Angel Fire

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “She’s attractive enough, if you don’t mind gray hair. And she’s really old. Like totally, you know?” He put his hand over the phone. “Like a couple thousand years anyway.” The alleged guardian angel blushed furiously. “Daddy.” Fionna.

  “There were men here.” Deirdre. “Asking questions.” Fionna. “About you and Ms. Reed.” Deirdre. “They said they were from the government.” Fionna. “Real geeks.”

  “What did they want to know about Stacey?” “like about her work, you know?” Chorus. Sean felt his stomach clutch and unclutch. Gaby’s face was grim, intent. Obviously she didn’t need a phone to listen to both ends of the conversation.

  “Listen very carefully, girls. I’m going to call Monsignor Ryan, you know, Father Blackie. He’ll call you. He has lots of friends in the government. Like Senator Cronin, the Cardinal’s sister. You tell him what you told me. Maybe Mr. Casey from the police department will come see you. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” “Yes, Daddy.” Huge sighs of relief. “Father Blackie is cute.” Dee. “So is Mr. Casey.” Fee.

  They talked about New York and the press conference tomorrow and about some totally gross boys at Ignatius and about how much they loved one another.

  Gaby listened to the love between father and daughters, it seemed to Sean, with glistening eyes.

  “You win that one,” Sean admitted as, limp and drained, he slumped in his chair. “I hope you guys are taking care of them too.”

  “If we are protecting you”—Gaby was still grim faced—“Sean Seamus Desmond, with all your faults and failings, would we not certainly be protecting them too, little angels that they are?”

  “Angels?”

  “Metaphor.”

  “Can you do it from here or do you have some of the guys hanging out in Chicago?”

  She was looking out the window again. “That question is not appropriately worded. It suffices to say that my, uh, associates and I can manage.”

  “Are the men from the same group as our friends this afternoon?”

  “Hardly. The other side, I would rather imagine.”

  “Our side?”

  “Your side, not mine. We’re neutral in the East-West foolishness.”

  “Neutral in our favor.”

  “Presumably.”

  “You’ll forgive me, but I want to call Blackie too.”

  “Certainly. The presence of Chicago’s finest will reassure the girls. It is by the way a very rare exception that my kind are permitted to let themselves be seen. Should I place the call?”

  “Why not? It’s quicker than punching the little buttons.”

  She didn’t bat an eye at that comment.

  “Monsignor Ryan? I’m Gabriella, Doctor Desmond’s guide on his pilgrimage to Stockholm,” she said, adjusting her manner to suit Blackie’s personality. Even sounding like him.

  “Doctor Desmond ... Sean Desmond ... Jackie Jim....” She rolled her eyes, hand over the phone. “Sleeping, of course, poor

  dear___Yes, that Doctor Desmond. He wants me to tell you that

  some men claiming to be from the government have been harassing his daughters. CIA probably. You know how they are. He wondered if you could have a quiet word with perhaps Senator Cronin and the admirable Mike Casey the Cop.... And your good father too, naturally.... Oh, that would be capital, Monsignor.... Yes, I’m sure they’d love to sleep over at your sister Nancy’s. Fee is a classmate of her daughter’s....”

  Blackie was obviously not expressing any doubts. Why don’t I ask him about a guardian angel when she lets me talk to him?

  “And one other thing, Monsignor___You know that applica-

  tion for an annulment he sent you before he left with the note to hold it? ... Well, perhaps it will arrive in today’s mail— Yes, well, he asked me to tell you to send it on to the matrimonial tribunal.”

  “You would never have said that,” she argued defensively after she had hung up, “but you want to say it. So I really did nothing more than you wanted. Right?”

  Sean was quite incapable of replying. No one else knew about the application. Not even Blackie, who could not have received it

  yet.

  How did she know?

  He wished the dream would end.

  Right now.

  In search of an angel, the week after his award was announced, Sean Desmond had wandered into the new John Crerar Library in the med school/biology quadrangle on the northwest corner of the campus. As a theoretical biologist, he avoided both the med school and the library. But someone had remarked at lunch that a Chicago writer had compared the sculpture in the atrium of the library to an angel.

  “A woman angel, Sean? Can you imagine that? Do Catholics still have to believe in angels?”

  “Only if they’re science fiction writers.” He had smiled his most leprechaunish smile. “And, by the way, did you know that St. Augustine held that angels had spiritual bodies, which raises the question of sexual differentiation in the angelic choirs?”

  “I’m not surprised,” the law school professor had replied—a typical academic response to almost any new information that someone else has proposed.

  “Would you think now that angels screw?” he had asked, with a bluntness no more appropriate for a round table than it would have been in a lunchroom of elderly nuns.

  He had weighed the possibilities carefully. “Screw” would cause marginally more dismay than “fuck.”

  He then rushed into the shocked silence with another one of the gaucheries that made Congreve the local favorite for the Nobel Prize: “Would they do it more quickly than we, do you think, or less quickly? And can they fuck humans, do you think?”

  “Well, the Greek gods did.” A red-faced classicist tried to get the conversation back on its path.

  “Did they now? I’m not surprised to hear it.”

