A Quiet Belief in Angels

by R.J. Ellory

  “You are passionate about this, aren’t you?” she said when I was finished.

  “I’m sorry,” I replied. “Once I get going it kind of takes me over.”

  She reached out and touched my hand. “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Sorry is for the things you’ve done that you shouldn’t have, not for the things you believe in. Next time, bring some of it, would you? I’d like to read what you’ve written.”

  I said I would. Anything to gain a second rendezvous. Thoughts of her pulled at me like gravity.

  The subsequent months we met two, three times a week. We went to the movie theater, we ate in a restaurant on the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant, we walked in Tompkins Park until our hands froze and our noses were blue. We learned something new about one another each time, and she encouraged me to work at The Homecoming the same way Alex would have done.

  As Christmas approached we recognized that time together was so much better than time apart, and it was Christmas Eve of that year, a week or so after I had typed the last lines of my novel, that Bridget McCormack came to the boarding house on Throop and Quincy and consumed my heart.

  Love, I would later conclude, was all things to all people. Love was the breaking and healing of hearts. Love was misunderstood, love was faith, love was the promise of now that became hope for the future. Love was a rhythm, a resonance, a reverberation. Love was awkward and foolish, it was aggressive and simple and possessed of so many indefinable qualities that it could never be conveyed in language. Love was being.

  I loved Bridget McCormack, and that night—Monday, December twenty-fourth, 1951—she loved me in return.

  For a while it seemed that the ghost of Alexandra Webber was there between us, and then I felt her leave. Her passing was quiet, and with her she took the memory of the child that never was. But the past was like an eye, opening, closing, and opening once more.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  BROOKLYN WAS MY NEW WORLD. SUCH THINGS AS I REMEMBERED from the moment I arrived: The high-rise and hopeful, the light smashing down, the multitude of people, the cars fender to fender, drivers leaning on horns, the passage of time, of people, of the past through the present into the ever-widening future. Here—as I’d imagined—was a place where I could be someone. In this clenched fist of a city I had finally, irrevocably, become the man I had longed to be.

  And Bridget McCormack believed in me, and I believed back.

  It was then that I believed I had finally buried the ghost of Georgia. Despite my memory and my conscience, despite the memory of my mother and all that had happened in Augusta Falls, I believed I was finally free. I felt it was not so much an escape as a pardon. My sentence had been served; justice had been seen to be done; I was reprieved.

  It seemed fitting. It seemed right. It seemed just.

  I met Bridget’s parents. Her father was a staunch Irish Catholic, his face like a boiled egg dropped from a generous height, maintaining some semblance of shape despite the jigsaw of cracks and fissures. Nails bitten to the quick, his fingers looked raw and sore and useless for gathering up anything smaller than shoes. And when he spoke, his thoughts came out as rough chunks of sound; had an ear for ten-dollar words: disposition, pivotal, exigent. Each phrase considered carefully, weighed and valued, like a bluff or call for a thousand-dollar pot. Her mother slight and insubstantial, haunting the edges of the conversation, snippets of words as if cut from a magazine. We lied to them, told them I was as Catholic as they came. We laughed in private. We wore our faces for the world, and the world took to accepting us without condition or reserve.

  For the first time since Alex I was truly happy. Hennessy stood quietly on the sidelines, ever encouraging, ever patient. He neither questioned nor envied what I had and showed his colors as a true and loyal friend.

  Early in 1952, when I believed things could get no better, Bridget came to see me at the boarding house.

  “You will be sore at me,” she said as I opened the door and let her in.

  “Sore at you? Why would I be sore at you?”

  She stood in the hallway, her head down, “I did something, Joseph, without telling you. I did something and I think you might be mad at me, and I’ve been holding off coming over all day . . .”

  “What?” I said. “What’s happened?”

  She shook her head and looked down again like a furtive thing. She shifted from one foot to the other.

  “For God’s sake, Bridget, what?”

  “Promise first,” she said. A scolded child.

  “Promise what?”

