going to let Larkin die.

  When Wilma Marie quit talking the defeated candidate for governor, William Summer, started in. He took the Shakespearean tack and pled for mercy for mercy’s sake. Then the representative from Issaquena County gave up talking and walked across the room and fell on his knees by Mr. Summer’s side. The governor looked down at the fat sweet face of the representative and the lean solemn face of Mr. Summer. He looked at his daughter, then he got up and walked across the room and opened the door to the hallway and called in a guard. “Stay the execution,” he said. “Call down there and get them on the phone.”

  His daughter began to weep. She got up from her chair and went to him and put her arms around him and her long unkempt hair flowed all over his suit jacket and she said, “I’ll never have another drink as long as I live, Daddy. I promised you and I won’t ever break my promise. You can count on this this time. You will never have to worry about it again.”

  He looked down at her troubled face and he wanted to believe that at least she believed it was true. It was his mother’s face, re-created on the earth so that his suffering could never end.

  “That’s good, baby. I know it’s true. I know you’re going to make it this time.”

  Mr. Summer got up and stood and faced him. He had been the governor’s Democratic opponent in two elections. He would be his opponent in the next election and probably until they both were dead. Still, they were friends and the governor trusted Mr. Summer to always tell the truth to him.

  The representative got up and dusted off his pants. “I need to call the families,” he said. “Where is a phone I can use?”

  Larkin had decided to cry. She still hadn’t let anyone in the cell but she had decided to cry, for Isaac and Steven and herself and her grandmother and granddaddy and Someral and Delicios and the river and the bayou and the bridge and the store and the burial ground at Greenfields and all the people who were lost and gone. She put her face down into her hands and cried slowly at first and then bitterly, bitterly. She cried for all the people of the earth, for the Mississippi Delta saturated with DDT and the fish in the bayous dead too and the bones of her ancestors rotting in their coffins where she would be rotting too.

  The warden and her sister and the bishop came to the cell door to tell her the governor had called but she would not listen. “Get the hell out of here,” she yelled at them. “Leave me alone. Can’t you see I’m dying.”

  “He called,” Charlotte kept saying. “He pardoned you. It’s going to be all right, Larkin. No one’s going to die.”

  “Were already dead,” she said and stood up and looked her sister in the eye, as straight into her eye as an arrow. “Everyone’s already dead. We’ve been dead since we were born.”

  “Let us in,” the bishop said. “Please let us talk to you.”

  “Eat something,” Charlotte said. “Just let us give you something you want to eat.”

  Miss Crystal Confronts the Past

  If you want to know why we had to go to North Carolina and spend the summer it is because of the inheritance. I am to blame too. My name is Traceleen Brown and I am old enough to know better but I got on the plane with Miss Crystal and went along. I have worked for Miss Crystal since she was thirty-two years old and I was thirty. I have worked for her since the day she married Mr. Manny and moved to New Orleans from Jackson, Mississippi, where her family lives. I have been with her through thick and thin. In return she and Mr. Manny have bought me a house and set me up a retirement income and given me more excitement than I need.

  Now we are getting old and should retire from adventures but we cannot seem to learn. We can’t even learn to stay away from Mr. Phelan, who is Miss Crystal’s older brother and a big game hunter who has killed one each of every big, mean animal that roams the earth. Plus a lot of elephants and small pretty animals and he has the hides and heads to prove it. He used to have them. Now he has been forced to sell most of them due to the demands of his five ex-wives, especially the one down in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who tried to shoot him when he broke into her bedroom. That is another story.

  I know it is mean to gossip and tell tales. I don’t know what comes over me and makes me do it.

  Still, somebody has to make a record. They write down everything about you when you go to a doctor’s office. They write down how tall you are and how much you weigh. All I am writing down is the things that change our lives. The things that seem almost to happen of their own accord, as if a big mist falls over the land and puts ideas into our heads.

  So we got on an American Airlines jet airplane and flew to Charlotte and were met at the airport by one of Crystal’s cousins. “What’s he doing?” Crystal asked. “What’s going on over there?”

  “They are playing cards for money,” the cousin answered. “He has won the Dufy and the baby grand piano and the chandeliers. She has won his Cape buffalo and two zebra hides.” The cousin started laughing this restrained North Carolina laugh. He is Crystal’s first cousin and a close friend since childhood of both Crystal and Phelan. I guessed I trusted him. He seemed to honestly adore her and just because Phelan had taken him on safari many times when he was rich wouldn’t make him want his own grandmother robbed blind.

  His name is Robin Martin Taylor and Crystal took his arm and held it all the way to the baggage carousel.

  “We’re going to stay at Robin Martin’s house,” Crystal said to me. “He says there’s tons of room and we’d be near to Grandmother’s so we can reconnoiter without being in her power. It’s not good to be in her power.”

