The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  It wasn’t Julia’s dalliances, though, that caused the divorce, or her removal to Litchfield that heightened the pain of it for Rose. And Kent knows it. As the years pass, some things in life do get simpler, and Kent’s divorce from Julia was becoming one of those things. No, it all came down to the simple fact that he grew up, and she didn’t, and then wouldn’t. And because she had plenty of inherited money, she’s never had to. She didn’t need Kent’s money or proximity to raise their child, she could do it on her own, and, mostly, that’s what she did. There’s no way, of course, that he can tell this to Rose or Julia. Not now. They’d think he was criticizing them, and he wasn’t.

  Kent washes Rose’s milk glass in the sink, places it into the dish rack, and switches off the overhead light. He steps into the darkened sitting porch just off the kitchen—he can’t remember if he locked the door to the backyard. The flagstone floor is cold against his bare feet, when suddenly it’s as if he’s walking on gravel or broken peanut shells. Popcorn, maybe. Beads from a broken necklace? He gropes beside him in the dark, until his hand finds a floor lamp.

  It’s birdseed! A wide trail of sunflower and wildflower seeds and cracked corn spills from the pantry behind him, where he stores a hundred-pound bag of mixed birdseed in a large galvanized trash can. The trail crosses the porch to the door leading outside. Mornings over his second cup of coffee and evenings over his first Scotch and soda, Kent often sits out here on the glider and watches the birds flutter greedily over the three large bird feeders hanging from the maple tree. There are finches, both purple and gold, pine siskins and grosbeaks, cardinals and phoebes. Once he saw an indigo bunting and was so excited he shouted, “Look!” but he was alone. His shout, even through the glass, scared the bunting, and it flew away and didn’t return.

  He stares down at the birdseed scattered over the slate floor, and he feels his neck and ears redden. She must have refilled the feeders sometime earlier tonight, and instead of bringing the feeders into the pantry and filling them there, which is how he does it and has demonstrated for her any number of times, she carried the seeds, scoop by scoop, across the porch and out the door, spilling as she went. That’s so damned typical! And, of course, since she never sees disorder anyway and didn’t see the stuff scattered across the floors of the porch and pantry, she didn’t think to clean it up. Never crossed her mind. He strides down the hall to Rose’s end of the house, snapping on lights as he goes.

  He knocks firmly on her door. Not with anger, for while he is exasperated, he’s not angry. He’s confused. He can admit that much. After all these years, he still doesn’t understand why she can’t or won’t remember what he tells her to do, what he asks her to do, what he wants her to do, when she’s in his house. When she’s in his life, for heaven’s sake. She acts as if, for her, his life doesn’t exist, or if it exists at all, it doesn’t have any meaning. He can’t bear that.

  She opens the door. She’s wearing green-and-blue-plaid flannel pajamas and has her toothbrush and toothpaste in hand. “You haven’t gone to sleep yet, have you?” he asks evenly.

  “I haven’t made my evening ablutions yet,” she says, smiling. Then she sees his expression. “What’s the matter?”

  “The birdseed, Rose. You spilled it all over the porch floor.”

  She wrinkles her brow and stares at her father’s face, not quite getting what he’s after. “I did?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry. I… I wasn’t aware…,” she trails off. “The bird feeders were almost empty. You want me to clean it up … now?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  She sighs audibly. “O-kay.”

  Kent turns and walks purposefully back to his side of the house, not stopping until he’s inside his bedroom and has closed the door, extinguished the light, and has got himself under the covers in bed. He’s breathing rapidly, as if he’s just climbed three flights of stairs. His heart is pounding, and adrenaline is rushing through his body. He knows what’s happening to his body, he’s a doctor, after all. But why is it happening? Why is he fuming over such a trivial offense? Why even view it as an offense in the first place? Must he take personally everything his daughter does wrong?

  In the morning, Kent leaves for the office before Rose wakes. There are no dents or scratches on his Audi. He feels guilty for last night, not because he did or said anything to hurt her, but because he was angry, when clearly something else was called for. He’s not sure what, but he knows that anger was useless to them both. Useless and therefore offensive somehow. Around ten, he telephones the house, and she picks up. “I wondered if you’d like to meet me for lunch downtown,” he says, a little shy and stiff.

