Angels All Over Town

by Luanne Rice

  “Chance, Billy, I’d like you to meet my friend, Sam Chamberlain.”

  “Delighted, Sam,” Billy said, twinkling. She had changed from her grimy turtleneck into a muslin caftan for the occasion, and I could see goose bumps on her arms and throat. Dampness clung to everything in spite of the heat whistling up the pipes. It had rained for seven days straight.

  “Oh, is that one of your pots?” Sam asked, leaning toward a tilting vessel full of bayberry and stalks of marsh grass. Without letting go of his hands, Billy led him closer. I watched the two of them, feeling as though I had brought Sam home to mother. He spoke to Billy, flattering her pottery, regarding her earnestly, with his long arms folded across his chest, as though she were telling the best, most entertaining story in the world. Taking his hand again, Billy led him into another part of the room where more pots, all empty, were displayed on a tall shelf. By the way they were standing, I could tell that she was letting him pick out one to take home. Then I thought of my real mother. I had no doubt that when I finally introduced Sam to her, he would be as charming and kind to her as he was to Billy. But she would be different. She would be friendly enough, in a perfunctory way, but she would turn skittish if Sam were too nice or got too close. Then she would bolt like a mustang.

  Sam’s office at Columbia, midway down a dark second-floor corridor in a huge Gothic building, surprised me. Approaching it for the first time, I made the same mistake I had that day in Watch Hill when I had seen Sam reading a book and expected it to be an oceanographic treatise instead of They Came to Baghdad. I had expected Sam’s office to be institutional, dusty, the sanctuary of a scientist, with piles of Latin-titled books covering the linoleum floor and piles of papers covering the wide desk. I hadn’t imagined pictures on the wall or curtains at the window.

  I was right about the clutter. Every surface was covered with manuscripts, paper, books, and journals. But there was a hominess about it, a personality that one would never expect to find in such a grim building. Sam had hung a giant Matisse print, one of the bright jazz cutouts, titled Les Bêtes de la Mer—The Beasts of the Sea. There was a black-and-white photo of boats in Padanaram harbor, a faded collection of flaking wildflowers preserved in a glass frame. White rice-paper shades, somewhat yellowed, hung crookedly in the large windows. I had come to meet Sam for dinner, and I couldn’t stop looking around. It was the first time I had visited him; usually he came to my place and, of course, we had met at the family inn.

  He introduced me to his research assistant, a pretty, overweight Columbia student named Christie Clendennin. Christie wore a man’s blue chamois shirt, the nap worn down to a comfortable sheen, over green denim pants. Her blond hair straggled into her wide brown eyes, and she didn’t bother to brush it away. She moved languidly, as though there were all the time in the world. In New York, where every movement, every gesture, was efficient, Christie was an anomaly. She would make a fine oceanographer, taking sun lines from the deck of a gently rolling ship.

  “Hi, Una,” she said, giving me a wide smile when Sam introduced us. Then she neatly placed the banana she had been eating onto the discarded peel, still atop a bunch of crumpled papers in the wastebasket, and wiped her hand on her pants. Her handshake was firm and sticky.

  “Hi, Christie,” I said. “I’ve talked to you on the phone so often, it’s nice to match your voice to a face.”

  Lily still had not matched Sam’s voice to his face. I thought of that; of how, to the important people in each other’s lives, Sam and I were still voices. But that was changing. Here I was, smiling at Christie.

  “Sam, we’re going to have to do something about that seminar at Yale,” she said, running her finger down a calendar page on Sam’s desk. “You going to give that talk or what?”

  “You find me a topic big enough to fill five days yet?” Sam asked.

  “Five days? When?” I asked.

  “Early in December,” Christie said. “If he ever gives me some ideas about what he wants to do.”

  “Listen, they don’t give a shit what I talk about. When visitors come here, what do they talk about? Obscure research, that’s what. And my research is just as obscure as anyone else’s.”

  “This is true,” Christie said, nodding her head at me. “Sam’s probably told you how crazy this stuff is. Sam doesn’t necessarily care about Professor Schmo’s research any more than Schmo cares about Sam’s, but they have to act nice to each other just so they can get grants from each other’s institutions.”

