A Quiet Belief in Angels

by R.J. Ellory

  There was a time we went to see White Heat, ostensibly out of respect for James Cagney, in reality because Hennessy and I shared a mutual crush on Virginia Mayo. On another occasion I remember an impulsive and spontaneous trip to the beach at the far end of Staten Island near Perth Amboy, and there—sober as judges—we had frozen Florida juice popsicles, Eskimo Pie, and rock salt-encrusted hot-dough pretzels. During such convivial times Hennessy proved himself dry and sardonic, but never resorting to the coarse and boorish language that seemed the fad.

  “Hope,” he would say, “is a tremendously overrated commodity, Vaughan. You take the vast majority of those fellows back in Brooklyn. They hope for something better instead of recognizing that there is something right there in front of them that can be enjoyed for what it is.” He smiled and winked at me. “Like right here and now. Here we are, two healthy young men packed to the brim with hormones, and what do we see? We see row after row of pretty young girls, any of them as cute as a George Petty pinup . . . and we possess the nerve and charm to speak to them, to invite them to dinner, anything we like, do we not? Merely being here is pleasure enough . . . regardless of whether we actually do anything else. Those boys back there . . . well, I can tell you now, they would bemoan the sun, they would complain about insufficient funds to take a bus back to the city, they would needle one another about venturing an exchange with some young lady, and not one of them would have the gall to do it. And later they would wonder why the world was such a dark and disappointing place. Me? I don’t give a red cent what people think of me! I’m living life every which way I can, and if I have nothing to show for it then who cares? Life isn’t a dress rehearsal, Vaughan.”

  Hennessy would laugh, and then he would search out Cecily Bryan and I would hear them laughing together.

  When we were down on our dollars Hennessy and I would eat Cream of Wheat breakfast cereal, and then later—mid-afternoon, when the hunger gnawed like a mongrel at a bone—we would walk to a Horn & Hardart automat and share a bowl of soup and a sandwich. One time we both were stricken with influenza, and Hennessy—out of sheer desperation—stole boxes of Citroid and SuperAnapac from a Rexall drugstore on the outskirts of Bedford-Stuyvesant. “Trust me, Vaughan,” he would say in a deep, somber voice. “No one will see me, and even if they do what’s gonna happen? They’re gonna chase me for a dollar and a half’s worth of cold remedies? Somehow I think not.” So Paul Hennessy stole them, and no one saw him, or if they did they had neither the will nor the want to pursue him. We took the medication; we recovered.

  When we were flush we would go up to Macy’s department store, an eleven-story monolith that consumed an entire block in Midtown Manhattan, and there—amongst the basement bargains—we would find articles of clothing that we would wear no more than once. We bought flannel and seersucker suits at Hart Schaffner & Marx, and then we would wander uptown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and pretend we were Eastern European art students, barking at one another in clipped falsetto accents, pronouncing opinions as if we had something of worth to say, and then afterward would buy a bottle of Calvert whiskey and sit on a bench near Central Park. We sang “Days of ’49” and tunes by the Gershwins, watched as Buicks, Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals made their way toward Broadway or across this better part of town—and never once did I think of my mother, of Gunther Kruger, of the past I had left behind. Alone, well, that was a different story. Alone I would think of Alex and the child that I lost. Sharing whiskey and laughter with Paul and Cecily seemed to blanch my mind of the past.

  Later, much later, I heard that Cecily moved back to Missouri. Eleventh of September, 1961, despite the successful evacuation of half a million people when Hurricane Carla brought floods and tornadoes to Missouri, Texas, Louisiana and Kansas, Cecily was one of the forty people killed. She didn’t deserve to die. Despite her dipsomania, despite the fact that the Watch and Ward Society of Boston, Massachusetts, would have outlawed most of her language, Cecily Bryan was a swathe of blazing color in an otherwise predominantly monochrome world, and only in her absence did I realize what a fundamentally gentle, lost, bewildered soul she was. The last memory I had of her was of a trip we took to New Brunswick in New Jersey. Cecily wanted to see Camp Kilmer, the place where Hungarian refugees were temporarily housed. Thirty-seven thousand of them came to the United States, and Cecily figured there was something desperately romantic and terrifying about such people. She bundled armfuls of copies of the Saturday Evening Post and American Weekly into a battered suitcase and dragged it to the front porch. Paul tried to explain to her that the Hungarians more than likely spoke no English.

