Angel in the Parlor

by Nancy Willard

  “My little bird, you mustn’t worry so much. If he’s not there, we’ll wait till he comes back.”

  Then the door opened and Janet, looking very pale, walked in pushing a wheelchair. Amyas overflowed it on all sides. Seeing Nicholas he gave a yelp of joy.

  “See, Janet, didn’t I tell you he’d still be here?”

  It was the same voice, the same fat belly, the same forked beard. But his face was badly swollen and his thick hair had been cut shorter and the back of his head was heavily bandaged. His right leg ballooned out in a heavy cast, like a piece of artillery.

  “They wanted me to stay, but I told them I had important matters at home. A family to look after. I see you’ve been feeding my doves.”

  Then he noticed the new jacket.

  “Richie came, did he?”

  “My God, Amyas, I’m so glad to see you,” cried Nicholas. He wanted to embrace him but instead shook both his hands.

  “Are you glad, Nicholas? Are you glad? Wasn’t it silly of me to think you would go away?”

  “Where should I go?”

  It startled Nicholas as he said it, because for the first time he realized it was true. This knowledge made it easy for him to settle into the slow timelessness of Amyas’s recuperation. From that hour on, the past did not exist. None of them mentioned the accident except as a way of marking the end of one life and the beginning of another: the day Amyas broke his leg. In Nicholas’s mind the mornings that followed blurred into one continuous morning without end. Even after Amyas got his crutches, Janet would wheel him out to feed his birds—for he hated to leave his chair—and let them out to circle around the roof.

  “I’ve never lost one, Janet. Not one!”

  As morning slid imperceptibly into afternoon, Amyas puttered with his glider, Janet went down to rehearse with her players, and Nicholas, following Amyas’s wishes, took a job in the Akton darkroom on the second floor. He arrived knowing nothing at all and wondering if perhaps Amyas hadn’t bribed Mr. March, the manager, to take him on. The first morning he watched half a dozen men and women wash the shining rolls of film in huge tanks while others ran off masses of prints under the red glow of the safelights. The second morning he cleaned trays, numbered film envelopes, and sorted prints. The third morning he was given his own rolls to wash and another set to print.

  It wasn’t a bad place to work, he told himself. But when he walked out of the darkroom, the sight of ten old women sitting at a long table and stapling envelopes of photographs depressed him. The packaging room was unimaginably drab, like an airplane hangar. The darkroom, on the other hand, seemed always about to explode. The soft red light which infused all their work whetted and roused strange passions. The women were large and buxom, the men small and hairless, and they worked side by side in a room so tiny that they couldn’t help rubbing against each other. The men sidled up behind the women and pinched them, and the women brushed the men with their enormous breasts, and the air grew hot with sweat and promises. The smallest and most brazen among them all, a retired jockey named Jon Spalding, would sometimes whisper in Nicholas’s ear, “You’ll never have a better chance.”

  Nicholas felt at ease only with the two women who worked on either side of him, Charlene Schwartz, a divorcée who had two children and lived in the Bronx, and Barbara Wiggins, a plump girl who had recently quit her job as a waitress and was constantly regretting it. A week after he arrived she began to wear such strong perfume that one of the other women threatened to complain to Mr. March.

  “She’s sweet on you, she is,” grinned Jon Spalding, nudging Nicholas significantly as they passed one another in the red light.

  But Nicholas had lost his taste for large buxom women. Skinny women, with some defect, these were the kind he loved now. No such women surrounded him here, and not wishing to have his taste challenged, he tried to lose himself in his work. He told himself that nothing pleased him more than seeing the images find themselves in the developing fluid. Slowly filling the blank paper, they would arrive, lined up in their Easter clothes on hundreds of doorsteps all over New York. Children blowing out candles, families crowded and smiling on low sofas. And occasionally an attempt at something serious—a landscape, badly out of focus, from a kid’s cheap camera.

