Men and Angels (6 page)

Hélène said Anne had never known trouble. Hélène had been kind to Laura. But people like Hélène were always kind to her. Hélène liked her. But people like Hélène always liked her. Her mother wouldn’t like Hélène. She wouldn’t like her clothes. Hélène wouldn’t make her mother change her mind, think that she had been wrong about her daughter. Hélène’s house wouldn’t make her change her mind. It was a college house, but she did nothing to it. It had no pictures on the walls. The dishes were from the dime store. Laura knew that Hélène’s house was like that because Hélène knew that beauty didn’t mean anything. Often it was a lure. Hélène said that Anne had gotten through the world too easily because of beauty. Anne’s husband had been deceived by it. Hélène said she knew Michael was not happy in his marriage. “He has sold his birthright for a mess of pottage,” Hélène said. He chose a companion with a pretty face, an alluring body, instead of a partner for his mind and his spirit. Michael was a very spiritual person, Hélène said, although it wasn’t evident until one knew him well. But Anne had nothing in her of the spirit. She was a complete materialist. Even what she called her intellectual life was sensual. Pictures of fat mothers with fat babies, that was what she studied. Anne had no ideas, Hélène said. She had no life above the flesh. Putting her hand on Laura’s hand (the palms of her hands were damp) Hélène told her that she would be very good for Anne and for the children.

When she saw Anne sitting by the window in her living room, looking at the asters in her garden, when she ate the food Anne offered her, when she wore the clothes Anne lent her, she knew she would save Anne and the children. Anne was not a bad person. But she was sinking in the flesh. The flesh of her hands was cool and dry; her forehead was cool. There were pink spots on her cheeks that gave her white skin color. For a while, that first day in the living room, Laura was afraid Anne didn’t like her, didn’t want her to take care of the children. But Anne did like her; she had called her back. She probably had to check on something. Money, maybe. Laura would have worked without money, for her food, her bed. One day Anne, if Laura helped her, would be saved. But now she was drowning. Laura could see her; drowning as the damned souls drowned in flames of eternal fire. She could see Anne as no one else could see her. She was drowning in flesh. Her own cool flesh. The soft flesh of her children.

From the bedroom Anne had fixed for her, Laura could look out the window to the garden. Now there were chrysanthemums, and later, Anne had said, the crocuses would come, and then there would be daffodils. Anne asked Laura if she was interested in gardening. She lied and said she was. She would learn to be. Her mother had not been. She would know more than her mother. Of course she already knew more of the Spirit. But Anne would teach her something (the flowers in the garden, the herbs in their clay pots) that her mother wanted to know but did not. Wanted to do but could not.

It was in a garden that the Spirit had first come to her.

The first coming of the Spirit had been beautiful. She was at her grandmother’s. Her grandmother was good at gardens. Laura was in her grandmother’s garden. Her mother had just been unkind to her. What was it she had said, “Go outside and blow the stink off you”? It was because her sister Deborah had taken the blouse she had wanted to wear that morning. Laura had planned the clothes that she would wear each day on their visit to their grandmother. Debbie had taken her blouse. It was pink with embroidered flowers on it. Laura had embroidered them. She washed the blouse by hand and ironed it. She particularly wanted to show it to her grandmother. Then her sister came down wearing it. Debbie looked just like their mother. She was beautiful, just like their mother. And their mother loved her best, loved her only.

Her sister Debbie walked into their grandmother’s kitchen wearing Laura’s blouse. Even now, even though she no longer felt anger because the Spirit lived in her, Laura could remember how she felt that day. Behind her eyes were dark things, sea creatures, the roots of trees uprooted, buildings falling on buildings. She ran toward her sister and hit her hard across the back.

“It’s mine,” she said. “You can’t wear it.”

Her mother came toward them. She pulled Laura away from Debbie. With the back of her hand she struck Laura. The large ring that their father had bought her for their fifteenth anniversary hit Laura in the eye. Her mother kept on hitting her. Four times she hit her in the face.

“How dare you touch that child,” their mother said. Debbie was fourteen, three years younger than Laura. She was not a child.

