Was (35 page)

“You miss breakfast?” Heritage asked her.

“Dang right,” said Dotty. “That eggy stuff looks like cat sick. Can’t stand it.”

Heritage was smiling again. “Bill,” he said, “this here’s Old Dynamite. Dynamite Dotty. You want to help people, well this is one of our success stories. Used to take three big men to hold Old Dynamite down. Till she became an Angel and grew wings.”

“I,” announced Dotty, “always had wings.” She began to stroke them, growing invisibly from her shoulders. She looked regal. “Hmmmph!” she said, and made a dismissive gesture.

“Come on, we got to make all these beds,” said Heritage.

As they worked, Bill looked at Old Dynamite. A smile had grown on her face. It grew wide and joyous, and the eyes fixed on Heaven seemed to be full of light.

Bill stood and looked at her. He wanted to say to Heritage that she looked like something in a Sunday School painting. Heritage was rolling sheets, quickly, into loosely wound balls and throwing them into sacks. Dimly, Bill could hear her singing. She sang to herself. It was an old, grand song, some kind of hymn, but not one that Bill knew from years of churchgoing. But he did know it from somewhere. The words, high and thin, over and over, were “Hally hoo hah.”

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” Bill said, later.

“Dot? Stick around,” said Heritage.

Bill and Heritage wheeled up lunch in huge industrial catering tureens on carts. They boomed their way through swinging doors that were plated with metal. They themselves ate and then wheeled the tureens back down.

And after lunch, they stood watch over the men and women in the common room. There were wide windows looking over the lawns. It was cold and misty, and the landscape was in layers of misted silhouette. A row of leafless trees looked like charts of nerves.

There was nothing for any of the Angels to do. Some of them were playing cards. The cards were black around the edges. There was a chess set. Pieces were missing. There were a few deserted books, all of them left a quarter of the way through, facedown. And the constant murmuring, almost musical. The sound of the Angels.

“We call this the Pearly Gates,” said Heritage.

Women sat mouthing the air or rocking the ghosts of children.

“It’s so boring for them,” said Bill.

“Used to be a radio, but they kept messing with the dials until it broke.” Suddenly Old Dot loomed next to them. She was huge, almost as tall as Bill, and even now neither fat nor thin. She was very stiff on her pins, but that lent her a kind of creeping iron dignity.

“We haven’t died, you know,” she said, to Heritage. “Not yet, anyway.”

Heritage leaned back against the wall and gave her an amused and crooked smile.

He feels superior, thought Bill. That’s it. He’s not mean or anything. He just knows he’s farther up the scale, and he thinks there’s nothing to be done. So he won’t listen.

Bill thought he knew what the old woman meant. “So you think we shouldn’t call this place Heaven?” Bill asked Dotty.

“But it is,” she said, suddenly fierce, drawing up. “It is, goddamn it. Take a look! I don’t know. You people!”

Old Dynamite turned away, shaking her head. Heritage gave Bill another crooked smile. You see? his raised eyebrows seemed to say. Very slowly Old Dot crept toward the window. From behind, she looked far more frail, bowed, her shoulders turning inward.

She stared out the window at the mist until it was dark.

Without realizing it, Bill must have said something to Mr. Hardie, because a few days later Hardie Electrical Supplies donated a television set to the Home. It was a great embarrassment. First, it embarrassed Bill, who had not asked and thought perhaps the Home would think he had been criticizing it. Second, it embarrassed the Home, which was overwhelmed by the generosity but was worried that one of the Angels would shove a fist into the vacuum tube.

When they tried to give it back, Mr. Hardie apparently suggested that Bill be put in charge of it, to change channels, to turn it off, to wheel it around, to guard its plugs and dials and glass face.

