Flights of Angels

by Ellen Gilchrist

“He’s sixty years old. She can’t mean it.”

  “It’s to embarrass Canada. It’s that old black white mess you and I have disavowed. Not everyone has rooted it out of their hearts. It’s part of that old evil.”

  “You’re imagining that. She’s just excited to be in on the story. Come on, let’s go see what they’re doing.”

  We found Andria packing up her things to leave. Phelan was watching her. “Mighty good to know you, little girl,” he said and we saw Andria straighten up.

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  “I said it’s mighty good to know you.”

  “Little girl. You called me a girl.”

  “Well, you are a girl, aren’t you?”

  “No, Mr. Manning. I am a woman, an anchorperson. I am not a girl. I don’t know what a girl is.” She moved to me and gave me a peck on the cheek. “See you later,” she said to everyone and she was gone. Phelan looked like she’d slapped him in the face.

  “What did I say?” he asked. “What was all that about?”

  Crystal and I went into the kitchen and I got my things and left so I wasn’t there for the next thing that happened. I was on the Saint Charles Avenue streetcar looking out the window and thinking about how crazy people are. Really crazy, open to suggestions, totally, completely mad. No, I told myself, they are also kind and wise and very, very smart. Think of the ruins of that bathhouse in Pompeii the year my church group went to see them. Think of all the things we make, songs and houses and mathematics and television stations. We are spotty in our madness and our goodness. Our lives are like clouds, moving, changing, coming apart. Or else our lives are just like riding on the streetcar, mostly just chugging along watching, then someone new gets on and we watch them for a while.

  While I was thinking all this Canada was walking into the kitchen where Crystal was getting things out for supper. Phelan was behind her. “Phelan has asked me to marry him,” Canada says. “And I have told him yes. We’re taking a chance, Crystal, the hardest chance you can take with the most to lose and the most to gain.”

  This is one hour after she has told me she would never marry him. Remember that?

  “I have loved her since I was a boy and she used to come and stay with you,” Phelan says. He puts his hand around her waist. “I have never really loved anyone else.”

  Forgetting his five wives, his four illegitimate and five legitimate children, his thousand mistresses and whores and so forth. Crystal said she couldn’t open her mouth to speak. All she could do was pray time would undo some of the day’s madness.

  I came in at nine the next morning. The yard was full of television trucks from CNN. They were there to tape a live interview with Phelan. They were in the living room, having moved half the furniture and pushed the baby grand piano into the bookshelves and laid yellow cords all over the floor.

  “Thank God you’re here,” Crystal said when she saw me. “More company’s coming. Canada’s son is flying in.”

  “Where will we put him?”

  “In Crystal Anne’s room. If he stays here. I think he’s upset about the engagement.”

  “Engagement,” I answered. “Stop right there. Let me put down my purse.”

  “Keep an open mind,” she said. “I think Phelan’s changed, Traceleen. I think he really is in love. He wants to make a home. He wants to settle down.”

  “And cats can swim,” I answered. “It was only yesterday he was flirting with Andria. Have you forgotten that?”

  “Canada’s worried about her son getting here.”

  “I’m sure she’s right to worry.”

  The son was coming to write a premarital agreement. It seems Canada has several million dollars and her son was not about to let that money get mixed up in a Louisiana community property law. The son is a lawyer from Denver. He is a tall good-looking man with black curly hair and a wide chest. He had on silver cowboy boots with a suit and he was in town on business. He and Phelan took an immediate dislike to each other. The son’s name is Bob and no sooner did I get him settled in the living room with a cup of tea and some sweet rolls on a tray than the CNN station called up to say the interview was going to be on in ten minutes. Everyone moved into the den to watch the television except Bob Marks. He wasn’t budging. He sat on the living room sofa eating the sweet rolls and looking like he would like to kill. In the den there was Phelan on television in a white safari shirt talking about alligators and how dumb they are. He was about to get off on a lecture about why big game hunting is good for the ecology when the announcer cut to an advertisement about denture cream.