  So after lunch Sean inspected the four-story sculpture called Ctystara. This man Mooney was good, he decided, damn good. Long, graceful, rounded aluminum struts bound together by solid bars of Waterford crystal—think of how many bottles of Black Bush or Jameson’s Special Reserve that much crystal might hold. Multi-colored lights playing on it as it hung, free and independent, in the center of the library.

  Too good for us physical scientists.

  He glanced at the brochure. M.A., Notre Dame.

  The artist must really be something else if this university is willing to take something from a Notre Dame alumnus. And admit he went there.

  I bet they don’t have anything of his down there.

  And if Congreve won the Nobel, they’d give him an honorary degree.

  I mustn’t let my self-pity interfere with enjoying this.

  Well, enjoy them both.

  He climbed up the stairs of the library, circling the atrium all the way to the fourth floor. At every level and from each angle at a level, Ctystara looked different, a graceful, elegant, colorful work—light yet solid, dainty yet massive, intricate yet simple, incorporeal yet preempting all the space in the atrium.

  Was it an image of an angel?

  Could be, Sean decided. Why not? Could he work it into the draft he was preparing for the Royal Swedes? Maybe.

  On the top floor, facing the statue, Sean concluded that, angel or not, Crystara’s shape from this perspective was definitely womanly, a woman graciously and generously opening herself up so that a man might enter her.

  What a wonderful idea for the round table tomorrow.

  They might take the sculpture down if he suggested that.

  Probably not, they wouldn’t want to be accused of accepting censorship. He could imagine the headlines:

  University Sculpture

  Called Pornographic

  Feminists Denounce Abstract Statue

  as Obscene

  Work by Notre Dame Grad Said To Be Exploitive

  Wonderful!

  Then he thought of the women over whose bodies he had poised before entering them.

  That ruined his day.

 
; There hadn’t been that many. He had been faithful to Mona until she left him. Not that there weren’t opportunities. A full professor with some distinction was a favored customer, as the mailorder catalogues would say, in the flesh market of graduate students and junior faculty.

  A market that, all over the academic world, operated on the same principles of supply and demand as in pagan Rome—“classical antiquity,” his colleague at the round table would have called it—and with the same rights and privileges accorded to senior professors as to Roman senators in days of yore.

  The market had recently been expanded by the addition of women assistant professors, perfect targets for a baron who promised to return a tenure vote for sexual favors.

  A new crop of captives—first-year graduate students and assistant professors—were not paraded naked on a block to be offered to the highest and most prestigious bidder. Not quite.

  But they were evaluated just as carefully and in as much detail as if such a parade had occurred.

  Not that all of them were either unaware or displeased by the process. Or unwilling to become the temporary slave of a powerful faculty baron.

  The market would continue as long as there were powerful men who felt they had special rights to the more attractive women, and women who did not mind belonging temporarily and perhaps permanently to powerful men.

  As long as there were men and women, with only the rules and the rhetoric changing?

  Maybe. As the father of two daughters, Sean hoped not. The university, stuffy about most things, was stuffy about sex. So there was rather less sexual exploitation than at most other institutions.

  So Sean abstained from the market. Being human and male, he

  noted the new intake and fantasized a little.

  His restraint was not necessarily a sign of virtue. Maybe he was shy. Maybe he had a hard time believing that women would find him attractive. Maybe his sense of the comic prevented him from making a fool out of himself as many of his colleagues did. Maybe he had a low hormone count in his bloodstream.

  He was respectful to his women students and colleagues. In return, they came to him with their problems, academic and personal (They think I’m a celibate priest, he told himself wryly), and laughed at his jokes, which was all that was really required of any

  of his students.

  Some of them even seemed to like him, a phenomenon that always surprised Sean Desmond. He was invariably astonished that anyone would like him.

  He walked out of the Crerar into the barren university campus—as dull and drab and as unproductive as his own life.

  Two beautiful kids and a Nobel Prize?

  Mostly luck in both cases.

  When Mona walked out and his code on the Availability Scale was shifted, as the university community saw it, from “0” to “1.”

  he was astonished to find that there was a plentiful supply of women who were prepared to offer themselves to him. The mobility of academic life, the uncertainty of academic marriages, the principles of ideological feminism had notably expanded the slave market despite his inattention.

  Sean felt in his gut that women were more likely to be deeply hurt than men. So he avoided first-year graduate students and untenured faculty.

  Yet he hardly lacked for companionship either in or out of bed. Some of the relationships went badly, only one went well for a time. Nonetheless, Sean Desmond experienced a postdoctoral course in academic sex, discovered that he had hormones after all and that some women enjoyed making love with him, and was no happier than when he and Mona were sleeping in separate bedrooms in their apartment in the Cloisters.

  Blanche was the exception, a gorgeous, full-bodied Ph.D. candidate from Oregon who frankly set out to seduce him, by her own admission, and was spectacularly successful.

  “I give myself two weeks to get myself in bed with you, Mr. Desmond,” she informed him. “So if you want to run away, start running.”

  You proposition a man and call him “Mister” as the university protocol requires when you are addressing senior faculty.

