A Cry of Angels (14 page)

"It's no wonder you feel that way," she said. "Look at that bookcase in the hall. Don't the people in this house read anyone but Zane Grey and Ellery Queen?"

"Well, there's Mrs. Cline's
True Detective
magazines, but Miss Esther don't like for me to read them. She makes Mrs. Cline keep 'em in her bureau drawer."

The teacher thought. "I know the school library is atrocious—what about the public library, do you ever go there?"

"Oh, no, nobody hardly ever goes there because of the librarian, Mrs. Watkins—old, snappish woman, got this big goiter. And you can't say a word the whole time you're in there. They say Mrs. Watkins keeps her silence rule in force even when there's nobody there but her. She don't even talk to herself. You know what I used to think? I used to think Mrs. Watkins' goiter was all of those unspoken words locked in her throat."

"Earl, you're wandering again. Listen, listen to me now as I read this verse from Browning . . ."

And so it went, with no peace: Browning, Frost, Shelley, Keats, the darkness of Poe, the verbal rainstorms of Thomas Wolfe. Em happened by one evening in time to get caught up in Twain's "Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn" and leaned on the porch and laughed until tears came to his eyes. That so enthralled Gwen that she started trying to enrich him, too, but all of her "serious" stuff went right over his head. At her insistent pleading he came back a couple of nights and sat and smoked and stared while she read, but even she could see she was getting nowhere. When Em responded to nothing else but a reading of the bounding rhythms of Vachel Lindsay, and went rocking about the yard shaking his behind, the teacher gave up and banished him from our literary circle.

By this time the boarders were unified, for the first time, in a single purpose: they wanted her out of there. Even Miss Esther started to drop hints:

"Jayell, have y'all about decided on your house yet?"

"I can't pin it down," he said. "What Gwen would like, and what I can bring myself to build! Damnit, they got codes up there!"

"You never had trouble with building codes before," said Miss Esther.

"Not structural—design. Up there they all got to look right to suit a committee, and what that committee likes is boxes!"

"Well," said Mrs. Metcalf, "maybe she wouldn't really like living up there."

"Oh, it's what she wants, heart and soul."

"It takes me out," said Mr. Rampey. "She took a shine to you at the college because you build the wild ones, and now you're sayin' she wants a regular house."

"I've got to find the right combination," said Jayell. "Something really good, really fine, and yet plain and old-fashioned enough for Gwen to like it. I think that's one of the reasons she insists on living in a suburb like Marble Park. She knows they won't let me go too far up there."

"Well, it seems to me the simplest thing to do would be to just sit down with the girl and let her tell you what she wants," said Miss Esther.

"I have! We've spent hours at it, and get nowhere! See, the hard part is getting Gwen to admit to her tastes. At heart she's an old fashioned girl, the home and hearth, grandpa's-farm type, and she's not about to acknowledge that. So we made a deal. I'll build the house, something I guaranteed she'd like, and she won't see it until it's finished."

"Sounds like you're taking an awful chance," said Mr. Rampey.

"You think I can't read her! My specialty is looking inside of people and building what they really want. And you think I don't know this girl I'm going to marry?"

No one could argue that point.

"Well," Miss Esther concluded, "you go right on looking till you find what you want. In the meantime she's more than welcome here, and that's all that's to be said on it."

And so the thing rocked along. The girl was a nuisance to me, too, of course, but I tried to keep an open mind about her, like Miss Esther, trying not to form a definite dislike for her.

Until the day when, through nothing but her own callousness, she came so close to exposing the gentle secret of Mrs. Bell. Then my feelings about her hardened like a rock.

Among all the gradations of character at the boardinghouse, there was at least one existing polarity, that between Mrs. Porter and Mrs. Bell. They were an inseparable pair, always together, and there were no two more different people alive.

