Angel Fire

by Andrew M. Greeley

  A certain kind of Irish Catholic you can’t drive away from the Church even if you try your best to do so.

  “But can’t they exist anyway?”

  “Who knows? Really.”

  “Who cares? Really.”

  “I mean, like isn’t God enough?”

  “And the Blessed Mother?”

  “She’s still in fashion?”

  “Daddy!”—in chorus.

  The two winsome little elves were grimly determined to recall their erring father to the practice of his faith. “Not because you need it, Daddy,” they had argued recently, “but because the Church needs you.”

  Which was an interesting approach, to say the least.

  So they constantly nudged him to visit his friend the Rector of the cathedral. Or to invite him for supper. “We’d love to cook for that adorable little Monsignor you went to school with. Really.”

  “Really.”

  They were polite and respectful to their mother, never criticizing her either to her face or to him when they came home from their Saturday visits.

  Still, there was no doubt on whose side they were. They had even recently urged him to remarry, doubtless after long discussion and careful preparation of their lines. “Like, Daddy, you’re too young—“

  “—and too good-looking—“

  Chorus of giggles.

  “—to go through life alone.”

  Solemn high silence.

  How do children acquire such wisdom?

  Probably by growing up in a family where your mother is a well-meaning but shallow child and your father a slightly flaky—no, considerably flaky—genius who wants to make up for all his failures as a husband and father by winning a silly prize.

  “So we don’t have guardian angels anymore?”

  “If you want to have one—“

  “—there’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “But what’s wrong with praying to Jesus—“

  “—and to God the Father?—“

  “—and to St. Ignatius?”

  “Really!”

  “Why don’t you go—“ Fionna grinned like a little gombeen man.

  “—and ask Monsignor Ryan?” Deirdre finished for her.

  “You guys have one-track minds.” He tried to laugh them off.

  “Really!” they both huffed

  Mona had been pretty and awed by the attention of a Notre Dame graduate who was studying biology at the University of Illinois. She had not gone to college and was not from the neighborhood—and hence, looking back on it, not much of a threat to his insecure male ego. She loved to neck and pet. She wanted to marry. After all, his mother had said, had she not, we’re poor people. We don’t move in the country club set.

  Nonetheless his mother did not approve of the marriage. And neither did Mona’s parents. By the wedding day, no one was speaking to anyone else, a not uncharacteristic condition for the merger of two Irish families, especially when both think their child is marrying down.

  It soon became apparent that Mona had not liked necking and petting, not really, and that she was not prepared to like sex either. Her key character trait was dissatisfaction, blended with a strong dose of self-pity. Attractive she was and continued to be, but she was a chronic complainer, a passive-aggressive person just like his mother. Nothing was ever right, nothing he did was ever good enough, nothing he ever said was kind enough. He was a loser, by her definition and in fact, from the day they were married.

  Looking back on their courtship—if that’s what the hasty meetings and gropings that occurred after a long ride on the Illinois Central from Urbana could be called—he realized that the traits which spoiled his marital happiness were plain enough to see. But he was young and sexually eager and busy with his studies and, as he thought, in love.

  Still, he was faithful to her until she walked out.

  Doubtless much of their unhappiness was his fault. The only way he knew to respond to her complaints was the way he had responded to his mother’s complaints: silent withdrawal.

  Occasionally he would venture the suggestion that maybe she would feel better about herself if she took some courses, maybe even got a degree (she complained daily about the “arrogant bitches” and their highfalutin degrees—meaning the wives of his colleagues and friends), or even perhaps began a career of some sort.

  Her response was always an hysterical “And then who will take care of your daughters?”

  He never replied that most of the time the kids took care of themselves.

  So Sean lost himself in his work and Mona lost herself in her complaints. When she departed—with two hours notice while two of her femtherapy friends waited impatiently—she blamed him for preventing her from having a career. Foolishly he tried to defend himself.

  That was when the femtherapy people led her out of the apartment.

