Flights of Angels Read online

  “Let’s sleep on it,” Ariel said. She was giggling and also trying to act wise. “Seize the day and all of that.”

  Daniel slept on an air mattress and the two women shared the bed. Late in the night, when she knew Ariel was asleep, Sally took her pillow and went into the living room and found Daniel and climbed down into his arms. He was awake. He had been waiting for her.

  “What do you think?” Sally asked. “Does she seem all right to you?”

  “She seems fine.”

  “She has problems. She never finishes anything she starts. This desire to find you is the first real passion I’ve seen her display in months. She’s lost her enthusiasm. I don’t know. Maybe I watch her too closely.”

  “We weren’t good parents, Sally, because we didn’t know how to be. I was the main villain because I gave up and left, but you weren’t much better. We were both nuts. Driven nuts by our culture. Every time I read an article about early childhood development I get crazy thinking about how little we knew.”

  “We did the best we could. At least we had her. Most of my friends got abortions. I don’t know anyone else who had a kid if they got pregnant without wanting to.”

  “She’s supposed to be grateful for that?”

  Sally pulled away from him. “I’d forgotten what it was like to talk to you, how unpleasant you are. The problem is how to help her now. She’s got to finish college. If she has that she’ll begin to believe in herself.”

  “That’s simplistic. I counsel people her age. If they aren’t doing well at something, often it’s because they don’t really like it. If they are truly interested in what they’re studying, they will do well at it.”

  “Oh, God, don’t go preaching that to her. That’s the line that got half the people we knew into trouble. The ones who thought they would be poets.” It was mean and she knew it but she couldn’t seem to stop herself from saying it. She moved off the bed and sat cross-legged on the floor looking at him. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean you. I don’t know why I came in here. I guess I thought we’d make love and everything would be erased. I thought you’d kiss me and it would all fall into place. Sleeping Beauty, although it’s more like Alice in Wonderland. I keep shrinking and expanding. She’s all right most of the time, except for hating her body. She’s okay. And I’m glad you’re here so she can see you.”

  “Don’t go getting down on poetry.” He smiled and sat up and began to quote a poem of Merwin’s that had been taped to the refrigerator in the house on Octavia Street.

  “Long afterwards

  the intelligent could deduce what had been offered

  and not recognized

  and they suggest that bitterness should he confined

  to the fact that the gods chose for their arbiter

  a mind and character so ordinary

  albeit a prince. . . .”

  “You always did that when you wanted the last word. Well, I’m going back to bed. It’s too late for this.”

  “If you want to get laid I’m available.”

  “Good night, Daniel.” She stood up, then walked to him and kissed him and then went back to the bedroom and got in bed beside her child. She rolled over on her side and covered her arm with the old red wool blanket Daniel had owned as long as she had known him. It was one of the few things he had taken when he left. It touched her somehow that he had kept this same old blanket for so many years and kept it clean. He must have washed this thing a hundred times, she decided, and it’s barely faded. She began to sink into sleep. She was thinking about the chapel at Tulane and Merwin reading and the hushed excitement of the night. I’m glad I had that, she decided. Or my whole life might have been as dull as the last few years. She began to tell herself the end of the poem Daniel had been quoting, a poem she had been so proud once of learning and understanding. A poem about human love, a force so powerful the Greeks had believed it was a goddess.

  then a mason working above the gates of Troy

  in the sunlight thought he felt the stone

  shiver

  in the quiver on Paris’s back the head

  of the arrow for Achilles’ heel

  smiled in its sleep

  and Helen stepped from the palace to gather

  as she would do every day in that season

  from the grove the yellow ray flowers tall

  as herself

  whose roots are said to dispel pain

  The Carnival of the Stoned Children

  Abby and I didn’t have anything to do that day so we decided to go over to Mandeville and lie in the sun and try to starve ourselves. I have a house in Mandeville on a little river called the Bogue Chitta. It was once a small resort hotel and there is a pretty beach surrounded by Cape jasmine bushes and cypress trees and brilliant willows with capes of moss as thick as velvet. It is very romantic and morose. Abby needed to get away. She had just recovered from the first case of herpes simplex ever documented in New Orleans and she was in a strange and desperate mood. Her ex-husband had given it to her one night when he brought the children home and caught her in a lonely mood.