  We all went into the living room to join Bob. “I think you and Mother should put this off for a few months,” Bob begins. “It’s going to take some time to get the papers ready.”

  “I don’t want to put it off,” Canada tells him. “We want to get on the Queen Elizabeth II and go to Europe. We should be married before we leave.”

  “I can’t get the papers by then,” Bob says. “And I haven’t told my girls. I have to have time to prepare them for it.”

  “They haven’t written me in months,” Canada replies. “They have their own lives. They didn’t even thank me for their birthday checks.”

  “Well, we’d better leave you alone to sort this out,” Crystal said and pulled me into the dining room and then the kitchen.

  “We need to rent Raise the Red Lantern and make her watch it,” I suggest. “I know she only said yes because he was flirting with Andria.”

  “Bob Marks will stop it,” Crystal says. “He looks like a determined man to me.”

  “You can tell her Phelan’s broke.”

  “I can’t do that. I can’t work against my own brother when he’s a guest in my house, after he saved that child. I can’t do that, Traceleen. I don’t think I can.”

  “You can. I think you have to.”

  “Maybe I have to but I can’t do it. I just don’t think I can do it.”

  Phelan has decided everyone should go out to Commander’s Palace for dinner. He is playing a close hand with Bob Marks. Not saying much. Letting Canada and her son row it out.

  “He loves this,” Crystal tells me. “He wanted to invite Andria but I wouldn’t let him. I told him it had gone far enough.”

  “Tell him you’re going to tell her he’s broke.” I was standing my ground, slicing onions for gazpacho as I talked.

  “I will. Yes, I might.”

  Blood is thicker than water. Crystal couldn’t undermine her brother while he was her guest so I saw that it was up to me. I went into the guest room and found Canada and told her as plain as I could what I knew. “He is completely broke and has sold all his property and doesn’t have a job of any kind,” I said. “He will expect you to support him. Are you aware of that?”

  “I guessed it,” she said. “I just wasn’t going to say anything about it. I don’t want to hurt his pride.”

  “I give up,” I answered. “I am going home and straighten out my closets.”

  The Louisiana legislature saved the day. Two weeks before all this happened they had signed into law a bill that said from now on there would be two kinds of marriages in Louisiana and each couple must take their pick. One would be a regular marriage with the possibility of a no-fault divorce if it didn’t work out. The other, new kind of marriage would be called a Covenant marriage. In it each person would turn over all their stuff and it would belong to both of them forever. Plus, if anybody wanted a divorce they could only have it for adultery, drunkenness, or abandonment. This Covenant marriage was not fooling around. If you chose it you were saying I am in this for the long haul no matter what happens or if you get broke or fat or one of us gets bored.

  After Bob got the premarital agreements about money all worked out and signed they all began to have spats over the Covenant marriage deal. Phelan wanted one but now Canada was not so sure. Marrying Phelan for a lark with a good premarital agreement and a fifty-fifty chance at happiness was one thing. Signing up for better or wo
rse with his track record was another thing entirely.

  No sooner had Phelan and Canada and Bob come back from the marriage license bureau empty-handed since they couldn’t decide what license to buy than the doorbell rang and Canada’s granddaughters from Colorado were standing at the door looking like the sweetest two young girls you could ever want to meet. Their father had sent for them. He had also called all of Phelan’s ex-wives and told them where he was and told them to start calling the house unless they wanted to have a sixth wife sharing Phelan’s salary from now on. He had not told the wives who he was or that his mother had plenty of dough. He had led them to believe Phelan was chasing another waitress like most of them had been.

  The phone began ringing. Two of the wives had better things to do with their lives than dream they were ever going to collect any alimony or child support from Phelan but the other three were glad to lend a hand. They called their grown children and told them to call in and start asking for money for things. The girl in Denver called in and asked for a new mountain bike. The boy in Alabama called and asked for money for tuition. The twins in Houston called and said they’d been invited to go to Disney World if only they could buy their own airline tickets.

