Angel in the Parlor

by Nancy Willard

  The sexton shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

  “Shouldn’t you call the police?”

  “I can’t telephone the police about a bundle of old clothes. How on earth did he get in, I wonder, without anyone seeing him?”

  “I leave the door open on Thursday nights for choir practice, Father.”

  He waits attentively for his orders. Father Hayden sighs.

  “Put it back, put it back. If you see any suspicious persons, come and tell me. Don’t call the police.”

  The sexton nods. Father Hayden turns back to his notes, but they reveal nothing to him now.

  He goes to bed earlier than usual and does not drop off to sleep until early morning. And then he dreams that the sexton is chasing him round the sanctuary with a broom, shouting, “Do not loll on the altar! Keep your elbows close to your sides! When you make the sign of the cross, make crosses, not circles, and make them high or you’ll upset the chalice.”

  Then he dreams that he wakes up. And in this two-storied dream, he sits up in his bed and hears music on Mansion Street, as from a parade far off. Running to the living room he throws up the shades and opens the great window that looks out on the street. From where do I know this tune? he asks himself, for it teases him like the smell of soap or tea when the memory of the smell has outlived the memory of the place it belonged to.

  The street shines, paved in silver.

  And now he sees the animals, the foxes beating their tambourines, the bears juggling firebrands, the goats tossing saucers and drums on their horns. The camels sing in thin, reedy voices. The hares and the marmots walk on their hind legs, paw in paw, all their grossness purged away as the souls of hunted and useful things must be, permanent as ivory, yet touching as flesh and fur. And he recognizes them at once; they walked on the silver lip of the tide on the first mornings of his childhood, before he learned to speak. Holding his mother’s hand, he often watched them pass. And now he knows they have been walking all these years, looking for him.

  But are they real animals or men in animal masks? he asks himself. For what animals could create such a radiant presence?

  At once the whole company vanishes, and he wakes up, ready to weep at the loss of them. He runs to the front door and unlocks it and stands for a moment blinded by the white brilliance of Mansion Street, empty but glazed with last night’s rain. Rain in December! He wishes that he might spend the morning walking that street, but he has four sick calls to make, and he has promised to visit Bertha Wells, the oldest living parishoner, who is bedridden and cannot attend the Christmas services that night. She lives in the Episcopal home across from the rectory. The others live in places less convenient to himself. Ah, he tells himself, someday there will be money to hire a curate who can make some of these visits for him.

  Later that afternoon, he enters the sanctuary and pauses by the steps to choose a poinsettia for Bertha Wells. He lifts out the smallest pot, hidden among the spruce boughs. He stands up, hesitates.

  Someone is watching him. He feels the skin on the back of his neck prickle. But looking out over the empty pews into the darkness, he sees nobody.

  Is somebody watching me?

  Nobody.

  Holding the pyx in one hand and the pot in the other, he crosses Mansion Street and climbs the steps to the front door. Behind the frosted oval glass, the shadow behind the desk rises to meet him. And for a moment he feels like his father, calling on the sick, and he wishes he had the power to heal bodies as well as souls. To make the lame walk and the blind see.

  The door opens and a young woman in a white uniform admits him.

  “Father Hayden,” she smiles. “How wonderful to see you. Won’t you come with me?”

  He follows her across the empty lobby. The sound of his footsteps sinks into the carpet. A TV set flickers soundlessly in front of a huge leather sofa. Hearing a clatter of dishes and voices to the left, he turns, but the young woman motions him to the elevator. They ride up smiling at one another.

  “Flowers,” remarks the woman. “How nice.”

  “Has Mrs. Wells had many visitors?”

  “Hardly any. But she gets lots of cards. She’s outlived everyone in her family, you know. Her husband died five years ago. Her daughter died two years ago of TB. There were no grandchildren.”

  “TB? I thought no one died of that anymore,” says Father Hayden.

  Leaving the elevator, he walks close behind his guide down the corridor. When she holds a door open for him, he enters without hesitation.

  “Bertha, you have a special visitor.”

