Flights of Angels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “I am going to forgive my brother William Battle for everything he’s ever done to me because of what he did for Daddy in the last weeks of his life. He drove him to Sheffield, Alabama, to see his cousins. He put an eighty-eight-year-old man who could barely walk and was dying of congestive heart failure into an old Mercedes station wagon and drove him seven hundred miles, taking him in and out of the car to go to the bathroom and then setting him up in his cousin’s river house overlooking bluffs and eagles and pine trees and stayed there with him for six days while he entertained his cousins. William Battle’s oldest daughter came up from Memphis to stay with them. She brought her husband and her maid. They cooked meals. They poured drinks. They went with Daddy to see his mother’s house and the school where he went to the first six grades. They sat beside him while his first cousins were wheeled in by their sons and daughters and while his younger brother, who was worse off than he was, was brought to visit practically on a stretcher. I will say this for my family. They can pull it off. They can imagine it and they can make it happen.

  “I see them driving up the highway from Jackson, Mississippi, to Sheffield, Alabama, Daddy telling William Battle how much he has screwed up by drinking and gambling and fucking whores and not being faithful to his wives and William Battle telling Daddy so many lies it boggles the mind to think of them. William Battle will lie when he could tell the truth. Daddy has kept him in a double bind for so many years the main thing he knows how to do is to lie. Of course, Daddy never admitted that he knew William Battle was a liar. He couldn’t tolerate such knowledge. He couldn’t believe he could have a child who wasn’t completely honest. ‘I did the best I could, Saint Peter,’ I can hear him saying. ‘But I made mistakes. I made terrible mistakes.’

  “‘You can say that again,’ Saint Peter answers. ‘Loving the boys more than you did your daughter was your first mistake. She was your image, your most perfect creation, and you did not recognize what you had made.’

  “‘Oh, Saint Peter,’ Daddy cries and now I begin to feel sorry for him and can’t go on with the scene. Well, he’s dead now, my first and truest love, my darling, crazy, funny, beautiful daddy, and that is that and I’m glad I wasn’t along for the trip to Sheffield. I wouldn’t have had a good time and I wouldn’t have made him happy. I would have been complaining about something. I would have had a fight with William Battle and embarrassed Daddy in front of his cousins.

  “My niece, William Battle’s daughter, told me all about it anyway. On the last day they were there Daddy hauled himself all the way across the long room that overlooks the river. He pulled himself in his walker all the way from one end of the room to the other. He was going to his bedroom to go to bed but he had gone in the wrong direction. A man who had been known to find anything without a compass, who could tell by the sun and moss on a tree what was east and west and north and south.

  “‘Where are you going, Granddaddy?’ she asked, going to him and putting her arm on his shoulder.

  “‘I’m going to my bedroom to go to sleep,’ he answered.

  “‘It’s in the other direction. You’re going to the wrong side of the house.’

  “‘Oh, lordy, lordy,’ he wailed, and it was the only time anyone ever heard him cry or complain. ‘I’m an old, old man, Aurelia. I’m finished. I think I’m done.’

  “Two weeks later it was true. William Battle drove him back to Jackson and they got to the house about dark. They went in and Daddy started to his room and fell and broke some ribs. It was the first time he had broken anything when he fell. When the ambulance came to get him, he told the young men that he thanked them but he didn’t want to go to the hospital. They took him anyway. It was two days before he could get anyone to bring him home. By the time he talked two of his grandsons into carrying him out of the hospital against medical advice he was wearing only a hospital sheet and a raincoat. The nurses had taken away his clothes because he kept getting dressed and trying to leave.

  “Then he went home and then he died. Gone forever, disappeared from the face of the earth, dead and buried.

  “My father is dead. Goddammit.”

  PART II

  The Triumph of Reason

  What to do while I wait for my fate to be decided. The fate is whether or not I get an abortion. It’s taking four days to find out because the only doctor in northwest Arkansas who performs abortions is in Boston at a meeting of the Reproductive Rights Council. He has been talking to my father almost every day since I told them I was pregnant. How did I get pregnant? Well, it was because my father took us to France for two months, and we thought it was safe for me to walk around a little village so beautiful and old that romance rose up from the stones and took me.

  His name was Moise and he wasn’t even completely French since his mother was from England and had died the year before in a motorcycle accident. The French like to race everything. That’s one thing I learned while I was there. And in the hot summer afternoons they make love and they think Americans are crazy to do anything else and they say it’s also the reason we are fat. I was fat when we got to Montreuil but in a week I was not. I could see my rib cage. I could wear a loose blouse without a bra and still look good. The minute we arrived I stopped thinking food was an issue. It’s so beautiful in France you won’t believe it. You just want to be part of that beauty.

  Data about me. I am sixteen years old. My name is Aurora Harris and I live in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where my father is the chairman of the Department of English at the university and my mother is a housewife who used to be a sculptor until my sister was born, when she gave it up and joined the middle class. I don’t know if you have ever been around an artist who had to give it up for their family but I’ll tell you, the family is the one who suffers. It’s like my mother is some sort of cripple with a vital organ missing. Well, in France she had a studio behind the farmhouse we were renting and she seemed happier there. Marble had been delivered and she spent the first two weeks touching it and looking at it and having a pair of young men from the village turn it over and stand it on end and we didn’t see much of her. I guess my sister, Jocelyn, did. Jocelyn is her middle name and she adopted it for our trip to France. She is the most rotten spoiled child who ever lived and can barely read so don’t even ask about her.