  “When their self-hatred becomes unbearable,” a psychiatrist on the staff of the university hospital had told him at lunch one day, “they must blame someone else. The spouse is the first available target.”

  So it went. Now he had won the Nobel Prize, a dream come true And he had no one with whom to share it.

  And the dream was pretty hollow.

  “Well,” he said to his daughters the night the prize was announced, “maybe I will do just that. Maybe I will have a little talk with the small Monsignor. 1 bet he believes in angels.”

  Much later Sean would wonder why angels were so much on his mind that night. Maybe his daughters had planted the idea in his head.

  “Daddy,” Fionna began hesitantly.

  ‘Yeah?” He was still thinking about angels, evolutionary ones, not daughter types.

  “We’re so proud of our dad the Nobel Prize winner,” Deirdre finished.

  They both hugged him fiercely. All three of them wept like the sentimental Irish fools they were.

  And Sean Seamus Desmond fell asleep that night thinking that perhaps the world was not such a bad place after all.

  His dreams were peaceful too, filled with music that, he told himself the next morning, his subconscious remembered from Stacey’s tapes.

  Wonderful, lyrical, seductive music.

  As she put his room in order, the woman was humming music that sounded familiar to Sean Desmond.

  “You really ought to keep your room neat,” she said, hanging up his overcoat, “and buy yourself a new overcoat. We can’t have a Nobel laureate who looks unfashionable.”

  You could buy a lot of fashionable overcoats with the silver she was wearing—impeccably tasteful earrings, bracelet, and pendant, simple and costly.

  “Mozart trumpet concerto?” he said.

  “Telemann, actually, Concerto in D.”

  She brushed off his suit coat as she hung it up.

  “Your name is really Gabriella?” He studied the smooth lines of her backside. Women this beautiful exist only in dreams.

  “Hebrew name ... it means, well, gabor means strength in Hebrew.” She had adopted the dry pedantic tones of the round table, a schoolmarm with a slow pupil. “So you could interpret the name as Strong One of God___”

  “I can respect that.” Seamus shivered slightly.

  “Now let’s see what we can do about straightening up your

  bathroom. It’s an extra service guardian angels provide for certain of their clients. Then we’ll see about a bite to eat. I will not have the waitress be embarrassed by a messy room.”

  “It’s your name.” He followed her into the bathroom.

  “Well,” she pondered as with deft movements—so quick that Sean hardly saw them—she rearranged the tubes and bottles on the wash basin table, “it’s one of my names. Actually, I rather like it. You might think of it as the name for phenomena that your species has come to associate with my presence.”

  “Uh-huh ... does that mean you play the trumpet?”

  She strode briskly back into the parlor of his suite, dusting off her hands to indicate a cleaning job completed. “Superstitious folk
lore.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.” He trailed after her, still convinced that he was dreaming.

  She patted her hair to make sure that every strand was in place. “I don’t have to answer your questions. I must tell you the truth because we angels tell the truth, which is more than your species does. But you have no right to my knowledge.”

  “You won’t tell me when the Last Judgment will be?” He eased himself toward the doorway, thinking that he might break for the corridor.

  “Did not your Teacher say that even He did not know?” Her hand rested imperiously on the phone. “If He didn’t know, how would I know?”

  There seemed to be a nimbus of red dots swirling around her head. Or were they only in his imagination?

  “You don’t play the trumpet, then?”

  She hesitated. “I have some skill on a musical instrument that might be thought of as an analog to your trumpet. However, I am not assigned to sound it for your mythological Day of Wrath.”

  In the background he thought he heard, faint but lovely, the sweet piercing notes of a trumpet playing a concerto that he knew did not exist.

  “Which does not mean that you couldn’t be assigned to blow the trumpet?”

  She shrugged her lovely shoulders indifferently. “We try to accommodate the Other’s requests. They are infrequent, you know.”

  “Could you wake up the dead with the trumpetlike thing of yours?”

  She put down the phone and walked over to him. Her breasts, lavish yet somehow delicate, offered an invitation to endless peace and rest. Challenging yet reassuring. Strong yet somehow vulnerable. Definitely a woman in a dream.