  In a bed against the far wall lies—is it a man or a woman? The figure is nearly bald. Father Hayden sets the flowerpot and the pyx on the bedside table. The bed nearest the door lies empty, immaculate. He puts his coat on the foot of it, and comes forward, extending his hand.

  “God bless you, Bertha, and merry Christmas to you!”

  The old woman’s blue eyes study him. Then she leans forward and whispers, “Just look at those people in the corner, Father. And they aren’t even married.”

  Glancing behind him, he discovers that the attendant has vanished, and in that instant the door across the hall opens and he sees an old woman in a bathrobe peering into the drawer of her table and scolding somebody.

  But Bertha still stares into the space behind him. Touching his arm, she draws him lightly toward her.

  “I know they’re not real, Father, because you walked right through them.”

  Hastily he takes his prayer book out of his pocket.

  Hearing the familiar prayers on his lips, the old woman lifts two fingers to receive the host. Arthritis has crumpled the others.

  “Here,” she says in a scratchy voice, “between these two.”

  When she has received his blessing, she seems all at once to come alive. She sits up, stares at Father Hayden, and says, “Are you the curate?”

  “I’m the new rector,” said Father Hayden.

  “The rector?” she repeats, surprised. She studies him, as if she hoped to unmask an imposter. Then, satisfied, she says, “We had a curate when Father Legg was rector. But it was Father Legg I always wanted to serve me. Still, you couldn’t tell which side he would serve on. And if I sat on the right side, then I had to go to the right rail, and if I sat on the left side, then the left rail. And if the curate served me, I confess I felt as if I’d hardly taken communion at all. And then I had to wait a whole week to take it again.”

  Father Hayden laughs in spite of himself.

  “And we young girls, we always got our hands folded just so, long before it was time to go up.”

  She closes her eyes. She is silent so long that he fears she has forgotten him. He takes her hand. Outside, snow is falling at last, draping the gravestones in the yard, the roof of the rectory, the steps.

  He feels the warmth of her hand like a lining in his glove all the way back to his own door. And it’s there the sexton takes his sleeve and whispers, smiling.

  “That bag of old clothes I found—it’s been taken away.”

  And Father Hayden thinks, he’s been waiting for me to tell me this.

  “Taken away? Who took it away?”

  “I don’t know. It was gone this morning. Taken away,” he repeats, as if he has done nothing his whole life but bring old clothes together with their rightful owners.

  “Well, that’s fine,” says Father Hayden. “A merry Christmas to you.”

  “And to you too, Father. Peter Beasley tells me you’ll be taking dinner with his family tonight, before the service.”

  Father Hayden nods. He unlocks his door and steps inside. The sexton is padding across the snow back to the sanctuary which is already aglow with candles for Christmas. Darkness comes now at four o’clock. Time! Time! There is not much time. Father Hayden remembers he must wrap the puppets he has bought for the deacon’s children, but a growing uneasiness has paralyzed him.

  Can a man be living in this house and I not know it?


  He hurries through all the rooms downstairs, turning on the lights. Then, standing in the vestibule, he snaps on the light in the second floor hall. Then he ascends the stairs, making as much noise as possible. He whistles. He bangs his feet. He sings a little. He reaches the top landing.

  Now he goes into the first bedroom. Turns on the lights.

  Nobody there.

  Into the second bedroom and the third. Empty rooms he has forgotten ever existed, rooms painted colors he never chose or papered in fruits, ships, and flowers. His footsteps shake the floorboards, his shadow follows him, gigantic, inhuman.

  Nobody there.

  At the foot of the stairs leading to the third floor, he turns on the light. His chest tightens, he can hear the thump of his heart. How frail a thing the body is! That his heart continues its work without a word from him amazes him, that his limbs move in spite of his doubts and confusion fills him with a peculiar tenderness toward them.

  Noisily he marches up the stairs. Into the first room. Nothing but dead flies in one corner, thick as sand. Now the second room. His hand on the light switch, he hears a scrabbling sound that nearly sends him running. In his heart miniature boxes of cereal are falling like hail and a pickpocket’s hand is snatching them up.