  “Hey, that’s not completely true, Christie,” Sam said. “I care about other research.”

  “Sure, Willander’s?”

  What senses of humor, I thought. How could two people engaged in such weighty matters as oceanography have such flip attitudes, when I, a soap opera actress, could not see the funny side to Beyond the Bridge? There is something to be learned here, I told myself.

  “Want dinner?” Sam asked.

  “Take her to the Acropolis,” Christie said. “You like Greek?”

  “Well, sure…”

  “They have the best stuffed grape leaves,” Christie said, beginning to salivate. Her eyes misted gently. “And souvlaki. Or better yet, moussaka.”

  “The owner painted every surface in the place,” Sam said. “Even the lightbulbs.”

  “Jesus, if that isn’t just like you, Chamberlain,” Christie said, letting out an impatient sigh. “Dinner means food, not painted lightbulbs. No wonder you’re so skinny.”

  “Fatten me up,” Sam said to me.

  I smiled, and we left Christie to retrieve her banana and continue eating it while working on the latest grant proposal.

  In the hallway we met Victor Parkson. He was staring at a green bulletin board covered with papers that luffed like sails in the breeze from an overhead heat duct. Fluorescent ceiling light buffed his bald pate, which he stroked abstractly. Markings decorated the back of his head. From a distance I had thought he was old and tattooed, but up close I could see that he was younger than me.

  “Vic, this is Una Cavan,” Sam said, stopping by the bulletin board. Sam’s dark hair stirred in the heat-breeze.

  Vic’s smile bunched his face into folds of loose skin. I could see the shape of his skull perfectly; I could imagine how he would look as a skeleton. I knew immediately that he was getting chemotherapy for some cancer or other. “Sam told me you’re an actress on that soap opera. My girlfriend watches it.”

  “It’s so unusual to be recognized in the halls of academia,” I said, knowing that that was a lie. Visiting Margo and Lily at Brown two years earlier had been the pantheon of my fame. All the students had known me. But I wanted to talk, to keep Victor from knowing that I knew about his condition. There were red and blue arrows on his neck and skull, indicating where the radiologist should aim the rays. Simultaneous radiology and chemotherapy; I began to feel sick.

  “How’s your treatment, Vic?” Sam asked.

  Don’t ask. Why did you have to ask? I thought, peering at a notice over Vic’s shoulder.

  Vic shrugged. “Sickening. But better than more surgery, I think. Who knows? Have you met with Desmond today?”

  Sam rolled his eyes. “Desmond, what a horse’s ass. Making us all sweat.”

  “Who’s Desmond?” I asked, happy the subject was changing.

  “Department head,” Vic said. “He keeps Sam on his toes.”

  “Someone has to do it,” I said, steering us further from more talk about Vic’s condition. But Sam turned us around. He squeezed Vic’s forearm.

  “You take care of yourself. We’re all pulling for you, you know.”

  “I know,” Vic said.

  When Sam and I were in the ugly, dark stairwell, I walked very fast, about two steps ahead of him. I could hear him falling behind with every step.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, not catching up to me until we were outside in the twilit courtyard on Morningside Heights.

  “Oh, nothing,” I said.

  “Did Vic bothe
r you?”

  “He looks like he’s about to die.”

  “He’s very sick. He has a tumor in his tongue, but he’s not about to die.”

  “Are you sure he wants to talk about it with everyone who comes along?”

  “Well, I’m his advisor, Una. We talk about it all the time.”

  “I’m not his advisor, though. We just met. It must be humiliating to talk about it with a stranger.” I thought of my father, of how carefully he had guarded the secret of his colostomies, whenever possible he would blame the sound on the nearest source of water.

  “Vic needs support. I don’t think he cares where it comes from.”

  “I wonder about that,” I said, no longer feeling like having stuffed grape leaves or viewing hand-painted lightbulbs. I felt like going home alone, pulling the quilt to my chin, and watching a homogenous night of television. First the bland, anonymous disasters on the local news, then a game show or two, and finally situation comedies, one after the other, that would finally blend into one hilarious whole. But instead I let Sam drag me to the Acropolis, where he ordered Demestica for us. Demestica made me think of Domestica, and I started wondering, do I really want to stay in love with Sam, hoping for domestica and marital bliss when one day within the next forty-five or so years one or both of us will die? Even the bright swirls of poster paint on every surface in the noisy restaurant made me think of the blue and red arrows on Victor Parkson’s head.