Bill was very wary of television sets himself. He had seen an accident. An assistant at Mr. Hardie’s had been carrying two picture tubes, whistling as he walked, swinging them gently. The tubes hit each other, and there was a kind of popping sound, like small pistol shots, and a gasp. Glass had been sucked in and then spat out. The assistant stood surprised and startled, rivulets of blood trickling down his face and his arms. Slivers of glass had been driven into him all over his body. Like the wilderness, like a cyclone, televisions had a nothingness in their hearts.

There was some discussion among the senior staff of the Home. It was decided to allow television only at certain times. Late evening was forbidden in case the dependants of the Home got overexcited. News would be forbidden or any program with guns or violence. The children of the Home would be allowed
Captain Kangaroo
and
The Three Stooges
and the morning game shows like
The Price is Right
and
Queen for a Day
. In the afternoon, they would be allowed soap operas.

Bill carried in the television the first day. He switched it on with trepidation and stood guard over it.

The first show the Angels saw was
Search for Tomorrow
. The title appeared over a picture of the moon in a cloudy night sky.

Bill waited for the reaction. There was none. At first the old, mad people kept staring somewhere else in their own private world. Then some of the women looked up, attracted by the sound of a young female voice and the sight of fresh makeup and nice dresses.

Brought to you by Procter and Gamble
.

They scowled slightly, not sure they had the thing figured out. A kind of radio with pictures. They were only mildly bemused. The whole world had passed them by so long ago that nothing made sense. But they liked the sound of families, and breakfasts, and husbands being kissed goodbye, and the softened voices of women dealing with secret shame.

At night, it was taken away.

The next day, they clustered around it, a new hunger in their eyes. Inside that little box, children bounced in and out of living rooms or wept in their mothers’ arms. Grand and powerful women schemed; husbands faced bankruptcy; toothpaste was sold. Gradually the nothingness sucked in the Angels.

Old Dynamite stood with her back to it, looking out of the window. Or she sat, staring somewhere else, her mouth creased around with smiles as if her face were a pond into which someone had thrown a stone. Sometimes her eyes blazed. Sometimes she sang softly. Bill found himself growing disturbed by her.

“Listen, Bill,” said Tom Heritage, “the only way you can stick this job is to put it all to the back of your mind. You start taking it to heart, you could end up like them. Once I get my license back, I’m getting out of here, drive a taxi, anything. You should do the same, boy, I can tell you.”

Forty years, fifty years, in this place, thought Bill. What a waste of a life.

In November, there was going to be a movie on TV. Networks did not usually show movies, so it was a special thing, a lot of publicity. It was a kids’ movie, but a lot of the staff wanted to see it. A kids’ movie would not have anything in it to rile the Angels.

So it was decided to wheel out the television from nine to eleven at night. The Angels, like children all over the country, were going to be allowed to stay up late to watch it. Bill, the gentle master of the TV, took the night shift for the first time.

The staff crowded in, the caterers especially, all the employees who were still too poor to own a television. They returned to the Home in their cloth coats. Some of them brought their kids. The children looked fat and sleepy and grumpy. A few of the Angels showed up too, drawn by the excitement and by the sound and sight of children.

The old people in their slippers shuffled up to the children, cooing, confused, wanting to warm their hands around young life, such as they had never had a chance to nurture. The children hated it.

Old Dynamite came lumbering forward too, like some stick insect on long prairie pins, in her Home pj’s, smelling slightly of sweat and dry-cleaned sheets. She staggered toward one of the children.

“Hello, hello,” she said in a breathless but supple voice. “Hello children. Hello my little ones.”

“Mo-mmmie!” wailed one of the children, in fear, and turned her face toward her mother.

“I told you, Hattie,” said the mother. “I said you was to be nice to the old people.”

“Now aren’t you the prettiest little thing!” said Dotty, with longing and bad breath. The child covered her mouth, shrank back into her mother’s arms.

“Sunflowers,” said Dotty. “You like sunflowers, honey?”

The child stared at her with sullen dislike.

“Well,” whispered the old woman. “Their real name is moonflowers.”

Bill smiled at the mother to let her know that nothing was wrong. “Come along, Dotty, it’s about to start,” he said, across the room.

