Bereavements (36 page)

He turned to the books for a moment’s respite, and read a few titles:
Moby Dick, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Tom Sawyer, War of the Worlds, The War Lords of Mars, The Art of Skin and Scuba Diving, Forbidden Planet, UFO’s: Fact or Fancy?, The World Almanac;
a whole shelf below of the
Oz
series, and ten or twelve
Tarzan’s.
He singled out a few he himself had read:
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, Tarzan the Unknown, Tarzan and the Ant Men . . .

There were even “dirty” books on another shelf; at least two or three. He pulled one out and looked at some of the many postures of love, then quickly put it back. It brought too much of a chill, and the remembered locked, lost sweetness and terror of his father’s arms . . .

The thing he wanted, the thing he sought, whatever it was, was more personal, more intimate, more secret than anything he’d found. It wasn’t here, and knowing this, he felt himself drawn to the final room.

He walked the length of a small hall with a bath on the left, then into the bedroom, feeling strongly—quite like that game we play as a child when a hidden object is to be found—that he was getting “warmer” and still “warmer.”

The far wall was composed entirely of small, vertically elongated diamond-shaped panes of Venetian glass, some stained quite dark at the top for shade, but ranging downward into pale almost colorless amber. Evidently the window faced east, for the sun, now sinking behind the house in the west, had washed the hills of snow with its rose, blushing warm color into the room.

The window, however, was the only unusual and unique feature to be seen, everything else was rather ordinary: an oversize bed with a brass headboard, a few simple chairs and lamps, a chest of drawers, and a bureau—with a large, oval, somewhat ornately-framed mirror, the wood carved into flowers, above it.

Angel stood still, a soldier waiting for orders, or a psychic whose control has not yet said what to do. Better—the game again: where was warmer and still warmer?

The bureau, of course! to which he moved with a curious autonomous ease, much calmer now, knowing that what he wanted was to be found very near.

But what? Where?

Jamie’s jewel box?—two sections, four drawers, each lined with black velvet, containing—oh, half a dozen cufflinks, most of them gold, rings of all kinds, pearl studs, three Indian head pennies, medals, medallions, old buffalo nickles and other coins, some maybe ancient, with smooth-worn, blurred helmeted heads of men who looked Roman or Greek.

Warmer . . .

Two belt buckles—one brass, the other silver; to the right—at least a foot in diameter, a sunburst, a half-sphere of delicate pink coral and a few weirdly-shaped seashells.

Warmer . . .

A white ivory comb. It couldn’t be that! But next to it—
warmest, yet!
—Jamie’s brush, and, tangled in it and through it, like a spider web of sun, a few strands of Jamie’s hair. With fingers that shook, Angel unwound them from the bristles, his care that of the expert who, breath held, disconnects the wires of a live bomb that might any second explode.

This?
This!
A few hairs from the head of a boy long dead? Impossible! He had missed what it was he knew he was there to see, and, fevered, distraught, searched the bureau once more, pushing things roughly aside.

It was here! It
was!
And in the next instant, smelling a scent so sweet it seemed to crackle all the nerves between his eyes, he stood still, knowing he had found it at last, knowing exactly where to look.

The
mirror,
you fool!

He stepped back quickly to afford himself a full, knees-to-head look of himself in the glass, then raised his eyes.

What he saw wasn’t Angel, of course—for long. Behind the shimmer of a golden haze, as if sea-spawned, half-liquid, black eyes melting into blue, dark hair an issue of the sun, the reflection of a smiling, naked boy strained through to shape itself to new and living form. Like the cameraed, time-sped opening of a flower, image crowded into image until the “real” became “unreal,” secondary—almost, but not yet quite too faint, too nebulous, to see . . .

Dori found him, curled up, asleep on the floor in front of the bureau in Jamie’s bedroom. Or had he passed out?—drunk, half-doped, the curious thought entering the man’s mind that perhaps the boy had found something Mrs. Evans had left lying about and taken it.

He shook him, slapped him, called his name. None of these would do. A sudden pang of wild, sharp panic made Dori place his hand to Angel’s heart. The beat was steady, strong. With a groan of relief, Dori carried him to the bed.

As Angel’s head touched the pillow, his eyes opened a drowsy crack. Seeing Dori, he smiled, closed his eyes, opened them again, this time knowing where he was and why, and what had happened.

“Hi!” It was Dori, smiling, holding his hand. His next words were rough, but the manner loving. “What the hell are you doing up here? You’ve got all of us half crazy. We’ve been looking for you for almost two hours.”

“Who
was lookin’?”