  “So, you’re an oceanographer,” Henk said, somewhat smugly, staring at Sam from his usual seat of honor in the library. Sam sat in another wing chair flanking the blazing hearth, while Lily, of fine and rotund proportions, and I sat on the couch. Every time she felt the baby kick, she grabbed my hand and placed it on her belly.

  “That’s right,” Sam said.

  “Eh, a doctor of the sea. Hey, we have another doctor in the room,” Henk said to Lily in a wry tone that meant to suggest only one of us was a real doctor.

  “I think oceanography is fascinating,” Lily said, grabbing my hand and planting it on her right hip. “That’s the head,” she said to me. Then, to Sam, “I was always most interested in plate tectonics. Continental drift and all that.”

  “Yes, the geophysical branch of oceanography,” Henk said. “When all the world’s landmasses were one grand place called Gondwanaland.”

  “You’re interested in geophysics?” Sam asked.

  Henk raised his hand in a scoffing manner. “Well, not interested, precisely. I just picked it up from somewhere. Probably from a patient or something.”

  How brilliant one must be to “pick up” geophysics, I thought.

  “Henk has such fascinating patients,” Lily said. “Dear, tell them about the diamond merchant.”

  And Henk whirled off into a long tale about a patient who, he admonished Lily, was not a diamond merchant at all, but a diamond broker, the richest in all of Amsterdam, in fact. He had paid Henk’s fee in cash along with a handsome collection of unset diamonds, which were now in the vault along with the rest of Henk’s bounty. Patients were so grateful when you saved their lives.

  “And I hear you’re an art historian, just like your other sister,” Sam said to Lily. I watched Henk’s expression, hoping it would reveal chagrin at being cut off in mid-self-glorification, but he remained stone-faced as ever.

  “Not practicing, however,” Lily said.

  “No, but you must be one of the best-informed museum visitors in New York,” Sam said.

  “She might become a docent somewhere in a few years, after the children are raised,” Henk said, pursing his lips in a smile.

  “Or maybe even a museum curator—and get paid for it,” I said.

  “We think highly of public service in this family,” Henk said, glaring at me, daring me. But to do what? Whenever I faced Henk, I felt as though I were being invited to do battle over some secret issue. (The issue, of course, was Lily, but I was slow to recognize this. Or afraid to.)

  “What sort of public service?” Sam asked.

  “Fund-raising, volunteer work. People in our positions, as professionals, have that responsibility, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t have much time for volunteer work,” Sam said. “But I know fund-raising. Christ, do I know fund-raising. Any scientist does—grants pay the way.”

  “Yes, but grants pay your way. You must start using your talents to raise money for the needy, for the arts.”

  Sam smiled across the wide, rosy expanse of Persian carpet at me. “Well, I contribute to the arts in my own way.”

  Henk looked blank for a second. “What, you mean Una?”

  “Yeah. She’s about to drive the critics crazy in Together Forever.”

  “I see,” Henk said, staring at the ceiling.

  But Lily was proud; that was all I cared about. Movie roles were what she, Margo, and I had always hoped I would eventually corner. And with Emile Balfour! She squeezed my hand, then pulled it onto her navel. “Feel it?” she asked.

  A wee appendage poked out, then retreated. I nodded, feeling tears gather in my eyes. A little half-Cavan was alive in Lily’s massive belly. It was half-Voorhees as well, but with Lily as its mother it would be wonderful. It seemed astonishing that I had not seen the pregnant Lily before now; suddenly she was magnificently huge, and the last time I had seen her she was as skinny as a bride.

  “I still cannot believe you’re going to have a baby,” I said quietly.

  “Naturally I am—I’m fertile as the plains of Kansas,” she whispered back. Her eyes glowed, and although her yellow hair had lost some of its sheen through a temporary transferal of vitamins to the new baby, her skin looked as though it never came into contact with New York air. I kept my hand on her stomach, waiting for the next bit of action. I was smiling at Lily, who was smiling around the room at Sam and Henk, when suddenly she went as stone-faced as her husband and pushed my hand away. I looked up just in time to see the tail end of Henk’s disgusted scowl.