  “That you won’t get mad.”

  I huffed impatiently. I opened my arms, hands wide.

  “I sent your book to someone,” she said, her voice reserved, little more than a whisper.

  I frowned. “My book? What d’you mean, you sent my book to someone?”

  “I sent it away to someone at a company in Manhattan.”

  “What company in Manhattan?”

  “A publishing company, Joseph, what kind of company do you think?”

  I lowered my arms, hands to my side.

  Bridget put her hand in her coat pocket and took out a letter.

  “They wrote to me,” she said. “Here—” and she held out the letter. I took it from her and withdrew a single sheet from the envelope. Morrison, Brennan & Young, the heading read in cursive script.

  Dear Miss McCormack,

  Unaccustomed as we are to replying to a person other than the author of a submitted manuscript, we obviously have no means of contacting Mr. Vaughan directly, and so respond to your enclosure with great interest.

  After due consideration, we at Morrison, Brennan & Young would very much like to discuss the possibility of publishing “The Homecoming,” and would be most grateful if you could forward our details to the author and request that he attend these offices at his earliest convenience.

  With gratitude for your forthright presentation of this manuscript, and in anticipation of meeting Mr. Vaughan to discuss his work.

  Yours sincerely,

  Arthur J. Morrison,

  Senior Editorial Director

  I read the letter twice and started smiling.

  “You’re not mad?” Bridget asked.

  It seemed I laughed for a week.

  I laughed all the way across the East River to Manhattan on January twenty-fourth.

  The corner of West Eleventh and Sixth—the Avenue of the Amer icas—there in the shadow of the Jefferson Market Library, Bridget McCormack and I sat in high-backed leather chairs in the office of Arthur Morrison, Senior Editorial Director.

  Hale and bluff, his face was round and generous, a cherubic, purse-lipped sketch that adorned archaic maps. But his manner was like that of a well-heeled uncle, complete with a charming tone that was generous with compliments of my prose and timbre.

  “Artless,” he said. “Simple, artless, unassuming, yet such depth. A fine work, Mr. Vaughan, a very fine work indeed.”

  I thanked him.

  “And so young,” Arthur Morrison said, and his face started laughing before the sound arrived. When it did it was like a train emerging from a tunnel, growing louder the nearer it came, and then he rose from behind his vast desk and walked to the mantel. He stood there for a moment with his arm crooked and balanced on the ledge, and nodded his head back and forth like a wind-up thing. His movements were metronomic, hypnotic almost. It seemed he was lost for a little while, and then, effortlessly, he returned.

  “It is hard to believe that someone so young could write something of such emotional depth.”

  He talked a while longer, and then he said his piece regarding costs and competition, a few sentences that seemed rote and practiced regarding the challenging nature of the publishing industry, and he arrived at his conclusion with deft aplomb.

  I told him that, yes, I would sign his contract, and yes, three hundred and fifty dollars would be an acceptable advance against the royalties to be earned from The Homecoming, and Arthur Morrison smiled like the
stretched, pink cherub that he was, and we shook hands before the mantel, and Bridget kissed me.

  “I said it, I said it, I said it a hundred times, and I would have kept on saying it had you given me the slightest impression you were listening,” Hennessy announced.

  The day after. Manhattan was a vague and pleasant memory. We sat in a bar on Van Buren Street—Hennessy, myself and Bridget—and we drank beer and talked a great deal of nothing important for a long while.

  “And she believed in you too,” he added, and raised his glass toward Bridget, and we beamed, and it felt like the world had come to rights in Brooklyn.

  The din of people, the faces on the street peering in toward us, envious, though not knowing why, and the smoke and chatter and rush of alcohol, and the knowledge that in less than six months I would walk to the same library where I had met Bridget McCormack and be able to borrow a copy of The Homecoming by Joseph Vaughan. Paul and Bridget were the most important people in the world. A small world, but a world all the same, and for once it seemed to be a world of my own creation, something I had built with the sweat from my brow, with the strength of my own hands and heart.