  “Why?” he had asked. “Times are not that bad, are they?”

  “First of all”—she counted on her fingers—“I want to be able to tell my grandchildren that I slept with a Nobel Prize winner, and secondly I think you’ll be a marvelous fuck, and thirdly I kind of like you: you’re funny and you’re one of the few gentlemen around here. Fourthly, if I’m not sleeping with someone, I’ll have to fend off all the vultures. You’ll never chase me, so I guess I’ll just have to chase you.”

  It had never occurred to Sean that the rumors he might be a laureate would make him an attractive sexual prize. So that’s why they were after me, he told himself.

  He thought about running but never quite got around to it.

  Blanche seduced him, bedded him, taught him about sex, made him a skillful lover, and captured his heart.

  When she left for her first teaching job at Emory, he discovered, to his dismay, she didn’t want his heart.

  “If I was going to Circle or even Bloomington or some place like that, sure I’d say let’s keep up the fun,” she told him. “But it had to end sometime, didn’t it?”

  “Did it?” he had asked glumly.

  “Don’t tell me you’re into permanence?” She was astonished. “Are you really?”

  “More or less.”

  “But that only makes it hard to end a relationship. All relationships have to end, don’t they?”

  “Do they?”

  “Sure. Everyone knows that.”

  Yet she sobbed hysterically in his arms just before she boarded the plane for Atlanta.

  He had wanted to marry her. The kids seemed to like her, and she them. Sixteen years was not all that much difference, was it?

  Yeah, it was. He’d been a fool.

  But so had she. If enough relationships end, each of them taking away a little of you, then afterward you have nothing left.

  He sounded like a Christian ethics teacher at Notre Dame.

  He hoped that while there was still some of her left, she learned that permanence, more or less, was not so absurd.

  He had proposed marriage before she left. She had replied that she was flattered and that he was sweet and the finest man that she ever knew and she would always love him but it wouldn’t work out.

  Hurt and confused, Sean didn’t ask why it wouldn’t work out.

  Later he thought that perhaps he ought to have pursued her with greater determination. Carried her off, psychologically speaking.

  He realized that his wounded pride and injured sensibilities made such a response impossible. So he settled down to cautious, safe, and unsatisfying relationships with women like Stacey.

  Who got him to thinking about this crazy angel business anyway.

  He turned up his coat collar and bent his head against the hostile wind sweeping in off the lake. Damnit, that statue did look like a beautiful angel offering herself in love.

  What would they have said at that press conference if they knew I was thinking such thoughts, heretical to the university and blasphemous to most Christians.

  What if Stacey is right? What if there are aliens we can’t see? And what if my suggestion is right that such a model would explain a lot of data in the religious traditions?

  Should I dump that on the Swedes?

  Why not?

  Blanche had called him right before the first press conference at the university, with tearful congratulations. No, she was sorry, it wouldn’t work out for her to go to Stockholm with him.

  She didn’t sound too positive, however. Perhaps she was learning how much of you is taken away by a relationship. Or perhaps she was only tempted by the thought that she could tell her grandchildren that she had slept with a laureate the night he received his prize.

  He did not push the invitation.

  The first press conference was for the local media, a halfhearted attempt by the university’s PR staff to pretend that they were proud of him.
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br />   He emphasized his debt to Barbara McClintock, whose earlier work on directional evolution in maize had won her the Nobel Prize a few years before—when the rest of the profession had finally caught up with her.

  “I was lucky,” he said truthfully. “I read her stuff before most of my generation did and had a head start on some of the others.”

  Poor Congreve had dismissed her as unimportant ten years ago when Sean had first discovered the woman’s prophetic work.

  “Will this help to find a cure for AIDS?” was the first question.

  Dumb Sean Desmond didn’t realize that it was the only biological issue on the minds of reporters these days.

  “That was not the intent of the project,” he said, stumbling over his words, “when we started. It will certainly not make a direct contribution to such a goal.”

  “Mr. Desmond”—the university’s flack cut in—rather nastily Sean thought—“is not part of our infectious disease program at the hospital. Nonetheless, his theory has very important implications for that program, does it not, Mr. Desmond?”

  “Well,” the reporter persisted, accusation dripping from her shrill voice, “what good is it if it doesn’t help find a cure for AIDS?”

  “Isn’t that like asking”—mistakenly Sean tried to be cute— “what good a breakthrough is in astronomy that doesn’t prevent another space shuttle disaster?”

  “Okay,” said the reporter, “so what good is such a discovery if it doesn’t help anyone?”

  “The Nobel Prize”—the flack was now miserably unhappy— “exists to award distinguished scientific effort whose pragmatic and programmatic implications may take generations to uncover.” “Truth doesn’t always have to be practical,” Sean added. “Yeah, but then what good is it?”

  The flack steered the questions to other subjects. Yes, Sean and his wife were separated. No, they had not yet discussed the prize.

  Dear God, what will Mona say when these idiots get to her?

  “Do you think the marriage broke up because of your ambition to win the prize?” Another angry woman’s voice assailed him.

  “I hope not. All the prizes in the world would not be worth the termination of a marriage.”