Flights of Angels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “The thing that’s killing me is that your brother didn’t marry that nice girl from Illinois, your friend Cynthia. How did we let her get away?”

  “Shut up, Daddy. That’s not the issue. I don’t want to hear about William Battle. I want to talk about you taking the sleeping pills so Momma can get some sleep.”

  “I don’t want her to go away,” he said in a childlike voice. “I need her with me when I get to the Pearly Gates.”

  “Daddy, you are not going to die but you are going to kill Mother if she doesn’t get some sleep. Will you take one of the sleeping pills tonight? Will you promise me to do that?”

  “All right. I’ll take one tonight. Did you hear that, Lila? I promised Ifigenia I’d take the sleeping pill.”

  “I do not want to go,” Ifigenia told her husband. “But there’s nothing I can do. If one of them dies while I’m in Europe I won’t be able to live with myself. We just have to put off the trip for a couple of weeks. I’m so sorry. There’s just nothing else to do.”

  “You should go see about them. Go ahead.”

  Ifigenia’s husband was glad to see her go. He was thinking about what would happen if he was old and infirm and she held his past against him instead of going to help. He thought it set a good precedent for Ifigenia to go on down to Jackson, Mississippi, and help her mother get her father to take the sleeping pills.

  They were able to change the airline tickets without a penalty after their travel agent explained to TWA that Ifigenia’s father was ill and she had to see about him before she left the country. “Bring a note from his doctor and mail it to me,” the agent said when she called to tell Ifigenia and her husband the good news about the tickets. “Get something that says there’s been a medical crisis.”

  “There is one,” Ifigenia answered. “Me having to fly to Jackson is a medical crisis. It takes a year off my life to spend the night there.”

  Ifigenia left her sons with her husband and boarded the plane and flew to Jackson. Her older brother met her at the plane. He was accompanied by a woman he had brought home from San Antonio the week before. A tall blowsy-looking blonde who had been reading Anna Hand’s books in William Battle’s apartment and wanted to talk to Ifigenia about them.

  “I don’t talk about my cousin Anna,” Ifigenia said. “Her death was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Just read the books and think your own thoughts.”

  “William Battle said you were a special friend of hers.”

  Ifigenia gave the blowsy creature a look that would have silenced the devil. “Get my bag, William Battle,” she told her brother. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Twenty minutes later they arrived at the McPhees’ house and came in the kitchen door and moved past the registered nurse into the den and found big Battle sitting in a chair in a clean white shirt waiting for them. He was a gorgeous man. Eighty-eight years old and barely able to use his left leg and he was still gorgeous. It was as if age had made his skin and face and cheekbones translucent. If there were a Saint Peter and he was an aesthete, he would let Daddy in for sure, Ifigenia was thinking. Goddamn he’s a handsome man. No wonder I love him.

  She sat down beside him and looked at her watch. The last time she had been there it had taken him three and a half minutes to push one of her buttons. She wanted to see if he could break his record.

  “That’s William Battle’s new lady friend,” Battle whispered to his daughter. “She’s not as good-looking as your friend Cynthia, but William Battle says she’s related to the Bankheads. Well, we’re mighty glad to have you here, Ifigenia. Your mother is very proud that you came.” He was warming up. “I’m proud of you too,” he said. “I never thought I would be. You were the last one I ever thought would amount to anything, but there you are, with a nice husband and the boys aren’t bad, although that little one is mighty smarty.”

  “Got to put my bag away.” Ifigenia got up and kissed her father on the head and heaved a sigh and began to roll the stone up the hill.

  “Up, up, up the hill,” Ifigenia sang to herself as she went into the guest room that had a portrait of her when she was sixteen hanging over the bed. “Up the hill down which my self-esteem has rolled like a heavy ball.” She lay down on the bed and imagined her father taking one of the sleeping pills and never waking up.

  She reached over and picked up the old-fashioned white phone and called her best friend in Jackson and asked if he would meet her later at the park for a walk.

