If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  For in that year, 1956, the great nation of the West was reinventing itself, changing from a land, part urban and part rural, into something not seen in the world before.

  Linda Martin sat behind the wheel of the blue and white Chevy Bel Air and savored her favorite moment of the day. She rolled down her window as Roy slid of out the passenger seat beside her, passed before the car making goo-goo eyes at six-year-old Sally in the back seat.

  He doffed his narrow brimmed hat, ducked his head to the open window. His mouth tasted of Pepsodent, coffee, eggs and bacon, and a single on-the-way-to-the-train Chesterfield. “Keep Lady Olivia amused,” he murmured.

  “She’d be happier if you did that,” Linda whispered in his ear.

  “Nah, no aristocrats for me. I’m a damn commissar. Comes the Revolution they all get shot.

  Linda giggled but glanced in the rearview mirror. She could just hear their daughter’s voice, loud and clear, asking in public, “Mommy, why is daddy a commissar?” But Sally was watching intently for the appearance of the commuter train.

  With the ghost of a wink, Roy stuck his hat on at the perfect angle and joined the marching husbands. Linda admired his easy way among the topcoated men. They were joined by old Mrs. Egan who liked to visit her specialists in the city and by Minnie Delahunt who, for reasons much speculated about, had kept her job in the fashion business even after getting married.

  The train was out of sight as Linda turned on the radio for news. Driving out of the parking lot, she still felt Roy’s parting touch and, holding that memory, was with him as he walked through a rocking car, greeting a man in horn rims whom they both knew through the PTA.

  Roy found a seat, opened his briefcase. Unlike the rest of the passengers, Roy could see in the dark and differentiate one set of footsteps from the dozens behind him on a crowded city street. And unlike almost anyone else in that time and place, he was aware of his wife’s contact. And he could deflect it, which he did with a little smile.

  Linda smiled too as she steered into traffic. An announcer on the car radio said, “A perfect blend.” Maybe he was pitching coffee or a new miracle fabric. But to Linda it described the life Roy and she had made in this time and place. Because a road crew was repairing the usual route, she detoured down Main Street.

  “Mommy?” asked a voice with a keen edge. In the air was that precarious moment when a thought becomes an idea.

  And Linda, her attention focused on the back seat, saw in the mirror the slight quiver of a six-year-old’s pigtails, the growing light in the eyes which were Roy’s eyes. “Yes, hon?”

  “How long is Auntie Olives going to stay?” The idea took form.

  “A little while. Why?”

  “Because last week Timothy brought his rabbit to school and nobody else has one and everyone got to touch her.”

  “And you wondered?” Linda felt the idea become a plan.

  “No one else has an aunt from England. And she could sing.”

  The plan was broached.

  Much of Linda’s concentration was focused on Sally. Most of the rest was devoted to negotiating traffic on the two blocks of shops that constituted downtown Grove Hill. So she only glanced at a delivery truck making a left turn beside Stillwell’s Grocery.

  Just a black, closed truck driving down a shadowed alley, but it caught her attention. The driver’s face, seen for a moment in profile was so ordinary as to escape the memory. The phrase “hard to pick out of a police line up” occurred to her.

  Driver and vehicle evoked dark deeds when the whole point of a village like Grove Hill was never to suggest anything even remotely like that.

  The voice from the back seat said, “Can she, Mommy? Huh?”

  And Linda heard herself say, “You have to ask Auntie Olives, honey.” She realized that she too was calling their guest that.

  Driver and vehicle were out of sight and contact. Alone, she would have cut back immediately. As it was, she drove to the Pathfinder Elementary School. Half distracted, she agreed that Sally could ask their house guest to be that week’s Show and Tell.

  When Linda returned to Main Street ten minutes later, there was no sign of the delivery truck either behind Stillwell’s nor anywhere else. In the gray stone and white clapboard stores of Grove Hill’s Main Street, she made quick purchases of a quart of milk, light bulbs, a pack of cigarettes. In each place she made casual mention of a truck that she said had cut her off. Her discreet probe produced the information that there had been no deliveries that morning.