Laura remembered how her teeth felt on the inside of her lips. She had bitten her lips until they bled. The blood was salt and thick, her teeth were dry against the sore flesh she had bitten. She stood before her mother. She was bigger than her mother. She could feel her eyes were wild.

“It’s my blouse, and she can’t have it.”

She was standing above her mother. Then she realized that she could kill her. It was possible; it might be easy. In a minute it could happen, and it would be done. And she knew her mother knew. With small steps, frightened, Laura’s mother moved toward her own mother, Laura’s grandmother.

“You don’t deserve this family,” her mother said. “I don’t know where you came from. You can’t be my child.”

“Cecilia,” said the grandmother.

Her mother was not afraid any longer. She knew that Laura was not going to kill her. The skin around her eyes looked bruised; her dark eyes, swelling with her anger, were a monster’s eyes. They reached out, as if they were hands, as if they could choke her daughter. She walked close to her.

“You great big ugly clod. You might as well let your sister have all your clothes. You’ll never be anything. You’re not my child, you never were. Get out of here. I can’t stand the sight of you. Get out and blow the stink off you. Don’t come back till you’re fit to be a member of this family.”

Even now, even now that she no longer felt anger, she remembered. She had run to the end of the garden. Her tears were splitting her body, as if lightning had split her, as if her veins were fire, as if the nerves that spread out from her spine were wires, cutting her hot flesh. She lay down on the grass. She pressed her eyes into the flesh of her arms. She was thinking that she wanted her mother to die. She was thinking that she could have killed her.

Then it came. It was not anything she saw or heard. She knew only that it was with her. She knew she had been chosen. In her heart she knew the words, “You are the chosen one, the favored of the Lord.”

She was not frightened, for she knew it was the Spirit of the Lord inside her, coming with power and with love. She walked back into her grandmother’s kitchen. That was the beginning of her power. No one was there but her father.

“I’m sorry,” said her father. “I guess your mother got a little carried away.”

She smiled at him with her new smile, the smile that she always had now, the smile that had the wisdom of the Spirit, and the Spirit’s peace. “It doesn’t matter,” she said to her father.

And it didn’t. Before the Spirit came, she would have been grateful to her father. Angry that he had not spoken sooner, but grateful that he was on her side. But she knew then that she would never need him anymore. Her poor father. She prayed that he, too, would one day find the Spirit. Her mother’s flesh was choking him. But with her mother dead, he would find the Spirit. She prayed for him to find it, but no more than for anyone else. He meant nothing special to her. Once she had needed him to love her. But now she was loved in the Spirit. She was the chosen of the Lord. Now people needed
her.

She was good with children; she understood them, and they liked her, she was sure they did. Even that time with the Chamberlains, the children had liked her. Only the parents hadn’t understood. They said the things she told the children gave them nightmares. But it wasn’t true. It was the presence of the Spirit that made the parents uneasy. She showed them their uncleanness by her life among them, by the presence of the Spirit. It was the darkness in the parents that gave the children nightmares. Her power was not great enough, the evil in the Chamberlains had beaten her. Now she knew, from Jesus’ words to the apostles, how she must proceed with Anne and with her children. She had not been wise with the Chamberlains, she had spoken the name of the Spirit too early, and the darkness had overcome them. Now she would not speak the name of God, not speak of the Spirit, until the time was right. They would not know the Spirit was among them until the power of the Spirit had subdued their darkness. Then she would conquer. Then they would all be saved.

The Chamberlains had asked her to leave. But they had said they would recommend her to another family. Their children had learned a great deal, the Chamberlains said, from Laura. She had taught the little girl to cross-stitch, the boy to make flowers, birds and animals from clay. Perhaps another family, the Chamberlains had said, with a more religious background…. As it is, we are not believers.

Not believers. Of course not, you are choked with wickedness. She had not said this to them. She wanted them to recommend her.

It would be different with Anne Foster. Now she knew more; now the power of the Spirit was much greater. It would not be difficult to save them all. She would begin with the children.

