Flights of Angels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Just say you’ll help me find the house. And don’t tell anyone about it. I want it to be a complete secret.”

  “Not even the children?”

  Mrs. Alstairs thought about it. “Not even them,” she said. “They’re too young to wonder where a house came from.”

  “Whatever you say.” The young woman who was the mother of the children hung up the phone and closed her eyes very tightly. She was the secretary to a bathroom and kitchen renovator. She dreamed for a moment of a shower that worked, a kitchen with a dishwasher. Why not, she decided. Why wouldn’t a grandmother want the best for her grandchildren. A nice house in a nice neighborhood. It made wonderful, brilliant sense. It made the world seem full of possibility and light. She ran into her boss’s office to tell him. Then she remembered it had to be a secret so she went back to her desk and worked on the billing records.

  Mrs. Alstairs found the house in two hours. A three-bedroom cottage two blocks from an elementary school. It was painted blue with white trim. There was a fenced-in backyard with trees big enough for swings. There was a yellow-and-white kitchen with new appliances. It was brand new. A brand-new house in a neighborhood with bicycles and toys in the yards. A place where children could live and grow in peace. If they like it, she reminded herself. If not, we’ll find another one. Her spirits soared. This had been there all along waiting for her to do. This wonderful adventure had been right before her eyes and she had been too afraid to see it.

  “I don’t know if we could be research chemists,” Kevin was saying to Jodie. They were having a snack in the lounge at Phyladda. “I was thinking about that this morning. I’d rather be a psychiatrist, I think. You be a research chemist and I’ll be a psychiatrist.”

  “Psychotherapist,” Jodie corrected him. “The real ones call themselves psychotherapists.”

  “All right.” Kevin handed him a sprout-and-lettuce sandwich with Tofu Rella and mustard and they sat down at the table and ate.

  “What a day,” Jodie said. “What a beautiful day.”

  “I’m feeling lucky,” Kevin answered, hoping a tiny little hint wouldn’t ruin the secret power. “I’m thinking about calling my brother-in-law and putting some money in the stock market. It’s down another hundred points. I heard it on the radio driving in to work.”

  “Your brother-in-law?”

  “He’s a broker at Merrill Lynch. He’s always after me to let him make me rich.” They giggled and finished their sandwiches and then went back to work. At twelve-fifteen Kevin called his brother-in-law and put his savings account to work in stocks that his brother-in-law swore were at their all-time lows.

  Then he forgot about it and went back to thinking about how he was going to quit smoking as soon as he and Jodie went on a vacation.

  Which is why, four years later, the fifty-car parking lot at Phyladda is now one-third its original size and Kevin and Jodie are running a hugely successful stop smoking clinic in a beautiful modern building designed by Peter Waring of New Orleans and featuring a twenty-foot-long curved stone hot tub bordered by ferns and orchids where the patients can sit and soak the nicotine out of their bodies. The clinic stays open twenty-four hours a day and the patients can come in any time they are feeling weak and get massages or aromatherapy or have food delivered from seventeen different gourmet restaurants or take yoga or sit in zazen or choose from a three-page list of displacement activities while they wait to overcome their addictions.

  Jodie has given up acting. Also, he has never fulfilled his secret ambitions to be a research chemist or a medical doctor but he no longer thinks he has missed his calling. The dropout rate at the Tax Shelter, which is what they jokingly named the smoking clinic, is fifteen percent. The cure rate after three years is ninety percent.

  Jodie and Kevin are in the process of adopting a child, or, hopefully, several children. If that falls through they are considering joining the big brother program and spreading their maternal instincts out into the community.

  “There’s plenty of time to decide all that,” Kevin always says.

  “Not as much as you think there is,” Jodie always answers.

  “Plenty of work to do.”

  “Sick people lined up trying to get well.”

  “So they can make themselves sick again.”

  “Ours not to reason why.”

  “Ours not to judge, if we can help it.”

