Angel Landing

by Alice Hoffman

  “Carter’s away in New Hampshire,” I told him.

  “Carter’s the one person I’ve met who wants me to be guilty,” Finn said. “He wants me to make speeches for his organization. He talked to me about good and evil.” Finn laughed. “Good and evil. I’ve never even thought about that.”

  “Don’t judge him too harshly,” I said. “He does have some good ideas.”

  “But they’re only ideas,” Finn said. “They have nothing to do with my life. The power plant was the closest thing to me—if I had been working on a hospital or a school, the explosion would have happened there. I was only thinking of myself, the times I was thinking at all.”

  “What do you want?” I asked. “How can you think about politics when you can’t find any peace for yourself?”

  “When am I going to find this inner peace?” Finn said, tiredly.

  “You’ll find it someday,” I said.

  “Oh really?” Finn said. “You seem to know a lot about me. I hope you get some good articles out of all this.”

  “There aren’t going to be any articles,” I said.

  “But that’s why you started with the whole thing. I’m an interesting case.”

  “That was before I knew you,” I said.

  “I’m no longer interesting?”

  I shook my head. “I’m no longer objective about your case.”

  I scared myself when I said those words; it had been much easier to imagine talking to Finn than it was sitting across from him in his apartment. My feelings were so close to surfacing that when there was a knock on the front door, I jumped.

  “Don’t answer it,” I said.

  “It could be LeKnight,” Finn said.

  “But it could be anyone,” I warned.

  “That’s why I have to answer it,” Finn nodded.

  When he went to the front door, I drew up my legs and sat huddled on the couch. The chain lock rattled and outside air rushed in from the hallway. There were no screams, no arguments; it was not Carter, returned from New Hampshire to find me in another man’s apartment; there were no signs of the police or a posse. I heard Finn’s voice and the voice of another man, and when Finn returned, an older man, dressed in work clothes and a heavy denim jacket lined with fleece, followed behind him.

  Finn sat again in the rocking chair. He cracked his knuckles, one by one. “My father,” he said.

  Danny Finn was shorter than I had imagined, he didn’t look like a man who beat his child, there wasn’t a trace of glass left on his shoes.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Danny Finn said to his son, ignoring me and not bothering to sit.

  “I’ve been right here,” Finn said.

  “Your mother is worried,” Danny Finn said. “She expected you to come to the house when they let you out.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I don’t care what you are. It’s your mother who’s worried.”

  “Well, then, tell her I’m fine.”

  “You’re fine?” Danny Finn growled. “Every time I pick up a newspaper I see your name.”

  Michael Finn motioned to the couch. “Sit down, Pop.”

  Danny Finn didn’t budge. “Are you guilty?” he asked. “Or just stupid?”

  Finn reached for a cigarette; his knuckles were white. “Just stupid.”

  “That’s no surprise,” his father nodded. “That’s nothing new.”

  There was no reason for me to be there, no reason for me to see Finn cringe as his father spoke. If I could have, I would have sunk through the floor. I couldn’t bear to look at either man.

  “Aren’t you wondering who she is?” Michael Finn asked with a nod toward me.

  “I can guess who she is,” Danny Finn said in an insulting tone.

  “She was my therapist,” Finn said.

  I jerked my head up. “Nice to meet you,” I said, too quickly.

  Danny Finn frowned at me. “Therapist?” he said. “She’s not a doctor.”

  “Social worker,” I said, but Danny Finn had turned away from me.

  “If she was a doctor she wouldn’t be here. They don’t make house calls any more. Not at night. Not for someone like you.”

  “Well”—Finn shrugged—“believe it or not, she was my therapist. Now I’ll have to see a psychiatrist from the court.”

  “You’re seeing everyone, aren’t you?” Danny Finn said. “You’re telling everyone all about yourself. Have you told her you’ve always been in trouble with the cops? Does she know that? Have you been telling her lies about me?” He now looked at me. “Don’t believe anything he tells you.”

  “Why shouldn’t I believe him?” I said. “He’s not a liar.”

