Angels All Over Town

by Luanne Rice

  “But the rest of us will, and we’ll be really proud. You can be sure of that. I can’t believe he’ll never meet Matt.”

  “No, but Mom knows Matt, and she has enough enthusiasm for two people.” I waited for a laugh.

  Margo hunched over her glass and sipped thoughtfully. “You know, Mom was always the stable parent, but even though Dad had Black Ass, I thought he was nicer. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ I think he loved us more.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, but I did know what she meant.

  “Let’s bust out of here,” Margo said, reading my mind.

  Chapter 11

  That afternoon I waved to Sam Chamberlain. He was sitting in a lawn chair, reading a book. Probably some scientific tome, I thought, but when I got closer I could see it was Agatha Christie’s They Came to Baghdad. Things are not always as they seem, I told myself sagely.

  “How’re things?” Sam asked as I passed.

  “Great,” I said, continuing to walk by. I wore all my beach regalia and carried a big bag filled with a blanket, a towel, books, and several different strengths of sunscreen. “Great weather we’re having.”

  “Fantastic.”

  “Well, bye,” I said, heading down the beach path into the gorse.

  That day I swam the length of the beach, back and forth, until I was too exhausted to move. Then I went up to the turret room for a nap.

  That became my routine for the next two days: waken at sunrise, drink coffee brought to me in bed by Margo, spend the morning with her, spend the afternoon alone swimming, reading, and sleeping, then have dinner with Margo and Matt in the inn’s dining room. Once Sam walked in just as we were finishing, but the other time he didn’t show up at all. Matt said he usually ate early, as soon as the dining room opened. With everything in New York geared to a late-night crowd, I wondered how Sam got along. But I didn’t consider asking him, even though I spotted him around the grounds quite often.

  On Friday I walked to the beach after breakfast and found Sam reading a new mystery in a low chair. He wore a long-visored cap and zinc oxide smeared on his lips. A bunch of dark hair stuck out of the gap above the hat’s adjustable strap. It glinted in the sun.

  “Hey, how are you?” he asked, looking surprised and pleased to see me. His strange greenish eyes lifted when he smiled.

  “Fine. How’s the book?”

  “It’s good, it’s good,” he said, kicking a few large round stones away from the sand beside him. “Here, have a seat.”

  I spread my towel. From behind, his black hair looked almost golden in the sun. I had a crazy urge to run my fingers through it. I thought of a pirate, dipping greedy hands into a treasure chest and letting jewels run through her fingers. The thought made me self-conscious, and I sat right down on my towel instead of smoothing its corners and anchoring it with rocks, the way I usually did. I caught Sam examining my scraped leg. It was covered by a huge blotch of Mercurochrome, which I hadn’t reapplied for several days and which the salt water had faded to sickly pink. “It’s healing pretty well,” I said.

  “It looks much better.”

  Our small talk felt comfortable after my fantasy of treasure hair. I stretched out on my towel and asked him how he liked New York. Then he asked me if I was the oldest sister. Then I asked him where he had gone to college. Then he said “Dartmouth” and asked me why I had dropped out of Juilliard. Then I was telling him the story of Chance Schutz and my father and how my father had died. I stopped short of telling him my ghost story, just as I realized that it wasn’t small talk any longer. “So, why marine biology and not geology?” I asked him, thinking about the plethora of geologists in the Chamberlain family.

  “Didn’t want to compete with my parents. There are only so many grants in the field, and I didn’t want to be any kind of a siphon from their money. Plus, I’d rather study living things. Things that move and change faster than rocks. I mean, there’s lava and glacial debris…and sludge. My parents make an excellent case for the thrill of the ice age, but it just didn’t turn me on.”

  “Do your parents work together?”

  “Mostly. My father’s really annoyed about how seriously my mother’s taking archaeology. He likes it as a sideline, but he doesn’t want to give up geology for it. He’s afraid she’ll defect from the igneous to the anthropomorphic.”

  “Tragic.”

  He nodded, smiling. “They love to build mountains out of molehills. Their marriage is always going through some crisis—they’re always terrified of being rent asunder by something. Like her getting a grant to study in Colorado and him not. Of course it never happens.” He paused. “She had a mastectomy a few years ago, and he nearly went wild. His hair went white that year.”