  After it was diagnosed half the obstetricians and gynecologists on the Ochsner’s staff were coming in and out of her hospital room taking notes for articles they were writing about the new epidemic. Her ex-husband stopped by and told her he had something similar a few weeks before but had recovered without going to a doctor. We didn’t know it then but it turned out that his whole law firm and their wives and secretaries and the secretaries’ husbands were infected.

  This was not funny. This was very, very serious. Abby’s father is an obstetrician at Ochsner’s so he was forcing everyone to look at what had happened. The air was poisoned all over the downtown business district of New Orleans and in many houses in the upper and lower Garden Districts and down in the Irish Channel and in some apartments in the Quarter. It was the beginning of the end of the sexual revolution but we didn’t know that yet.

  While Abby was in the hospital with the terrible lesions on her body and the physicians coming and going I went down twice a day and sat by her bed. How could this have happened to us, I wondered. We were so pretty and well meaning and sweet. We overpaid our servants and never said mean things in public and marched against the war. We drove small energy-efficient automobiles and read books and went to poetry readings at Tulane and ran in the park and loved our children even if we hadn’t wanted to have them. Why were we being picked out for a plague?

  “If only there was someone to sue,” she said many times. Abby had a degree in law from Tulane but she had never practiced because she had the children instead thanks to falling in love with a man who reminded her of her father. Plus she failed the bar and went into a depression.

  “Someone to sue or someone to kill,” I would answer. This was before it occurred to me that we could become biochemists and develop antiviral drugs. Something to kill was an idea I would develop later.

  It was about a month after Abby recovered and before she realized the lesions were going to recur and recur and recur that we got so bored we decided to go spend the night in Mandeville and starve ourselves. We believed in fasts at the time, quick fixes. At getting five pounds off in two days. We didn’t give a damn what happened next. We had faith in the moment, the golden present, the day.

  I parked my kids with my mother-in-law and Abby parked hers with her mother and we set off in my little Rambler station wagon with the windows down and the portable tape player on the seat beside us playing John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things.” “Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes. Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes. . . .”

  “Has anybody else broken out with it?” I asked. I was driving. Abby was manning the tape player, rewinding it every time “My Favorite Things” was over. It was the only song we wanted to hear that week.

  “Yeah. Frank Osler’s wife is in bed and two of the secretaries at the firm. This is an epidemic, Rhoda. A sexually transmitted disease. It’s like syphilis use
d to be only there aren’t any drugs for it yet. Daddy said it’s only beginning to be recognized. He’s furious that there aren’t any public health warnings about it.”

  “Oh, well, they’ll find a cure. They always do.”

  “They might not. You don’t know how much it hurt. I couldn’t go to the bathroom for days. It hurt so much I would rather have died.”

  “Don’t I know it. I was watching. If that dentist hadn’t shown up with that topical anesthetic, you might have had your bladder burst.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Your mother did.”

  “Is this story all over town?”

  “No.” I was lying and she knew it.

  “Yes, it is. Oh, God, why did this happen to me?”

  “It’s just bad luck. It’s not like you did something wrong.”

  “Don’t talk about it anymore. What are we going to do when we get to Mandeville?”

  “We’ll eat carrot sticks and drink water and maybe have a hard-boiled egg for lunch. Then for supper we’ll have a salad and take a sleeping pill so we’ll sleep. I have fourteen of them I saved from when I broke my leg.”

  “Are you sure they’re still good?”

  “I hope so. It’s only been a year since I got them.”

  “What else will we do?”

  “I don’t know. Exercise, take a walk, go swimming. We could take out the canoe. I don’t think the motorboat is working.”

  “We could go up to Red Falls and tube down to the house. Remember when we did that last summer? That would take up some time.”

  “That’s the problem with starving. You have to keep finding things to do. Time passes so slowly when you’re hungry.”

  We drove in silence for a while. I was glad to be away from my house. I was the mother of three bad teenage boys. Wild boys, the wildest boys in New Orleans, perhaps the world. Well, that’s not true, but for fifteen years, since the first one was born, it had seemed that way. I didn’t even want any children but here I was with a passel of wild boys, a career of boys, eating up about ninety percent of my brain on any given day, since the first one was born when I was nineteen years old and wilder than any of them would ever be. I knew wild. I was born wild and I was still wild so they couldn’t fool me, except that they were fooling me and would keep on doing it.

