Angels All Over Town

by Luanne Rice

  “Straighten out!” I laughed at the irony.

  “It isn’t funny, Una,” Margo said sadly. “We love you, but this isn’t like you.”

  I stared at my sisters, at their soft, monochromatic yellow hair. Their hair had been pure blond since birth, as if they shared a secret Scandinavian heritage that had nothing to do with the rest of us Irish Cavans. But Lily’s face was soft and voluptuous, like a Raphael madonna, while Margo’s was sharp, like a bird’s.

  “Do you want borscht in bed?” Lily asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Toast, then. I’ll fix toast with honey.”

  Margo sat next to me on the bed. “Want to glance through the new Vogue?” she asked. The magazine was open on the covers. I wondered whether one of the girls had been reading it at my bedside while I slept. I liked that idea. Only, sleeping for two days straight seemed too close to death.

  “The last time I was in a coma was on the show,” I said.

  “I remember. Beck was cheating on you with that cub reporter, and she hit you with a bookend. Are you going to marry that loser?”

  “Well, I hope not. I’m sort of hoping they fire the actor who plays him—he has a miserable personal life and keeps flubbing his lines. It’s constant improvisation when I have a scene with him. But he is a nice guy.”

  “That must be fun, though. You’re always saying you love improvisation.”

  “I do, but not that kind.” I wanted to fall asleep again, and I fought to keep my eyes open.

  “When do you start filming again?”

  “In the fall. Right around my birthday.”

  “Late September, good. Lily and I will cure you before you turn twenty-nine.”

  “Of what?” I asked, but then we heard Lily’s voice in the kitchen. Occasionally it was answered by a primal grunt.

  “Who’s she talking to?” I asked, and we listened.

  “The Wild One,” Margo and I said at once.

  In Newport there were many racing yachts, most with all-male crews, ready to leave New England as soon as the first autumn breezes started to blow. That signaled the great exodus to the south, the start of the Southern Ocean Racing Circuit, known to sailors and followers of sailors as the SORC. Yachtsmen were fond of nicknames. For each other: Boom-Boom, the Wild One, Big Bird. For boats: Yankee Girl was called “Girl,” China Doll was called “Dollface,” Different Drummer was called “Ringo,” Tempest was called “Tempo.” The diminutives were a shrewd method of telling SORC insiders from pretenders. People who thought they knew about yachting said mast, deck, crewman. But real racers called the mast a “stick,” the deck the “floor,” the least experienced crewman the “boat nigger.” It struck me as puerile and racist, but one had to abandon judgment to last in Newport.

  The Wild One opened my bedroom door and leaned against the doorjamb. His messy black hair fell into his dark eyes; he stretched one long, muscular arm up the wall. He nodded at me. I nodded back. That was the extent of our communication. Lily and Margo, art history scholars, spoke fluent French, and Margo carried on a lengthy conversation with him. His answers were brief.

  “What did he say?” I asked when the discussion was over. The Wild One remained in position, burning me with his eyes.

  “He hopes you become well soon. I told him you have a virus.”

  “Maybe we should tell him it’s catching,” I said, turning my head to the wall.

  “No, he’s really concerned. He says he hopes you become happier.”

  I looked back at him. He wore a white sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and a pair of navy shorts. Sun-lightened hairs glinted on his golden skin, and there were shadows in the valleys of his muscles. His taut mouth lifted in a semismile. I felt like my father; I thought I could read his mind. “I bet I know what he thinks can make me happy.”

  Margo slapped the bedcovers. “Una, you sound like a Vibbert.” The Vibberts were unmarried sisters who referred to themselves as “maiden ladies” and lived next door to my mother, complaining nightly of sleeplessness caused by noise on the beach, any noise, all of which they attributed to sexual frolicking.

  “I’m serious,” she went on. “You’d better watch it. Mom says both of them liked men until they were thirty or so and then went frigid. And you’re twenty-eight.”