  Again, I tried to see whether this was hyperbole, but this time I could see it wasn’t. “Really,” he said. “He lost weight, went completely white, and broke his arm rolling over in bed. When she got out of the hospital, he looked worse than she did. The idea of losing each other is unthinkable for them.”

  “Is she okay now?”

  “We think so. The cancer didn’t metastasize, and if it doesn’t recur within five years, she’s supposedly cured. It’s been four years. Nearly five.”

  “That’s great,” I said, thinking of how my father’s doctors had told him the same thing. They hadn’t counted on the complications of radiation.

  “So, you Cavan girls are a close pair,” he said. “What about the one in New York?”

  “Lily,” I said. “She’s wonderful, only she’s married to Rasputin.”

  “Yeah? A beast?”

  “Not a regular beast. You can never quite put your finger on what’s wrong about him. The main thing is that he keeps her imprisoned—on East End Avenue, no less. Which partly explains what I mean about his beastliness; I mean, how can you say someone is imprisoned on East End Avenue? When it’s such a spiffy place and most people would kill to live there?”

  “She’s a prisoner of the heart,” Sam said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Made worse by the fact that she doesn’t try to escape. He’s exerting some kind of power over her.”

  “She makes absolutely no effort to see me,” I said, drizzling a handful of sand onto my good leg. It caught in the tiny blond hairs on my thigh. “Maybe I should move to France or California and do movies. Let Lily and Henk alone in New York.”

  “Seems to me you don’t have to go anywhere to do that. You’d better give her a little time to get sick of it. Then she’ll let him know what’s what.”

  “Actually, I thought that would have happened before now.”

  Sam was staring at the rocky promontory, now covered with water. “Hey, it’s going to be dead low tide around six tonight. Want to take a look at the tidal pools with me?”

  “Great!” I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster, but I had the definite feeling he had said it to raise my spirits.

  “You’re going to love it,” he said, patting my injured leg. “It’ll be broad daylight, and there’ll be no slipping whatsoever.”

  Margo, Matt, and I had lunch on the inn’s porch, and then I retreated to the turret room. Although I felt like finishing To the Lighthouse for the seventh time since I had first read it at fourteen, I fell asleep on top of the bedspread. I dreamed a wonderful dream. It was winter; the sky was pearly white, opalescent, like the inside of an oyster shell. I was walking on the beach in front of my parents’ house with a woman—Susan, Lily, or Margo. The water was flat calm and licked the shore in gentle rhythms. The air was icy cold, ready to snow. Walking along, I had the sudden urge to swim. I dropped my clothes on the sand and walked into the gray water, casting a glance back at my companion. Look at me! Doesn’t it amuse you to see me swimming in the middle of winter? I dove and swam underwater, bubbles coming out of my mouth. A glorious azure fish swam by. I followed it, gaining, and caught it in my arms. Then I walked naked from the sea, holding the blue fish like a baby to present to Su
san-Lily-Margo.

  When I wakened from that dream the sun had gone around the inn. It was late afternoon. I lay still for a long time, trying to analyze the dream’s meaning, feeling content, not wanting to lose the restful feeling. I closed my eyes to preserve the color of the fish in my mind. What a lovely fat blue fish! Its scales were radiant, edged with ice crystals that refracted light like rainbows. I had felt so proud to hand it over to my companion. This blue fish is for you, I had thought, and she had known what I meant. I wasn’t sure who my companion was, but I knew she was female. Females, beginning with my sisters, had been my most loyal, my most satisfactory companions.

  Rising from the bed, I stretched, looking out at the beach. There was Sam, waiting for me. He wore his baggy khaki pants and a blue shirt with the sleeves pushed up. After my brilliant fish, Sam’s blue shirt looked bleached and faded. I dressed and walked slowly down to join him, and when I arrived, I could see that the shirt really was bleached and faded. It looked decades old. It was made of blue oxford cloth and had ragged places around the neck and elbows where white threads hung loose. It had a soft shapelessness to it; it hung loosely on Sam’s lean frame.

  “Hi, Una,” he said.

  “Hi, Sam.”