Mrs. Porter was a sufferer. We had all learned about the hell of Mrs. Porter's childhood and the hell of Mrs. Porter's marriage, and she shared with us unreservedly the hell of her declining years. Let Mrs. Porter come on the porch and a foreboding chill cut the air, all banter ceased, and one imagined bugs scurried higher in the vines and worms in the planters dived deep. Any ear that wandered near was seized on the spot, no matter if that ear had become as stony as the courthouse steps. And having heard a story once in no way disqualified you from hearing it again; rather, it solidified your standing in her circle of confidants and permitted access to even darker secrets. Thus, the plumber learned of both her father's desertion of the family and her husband's penchant for strip poker. The men who put down the linoleum knew the real reason for her brother's dishonorable discharge from the army, and the man caught repairing the furnace found out what a time she had with her hysterectomy. The mailman became so deaf at our house you had to follow him down the street to get his attention on any matter at all.

Mrs. Porter suffered greatly, but she understood that everyone else suffered too, and was ever ready to share the pain. That was her attitude toward Mrs. Bell's drinking problem. She was shocked, of course, when she first suspicioned it, but quick and joyous in Mrs. Bell's defense. "Lord, she's had a hard enough time of it since they lost that farm, and little enough help she's had from her daughter and that idol-worshiping Catholic she married! You can't expect a person that's lived the quiet, sheltered life she has to forbear like somebody's had the knocks I have, praise the Lord."

With Mrs. Bell, she was able to turn outward. There had to be suffering, and if it was someone else's—and she could share—it didn't have to be her own. And so she sat—when her aged spaniel died, when the drugstore threatened to close her account, when word came of sickness or troubles in the family, and rocked and consoled Mrs. Bell.

On the other hand, we knew next to nothing about Mrs. Bell. She moved in from the country when her husband died, and although her daughter had since married well and moved to Marble Park, she never came to visit. Mrs. Bell was the gentlest person I ever knew. A lady of impeccable manners, she moved about the house and grounds like a wisp of smoke, enshrouded always in her own quiet aura of dignity and peace. You couldn't talk
with
Mrs. Bell, for she seldom spoke, but she was always ready to listen, and you never felt uncomfortable with her; nothing about her was tense or awkward, even her way of sitting erect and still in a rocking chair. But as you talked the words simply disappeared in the silence of some bottomless well, absorbed in the nether regions of that impenetrable mind, and you found yourself simply sitting quietly, sharing her presence. To all but Mrs. Porter this hampered, and finally killed, conversation. To Mrs. Porter silence was fuel.

No one really cared that Mrs. Bell was drinking. She didn't take drugs of any kind, and as Mr. Rampey said, with a case of arthritis like hers, she certainly needed something.

It was the worst case I ever saw. She could barely open her hands. Yet she worked daily in her vegetable garden, bending from the hips like an experienced field hand, digging her knobby fingers determinedly in the soil. Once I rounded the shed and found Mrs. Bell crying. She stood rubbing her fingers over the gnarled knuckles, her upturned face bright with pain. When she saw me, the pointed jaw quickly set and she pulled a sleeve across her face. "Foolish arthritis," she said apologetically, "mustn't give in to it." And she took out her trowel and went back to her garden.

There
was
some concern among the boarders that she was drinking hard shine, although the pint jar she received from the country man once a week hardly seemed cause for alarm. She certainly never showed any effects from it, and she never smelled of anything but bath powder. If anything, it made them more comfortable to know of her one weakness, to know that she was not the absolutely unflinching personality they thought.

I was the only one who knew Mrs. Bell's real secret, and the day that Gwen Burns came so close to exposing it I knew that, somehow, we had to get that teacher away from there.

It was a showery Sunday afternoon, one of the last warm days of September. I was sitting on the front steps watching a Dixie cup wash along the gutter and half listening to Mrs. Porter recount to Mrs. Bell the latest episode in her running battle with the paperboy.

"'I ain't gonna put it in the box,' he said, 'I ain't got the time.' And I said, 'Yes you will, young man, if you deliver my paper at all.' So then, this morning, I heard him,
whap
! against the house. 'Well! Well,' I said, but by the time I got my robe on he was gone. So, I didn't do a thing in the world but pick up the phone and call Ed Davis at the
Star
. . ."

Mrs. Porter stopped as Jayell's pickup rattled to the curb. Gwen got out, laughing, turned and kissed him and came trotting up the walk in her bathing suit. Sweetness flooded Mrs. Porter's face. She gripped the arms of her chair and leaned forward to spit over the rail. Gwen tried to get by with a nod but Mrs. Porter stopped her. Well, Miss Burns," she said, pinching at her mouth, "been to the lake, I see."