  She tilted his chin back and absorbed him in the mystery of her deep brown eyes. The trumpet music seemed to grow louder, a waterfall of sound pouring into a rushing river.

  “Jackie Jim”—she smiled affectionately—“I could wake up all the dead in the cosmos with my horn.”

  As the trumpet notes soared toward a crescendo, Sean Desmond found himself sinking into the soothing marshland of her eyes. “Quite an alarm clock,” he murmured.

  “May I read a quote, Monsi-gnor?” Sean Desmond had asked in the Rector’s suite in the cathedral before he flew to New York.

  “Certainly, Professor.”

  “Hoimar von Ditfurth, professor of physics at Tubingen ... I quote:

  There must be many places in the cosmos ... where evolution for various reasons has made more headway than here on earth, many places where it has by now pressed its efforts beyond generating life, consciousness, and knowledge to new heights, enlarging the realm of subjectivity by annexing regions of which we are still

  ignorant----These creatures would be equipped with brains which

  would help their owners to a much larger share of that mind which has just now begun to shed some light, though as yet a relatively faint one, on our own heads.... We ourselves may have descendants as genetically distant from us as we are from Homo habilis___

  We might constitute a bridge to nonbiological descendants of an entirely different sort___”

  “Interesting,” whispered Blackie Ryan. “Sounds not unlike your periodic punctuation theory, great leap forward.”

  “Into angels?”

  “Arguably. Did you not yourself suggest as much to the venerable New York Times?”

  “I was joking.”

  “We both know better.”

  Sean could never figure out whether his priest friend deliberately used academic buzzwords to tease him or because he was himself an academic of a sort—Ph.D. in process philosophy and with a book on criteria of truth in William James.

  With Blackie Ryan you could never be quite sure where the leg pulling began and ended.

  Which, arguably, was the reason why they were friends.

  “St. Augustine”—Blackie sighed as if he were about to experience an enormous asthma attack—“held that angels had spiritual bodies. He was constrained to do so by his philosophical presuppositions, but given his convictions about evolution, he would not, we may assume, be completely offended by your suggestion.”

  Johnny Desmond and Johnny Ryan had not been close friends at St. Praxides. The former was always in trouble, the latter never in trouble. Moreover, the “little Ryan boy” was from what Johnny Desmond’s mother called “country club Irish” while the Desmonds were poor but hardworking “ordinary people.”

  A city building inspector, Sean Desmond would conclude many years later, ought not to live in Beverly, not even on Vander-poel Avenue in the east end of the parish in what might have been the smallest bungalow in the neighborhood.

  And the Ryans lived in the biggest house on Longwood Drive.

  Johnny Ryan, Blackie to everyone, was as quiet and reflective as Johnny Desmond was loud and obnoxious. The only event that could stir Blackie out of his absentminded tranquillity was a mean word from a nun about his cousin Catherine Collins or his next-door neighbor Lisa Malone, both of whom doted on the pudgy little kid with thick glasses.

  It was only in later years, after Blackie had been ordained and Sean had left the Church, that Sean discovered what Blackie probably already knew: they had similar minds.

  Sean told himself that he should have known there was more

  to the future priest than merely his opaque stare and his round head always buried in a book. If two such lovelies as Catherine and Lisa were fond of him, he must have something.

  Two women like that in class and he had to marry Mona.

  “If they have bodies”—Sean leaned forward confidentially— “there might be sexual differentiation, might there not? I mean male and female angels?”

  It was still all ajeu d’esprit, a game, a flight of a Nobel laureate’s fantasy, a potential joke on the Royal Swedish Academy.

  “Doubtless.” Blackie, with the customary heavy hand, refilled his guest’s Waterford tumbler with Bushmill’s Black Label. “Though I don’t think the inestimable Augustine would have approved. He didn’t quite hold with sexual differentiation. As though the Almighty had made an artistic mistake in ordaining the mechanics and dynamics of human procreation and of the nurturance of human young.”