  He arrived at one and left at four, well pleased. He knew that if he quit tomorrow the loss of his small income would hardly ripple their lives. Amyas took care of them but knew the value of keeping up certain illusions about independence, and Nicholas was happy to let Amyas think he accepted the illusions as truth. The truth was, Nicholas enjoyed being comfortable.

  With Amyas confined to his chair, the great feasts and exotic dinners came to an end. Amyas did not complain, but when Janet put a plate of peas and hamburgers before him, he sighed deeply.

  “How much I could teach you, my little dove.”

  And afterwards, plucking the stray peas from his beard, he wheeled himself over to inspect his glider.

  “Janet, do you think you could get me a pair of wheels?”

  Janet was washing the dishes and handing them to Nicholas, who dried them and stacked them in the cupboard.

  “How would I get you a pair of wheels?” she asked.

  “You could find a pair. You could have them delivered.”

  Nicholas stepped behind Janet’s bed to have a look. Amyas had recently installed a cockpit, and the glider looked less like a dream of Leonardo da Vinci’s and more like a working machine.

  “Isn’t my blue angel handsome?” exclaimed Amyas, fingering the tip of one wing.

  On an afternoon that started out as no more than a brilliant chip off the long dream of their life together, Nicholas entered the loft after work and heard Amyas and Janet arguing. Sitting alone beside the table, which was already set for dinner, Janet was darning a huge black stocking. It belonged, Nicholas knew, to Amyas. She broke the thread and threw the stocking across the room.

  “I don’t know why I can’t go with them. You have Nicholas.”

  “My little dove,” rumbled Amyas’s voice from the bathoom, “Nicholas isn’t you. I would worry about you terribly.”

  She pulled a pale nylon stocking from the pile on the floor beside her, yanked a single strand of hair out of her head, threaded the needle and began to mend a long run.

  “And why do we have to eat dinner so close to the bathroom where a person can smell and hear everything that goes on in there?” she called to him.

  “I’ll ask Nicholas to move the table,” said Amyas.

  Catching sight of Nicholas, she raised her voice.

  “Isn’t it odd that the only person who has carpeting around his bed is Amyas? Nice green carpeting. You know why, Nicholas? Green is the color of life, it scares away the rats. On a gray floor they feel right at home. But gray is good enough for you and me.”

  From the bathroom came an inarticulate moan.

  “And why should Amyas get half the room to himself while you and I share the other half with the kitchen and the bathroom and the glider?”

  Suddenly she burst into tears, dropped her sewing, and flew over to her bed. Its doors slammed shut. Amyas burst out of the bathroom and wheeled himself after her.

  “My pigeon, what is it? Nobody’s making you work if you don’t want to. I’ve plenty of money to hire someone to clean the loft and fix our meals.”

  From behind the doors came a drawn-out snuffle. Amyas turned to Nicholas who stood rooted in the doorway.

  “Ah, Nicholas, what to do! The Apple Town Players are going on the road and she wants to go with them. The whole venture is terribly impractical. They’ve borrowed an old truck—I’m sure it will break down—and they’ll earn their keep by passing the hat at performances. Who will look after her there?”

  He wheeled himself up to the doors and pressed his ear against them.

  “Are you ill? Do you want me to fetch a doctor?”

  No response.

  “Nicholas, sit down and eat before everything gets cold. I hope yo
u like macaroni and cheese.”

  “I’m not going to sit down alone,” said Nicholas.

  “Did you hear that?” cried Amyas, drumming his fists on the doors. “Nobody can do anything. We’re completely prostrate. How can we eat dinner when you’ve locked yourself up?”

  Still no reply. Amyas sighed.

  “Leave a dish of macaroni by the doors. I don’t want her starving to death in there.”

  Amyas watched every move as Nicholas spooned it into a bowl.

  “Don’t forget the napkin and the fork.”

  Nicholas placed it on a chair outside the bed, like an offering to some petulant sybil. Then Amyas motioned him to sit down and fell upon the meal with both hands. He seemed to have forgotten the use of a fork. After dinner they worked on the glider together and conversed without pleasure. Both went to bed early. Janet brooding in her dark nest did not utter a sound.

