A Flight of Storks and Angels

by Robert Devereaux

  “That’s it. I look at every one of these photos, the negatives alone break my heart, and then when the suckers are enlarged, I swear it makes you want to wet your pants like organ music vacuuming your skull in a cathedral.”

  Tad’s guardian was bent to him. Clever, intellectual in mien. Goddamn Auroville High had given him some really great kids over the years. He thought of Luke. Tad said, “I wonder if it might be an optical illusion.”

  “That’s the sharpest image I’ve ever seen.”

  Call him. A stone in a pond.

  “It’s almost too sharp,” countered Tad.

  “You know who might be interested in this?”

  “Like they leap off the paper, as if it’s our minds that somehow—”

  “Luke Petrakis.”

  Tad looked at him. “The CNN guy?”

  “Auroville High, class of ‘77.”

  “That was a really cool documentary the other night. But I like his live reporting better.”

  “You and millions of others. He’s got the talent; he had it when he was sitting there where you are. Knows how to find the interesting stuff, zero right in on it, switch away when it wanes, find the next thing.”

  “‘The high-class Geraldo,’” Tad quoted.

  “That’s marketing hype. He began it during the Gulf War. Some of it luck, mostly talent. Luke’s never lost touch, either. Calls me every year, June sixteenth, the anniversary of the day I hired him.” Snaking around the baffles into the cooler office air, Tad at his heels, he keyed open the thin drawer under his desktop and rummaged through some papers until he found it. A pink While You Were Out slip, Luke’s private line at CNN.

  He punched it in, 4:35 here, 7:35 in Atlanta, even if Luke wasn’t elsewhere on the globe, not likely, he sure as hell wasn’t going to be in his office. Three rings, then voicemail kicked in, that annoying universal lady with the underlay of snippy arrogance to her tone, “if it is urgent that you speak with someone now,” yeah, yeah, he hit zero like she was about to fulsomely urge him to do, dead line for a moment, then an admin assistant came on. Luke’s in town but he’s probably home packing for a few days in the Bahamas, vacation, no she was sorry she couldn’t give his home number, unlisted for a reason, who did he say he was, yes sir that name, mighty glad to be speaking to you, Luke gets to talking about you, Mister Dietz, every year at the Christmas party, yes he does, and—oh, yes, sorry, she had it right there. And then Clarence had it and was punching it in, swearing at Luke not to have left for the airport.

  Calm down. Pinched pruned face, but old Sourpuss was right. No good pumping up the blood pressure.

  “Luke here.” First ring. Famous voice, a hint of caution. Even unlisted, he no doubt had unwanted calls.

  “Luke, it’s Clarence Dietz.” Tad’s eyes were wide and Clarence nodded to him. The boy’s angel looked as red-cheeked and merry as a backpage Santa.

  There was a second of silence at the other end, then an explosion of ebullience, famous voice gone manic with glee. When at last the voice spiraled down an octave and slowed to near normal, Clarence told him why he’d called. He prefaced it with “remember you told me if I ever had a story so hot” and with “you’re not going to believe this, but trust me, you can hear how rational I sound, I am not joking, I’m on the up and up,” and even so, Luke thrashed about like a pike reluctant to be landed.

  But eventually, there came an inflection point.

  And Luke Petrakis became very interested.

  Very interested indeed.

  8. Awakenings and Losses

  Thursday morning, giving the final chapters one last editorial gloss, Grampa realized at last what had put him off about Thalia: Too like Mozart. Safe, tidy, precise. Another outing in the old vein; a slight departure, sure, from elves and fairies, but scratch away the nice conceit which linked anti-choicers to bookburners and all you had was the same old reliable T. E. Jameson gavotte.

  It’s a gem, Esme offered from where she sprawled. It scintillates.

  “It’s done. That’s all I care about.” The LaserJet eked out page after page, a blessed whisper of mechanism after the mind-shattering clatter of his clunky old daisywheel, but its predictable rhythm nevertheless reinforced his dissatisfaction with Thalia as a soulless bagatelle, a miniature music box with a pirouetting ballerina on top.

  That’s cuz your mind’s opening to new possibilities.

  “Yeah, no shit.”

  You’ve seen your new audience.