As a little child, she had wanted the heat that jetted round her mother’s body. But her mother said, “Don’t hang on me.” Once, when Laura was a child, her mother had pushed her off the arm of the couch and she had cut her lip and bled and bled so that everyone was frightened. “Well, I told her not to hang on me,” her mother said, cleaning Laura’s face with quick, sharp hands that did not linger, did not treasure. “Why can’t you be more like your sister? Do you see her hanging on me all the time?”

Debbie was quick and dark and like the mother dancing. She sang and snapped her fingers. She told stories with mistakes in them just to make people laugh. She hung upside down from the trapeze on the swing set. The children in the swimming pool were her friends, dove and rose up from the water holding hands with her, played treasure hunt and went for shining pennies with her at the bottom of the pool. Laura wore a bathing cap because she didn’t like to get her thick hair wet, swam by herself in straight rows that she counted up like gold, feared hanging from the trapeze and swung alone in silence, kicking the sand with the toe of her shoe. Then her mother shouted at her for her dirty shoes. “Make friends, be more independent.”

She had one friend named Warren. He came to the house. He went into the pool with her. But then he had an accident. He moved his bowels in the pool. He spoiled the clearness of the water (so clear you could see pennies on the bottom that her father threw for children to go after). The pool had to be completely emptied, her mother said, screaming at her, hitting her, saying it was just like her to bring filth home with her. Warren was not allowed to come again.

But she wasn’t filthy. She was careful, she was tidy. Debbie was the one whose book covers were ripped, whose clothes were on the floor after she tried on outfit after outfit to see which ones would make her girlfriends love her. Debbie never helped. Laura helped her mother in the kitchen. She tried to help her mother keep the house clean, but her mother wasn’t interested and thought Laura cleaned house to make her feel bad. “You love it, don’t you, putting me in a bad light.”

Debbie taught their mother the new dances. Married at seventeen, a mother six months later (Laura had been conceived in sin), her mother said she had never had the time to be young. She liked to stand next to Debbie at the mirror. She liked to say, “We could be sisters, couldn’t we,” putting her hands around her waist, then around Debbie’s. Laura would hang back, heavy, her braids a weight on her shoulders, pushing her down to the earth while they danced high above it, light, like stars that burnt and dazzled.

She would teach Anne’s children that the flesh was nothing; a mother and her children, all that famous love, was nothing more than flesh to flesh, would drown them all, would keep them from the Spirit.

But she must be careful. She must not make the mistake she had made with the Chamberlains. She would teach the girl to make clay animals. She would build models with the little boy. She would let them cook with her in the kitchen, make whatever mess they wanted and then clean it up without a word. They would look through field glasses at birds. They would pick wildflowers. They would dip leaves in glycerine and paste them into books. The children would love her. They would have fun. She would not talk to them about the Spirit until she knew that they loved her.

“D
ARLING, IT’S IANTHE,” SAID
the voice on the telephone. “You’ve got to come over quick, right now, immediately. I’m dying, I’m in absolutely desperate straits. You’ve no idea.”

“What is it, Ianthe?” Anne said distantly. Ianthe had interrupted her while she was working, and she’d known her long enough to be wary of her reports of disaster. Ianthe was the woman to whom she’d lost the job of director of the college gallery. Tall, knife-thin, with a shock of Veronica Lake blond hair and lips colored in red and outlined in a darker reddish purple, she had become, improbably, one of Anne’s best friends. For one thing, they worked well together.

“You can keep track of the fucking old masters in the basement,” Ianthe had said to Anne when they began working together, “and deal with the alums who want to give us their uncles’ watercolors for a tax writeoff. Whereas I can suck off the entire Board of Trustees for a Stella when the time comes. We’ll make a splendid team.”

And, in fact, they did. Ianthe’s vision of their division of labor was not far off. Anne organized the gallery’s holdings, kept records, varied the displays and wrote exhibit notes that were generally admired. Ianthe expanded the collection so that the gallery was lauded as unusually representative of current trends. Anne knew that she could never have done what Ianthe did. She could never, for example, have accomplished Ianthe’s latest feat, the purchase, for a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, of a painting by an Italian Neo-Expressionist. In tabloid colors, it presented a dog biting the thigh of a child who sprawled among his schoolbooks, screaming.