  “Sure thing,” he said. “Wait until it’s cool. I’ll meet you there at eight and we’ll walk for an hour.”

  Eight in the evening in July is still light in Jackson, Mississippi, but the intense heat of the day had started to dissipate as Ifigenia got out of her mother’s white Oldsmobile and walked across the parking lot to meet her oldest friend. He was her best friend and her astral twin, born on the same day of the same year in the same state. He had been born in a five-bed hospital in Smith County with his cousin for the doctor. She had been born in Jackson at her grandmother’s house because her mother didn’t want strangers to see her naked.

  Her friend’s name was Johnny Tuttle and he had become a famous lawyer. He had gone to law school meaning to become a federal judge. Then he had learned the real power was in front of juries. The power and the money. He had plenty of both now but he had not changed. He was still the tall gangly redheaded man Ifigenia had run around with at Millsaps College. They had met in the library when they were freshmen, both escaping college rush in the stacks of musty books. They had remained friends all these years, through his unhappy first marriage and happy later marriage, through the madness and death of many of their friends and the startling successes of others, through thick and thin. The sight of Johnny made Ifigenia a nicer person. She had never accomplished anything significant in her life but the fact that Johnny was still her friend meant that she was also special.

  She took his arm and they began to walk down the circuitous paths of the Parham Bridges Memorial Park. “I don’t know what to do for them,” she began. “It does no good for me to come here. Neither of them takes my advice about anything. It’s like I’m five years old trying to enter into one of their arguments. I guess Daddy would like to enlist me on his side against her. I don’t know what goes on with them. Sometimes I think I don’t understand men or women. I know I don’t understand men like Daddy. They’re working on some program that’s far from me.”

  “Pride,” Johnny said. “He can’t be seen as someone who was kicked out of his own house.”

  “No, it’s fear of death. He believed those old Presbyterian ministers who preached to him in his youth. He believes in the devil and he thinks he’s going to be punished for something.”

  “I can’t imagine your old man being afraid of anything. I think it’s pride, Ifigenia. You don’t know what a man will do for pride.”

  “If he’d take the sleeping pills she wouldn’t send him away. Can you believe it? He’s got a bottle of ten-milligram Ambiens and he won’t take them. If I had them I’d take one every night until they were gone.”

  “Give me a couple. I could use a night’s sleep.” They giggled in obeisance to their old pill-popping college days. They speeded up. They walked half a mile without speaking, then Ifigenia picked up the conversation in the middle of a thought.

  “He does all this to get people to call up and come over. We know it and we still do it. It’s not like they are ignored. They have servants in and out all day long. The grandchildren come by all the time. Hardly a day goes by that someone isn’t over there. And they talk on the phone all day. They talk to their sisters and brothers constantly on the phone.”

  They passed the two-mile marker on the path and started down a tree-lined path to a creek. “Look at it this way,” her friend suggested. “Think of the money you are getting back from the government in all that Medicare. That would make me feel better. I wish I knew someone who was benefiting from a government program, especially someone kin to me.” />
  “We were on our way to Italy,” Ifigenia said. “Not that those brats of mine would pay attention. Maybe now I won’t have to take them. Maybe Jake and I can go alone. Oh, well, don’t pay any attention to me. I don’t mean to complain.”

  “Remember that summer we went to Italy with Professor Nelson? That was the best time I ever had in my life. I don’t think I slept the whole time we were there. We didn’t think of sleep as something to be desired back then.” He stopped on a bridge over the creek and she stopped beside him, remembering the gaiety and fun they had shared when they were young.

  “He had memorized the floor plans of the museums. He was so bossy. We were so mean to him. We didn’t appreciate what he was doing for us.”

  “We were learning things whether we knew it or not. I had to work construction for two months to make the money for that trip. We were building the road from the tennis club to the airport. Jesus, it was hot.”

  “I just asked to go and they said yes. I didn’t appreciate anything. No wonder my kids are such brats. Maybe it’s the genes.”