  “I’m not frigid. I just don’t like the Wild One looking at me that way when he’s supposed to be Lily’s boyfriend. Besides, I completely hate the word ‘frigid.’ It was created by men to make women feel guilty just because they’re not in the mood one night.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I meant hating sex.”

  “I don’t hate sex.” It seemed extraordinary that we were having this discussion with the Wild One standing in the doorway, a paragon of seduction, not understanding a word.

  “No, but you’re feeling guilty. Isn’t that what this is all about? You imagining Dad reading your mind, watching you and Boom-Boom in bed? And what about John?”

  I tried not to think about John Luddington. He was part of the reason I had decided to go to Newport. He was the curator of Achilles House, a small museum on East Eighty-third Street devoted to ancient art. It had once been the private residence of an obscure robber baron. For one year I had thought I loved John. I had spent nearly every night at his brownstone in Brooklyn Heights while my own apartment in Chelsea gathered dust and attracted burglars. During my time with John, it was burgled twice.

  John, tall and pristine, wore a gold stickpin to keep his collar together beneath his narrow pale-silk ties. He kept his hands still, just so, on top of his desk, as if he were posing for a sculptor. His black suits never lost their creases or picked up hairs. He took me to every four-star restaurant in the city, then every three-star one. He drew the line there; except for mad forays into Chinatown or Little Italy, excursions that he called “slumming,” he had no desire to try the two- and one-star establishments. The exception to this rule was any place that was very in with the art crowd, like Café Brillat and the Empire Diner. Often I would be unaware of a restaurant’s rating until we were in the cab, heading across the Brooklyn Bridge, when he would say, “If only they gave five stars, they’d move that place into the stratosphere,” or, “What a charade! Three stars? That place was no more than fair.”

  But in spite of his outward refinement, John had loved me messily. He would bring me croissants in bed and let me eat them amid his pressed white sheets (his cleaning woman, finding nothing to clean in the Luddington apartment, would press his sheets and then stack them in the cedar chest, tied with yellow grosgrain ribbons). On our weekend trips to the country, he would tromp through mud in order to show me the largest-known patch of lady slippers in New England. He would follow me into the dustiest stacks of my favorite library. He would hold me tight, without apparent fear that my makeup would smear on his shirt, whenever I told him I was afraid my father would die of cancer. He adored hugging me.

  His widowed mother was rich and lived year-round on Monhegan Island in Maine. John would often charter a plane and we would land at Brunswick, drive to Port Clyde, and ferry to the island for a visit. It was there, on a new spring weekend in April, that I discovered the strange sexual stirrings that went on in the Luddington household and sent me running, alone, to the ferry across Muscongus Bay to the first Bonanza Bus headed for New York and sanity.

  “John Luddington was a very sick man,” I said to Margo.

  “In what way?”

  “Well, he was…troubled. He was driven by success and a need to please. Those two goals are not always compatible.”

  “Quit talking like a principal. Tell me, Una.”

  Had the time come to tell? I lay on my back, feeling a hot breeze blow through the open window, and stared at the water-marked ceiling. My youngest sister sat beside me, tweaking my big toe, urging me to talk. The Wild One leaned against the door and stared at both of us.

  What I knew of the truth sounded nearly innocent. But my conclusions, my suspicions, and the sum of
it all made for a sordid tale. “John and his mother had a weird flirtation going,” I said.

  “How weird?”

  “Well, pretty weird. John’s a night owl, and on Monhegan I would go to bed even earlier than I usually do. Probably from hiking all over and swimming in freezing water. I used to wake up and wonder where John was and find him sitting on his mother’s bed, having a chat.”

  “You went swimming in April in Maine? You must have been crazy.”

  “Well…”

  “So, they were having a chat.”

  “It never bothered me at first. I thought it was nice—a man who cares about his mother. You know how they say a man who loves his mother will love his wife?”

  Margo nodded.

  “She had a very frilly bedroom, with scented things all over the place and lots of pink, even though her clothes were quite tailored. It seemed incongruous, seeing her sitting up against about fifty pillows, wearing a pink negligee, with John cuddled around her feet as if he were a little boy.”

