Flights of Angels Read online

  Flights of Angels

  Stories by

  Ellen Gilchrist

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1998 by Ellen Gilchrist

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.” Words and music by Henry Creamer and J. Turner Layton. Copyright © 1922 by Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc., New York. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  “The Judgement of Paris” from The Carrier of Ladders. Copyright © 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970 by W. S. Merwin. “Come Back” from The Lice. Copyright © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967 by W. S. Merwin. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for W. S. Merwin.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition September 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-63576-222-8

  Contents

  Part I A Prologue

  A Tree to Be Desired

  While We Waited for You to Be Born

  The Carnival of the Stoned Children

  Mississippi

  Miss Crystal Confronts the Past

  A Sordid Tale, or, Traceleen Continues Talking

  Phyladda, or, The Mind/Body Problem

  Battle

  Part I The Triumph of Reason

  Have a *Wonderful* Nice Walk

  Witness to the Crucifixion

  Ocean Springs

  Part III   Abstract and Brief Chronicles of the Times Excitement at Drake Field

  A Lady with Pearls

  Excitement in Audubon Park

  Free Pull

  Down at the Dollhouse

  The Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor

  Also by Ellen Gilchrist

  Connect with Diversion Books

  “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  PART I

  A Prologue

  Six months before he died he told his daughter that he had not wanted to remarry her mother. He was brushing his teeth while he told her. She liked to watch him brush his teeth. He was so efficient, so dedicated, so determined.

  “I did it to save the children,” he said. “I came back to save the children.”

  “You gave up the mistress to save what children?” the daughter asked.

  “To save Juliet. She was running around with the wrong crowd. She was going out with a black.”

  “So you tore up the life Mother was making for herself and made her marry you again to save Juliet?”

  “Had to do it. Had to stop that.” He was flossing now. He had been the first person she knew who used dental floss. It had been given to him by the pathological dentist who had ruined all their teeth in the sixties.

  The old man was eighty-eight when this conversation took place. The year after he lost all the money. The year before they took his car away and then his gun. He had had at one time almost twenty million dollars but he had lost it all. He had lost it by believing in his sons. Or else, he had lost it by being afraid to invest in the markets, by being afraid of the contemporary world, by being a racist and a misogynist and becoming an old man. His father had died a pauper and now he was about to die one too. Except for Social Security, a government program he would have ended if he could have. He had given at least one of his millions of dollars to the right wing of the Republican party. Now he was being taken care of by Social Security and Medicare. He saw the irony. What he could not see was how the weak destroy the strong within a family as well as in larger worlds. This happens in every family. It is as inevitable as the sun and rain. All the daughter wanted to know was how to keep it from happening to her.

  A Tree to Be Desired

  The old man lay dying. His great-grandsons sat on either side of the bed. They had been there all night, barely moving or speaking. The only other person in the room was the black male nurse sent by Hospice. His name was Adam Harris. He was twenty-five years old. This was the fourteenth night he had sat by the bed feeding droppers of water to the dying man and wiping his mouth and tongue with the lemon-flavored glycerin swabs. He had sat by the bed on the two nights when the old man’s sons had been there. He had sat by the bed when the youngest grandson had been there. He had sat by the bed when the old man’s physician brother had come from Memphis and changed the medication. They had changed from Haldol to morphine. Now it would not be long. Now the long nights would soon be over.

  The great-grandsons were the quietest men who had sat in the room all night. They were taller and sweeter and quieter than the redheaded sons and grandsons. Their sweet brown eyes met Adam’s eyes with a deeper, stranger sadness than the sons and grandsons. The old man had never screamed at them or hit them with his belt. They were not conflicted in their sadness. All the old man had ever done to them was laugh at them and give them candy and tell them about baseball games. He had never made them cut off their hair or work all day at meaningless chores or laughed at them for playing musical instruments. They did not live in Mobile where the old man lay dying. They lived forty miles away in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and worked in their fathers dry cleaning establishment and played in a band that had gone to Jazz Fest in New Orleans the year before.

  The great-grandsons were the children of the old man’s oldest granddaughter. Once she had been the prettiest girl in Mobile. She was still pretty. Tall and agile and full of the sort of restless energy that the sons and grandsons had. She had been in the house every one of the fourteen nights Adam had sat in the room feeding drops of water to the old man and bathing his lips and the inside of his mouth with the glycerin swabs. The old man was starving to death and dying of dehydration. He could not swallow and he refused to be taken to the hospital and put on a feeding tube. On the night that his physician brother had sat by the bed many people had wept many times. The brother had wept continually and the youngest grandson had wept and Adam had wept. The daughter had been there that night. She had kept thinking they should send the old man to the hospital whether he wanted to go or not. “It is too late,” the brother said. “It would do no good now.”

  That was the night they all gave up. They were crying because they knew they had to give up.