  “Sounds great!” She’s chewing food, he can tell, and is probably still in bed in her pajamas, flopped in front of the TV, working her way through the lox and bagels he bought especially for her visit.

  “Want me to come by the house and pick you up?”

  “No, I’ll ride the bike! It’s gorgeous out, and I need the exercise. I’ve been a lump all week.”

  They agree to meet at his office at one. At a quarter to one, Kent walks out the door of the clinic, leans against the railing of the front steps, and looks along the street uphill to his right, where he knows that Rose in a few moments will come into view pedaling her old bike, the blue Raleigh three-speed that he bought for her the summer she turned fourteen. She already owned a bike, a present on her twelfth birthday from both Mom and Dad, but he bought her the Raleigh himself so that, after the divorce, she could ride from her mother’s house to his whenever she wanted. Then Julia moved. Or from his house to the office, he assured her, where they could meet for lunch on Saturdays when he had to work. She rode from his house on Ash Street to Main and then cruised ten blocks along Main to the long, curving hill that flattened and straightened where it passed in front of the clinic. He remembers October leaves skidding across the sidewalks and streets, and the sky was deep blue. He liked to wait on the steps outside, just as he is doing today, and every time he saw her pedal around that far curve with a wide, excited grin on her face and her auburn hair flying behind her in the rippling sunlight, his chest filled with joy and with an inescapable sadness, and he could barely keep his eyes from flooding with tears. He knew what gave him the joy—she did; he loved her, and the joy proved it—but he did not know what caused the sadness.

  Here she comes now, a beautiful young woman in jeans and mint green sleeveless T-shirt, wearing sunglasses, and smiling broadly at the sight of her father. He stands on the clinic steps with arms folded, still a hundred yards away from her, and she lifts her right hand high in the air and waves.

  He waves back, smiles, and feels his chest tighten and buckle with emotion. He has never felt as proud of Rose as he does at this moment. It’s the simplicity of her beauty and her sincerity, he decides. That’s what makes him proud of her. They are qualities of body and character, qualities of self, that for unknown reasons have been invisible to him until this moment. He doesn’t ask why he never saw them before. Instead, he wonders why they should have suddenly become visible.

  Because she is at hand, yet still far away, is his answer. But coming nearer by the second, and nearer, when suddenly, to avoid hitting something on the road that he can’t see, a piece of broken glass, perhaps, she swerves the bike out into the middle of the street and puts herself between an oncoming UPS truck and a Volvo station wagon bearing down behind her. Kent reaches toward her with both arms, his mouth wide open as if to shout, but he can’t break his silence, he can’t even say her name, and she swerves a second time, this time cutting in front of the UPS truck and off Main Street onto a narrow lane on the opposite side, where she disappears.

  The UPS truck passes Kent nonchalantly, as if the driver has noticed nothing out of the way, as if he’s not seen anyone in danger for a very long time, and the Volvo station wagon passes in the other direction as normally as cars have passed all day, the woman driver chatting with the passenger, her husband, per
haps, or a client to whom she’s about to show a house. Then, on his right and across the street, Rose emerges from behind a high hedge on the corner of Main, pedaling her blue Raleigh with ease and obvious pleasure. She’s still smiling and is close enough now to call to him and be heard. “Hey, Dad! What a day, huh?”

  Kent rushes across the street and grabs her bicycle by the handlebars and stops it dead. Rose’s face drops and tightens. Her father is panting, red-faced, sweating.

  “Jesus, Dad, what’s the matter?” she asks, her voice rising in fear. “Are you okay?”

  “Why? Why do you do this to me? To yourself! Why do you do it to yourself?”

  Rose lets go of the handlebars. She reaches forward and places her hands on her father’s shoulders, as if she is the parent and he the reckless child. “Dad,” she says. “Stop.”

  “Why?”

  Then, calmly, patiently, with a detachment that’s incomprehensible to him, she explains. “I do it because what you do is violent, and it makes me violent, too. That’s why.” The two of them stand there with the blue bicycle between them, traffic whizzing by in the background.

