In the Absence of Angels (19 page)

Bending nearer, the gentleman murmured an inquiry and agitatedly checked her answer against his list. “I am sorry,” he said in buttered tones, “but there seems to have been an oversight. Do you wish me to check with a member of ...” He paused and allowed a delicate insinuation of disapproval to affect his face.

“No,” said Selena in a rusty voice. “Never mind.”

He bowed. “The family,” he said consolingly, “will receive friends of the deceased upstairs when they return.” He flicked a nod to his assistant, and with a sinuous deftness they inserted themselves into the hearse, which pulsed into a motion that reverberated sluggishly down the line of cars.

In a few minutes, the street was almost empty of cars and onlookers, except for Hester, who had crept behind one of the ironwork grilles in the courtyard, and Selena, who remained as if held by a need to see the last of the cars inexorably gone. Standing there in the open light of summer, she looked to Hester at once bizarre and dusty, like one of those oddly colored bits of bric-a-brac that seem mysterious and compelling in the back of the store but, when brought to the light by the excited purchaser, are seen to be lurid and unsuccessful. When the last car had gone, Selena stood there for a moment, her hand still nervously groping on her chest; then, slowly, with a ragged, indecisive gait, she turned and walked away.

Hester saw her recede down the long block, until she vanished around the corner. In her mind, like a frieze, she saw the added-up picture of Selena, always watching tentatively, thirstily, on the fringe of other people’s happenings, and fear grew in her as she became suddenly aware of her own figure, standing now in the hot sun. It was watching, too.

S
UNDAY WAS THE
day you hung around listening to the echoes of yourself. In the fat silences after dinner, everyone hovered, holding on to the dwindling thread of yesterday’s routine, wretchedly waiting to join it to that of tomorrow. Outside, the soft tearing sound of the traffic rushed people to innumerable delights and conclusions; inside the ticking room anticipation swelled like a bell that was never sounded. Laved, in fresh clothes, the body thudded, poised for its adventure, until the sharp definitive click of the lamps slid the day down from the hope of change into the pigeonhole of reality.

For all, for everyone except his father. For him, Sunday was a kind of justification, whose rest he took in the biblical sense, a patriarch relaxing superbly from converse into the sleep where he lay now, the mock-fierce mustache stirred by the breath from the hidden kindly mouth, the delicately made spatted ankles, out of another era, crossed sideways on the sofa.

If he moved now, his father would stir irritably, muttering “Eh? Where’re you going now? Can’t you spend a day with your family?” for, to his almost tribal sense of family, outside interests were always to be secondary, and — with the dwindling of his own family contemporaries by death — the attainment of adulthood in his children and their increasing focus outside the home seemed to induce in him a pathetic rage, almost as if over a breach of allegiance.

If wholly awakened now, he would rise to potter testily with his cigar, roughing the newspapers back into coherence with mutterings against the disorderliness of the rest of the family, or, if fate provided an attentive Sunday visitor, settling benignly again into the anecdotes that eructated like bubbles from the ferment of his memory. “Salesman’s talk,” his mother called it, for to her his father’s expansiveness, always a continual social embarrassment to her aloofness, had become even more of a reminder that his father was really an old man now, that the long gap of age between them would never again be bridged. His father was old enough to be his grandfather — had the gap between his father and himself never really been bridged at all because of this alone, he wondered? Or was it because his father belonged to the last outpost of a generation which regarded its children as the final insignia of a full life, perhaps, but always as extensions of its own identity, interposing between them and it a wall of glass, through which the pattern of daily intimacies might be filtered, but through which the self-contained globe of a child’s private world was forever inadmissible?

Over and above the flood of real “goods” that his father sold twinklingly, unfailingly, in the backslapping camaraderie of business, his father
was
a salesman, he thought — a salesman of the past. Rootless though the family had long been, in the shifting way of the apartment dweller, because of his father they had continued to live as if they still had attics and cellars, their closets and rooms crammed with the droppings of generations, the yellowed inanimates that had pitilessly survived the transient fingerprints of the flesh. When he, his son, had looked about him at the mass of young men at college with him, he had felt that, compared to his own, their backgrounds were as truncated, as flat, as their tidy one-step-above hire-purchase homes, where a family picture was an anachronism that must not mar the current scheme, where the old and worn must immediately be slip-covered with the new. And it had seemed to him then, that although he had never had the permanence of a homestead, of the landed people, he was rooted, he had been nourished, in the rich compost of his father’s reminiscence.