  “And I am, is that it?” Danny Finn said to me. “I don’t have to listen to this. No social worker is going to call me a liar.”

  “That’s not what I said,” I told him.

  “Calm down,” Michael Finn said.

  “I’m fucking calmer than you’ll ever be,” his father responded, but his temples pulsed and his hands were clenched. “We’ll see how calm you are when they throw you in jail. What the hell kind of welder blows up a power plant?”

  “That’s enough,” Michael Finn told his father.

  “Sure it’s enough. It’s enough to have you locked up for ten years.”

  Finn leaned his head against the back of the rocking chair and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Maybe even fifteen or twenty years,” Danny Finn went on. “That’s how much time you could get for being so stupid.”

  It was still Finn’s body in the rocking chair, but he was no more there than if he had gotten up and left the room; he was gone, far from the reach of any of his father’s words.

  “Are you listening to me?” Danny Finn walked over and peered into Michael’s blank face.

  “I think you should go,” I told Danny Finn.

  “You don’t have to tell me to go, because that’s exactly what I plan to do,” Danny Finn said. “I don’t have time to waste on him.” He zipped up his jacket and headed for the door. Just before he left, he turned. “Don’t forget,” he called, “your mother wants to hear from you.”

  When the door slammed behind Danny Finn, I waited for his son to return, but Finn remained unmoved, he still watched the ceiling, not blinking an eye.

  “Michael,” I said.

  “He’s right,” Finn said softly. “I’m going to jail.”

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “And even if I didn’t,” Finn went on, “what difference would it make? My whole life has been planned, it’s been waiting for me, from the time I was born. I just follow in the footsteps ahead of me.”

  “Your father has had his life, and you have your own,” I said.

  “Really?” Finn laughed. “Oh, really?” Finn shook his head. “You don’t know,” he said. “That old man was once young, he was the same age I am now. And look at him, look at him. He wanted things once, he wanted things he could never have. Is that any different from me?”

  Finn rocked faster in his chair, as if some demon moved him, back and forth, rocking him without mercy. Then he began to unwind the fragile thread of memories he had put away long ago.

  FOUR

  DANNY FINN WAS TWENTY-seven the first time he got really drunk. He thought he had been drunk before, he had grown up with friends who carried bottles of wine in their coat pockets, he had been drinking since the year he turned thirteen. But this time was different. This time he nearly forgot who he was. Danny had passed out in the alleyway outside a bar east of Fishers Cove, and he didn’t come to, not even when a police officer found him in the snow and shook him with a heavy foot. He didn’t regain consciousness until three days later. He opened his eyes to find himself in St. Elmo’s Hospital; tubes had been run into his arms and nose, and a terrible sad feeling ran all through him. On that day, when he opened his eyes to clean hospital walls, Danny Finn no longer had a vague notion that he would die someday, now he was certain that he would, and most probab
ly the day would come long before even one of his dreams had come true.

  Before that time in the hospital, Danny Finn had been a solitary man, a drinker, but he had never been mean. His wife, Ada, who had picked him out at a church dance when they were both nineteen, had nothing to complain about. Perhaps the drinking, but Danny’s father had been a drinker, and so had Ada’s, and alcohol seemed natural to a man like Danny Finn. No, something had happened to him in that hospital, Ada would whisper years later to her friends, as the women sat together in their back yards with an eye on the children who played quietly on the sparse lawns. A part of him was missing when he came back; he drank even more, he slapped the boy, Michael, for the slightest misdeed, he didn’t bother to shave, and he came home from work later and later each night.

  Ada didn’t tell those other women that Danny Finn had begun to beat her, and to demand sexual acts Ada would have never even thought possible, although Danny didn’t seem to really expect to have his bizarre desires fulfilled, and Ada suspected his demands were only an excuse to shove her or slap her. Soon Ada wished that her husband would go on the road—to Arkansas or Florida—like some of the other construction workers. She wished he would just pick up and leave. But more than once, late at night, when Ada leaned far into her pillow and pretended to be asleep, Danny had whispered that he wasn’t leaving; he wasn’t going anywhere at all.