  “What? It’s my fault?”

  She sighs, and then she tells her father what he needs most to know, but has always seemed incapable of knowing: that his kindness and intimacy draw her close to him, but only for him to reject her—because of her sloppiness, her carelessness, her disorder. She reminds him of last night’s confrontation over the spilled birdseed. She tells him that he should have let it go till morning. “I’m twenty-nine, Dad. Leave me a note. I’d have cleaned it up this morning.” He spoiled their earlier moment in the kitchen, she says, which, if he had left her alone, would have helped her deal with her little failure later in a useful way. “In a way that wouldn’t have scared you. You don’t know, but it’s what I’ve been doing for years,” she says.

  “What have you been doing for years?”

  “Things that would scare you, Dad. Only this time you saw it.”

  Side by side, they walk along the sidewalk, uphill away from the office. Rose keeps one hand on the handlebars, steering the bike, and the other on her father’s slumped shoulder. “I’m not angry at you,” she says, sounding distant and almost scientific. “Not anymore.” She understands his needs. Her needs, however, are different, and it’s her mother, she says, who’s shaped her needs. Not him.

  “Your mother?”

  “Dad, Mom is like my hollow double,” she says. “My absent self. Not you. You’re my father.” All these years he’s treated her as if she were like him, she explains, instead of like her mother. And consequently he’s dealt with her as if she had his needs instead of her mother’s. Rose smiles at him, but from a great height.

  It’s only a flash of awareness, as if a darkened room were lit for a second and then dropped into darkness again, but Kent sees how vain and cruel he’s been. He sees that he’s been a man completely opposed to the man he thought he was. And as surely as he lost her mother fifteen years earlier, he has lost Rose now, and for the same reason. He knows nothing of his daughter’s needs, because he knew nothing of her mother’s.

  He says to Rose, as they turn off Main Street onto Ash, “Was I wrong, to divorce your mother? To leave you?”

  “No,” she says. “You weren’t. But you shouldn’t have tried to keep her through me. And me through her,” she says. “Now you’ve lost us both.”

  “You’ll never come to visit me again, will you?”

  She shakes her head no. “I’m sorry. I think this has been the end of everything between us. But we’ll see.” She tells him to go on back to his office. She’ll leave the bicycle in the garage and call a cab to take her to the Trailways station.

  He stops, and she continues on.

  The Lie

  A ten-year-old boy—maybe eleven, maybe nine, but no older and certainly no younger—kills his buddy, one Alfred Coburn, while the two are enemy espionage agents engaged in a life-or-death struggle in the middle of the wide, perfectly flat, tarred roof of an American-owned hotel in Hong Kong. The young killer, whose name is Nicholas Lebrun, stabs his good buddy in the chest just below the left nipple, slicing deftly between two ribs, thence through the taut pericardium, plunging unimpeded into the left ventricle of the heart—stabs his friend with an inexpensive penknife manufactured by the Barlow Cutlery Corp., of Springfield, Massachusetts. This knife has a plastic, simulated-wood grip and a two-and-a-half-inch steel blade. Also a one-and-a-half-inch smaller, narrower blade.

  Alfred, poor wide-eyed Alfred, squeaks in surprise and falls; Nicholas understands what has happened and runs home.

  A distance of approximately one city block separates the Transilex parking lot that has been serving as the roof of an American-owned hotel in Hong Kong and the asbestos-shingled, wood-framed, mid-Victorian house that has been serving as the Lebrun home and hearth for over forty years—ever since Nicholas’s paternal grandfather was a young, newly wedded, still childless man. Nicholas’s grandfather was named Ernest, but he was called Red because of the color of his thick, short-cropped hair and mustache. A clockmaker and a good one, too, Ernest learned his trade (he would have said craft) in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut. Later, when the time industry shifted to Waltham, Massachusetts, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, he followed it and went to work for the Waltham Watch Company. A French Protestant and native New Englander, Ernest Lebrun: thrifty, prudent, implacably stable, high-minded and honorable, incorruptible, intelligent, organized, good-humored—all resulting in his having become well-liked and financially secure well before he was forty years old. He died in a dreamless sleep shortly after World War II had finally ground to a halt and sometime during the year that commenced with his grandson Nicholas’s birth and winked out with the child’s first birthday, a fact surely of considerable moment for Ernest (Red): hanging on to shreds of life until after the birth of his first male grandchild, the son of an only son, assured finally and at the very end of the continuation of the name, et cetera.