  The whole time Canada is going around the house and introducing her granddaughters to all of us the phone is ringing with requests from Phelan’s wives and children. Even Crystal started to think it was funny. “The dark side of testosterone,” she whispered to me. “Well, at least he gives all of them everything he can make or borrow or steal.”

  I think Manny picked up the tab for the Disney World trip. By then I had gone back to thinking it was more madness than goodness and more complicated than evil and that we didn’t have to worry about Canada and Phelan getting married on our watch as Manny calls it. He calls our lives our watches because he used to be in the U.S. Navy when he was young.

  Canada packed up her clothes and went downtown to stay at the Royal Orleans with her granddaughters and her son. Phelan sat in the living room after they left, telling me and Crystal some lies about his business down in Texas where they manufacture guns for shooting elephants. He said it was making money steady and would soon be making money hand over fist now that the U.N. had relaxed its rules on elephant hunting.

  Actually, his gun-making business has been closed for two years but we didn’t want to remind him of that. Not with Canada leaving and so forth, not to mention his untreated prostate cancer that he never mentions.

  “I’ll be heading on out this afternoon,” he says at last. “If the kids are going to be at Disney World I might drive down there and ride some of the rides with them.”

  We let him go. I helped him carry all his bags out to his old station wagon and I stood on the sidewalk with Crystal as he said goodbye. I forget he is the biggest racist I have ever personally known when he looks up at you out of those sad brown eyes and keeps on lying to himself and being brave when the world he was given has turned completely upside down on him. He is what Crystal’s parents made of him and he was brought up to live someplace that no longer exists in the world. He was brought up to ride horses and carry guns and look down on everybody and treat women like slaves, except for the time when he’s reminding them of their fathers to get them in his power. It’s a tangled skein.

  So I felt sorry for him as he went driving off down Story Street on his way to Florida to pick up a little love from his children and ride some cheap tacky rides at Disney World.

  “Disney World,” Crystal said, fighting back her own sympathy and sorrow. “He needs Disney World about like a squirrel needs Dexedrine. Oh, to hell with it, Traceleen. Let’s go clean up the house. I’m sick of houseguests. I want to lie down on my bed and think about my own problems, don’t you?”

  “I want to clean the house,” I agreed. “Put on that Ninth Symphony we used to play when we’d clean up after parties. I get into the corners when I hear that music.”

  We marched back into our house and got out the twin Miele vacuum sweepers we bought when we thought Crystal had allergies. We got out a pile of dust cloths and a bucket full of furniture polish and window-cleaning aerosol cans and put on our double-lined plastic gloves and went to work.

  Over at the zoo they were cleaning out the alligator pond and raising the fences around every dangerous animal. As Andria said later, we might be able to do without so much testosterone if we could get enough estrogen-driven vigilance in play.

  Phyladda, or, The Mind/Body Problem

  It’s all in the mind was the watchword of the Phyladda Hospital on Lenox Street in south L.A. It was a one-story stucco building surrounded by a brick wall painted white. There was a parking lot for fifty automobiles, and two beautiful entrances, a back entrance with a wide double door painted red and a front entrance with a wide double door painted blue. Pots of geraniums framed the red door and pots of blue salvia framed the blue one. Inside was a long open room and a reception desk staffed by two pretty blond girls in long white uniforms. Their hair was always pulled back in neat ponytails. Their earrings were small pearls, one to an ear. They had soft voices and soft pink skin.

  They handed out forms to be filled in and when they said it will only be a few minutes it was true. No matter what the problem the patient brought to the clinic it was addressed within ten minutes of entry through the doors. No one had to sit on a hard chair and stew in self-inflicted torment. No one had to be alone or afraid. They were taken back to a colorful examining room and greeted by one of the staff of seven.