  “You just wake up?” he asked, moving one finger close to my cheek as if to touch a crease, then stopping short.

  “Yes,” I answered, and we just started walking. He seemed to understand that I needed to wake up slowly. The sand flats gleamed in the declining light. Cirrus clouds had started to gather over Montauk; in a couple of days there would be rain. We walked silently along the deserted beach to the rocky headland. Our passage across the rocks was easier than it had been the other night. We crouched beside the tidal pool where I had scraped my leg, and saw periwinkles gripping the rocks, feathery appendages wisping out of crusty barnacle shells, weird crabs scuttling away from our shadows, an abandoned moon shell, a colony of blue-black mussels anchored by silken threads to the pinkish rocks, springy brown seaweed.

  “What new things can you see?” I asked Sam, playing the old game.

  “Huh?”

  “In the pool—find something you’ve never seen before.”

  “I study this stuff. None of it is new.”

  “Something is. Find it.” The pool was still; the ebb was total, a foot lower than it had been, and no waves stirred the surface. It was as still as the water in my dream.

  “Oh, there’s some starfish larvae,” he said, pointing at a microscopic dot of gelatin. “Too bad I don’t have my hand lens.”

  “It’s not in your pocket?”

  “No, it’s back in my room.”

  I felt disappointed, gazing at the cloudy mass. I would have loved to see the tiny stars. Magnified, they would be as perfect as snowflakes, and they wouldn’t melt. “Are you telling me starfish larvae are new to you?” I asked.

  “No, but they’re new to you.”

  “True.”

  We sat on the rocks and felt the evening breeze grow cool. Our arms touched. The breeze made the hairs on the back of my neck tingle. I glanced at Sam’s weathered brown face, and thought how marine biologists had to spend lots of time in the sun. He had cat eyes and shaggy black hair. Without sunlight it lost its golden glints. He had a habit of brushing his hair out of his eyes with large, careless hands. He did it over and over, but it kept falling back.

  Black plovers flew along the ocean’s edge, silhouetted against the gray gleam. As dusk approached, the scene took on a mysterious quality. I felt timeless. If I closed my eyes, I could be on the beach in front of my parents’ house. Or I could be eighty, spending my last autumn at the shore. The rocks beneath me were giving up their warmth. I started to shiver.

  “Hey, look at the black zone,” Sam said.

  I opened my eyes. The light was fading. “What’s the black zone?”

  He pointed behind us, requiring me to swivel. Where the rocks met the hill covered with bayberry and beach plum, there were streaks of black. They inscribed the rock with rough, bold bands: a dark message. In the light of early evening, they looked magical and terrible. “The black zone of shore,” he said. “It’s where the land meets the sea—literally. That stain is made of microscopic plants. Millions of them. It looks dead, but it’s alive.”

  I stared at the markings for a long time, as if they were hieroglyphics in command of a greater meaning. I waited for them to speak to me, the way my father’s ghost had. I did not believe in God, I did not trust my own convictions, my own conscience, my own wishes, my own spirit. I looked to the supernatural, to things like my father’s ghost, Hester’s Sister, Margo’s vibes, the Black Zone of Shore, to set me on the right track. To tell me what to do. I needed permission to follow my own instincts.

  “You hungry?” Sam asked.

  Food hadn’t occurred to me. I stared at him with what must have been a stupid expression on my face.

  “I think you’ve had too much sun,” he said, gently taking hold of my hand and helping me across the rocks. Funny man, the sun hasn’t been seen for half an hour.

  My feet firmly planted on the sand flats, I walked toward the inn. Sam moved his arm around my shoulders. His body felt warm and smelled like sweat and suntan lotion. When we climbed the porch steps and wiped our sandy feet on the sisal mat, Margo looked up from the chair where she had been reading. Her face betrayed no surprise at seeing us together.

  “Oh, Una—I’m glad you’re back. A telegram came for you.” She hurried inside to find it, and I followed her.

