The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  Sometimes you dream that you are walking across a meadow beneath sunshine and a cloudless blue sky, hand in hand with your favorite child, and soon you notice that the meadow is sloping uphill slightly, and walking becomes somewhat more difficult, although it remains a pleasure, for you are with your favorite child, and he is beautiful and happy and confident that you will let nothing terrible happen to him. You cross the crest, a rounded, meandering ridge, and start downhill, walking faster and more easily. The sun is shining, and there are wildflowers all around you, and the grass is golden and drifting in long waves in the breeze. Soon you find that the hill is steeper than before, the slope is falling away beneath your feet, as if the earth were curving in on itself, so you dig in your heels and try to slow your descent. Your child looks up at you, and there is fear in his eyes, as he realizes he is falling away from you. “My hand!” you cry. “Hold tightly to my hand!” And you grasp the hand of the child, who has started to fly away from you, as if over the edge of a crevice, while you dig your heels deeper into the ground and grab with your free hand at the long grasses behind you. The child screams and looks back at you with a pitiful gaze, and suddenly he grows so heavy that his weight is pulling you free of the ground also. You feel your feet leave the ground, and your body falls forward and down, behind your child’s body, even though with one hand you still cling to the grasses. You weep, and you let go of your child’s hand. The child flies away.

  That night the boy’s fever went higher. To one hundred five degrees, and Marcelle moved the younger boys into her own room, so that she could sleep in the bed next to the sick boy’s. She bathed him in cool water with washcloths, coaxed him into swallowing aspirin with orange juice, and sat on the edge of the bed next to his and watched him sleep, although she knew that he was not truly sleeping, he was merely lying there on his side, his legs out straight now, and breathing rapidly, like an injured dog, stunned and silently healing itself. But the boy was not healing himself, he was hourly growing worse. She could tell that. She tried to move him so that she could straighten the sheets, but when she touched him, he cried out in pain, as if his spine or neck were broken, and, frightened, she drew back from him. She wanted to call Doctor Wickshaw, and several times she got up and walked out to the kitchen where the telephone hung on the wall like a large black insect, and each time she stood for a few seconds before the instrument, remembered the doctor in the hallway and what she had let him promise her with his eyes, remembered then what he had told her about her son’s illness, and turned and walked back to the boy and tried again to cool him with damp cloths. Her three other sons slept peacefully through the night and knew nothing of what happened until morning came.

  When your child lives, he carries with him all his earlier selves, so that you cannot separate your individual memories of him from your view of him now, at this moment. When you recall a particular event in your and your child’s shared past—a day at the beach, a Christmas morning, a sad, weary night of flight from the child’s shouting father, a sweet, pathetic supper prepared by the child for your birthday—when you recall these events singly, you cannot see the child as a camera would have photographed him then. You see him simultaneously all the way from infancy to adolescence to adulthood and on, as if he has been moving through your life too rapidly for any camera to catch, and the image is blurred, grayed out, a swatch of your own past pasted across the foreground of a studio photographer’s carefully arranged backdrop.

  When her son went into convulsions, Marcelle did not at first know it, for his voice was clear and what he said made sense. Suddenly he spoke loudly and in complete sentences. “Ma, I’m not alone. I know that, and it helps me to not be scared. For a while I thought I was alone,” he declared. Marcelle sat upright and listened alertly to him in the darkness of the bedroom. “Then I started to see things and think maybe there was someone else in the room here with me, and then I was scared, Ma. Because I didn’t know for sure whether I was alone or not. But now I know I’m not alone, and knowing it helps me not be scared.” She said that she was glad, because she thought he was talking about her presence in the room, and she took his recognition of her presence as a sign that the fever had broken. But when she reached out in the darkness and touched his neck, it was burning, like an empty, black pot left over a fire, and she almost cried out in pain and might have, had the child not commenced to shout at her, bellowing at her, as if she were a large, ugly animal that he wished to send cowering into the far corner of his room.

  Most people, when they do what the physician has told them to do, expect to be cured. When they are not cured, they at first believe it is because they have not done properly what they have been told to do. Sickness is the mystery, the miracle, and the physician understands such things, we say, whereas we, who are not physicians, all we understand is health. This is not the case, of course, for health is the mystery and the miracle. Not sickness. Sickness can be penetrated, understood, predicted. Health cannot. The analogy between the physician and the priest will not hold, for sickness and injury are not at all like divine protection and forgiveness. Sadly, most people and most physicians and most priests do not know this, or if they do, they do not act as if they know it. It’s only in dealing with our children that we treat life as if it were indeed the miracle, as if life itself were the mystery of divine protection and forgiveness, and in that way, it is only in dealing with our children that most people are like priests serving God, making it possible for poor sinners to obtain grace.

  Doctor Wickshaw hurried into the boy’s bedroom and this time knew that the boy had contracted meningitis, probably spinal meningitis, and he also knew that it was too late to save the boy, that if the boy did not die in the next few days, he would suffer irreparable damage to his central nervous system.