  “This is sounding strange, Una. What else?”

  I felt grateful to her for getting my drift, though I shouldn’t have been surprised. All three of us had strong powers of intuition when it came to each other.

  “She started pushing him on another man.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not. Things were getting serious for John and me. Jemmie could see that; I mean every time John went up there, he took me.” The memory of it made me start to cry. At the first sign of tears, the Wild One left the room. “In April we went up, and I had the strangest feeling he was going to propose to me. We had discussed marriage a million times, but he was conventional. He’d go to Tiffany’s and pick out a ring by himself, if you know what I mean. And that weekend in April, I had a feeling he was about to propose.”

  “On that big cliff, right?” Margo asked.

  Of course I had kept Margo and Lily informed on the progress of my relationship with John Luddington. I had told them about our favorite spot, on the south side of the island, an enormous bluff rising above the Atlantic, from which we could see rocks, crashing surf, passing whales, and seals. It was the most romantic spot in the world. We would go there in the morning with a blanket, books, and a basket filled with lunch, and not return to Jemmie’s until cocktail time. It was the place I had imagined John asking me to marry him.

  “Well, love was in the air, and obviously Jemmie felt it. She had a cocktail party that night and invited an old friend of John’s. He came up from Boston and didn’t have a place to stay and naturally wound up spending the night. So, anyway, I walked down to Jemmie’s room later, and there were all three of them—Jemmie under the covers, and John and his friend at the foot of her bed.”

  “This is sounding perverted.”

  “I never actually saw them doing—”

  “Who the hell cares?” Margo exploded. “What do you need with a family that does things like that? It sounds very gothic. Jemmie Luddington feels threatened by you, so she brings in someone else. A ringer. But why that ringer?”

  I had wondered about that all the following week, until John finally showed up at Soundstage 3 to explain things to me. “John and he had fooled around at Hotchkiss. Apparently John had gotten drunk or had a guilt attack one night and confessed the whole thing to his mother.”

  “Jemmie probably loved it—John and his little friend, just like old times. Did you run out of the house?”

  “No. I stayed until the next afternoon. Even then I didn’t know anything. It was just a terrible feeling I had. Plus the way Jemmie kept looking at me—as if she had already shut me out.”

  “Strange. I always thought you and John’s mother were fond of each other.”

  “So did I.” I felt like crying again. I wouldn’t tell Margo the worst part: when John had visited me the next week, I had screamed and screamed at him, accusing him of every sort of betrayal. He had calmly denied each accusation except one. At the end of my tirade, when I had worked up enough adrenaline and momentum to screech something about his unnatural fascination with his mother, John was silent. He turned bright red and said nothing at all.

  “No wonder you’re under the weather,” Margo said, taking my hand. “You’ve got to let me tell Lily about this.”

  “Of course tell Lily. I’d have told her myself if the Wild One weren’t here.”

  “Hey, what happened to your toast?”

  We listened. From the next room, which was Lily’s, we could hear moans.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Margo said. “Are you hungry? I can get the toast.”

  “Actually I am.”

  I wondered what my father thought about John. He hated to see his daughters hurt. All our lives he had called us his “Good Girls.” Once he had walked down the beach and come across me and Lily standing on the high-tide line beside a couple of boys, who were sitting. One of the boys was notorious for having been expelled from boarding school for possessing beer. My father walked straight up to him, wagged his long finger in the boy’s face, and hissed, “You stay away from my Good Girls.”

  On waking from my two-day sleep, in spite of what I had told Lily and Margo, I felt less convinced of my father’s presence among us. But in case he could know my thoughts, I tried to think some good ones about John. Why had I loved a man who was snobby about restaurants and in love with his own mother? Because we both loved libraries and would spend many free days together wandering through them, taking books off the shelves and reading them at those wide, polished wood tables with the immovable green shaded lamps. I had never before met a man who shared my passion for libraries. Because he kept a small black-and-white television in his austere classical office so that he could lock his door and watch me on Beyond the Bridge every day between two and three. Because he would pass up big parties because I hated them. Because he had comforted me before and after my father had died. And because, for one year, from one spring till the next, he had given me all the love I had thought I wanted.

