The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  Earl supposes that Jack Bailey telephones the writer of the letter nominating a particular woman for Queen for a Day and offers him and his nominee the opportunity to come to New York City’s Radio City Music Hall to tell her story in person, and then, based on how she does in the audition, Jack Bailey chooses her and two other nominees for a particular show, maybe next week, when they all come back to New York City to tell their stories live on television. Thus, daily, when Earl arrives home, he asks Louise and George, who normally get home from school an hour or so earlier than he, if there’s been any calls for him. You’re sure? No mail, either, no letters?

  “Who’re you expectin’ to hear from, lover boy, your girlfriend?” George grins, teeth spotted with peanut butter and gobs of white bread.

  “Up yours,” Earl says, and heads into his bedroom, where he dumps his coat, books, hockey gear. It’s becoming clear to him that, if there’s such a thing as a success, he’s evidently a failure. If there’s such a thing as a winner, he’s a loser. I oughta go on that goddamned show myself, he thinks. Flopping onto his bed face-first, he wishes he could keep on falling, as if down a bottomless well or mine shaft, into darkness and warmth, lost, and finally blameless, gone, gone, gone. And soon he is asleep, dreaming of a hockey game, and he’s carrying the puck, dragging it all the way up along the right, digging in close to the boards, skate blades flashing as he cuts around behind the net, ice chips spraying in white fantails, and when he comes out on the other side, he looks down in front of him and can’t find the puck, it’s gone, dropped off behind him, lost in his sweeping turn, the spray, the slash of the skates, and the long sweeping arc of the stick in front of him. He brakes, turns, and heads back, searching for the small black disc.

  At the sound of the front door closing, a quiet click, as if someone is deliberately trying to enter the apartment silently, Earl wakes from his dream, and he hears voices from the kitchen, George and Louise and his mother:

  “Hi, Mom. We’re just makin’ a snack, peanut butter sandwiches.”

  “Mommy, George won’t give me—”

  “Don’t eat it directly off the knife like that!”

  “Sorry, I was jus’—”

  “You heard me, mister, don’t answer back!”

  “Jeez, I was jus’—”

  “I don’t care what you were doing!” Her voice is trembling and quickly rising in pitch and timbre, and Earl moves off his bed and comes into the kitchen, smiling, drawing everyone’s attention to him, the largest person in the room, the only one with a smile on his face, a relaxed, easy, sociable face and manner, normalcy itself, as he gives his brother’s shoulder a fraternal squeeze, tousles his sister’s brown hair, nods hello to his mother, and says, “Hey, you’re home early, Ma. What happened, they give you guys the rest of the day off?”

  Then he sees her face, white, tight, drawn back in a cadaverous grimace, her pale blue eyes wild, unfocused, rolling back, and he says, “Jeez, Ma, what’s the matter, you okay?”

  Her face breaks into pieces, goes from dry to wet, white to red, and she is weeping loudly, blubbering, wringing her hands in front of her like a maddened knitter. “Aw-w-w-w!” she wails, and Louise and George, too, start to cry. They run to her and wrap her in their arms, crying and begging her not to cry, as Earl, aghast, sits back in his chair and watches the three of them wind around each other like snakes moving in and out of one another’s coils.

  “Stop!” he screams at last. “Stop it! All of you!” He pounds his fist on the table. “Stop crying, all of you!”

  They obey him. George first, then their mother, then Louise, who goes on staring into her mother’s face. George looks at his feet, ashamed, and their mother looks pleadingly into Earl’s face, expectant, hopeful, knowing that he will organize everything.

  In a calm voice, Earl says, “Ma, tell me what happened. Just say it slowly, and it’ll come out okay, and then we can all talk about it, okay?”

  She nods, and George unravels his arms from around her neck and steps away from her, moving to the far wall of the room, where he stands and looks out the window and down to the bare yard below. Louise snuggles her face in close to her mother and sniffles.

  “I… I lost my job. I got fired today,” their mother says. “And it wasn’t my fault.” She starts to weep again, and Louise joins her, bawling now, and George at the window starts to sob, his small shoulders heaving.