  “But they speak American, surely?” she shrilled, and insisted that we take the magazines. “They’ll want to know something of their new homeland,” she went on, and Paul looked at me and shook his head resignedly. In Cecily’s world, non-English-speaking refugees were tremendously interested in William Randolph Hearst’s sensational reportage; perhaps they also took pleasure in the funny pages, the latest exploits of Homer Hoopee and Li’l Abner. I suggested we take a wireless. The Hungarians would more than likely enjoy Dragnet and The Jack Benny Show.

  Paul laughed. “All we want are the facts, ma’am,” he said, in a passable Joe Friday.

  “You boys are utterly ridiculous,” Cecily said. “That wireless has to weigh at least thirty pounds. You might wish to carry that on a train, but I certainly do not.”

  Rumor had it that Cecily had come from a once rich family, that they’d lost everything in the Wall Street crash of ’29. Her father had put a flare pistol in his mouth. He needed a closed coffin because his face looked like a handful of smoldering Bakelite. It seemed to me, perhaps from personal experience, that death either consolidated or collapsed people. Some—challenged not only mentally, but emotionally and spiritually—found in the death of loved ones the will and resolution to reaffirm their presence and persuasion alongside everyone else. Others, their connections to the world already tenuous, simply fell away into a world of their own creation. So in some small way Cecily Bryan was a reflection of my mother, and perhaps this unspoken parallel gave me a sense of loss that was out of proportion to my emotional tie. Cecily was crazy, but beautifully, poetically, magnificently so, and for this I believe she may have become an angel.

  Such were the weeks and months that closed 1949 and started 1950. A time of new faces and experiences. It seemed I had passed through the walls of one world and entered another’ and from my room on the corner of Throop and Quincy, through my irregular and clandestine rendezvous with Joyce Spragg, and my friendship with Hennessy, I managed to establish some sense of who I was and why I had chosen to escape my past.

  In July of 1950 I wrote to Reilly. I spoke of New York: A great swathe of noise, within which people rush and flood and overflow. It seems there is insufficient room on the sidewalks or streets, as though there could never be enough houses or apartments to cope with such a throng, but somehow they press together in oblivious ignorance of each others’ feelings and fortunes. I find it hard to understand how so many people can be so close, and yet remain so far apart.

  And in writing I revealed my location, and in revealing my location I created a window through which Georgia could climb back into my life.

  And that’s what happened. In October a letter arrived at the boarding house, and Aggie carried it up and slipped it beneath the door as I slept.

  I remember the day precisely, standing at the window, the letter in my hand, the weight of it something far greater than ounces or grams. The script I did not recognize, save that it had not come from Reilly, and in understanding this I understood also that this dispatch would be an invasion. Before I even opened it I knew that it would, in turn, open something within me. A wound. Reason and deliverance had carried me away from my home. I had sought remission from the weight and burden of loss. Fooled myself into thinking that such a thing, once achieved, could be maintained. As if I had earned it.

  I had earned nothing.
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br />   I knew I would have to go back, all the way back to Georgia, to Augusta Falls; all the way back to where this thing had started.

  And what scared me, scared me more than anything, was the belief that if I returned I would never escape again.

  I opened the letter . . .

  I believed myself a writer, a poet, a man of vision and foresight.

  I believed myself strong, resolute, dispassionate and calm.

  I believed I could go back home, and somehow remain distant. As if I would merely send my body, not my mind. I would remain in New York and view everything from some hundreds of miles away. My heart was strong. Hadn’t Reilly Hawkins told me that? But strong enough to go back into the past? I was afraid—for myself, for my mother, for what might happen.

  I was afraid that the memory of Gunther Kruger and ten little girls would haunt me forever.