  “Have you met her, Traceleen?” Robin Martin turned to me. “She’s a force of nature.” He warmed into his story as we waited for our bags. “We call her Miss Louise or Grandmother Louise. She went to Vassar and a year to the Sorbonne and knew Edna Millay and Elinor Wylie. Then she married our grandfather and had four children but she never took care of them a single day. Each child had its own nurse, which is why so many people in our family have trouble with relationships. Anyway, she was a liberated woman before there was a name for such a thing. She was the first society woman in Charlotte to openly support Planned Parenthood. She is so powerful it’s unbelievable. Even crippled and sick she is a force of the first power. Well, you’ll see. What else? She has a fabulous sense of humor and a seductive voice. She can talk you into anything. My grandfather adored her every minute of his life and she wouldn’t even sleep with him after the babies came. You can stay there if you like, Crystal, but I’m telling you, they barely even dust. I’d be afraid to sleep there myself.”

  “She doesn’t have help?”

  “Anabelle is still with her but they only let a girl in to clean once a week. Miss Louise won’t let her touch anything. She thinks something will be broken.”

  “Why are we worrying about her if she’s so powerful?” I asked. “Can’t she hold her own with Phelan?”

  “He is her favorite,” Crystal said. “He looks like her father, who was an adventurer too. She insists on perfect civilization from everyone else and then she goes and adores Phelan. She told me at her ninetieth birthday party that he was the only one who had the sense to have a lot of babies. Can you believe that? As if the fate of the women who have had them is completely unimportant.”

  “I thought you said she was so big on Planned Parenthood.”

  “She is, for everyone but Phelan. She thinks he’s so superior he shoul
d be reproduced. If Grandmother and Phelan were young now they’d probably be cloning themselves. I mean, you have never seen ego until you see this pair.”

  “He supports the children,” Robin Martin put in. “He has given them all the money he has ever made.”

  “Except the money he loses gambling, to say nothing of the fact that he has robbed my parents to support all those women and children.” Crystal was getting mad. It is the thing that makes her maddest in the world. “Last year Mother discovered he hadn’t paid their automobile insurance in seven months.”

  “They are all grown people.” Robin Martin got this distressed look, like, oh, let’s don’t have controversy. “They put him in charge of their affairs. They must think he knows what he’s doing.”

  “They give him anything he wants. They always have. They always will. Everything for Phelan. Nothing for me.” I looked at her and knew it had been a mistake to come to North Carolina. Crystal looked like a different person from the happy, useful lady she is in New Orleans. Here she is thrown back into her powerless position in a family that favors males.

  By the time we drove up the oak-lined driveway and went into Miss Louise’s ancient house, she and Phelan had stopped playing cards and were playing chess. Phelan had ordered a huge chess set from New York City and they had it set up on a coffee table so Miss Louise could just ride her wheelchair up to the edge and move a piece. When we arrived they had just started on their third game of the day. Miss Louise was holding a glass of sherry. On a table near the chess set was a silver pot of strong black coffee.

  “She’s drinking sherry and coffee,” Crystal noted later. “She’s always lived on sugar and caffeine. She lived on pound cake and biscuits from the time Granddaddy died until George Manning came down from medical school and made her promise to eat some protein each day. I don’t know if she still does, although she always keeps her promises. Coffee and sherry. That’s just like Phelan. He is a complete and total sensate. He is a mess. I’m surprised there aren’t cigars.”

  Miss Louise was surprised to see us. Of course she hugged Crystal and asked if she wanted some pieces of jewelry or a painting of the swamps near New Orleans but Crystal said no, she had just come down for a few days to pay her respects and see what was going on in Charlotte.

  “I’m dying,” Miss Louise said. “The same thing I’ve been doing for five years. It is taking a very long time, I will say that. It’s taking longer than I thought it would.”

  “She isn’t dying,” Phelan put in. “She wouldn’t dream of dying until I figure out a way to take her to New York to see the ballet. We’re going in the fall, Sister. You should come and meet us. We’ll stay at the Westbury and see all the young dancers Grandmother has been reading about in the Times.” He went to her wheelchair and put his hands on her slim old shoulders. She beamed like a girl in love. She radiated.

  Well, Phelan is the oldest grandson. It’s a position of great and awesome power and the power runs both ways. The paternal grandmother and the oldest grandson have a river of power that runs between them like a torrent that never stops.

  “How long are you going to be in town?” Robin Martin asked Phelan. Robin Martin is a pale shadow of Phelan in every way, thinner, softer, quieter, but there is something alike about them too, a self-assurance, a watchfulness.

  “As long as Grandmother wants me here,” Phelan answered. “This is how I’m spending this year.” He squeezed her shoulders very softly and I could see Crystal’s chance for an inheritance moving off like the ghost of Christmas past.

  “Well,” Robin Martin said, “have you been playing those tapes I brought you, Grandmother Louise? The ones of the tenors?”

  “It doesn’t work right anymore,” she answered. “I can’t get it to go up or down.” She pointed in the direction of an antiquated set of stereo equipment. There was an old 33 rpm turntable, a tape player, and some huge old speakers stacked on top of each other underneath a table. There was a rickety wire table with 33 rpm records and shoe boxes filled with tapes. There was a small radio beside that on an antique glove box. It was the messiest arrangement I had ever seen in my life and we all walked over and began to try to figure out how to turn it on.