  The old man did not give up. When it was too late he called the oldest granddaughter into the room and rasped out five words. Take me to the hospital, he told her, but it was too late to go now. That was the night they changed the medication from Haldol to morphine.

  The granddaughter came into the room now. She went to Adam’s chair and put her hand on his shoulder. “How is he?” she asked. She was wearing the long pink-and-white chenille bathrobe she had worn every night since she had come to stay in the house. It belonged to the old man’s wife, who had almost stopped coming into the room. In the beginning, when the old man was crying out for her all the time, she came into the room many times. Now he had stopped asking for anything but water and she did not come in very often. She was in the kitchen, directing the maids to cook things for all the people who had come to stay in the house.

  “I don’t know. He seemed better a while ago,” Adam answered.

  “Come outside and talk to me,” the granddaughter said. “Willie and Sam can watch him.” Adam stood up
. One of the great-grandsons got up from his chair and went to Adam’s place and put his hand in the old man’s. The old man couldn’t talk anymore but he could squeeze their hands to mean yes and no.

  The granddaughter’s name was Juliet. She and Adam walked out of the room and down a hall to the den and went out onto a patio and lit cigarettes. It was beginning to be light in the sky. The moon was still visible, a clean new moon. Around it were six or seven bright stars. The planet Venus sat in the sky, right above the moon just like the fraternity pin of the old man who lay dying. There was a redwood picnic table on the patio and six or seven wrought-iron chairs. Juliet sat on one of the chairs and blew the smoke from her cigarette in a long thin line. A waft of air carried it toward a backyard swing. The robe had fallen open and her legs stuck out from the bottom of her short white nightgown. She was wearing pink sandals she had found in a closet and her toenails were painted a bright pale pink. She had not washed her hair in three days and it hung down her back and was tied with a faded red ribbon. She had been so beautiful when she was young that she had learned not to bother about her hair or clothes. She had become disenchanted with her beauty. Her husband had a girlfriend and that made her hate her beauty since it had betrayed and failed her. She looked up at Adam and smiled. He was more beautiful than she was because he was not sad. He had been sad when he had broken his ankle and ended his hopes of being a professional basketball player but he was not sad now because he had this job making twenty dollars an hour for staying up all night and he had a new Jeep Cherokee and an apartment of his own and the fourteen nights he had been in the Manning house had been pleasant compared to some of the places he had been sent by the Hospice people.

  “What do you think is going to happen?” Juliet asked. “How long do you think it’s going to be?”

  “He’s mighty strong. He’s the strongest man I’ve ever seen as old as he is. How old is he again?”

  “He will be eighty-nine in May. Next month, if he lives that long. He won’t live that long, will he?”

  “He was talking to your sons a while ago.”

  “Did you change the morphine patch?”

  “No. I wanted to wait until the nurse got here at eight. His daughter told me not to give him the morphine unless the nurse was here.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to her. She’s going crazy. She can’t take it. Neither can Grandmother. She’s not doing very well.”

  Adam looked at the pink toenail polish. He was starting to desire her again. He had been suffering that on and off since the night the two of them had sat by the bed all night alone, or else, since the night she had fixed a sandwich for him and brought it to him on a tray. He raised his eyes and met her eyes. She took a long drag on her cigarette and then put it out in a black wrought-iron ashtray made in the shape of a doll’s skillet.

  Adam walked across the patio to the basketball goal and picked up an old half-inflated ball and tossed it through the hoop. Juliet stood up and walked to where he was and picked up the fallen ball and shot a perfect hook shot. The robe was completely open now. She stopped and tied it tightly around her waist. Adam retrieved the ball and passed it to her. She shot again. This time the ball went through the hoop without even touching the rim. Swoosh. “You’re good,” Adam said. “Where’d you learn a shot like that?”

  “Basketball camp,” she said. “I ran the cafeteria so the boys could go to camp. At Auburn in the summers. We used to play in the afternoons. The staff would play. Did you ever play?”

  “I played for Delta State, up in Cleveland, Mississippi. Then I broke my ankle. I still can’t run.” He stood back about fifteen feet from the goal and shot the ball, but it bounced off the rim. “Damn. It’s not inflated.”

  “I know. Mine were lucky shots.” She picked up the ball and held it against her waist. It was growing light behind them. There was a fence across the back of the property and behind the fence a stand of pine and oak trees. Light was spreading through the trees and illuminating the soft cirrus clouds that hung in the late April sky. It was still cool in the mornings in Mobile, especially when the wind was blowing from the east. Juliet shivered. Adam walked to her and took off his windbreaker and put it around her shoulders. They stood there then, not talking, watching the moon fade into the growing blueness of the sky.

  Juliet’s grandmother came out onto the patio. She was still wearing her gown and robe. “Come in and get some breakfast,” she said. “Allison and your uncle Freddy are on their way. I need someone to go and get them at the airport.”

  “I’ll go,” Adam said. “As soon as the nurse gets here.”

  “I’ll go with him,” Juliet said. “I need to get out of the house for a while.”