  Roy, long gone down the tracks to New York City, would not be accessible until evening. She reached for Sally. Right hand on left side. Not like Perry Gibson next to her who had it wrong.

  Saying the magic words, “. . . one nation invisible . . .”

  Linda considered the slippery path from proper precaution through solipsism to paranoia as she got back in the Chevy. Still, instead of heading directly home, she drove onto the Parkway and off again. East Radley was the town next to Grove Hill. It lacked a commuter station and was considered a bit dusty and decayed.

  A place on the corner where she turned was owned by an old Italian couple who had a small vineyard out back, a statue of the Virgin Mary in the front yard. The neighborhood was mostly large, older houses. As she had been taught since she was eleven, Linda did not reach out.

  Abruptly, she felt the touch. Like a sudden ripple on the water, swirling leaves, a shooting star seen at the corner of an eye. Dearest? Mrs. Wood was home.

  She tried to keep her memories of the truck, the driver, the people she questioned, as clear as they had been when she first saw them. Mrs. Wood accepted her offering.

  Linda Martin pulled up in front of a tall shingled, Queen Anne house. It had an old-fashioned conservatory attached. No car sat in the driveway and the blinds were drawn. A slide and some see-saws could be seen out back. The voices of children were heard. But the back yard was big and overgrown and the voices sounded far away.

  Aware of neighbors and casual curiosity, Linda scribbled a note, an actual one about needing a sitter for that Thursday. She walked up to the front porch as if that was why she had come.

  Bending to slip the paper under the door, she caught the images of the truck, the driver, the store keepers on Main Street. All had been rearranged and examined. Clumsiness too is a strategy. Just that and no more. She had turned to go when Mrs. Wood touched her again. Your guest. Linda caught the image of a woman, wild haired, naked. It took Linda a moment to realize what the woman was doing. Her passage is in your hands.

  Linda remained bending. “Sally is safe?”

  She saw another face then, black and white. Beautiful. Mrs. Wood smiled as if that hardly needed asking.

  It was well after nine by the time Linda parked the car in her driveway. That’s when she heard the voice. A soprano clean as a child’s trilled up the years from a place where being a ruined woman was an identity and a full time occupation.

  I leaned my back up against some oak,

  Thinking that he was a trusty tree.

  But first he bended, then he broke,

  And so did my false love to me.

  Think of the song as compensation, Linda told herself as she opened the door and saw a petticoat—her petticoat from Bendel’s!—draped over the hall table. Slips had been taken out of drawers and dropped on the floor without even being tried on. Linda followed the trail of undergarments down to the rec room. This world did not hold enough chemise and lingerie to satisfy the guest. Linda had come to regard it as like being around a magic animal, one which sang wondrously but shed everywhere.

  Olivia Wexford sat in a green silk, floor-length robe, her skin like fine porcelain. She brushed her auburn hair with long strokes. It was something she had, with great reluctance, just learned to do for herself. Still, the repeated gesture was elegant each time. She looked up as Linda entered, with an unguarded expression of cold speculation.

  She wonders, Linda thought to herself, where I’ve been for th
e last hour when I should have been here entertaining her. In her slacks, blouse, and French-bobbed brunet haircut, Linda was cute and knew it. But here she felt dowdy, almost sexless. The TV was on with the sound off. Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Greenjeans skipped around a table. Mr. Greenjeans, a proper second banana, was poker-faced, but the Captain mugged each time he passed the camera.

  The guest gave a surpassingly raucous laugh. “Amusing rustics,” she said. Her eyes sparkled, her face was animated. If one could ignore the background of pine paneling, the local florist’s calendar on the wall, she could have stepped out of a painting by Gainsborough or Romney, “Lady Olivia Wexford at her toilette.”

  Hated and feared back home, unable to boil water, resentful of having to dress herself, disturbed and aroused that men could see her bare ankles, wherever Olivia was it would always be 1759.

  Idly, out of habit, Linda brushed her guest’s mind. And was stopped abruptly by an image of a silk fan in pink and pearl. On the fan, half dressed and agape, Bacchus and Ariadne encountered each other for the first time. With a slight nod, Linda backed off. Lady Wexford had a powerful protector.