  Marcelle knew that by her son’s death she was now a lost soul. She did not weep. She went grimly about her appointed rounds, she raised her three remaining sons, and each of them, in his turn, forgave her and protected her. The one who died, Joel, the oldest, would never forgive her, never shield her from judgment, never let grace fall on her. Late at night, when she lay in bed alone, she knew this to the very bottom of her mind, and that knowledge was the lamp that illuminated the mystery and the miracle of her remaining days.

  Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story

  1

  To begin, then, here is a scene in which I am the man and my friend Sarah Cole is the woman. I don’t mind describing it now, because I’m a decade older and don’t look the same now as I did then, and Sarah Cole is dead. That is to say, on hearing this story you might think me vain if I looked the same now as I did then, because I must tell you that I was extremely handsome then. And if Sarah were not dead, you’d think I was cruel, for I must tell you that Sarah was very homely. In fact, she was the homeliest woman I have ever known. Personally, I mean. I’ve seen a few women who were more unattractive than Sarah, but they were freaks of nature or had been badly injured or had been victimized by some grotesque, disfiguring disease. Sarah, however, was quite normal, and I knew her well, because for three and a half months we were lovers.

  Here is the scene. You can put it in the present, even though it took place ten years ago, because nothing that matters to the story depends on when it took place, and you can put it in Concord, New Hampshire, even though that is indeed where it took place, because it doesn’t matter where it took place, so it might as well be Concord, New Hampshire, a place I happen to know well and can therefore describe with sufficient detail to make the story believable. Around six o’clock on a Wednesday evening in late May, a man enters a bar. The bar, a cocktail lounge at street level, with a restaurant upstairs, is decorated with hanging plants and unfinished wood paneling, butcher-block tables and captain’s chairs, with a half dozen darkened, thickly upholstered booths along one wall. Three or four men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five are drinking at the bar and, like the man who has just entered, wear three-piece suits and loosened nec
kties. They are probably lawyers, young, unmarried lawyers gossiping with their brethren over martinis so as to postpone arriving home alone at their whitewashed town-house apartments, where they will fix their evening meals in microwave ovens and afterwards, while their TVs chuckle quietly in front of them, sit on their couches and do a little extra work for tomorrow. They are, for the most part, honorable, educated, hardworking, shallow, and moderately unhappy young men.

  Our man, call him Ronald, Ron, in most ways is like these men, except that he is unusually good-looking, and that makes him a little less unhappy than they. Ron is effortlessly attractive, a genetic wonder, tall, slender, symmetrical, and clean. His flaws—a small mole on the left corner of his square, not-too-prominent chin, a slight excess of blond hair on the tops of his tanned hands, and somewhat underdeveloped buttocks—insofar as they keep him from resembling too closely a men’s store mannequin, only contribute to his beauty, for he is beautiful, the way we usually think of a woman as being beautiful. And he is nice, too, the consequence, perhaps, of his seeming not to know how beautiful he is, to men as well as women, to young people (even children) as well as old, to attractive people (who realize immediately that he is so much more attractive than they as not to be competitive with them) as well as unattractive people.

  Ron takes a seat at the bar, unfolds the evening paper in front of him, and, before he can start reading, the bartender asks to help him, calling him “Sir,” even though Ron has come into this bar numerous times at this time of day, especially since his divorce last fall. Ron got divorced because, after three years of marriage, his wife chose to pursue the career that his had interrupted, that of a fashion designer, which required her to live in New York City while he had to continue to live in New Hampshire, where his career got its start. They agreed to live apart until he could continue his career near New York City, but after a few months, between conjugal visits, he started sleeping with other women, and she started sleeping with other men, and that was that. “No big deal,” he explained to friends who liked both Ron and his wife, even though he was slightly more beautiful than she. “We really were too young when we got married. College sweethearts. But we’re still best friends,” he assured them. They understood. Most of Ron’s friends were divorced by then, too.

  Ron orders a Scotch and soda with a twist and goes back to reading his paper. When his drink comes, before he takes a sip of it, he first carefully finishes reading an article about the recent reappearance of coyotes in northern New Hampshire and Vermont. He lights a cigarette. He goes on reading. He takes a second sip of his drink. Everyone in the room—the three or four men scattered along the bar, the tall, thin bartender, and several people in the booths at the back—watches Ron do these ordinary things.

  He has got to the classified section, is perhaps searching for someone willing to come in once a week and clean his apartment, when the woman who will turn out to be Sarah Cole leaves a booth in the back and approaches him. She comes up from the side and sits next to him. She’s wearing heavy, tan cowboy boots and a dark brown, suede cowboy hat, lumpy jeans, and a yellow T-shirt that clings to her arms, breasts, and round belly like the skin of a sausage. Though he will later learn that she is thirty-eight years old, she looks older by about ten years, which makes her look about twenty years older than he actually is. (It’s difficult to guess accurately how old Ron is; he looks anywhere from a mature twenty-five to a youthful forty, so his actual age doesn’t seem to matter.)