  And then he hears the twitter of starlings in the eaves and relief floods him. I must call an exterminator to get rid of them, he thinks, for he has heard stories of starlings stealing lighted cigarettes from ashtrays left by open windows and sticking them into their nests. Great buildings have been brought low by such small causes.

  Carefully turning off all the lights, he walks downstairs. The house is empty. And this certain knowledge floods him with a loneliness he had not expected.

  Time! Time! The deacon is sitting down to dinner without him. Father Hayden hurries to take the box of puppets from his closet shelf. Is it possible he dreamed of animals this morning? He cannot remember their shapes now, only that he wanted them and looked for them in the street he saw upon waking.

  And now see him. It is eleven o’clock, the faithful have arrived in their best clothes, they rustle in the pews, waiting eagerly for the service to begin. In the corridor, Father Hayden fastens his cope; its scarlet cross slopes down his back as he takes his place behind the acolytes and folds both hands over his prayer book. The acolytes lift their candles. Now he is standing at the borders of the forest of lights. He hears the opening measure of the processional hymn. And as the door opens and they move into the sanctuary, his heart too is lifted. For among the faithful, perhaps the madman has come back and is even now sitting on the bench behind the last row of pews like a stray animal that has slunk out of the cold, caring nothing for the Word but wanting only to warm its paws at these mysterious fires.

  3

  The Doctrine of the Leather-Stocking Jesus

  On the day before Easter, in my father’s garage, just before supper, I drew a chalk circle around Galen Malory, and said, “Now I am going to change you into a donkey.”

  “Don’t,” pleaded Galen.

  He was five, three years younger than I, and the second youngest of eight children. His father had worked for forty years on the assembly line of the biggest furniture factory in Grand Rapids and was given, on retiring, a large dining-room table with two unmatching chairs. On holidays Mr. Malory sat at one end and Mrs. Malory sat at the other, and in between stood the children on either side, holding their plates to their mouths. The rest of the time, they ate on TV tables all over the house.

  “Now you will turn all furry and grow terrible ears,” I said, smoothing my skirt. “Heehaw.”

  “If I turn into a donkey,” shouted Galen, “my mother won’t ever let me come here again.”

  “Too late,” I howled, rolling my eyes up into my head. “I don’t know how to undo it.”

  Suddenly Mrs. Malory rang her cowbell, and all over the block children leaped over hedges and fences and fell out of trees.

  “I have to go,” said Galen. “See you.”

  As he ran out of the garage he bumped his big furry nose on the rake leaning against the door. He stopped, reached up and touched his floppy ears, and burst into tears.

  Out of sight of God-fearing folk, we sat together on the compost pile where three garages met, and we wept together. I stared at Galen’s ears, large as telephone receivers, and at his big hairy lips and his small hands browsing over all this in bewilderment.

  His hands. His hands?

  I looked again. I had not turned him into a donkey. I had only given him a donkey’s head.

  And I thought briefly and sorrowfully of all the false gifts I’d given him. The candy canes I hung on his mother’s peonies, left there, I told him, by angels.

  “Dear God,” I bellowed, addressing the one power I did believe in, “Please change Galen back.”

  “Somebody’s coming,” whispered Galen, terrified. “I think it’s my father.”

  An old man in a brown overcoat and curled-up shoes was crossing the snow-patched field, poking the ground with a pointed stick. He was spearing bunches of dead leaves and tucking them into a white laundrybag.

  “That’s not your father,” I said, “and he doesn’t even see us.”

  But who could fail to see us? The old man skinned the leaves off his stick like a shish kebab, put them in his pack, and sat down half a yard from us, nearly on top of the hole where a little green snake once stuck her tongue out at me. He pulled a sandwich out of his pocket and ate it slowly, and I saw he had dozens of pockets, all bulging, and sometimes the bulges twitched. We watched him wipe his hands on his coat, stand up, and turn toward us.

  “Once a thing is created,” said the old man, “it cannot be destroyed. You cannot, therefore, get rid of the donkey’s head. You must give it to somebody else.”