  Aware of what had just happened, suddenly reflective, Olivia sipped chocolate out of a doll-size china cup. “HE knew my life up and down, how I had lived it and what I’d do next,” she said. “HE promised me all of Time but little did I guess that I would see it as a fugitive in flight.”

  She had fallen hard not for an ordinary lord, goodness help them all, some ass in a powdered wig and silk stockings. No, her particular daemon lover was a power of a kind that made Linda wary. It was not well to know more than a god wanted you to.

  “In the last place where the Rangers had me, shock was a favorite word,” said Olivia. “It referred to glassy eyed ex-soldiers, hysterical young women with skirts above their knees. And to me.”

  Fresh from the ruins of her own world, Lady Olivia had stayed in a private nursing home just outside London in a certain 1920. This particular sanitarium was secretly controlled by the organization known, where they were known, as the Time Rangers.

  “Scarcely could I concentrate my mind enough to wonder why I was there much less what was to be done to me. Here, I have begun to unravel various mysteries.”

  Linda saw the image of the fan snap shut, replaced by what looked like a Watteau painting. Light shone through trees, moss grew like velvet, a white body reclined, privacy protected by long auburn hair and chains. They were graceful chains but secure all the same. Lady Olivia Wexford was staked out in the woods. “Bait,” she said, “is what I will be, a playing piece in the games of the Rangers and the Gods.”

  Linda thought to herself, ‘After what you and your lover boy did you’re lucky not to have been burned at the stake.’ Aloud she said, “Let’s finish getting you dressed. Make up first.”

  Olivia’s nose wrinkled. “In that last London where I stayed, girls who had not been kissed, much less deflowered, wore whores’ paint.”

  “Nonetheless. We must honor local custom.”

  “Let us,” Olivia said as she rose, and Linda noted how she barely overcame the instinct to issue orders. “Let us, go into the city.”

  “Not today. I didn’t arrange for a babysitter.” Linda thought of the black truck. Instinctively, she reached out.

  Through Sally’s eyes, a mile away, she saw a blackboard and on it the letter H written as big as a six-year-old.

  “We’re going to the supermarket,” she said. Lids rolled over the guest’s wide blue eyes. Life with Sally had prepared Linda for these moments, so she added, “And on the way, we can have a driving lesson.”

  Lady Wexford’s eyes opened at this and she allowed herself to be guided upstairs. A bit longer afterwards than Linda would have thought possible, Olivia had helped to dress herself in a velvet jacket and a pair of Linda’s toreador pants under a flared skirt. She had put on flat pumps and was standing at the front door.

  “Lord Riot, was what HE was called and after a summer of HIS rule the city lay in smoldering ruins. All burned, the palaces and churches, the docks and the slums. And the populace, gentry and commoners were gone to whatever place HE had led them. But in that other London where I just stayed, it was 1920 and while all else was changed, the palaces and churches still stood and nobody had ever heard of the summer of Lord Riot.”

  ‘Damn right,’ Linda thought. ‘The Rangers spent a lot of effort making sure your particular London never got heard of again.’

  She opened the front door and Olivia stepped out. Linda noticed the other woman’s slight shudder as she entered an alien world.

  In the driveway, Lady Wexford touched the hood and roof of the Chevy as if she were acquainting herself with a new horse. While they drove, she listened intently to Linda’s explanation of the ignition, the steering wheel, the clutch, the gas pedal.

  At the supermarket she was at once coy and haughty, dizzy in what seemed to her to be public nudity. Linda was aware of the assistant manager at the meat counter, an Italian kid, appraising them. Olivia noticed also. Linda couldn’t see the glance that was thrown, but the young man took a step back, face flushed, eyes wide open.

  ‘Amusing rustics,’ Linda thought. ‘That’s what we are for her.’

  “Duz, Palmolive, Ivory,” Olivia said. “A cornucopia, a soap for every purpose. But every place looks like every other. Your house is the mirror duplicate of one at the corner of your street. The house across the road from yours looks exactly like one three doors down. You tell me this isn’t the same store we were in on Friday last?”