  Battle

  On King’s way in Jackson, Mississippi, the battle was joined. Mrs. McPhee was going to have to send her husband of sixty-seven years to a nursing home that was only fifteen minutes away from her house and that was that. There was nothing else to do. He was killing her. He never slept. He woke her up every two hours every night to tell her things. He would rouse himself from his bed and struggle into his walker and go and find her. No matter where she found to sleep in the three-bedroom house he could find her. She was eighty-eight years old and the maid and the nurses left at ten every night and from then until the morning her life resembled the Lewis and Clark expedition. Finding a way to get him back to sleep. Putting him in bed and petting him. Assuring him that the black fireman who had bought the house next door was not going to come in with a gang and murder them in their beds. Playing his Books for the Blind tapes for him, although they had had to take away the Louis L’Amour tapes as they only made him crazier.

  There was the matter of the gun. He had a loaded thirty-eight revolver in the apron pocket of his walker and he had thrown a fit when his children tried to take it away. He had pouted and complained for so many nights and become so paranoid that they had finally given it back to him, bullets and all. He had been armed since he was twelve years old. There was no way they could disarm him now. Mrs. McPhee and her sons put the bullets back in the gun and gave it to him and he returned it to the apron pocket of his walker.

  Then there was the matter of Mrs. McPhee’s children. Neither of her sons was ever in Jackson when she needed them, although their wives were sweet and helpful. One of the wives, a darling named SuSu, was even able to calm old Battle down when he became paranoid about the black people moving into the neighborhood. It was SuSu who thought up having the minister across the street come talk to him. The minister had black people living on either side of him. “They are very nice people,” the minister told old Battle McPhee. “They are just trying to escape the ghettos and find a place to raise their children. None of them is going to hurt you. They are protection from the sort of black people you fear.”

  This calmed Mr. McPhee down and made him more determined than ever not to go to the nursing home. He had been willing to go to the nursing home when he thought his life was in danger from the black people moving into the neighborhood. Now that the minister had reassured him about that, he had decided to stay home until he died.

  “I am living in the best black neighborhood in Jackson,” he told his daughter when she called on the phone. “Did you hear about that?”

  “I heard you were going to the nursing home where Uncle Phillip went,” she answered. “How do you feel about that?”

  “Oh, I’m not going anymore,” he said. “Now that the minister tells me we’re in the hoi polloi.”

  “Oh, Daddy,” she said. “You have to go to the nursing home for a few months while Mother gets rested. You have almost killed her keeping her awake. If you kill her, where will you be? She’s the one who takes care of you. You have to let her get some rest.”

  “If only he would take the sleeping pills,” her mother put in from the other phone. “If he’d take the sleeping pills he could stay home.”

  “I’m about to die,” old Battle said in his most charming voice. “I want your mother with me when I get to the Pearly Gates.”

  “Shut up, Daddy. You are not going to die. That is not the issue here. The issue is Mother has to get some sleep. Take the sleeping pill tonight. Promise that you will. I take them all the time. They aren’t going to hurt you. All they do is make you go to sleep. It’s less dangerous
to take an Ambien than an aspirin. If I were your age I’d take one every night.”

  “I’ll promise anything,” he said, and laughed his wicked, dangerous laugh.

  Days were all right in the McPhee household on King’s Way, a small boulevard in what had been the bright new part of Jackson when the McPhees’ oldest granddaughter had bought the house for her first marriage. The McPhees’ oldest great-grandson had been born there. It was a one-story brick house, on a hill, with a beautiful oak tree in the front yard and a landscaped backyard with rose gardens. The older McPhees had moved into it when the money began to shrink.

  Everyone in the family had different ideas about why the money had shrunk. The McPhees’ daughter, Ifigenia, blamed it on her brothers and had gone up north to live. She was mad at everyone for losing all the money. She was a perfectionist and couldn’t tolerate anyone who was messy in any way. The brothers blamed it on each other. Old Battle McPhee blamed it on the government, which made so many crazy laws it was impossible to run a business. The grandchildren blamed it on bad luck and didn’t really believe it was shrinking. If it was shrinking, they sure wanted to get one last house or car or a never-to-be-repaid loan out of their grandparents before it was completely gone. In the years that Mr. McPhee was a millionaire they had been able to get anything they wanted from him. They were in the habit of never having to get anything for themselves and it was a habit that was hard to break.