  Chapter 2

  When I first felt better after what Lily and Margaret had come to call “The Awakening,” I took a book to read on one of the docks. The day was clear and fine, a brilliant day with a stiff offshore breeze. Beneath my long white pants and billowy shirt, I was covered with sunscreen. I wore sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat, tied on with a blue silk scarf. Perhaps I looked like a reclusive movie star, but my purpose was more urgent: cancer runs in the Cavan family, especially in the fair among us, the ones who freckle easily. And I have red hair.

  “Delilah, can I have your autograph?” asked one girl in a group of high school girls clustered around The Yard’s entrance. They moved nervously while I signed the covers of their paperback books with someone’s eyeliner: no one had paper or pen. Why did that act have the strange effect of lifting my spirits so high? Because it told me I was loved. It didn’t matter that the man I had loved was perverse, that I had twice seen my father’s ghost, that I believed the Cavan women had the power of witches. Nice high school girls liked me, and that counted.

  “Una!” I turned to see Boom-Boom hurrying toward me from Manaloa. Instantly I resolved to call him Alastair. I would never call another man, even a sailor, by an idiotic nickname. I would learn the Wild One’s first name and call him by it.

  “Hi there,” he said, grabbing me in a hard, close hug. His body was stout and muscular, and he anchored it to me. Grains of salt clung to his short, curly brown hair. He smiled a three-cornered smile, like Elvis. “Your sisters keep telling me you’re off-limits. You feeling any better?”

  “Yes. Much better. Thank you for the daisies.”

  We kissed, and I touched his hair. It felt warm, and his scalp felt hot. We were sheltered from the wind behind a toolshed, and the sun beat relentlessly down from a cloudless August sky.

  “I’ve missed you,” he whispered, his mouth on my ear.

  We walked toward Manaloa. I felt brave, as if I had fallen off a horse and was daring myself to get
back on. A sense of adventure: desire tempered by terror.

  Manaloa was an eighty-foot racing sloop, owned by a rich Floridian and crewed by twenty-five men. It always won most of the SORC trophies. Boom-Boom—no, Alastair—and I stepped down the gangway into the main salon, a fabulous room with teak walls, an enormous leather settee, a gimbaled teak table at which a party of twenty could eat without spilling a drop while ten-foot seas battered the hull, and a door that led to a well-stocked wine cellar. Alastair went through it and emerged with a bottle of Cristal Louis Roederer champagne.

  “We’ve got to celebrate your return to the living,” he said. I loved the way Australians talked, the way they made “celebrate” sound like “celebright.”

  We walked into the crew’s quarters where Alastair, as one of the senior men, had his own compartment. He undressed me tenderly, as if my absence had made me more fragile. Unhooking my bra’s front closure, he spent ample time nibbling my nipples, circling them with his pink tongue, cupping my round breasts with calloused brown hands, murmuring “beautiful, beautiful.” We climbed into his bunk with the champagne and two champagne glasses shallow as fingerbowls. They reminded me of the sign at the old Blue Danube.

  Alastair opened the bottle the way I knew he would: with one mighty twist that sent the cork ricocheting off the teak walls and bubbly cascading over our naked bodies.

  “Can’t waste a drop!” he said, bending to slurp champagne out of my navel. Then he poured two glasses and we toasted to health.

  I needed that champagne. It blazed on my tongue like fireworks fizzling on the surface of a bay. It went straight to my head and transported me. If Alastair had set sail and pointed east, I couldn’t have felt farther from Newport.

  “You need a tan,” Alastair said, tracing my pale shoulder with one big finger. He smelled faintly like the medicated powder he used to combat the dampness on board.

  “I hate the sun.”

  “You can’t hate the sun, Una.”

  “But I do.” The banality of our conversation soothed me somehow. It was nothing like what had gone on between me and John. What went on between me and Alastair was pure sex, and the conversation was filler.