But now, in the taut room, where the silence stretched like a wire vibrating with impulses that were never heard, he felt suddenly that his father had always been as remote to him as a figure in a pageant, or as a storyteller between whose knees he had been gripped, enthralled, but whose recitative backward glance had never bent itself to him. And torn, half by a jealousy for that panoramic experience, that sweep of life that he and his own contemporaries might never duplicate, he looked across at his father with regret, feeling that he, the son, had listened indeed, but had never himself been heard. From all the crooning corners of his childhood he could hear his father’s teasing, crowing voice: “Sure, boy. I’ve been everywhere! I’ve been to Europe, I-rup, O-rup, and Stir-rup!”

As in the faded primary tints of a lithograph on a thumbed calendar, he could see, he could almost
remember
the dusty provincial streets and lanes of the post-Civil War Richmond of sixty-five years ago, and the little boy with black Fauntleroy curls being dragged along by the gaunt, arrogant Negro woman, past the jeers of the street urchins.

“Plenty of professional Southerners talk about their colored mammies — but Awnt Nell — she was a real woman. Freed woman too, but she would never leave your grandmother. And proud of my curls — as if they were her own boy’s! Kept me getting in fights over ’em. Then she took to follering around behind me, ’til I went to Maw and cried to have ’em cut off. Stayed with us too; wouldn’t go away even after Paw’s business went bad with the rest.” …The remembered voice went on, like a record he could pluck out from the years at will.

“Guess I should have been a lawyer. Always wanted to be.” Yes, his father would have liked that — the poised strut in front of the attentive jury, the poured-out display of the enormous, sometimes inaccurately pronounced vocabulary.

“Left school too early. Heh! The Academy — that’s where we went in those days — all religions alike. Academy of St. Joseph. That old harridan there — Miss Atwell — she never did like me. One day she said to me ‘Joe! Come up here!’ And she had the ruler in her hand. Now your grandmother — she never raised her hand to the eight of us, and she kept us all in line. I wasn’t gawn to stand for any ruler rapped on my knuckles. So I walked up there …and I stood there …and I put out my hand. And when she raised the ruler I took it, and broke it over my knee, and threw it out the window. I left there and I never went back. Never. Only time I ever made my mother cry. Swore I would never make her cry again. I was a good son, and I didn’t. But I never went back there again.”

Then the first job — the grocery store — almost like the stereotype beginnings of the self-made American, but with the imprint of the fastidious Joe, the
bon vivant,
the
fin de siècle
beau-to-be, already implicit in the tale.

“That herring barrel! Seemed ’s if everybody who came into that store wanted herring. So I’d reach my hand down in that cold slithery mess of stuff and haul up one of those herring. Ugh! Quit that job as quick as I could …went into a lawyer’s office licking stamps. At the end of a week I went to Mr. Morris (your grandmother was married from his house) and I said ‘Mr. Morris, I want to leave.’

“ ‘Why Joe,’ he says, ‘what’s the matter?’

“ ‘Mr. Morris,’ I said, ‘my tongue is sore!’

“He sat back and laughed and laughed. ‘Why Joe,’ he says, ‘we’ll give you a sponge!’ ”

In the stereopticon of his mind he could see his father’s hand reaching down into the barrel, but somehow it was not the raw hand of the thirteen-year-old boy, but the elegant knotted hand with the raised blue veins and the brown diamond finger ring, in the graphically illustrative gesture he had seen again and again, the hand he saw now drooping over the sofa, lifted imperceptibly now and again in the current of slumber.

Glancing back into the dimness of the foyer, he could see the huge triple-doored bookcase, its sagging shelves stuffed three-deep with the books that had been his father’s education. He thought of his own studies, the slow acquisition of the accepted opinions on the world’s literature, sedulously gathered from the squeezings of the compartmented minds of his professors, the easy access to the ponderous libraries with their mountains of ticketed references as available as his daily dinner. Yet it had been years before he could mention a book of which his father had not heard. “Baldassare Castiglione!” his father would say, taking the book from his hand, rolling the syllables on his tongue.
“The Courtier!
My God, it must be nearly fifty years since I saw that!” For a moment a formless eagerness has trembled on his own lips, as if he might say at last “What do you — ? — This is what I — Let us exchange ...’ ” but the book would be handed back, the sighing revelation had not been made, the moment passed.