  “Not even the same town. That was an A&P in Larchmont, remember? This is a Safeway. In the Leather Stocking Shopping Center in Grove Hill.” Then she repeated something she had said before to other refugees fleeing Upstream or Down. “These suburbs sprang out of nowhere. No one knows anyone else.” She added, “Here you are my English cousin, Olivia Smithfield. A bit odd, a bit exotic. But a recognizable commodity. Here everyone is a bit of an Anglophile. This is where you learn to blend.”

  Lady Olivia’s eyes narrowed. Blending in was not why she had been born and raised. In the checkout line, she fumbled with a wallet and bills. The lesson for today was paying for purchases. In her prior life she had never touched so much as a penny. “Foolish colonial monies!” she said, but smiled as she did, amusing the cashier and winning an approving nod from Linda.

  It was well after noon by the time they had wheeled the cart out to the Chevy, loaded the groceries into the trunk, and sat in a booth at the back of a mostly empty luncheonette.

  “You said that you were raised in this time.” Lady Wexford’s expression indicated that she found the idea fascinating and appalling.

  The oldest student trick, Linda knew. Get the teachers to talk about their VERY favorite subject. Themselves. Still, her cover story came in layers, so she peeled one off and said, “I’m a Ranger’s wife. We go where he’s assigned. I’m happy that we’re where I can help him.

  “Yet you are not a Ranger.”

  “No. My mother was. A station chief like Roy. 1950s North America was her assignment. More or less the same one he has. Keeping the peace, managing the Time Stream. Jake Stockley was her husband. He was a Ranger field operative, kind of low level. Not a bad guy at all. Lovable. But he wasn’t my father. My dad was dead before I could remember him. My mother had remarried.”

  Olivia listened intently. Linda found herself surprised by how much she wanted to talk.

  “The first time we hit 1960, I wasn’t even two and didn’t know the difference between that and 1950. All I understood was we were in a new house. Outside Chicago. Mom and Jake were real estate agents. A nice cover. It fooled me.

  “By my second 1959, I was eleven. I thought Tony Curtis was dreamy and had a major crush on Danny Larogga in my sixth grade class because I thought he looked like Tony Curtis. I was lobbying for a poodle skirt and training bra in exchange for having to wear braces on my teeth. Couldn’t have been more typical if I’d been trying.


  “Mom had been dropping hints for a long while. And the evidence was all around me, the number of strange ‘friends’ who stayed with us, the way Jake traveled on business all the time, the fact that Mom read the papers, watched the news constantly but was never surprised by anything. So I knew, but I didn’t want to find out.” Linda looked inquiringly at Lady Olivia, who nodded her understanding.

  “At that point, Mom took me aside and explained that she and Ranger Stockley and I were going to move. Bad enough. But, instead of it being to an identical ranch house in another town, we were going where I could get to see them build the ranch houses. Where Tony Curtis was still waiting tables and Danny Larogga was being toilet trained.

  “The name of our new home was 1950. The Korean War. Harry Truman. Ancient history. We, it turned out, had reached the end of Mom’s Beat. As Jake put it later, ‘Weird, huh kid, whores and cops have beats.’

  Linda caught Olivia’s look, distant, speculative. She had said too much. “Want to get behind the wheel?” she asked.

  As they got in the car, she reached out and was aware of blue. Bouncing in the air. The whole class had been given balloons. Sally’s was blue. The bus was here and she was taking her blue balloon home.

  A few minutes later, Linda and Olivia were in the Chevy. Lady Wexford marveled as she headed for the parking lot exit, “As if I had in hand a team of a thousand horses!” In her enthusiasm, she stepped down on the break. The car bucked and stalled.

  A trailer truck with Wonder Bread logos was pulling into the lot. Gears ground, what sounded like a steam whistle blared. From his high seat, the trucker yelled, “Drive it or park it, lady!”

  As he did, Linda saw a black delivery van the same or the twin of the one that morning speed by on the access road. Instantly, she took a deep breath and said. “Get out of the seat!” The van had already disappeared. It was between her and Pathfinder Elementary School.