“Why,
I
was, of course, and Jodi, and Delia.” Without pause he rushed on, knowing whose name Angel had been after. “What’s up? You felt like Columbus today and wanted to explore? But got tired and fell asleep?” Why was the boy so pale!—lips parched, breathing shallow, black eyes like a young deer’s in a forest with the first scent of fire in the wind? “Do you want some water?”

There was no reply, but Dori went for it anyway. When he returned, Angel was standing in front of the bureau, staring at himself in the mirror, so darkly solemn in expression and demeanor, the man put the glass down, burning his brain for something quickly light or funny to say. Or anything.

“Like what you see? I do. Good-looking kid; goddamn handsome boy.”

Why had he said that? Why did it seem necessary, essential right now? Because Angel’s shocked reaction to Jamie’s picture had been one of admiration, envy and hate? Because Mrs. Evans had ostensibly abandoned the boy?—locked away in bedroom or tomb, making herself inaccessible to everyone but her lawyers, seeing those only because she had to set her affairs in order before she killed herself? (Dori believed it
would
happen this time, and very soon.) But he’d said it above all because he’d found Angel here, in Jamie’s room, not sleeping as he’d first thought, but truly unconscious on the floor, after some—(it was impossible to say, or to ask)—after some hysterical outburst, raging despair, hours of passionate weeping, perhaps, murderous self-hatred . . . accusing, loathing himself because he’d failed; hadn’t “measured up,” wasn’t, couldn’t be, what that incredible woman relentlessly demanded: Jamie.

At moments like these, Dori found it impossible not to despise Mrs. Evans, weaving his hate into the strange paradox of his almost boundless simultaneous love.

She had been cruel, ruthless, demonic in her grief, but her grief, exposed, examined, was a deployment of her maniacal self-involvement, affording—for her own perverse pleasure and pain—bizarre, theatrical displays and extensions of monumental self-love.

Who had killed that wretched little boy who ripped open his veins on her icy door? Who had murdered the actor, cut his throat half-through?—if one cared to follow the torturous emotional paths that led to his death.

And finally—Angel. The last of her “boys.” What a courtship! What a seduction
that
had been!

Book VII

N
OW WHAT
about
Jamie? And his white-capped tomb—a palace of frost in its wooded valley of well-tracked snow: glittering, almost festive with icicles, the whole north face of it a blue-glazed mirror.

Footprints:
Angel’s; made days ago, when he often got off his sled to circle the building, look closely, feel the touch of its marble and ice, the ice and bronze of its door. He had, of course, peered through the bars of the windows several times, only to see his own queer, intent face gazing back.

Footprints:
hers; countless, back and forth, from and to the house, so many, so often, they’d tramped down a path so clear one might think she’d had someone take a shovel to do it. But also her single-line prints wandering off into nowhere, and back again, or crazily zig-zagging their way from the tomb. These, to Angel’s half-ashamed guess, were made on those nights when she had “taken something” (or too much of something)—her addiction to, or (to be kind) her penchant for, a variety of drugs and occasional alcohol being the most ill-kept secret of the house.

Sometimes there were deep, body-made impressions in the snow, as if she’d stumbled, fallen, then regained her footing. There were also—and these were the ones frightening and terrible to see—some that appeared to have been made by thrashing about; as if, after falling or throwing herself down, she’d twisted, rolled, flailed arms and legs like a child convulsed, in the throes of a tantrum, or an animal snared, a paw or a leg caught in the jaws of a trap.

Footprints:
heavy, booted, deep-set; not Jodi’s (who was much too frail for the task; not, of course, Delia’s) but Dori’s. Even a clear print of the flashlight he’d dropped on one of the nights he’d gone out to find her and carry her back to the house.

And
footprints
(finally): just a few—light, faintly made on the steps of the tomb that Angel couldn’t decipher at first, but had to conclude were Mrs. Evans’. Whose else could they be? They were small, no larger than his own, and only once did he see them, after a brief fall of snow. Then, to his mild surprise, he saw they were bare, they were prints of her naked feet.

She had removed her shoes, or lost them, and this was hardly a surprise after all. Once he’d found one of her mink coats lying yards from the tomb; other times, a wool hat, a silk scarf, black gloves, a scatter of blue pills. Twice he’d seen wine bottles, the last one half filled (or half empty) most of the burgundy having bored a ragged wound in the snow. Lying next to this one, had been a delicate long-stemmed champagne glass which he brought back to Delia who, requiring no explanation, washed it and put it back where it belonged.

Angel knew he was ill. But ill in a way he couldn’t define, that had no name at all, perhaps, unless—with his long Catholic exposure—it could be called “mortal sin.”