The Third Angel

by Alice Hoffman

  “Bill comes by once or twice a week.” Now he had to throw up Bill when he'd always said Frieda was too young to get serious with anyone. “He's very confused about why you won't see him, Frieda. It's affecting his work at the university. He's taking a very difficult course of studies, you know. Frankly, you should be right there with him. You're at least as smart. You're as smart as anyone. You were meant to be a doctor and we both know it.”

  “I remember her clear as day,” Frieda said. “Crying. Terrified.”

  Their pasta had come and the doctor ordered some wine.

  “I suppose you drink now?” he said to Frieda.

  “I'll have a beer,” Frieda said to the waitress. When the waitress had gone, Frieda turned back to her father. She wasn't the only one who could be accused of ruining things. “She's the woman you're with, isn't she?”

  “Her husband had died of bone cancer, Frieda. Surely you can understand that she was upset.”

  “I was fifteen and I wasn't afraid.”

  “You were always different,” the doctor said. “You were like me.”

  It was so long ago, that night when the Angel of Death was right behind them in the car. Frieda thought she saw him once, in his black coat with his hat pulled low. She had opened all the windows, hoping a gust of wind would blow him away. But he just stayed put until they got to the house with the white horses. Now her father was living there with that woman, Jenny. He walked out into the field every morning, bringing oats to the horses, and Frieda wondered if they ran to him when they heard the back door open, if they waited by the fence.

  “I'm nothing like you,” Frieda said. She sounded more certain than she felt.

  “Love is more complicated than you might imagine, Frieda.”

  “Well, thanks so much for the instruction.” Frieda threw down her napkin and grabbed her purse. “Don't call me again,” she told her father. “Don't contact me at all.”

  “Frieda,” the doctor called.

  He sounded hurt, but Frieda didn't care. She didn't think about the roads at night, or the songs he sang, or the way people looked at him when there was so much suffering and he was their only hope. She didn't care that he still wore two watches so he would always be on time. She had always believed he was the one person in the world she could depend upon, but she'd been wrong. Maybe if she'd been more afraid he would have stayed on with them, if she'd been a frightened little girl who screamed at the sight of mice, who feared death and fled from the angels.

  That night Jamie was gone. Frieda knocked on the door of 708, then let herself in. It was dark, so she turned on the light. She opened the window for a bit of air. She tidied the room, and afterward sat at the desk and wrote down random words. She didn't even bother to think; it was like automatic writing. The words were horrible recriminations. It wasn't a song. If anything it was a list like her mother's, and Frieda didn't want to feel that way. Unlike “The Ghost of Michael Macklin,” which she kept for herself, she threw this poem away. It wasn't possible to make art out of unbridled fury.

  Frieda left Jamie's room and went down to the lounge to use the phone. She called her mother.

  “I got your letter,” Frieda said. “About men leaving.”

  “Well, I've tried it all and none of it works,” Violet said. “So forget I ever wrote it. I'm not going to sit around and die because he went to some other woman. I decided to get my act together.”

  Frieda's mother had been doing volunteer work at the hospital, in the style of a proper doctor's wife, but she'd given that up.

  Instead, she was taking art classes at the university. She was living for herself now, something she'd never tried before. Frieda hadn't even known her mother liked art. Her mother had also changed her name from Violet to Vi. “It's more modern,” her mother said. “More me.”

  “He came to see me,” Frieda said. “I can't believe you told him where I lived and that I was working as a maid. Really, Mother.”

  “Well, aren't you?”

  “And you gave him the phone number? You helped him reach me when you know I don't want to talk to him?”

  “He's your father,” Vi said.

  “It doesn't seem like he is. I left the restaurant. I didn't even eat.”

  “Is he happy?” Frieda's mother asked.

  “I didn't stick around long enough to find out,” Frieda said, but they both knew the answer.

  “You can't make someone love you,” Vi said.

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Of course I am,” Frieda said. “I always am.”

  When she got off the phone, Frieda went to the bar and asked the barman if she could have a drink.