  Earl shouts, “Wait! Wait a minute, Ma, just tell me about it. Don’t cry!” he commands her, and she shudders, draws herself together again, and continues.

  “I… I had some problems this morning, a bunch of files I was supposed to put away last week got lost. And everybody was running around like crazy looking for them, because they had all these figures from last year’s sales in them or something, I don’t know. Anyhow, they were important, and I was the one who was accused of losing them. Which I didn’t. But no one could find them, until finally they turned up on Robbie’s desk, down in shipping, which I couldn’t’ve done, since I never go to shipping anyhow. But Rose blamed me, because she’s the head bookkeeper, and she was the last person to use the files, and she was getting it because they needed them upstairs, and … well, you know, I was just getting yelled at and yelled at, and it went on after lunch … and, I don’t know, I just started feeling dizzy and all, like I was going to black out again. And I guess I got scared and started talking real fast, so Rose took me down to the nurse, and I did black out then. Only for a few seconds, though, and when I felt a little better, Rose said maybe I should go home for the rest of the day, which is what I wanted to do, anyhow. But when I went back upstairs to get my pocketbook and coat and my lunch, because I hadn’t been able to eat my sandwich, I was so nervous and all, and then Mr. Shandy called me into his office…” She makes a twisted, little smile, helpless and confused, and quickly continues. “Mr. Shandy said I should maybe take a lot of time off. Two weeks sick leave with pay, he said, even though I was only working there six months. He said that would give me time to look for another job, one that wouldn’t cause me so much worry, he said. So I asked him, ‘Are you firing me?’ and he said, ‘Yes, I am,’ just like that. ‘But it would be better for you all around,’ he said, ‘if you left for medical reasons or something.’”

  Earl slowly exhales. He’s been holding his breath throughout, though from her very first sentence he has known what the outcome would be. Reaching forward, he takes his mother’s hands in his, stroking them as if they were an injured bird. He doesn’t know what will happen now, but he is not afraid. Not really. Yet he knows that he should be terrified, and when he says this to himself, I should be terrified, he answers by observing simply that this is not the worst thing. The worst thing that can happen to them is that one or all of them will die. And because he is still a child, or at least enough of a child not to believe in death, he knows that no one in his family is going to die. He cannot share this secret comfort with anyone in the family, however. His brother and sister, children completely, cannot yet know that death is the worst thing that can happen to them; they think this is, that their mother has been fired from her job, which is why they are crying. And his mother, no longer a child at all, cannot believe with Earl that the worst thing will not happen, for this is too much like death and may somehow lead directly to it, which is why she is crying. Only Earl can refuse to cry. Which he does.

  Later, in the room she shares with her daughter, their mother lies fully clothed on the double bed and sleeps, and it grows dark, and while George and Louise watch television in the gloom of the living room, Earl writes:

  Nov. 21, 1953

  Dear Jack Bailey,

  Maybe my first letter to you about why my mother should be queen for a day did not reach you or else I just didn’t write it good enough for you to want her on your show. But I thought I would write again anyhow, if that’s okay, and mention to you a few things that I left out of that first letter and also mention again some of the things in that letter, in case you did no
t get it at all for some reason (you know the Post Office). I also want to mention a few new developments that have made things even worse for my poor mother than they already were.

  First, even though it’s only a few days until Thanksgiving my father who left us last May, as you know, has not contacted us about the holidays or offered to help in any way. This makes us mad though we don’t talk about it much since the little kids tend to cry about it a lot when they think about it, and me and my mother think it’s best not to think about it. We don’t even know how to write a letter to my father, though we know the name of the company that he works for up in Holderness (a town pretty far from here) and his sisters could tell us his address if we asked, but we won’t. A person has to have some pride, as my mother says. Which she has a lot of.

  We will get through Thanksgiving all right because of St. Joseph’s Church, which is where we go sometimes and where I was confirmed and my brother George (age 10) took his first communion last year and where my sister Louise (age 6) goes to catechism class. St. Joe’s (as we call it) has turkeys and other kinds of food for people who can’t afford to buy one so we’ll do okay if my mother goes down there and says she can’t afford to buy a turkey for her family on Thanksgiving. This brings me to the new developments.