  IV

  The first thing Nicholas saw when he woke up the next morning was the doors swinging wide and beyond them the rumpled empty bed. He rushed over to Amyas and shook him awake.

  “She’s gone! Flown away! The bed is empty!” he cried.

  Amyas, in a peacock blue Nehru nightshirt, opened his eyes and turned deadly pale.

  “My chair, Nicholas,” he said.

  Nicholas steadied the chair, eased him into it, and settled the heavy leg in its cast.

  “Go and put on some clothes,” snapped Amyas. “It’s chilly. Do you want two invalids up here instead of one?”

  Then he wheeled himself over to Janet’s bed, peered inside, closed the doors, and backed over the empty dish on the floor, smashing it. Under Nicholas’s gaze, he rolled around the room, pausing to look into the wardrobe, the sink, the cupboards, until he had examined everything.

  “At least she had the sense to take enough clothes,” he said. “She also took a new loaf of pumpernickel she got for my breakfast this morning. We shall have to make do. Nicholas, put on the coffee.”

  Slightly annoyed at being ordered about, Nicholas filled the coffeepot and plugged it in.

  “Move the table please. It is really too unpleasant sitting so close to the bathroom where the most offensive smells mingle with the odor of the food. I suppose she took the pecan roll as well.”

  Nicholas peered into the cupboard and into the icebox.

  “I don’t see any roll.”

  “Get out the toaster, then. We’ll have toast. Assuming that she didn’t take the last slice of white bread.”

  They sat opposite each other in silence like a quarreling couple until the first slice of toast popped up. Amyas gulped down six slices as if they were crackers. Nicholas managed to save one for himself. He shook the bread bag for the last slice, but it was empty.

  “Well,” said Amyas, pushing himself away from the table, “what do you think of carpeting the whole floor, Nicholas?”

  “Why, I’d like it, I guess,” said Nicholas. Amyas’s reaction made him uneasy; he was taking Janet’s flight too lightly.

  “So would Janet. But one mustn’t give in too fast. It’s not worth compromising one’s character to settle an argument. The most important thing to remember is that she’ll come back.” A glazed, dreamy look passed like a film over his eyes. “She always comes back.”

  “Oh,” said Nicholas, greatly relieved. “Then she’s done this before.”

  Amyas nodded.

  “She goes away sometimes to test me. And when she comes back, the bond is even stronger. Don’t think she’s left me behind, Nicholas. When she first arrived, I sewed my gold Saint Christopher medal into the lining of her jacket.”

  “Are you Catholic?” exclaimed Nicholas, very much surprised.

  “No. My mother was a convert. I don’t know whether Saint Christopher will do much for Janet; he never helped my mother. What matters is that she hasn’t really lost me. Whenever she goes out, she carries some part of me, some small token of myself. And one day she’ll be feeling in her jacket for some change and she’ll feel a coin buried deep in the lining. She’ll be curious. She’ll fetch scissors and open the lining. And out will fall my medal, engraved with my name, Amyas Axel. Then she’ll remember where she lives and come home.”

  Nicholas got up and started toward the door.

  “Are you going to the darkroom?”

  “Yes, I thought I’d work a little today.”

  “You don’t have to work, you know, if you’d rather not.”

  “I know,” said Nicholas. He wanted to get away. “But it gives me something to do.”

  To enter the darkroom, to plunge his hands into its mysterious baths and bring out the faces of the past comforted him. He hurried past the gray ladies packaging prints to his place in the darkness between plump Barbara and boisterous Charlene.

  “Oh, God. One more picture of kids in Easter bonnets and I’m quitting,” cried Charlene.