“Do you like Indians? I’ll tell you a secret, honey. The Indians won. They’re everywhere, but they’re just invisible.”

Bill walked among the old people, gently guiding them away from the children, into chairs. They should have realized the effect that seeing children would have. None of them had seen children in so long.

“And taffy apples,” Old Dynamite was saying. “Oh, I used to like those. They pull out my teeth now.”

Bill was next to her, lulled by the normality of her voice. Bill still thought normality was hardly to be breached. He touched Old Dynamite’s arm, to lead her away.

The insanity came leaping out of her. Her face twisted up, and she hissed at him like a snake and threw off his hand with clumsy, sweeping strength. She staggered backward and nearly fell over. Bill felt something in him leap back with fear. Her back stiff with pride, Dynamite began to walk by herself toward an empty wheelchair.

The child’s mother shifted her body and the subject, looking away from the old insane woman. “I don’t know why they have to put on a kids’ movie this time of night,” she said to her buddy from the kitchens. She had been hoping all the Angels would be asleep, so her little Hattie need not be frightened. She was bitter about being poor and what it cost her little girl.

That’ll teach me, thought Bill. Looks sweet, but she’s in here for a reason. I reckon Old Dynamite could still be quite an ornery handful. Some rough old pioneer lady who went mad.

They had their first bad reaction to the TV that night. Wasn’t more than five minutes into the movie when Old Dotty stood up and shouted. “Who put this on?” she demanded. Bill moved quickly. He put a hand on her shoulder.

“Just sit still, Dotty,” said Bill, trying to soothe her.

“How’d it get there?” she shouted, loud. “That’s me. How did I get there?”

“It’s just a movie, Dotty.”

“Who said they could put me on that thing? They got it wrong! Wasn’t like that. Only one room we had and couldn’t afford no hired hands, I can tell you.”

The woman from the kitchen made clicking sounds of disapproval. Did everything have to be ruined for her little girl?

“It’s just a movie, Dotty,” said Bill.

“What is that thing?” She pointed to the television.

“It’s a TV. It’s like a radio with pictures. You can show old movies on it. That’s what that is, an old movie.”

For some reason, that seemed to mollify Dotty. She dropped back down onto her chair, sulking, arms folded. “I ain’t never seen a movie,” she said, as though that might explain how she came to be in one. She sat looking merely disgruntled for a few minutes more.

Then the cyclone came. When the wind began to moan, Old Dotty began to shake her head from side to side, no, no, no. She looked confused; her hair was wild but her eyes looked frightened and lost. When she finally saw it was a cyclone, she shouted, once, very loudly, and covered her mouth. And when Judy Garland stepped out of Kansas into Oz, Old Dotty covered her face and wept. She pulled in breath with great heaving sobs. The little girl began to cry too.

“I want to go home!” said the little girl.

The mother began to gather up her coat in a rage. “Just for once,” she muttered in bitterness.

“I want to go home,” echoed Dotty, so softly that only Bill could hear.

“Come on, Dotty,” he murmured. Experimentally he wheeled the chair around. Dotty did not fight. She had gone still and staring, her head hanging slightly. Bill wheeled her down the corridor to where the Angels slept.

“Here we are,” said Bill. “Back home.”

Old Dynamite didn’t fight as he helped her up onto the bed and lifted her feet around, pulling up the bars of the cot. She turned her old seeping head with staring, watery eyes onto the pillow as he tucked her under the quilt. She’s peaceful now, Bill thought. Getting her to go to the john will only rile her up. I’ll clean her in the morning, before anyone sees.

“You just sleep now, Dotty,” he whispered. He patted her arm, helpless to offer anything. He began to walk back quietly toward the lighted window in the door.

“Take me to the ocean,” said Dotty.

Bill stopped and turned. Did she want to say anything else? He waited. There was a silence for a while. He was about to go again when she said, “I ain’t never seen the sea.”