  “Good,” the grandmother said. “Then eat breakfast and get dressed. The plane gets in at nine-fifteen. How is he, Adam?”

  “He had a good night. He woke up about three and talked to the boys. The morphine’s better than the Haldol. He’s a lot more comfortable now.”

  “Thank you for taking such good care of him.” She moved to him and put her hand on his arm. Juliet was still holding the basketball. She put it on one of the wrought-iron chairs. She went to her grandmother and put her arm around her waist.

  “The moon is very nice,” Juliet said. “It has Venus in its arms. Remember when you used to show us that and tell us it was Granddaddy’s fraternity pin?”

  They went into the kitchen where the grandmother had bacon cooking and toast warm on a tray. Adam took a seat at the table. Juliet stood by the stove. She picked up a piece of toast and began to nibble the hard edges of it. Her grandmother made delicious toast. It was made of white bread with four pats of butter on each slice. There were little pools of butter with the hard edges all around it. She had eaten this toast all her life when she visited them. It reminded her of the pond on her grandfather’s farm. Hard on the edge and soft in the center. After her grandfather got sick her grandmother had started making the toast with margarine instead of butter but this morning she had gone back to butter. “Sit down,” her grandmother said. “Let me feed you.”

  “No, this is all I want.” Her grandmother shook her head and served Adam a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon. Juliet stood by the stove watching him eat. He had elegant manners. He was an elegant man, elegant and still.

  “At least have some orange juice,” her grandmother said. “You aren’t eating enough.”

  “This is good. This is fine. I’m going to get dressed.”

  Her grandmother poured a glass of orange juice and gave it to Adam. Then she poured another one and handed it to Juliet. Juliet drank part of it. “Thank you,” she said. Then she left the kitchen and went into the spare bedroom and took off the robe and gown and put on a pair of slacks and a blouse. She went into her grandmother’s bathroom and washed her face and hands. She put some of her grandmother’s moisturizer on her face. She found a lipstick in her purse and put some on her lips. She started to leave the bedroom. Then she went back to the dresser and picked up a bottle of Guerlain’s Blue Hour and sprayed it on her hair. She brushed her hair very hard and pulled it back behind her ears. She shook her head at her reflection and turned and left the room and went out to the side yard to wait for Adam. A tree her grandmother had planted the day she was born grew in the side yard. It was a sturdy oak tree, now at least two feet in circumference. She stood looking at it, imagining her grandmother directing the yard man to set it in the hole, imagining the roots searching and seeking for water far down into the ground.

  “Are you ready?” Adam had come out and was standing by his car waiting for her.

  “Let’s go,” she said. He held the door open for her and she got in and put on the seat belt. They drove almost all the way to the airport in silence. “Meet me somewhere this afternoon,” she said finally. “Somewhere where we can be alone.”

  “You’re married.”

  “He has a girlfriend and the question isn’t marriage. The question is you’re black and I’m white. And, ye
s, I mean it. If you want it too.”

  He looked away, then back to her. “Go to the Ramada Inn on the highway. Get a room. At four o’clock. I’ll be there. I have to go home first and get some sleep.”

  “At four. I’ll be waiting there.”

  They picked up Juliet’s uncle and aunt and drove them to the house. Then Adam left and Juliet went inside and took off her clothes and got into the shower and washed her hair and shaved her legs.

  Then it was afternoon and she went to the motel and got a room and went up to it. Then he called and came up to the room and came inside and closed the door.

  It was like silk. It was like water. It was without cruelty or ego. It confirmed everything she had believed all her life. It was a different thing, a completely different thing.

  What was this difference? This vast unimaginable difference?

  How flighty she seemed to him. How frightened. Like a bird imprisoned in a room, trying to find an open window or a door. He wanted music. “There should be music,” he said.

  “There is plenty of music,” she answered. “I can hear it everywhere.”

  The old man died that night. Adam was in the room and one of the old man’s sons and his oldest grandson. They sat with the body until the Hospice people came and took it away.

  On the morning of the old man’s funeral Adam woke up feeling lonely. His apartment was too quiet. There was no one there to talk to or eat breakfast with. It was a new apartment complex in a safe neighborhood and everyone had already gone to work. Adam’s girlfriend had been there the night before but she had only stayed long enough to start an argument. She had gone there wanting to start an argument. She was sick of Adam. Sick of only seeing him in the afternoons. Sick of spending every night alone. She was twenty years old and ambitious. She had a job at a television studio and she got off work two hours before Adam had to go to work. Sometimes he even worked on the weekends. Sometimes he smelled like death. What he did reminded her of death and she was looking for life. She didn’t care if he had a Jeep Cherokee and was the best-looking and most polite boyfriend she had ever had. She had young men waiting in the wings. She didn’t have to sit around watching television all night by herself while he waited for someone to die. She went over to Adam’s house to pick a fight and she picked one and then she left.