  “And I like what I see.”

  They’ve always been there. Just crusted over.

  That was so. He’d felt it the day before as he came into the town square. People he’d always thought dull and predictable had manifested the most amazing of companions. He’d always been puzzled when any of them had gathered the courage to accost him and confide in stultifying monotones their admiration for his books, all of his books. He saw now, and realized he’d always known, that when these folks read a novel, their fascinating hidden true selves came to the fore for those precious moments, feasting on the magic of his tales, the magic missing from their everyday lives. He’d fed that beast. But, sensing deep inside himself how confined it was, he’d held back nutrient without realizing he was doing so. How free he had felt spinning Thalia out of his head—and how cramped it seemed now, an oxygen-poor attic where roof and clutter conspired to bend one low and hold one motionless.

  Glancing at his bookshelves, he thought of—

  Oedipus? Maybe so. Things keep on like this, I’d say it’s remotely possible.

  “We’re going to get that sucker out there.” But she knew, and he knew she knew, he was just blowing air. Old Oedipus represented major departure, a blast of raw ruddy erotic energy he doubted pucker-stuck America would ever be ready for, not the way the pendulum swinging away from the sixties had defied the laws of historical gravity and stubbornly refused to swing back.

  And yet . . .

  And yet the stirrings he’d felt downtown, the shared simmerings of freedom and creativity and brewing ecstasy, these gave him new hope. The Oedipus book would resonate nicely with a transformed America, would celebrate it and buttress it, a trellis for the righteous vines of license. And the follow-on ideas that exploded from his fingertips into his laptop (as his PC busied itself printing Thalia) like the plumping of grapes, bunched and shiny and thick with purple, in the sun—these ideas would fill out in the newborn light of liberty, would take on tight round sounds bursting with implication and assurance. It could happen, it really could, a true renaissance of goodness that would find its reflection everywhere, not simply in his fiction, but in the lives of every wakened dreamer, a denial of ill will and violence so complete that they withered and fell, dwindling into dust.

  Quite a ways.

  “Yes, I know. But I’ve got the faintest foretaste of it on my tongue tip, and it’s heaven-sweet.”

  When the printing was done, he checked the pagination one last time, made a backup for Joy’s safe, switched off printer and PC, put dust-covers over both, split the novel between the manuscript boxes, labeled them, placed them in two padded mailers, taped and stapled them shut, addressed them to Cynthia Stephens—sniffing and admiring the wicked cherry odor of the black marking pen—and zipped them into his backpack. Heavy suckers. Happy to be rid of them and on to what lay ahead.

  The sky was overcast, but Nemo gleamed about Joydrop at the kitchen window as if his body’s strung beads flared with reflected sun. June sat across from Ward, spreading blackberry jam on a toasted muffin. Sliding the door open onto a perfect unity of three, he made it a unity of four just as perfect, angels inclusive without being exclusive in the slightest. Strong, subtle, adaptive—these words described them. There seemed noticeable growth in their guardians’ depth and strength every time they converged, and Grampa wondered if and when a natural stopping point in angelic sophistication would be reached.

  “You just missed my dad, Grampa,” said June, Jeannie beaming down on her with so much lov
e it made him shudder like an inrush of fresh air after confinement. “He drove away two seconds ago.”

  Grampa looked about. “Where’s Laura?”

  “She got beeped,” said Ward. “Someone named Sarah.”

  “Sarah Haskell,” June volunteered.

  “Yeah, her baby’s on its way. Nothing urgent, but it could be any time I guess, so Mom went to check her out at the hospital.” Ward popped a final crunch of muffin into his mouth, Timothy benevolent and afloat by his side.

  “So that’s Thalia,” Joy offhanded, holding herself in with folded arms; but glimmers of delight escaped from the edges of her smile.

  “No,” he said, unshouldering the pack and lowering it lightly to the tile floor, “it’s a couple of cinder blocks and that’s no lie,” and he gathered Joy in for an embrace, passing through Nemo, the gems moving like crystal bullets through his body and out the back, no pain, hints of stung pleasure if anything, and then Joy kissed a cheek and gave him her heartfelt congratulations.

  Nora. Esme’s voice was Ted’s own best voice, a goad whose soft prompt he welcomed.