  With Mother out of the way and Daddy happy to sit in a hammock and read all day, I had France pretty much to myself from the word go. The first thing I did was fix up my room into an office and set up my computer so I could write poems and then I started going off on these long walks to explore the place. Montreuil is this beautiful hilltop town with lime-washed seventeenth-century houses that look like mirages in the morning sun. Roses grow in the oddest places, creeping around fences and bushes, running up the side of a building. I don’t know. It smells so good and I was so glad to be away from Fayetteville, Arkansas, and the born-again Christian idiots I go to school with five days a week until I get to college. I could have gone to college this year but my parents wouldn’t let me. They have dedicated their lives to making me a normal person, which is a losing battle since I am not one. I am a person who writes poems and does not believe in any form of God or gods and does not like to talk to fools. Imagine me in high school. Just imagine what that’s doing to my spirit.

  Moise was waiting at a bend in the road on the third day I went off walking by myself. Here’s how he looked at seven in the morning. About five feet ten inches tall, very muscular, with long, light brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. Holding a mug of coffee and smoking a cigarette and leaning over to inspect a flower bed. He straightened up when he heard my footsteps and gave me this brilliant, unforgettable, perfect, flowering smile. He wasn’t afraid of a thing in the world, that’s what that smile said to me. He was ready for anything that happened, any event, any challenge, any girl coming down the road in a pair of khaki shorts and a white T-shirt that read “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.” God, can you believe I was wearing that stupid T-shirt when I met him? Y
ou can believe I wasn’t wearing it the next day.

  He had on some sort of faded blue-and-white-checked shirt and a tie. I don’t know what else.

  All I said was hi or hello and then I walked on by, knowing right that minute that eating was over for me this summer. I was in love with him before he turned around and showed me his face. The psychotherapist I talk to when I get crazy says I was ripe to fall in love and there is nothing wrong or unusual with anything that happened next. He’s for the abortion, I guess. He kept asking me what I wanted to do. What do you think I want to do? Do you think I want to be a pregnant junior in high school and ruin my life just because we quit using rubbers? No. The answer is definitely no and I am not going to change my mind. Doctor Masterson will be back on Friday. Friday afternoon I’m going in. It’s over. It’s done. It’s decided.

  Can you imagine how beautiful that baby might be? None of us are saying that but I know I’m not the only one who thought it. Jocelyn was in her room crying this morning. She can’t take strife. She goes crazy if there’s anything wrong in our lives. I don’t know what she’ll do when she grows up. She can’t handle the bad parts. She can’t even read a whole book because she has to skip the parts when anyone is sad or in trouble. I think it’s sick the way my parents give in to these neuroses, but no one listens to me. This house has too many good minds and too many ideas. It’s a wonder we don’t kill each other. We are going to kill this fetus. That’s done. That’s for sure.

  The second morning I was up at dawn and spent about an hour getting dressed to go for a walk. I decided to go totally American and put on black bike shorts and a white tank top. I let my hair just fly out behind me. It’s pretty curly and has invited comparisons with Chelsea Clinton, whom I happen to know, by the way. Anyway, I didn’t see any point in trying to look like I was French when I didn’t even speak the language well enough to order breakfast.

  I wore my dad’s old watch and went on down the hill the same way I had gone the day before. I wasn’t really expecting him to be there because I had forgotten that everyone likes excitement and the mysterious appearance of persons from another country. So he was standing by the flower beds in the same shirt and he was looking up the road as if he was waiting for me.

  “Hello,” I said. “Do you speak English?”

  “A little bit,” he answered and gave me another one of those indescribable smiles. The smile of someone who is so good-looking and sure of himself that he can just throw that sort of smile away on anyone who comes along. “Are you staying in the house on the cliff?”

  “We rented it for the summer. My mom’s father died and left us some money and we’re spending it on France. We could never afford a villa like that. My father is an English professor. I’m sixteen. How old are you?” See, I had decided not to change my personality for this encounter. I always tell everything I know to anyone I meet. It’s too much trouble to try to be quiet or mysterious. I’m never good at it. I don’t even try. That’s one thing the psychotherapist has taught me.

  He laughed at all of that and put down his coffee cup and held out his hand to shake my hand. “I am Moise Vallery,” he said. “I’m a student at the Sorbonne. But this summer I work at a resort hotel in Le Touquet. May I walk with you awhile? Which way are you going?”

  So he walked to the village with me. He had on leather shoes and a shirt and tie and he strode along beside me and told me he was studying world literature and would like to meet my father.

  Could I tell you how blue the skies were that morning? How green the fields and hills, how brilliant the clouds and flowers? Would you believe it if I told you I thought I had not been alive until that morning, that my whole life had been a preparation for this walk?