  It is because of the distance between the Transilex parking lot and home and because he ran all the way home that Nicholas is out of breath, panting, and red-faced when he turns into the scrubby yard and arrives safely at what appears to be and what later turns out to be heaven.

  Robert Lebrun, the boy’s middle-aging, auburn-haired father, a paid-in-full member of the United Association of Plumbers and Pipe-fitters (AFL-CIO), Local 143, is comfortably swinging on the porch glider, smoking an after-supper cigar in the orange evening light and from time to time reading from the tabloid newspaper spread on his lap.

  Abruptly, Nicholas parks himself next to his father, upsetting with his momentum the glider’s gentle vacillation, and the father asks the son, his only child, heir to his ancient name and lands, Why is he running? The lad tells his father why he is running. Not, of course, without considerable encouragement from the father—whose cigar goes slowly out during the telling.

  Young Nicholas does not forget to mention the fact that just as he steps off the flat, square expanse of tar that has been serving as the Transilex parking lot—now almost innocent of parked automobiles—and onto the narrow sidewalk of Brown Steet, he happens to glance back at his little friend’s fallen body, that small heap of summer clothing and inert flesh already used up and thrown out, dropped in the middle of the great black square. A crumpled pile of stuff lying next to the front tire of a bottle green British Ford sedan. And in that fraction of a second, Nicholas realizes that the owner of the bottle green sedan—a man who lives in the neighborhood and who unfortunately is notoriously effeminate, a practicing pederast, in fact, mocked to his face by all the neighborhood kids and behind his back by the parents—is strolling blithely across the lot, is approaching his car from the side opposite Nicholas and the car’s right front tire.

  It’s possible that the man, whose name is Toni Scott, catches a glimpse of Nicholas in flight, but that possibility shall have to remain equivocal. The facts which follo
w shall demonstrate why this is so.

  Toni, who has worked as a waiter in an attractively decorated Boston cocktail lounge of socially ambiguous, though not inconsiderable fame for several years now, has been saving at least five dollars a month by parking his car illegally in the Transilex parking lot, always taking care to remove his car well before the 9:00 P.M. departure of the Transilex cafeteria second shift and—because of his nighttime working hours—usually managing to slip the innocuous little sedan back into the lot sometime between the 4:00 A.M. unlocking and 5:00 A.M. arrival of the cafeteria first shift. However, this particular summer evening ritual removal of his car from its stolen space definitely, even though only partially and from afar, is observed over young Nicholas Lebrun’s fleeing shoulder (fateful, damning, backward glance!) just before the rigorously bathed, meticulously groomed, idly smiling Toni Scott, filled to the eyes with sweet memories and still sweeter anticipation, discovers Alfred Coburn’s hard, sun-haired body by accidentally smashing its rib cage, sternum, and spine with the right front tire of his bottle green car.

  He cuts the wheel hard to the left, revs up the tiny four-cylinder motor, and spins the car backwards, swinging the front of the car around in an arc to the right—so that he can make his exit from the lot by the very gate Nicholas has used just seconds earlier.

  It is at this point in the boy’s narrative that Robert Lebrun interrupts his son and compels him to insist that no one saw him stab his playmate. He makes the boy reassure him that he (Nicholas) did not extract the penknife from Alfred’s chest—an unnecessary reassurance, for Toni’s right front tire has already torn the knife from its nest of flesh, bone, and blood, has ground it against pavement, paint, white pebbles in the tar, has smashed the plastic simulated-wood grip and removed all fingerprints. Then Lebrun makes Nicholas repeat several times the part of his narrative that has to do with Toni Scott’s arrival on the scene, and finally, after telling his son in clear, exact, and step-by-step terms just what he intends to do, Lebrun stomps into the house and, yelling Emergency, Police! to the telephone operator, he calls the cops.