  This time it lasted. This time there were no white feathers around doorways, carried on narrow breezes from the sill to the floor. This time it seemed that all decisions had been made in earnest, and the world had responded with similar resolution. I was to be published, and through editing, line editing, proofreading, through one-sided discussions regarding covers and typeface, I maintained my reserve. I made believe I was of significance, that beneath the exterior was a man of culture and balance, whereas, in truth, I felt like a seven-year-old child on the night before Christmas.

  The spring of ’52 was a rush of color and inspiration. The Writers’ Forum became my second home, and some evenings there would be a small gathering of people who would follow Bridget and me back to Aggie Boyle’s. Aggie seemed in her element, as did Joyce Spragg, for the house rumbled with the passage of young people, injecting life and love and levity into everything.

  “You are the new Scott Fitzgerald!” Joyce called at me from the upper landing, and then she was grabbed from behind by some hormone-driven Lothario. There was laughter. There was drinking.

  It was in the latter part of May that I first met Ben Godfrey.

  “On the north side of Jackson Heights,” he said. “I’m a third-generation Jew. I live out near Mount Zion and New Calvary Cemeteries.” He laughed, not just with his face, but with his whole body. “A literary-minded lot really, they appreciate the sad nobility, the austere and grandiose performance of death. They all want to be Shelley and Byron, but they can’t because they’re Jews.” He laughed again, a rolling sound, kind of irritating like an empty bottle on the floor of the bus.

  “But we do them all anyway. Rosh Hashanah. Yom Kippur. Suk koth. Hanukkah. Purim. Pesach. Shavuot.” Laughed more, the sound rolling, rolling.

  Hennessy was in the wings. Crossed his eyes, slack-jawed; made a face like a crazy man.

  “You’re a writer?” I asked Godfrey.

  “I am, I am,” he pronounced. “I have a small thing gathering ink on the presses as we speak. A novella really, perhaps forty or fifty thousand words. Anything to drink around here, anything to eat except more goddamned matzoh?”

  I handed Ben Godfrey a glass, a bottle of Calvert. He took them both in one hand and clapped me on the shoulder. I liked the man. He filled the room with something other than size and volume. He possessed a rough-edged charm, and by his dress it seemed he had no shortage of money.

  “And you? I understand you are the head of this household?”

  I shook my head. I reached out my hand for Bridget and she walked toward me.

  Godfrey lit up like a jack-o’-lantern. “Well, well, well,” he said. “And who might you be, young lady?”

  Bridget laughed at him. Godfrey perhaps believed she was laughing with him.

  “Bridget,” she said.

  “Well, hello there, Bridget,” he oozed. He ingratiated himself a little closer and peered down at her.

  “Hello to you too,” she said, and slipped her hand beneath my arm. She pulled me tight. Her message was clear.

  “So, what do we have here then? A gathering of like-minded literary drunkards, I think,” Godfrey said. “Seems a perfect setting for people in our disreputable line of work, wouldn’t you say?”

  And Ben Godfrey became one of us that day. Me and Bridget, Paul Hennessy, and Benjamin Godfrey, third-generation Jew. He was twenty-seven, three years my senior, and he flattered himself into the charms of Aggie Boyle and Joyce Spragg with ease. He even brought tea and baskets of fresh fruit for Letitia Brock, the elderly tenant at the end of the upper hall. Godfrey knew literature, and once you penetrated his blithe and convivial exterior, he proved himself to be good company, and generous to a fault.

  When his book was published we took the bus to Manhattan and bought two copies each. It was a slim piece entitled Day of Winter, and I enjoyed his language, the brevity and terseness of his style. I believed I had found a contemporary, and we talked of how we would become models of a new zeitgeist, the youngbloods, the bold talent of a new literary age.

  My affair with Bridget grew in intensity. I loved her, and was loved in return. Where once my nerves had tightened like turns of a ratchet, strung rigid until they hummed with the promise of breaking; where once my heart was a cold furnace, and I had believed myself hollow, incapable of passion, I now understood that I had healed, that Georgia was a dark nostalgia rarely considered and gratefully forgotten.