  But Nicholas was leaning over his tray of fluids, transfixed. A bride and groom were slowly coming alive on the paper, figures torn from the past, looking a little bewildered until their features clarified and they recognized one another, and now they were smiling forever. Where are you now, thought Nicholas as he dropped them into the fixative bath. For the bride wore the graceless style and curled pageboy of an earlier time. Once it pleased Nicholas to mediate between the past and the present, to remember again the centuries of lives and cities that stretched in all directions away from Amyas’s loft. To remember and touch nothing.

  “She’s testing me,” said Amyas every morning. “She’ll drop us a line in a day or two.”

  He quit work on the glider and began reading cookbooks and planning the menus he would prepare when she returned: stuffed dormice, snails fattened in milk, violet wine. To Nicholas he gave the task of ordering groceries from the Chinese grocery store once a week. Monday night a young boy deposited them in the elevator and Nicholas accompanied them up to the loft, where Amyas ordered him to put everything away while instructing him in matters of the palate.

  “The paper belongs on the top shelf—that’s right. Now where was I?”

  “The Frankish dishes,” said Nicholas wearily.

  “Yes. I’m glad to see you’re really listening. The Frankish dishes bring to the meal a—how shall I describe it?—a primitive flavor. Oh, Nicholas, do remember to order me some snails. Janet will adore them.”

  But when two weeks had passed without a word from her, Amyas’s calm began to crack. Before she left, the days flowed around them as indivisibly as a river. Now they counted not only the days but the hours. On the fourteenth day after her flight, Amyas took action.

  “Nicholas,” he said, when the noon mail had brought him nothing, “why don’t you go down to the dead letter office and see if there’s a message from Janet?”

  “Why, she knows how to reach us if she wants to.”

  “Oh, but she might have misaddressed the letter. Or it might have got lost. Thousands of letters disappear every year.”

  “I don’t know,” said Nicholas doubtfully. “If it’s lost, how are they going to find it?”

  But Amyas persisted until Nicholas finally gave in. Five days later, on a Friday morning, he took the subway to the main post office on Eighth Avenue. It seemed to him that never in his life had he been jostled by so many people and touched by so many different shades of frustration. Watching the faces of humanity blossom and ripen in the darkroom, he felt he had detached himself from them. Now he sat in the crowded car and tried to gather himself together while thighs, coats, behinds, and packages pressed upon him. The names of streets flashed by on the wall outside like milestones, as if all the passengers were hurtling on a timeline and would step out in an unknown century.

  A hefty black woman at the other end of the car let out a cry.

  “I left it on the platform. On the platform. No use goin’ back. Somebody’s got it by now.”

  The white girl in front of Nicholas gripped her purse and felt for the shopping bag wedged between her feet.
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  “No use goin’ back,” chanted the other, swaying on her feet as if she were crooning to herself.

  No use goin’ back.

  No use goin’ back.

  No use goin’ back.

  Somebody’s got you by now.

  Nicholas walked into the lobby of the post office, huge, austere, and empty. In such a room the unbaptized and the unforgiven could wait in vain for a glimpse of the mercy of God. Only one window was open for service. Nicholas walked over to a face as closed and hostile as a fist. The old man on the other side of the grille heard the resonant boom of footsteps and glanced up.

  “Excuse me,” said Nicholas. “I’m expecting a letter from someone, and I think it might have gotten lost. Is there any way of checking the dead letter office to see whether—”

  He could not finish; the old man’s eyes were widening with disbelief. Presently he answered, so slowly and deliberately that Nicholas had the curious feeling he was watching a dubbed-in performance.

  “Do you know how many dead letters we get each year?”

  “No,” said Nicholas.

  “Hundreds. Thousands. We have rooms full of letters that we can’t deliver. The writers are dead, the people they’re addressed to are dead. Every Christmas we’re flooded with cards to people who’ve been dead for years.”

  He was warming to his subject; he slapped the counter with the side of his hand.

  “And the worst of it is, not one of those letters has a return address. Then it would be simple; we’d stamp it ‘deceased,’ and send it back.”

  “I just thought—that is, this letter would be very recent——” Nicholas stammered.