  “Against the rules,” he told her. Hired people couldn't drink at the bar.

  “She's my guest,” a man said. It was Teddy Healy, getting drunk. “She'll have a glass of red wine.”

  “A beer,” Frieda said. She sat beside Teddy Healy. “You're going to wind up with cirrhosis, and once you do damage to your liver, it can't be undone. A liver is irreplaceable.”

  “Doctor's daughter or hypochondriac?”

  “Very funny.” Frieda raised the beer set before her. “Cheers.” She took a sip. “Doctor's daughter. Not that it's any of your business.”

  “I thought about what you said,” Teddy said. “I might take your advice.”

  “Great.” Frieda had no idea what he was referring to, but it was probably good that something had gotten him thinking. Her attentions were elsewhere. She recognized a group in the lobby. Jamie and Stella and her drug-addled sister with her good-looking silly boyfriend along with another couple. Frieda took a few gulps of her beer. Stella looked beautiful, even from a distance; she was wearing a pale fur coat the same color as her hair and high beige suede boots that buttoned up the side. She would bring him to ruin, Frieda thought, or if she didn't bring it, if he ruined his life all by himself, Stella wouldn't be able to pull him back. She'd be asleep or gazing into a mirror or she'd be too drugged out to get up off the sofa. She'd be perched someplace thinking about herself and her needs. She would never understand him.

  Maybe Frieda was looking for trouble, maybe she just didn't know what her place was in the world, but she left the bar and headed straight for the elevator where Jamie and his friends were. They were all high, she could see that. The glassy eyes, the exhaustion, the pallor. Jamie nodded at her and grinned, nothing more. He was wearing a tux, but he looked disheveled. He had on his cowboy boots.

  “Well here she is,” Stella said. “The muse.”

  “Hello,” Frieda said. To Jamie, not to Stella.

  Stella turned to her sister. “Could you tell her? I don't have the heart.”

  The others got into the elevator, but Marianne stayed behind. She was a little unsteady on her feet, but she had a smart, sly little face. She had on earrings made of feathers. Her eyes were ringed with kohl and she was wearing her bangle bracelets and a huge green gemstone ring the same color as her eyes. Maybe it was emerald; maybe it was tourmaline.

  “Look, I don't want to hurt your feelings,” Marianne began. Her expression said otherwise. She was wearing a black-and-white quilted coat over a black satin dress. She had a dozen little braids in her long hair; when she moved her arm all those gold bangle bracelets sounded like birds chirping.

  “You won't,” Frieda said. “You don't have to worry about that.”

  “Okay. Right. Fine. Well, then. Here goes. They got married yesterday.”

  Frieda noticed that the brass hadn't been polished on the lift doors, and that the lift had already reached the seventh floor. It was an old model, with a lacy brass outer casing and glass doors, but it was still in good working condition. The staff, of course, was asked to use the stairs.

  “Did you hear what I said?” Marianne asked. “We all went to the register office, the clerk did the deed, and then we drove to Nick's house in Wiltshire and drank champagne all night. A minister came this morning and married
them again, for the religious part to be fulfilled and just for fun. We had a party that lasted all day at our place today, then we called the parents and informed them. And that's the end of the story. Mr. and Mrs. Dunn. Face it,” Marianne went on, “he was never going to take you seriously. You're not from our world.” She cast a gaze around the lobby. “You're from here.”

  “That's why you seem drunk,” Frieda said. “You've been celebrating. Well, all that drinking added to no sleep is terrible for the dermis, you know. The skin,” she added when Marianne looked puzzled. “One day you'll wake up and instead of being fresh and young, your skin will be hanging off and you'll look like you're a hundred years old. I can see the lines already.”