  Everyone stared at the fire, trying to ignore Lily, who was starting to silently sob. An iron basket on the marble hearth held thin driftwood branches; I wondered which beach Lily and Henk had gathered them from. Or whether they had bought them at a florist. New York florists sell every sort of vegetation from ficus trees to tumbleweeds. Suddenly Henk let out a mighty puff of air. “For Christ’s sake! Will you do your crying in private?”

  Lily stood with immense dignity, considering her girth and the fact that she was heaving with the effort of not making noise, and walked quickly out of the room, passing Ilsa as she went. I stood to follow.

  “You stay here,” Henk commanded me.

  “Shut the fuck up,” I shot back and ran after Lily. I could hear her footsteps clicking on the marble tiles of one hall or another, but I could not see her. I was in the maze at some frighthouse. I darted in and out of rooms I had never seen before: a sewing room strewn with flimsy paper patterns and snippets of gingham and velvet; a flower room filled with stainless-steel sinks and the discarded stems of a veritable acre of gladioli and irises; a TV room whose walls bore spiked metal helmets, pearl-handled rifles, a lance, and several portraits of the same man in full military regalia—some warrior ancestor of Henk’s, no doubt; one pristine guest room after the other, all done in shades of green and yellow. Sweating and panicked, I finally found Lily at the end of one long corridor, far enough from the library that she knew her sobs could not be heard. They were primitive, wild, and terrifying. I will never forget how they pierced me.

  She lay on her back on a massive bed, her pregnant belly rising like an island, like Corsica, out of the sea, her toes pointed daintily at the ceiling. She wailed as though her child were dead.

  “Lily?” I said, sitting next to her, taking her hand. She gripped mine so tightly it started to hurt. Then, when her cries subsided, her hand went limp. I had time to gaze around the room, at her dressing table covered with jewel cases and tiny crystal flagons of makeup and perfume, at Henk’s valet stand bearing his
dark suit and black shoes (apparel for the funerals of his less grateful patients?), at the tiny gold-framed oil paintings hanging on each wall. “Lily?” I said again.

  “What.” Her voice was flat, as though she were totally defeated.

  What? I tried to think of diplomatic ways to phrase the question that was pounding in my brain: what are you doing with a fascist like Henk?

  “What’s wrong?” I asked as mildly as I could.

  “Nothing. Pregnancy has made me very emotional.”

  “Didn’t Henk like me feeling the baby kick?”

  At that she started to struggle into an upright position, but I patted her shoulder and she sank back onto the pillow. Her eyes glared at me. “Well, can you blame him? I mean, pregnancy is an unbelievably intense time for a couple. They really don’t want any intrusions.”

  “They,” as if the word had nothing to do with Lily—as if “they” were Henk and some automaton wife.

  “Maybe, but don’t you think we want to be involved? Me, Margo, and Mom, I mean.”

  “I’m sure you do, but do you honestly think it’s your right?” She assumed that haughty tone I had heard so often on the phone, made more extreme by the sudden nasality of crying.

  “Actually, yes. I’m not taking anything away from Henk by wanting to see you once in a while. I understand that he’s your husband…” (stating the obvious, to reassure her) “and that he wants to protect you. And that you’re…” (choke) “happy together.”

  “We are. Very.”

  “So why won’t he let me feel the baby kick? My little niece is in that belly.” I smiled, but Lily exploded.

  “And that’s another thing! Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that we might want a son?”

  “I’m sure Henk does.” It slipped out, and I knew I couldn’t call it back. Lily regarded me with satisfied eyes.

  “You see? You don’t like Henk. He’s known it all along. Just because the Cavans have a dynasty of women, that doesn’t mean that I want to carry on the tradition. Henk and I are together in this, Una. Right from the beginning he knew you couldn’t stand him. I don’t know whether it’s jealousy or”—she sailed right on, past my grunted protests—“the fact that he thinks soap operas are inferior to the stage. I mean, that he doesn’t respect you professionally. You don’t seem to be able to separate it in your own mind—the fact that Henk likes you as a person but doesn’t think much of your work.”