  The aforementioned Rector, wearing a Chicago Bears’ wind-breaker over his clerical shirt {sans collar), was sprawled on an enormous easy chair. On the wall behind him were posters of what he liked to call “the three Johns of our adolescence: the pope, the president, and the Baltimore quarterback.”

  Next to Johnny Unitas there was a pedestal from which reigned a saucy medieval ivory madonna and her equally saucy kid. Blackie had told Sean once that the statue was a gift from his father, Ned Ryan, who claimed that the madonna looked like Blackie’s mother as a young woman. Blackie had been in grammar school when Kate Collins Ryan had died of cancer at the family’s Grand Beach home. It was the first wake that Sean Desmond had ever attended. He came away from it terrified by death, a terror that had never left him.

  So they wonder why I joke? You either laugh at death or you sob hysterically.

  And now he and Blackie were the same age as Kate Ryan when she died.

  “Angels, then, might be the result of an evolutionary process in another solar system?”

  “Or galaxy. Or, arguably”—the priest gestured with his tumbler, a hint of fun in his pale blue eyes—“another cosmos. Perhaps they have evolved to such a state of perfection that they can leap over Planck’s wall, that barrier set up in the minute fraction of

  a second when there was only one force in the nascent universe.”

  “One could be burned at the stake out at the university for such a thought.”

  “Doubtless.” Blackie looked at his empty tumbler as though he suspected that a throne or a domination had stolen some of its precious contents. “Would you care for some chocolate ice cream?”

  “Why else would I come?”

  “Indeed.”

  The Ryan clan were all chocolate freaks. None of them thought it strange to consume ice cream after Irish
whiskey.

  In their infrequent conversations, the priest and the professor always pretended to speak first about their academic interests, then about theology, then about Sean’s marital problems, then, finally, about God.

  Blackie dug liberal scoops of ice cream out of a container he had found somewhere in a freezer hidden in his closet. ‘Tou propose to suggest this possibility to those marking your reception of the Nobel Prize? Angels as a punctuation, perhaps even an exclamation point in the evolutionary process?”

  “Can they eat chocolate ice cream?”

  The priest considered the plate he had filled. “With God all things are possible ... but surely that will cause a sensation?”

  “Why not?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Maybe your buddy Teilhard de Garden was right.”

  “Chardin, Professor, although your invariable and invariant mistake, we both know, is deliberate. But consider: if we are really-moving toward Point Omega, the ultimate goal of everything, and if the angels are really one step, or perhaps several steps ... pardon, punctuation points ... closer to Point Omega than we are, does it not follow”—he extended the calorie-laden dish to Sean— “that we ought to be concerned about the nature of Point Omega, about who She is and what She wants of us? ...”

  “And then it follows that I should get an annulment of my marriage to Mona, find some nice Irish Catholic woman who finds my odd humor funny, return to the Church, and perhaps sire more children like Deirdre and Fionna? Consider it all said and tell me about angels.”

  “A world which can produce such persons as your admirable

  daughters,” the priest said as he spooned a giant chunk of chocolate into his tiny mouth, “need not have angels to be filled with wonder. However, let us leave aside such poetic exclamation points and consider other angels___”

  God, the little bastard was clever.

  “The Jebs tell them there are no angels. They represent God’s work in the world. So we don’t have to believe in guardian angels anymore. Sister Intemerata would die if she hadn’t died already.”

  The priest continued to wolf down his ice cream. “There is some debate among theologians as to whether the scriptures constrain us to believe in angels. I think the weight of opinion is with the excellent Jesuits at St. Ignatius. Surely in the scriptures the angel is a function rather than a person. Yet the issue remains open as to whether they in feet exist even if we need not accept them as a matter of faith.” He sighed again. “It is not an issue that much occupies theologians, who now are principally interested in politics while science fiction writers and filmmakers are interested in theology. Spielberg, for example, obviously believes in creatures of light, the cherubic characters in Close Encounters, the forces of good in Poltergeist, even perhaps the admirable ET.”