  I told him about the poet in Fayetteville who had committed suicide because he was adopted and because his girlfriend talked his wife into divorcing him. I told him about the six-day wake we had at our house and how it was the day I got kissed for the first time and about how Dad hid all the poet’s books for several years and finally last year I demanded to be able to read his poetry. I told him I adored Rilke. He agreed Rilke was the main man but he hadn’t ever read the Stephen Mitchell translations and said he didn’t want to if they had been made from a trot.

  His main interest is in South American writers and magic realism. Can you see why I thought my life was lived to arrive at that moment? My father is an English professor. How else would I have been in a position to even talk to Moise?

  He took me down a tree-shaded walk that leads along the ramparts of the town. A breeze stirred the leaves and made the shadows dance and my heart was dancing with them. This was it. What I had waited all my life to know. I don’t know when we started holding hands. I guess when he told me about the people of Montreuil during the Second World War and how his relatives on the coast had helped save the stranded British and French sailors in a famous rescue. It was like they were with us as he talked, smiling down on the progeny of the Allies who had won the war.

  I had made up my mind not to kiss him until I had seen him at least two more times but the decision was taken out of my hands. At nine o’clock by Dad’s watch he said he had to go and catch a bus to Le Touquet or he would be late for work. He had left his car at his house and was riding a bus to work just so he could walk with me to town.

  He walked me back to where I could see the road going up the mountain to our houses and then he turned and kissed me on the mouth. In the sunlight, on the street, in the world no God made but that morning I would have believed in one. He kissed me the way lovers kiss and then he took my hands and said he would see me in the morning and would not go to work that day.

  I said yes.

  You have to know one thing about me. The poet who killed himself is not the only death I have suffered. My older brother died two years ago climbing on the bluffs above Beaver Lake. This is not something any of us can talk about. My mother spent the summer carving him in stone. That’s what the marble was for. She made three almost-life-size sculptures in three months. They are all of Joe. There, I wrote his name.

  Death is a reality to me. Not many sixteen-year-old girls in Fayetteville can say that. They didn’t look down into a coffin and see a face they have seen every day of their lives. Joe was a master climber. My parents let him do it because they thought it was better than drugs. He was a student in the architecture school and worked at The Mountaineer on weekends and taught people how to rock climb in the studio on Dickson Street. Mother and Daddy don’t think they did anything wrong by letting him climb. They think it was an accident. They say they think it was an accident. I don’t know. I don’t know when we’ll get over this.

  A month later my grandfather died in Kansas City and left Mom the money so we went to France and now I have this baby in my womb that would be born about on Joe’s birthday, which is April 18, but it isn’t going to be born because as soon as Doctor Masterson gets back we are going to stop it. I am a reasonable person. I cannot have a baby at this time. It would totally ruin my life and also my parents’ and Jocelyn would probably love it so much it would be ruined. She has three cats already.

  No, no, no, no, no. You see, I have a choice and the choice is no. If I could take it out and put it in a jar like in Brave New World and save it for ten years that might be okay, but the way it is, it would be my family and me taking care of it for the next twenty years when we aren’t even sure how we are going to pay for college for Jocelyn and me. The money my mother inherited wasn’t much. We spent half of it going to France.

  This is like the four-day waiting period the born-agains want everyone to put up with. They want you to sit around and imagine the child you might have had if you agreed to give up your life for it. A child you didn’t even want or plan or ask for. It just comes in like some parasite and makes its nest, which becomes a colony, which is more like a cancer than a blessing. So it would be cute. Who gives a damn?

  The next day was Friday. I told my parents the night before I was go
ing for a ten-mile walk and not to expect me back until afternoon (if I was gone when they got up). My father immediately got suspicious and offered to go with me but I threw a fit and said he didn’t trust me and the usual bullshit and finally I won. Mother didn’t want any trouble or for Jocelyn to hear any quarreling.

  So I threw a bathing suit into a backpack and I was off at six-thirty and going down the hill to meet Moise.

  Dad caught up with us about halfway to town. He was driving our rented Citroën and he stopped and walked over and I introduced Moise and we stood around talking about world literature. Dad shook Moise’s hand and invited him to come to lunch at one. Moise said he’d be delighted and they stood there looking each other over and then Dad got back into the Citroën and drove away.

  Erik Satie was what happened next. Moise took me to a restaurant owned by a friend of his father’s. We had croissants and coffee and raspberries and fresh yogurt and Moise went behind the counter and put on a tape of Erik Satie played by a pianist they all knew and we ate croissants and drank coffee and listened to that music. He didn’t even hold my hand. He just watched me eating and every now and then smiled at something I said or got very quiet when I told him about Joe. He didn’t try to cheer me up or say he died doing what he wanted to do or at least he didn’t have to get old or any of the things we had heard before. He knew I was talking about a life-changing experience from which my family was not going to recover although we would survive. We were surviving. I was always going to survive. I knew that about myself. I had seen myself survive two years of Fayetteville High School and now that I had met Moise I was thinking about getting into the Sorbonne and just going to school in Paris. There are French teachers at the university. I could start taking classes as soon as I got home.