  He gave Joy another hug, then excused himself. Nora sat in her chair, of course, where he’d waved to her from the backyard. She seemed to be watching him still, fixed and invisible and perhaps twelve years younger beside the great oak. Joy had dressed her in a breezy short-sleeved cotton frock, lemon yellow, buttoned and belted, breaking below the knees. Knee socks of a matching color enclosed her compact calves, her ankles and feet.

  Pulling up a squat stool, he took the hands that lay lifeless in her lap, felt her feeble response, kissed her pale wrinkled knuckles one by one, savoring the ineffable balm of her flesh. How comforting that was, but how much more of a comfort it would be if it were motile. “Hello, love,” he said. “It’s Ted.” Closing his eyes, he ran the tips of her fingers over his face.

  Warm, smooth.

  Nora.

  He set her hands back on her lap and rose forward, a grip on each armrest, to probe into her eyes. Esme moved about him, the intimacy of their connection more apparent than ever. That’s when it happened. Nothing complicated, a simple movement of the eyes. In days past, as Esme had grown closer, he’d noticed—or thought he did—the flicker of Nora’s gaze gathering intent. But now that flicker was gone; instead he saw the slow sure tracking of his angel’s advance on the right, subtle but unmistakable.

  Grampa’s excitement bubbled and brimmed. He couldn’t breathe for a moment, then he shouted out for Joy to come. He heard her footsteps swift in the hall—

  She thinks Nora’s having a seizure.

  —and Joy threw open the door, Ward and June not far behind. And then they came into the room, they and their angels—and Grampa wondered why the idea hadn’t occurred to him before, as he watched the angelic face lift like a layer of animate epidermis off Nora’s face, coming away in waves, its wide-eyed intelligence massaging the muscles of Nora’s flesh into beautifully willed movement. Her chest caught momentarily, as if the white drift of her emerging guardian blocked her nose and throat, but then her breath eased back toward normal.

  She turned her head.

  Nora turned her head!

  It was a subtle flex of the neck, pure Nora, a simple expressive gesture he hadn’t seen in twelve years. Taking in the wisdom and delicacy of her companion, her slow eyes found the figures on the far side of the bed, rose to Esme so tall that Nora’s forehead lines deepened as she scanned upward. Then her gaze dropped into her husband’s eyes.

  “Gramma?” Ward managed.

  She looked at him and smiled. Her lips parted as if to speak but she caught herself, turned back, said, “Ted,” and he gathered her to him as she tried to rise, soft with her but all-encompassing, as soft as the arms encircling him, as soft as the hands resting lightly on his back.

  So calm it surprised him, he confided, “I knew you’d come back.” Her face nestled like a thrush at his chest. She brushed upward with it, his body remembering patterns of movement so that, without thought, he came down to meet her kiss and she was there and their years of loss dropped away like a heavy cloak of sorrow and he felt so elated he thought he must be rising to the ceiling.

  When he tried to seat her again, she said, “No. Not here. Outside on the patio.” But first, as he guided her across the bedroom, she was introduced to and gave hugs to Joydrop and an awestruck Ward and to June, who looked upon her like visiting royalty. Then they launched, piecemeal and overlapping—like a storyteller with four mouths, and those not enough to tell the tale—into introductions to their guardians and how they came to manifest themselves and what had been happening the past three days downtown. Joy brought them all mint tea on the patio, standing by the screened door sipping from her glass as he and Ward and June drew up lawn chairs to the webbed divan Nora lay upon and glossed the highlights of twelve lost years.

  The kids did most of the talking. Ted was content to marvel at his wife, the catalepsy gone from her as swiftly as it had descended. His eyes moved between Nora and her angel, a pair of reinforcing beloveds between whom there was no contest: here, the open accepting essence of love, the deep-eyed, glowing-eyed seat of her own creativity and the perfect sounding board to his; there, Nora herself, a woman whose forgotten phrases and gestures he found he was falling for anew, so much had passed by unnoticed in their years together. But now he drank her in, every intricacy, every breath and glow, and he felt like a sponge saturated only to realize how parched it is and to thirst for more.

  Ward glanced at his watch and said they really ought to be going, asking Gramma if she wanted to come too.