  Frieda turned and took the stairs up to her room. She ran, as a matter of fact. Once inside, she closed the door and wedged a chair in front of it. She wasn't about to cry over this. A broken heart was a physical impossibility, she knew that, and yet she understood why people referred to it as such. It felt that way. She got into bed and curled up, her knees drawn to her chest. She thought about her mother's list of things to do when he left you. Then she stopped thinking and rocked back and forth. Love wasn't rational; there was no proof that it even existed outside of people's imaginings. Frieda counted the cracks in the wall. She fell asleep and she dreamed of nothing, just blank space and heat. Her chest felt as though it were being crushed. She tried to wake up, but she couldn't; not until Lennie was knocking at the door, which was immovable because of the wedged-in chair.

  “Jesus, you had me worried,” Lennie said when Frieda finally came and pulled the chair away so Lennie could enter. “I thought you were in a coma.”

  “You don't have to worry about me,” Frieda said.

  Lennie looked at her, eyes narrowed. “All right,” she said. “I won't if that's the way you want it.”

  They really had nothing in common anymore.

  “I'm fine,” Frieda insisted. The mark of her pillowcase on her skin made her face look crumpled.

  “I see that,” Lennie said. “I'm glad that you woke up and saw him for what he was. He's gone, you know. Checked out.”

  Just to make certain, Frieda went to his room that night. There was no one in the hallways. The only sound was of water in the pipes as someone ran a bath. She used the skeleton key and went inside. Everything was gone. Someone had already cleaned the room. They'd probably had to send up a crew of maids because of the way he'd left things. Frieda opened the desk drawer, to make certain there weren't any forgotten drugs that could get him in trouble. Everything was in order. She noticed a pad of hotel writing paper. it should have been you had been scrawled in ink. Frieda tore off that page, folded it, and put it in her pocket. She felt those words imprinted upon her. She could not think of any words other than those. She lay down on the bed they had shared and tried to think, but she couldn't. Just those words. She couldn't get past them.

  Soon enough it was ten-thirty, the haunting hour. Frieda could hear the racket in the hall, the man's voice beginning, the panic in his tone, as though he'd been so betrayed he could barely speak. Frieda got off the bed and went to the door. She could hear the man out there more clearly. “I thought you loved me,” he said.

  Frieda could feel the echo of her pulse in her ears. She felt as if anything could happen. She slowly opened the door. She thought she saw a man in a black suit standing there. A young, handsome man standing right in front of the door to 707. She thought perhaps he was crying.

  “Michael Macklin?” she said, but the figure or whatever it was didn't hear her. He was there but he was also somehow far away. Frieda stood in the doorway and watched until the figure disappeared. A hand and a foot. A suit jacket and the back of his head. It happened so fast; she blinked and he was gone and all that was left was a tiny globe of light, like the floaters that appeared behind a person's eyes when they were developing cataracts; a white orb hanging in the air for a moment before it disappeared. Everything was gone. Frieda went back to her room and slept in her clothes. In the morning, she packed up her belongings.

  “You're not leaving me alone in this craphole, are you?” Lennie asked.

  Frieda hugged her. “I'm not going to be here to tell you what to do,” she said. “You're on your own.”

  “Good, because I never listened anyway.”

  They laughed then. It had been a perfect friendship that could only exist in that bubble of time. Had Frieda stayed any longer, things would have disintegrated between the two; the differences between them would have made it impossible for either to understand or even appreciate the other. But for now, they were sniffling.

  Before she left, Frieda stopped at the desk and asked Meg for one last favor. She asked for the forwarding address Jamie had left when he checked out.

  “It would be my job if I got caught,” Meg said primly.

  “But you don't mind doing other things that are against the law and you don't mind putting Lennie in danger. Isn't what you do called pimping? Or is it just sisterly guidance?”

  “Why don't you shut up? You grew up privileged; you know nothing about having to fend for yourself.”

  “Give me the address, Meg, and then you can do whatever the hell you like.”

  Meg wrote down an address in Kensington. “Don't say you got it off me.”