  But the money shrinking was not the problem for Mr. and Mrs. McPhee in nineteen ninety-six, although more money would have made some of the problems less acute. The problem was that Mr. and Mrs. McPhee were eighty-eight years old and they had not expected that to happen. They had not expected to desire so much to walk across a room and out the door and get into a car and go and do exactly what they damn well pleased.

  Instead they were stuck in this little three-bedroom house in a neighborhood that was turning black. In many ways the little house was turning into the plantations where both of them had been born and raised. There were black nurses and a black cleaning lady and Mr. and Mrs. McPhee spent their days helping the black people solve their problems in return for the black people feeding and cleaning up after them and, in Mr. McPhee’s case, getting him dressed and bathed and bandaged. He had a bad foot that wouldn’t heal. It was the first thing that had happened to either of them that medical science or their incredible bodies couldn’t heal.

  The black nurse who had been there the longest and become Mr. McPhee’s right-hand man had plenty of troubles of her own. She had a daughter who was on a dialysis machine three afternoons a week. “Dialysis,” the nurse, whose name was Phoebe, told Mr. McPhee. “It’s a machine to clean her blood. We have to pay extra to have the filters changed on the machine. The filters cost a hundred dollars a week.” Then Mr. McPhee would dip into his small store of dwindling money and pitch in to buy some filters.

  Mr. McPhee had been allowed to drive until he was eighty-seven. He had a valid driver’s license until he was eighty-two and his sons let him keep on driving for five years after that as long as he stuck to the streets near his house. They had put handicapped stickers in the front and back windows of the car and decided to take a chance on him not killing someone on his way to the bank or the library. Then he injured his right foot and the wound wouldn’t close. Karma, the bright ones among his progeny whispered among themselves. That’s the foot he used to kick us with. There were many bright ones. Bright, smart, powerful, ambitious, self-centered, spoiled, beautiful, cunning, and selfish. He had passed on his genes.

  But the crucial problem was not the dwindling money or the selfishness of the gene pool. The problem was that Lila McPhee wasn’t getting any sleep. Old Battle was sucking her dry. He was killing her. In the daytime he would charm the maids and nurses. At night he would whine and cry and pretend to be paranoid about the black people in the neighborhood or become paranoid by dint of his incredible imagination or whatever it took to get into her bed and make her pet him while he went to sleep.

  “Sometimes I don’t care if they both die,” their daughter, Ifigenia, told her sisters-in-law. “Let them kill each other. It’s their marriage, their insane relationship. They’ve been at it for sixty-seven years. I can’t do anything about it.”

  In order to make sure that she didn’t end up down in Jackson, Mississippi, in the middle of the melee over whether Mrs. McPhee put Mr. McPhee into a nursing home for three months while she rested up, Ifigenia bought airline tickets for her entire family to go to Italy for two weeks at the end of July. She made reservations for herself, her husband, and all three of her teenage sons. They would leave at seven in the evening on the twentieth of July. A vacation and an adventure.

  Early in the morning of July thirteenth, old Battle McPhee was lying in bed thinking about his luck. He had had good luck, he decided, but made bad decisions. The bad decisions were going to lead to him being slaughtered in his bed by black people. Not to mention the effect the bad decisions were going to have on his arrival at the Pearly Gates. Old Saint Pete would be at his post. Old Battle would be approaching, hat in hand, all his power gone, his strong right hand, his strong legs, his good brain, most of his teeth and money, gone. “I did the best I could and you know I was the soul of charity. I fed the poor and clothed the sick and housed the homeless. I did my damnedest, Lord. But I made bad decisions. Miss Lila will be along to tell you a lot of stories about me, but they are not true. She was a hard woman to live with. I know I shouldn’t have taken that little vacation from my vows but I am repentant and you know I have sorrowed over that.”