  “It’s not bad here at the bar,” she says, looking around. “More light, anyhow. Whatcha readin’?” she asks brightly, planting both elbows on the bar.

  Ron looks up from his paper with a slight smile on his lips, sees the face of a woman homelier than any he has ever seen or imagined before, and goes on smiling lightly. He feels himself falling into her tiny, slightly crossed, dark brown eyes, pulls himself back, and studies for a few seconds her mottled, pocked complexion, bulbous nose, loose mouth, twisted and gapped teeth, and heavy, but receding chin. He casts a glance over her thatch of dun-colored hair and along her neck and throat, where acne burns against gray skin, and returns to her eyes, and again feels himself falling into her.

  “What did you say?” he asks.

  She knocks a mentholated cigarette from her pack, and Ron swiftly lights it. Blowing smoke from her large, wing-shaped nostrils, she speaks again. Her voice is thick and nasal, a chocolate-colored voice. “I asked you whatcha readin’, but I can see now.” She belts out a single, loud laugh. “The paper!”

  Ron laughs too. “The paper! The Concord Monitor!” He is not hallucinating, he clearly sees what is before him and admits—no, he asserts—to himself that he is speaking to the most unattractive woman he has ever seen, a fact that fascinates him, as if instead he were speaking to the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, so he treasures the moment, attempts to hold it as if it were a golden ball, a disproportionately heavy object which—if he does not hold it lightly, with precision and firmness—will slip from his hand and roll across the lawn to the lip of the well and down, down to the bottom of the well, lost to him forever. It will be a memory, that’s all, something to speak of wistfully and with wonder as over the years the image fades and comes in the end to exist only in the telling. His mind and body waken from their sleepy self-absorption, and all his attention focuses on the woman, Sarah Cole, her ugly face, like a warthog’s, her thick, rapid speech, her dumpy, off-center wreck of a body. To keep this moment here before him, he begins to ask questions of her, he buys her a drink, he smiles, until soon it seems, even to him, that he is taking her and her life, its vicissitudes and woe, quite seriously.

  He learns her name, and she volunteers the information that she spoke to him on a dare from one of the two women sitting in the booth behind her. She turns on her stool and smiles brazenly, triumphantly, to her friends, two women, also homely (though nowhere as homely as she), and dressed, like her, in cowboy boots, hats, and jeans. One of the women, a blond with an underslung jaw and wearing heavy eye makeup, flips a little wave at her, and, as if embarrassed, she and the other woman at the booth turn back to their drinks and sip fiercely at straws.

  Sarah returns to Ron and goes on telling him what he wants to know, about her job at Rumford Press, about her divorced husband, who was a bastard and stupid and “sick,” she says, as if filling suddenly with sympathy for the man. She tells Ron about her three children, the youngest, a girl, in junior high school and boy-crazy, the other two, boys, in high school and almost never at home anymore. She speaks of her children with genuine tenderness and concern, and Ron is touched. He can see with what pleasure and pain she speaks of her children; he watches her tiny eyes light up and water over when he asks their names.

  “You’re a nice woman,” he informs her.

  She smiles, looks at her empty glass. “No. No, I’m not. But you’re a nice man, to tell me that.”

  Ron, with a gesture, asks the bartender to refill Sarah’s glass. She is drinking White Russians. Perhaps she has been drinking them for an hour or two, for she seems very relaxed, more relaxed than women usually do when they come up and without introduction or invitation speak to Ron.

  She asks him about himself, his job, his divorce, how long he has lived in Concord, but he finds that he is not at all interested in telling her about himself. He wants to know about her, even though what she has to tell him about herself is predictable and ordinary and the way she tells it unadorned and clichéd. He wonders about her husband. What kind of man would fall in love with Sarah Cole?

  2

  That scene, at Osgood’s Lounge in Concord, ended with Ron’s departure, alone, after having bought Sarah a second drink, and Sarah’s return to her friends in the booth. I don’t know what she told them, but it’s not hard to imagine. The three women were not close friends, merely fellow workers at Rumford Press, where they stood at the end of a long conveyor belt day after day packing TV Guides into cartons. They all hated their jobs, and frequently after work, wh
en they worked the day shift, they put on their cowboy hats and boots, which they kept all day in their lockers, and stopped for a drink or two on their way home. This had been their first visit to Osgood’s, however, a place that, prior to this, they had avoided out of a sneering belief that no one went there but lawyers and insurance men. It had been Sarah who asked the others why that should keep them away, and when they had no answer for her, the three decided to stop at Osgood’s. Ron was right, they had been there over an hour when he came in, and Sarah was a little drunk. “We’ll hafta come in here again,” she said to her friends, her voice rising slightly.

  Which they did, that Friday, and once again Ron appeared with his evening newspaper. He put his briefcase down next to his stool and ordered a drink and proceeded to read the front page, slowly, deliberately, clearly a weary, unhurried, solitary man. He did not notice the three women in cowboy hats and boots in the booth in back, but they saw him, and after a few minutes, Sarah was once again at his side.