  I tore open the envelope and read:

  CONGRATULATIONS/ YOU AND JASON MORDANT

  AWARDED “SOAP COUPLE OF THE YEAR” BY SOAP OPERA

  UPDATE/ PROMO TRIP TO EUROPE IN OCT????/ LOVE

  CHANCE AND BILLY

  That night Margo and I decided to run up the phone bill. We had to tell our mother and Lily about Margo and Matt’s betrothal and about my award and movie audition. While Matt boiled water for lobsters and Sam took a shower, Margo and I settled on the couch in her and Matt’s private quarters. Margo dialed our mother’s number.

  “Mom, guess what?” (I heard her say, bubbling with excitement) “Matt and I are getting married!…Probably Christmas…Well, as a matter of fact, two nights ago…. Oh, thanks, I’ll tell him…” (Long pause.) “Una’s here. She wants to talk to you.”

  With a sour look, she handed me the phone.

  ME Hi, Mom. Great news, or what?

  MOM Mmmm. She sounds very happy.

  ME Oh, she is! We’re ecstatic—don’t you adore Matt?

  MOM Well, I only met him that once. He seems very nice.

  ME (looking at Margo). Yes, he is wonderful. (Long pause.) I have some good news too. I just won an award.

  MOM For—

  ME The show. Jason and I got “Soap Couple of the Year.” I mean, I know it’s not a Tony or an Emmy or anything…(Margo, at this, shaking her head violently, mouthing, “It’s great!”)

  MOM Congratulations, dear.

  ME (now subdued). Plus, I have a movie audition. With Emile Balfour. My career is really moving ahead.

  MOM I think that’s wonderful.

  ME (fighting strong urges to say terrible things). Well, I think I hear Matt calling us for dinner. He’s a fabulous cook.

  MOM (with as much enthusiasm as I have heard during the conversation). Oh, what’s for dinner?

  ME Lobster.

  MOM Oh, lobster! Yummy! Bye-bye.

  ME Bye-bye.

  Replacing the receiver, I looked into Margo’s eyes.

  “Not exactly brimming with excitement, is she?” Margo asked dryly.

  “We must have interrupted a really intense painting session.”

  “Gee, I hope the good news didn’t wreck her concentration.”

  Years of being her daughters had taught us not to dwell on it. Margo lifted the receiver and I dialed Lily’s number in New York.

  “I really wish we had a speakerphone for this,” I said.

  Ilsa answe
red, and Margo asked for Lily.

  “Baby, here’s the scoop,” Margo said the instant she heard Lily’s voice. “Wedding bells are ringing for me and Matt!”

  From four feet away I heard Lily’s howl. “When???” she yelled. Margo held the receiver away from her ear and shouted, “At Christmas! Talk loud ’cause Una’s here and she has to hear you.”

  “Hi, Una!” Lily hollered.

  “Hi, Lily!” I yelled back, leaning close to the telephone.

  “Put Matt on!”

  “He’s cooking lobsters in the kitchen!”

  “I don’t give a shit if he’s catching lobsters in the ocean. I want to talk to him!”

  I ran into the kitchen and found Matt and Sam drinking beers. “Your other future sister-in-law wants to say hi,” I told Matt. “Get ready to scream.”

  Matt and Sam followed me in to Margo. Matt had a few private words with Lily, and then we all huddled close to the telephone, reinstituting the conference call.

  “Una’s got great news too!” Margo bellowed.

  “What cooks?”

  “A movie audition—plus I won ‘Soap Couple of the Year’!” I yelled.

  “Zoap couple of the year? You got an award ceremony or anything? You gonna need a new zoot?” Lily loved to replace s with z whenever possible.

  “I don’t know yet—”

  “She also has a movie audition,” Matt yelled.

  “With Emile Balfour!!” Sam yelled.

  “Who the hell’s voice is that?” Lily asked in a lower tone.

  “That’s Sam Chamberlain,” Margo screeched. “Tell you about him later!”

  “I have some news of my own!!” We heard Lily call. “I’m going to have a baby!!!”

  Margo and I looked at each other. Suddenly Margo pressed the receiver tightly to her ear. There was no more shouting. The conference call was over. This was serious business; we were on the way to becoming aunts.

  Margo, Matt, Sam, and I ate the lobsters on the inn’s front porch. All that was visible of the ocean was a white line of breakers. We took turns dipping lobster meat in the communal bowl of melted butter.