  My mother just got fired from her job as assistant bookkeeper at the tannery. It wasn’t her fault or anything she did. They just fired her because she has these nervous spells sometimes when there’s a lot of pressure on her, which is something that happens a lot these days because of my father and all and us kids and the rest of it. She got two weeks pay but that’s the only money we have until she gets another job. Tomorrow she plans to go downtown to all the stores and try to get a job as a saleslady now that Christmas is coming and the stores hire a lot of extras. But right now we don’t have any money for anything like Thanksgiving turkey or pies, and we can’t go down to Massachusetts to my mother’s family, Aunt Dot’s and Aunt Leona’s and Uncle Jerry’s house, like we used to because (as you know) the bank repossessed the car. And my father’s sisters and all, who used to have Thanksgiving with us, sometimes, have taken our father’s side in this because of his lies about us and now they won’t talk to us anymore.

  I know that lots and lots of people are poor as us and many of them are sick too, or crippled from polio and other bad diseases. But I still think that my mother should be Queen for a Day because of other things.

  Because even though she’s poor and got fired and has dizzy spells and sometimes blacks out, she’s a proud woman. And even though my father walked off and left all his responsibilities behind, she stayed here with us. And in spite of all her troubles and worries, she really does take good care of his children. One look in her eyes and you know it.

  Thank you very much for listening to me and considering my mother for the Queen for a Day television show.

  Sincerely,

  Earl Painter

  The day before Thanksgiving their mother is hired to start work the day after Thanksgiving in gift wrapping at Grover Cronin’s on Moody Street, and consequently she does not feel ashamed for accepting a turkey and a bag of groceries from St. Joe’s. “Since I’m working, I don’t think of it as charity. I think of it as a kind of loan,” she explains to Earl as they walk the four blocks to the church.

  It’s dark, though still late afternoon, and cold, almost cold enough to snow, Earl thinks, which makes him think of Christmas, which in turn makes him cringe and tremble inside and turn quickly back to now, to this very moment, to walking with his tiny, brittle-bodied mother down the quiet street, past houses like their own—triple-decker wood-frame tenements, each with a wide front porch like a bosom facing the narrow street below, lights on in kitchens in back, where mothers make boiled supper for kids cross-legged on the living room floor watching Kukla, Fran & Ollie, while dads trudge up from the mills by the river or drive in from one of the plants on the Heights or maybe walk home from one of the stores downtown, the A&P, J.C. Penney’s, Sears: the homes of ordinary families, people just like them. But with one crucial difference, for a piece is missing from the Painter family, a keystone, making all other families, in Earl’s eyes, wholly different from his, and for an anxious moment he envies them. He wants to turn up a walkway to a strange house, step up to the door, open it, and walk down the long, dark, sweet-smelling hallway to the kitchen in back, say hi and toss his coat over a chair and sit down for supper, have his father growl at him to hang his coat up and wash his hands first, have his mother ask about school today, how did hockey practice go, have his sister interrupt to show her broken dolly to their father, beg him to fix it, which he does at the table next to his son, waiting for supper to be put on the table, all of them relaxed, happy, relieved that tomorrow is a holiday, a day at home with the family, no work, no school, no hockey practice. Tomorrow, he and his father and brother will go to the high school football game at noon and will be home by two to help set the table.

  Earl’s mother says, “That job down at Grover Cronin’s? It’s only … it’s a temporary job, you know.” She says it as if uttering a slightly shameful secret. “After Christmas I get let go.”

  Earl jams his hands deeper into his jacket pockets and draws his chin down inside his collar. “Yeah, I figured.”

  “And the money, well, the money’s not much. It’s almost nothing. I added it up, for a week and for a month, and it comes out to quite a lot less than what you and me figured out in that budget, for the rent and food and all. What we need. It’s less than what we need. Never mind Christmas, even. Just regular.”

  Earl and his mother stop a second at a curb, wait for a car to pass, then cross the street and turn right. Elm trees loom in black columns overhead; leafless branches spread in high arcs and cast intricate shadows on the sidewalk below. Earl can hear footsteps click against the pavement, his own off-beat, long stride and her short, quick one combining in a stuttered rhythm. He says, “You gotta take the job, though, don’t you? I mean, there isn’t anything else, is there? Not now, anyhow. Maybe soon, though, Ma, in a few days, maybe, if something at the store opens up in one of the other departments, dresses or something. Bookkeeping, maybe. You never know, Ma.”