All during the early years while his father had been selling soap for a Quaker merchant in Philadelphia he had also been studying Italian in the evenings so that he could read Dante in the original, or picking his way through Horace and Ovid with the aid of the “trots” that would have been forbidden to him had he gone to college. On one shelf of the bookcase,
Mademoiselle de Maupin,
the
Mémoires de Ninon de Lenclos,
and a row of Balzac stood as evidence of the years in New Orleans, where, only in his twenties, but already the dashing representative of “Motley and Co., Manufacturers and Perfumers, Founded 1817,” he had, according to his own testimony, spent half his time at Antoine’s, and the rest on the pouting bosoms of Creole ladies of good family. On the other shelves
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia,
a red-edged set of Thackeray, and some funereally bound Waverley novels were jumbled together; copies of Burns, Mrs. Browning, and the
Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre
might be interlarded with the Victoriana of Quiller-Couch, Sir Edmund Gosse, and an old copy of Will Carleton’s
Farm Legends.
In the brown dusk of the foyer they all melted together, holding under their dusty gilt a repository of his own childhood, for on them he had fed also, and from them had been drawn the innumerable orotund tags of his father’s conversation.

Stealthily he rose and went to the window. On one of the nearby tables lay the broken-backed copy of Pope from which his father often quoted, its cover scrolled and illuminated to look like a church window. Published by William P. Nimmo of Edinburgh. He had never realized until he was almost grown that his father’s vaunting chant was not literally true; that his father had never actually been out of America. Where had he picked this up? He opened it and read the inscription: “J. Henri Elkin, Mar. 26th, 1882,” and beneath that, underlined with flourishes, “sans puer et sans reproche.” With a smile for the insouciant motto and the error in spelling, both so typical of his father, he grimaced at his own forgotten inscription underneath, written in the brash pencil of his sophomore year: — “J. H. Elkin, Jr., Jan. 5th, 1929. De gustibus non est disputandum.”

“Europe, I-rup, O-rup, and Stir-rup,” he thought bitterly. He had believed it of his father; in a way it was his trouble that he still believed, not only for his father, but for himself. The phrase had meant for him all the perilous seas beyond the casement, all the width of the future that lay before the “compleat,” the “whole” man, all the roads to Rome. When he heard the foghorns lowing on the river, the phrase sometimes came to him still, with a quickening of inexplicable delight and unease.

Now suddenly its echoes brought to him, with an association he did not understand, the image, sharp and disturbing, of the glass of anise on Anna Guryan’s table.

Shutting the image out, he turned his back to the sleeping figure and stared out the window, past the blurred palette of the park with its motley strollers, to the strong blue of the river, which struck through the tentative spring air like a flail against his sight. It was not too late to fill the day that was draining away from him with one of those commonplace devices for seeking human warmth, a dinner, a date, a movie — the little second-rate enterprises where there was always the chance, after all, that reality might explode upon one in the exchange of a word, a recognition, an embrace.

He turned over a roster of people in his mind: the earnest young men of his own age, whose conversation would turn inevitably from books and jobs to girls, with the fascinated allusiveness of inexperience, or the gauche young girls tricked out in the bright dresses, shrill patter, and the finger-snapping gestures of allurement that would lead them not too improperly to their goal of a doctor or a dentist.

There was no one, nothing that he could scrape up that would serve as a palliative for the driving sense of alienation, of constriction, that sent him out more and more on his free Saturday afternoons and Sundays, prowling the dim drowsy art galleries, standing before each picture as if it were a window to a world, yet always subtly conscious of the current of people moving behind him, their dress and their speech, and of how he, in his stance before the picture, looked to them. Or he would walk the brilliant mid-town streets briskly, as if he had a destination, savoring the expensive color and movement, glancing at the great carved upheaval of buildings with a pride almost of ownership, until a dusk the color of melancholy blended all the outlines of faces and buildings in a brooding preamble to the great play of light that was to come.