  They left the bridge and kept on walking. They walked for four miles, up and down the small hills and the circuitous route, picking up the pace while the sun left Mississippi and the pink and blue clouds turned to gray and darker gray and the cicadas made their buzzing music in the trees.

  I never had to want for a thing, Ifigenia was thinking. That old man made sure I had everything the world had to offer. And he kept me safe. I never feared a thing in the world. I knew he would protect me with his life, so I was free to be as stupid as I wanted to be, to stay a child forever. Then I married a rich man because I had a rich daddy and a rich education. I didn’t have to be anybody or do anything. So how do I pay him back for that? I can’t make him stop being eighty-eight years old.

  “I would pay him back if I could,” she said out loud. “I don’t know how to help them, Johnny. It’s so frustrating. Because there’s nothing anyone can do. All he wants me for is to make me do things for old cousins of his in Natchez or people I don’t know. He wants to use me like a tool and I won’t be used.”

  “You can help him,” Johnny answered. “You just haven’t thought of the right thing yet. Take your mother somewhere so she can get some rest. Or make him take the pills. Slip him one in a drink. Outwit him.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m really going to outwit that old man. If I gave him a pill without him knowing it he would kill me. He’d go completely crazy when he woke up. The last time he went to the hospital he almost tore the place up. He doesn’t want to be in anybody’s power, not even the power of a pharmaceutical company.”

  “I know. I’ve seen him in action. Well, call us if you need us.” They had come to the parking lot and had stopped walking and were stretching their legs. The very last light had left the sky. It was dark.

  Ifigenia hugged her wonderful, consoling, dearest friend and got into her car and drove away. I have been protected by wonderful men all my life, she decided. I am going to be grateful for that. I am not going to spend the rest of my life being the ungrateful wretch that I’ve become. I can change. I can be better than this. I know I can.

  When Ifigenia got back to her parents’ house she went into the den and sat near her father and really looked at him for the first time since she had been there. She looked at the beloved freckles on his hands and the wide clear brow and the rich thick hair that still grew on his head and his wide strong shoulders and still-strong arms. Everything about him was in perfect proportion to everything else. Eighty-eight years had not altered that.

  He smiled at her and returned her affection. He told her a few jokes, laughing uproariously at the punch lines. “I’m going in the kitchen and see what your mother has to eat,” he said at last. “Come eat supper with me.” He began to struggle to move from his chair into his walker.

  “Where is that wheelchair Medicare bought you?” she asked him. “I thought you got a wheelchair.”

  “It’s in the living room,” her mother answered. “Where it has always been. He won’t touch it.”

  Ifigenia got up and went into the living room and looked at the wheelchair. It was sitting by a gold sofa. In between a gold sofa and a lamp table holding a Chinese vase that had been turned into a lamp. She unfolded the wheelchair, locked down the arms, and pulled it toward the center of the room. “Nice piece of equipment,” she called back into the den. “You got the government to buy you this?”

  “Sure did,” her father called back. “They brought it right out.”

  “It’s just equipment,” she called. Her father had been a heavy equipment dealer. “It’s no different than a horse or a car,” she called out louder. “It’s a tool and man is a tool user. I’m trying it. It’s not about being an old man in a wheelchair, Daddy. It’s about getting from the den to the kitchen table.” She got into the wheelchair and rolled herself across the carpets and into the den. It was hard to make the wheels move on the thick rugs. “No wonder he won’t use it,” she announced when she got to the den. “The rugs are too thick. The wheels get bogged down in the carpets.” She rolled across the den floor and into the back hall where the carpets were older and the going was easier. She rolled the wheelchair up and down the hall and then back into the den, then toward the kitchen. Her mother was standing by the fireplace. The nurse was sitting on the sofa by her father. “Goddamn,” Ifigenia called out each time she passed them. “This is impossible. I don’t know how he gets the walker across these goddamn rugs, much less a wheelchair. You ought to send him to a nursing home, Mother, if this is how you take care of him. He needs this wheelchair and there’s nowhere to roll it.”