  The Phyladda called them the staff of seven because there were seven actors at work there twenty-four hours a day. They were handsome young men, in their thirties and forties, dressed in white coats and shirts and handsome ties. They had been chosen by Phyladda Hoyt herself after long interviews. They were all excellent listeners and had become well versed in the latest medical and scientific know-how on twenty subjects. Of course, if the patient was deemed to be actually sick, any of the seven was capable of getting them into an ambulance and to the hospital if necessary or to a real doctor’s office in record time. This only happened once or twice a week but the real local doctors were so happy with Phyladda’s services they were glad to be on call for any real illnesses that happened along.

  In the meantime, in the day-to-day hard work at the Phyladda, the seven listened until their hearts almost burst with the burden of anxiety and fear that was unloaded onto them hour after hour, day after day, by housewives and lawyers and lonely men and women and even sometimes overweight or neglected children. Most of the patients, however, were women in their fifties and sixties.

  Jodie Wainwright had started life in Harrisburg, Illinois. Only after he discovered he was gay did he leave and find his way to Los Angeles. He had a degree in theater arts from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where he had played Hamlet and Henry V and the Duke of Burgundy in Lear. Also, he had been a chorus boy in three musicals and had had several small parts in revivals of Albee. He was a gorgeous young man, as blond and blue-eyed and lithe and fine featured as anyone who ever showed up in L.A. looking for work. It was happening, he decided every morning. It was slow, but it was happening. He had also had a small role on a soap opera for a year and two walk-ons in movies. It was happening. His name was out there. He had an agent. It would happen soon.

  In the meantime he made a living working four days a week at Phyladda. He went in at six in the morning, changed into his doctor gear, and was on call until six in the evening. By late afternoon he began to droop and really look like a doctor. In the mornings he was so trim and dapper and clean shaven it was hard to believe he had been doing anything more strenuous than reading newspapers while he drank coffee at sidewalk cafés. He was reading medical textbooks all the time when he wasn’t at the clinic. He had got caught up in the details of the job. He had begun to think he was a natural-born diagnostician. There were reasons for his believing this. It was not just ego or wishful thinking. Other members of the staff believed it too. He had diagn
osed AIDS in a forty-year-old society woman who seemed in perfect health. He had diagnosed it by listening so carefully and asking so many questions that she finally remembered a blood transfusion ten years previously. It was a very early diagnosis. As soon as he suspected it, he sent her to a clinic to have blood tests. Now she was on the cocktail and with luck would live another twenty years. She sent him flowers once a week for a month. She wasn’t mad at him for finding out she was sick. She thought he was a hero.

  Also, he had diagnosed a liver ailment that had been overlooked by two physicians. He had sent a marathon runner who thought she had allergies to a dentist to have a full mouth radiogram. She had infected molars that had been causing her to have a chronic sinus infection.

  Jodie didn’t know why he was able to ferret things out. He thought it was because he kept reading and reading and reading and thinking and thinking and thinking. He had to read and think because he had given up sex. Two scares with false positive HIV tests had revved up his small-town mid-western common sense. Until I find the right guy and want to get married and settle down it’s over for me, he told his friends and they said okay and behind his back they said, Oh, right, give that a month and we’ll see. It had been six months and he was still as celibate as a priest. He had forsaken sex for science.

  Jodie was waiting in a blue-and-white examining room when Mrs. Gaithwright was ushered in by a nurse. She was a lady in her early sixties, medium height, slightly overweight but still fit looking. Her hair was pulled back in a chignon and she was wearing silk slacks and Birkenstocks.

  “I know I don’t have cancer,” she began. “But it says you are supposed to report any change in your bowel habits and I have a change. Changes. I know what caused it. Everything that’s happened has had a cause I can understand. Also, it’s not so much a change as an exacerbation. I have always had trouble shitting. Long ago I had cesarean sections and afterward I got hemorrhoids from the painkillers they gave me. So since then I have always taken laxatives or Metamucil or whatever it took to keep me from having large, hard stools. Large, hard stools are the enemy of what I want, which is not to think about shitting one way or the other but to do it without pain every morning and then go on my way.”