  “Who?” asked Galen.

  “Me,” said the old man.

  “I asked God to get rid of it,” I said.

  “I am God,” said the old man. “See if you can change me into a donkey.”

  The smell of crushed apples and incense filled the garage when God stood in the center of the chalk circle and my voice weasled forth, small and nervous.

  “Now I am going to change You into a donkey.”

  And because it was God and not Galen, I sang the rhyme that expert skip-ropers save for jumping fifty times without tripping:

  Now we go round the sun,

  now we go round the stars.

  Every Sunday afternoon:

  one, two, three—

  Then I saw God stroking the tip of His velvet nose with one hand. His eyes, on either side of His long head, smiled at Galen’s freckled face.

  “After all, it is not so dreadful to be mistaken for an ass. Didn’t Balaam’s ass see My angel before his master did? Wasn’t it the ass who sang in the stable the night My son was born? And what man has ever looked upon My face?”

  “We have,” said Galen.

  “You looked upon my God-mask,” said God. “Only the eyes are real.”

  He stepped out of the circle, opened His bag of leaves, and peeped inside.

  “What are you going to do with all those leaves?” I asked him.

  “I save them,” said God. “I never throw anything away.”

  The leaves whirled around as if a cyclone carried them, as God pulled the drawstring tight.

  And suddenly He was gone.

  And now I smelled the reek of oil where my father parked his Buick each night, and an airplane rumbled overhead, and Galen was jumping the hedge into the Malorys’ yard, and Etta called me for dinner.

  And, conscious of some great loss which I did not understand, I went.

  My mother and my sister Kirsten had already left for church to fix the flowers for tomorrow’s service. Etta the babysitter and I ate macaroni and cheese at the kitchen table, out of the way of the apples waiting to be peeled, the yams and the onions, the cranberries and avocados, and the ham which Etta had studded with cloves.

  I wanted to tell Etta
all that had happened, but when the words finally came, they were not the words I intended.

  “Do you know what Reverend Peel’s collar is made of?”

  “Linen,” said Etta.

  “Indian scalps,” I told her. “Do you know what chocolate is made of?”

  “It comes from a tree,” said Etta.

  “It’s dried blood,” I said.

  “Who told you that rubbish?” she demanded.

  “Timothy Bean.”

  “A nine-year-old boy who would shave off his own eyebrows don’t know nothing worth knowing,” snorted Etta.

  Etta gathered up our dishes and rinsed them in the sink.

  “Can we go over and see the Malorys’ new baby? I asked.”

  When we arrived, Mrs. Malory and five of her daughters had already gone to church to make bread for the Easter breakfast. The Malory kitchen smelled of gingerbread, but nobody offered me any. It was so warm the windows were weeping steam. The corrugated legs of a chicken peeked out over the rim of a discreetly covered pot. Etta comfied herself in the Morris chair by the stove, mopping her face with her apron as she crocheted enormous snowflakes which would someday be a bedspread. Helen Malory, who was nineteen, plump, lightly mustached, and frizzy-haired, sat in the rocker nestling her baby brother in her arms. She was newly engaged to a mailman. Thank God! said my mother when she heard it. Helen’s got so many towels and sheets in that hope chest down cellar, she can’t even close it.

  Today Helen had given Galen a whole roll of shelf paper and some crayons and now he and I were lying under the table, drawing. Because tomorrow was Easter, I drew the church: the carved angels that blossomed on the ends of the rafters, the processional banners on either side of the altar, the candles everywhere.

  Galen drew Nuisance, the golden retriever who at that moment slept beside the warm stove. The dog’s head would not come out right, nor the legs either, so he drew Nuisance wearing a bucket and walking behind a little hill.

  Tenderly Helen tested the baby’s bottle on her wrist and touched the nipple to its mouth. The baby squinted and pawed the air and milk sprayed down its cheeks. The lace gown it would wear tomorrow for its baptism at the eleven-o’clock service shimmered in a box on the kitchen table. Etta was allowed to touch it before Helen put it safely away on top of the china cabinet.