  In Bridget lived the memory of Alexandra Webber, but that memory lived free of pain and without regret.

  It was a high tide of euphoria, and when June arrived and we stood hand in hand between the narrow shelves of Langton Brothers bookstore on Monroe Street, and carried a copy of The Homecoming to the register, it seemed that my history had been some other existence entirely.

  “The beginning of the rest of our lives,” Bridget said as we left the store, my arm around her shoulder, the sun warming our faces as we left the shadow of the awning.

  Paul Hennessy and Ben Godfrey were at Aggie Boyle’s when we returned. They had prepared a smorgasbord of cold cuts and cheeses, water biscuits and wine. We celebrated the day, and the promise of the future.

  That night Bridget and I made love, and I felt that then we each consumed some small part of one another. We became one—Bridget McCormack and Joseph Vaughan—and believed it would be this way forever.

  And it was that night that I saw the feather. Standing naked near the window, Bridget sleeping on the bed behind me, a cool breeze chilling my skin. I saw it then, watched as it graced the air with arabesques and curves, as it floated ever closer, as it settled upon the sill within reach of my hand.

  I did not pick it up. I felt fear tighten my throat. I felt a shadow from the past inching through the open window and closing up against me.

  I closed my eyes, my mind, my heart. I wished it to disappear. When I looked once again it was still there, but just for a fraction of a second, for I exhaled in anticipation and watched it vanish in the dark.

  To walk backwards.

  Given the chance to walk backwards I would, even now.

  One by one, slowly, tentatively, I would retrace every single step, and my decisions would be different. I would forgive my mother her indiscretions, Gunther his infidelities; I would have kept Bridget as close as my shadow, and never let her from my sight; I would have been out there with the Guardians, and we would have seen the child killer, and Sheriff Dearing would have run with us until he was ready to fall with exhaustion, and it would have ended, just as it has ended now, but different.

  More than anything, I would make no promises that could not be kept.

  Hindsight is perceptive, and sometimes more honest than one can bear. Everything is easy in hindsight, and had I ever glimpsed a fraction of the truth of this thing, I would have fled New York, and run like the wind away from it
all with Bridget beside me, and I would never have looked back.

  But I did not know, and would not know for many years to come.

  Those years unfold behind me now. They stand as milestones and markers of the route I took, each step—whether brave or fearful, whether honest or deceptive—reflecting in all its facets the man I have become.

  I am who I am. And who I am will never be as important as what I have now done.

  Everything came full circle, turning about upon itself and taking me right back to the beginning.

  The blood on my hands is dry now.

  I have become what I feared the most, and it frightens me.

  TWENTY-SIX

  FALL CAME SWIFTLY. THE MONTHS THAT PRECEDED IT SEEMED VAGUE and tenuous. Later, much later, I would think of the weeks that separated June and November and they would possess a thin and insubstantial quality, as if they had never happened at all. Paul was amongst those memories, as was Ben Godfrey—forever laughing, teasing Bridget, making no mystery of the fact that he loved her too. Bridget dealt with him in a matter-of-fact and politic manner, always quick to point out that she was his friend, nothing more. For a while Ben brought a quiet girl along: Ruth Steinberg, a German Jewess whose parents had spirited her out of Munich as soon as national socialism tightened its fervent grip on the nation. Her parents, her grandparents, and her brother—they had not survived, and Ruth lived with a step-aunt on her mother’s side, a resentful and bitter woman who bore the responsibility with something other than familial loyalty. I liked Ruth, but she did not suit Ben. They had parted company by the end of August, and once again he was the third wheel.

  Mid-November came. We were planning a grand Thanksgiving party at Aggie Boyle’s, and on Thursday the twentieth I took a trip to Manhattan to see Arthur Morrison. The Homecoming had sold a modest eleven hundred copies in five months, but Morrison was not daunted. He wanted a second novel, something with spirit and passion.