Gwen put her fists on her hips, returning the smile. "Nothing escapes you, does it, Mrs. Porter."

"Lord, you girls nowadays have more courage than we ever did, going out in public in an outfit like that. Next you know, girls will be running buck naked, I guess."

"It's called a bikini," said Gwen evenly, "and most people consider it quite respectable."

Mrs. Porter chuckled. "My, it's a wonder to me a little thing like that'd even stay on if you tried to swim in it."

"No worry about that," said Gwen, "I always take it off before I go in the water."

Mrs. Porter glowered, blinking, but could think of nothing to say. The girl beamed in triumph. She started toward the door, then stopped at the sound of a motor turning the corner. A mud-streaked car pulled in the driveway and a farmer got out with a twisted paper bag.

Gwen let the door close and called out cheerily, "Happy time, Mrs. Bell."

Mrs. Bell, acutely embarrassed, pulled herself from her chair and made her way to the edge of the porch.

"You know," mused Gwen aloud, "I've lived in the South all my life and I've never tasted shine."

"Miss Burns!" snapped Mrs. Porter.

Mrs. Bell paid the man, took the bag and turned for the house. Gwen stepped in front of her. "That is the real stuff, isn't it, Mrs. Bell? The old stumpy hole?"

"If you don't mind . . ." began Mrs. Bell.

"Oh, don't let Mrs. Porter spook you. I'll bet that White River tonic of hers is at least ninety proof. Do you mind if I have just a taste? I'm dying to know what it's like."

"Really, I—" Mrs. Bell was trying to edge by when suddenly Gwen lifted the sack from her hand. "Well, at least let me see what it looks like. Better look away, Mrs. Porter, you'll turn to a pillar of salt or something." She was flipping open the top of the sack. "Really, Mrs. Bell, you shouldn't be so . . ."

"
No, don't
!" Before I realized what I was doing I had jumped onto the porch and grabbed the sack from the girl's hand. She looked at me in amazement. "What's got into you?"

"Leave her alone!" I realized the hand holding the bag was shaking, and put it behind me.

"My goodness, you'd think I was going to . . ."

"What's in there belongs to Mrs. Bell. You got no right to be takin' it away from her." I took Mrs. Bell's arm and led her through the door and up the stairs. At her room I turned the knob for her and handed her the sack. "Why do you put up with it?" I said angrily. "Why don't you tell them?"

Mrs. Bell smiled and shook her head. "Mrs. Porter needs my alcoholism," she said, and giving my arm a light squeeze, she slipped into her room.

I went to my own room and lay down on the bed. I was still angry, angry at Gwen, at Mrs. Porter, at the weakness that despises strength and makes strength feign weakness. Why couldn't they accept her for what she was?

I was jolted out of my thoughts by a soft tap, like a fingernail, on the door. I jumped out of bed and opened it and found Mrs. Bell clutching a robe over her slip. She smiled timidly and shook her head. "I'm afraid I need your help again. Would you mind?"

Mrs. Bell led me back to her room and took the sack off the bureau. "I tried to get it open, but Mr. Bowman has such a strong grip." She pulled the jar out of the sack.

The lid was punched full of holes, and instead of whiskey it contained a half-dozen live honeybees, flicking their wings and buzzing against the glass.

It was for her arthritis. It was an old country remedy—superstition perhaps, a ritual to toughen the will, but the only thing, she said, that helped. I braced the jar against my thigh and wrenched loose the lid.

She had removed her robe and moved to the window in her slip. Very carefully she reached into the jar and picked out two angry bees. Placing one under each white armpit, she stood with her hands folded, the elegant face placid, immobile, staring out at the rain.

As it turned out, Jayell himself solved the problem. In a drunken tear, he abruptly announced, "Hell, I know what she wants is a plain old ordinary house, so by God, why don't I just build her a plain old ordinary house! What's she want, one of your Ranchero models, a Tara, a
Magnolia Manor
?" He ripped through the drawings and magazine clippings piled on his office desk. "All right, I'll build her the ordinariest house—what do I care? She's the one got to live in it, right? Ain't that what the salesmen say? I'll build such a box it'll get the Smithbilt Silver Medallion!"