  I knew what had happened back then. I knew the weight of conscience that Dearing must have carried as he walked away from that barn, Kruger hanging from the rafters, his face swollen, his tongue blue, the thin pink ribbon woven between his fingers.

  Perhaps I feared what might have been said, the rumors that would have wound their way through the people of that town. Seven counties, seven separate worlds, and to all of them I was as much a ghost as they were to me.

  I forced myself to believe it was a test: my returning. Forced myself to believe that if I could survive this then I could finally lay the past to rest and continue with my life.

  But I knew better. I knew all too well that they would always be there—the memories of girls, the sound of Alex’s voice within the walls of my mother’s house, the sound of my child crying in the darkness, how I would never understand nor believe that a life could have been so brief.

  I faced a conflict and it challenged me. It threatened to break every bone in my body, every resolve in my mind. It assumed a nature and character all its own, and its nature was one of darkness, of loneliness, of some thin line drawn between who I believed I was, and who I feared I would become. I had tried to exorcise these things, believing that my escape to New York was a catharsis for the soul, but it was merely that and nothing more: an escape.

  Had I traveled to some other distant corner of the earth it would have found me, for Georgia was not so much a thing of the external world, it was something within.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “GOING HOME IS AS NATURAL AS BREATHING,” JOYCE SPRAGG TOLD me, “except if you happen to be drowning.”

  I smiled and reached out to hold her hand.

  “You’ll come back. Everything will be okay,” she whispered. She stepped closer to me. Right there in the lower hallway of Aggie Boyle’s house. My suitcase at my feet, my coat buttoned against the cold, and she pressed herself against me, her lips to my ear. “Everything I said before . . . it was something, you know? This thing we had . . . it was something.”

  When she stepped away she was trying to hold back tears. I reached up my hand and held it against her cheek. “I know,” I said. “You are a terrible liar, Joyce Spragg.”

  Our farewell was awkward. I believed that when I returned—if I returned—things would not be the same between us.

  An hour later I stood in the bus station. I waited patiently. I shivered. I wished that the world I was returning to was a world I wanted.

  The letter had been brief and succinct.

  Dear Joseph,

  I trust you are keeping well. Reilly Hawkins showed me your letter. I am glad he did, for otherwise I would not have known how to contact you. I write regarding your mother. She has not been well for a long time, as you know, and recently has slipped further away. I am afraid she will not make it through the year. I felt you should know this in the event that you wished to see her again. Sheriff Haynes Dearing visited a few times, but he has not been for a very long time. He spoke with her, but I do not think she realized who he was. I am asking if you would please come. She speaks of you often, though I’m not sure if she understands what she is saying.

  My thoughts are with you, and I hope you will return. I write in anticipation.

  Sincerely,

  Laurence Gabillard M.D.

  In my mind I resented my mother—her illness, her madness, the way in which a simple note could carry me away from something for which I had so long yearned.

  But I took the bus back to my past, waiting there to meet me as if I had never left.

  Georgia, the darkest light of my heart.

  The sun, once high and bold, now seemed stark and aggressive. Colors appeared insubstantial and vague, as if lacking assertion, as if the land itself had seen too many darkened days to possess the strength to continue.

  I stood at the side of the road looking down at the house of my childhood. I did not see the people that now lived in it, but I sensed their presence, saw signs of their occupancy. It was dusk, early evening of October thirteenth, a Friday, and though I was never superstitious, I did feel that here was both the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. Smoke rose from the chimney like a specter. A dog barked.

  I shuddered and turned away.

  I took a room for the night at the Falls Inn. I had been away for eighteen months. I considered walking to Reilly Hawkins’s place, but for some reason I could not. Frank Turow was dead, I learned; his place was now owned by someone called McGonagle. A heavyset man, wider than two regular men, but even with his size he seemed gentle, with soft and rounded features, a thatch of gray-blond hair and pale eyes. There was something about him that was immediately likable.

