Bereavements (38 page)

Angel slept fitfully, waking, dozing, waking again.

It had taken days for him to get used to the immense, almost painful silence of the country, particularly at night when it pressed against him like a heavy weight—in itself sometimes enough to rouse him from sleep.

At eleven, he was suddenly fully awake, up on an elbow reading the phosphorescent hands of his bedside clock.

He thought he’d heard a noise, a loud one. Could it be Dori, returning so late; perhaps the slam of a garage door in the wind?

He listened and heard nothing . . . or, yes—a quick, curious and pleasant illusion or hallucination if they have those for the ears. For a few seconds he thought he heard city sounds: night voices, street voices, traffic, shouts, rattles, blaring horns, the crash of a bottle some drunk had thrown from an upstairs window. It was always wild in New York on New Year’s Eve. Perhaps that’s what he missed, maybe that’s what woke him—the very fact that he wasn’t doing what he was used to. He always did something to celebrate the New Year, even if only to stay awake and lean out a window, making the loudest noise he could the moment the clock struck twelve.

But tonight he had no horn to blow, no rattle to shake, no city street to open a window to, so he could yell and scream and shout Happy New Year!

Well then . . . A pot or a frying pan would do, two of them, or even one with a large metal spoon; better, a soup ladle if he could find one.

And there it was!—what he would do, born out of sleep: the thought thought before he’d had time to think it, the decision made.

Part love, part hate, part passion, part plea, part rage, part revenge for the atrocity she’d made of the rose, part devil-may-care and fuck-it-all for the moment—regardless of the consequences, at midnight he was going to bang a frying pan like fury, like the fallen angel he was, loud enough to wake the dead, outside of Mrs. Evan’s door.

He went to the kitchen, then to the pantry where the large pots were kept. He tested every one he could find, knuckling each quietly until he found one that reverberated, had resonance, promising clatters and clanks so loud they’d rattle one’s bones.

A giant spoon or ladle was next, and looking for this, he happened to glance through the room’s large double windows that faced the grounds on the northwest side of the house.

The night was clear now, and there must have been a moon, because pale eerie light was resting everywhere, settled so strongly on the hills and into the vallies of snow, it looked as if dawn were arising hours before its time.

Then—an amazing thing! Far down in one valley, so far it looked like a toy, like a tiny “manger” where Christ was born, he saw Jamie’s tomb, its door open, its windows flooded with yellow light.

He only half dressed, no scarf; just his navy pea jacket which he’d left on a chair in the kitchen, and, unable to find two, only one wool glove. No boots for the snow, just sneakers, but wings on his heels because he knew
she
was there; she had opened the great bronze door as only she could, and it was important, imperative that he be there, with her.

He ran, sprawled, staggered up the hills, rolled and tumbled his way down, to arrive, breath steaming the air, shaking with fear, body temperature risen, gathering strength as he walked up the fourteen marble steps—one for each year of Jamie’s life—to stand in the blaze of the open door.

The snow which was fresh, newly fallen, silenced his footfall; she didn’t hear a sound as he mounted the stairs, edged himself in and stood motionless for moments, as graven as she, her head bowed, her hand almost a fist between her eyes.

The coffin remained a blurred haze in the periphery of his vision; there might not be time!—he’d feast on it later. Before anything else—and there
was
nothing much else in the tomb to see—his eyes had gone to Mrs. Evans, knowing with the instancy of God what she was doing.

She was seated on a ledge that bordered the room—meant for flowers but which in her passion for privacy she’d decided not to let Jodi use; her fur coat thrown from her shoulders behind her. She’d taken off ankle boots which she’d placed on the floor beside a blood-red scarf and knitted gloves. Her dress was white, so simple it might have been a nightgown, and a gold cross hung from her throat.

Beside her on the ledge was a bottle of wine, unopened, and a round long-stemmed glass, the kind he had found days before in the snow. Next to these, in scattered disorder, was one large bottle and tens of small vials and glass containers, several opened, spilling out pills in a multiplicity of colors: red, blue, yellow, violet, green . . .

As he watched, her hand dropped from between her eyes; she raised her head to speak, but not to Angel; she still had no idea he was there.

“Would you believe it,” she said to her son—with a smile and almost comic despair; “I forgot to open the bottle. And I can’t — here. I may have to smash off the top.”

Her voice, its unnatural tempo, curiously precise and with effort composed, had the tranquilized quality Angel had come to know so well. But it was clear he hadn’t come too late.

Reassured, with time left to use, his head now turned irresistibly toward the coffin. But first, the walls!—intricate mosaics of burnished gold, dark to palest yellow: red gold, green gold, gold gold, containing, portraying mysterious figures—a pageant of naked children, laughing, running, dancing, leaping, all reaching, reaching . . . for nothing one could see, perhaps the sun.

The room otherwise was simple, bare, virtually empty. Only three tall unlighted candles in round smooth-faced floor-standing gold holders. These stood at the head-side of the rectangular slab of carefully “pitted” unpolished white marble that held the coffin.

The coffin itself was glass, apparently seamless: molded or “poured”—its manufacture impossible to guess.

Inside, suspended—“floating” midway and exactly centered in a clear but faintly amber liquid—was Angel’s golden-hazed boy in the mirror, the naked Jamie de Vinaz Rojas, Mrs. Evans’ son, his undersea hair radial and glowing, fanned about a face so fresh with color it seemed totally alive, the open eyes pristine, of the purest, the most glittering blue.

Had she heard Angel—his breath, his rapid breathing?—felt his eyes upon her, or perhaps on Jamie?—knew noetically or intuitively that he was there? No matter. She turned and looked at him—with no surprise whatsoever—the surprise, the shock, the spilled panic and disorder of her wild regret at the accident of his being there coming so much later and so slowly that, whatever chemical she had taken, it had figuratively severed nerves and connections, so distancing her from immediate reality that time and space were elongated. She spoke and, listener to herself, the words became an echo, drifting back to her from the walls of a mountain far away.

When she saw him—“Ah, Angel—!” was all she said, nothing more, quite as if he were the newsboy who had just now thrown the day’s paper to her door.

The chemical had been valium—three, then three more. Sixty miligrams, only that, a match to light the end of the fuse. The rest was to come later; all the circus colors, the confetti, the rainbow of death. And with it, the finest, the oldest, the most ancient of her wines. Champagne, the very best, had bored her years ago, but burgundy of sufficient age, the right bouquet, exquisitely dry, clear as God’s eyes, would sometimes do. It would have to do now.

“But good heavens!”—her drifting eyes settling on the bottle beside her—“I didn’t open it!”—forgetting she had just now told her son. “And I’ve brought nothing to open it
with.
What I’ll do . . . ”

She turned her head toward him, preferring always to face the person to whom she spoke, having not only forgotten she had already mentioned the bottle, but also that Angel was there—now moved beside the coffin for a better view, bending over it, his face a mixture of amazement, curiosity and awe.

The Valiums were working too well, too quickly. Might she not fall in a faint before she took the trouble to die?

She roused herself, shaking the creeping narcosis from her head, stood up and moved majestically toward the coffin, her eyes on Angel, desiring to explain what he saw—and certainly not without drama—even more now than usual: expressive gestures, pretentious pauses, mannered postures, exquisite style. After all, these last moments were the
coup de theatre
of her life.

And her death.