  “The devil take you,” Saint Pete would say. “No one can enter here who does not have a heart that’s pure.”

  Battle’s mother was looking over the battlements of the Holy City. “Let my boy in here,” she called down, and Saint Pete opened the Pearly Gates a crack, so Battle could speak to his mother. Still, he did not let him in. Down below, the devil waited with his fiery angels.

  Battle struggled to get his good leg out of the bed and down onto the floor. He painfully pulled his body up into a sitting position and then sat for a moment listening to his heart beat. At any second it might stop. It would stop and he would be gone. I shouldn’t have slept so long, he was thinking. I’ve got to get out of bed and get to work.

  He pulled the walker over to the edge of the bed and began the struggle of pulling his body into a standing posture. His arms were still strong and well muscled. His arms were all he had left. He had pitched a hundred thousand baseballs with that right arm. He had caught a hundred thousand flies. He stopped for a moment and imagined himself on a summer afternoon in Sheffield, Alabama. Out on a vacant lot near the courthouse with his cousins and his friends. There are nine or ten of them divided into two teams. It grows darker. It’s after supper and some of the grown men come out to play with them. The cicadas and crickets and tree frogs are as loud as a symphony. The women come and sit on the benches and gossip and watch the game. The black people are lounging on their benches by the livery stable. It is still light enough to see a fly ball. The ladies have on long-sleeved dresses for the mosquitoes. His daddy comes and stands by home plate and calls out to him. “Pitch him a curve, Battle. Strike him out and I’ll let you drive the car.” Battle winds up his arm, zeroes in on the catcher’s mitt, throws a perfect curve ball that drops as it nears the plate.

  “Now we’re railroading,” Battle says to himself and makes one last huge effort and pulls his body into a standing position behind his walker. Now he is ready to walk into Lila’s room and wake her up and get her to help him go to the bathroom. It is the third time since midnight he has come into her room to wake her up.

  At nine that morning Lila got her daughter on the phone in New York and issued an ultimatum. “You have to come and help me. I have to get him into a home for a few months. I have to be able to sleep. I get up in the morning and look in the mirror and don’t know who I see.”

  “If he hadn’t given William Battle and Joe al
l the money there’d be enough money to have nurses at night. It isn’t my fault. I warned you and warned you. I have given up. I am not coming down there and spend my hard-earned money to make up for the money William Battle and Joe threw away in Las Vegas. That’s that, Mother. I am not coming down there right now. We’re taking the boys to Italy. It’s been planned for months. If we change the tickets it will cost hundreds of dollars. Call the nursing home and tell them to come pick him up. Didn’t you see Streetcar Named Desire? They come and pick them up.”

  “I deserve better treatment than this. I deserve your help. What have I ever done in my life but love and help you? I don’t ask much, Ifigenia. I only need your help to get him into the home. Couldn’t you come for one day? I’ll pay for the airline ticket.”

  “You can barely pay your electric bill. I’ll call you back tonight. Call the place and see if they won’t come get him. Is he awake? Put him on the phone.”

  There was much clicking of receivers and whispered orders and finally Ifigenia heard her father’s voice. My first love, she warned herself. The one who set the standards that have ruined my life. The alpha male. Beware, beware, beware. Snake charmer. Egomaniac, narcissist, king.

  “Hey, Daddy,” she said in her sweetest voice. “How’s it going?”

  “I’m going to die,” he said in a pleasant, charming voice. “They’re trying to put me in a nursing home.”

  “Mother has to get some sleep,” she answered. “You’re killing her, Daddy. She’s eighty-eight years old. You have to let her sleep. You have to take the sleeping pills. If you’d take the sleeping pills you wouldn’t have to go to the home. They aren’t going to hurt you, Daddy. They are going to extend your life. I take them all the time. So do all my friends. I have taken hundreds of sleeping pills. You have to be brave and courageous enough to take the sleeping pills, Daddy. If you don’t take them, she can’t sleep. You are going to kill her keeping her awake.”