  “Yes, Frank Turow went and died,” McGonagle said, his voice as gentle as his mannerisms, as I followed him upstairs to the narrow attic room. “Stroke I think. You knew him?”

  “A little.”

  “I didn’t know him at all. I bought this place on a handshake back last winter and Frank Turow had been dead for a couple of months already.” I sensed a half smile in his voice. “Odd, but sometimes I get the idea he’s hanging around to make sure I take care of his place.” He laughed, almost nothing of a sound.

  I did not ask further. Somehow I didn’t want to know about Frank Turow or Lowell Shaner, Clement Yates and Leonard Stowell. The past was the past.

  I did ask after Sheriff Dearing.

  “Haynes Dearing,” McGonagle said, and he slowed and turned toward me. “You didn’t hear about that?”

  I felt cool and loose inside. How had I known that my return would not be some joyous rush of nostalgia?

  I shook my head.

  “Tragic . . . really tragic.”

  “What was?” I asked, in my voice an edge of anxiety.

  “The thing that happened with his wife, you know?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t know details,” McGonagle said. “Let’s see . . . I bought this place the winter before last, February of this year. Yes, February this year. Of course, details ain’t my business, but from what I heard, well, she took her own life.”

  “She committed suicide?”

  “Seems that way, yes.”

  “Why?” I was taken aback. I had never met Dearing’s wife, but the idea that anyone would take their own life shocked and upset me.

  McGonagle shrugged. “Like I said, mister, I don’t know details. Why does anyone take their own life? Something they want they can’t have. Something they got they don’t want. Don’t get an awful lot more complicated than that, eh?”

  I couldn’t speak, and for a few moments I couldn’t move.

  Why was Georgia so replete with the dead and dying? Or was it me? Was I some emissary of Death? Did I carry it with me like a scent, something imbued, a stain on the soul that permeated the air around me?

  “And Sheriff Dearing?”

  McGonagle shrugged. “Outta here within a week or two. Resigned as sheriff and took off somewhere. That would have been in March. Understood he was a shell, and drinking, though don’t quote me on that. Haven’t heard a word of him since.”

  I st
ood there on the stairwell, my heart in my mouth, a cold sweat across my forehead, the backs of my hands, and made believe that I had never returned, that I could close my eyes and wish myself back in New York and everything would disappear.

  “You okay there, mister?” McGonagle asked.

  I nodded. “Yes. I’m all right.”

  “Well, come on then. Let me show you the room.”

  Later, an hour or more, I stood at the window and looked out toward the shadows of Augusta Falls. The world was silent but for the ghosts of the day, and they seemed afraid to come out.

  Eighteen months, all but a fortnight. This place had swallowed some more of my past, and all of it beyond my awareness.

  Tomorrow I would go to Waycross and see my mother.

  The morning broke early. The sun angled high and full, white like snow, casting shadows crisp and definite. The night had cut cold, sleep came awkwardly, knees and elbows beyond the edge of the mattress, and when I rose my muscles ached with the dull thud of fatigue. This was no physical distress, but something else. Perhaps my bones, grown from this land, sensed their home, and in my sleep had tried to drag me down. They hankered for the earth, for the swollen damp and relentless humidity. I washed with cold water from the faucet in the bathroom, hoping that the snap and bite of ice would somehow refresh me. It did not. I clawed my way into consciousness, the world around me edged with the ban of memory.

  “Sleep well?” McGonagle asked, as he set a plate before me in the kitchen.

  I grunted, and faced as much meal as I could. My throat tightened with each mouthful.

  I left quickly, and walked to Reilly Hawkins’s place.

  The house was unlocked but empty. His pickup stood in the yard, the keys in the ignition. In the kitchen I scrawled a note and then tore a hole through it to hang on the handle outside.

  In Reilly’s pickup I followed the meandering line of Suwannee northeast toward Waycross, my heart like a clenched fist, my eyes seeing nothing but the thin strip of road ahead. I arrived at the town limits within an hour and pulled over. I tried to play the scene in my mind. A reunion with my mother. I thought of Alex and tears came. I rested my forehead against the steering wheel