  “Throw all this goddamn stuff away,” Phelan said. “What the hell is all of this? I’m going out and get Grandmother some music and something to play it on. Come on, Sister, ride with me.” He swept Crystal up and started out the door. “Keep Miss Louise company, Robin Martin. I’ll be back in an hour.” He turned at the door. “Throw all that goddamn stuff away, Robin Martin, while you’re waiting. Just get it out of here. I’m going to need the space.”

  “You will not throw away my records,” Miss Louise said. “Those were your grandfather’s favorites that Dudley left here when he was in college. Don’t throw anything of mine away, Robin Martin. Phelan, don’t go off now. I’ve barely seen Crystal.” She rose from her wheelchair and stood up as straight as a dancer with only her cane for support. “Where are you going?”

  “You need some music,” Phelan said. “I’m going to procure it.”

  “I do not need a thing,” she answered. “I don’t want anyone buying me a thing. I’m dying. I won’t be here to listen to it.”

  “You are not dying.” Phelan took a step toward her. Then another step. Then he kissed her on the face. “Stop saying that, Grandmother. I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

  I was sitting on the sofa with my hands in my lap, not moving or saying a thing. I had never seen anything in my life like the electricity that went on between that old woman and her grandson.

  “Where is he going?” she asked Robin Martin.

  “I guess he’s going to buy a CD player,” Robin Martin answered. “Show me the new chess set, Miss Louise. I love the pieces. When did it arrive?”

  “We’ll have to get you something to drink.” She turned to me. “Traceleen, would you go out into the kitchen and see if anyone is there. I never know if there’s any help in this house or not. I’m paying someone a hundred dollars a week to be here but you’d never know it when I want something fixed.”

  “Who am I looking for?” I asked.

  “A Watusi named Anabelle who says she works for me.” Miss Louise laughed and Robin Martin laughed with her. It was some old joke I was not privy to. Also, I didn’t like her thinking she could order me around just because I am on the Mannings’ payroll but I decided just to do what she had asked.

  “The kitchen’s on the other side of the hall,” Robin Martin said. “Would you like for me to go?”

  “No.” I left the room, glad to get a little private space in which to think.

  Crystal told me later about the trip to get the CD player. First he stopped at a filling station and asked for the best electronic place and they told him to go to this place called Stereo One. Then they went there and Phelan found the only woman salesperson and put some moves on her and gave her his phone number and then picked out a three-hundred-dollar CD player and speakers and paid for it with cash and walked out carrying the box.

  Then they went to a record store and he found the youngest woman salesperson and did some moves on her and gave her his phone number and then bought a hundred dollars’ worth of CDs of classical music and old dance music and then they came back to the house. This all was done very quickly. “My money,” Crystal said. “Momma’s money. Daddy’s money. Money I’ll never see. Money Manny and I will have to make up for when my parents are completely broke.”

  “Did you say anything?” I asked.

  “What is there to say?” she answered. “He’s the oldest son. He can do no wrong. He is forgiven before the deed. So I just rode along and watched. Well, I hope she likes the CD player. I even hope one of those tacky women calls him up and gives him a piece of ass. That’s how he makes me feel, Traceleen. Like I’m watching a hurricane or a storm. Like there’s no point in arguing.”

  I walked out of the old oak dining room and across the hall into the kitchen. The main flo
or of the house consists of large rooms off of a wide central hall. It was all very dark with the windows swathed in velvet drapes as old as God which have not been vacuumed in twenty years. The kitchen is behind the library, about as far away from where it is needed as a kitchen can possibly be. Beside the kitchen is a breakfast nook where Miss Louise takes most of her meals.

  Anabelle was asleep in an old Stratolounger pulled up beside the refrigerator. The kitchen is a large room with a new white stove and a refrigerator big enough for a restaurant. There is a table in the middle of the room with pans hanging above it and a bowl of fruit that had seen better days attracting flies. The back door was open letting all the air conditioning out and there was Anabelle sound asleep in the Stratolounger. A fly swatter was in her hand and her hands were crossed across her chest like a pharaoh in his tomb. It was hard to tell her age while she slept but she couldn’t have been a day under eighty. She was so tall her feet hung off the footrest of the chair and so light skinned I couldn’t decide if she was white or black. I have tried to stop thinking in those terms, as my niece, Andria, calls them, but I was born in another age and have not finished adjusting to the one we live in now.

  Anabelle’s hair was swept back from her face in a bun and was as black as night. Whatever her age she was not letting it show in her hair. Also, she had these beautiful high cheekbones and a wide nose. I was standing three feet away hoping not to wake her and watching her breathe through those wide nostrils when she spoke without opening her eyes. “I suppose she sent you in here to get something. Well, let her send her grandson for it. I’m taking my siesta. I told her I was not going to be getting anything for anybody until four o’clock in the afternoon and not to send anyone to wake me.”

  “I came to make tea for the company,” I answered. “My name is Traceleen Brown and I have accompanied Miss Crystal Weiss here from New Orleans to see her grandmother. You don’t need to get up. I can probably find what I need.”