  Frieda went there straightaway. Her suitcase wasn't very heavy. She didn't own much. She had left most of her belongings in Reading. The road where Stella lived was lovely, shaded with trees, very exclusive. The sisters lived in a beautiful Edwardian town house that looked like a wedding cake. White limestone, five stories, across from a private park where two little black dogs were chasing sparrows. Frieda sat down on a bench in front of the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the park. The fence was so old yellow moss had formed over it and was as hard as brick. There was a small pond inside the park and some children were playing. Their voices were sweet. The light had changed. It wasn't the blue of summer, or the deep indigo of September. Frieda's father had told her that people in the grip of a mortal disease tended to hang on through fine weather and that more deaths occurred during heat waves and snowstorms than anyone might imagine. Even more deaths took place right after a holiday or a major life event; the birth of a grandchild, for instance, or a wedding.

  People have amazing strength, the doctor had said. They hang on beyond the bonds of what anyone would think is humanly possible.

  A dark green Mercedes pulled up and the driver got out and leaned against his car to smoke a cigarette. He was young and wore a brown suit. Frieda decided to watch him, biding her time.

  The driver waited a good half hour, then the front door of the town house opened and Stella and Marianne came out, all in a rush, laughing. They were wearing short silk dresses, one lilac, the other blue; clothes too skimpy for the season. They were laughing, their arms around each other. The driver hurried to open the car door for them; they ignored him completely and slipped inside. The driver caught sight of Frieda and as he went around the back of the car he waved to her, as if he knew her. Frieda waved back—they both needed some assurance that they were also human beings, worth something in the grand scheme of things.

  When the car took off, Frieda crossed the street and went up the granite steps. She realized she was holding her breath. A stupid thing to do, it caused hyperventilation. She rang the bell, then knocked on the door for good measure. She'd never been shy. You never knew what you might receive if you didn't ask.

  A woman came to the door, a pale blonde in her fifties who looked very much like Stella would someday if Stella didn't kill herself with drugs first. Very stylish, very attractive, and very busy. She clearly wasn't pleased to have been disturbed.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Frieda began.

  “Well then don't,” Stella's mother, Mrs. Ridge, said. “I just got back from a long trip and all the help has quit in my absence. Everything is a total disaster. The house is a mess and my life is falling apart. So tell me what it is quickly.”r />
  “I'm here to see Jamie,” Frieda said.

  Daisy Ridge stopped going over a sheet of paper in her hand. It was her to-do list. She looked at Frieda quite closely. “Are you?”

  “For a minute,” Frieda said. “I won't be long.”

  “If this is a delivery of some sort, just go around to the back door. The only remaining housekeeper is there doing God knows what. Planning on quitting, I presume.”

  “It's not a delivery.”

  Frieda was wearing black eyeliner and her black dress underneath her raincoat. She looked very competent, someone who knew what she was doing. She had her suitcase balanced on the step. Mrs. Ridge gazed at the suitcase. It was an old one that had been torn and neatly repaired with packing tape.

  “Well you're welcome to take him home with you if that's what you're here for. He's all yours, really, if that's what you want.” She often wished she had told her sister that when they'd argued over the same man.

  Frieda looked past Mrs. Ridge. The entranceway floor was black-and-white marble. The walls of the sitting room beyond were painted red, then glazed to a shiny patina.

  “Could you tell him I'm here? I'm Frieda.”

  Mrs. Ridge opened the door wider. “Tell him yourself. He's up on the third floor. Second door on the left. In bed, where I gather he spends most of his time.”

  “Thank you.” Frieda stored her suitcase in the corner where there was an ornate mirror and umbrella stand. The stand was gilded with the head of a swan on each corner. “I'll just leave this here.”

  “He didn't wrong you in any way, did he?” Stella's mother asked. “Because I'll have the police here in an instant if he did. Frankly, I'd be happy to do so. I could help you out, you know. I could have him arrested.”

  “You needn't bother.” Frieda wasn't the sort to confide in people, and she certainly wasn't about to tell this woman anything. Not that Mrs. Ridge was so easily dissuaded. Clearly, she wanted to be rid of her new son-in-law, no matter the means.

  “Did he leave you pregnant?”

  “No, but even if he had, that's not a crime, is it?”