  “No, you’re right. Things surprise you. Still…” She sighs, pushing a cloud of breath out in front of her. “But I am glad for the turkey and the groceries. We’ll have a nice Thanksgiving, anyhow,” she chirps.

  “Yeah.”

  They are silent for a few seconds, still walking, and then she says, “I’ve been talking to Father LaCoy, Earl. You know, about … about our problems. I’ve been asking his advice. He’s a nice man, not just a priest, you know, but a kind man, too. He knows your father, he knew him years and years ago, when they were in high school together. He said he was a terrible drinker even then. And he said … other things. He said some other things the other morning, that I’ve been thinking about since.”

  “What morning?”

  “Day before yesterday. Early. When you were delivering your papers. I felt I just had to talk to someone, I was all nervous and worried, and I needed to talk to someone here at St. Joe’s anyhow, because I wanted to know about how to get the turkey and all, so I came over, and he was saying the early mass, so I stayed and talked with him awhile afterwards. He’s a nice priest, I like him. I always liked Father LaCoy.”

  “Yeah. What’d he say?” Earl knows already what the priest said, and he pulls himself further down inside his jacket, where his insides have hardened like an ingot, cold and dense, at the exact center of his body.

  Up ahead, at the end of the block, is St. Joseph’s, a large, squat parish church with a short, broad steeple, built late in the last century of pale yellow stone cut from a quarry up on the Heights and hauled across the river in winter on sledges. “Father LaCoy says that your father and me, we should try to get back together. That we should start over, so to speak.”

  “And you think he’s right,” Earl adds.

  “Well, not exactly. Not
just like that. I mean, he knows what happened. He knows all about your father and all, I told him, but he knew anyhow. I told him how it was, but he told me that it’s not right for us to be going on like this, without a father and all. So he said, he told me, he’d like to arrange to have a meeting in his office at the church, a meeting between me and your father, so we could maybe talk some of our problems out. And make some compromises, he said.”

  Earl is nearly a full head taller than his mother, but suddenly, for the first time since before his father left, he feels small, a child again, helpless, dependent, pulled this way or that by the obscure needs and desires of adults. “Yeah, but how come … how come Father LaCoy thinks Daddy’ll even listen? He doesn’t want us!”

  “I know, I know,” his mother murmurs. “But what can I do? What else can I do?”

  Earl has stopped walking, and he shouts at his mother, like a dog barking at the end of a leash: “He can’t even get in touch with Daddy! He doesn’t even know where Daddy is!”

  She stops and speaks in a steady voice. “Yes, he can find him all right. I told him where Daddy was working and gave him the name of McGrath and Company, and also Aunt Ellie’s number. So he can get in touch with him, if he wants to. He’s a priest.”

  “A priest can get in touch with him, but his own wife and kids can’t?”

  His mother has pulled up now, and she looks at her son with a hardness in her face that he can’t remember having seen before. She tells him, “You don’t understand. I know how tough it’s been for you, Earl, all this year, from way back, even, with all the fighting, and then when your father went away. But you have got to understand a little bit how it’s been for me, too. I can’t … do this all alone like this.”

  “Do you love Daddy?” he demands. “Do you? After … after everything he’s done? After hitting you like he did those times, and the yelling and all, and the drinking, and then, then the worst, after leaving us like he did! Leaving us and running off with that girlfriend or whatever of his! And not sending any money! Making you have to go to work, with us kids coming home after school and nobody at home. Ma, he left us! Don’t you know that? He left us!” Earl is weeping now. His skinny arms wrapped around his own chest, tears streaming over his cheeks, the boy stands straight-legged and stiff on the sidewalk in the golden glow of the streetlight, his wet face crossed with shadows from the elm trees, and he shouts, “I hate him! I hate him, and I never want him to come back again! If you let him come back, I swear it, I’m gonna run away! I’ll leave!”