  What Danny Finn lost, during his stay in the hospital, was his tunnel vision. He lost the belief that every man was fated to his life, he began to see that a glimmer of choice ran through each day. And after that, Danny Finn spent his whole life just trying to see straight, trying to see the way he did before his vision was all twisted around by a young woman he met on the third floor of St. Elmo’s Hospital.

  Though he would have to stay for days to have tests to check for damage to his liver and brain, the minute the tubes were out of him, Danny Finn got out of bed. He walked down the corridor to the patients’ lounge, where he begged a cigarette from an orderly. When he had lit his cigarette and turned away from the orderly he saw her for the first time—a young girl so lovely she seemed to glow. She was dressed in a long, white hospital gown; she sat at a window so coated with dirt and film that she couldn’t possibly be seeing anything on the other side. Danny Finn chose a seat near her. He took in her shining skin, the sweet face which looked as if it had never seen disease. He felt as if he had known her all his life. The girl was more beautiful than anyone Danny had ever seen, even more beautiful than his own mother, whose face he remembered only from photographs taken before she died in childbirth.

  Danny was so enchanted that he watched the girl for nearly an hour, he even forgot to ask the orderly for another Pall Mall. Finally he leaned forward in his chair. “I’m here because I blacked out,” he said.

  He did not want to mention the drinking to a girl like her; he did not want to mention his wife or his child. He wanted to be born again, fresh, with no past history, no memory, and the power to do with his future whatever he wished. Because the girl hadn’t seemed to have heard him, Danny leaned even closer. “Blackouts,” he said. “That’s my medical problem.”

  When the girl looked up at him her eyes were so deep Danny Finn and all his memories could sink down into them. Right then, Danny wanted to take back most of his life; it was a life that was too rough to ever explain to a girl like her; it was too bitter and too dry for her to have ever understood. Danny Finn smiled at her, and he wanted nothing more than for the girl to smile back, but instead she looked at him blankly and said, “My medical problem is death.”

  Danny Finn didn’t move from his chair when the girl got up and walked out of the patients’ lounge. He did not move until the orderly appeared in front of the windows and asked Danny Finn if he wanted another cigarette.

  “That girl who was sitting here,” Danny Finn said, pointing to the chair, still surrounded by an aura of youth and beauty. “What’s wrong with her? What’s she got?”

  The orderly handed Danny Finn a cigarette and lit a match. “Leukemia,” the orderly said. He bent down and blew out the match. “She’s as good as dead,” he told Danny Finn.

  Danny Finn would never know that death, but he would imagine it over and over again for the rest of his life; it would hit him harder than the death of anyone he had ever known. Years later, Danny Finn would talk about the girl on nights when he was too drunk to drive and his young son drove him home from the Modern Times Bar. Danny Finn would lie on the back seat of his car and weep as if he had been at the girl’s bedside right when she died, he would cry out as if she had breathed her last into his ear. On these nights, Danny Finn knew he hadn’t had quite enough to drink, if he had he wouldn’t have remembered the girl. He wouldn’t have remembered that first time he wished that he could be a different man, the kind of man who could perform a miraculous rescue.

  Before the girl, the only losses Danny Finn had faced were those of his parents. His mother had died before he had ever seen her face, before he had begun to breathe she had deserted him, she had closed her eyes and smiled, because after the birth of four sons, after a lifetime of crowded solitude, she really had not wished to go on. Danny’s father, however, did not die until Danny was nineteen, but it had been wished for by all of his sons for quite a long time, and Danny Finn had wished especially hard.

  Danny’s father, John, treated his youngest son harshly, but none of his sons hadn’t been beaten with a leather belt, none of them hadn’t been knocked to the ground when they spoke back. Perhaps it was only that Danny Finn spoke back more than the others, particularly on the morning of his seventeenth birthday. That was the day John suggested, ordered really, that his son dress and accompany him to the union hall; it was time for the boy to begin his career. But Danny Finn shook his head and told his father his dream: he wanted to join the Navy, he wanted to travel, to sail across the seas.