  Nora looked to Ted. “I don’t know, Ward. It feels so wonderful just to sit here.”

  “Gramma and I are going to pass today I think.”

  Ward was mildly astonished. “You’re not coming?”

  “Maybe later,” he said, “but I wouldn’t count on it. Gramma’s got to get her strength back. Besides, I have a feeling there’ll be other gatherings on the square. Tell you what. If Gramma feels up to it, maybe we’ll taxi into town later in the day, just for a few minutes.”

  That seemed to mollify his grandson, judging from his expression and from Timothy’s renewed zing. He had a more difficult time convincing Joy that it was perfectly proper for her to deliver Thalia to the post office, offering his apologies to Mindy Rutherford who would surely understand, yes it was all right, yes they’d be fine alone, yes please dear Joydrop take the car and go.

  He sat beside her, the lawn furniture protesting, and held her tight as the garage door rumbled open and closed and the sound of Joydrop’s car and then of Ward and June talking excitedly along the road dwindled in the distance and faded away.

  “Ted?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Make love to me?”

  *****

  Reverend William Fleischer sat alone in the darkened sanctuary, centered on the hard stone steps to the altar, staring out over empty pews and down the plush red runner to the narthex doors; above them, the choir loft with its rounded rosette of a stained-glass window. What with the overcast outside, that window—the tall one behind him too with the cross motif—gloomed opaque and inward, reminding him of a picture he’d had as a child, Christ praying apart in Gethsemane, the colors of his robe, of the black night, done in the dark delicacy of clipped and stained butterfly wings.

  His sleep had been troubled. But he’d concealed his wakeful state from Marge just as he’d put on a cheery face for Dawn on her dinner visit the night before. He sniffed a laugh, short and bitter, and felt a pained chill shudder through him. Hiding things from his family, from himself, had, it seemed, been for years one of his specialties.

  The creature that had uglied out of his body, obscene as an all-over caress, sheeted now dimly before him—tall, gaunt, misty as unraveled fog. He hadn’t dared—not since the town square—to glance directly into the recrimination of its eyes, nor had he attempted to parse its continually moving, silent lips. In the office, he’d tried
to work on Sunday’s sermon. But Kathleen Grayson’s cheerful chatter, usually more inspiration than irritant, proved the reverse today, it stood in such terrible contrast to his troubled thoughts. His angel had swayed nearby in condemnation as he tried unsuccessfully to focus on his notes. And then, of course, there was Ken Jefferson, obviously a visitant to yesterday’s gathering as well, to judge from the kind-eyed, roly-poly guardian that hunched over his exegetical researches into the article he was preparing for Biblical Review and from the conspiratorial winks he slipped past Kathleen, not knowing—God he couldn’t, mustn’t, know—the effect those winks had. He’d let a sob slip out, covered it but not fast enough, said he needed some time alone in the sanctuary, and managed to hold his tears inside until the door closed between them and him, crying even so into his sleeve to muffle the sound.

  It was so quiet. He was fifty-nine. Had it been his father? A gentle man, joked a lot, ribbed his mother, not at all domineering, not anywhere near insisting his son go into the ministry. He was still alive, a Floridian, loved to fish. What had his angel said to him as he squatted by Harold Porter, just before he skirted around the crowd and fled, just before its voice faded into silence? You don’t have to wait until he’s buried. And he’d known precisely the meaning of that. It had struck him, foundation-deep. It had unlocked deep dungeon doors and freed the self he had long ago partitioned and locked away.

  Empty pews, stilled organ, the paraphernalia of faith without one iota of the stuff itself. A dead stage set, a place of delusion, and he, the trained mesmerist, expected week upon week to reinforce the comforting tissue of lies, had come out of his master trance at last. Every last bit of it, the elaborate show of unassailable bedrock belief in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, had been vaporized in one awful instant in the square. Please his daddy, stifle who he really was, take refuge and solace in the One True God. It had happened too quick, it was too much like having the fuselage stripped away like a banana peel from around you, still hurtling forward, not falling, looking down into the death between you and the ground, a collar of terror about your throat. What could he do? How was he to sustain his wife, who depended on this ministry for food and shelter? Yet how could he continue, knowing his faith had fled—and knowing the rest of it?