  Her father was paying attention. He was smiling. He loved it when people raised their voices and yelled out instructions to other people. “You’ll have to take up these rugs,” Ifigenia yelled. “It’s nuts to have Karastan rugs on top of carpets anyway. It’s unhealthy to have all this wool on the floor.”

  The black nurse began following Ifigenia around offering suggestions. She had worked at a nursing home once and knew all about wheelchair access. “Medicare will widen these doors,” she offered. “They’ll pay to get them done.”

  Ifigenia rolled past her father going at a good clip. She got out of the chair and rolled a rug out of the way into the kitchen.

  “Let me see that thing,” old Battle said. “Bring it over here.”

  Ifigenia rolled over to him and got out and helped him into the chair. “Your arms are all you have left but they’re strong and fit,” she said. “You have the arms of a young man. You’ll be out on the sidewalk taking rides before too long. They have electric ones, you know. We’ll get you one of those.”

  The nurse took hold of the left side of old Battle and helped get him settled in the chair. “Medicare will get him one,” she said. “They’ll send one right over. I’ve been telling him that but he wouldn’t listen.”

  Battle shook the women off. He settled his hands on the wheels and began to roll. He rolled past the rolled-up rug and into the kitchen and up to the kitchen table. “Table’s too high,” he yelled back. “We’ll have to get the table changed.”

  “I’ll call Dinwiddie,” Mrs. McPhee said. “He’ll lower it, or cut the legs down.” One thing about Mrs. McPhee. She knew when she was defeated. The two people in the family who could defeat her anytime they wanted to because they were ruthless about means were her daughter, Ifigenia, and her husband, Battle. Aligned against her they were an impenetrable wall. But it made her feel good to see Ifigenia and Battle on the same side for a moment. It almost never happened that their selfish desires coincided so perfectly.

  Ifigenia was in high gear now. She was moving all the furniture in the house. She was completely messing up Mrs. McPhee’s decor. She took two houseplants and put them in the garage. She rolled up the rose-and-yellow Karastan in the dining room and shoved it under the table. She made a list.

  The nurse was supposed to leave at ten but it was almost eleven when she and If
igenia finished making paths through the house and Ifigenia walked her to the door and handed her two twenty-dollar bills and thanked her for her help.

  Ifigenia went back into the den. Old Battle was sitting by the fireplace in the wheelchair. He was nodding. He was almost asleep. “Come on, Daddy,” Ifigenia said. “I’ll roll you to your bed and give you a sleeping pill and take one myself and then we’ll all get some sleep.”

  “Oh, God, that would be nice,” Mrs. McPhee said. She watched as Ifigenia rolled her father into his room and helped him into his bed. The nurse had helped him undress and put on his pajamas earlier that evening. No matter how old he became or how much his legs wouldn’t work, Mr. McPhee got up every morning and dressed in clean khaki pants and an ironed white cotton shirt. At night he put on ironed cotton pajamas with piping on the cuffs and down the button placket.

  He didn’t take the sleeping pill, of course. No matter what the minister told him he felt it was up to him to be on guard at night. But he did sleep very well and soundly for almost six hours. He had got to listen to plenty of yelling and to watch power being used and muscles being flexed and furniture being moved. That was more like it. That was something he could recognize as life.

  II

  Later, in November, Ifigenia began a journal.

  “But he was going to die and maybe we all knew it and maybe we didn’t know it. How could the strongest man we knew die? How could we have believed that? He believed it but I am not sure if he really believed in the Pearly Gates and all that bullshit. He kept saying he believed it and he gave all that money to the 700 Club and all the other right-wing preachers and he looked sincere when he went on about the God who made us. Still, I never knew him to think anyone was as smart as he was and I never knew him to think there was something he couldn’t control so maybe he just pretended to believe it rather than believe in nothing. Maybe he just couldn’t bear to think he would disappear, vanish, not be.