  “Not in my lifetime,” John Finn told his youngest son. “What’s good enough for me and your brothers is good enough for you.”

  “To hell with you,” Danny Finn said, and he refused to get dressed in his one good blue suit and follow his father down to the union hall. “To hell with all of you,” Danny crowed.

  John Finn was the tallest man there had ever been in the family—he was six-foot-four and not one of his sons was more than five-eleven. And so even though Danny Finn was seventeen years old and stronger than he’d ever be again, when his father reached out and caught him on the jaw, Danny flew up into the air, and landed head first on a block of cement. Although he didn’t lose consciousness, a stream of blood trickled through his hair, until his face was streaked red. John Finn knelt down and gently held his son around his shoulders.

  “I just wanted you to come to your senses,” John Finn explained to the boy. “You’re not sailing any seas.”

  Later that day as they walked to the union hall, Danny Finn wished over and over again that his father would drop dead in his tracks. But John Finn’s strides grew no shorter, and he was still walking tall when they left the union hall after Danny’s induction as an apprentice. But the resentment did not end; although it seemed to disappear by the time John Finn fell from a scaffolding and broke his neck. By that time, Danny Finn had forgotten all about the Navy, he had forgotten any dreams. He really believed he was telling the truth when he shook his head and whispered to his brothers at the funeral, “He was the one who brought me to my senses when I was a boy. Best thing that ever happened to me.” As he stood beside the grave, Danny Finn really believed that all his old resentment was gone; but the curious thing was that he didn’t feel a thing when they lowered the casket into the ground; when the first shovelful of dirt hit against the wood with a thud, he didn’t even flinch. Still, he had convinced himself that his father had set him on the right road by forcing him to join the union. At nineteen, Danny Finn was a journeyman, he was earning a good salary, and soon there would be the benefits from John Finn’s accident to share with his brothers. Danny Finn needed ex
tra money: he had gotten a young woman pregnant, and the terrible thing was, she was the sort of woman that once you got into trouble you had to marry.

  But somehow things never worked out. Danny Finn waited for his check, but after a while saw that his brothers meant to cut him out of his share. Danny Finn never saw a cent of his father’s money; he learned to hate his three brothers. Dead, John Finn seemed to grow even taller; he became an invisible giant who would have guided Danny had he lived. The more Danny Finn thought about it, the more certain he was that his father would have approved of his marrying a woman like Ada; the old man, had he been alive, would surely have loved her as if she were the daughter he never had.

  But after several years of marriage, after the birth of his only son, Michael, and the family’s move into the new house in Harbor Heights, Danny Finn suddenly changed. He had seen the face of death; luminous eyes had drilled into his own, the breath of despair had touched him. Danny Finn was only twenty-seven when he left the hospital and walked across the parking lot where Ada and Michael Finn waited in the car, but he walked like an old man, he stumbled on the asphalt. He now knew, as he slid behind the wheel of his car and looked up toward the third-floor window where the girl had sat, where she might be sitting still, straining to see through the smudges and the mist, that his life was not ever going to be different. The only thing that would happen was that he would grow older. If he was lucky he would meet a quick death like his father, while he was still young. If not, he would spend his old age on a union pension, side by side with a woman who didn’t even know him, who would not have guessed how he felt when he looked into a young girl’s eyes.

  That was when he began to grow meaner. He stayed out late every night drinking, hoping to erase all the terrors that had come together like a death knell when he saw that girl’s face. He became terrified of life and of death, and of the years stretching out before him. Ada Finn never knew what he felt, she never knew any more than she saw: the young man she had married had disappeared, someone else had taken his place. She knew this could happen, she had seen the faces of women whose husbands it had happened to; she had never thought she would be one of them. But she was; just like the women she had heard whispered about by neighbors and friends, she became a woman who carried dinner out to her family without one word, just like them she was afraid that her husband might slap her for cooking the potatoes too long, or serving the meat undercooked. At night she was glad to sleep alone, and she shuddered when she heard the front door slam at 3 or 4 A.M., she wanted to weep when she heard Danny Finn’s footsteps in the hall.