  While Abby was suffering the first documented case of herpes simplex in New Orleans, I had been breaking up a drug ring at Benjamin Franklin and Bob Taylor and Country Day. My fourteen-year-old had been mailing LSD to a Jewish friend up north in a school for the deaf. He was mailing something called White Rabbit. The friend had been mailing back something called blotter acid, which comes on blue paper that looks like the sheets Leonardo used for drawing. The mother of the deaf boy and I had intercepted the letters. Then we had searched their rooms and collected evidence and called the parents of the recipients of the drugs and had meetings with them in the living room. My husband is a lawyer and although he is not the children’s natural father he is the best stepfather who ever lived and he was extremely good at calming down the panicked parents of what can only be called my son’s clients.

  “You aren’t the only one who has troubles,” I said to Abby. “You can’t imagine what it was like when we got all those parents together to tell them their kids were taking LSD. You’d have thought Eric and I were selling the drugs. Some of them got mad at me.”

  “Kill the messenger. It’s all straightened out now, isn’t it?”

  “Who knows. Jimmy swore he’d never take another drug. And his deaf friend is back at Bob Taylor. Jimmy cried, Abby. It almost broke my heart.”

  “He’s such a darling child. He’s the sweetest boy in the world.”

  We drove to the edge of town and out onto the Pontchartrain Causeway, a twenty-four-mile bridge that connects New Orleans with Mandeville. I have a great fondness for the causeway because of having run a marathon across it one February day. When I come to the span where I fell and cut my knee and got up and kept on running I always want to weep. It was my greatest moment, the apex of my physical courage.

  “That’s where I cut my knee,” I said.

  “I know,” she answered. “And a great ball of dried blood formed and when you got finished with the race it fell off and the leg was well, proving we could heal if we let ourselves.”

  “It was a meaningful moment in my life.”

  “So you think the drug ring is busted?”

  “We took away their money and their privileges. Danny is home from the deaf school. Jimmy is being tutored so he can catch up in his classes. We’re just going to watch him like a hawk. We’re not going to take our eyes off him.”

  “Is Eric at home? Will Jimmy be all right while we’re gone?”

  “He’s going over to my mother-in-law’s. Eric’s gone to Chicago but he’ll be back tomorrow. We’re only going to spend the night, you know.”

  “I was only asking.”

  We drove along. I had been reading Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. I was thinking about the marvelous passage where the hero, Joseph Knecht, the Magister Ludi, reminds his friend Plinio how to meditate. “Look,” he said. “This landscape of clouds and sky. At first glance you might think the depths are there where it is darkest; but then you realize . . . that the depths of the universe begin only at the fringes and fjords of this mountain range of clouds. . . . The depths and mysteries of the universe lie not where the clouds and blackness are; the depths are to be found in the spaces of clarity and serenity. . . .”

  Over at the Bob Taylor School, Jimmy was fighting his desire to go to sleep in algebra class. His deaf friend, Danny, was asleep beside him. They had smoked a joint on the way to school and now they were going to sleep. They had meant it when they swore off LSD. They were leaving LSD to their older brothers. But they were only planning on cutting down on marijuana. It was easy to cut down this week since neither of them had any money.

  “I might be able to get some money from my grandmother this afternoon,” Jimmy was saying. “I guess I could ask her for some.”

  “Didn’t your mother tell her not to gib you any? My mother called everyone in the family and told them not to gib me money.” Danny could talk extremely well for someone who was totally deaf but he still got some of the consonants wrong. His parents had spent almost eighty thousand dollars sending him to deaf schools and hiring elocution coaches. Of course, he hadn’t become deaf until he got chicken pox in the second grade so he knew how to talk before he lost his hearing. Also, he had a very high IQ and he could learn fast. The best school he had gone to was the one in Rhode Island that had turned out to be the hotbed of drugs. It was a shame he had left it and come back to Bob Taylor, which was more a football camp than a school, but he and Jimmy didn’t think so. They thought it was fabulous that they were back together. They were sworn friends and allies, who had smoked their first joint together in the vacant lot behind Trip Halley’s house and known their first French Quarter whores that same night. Actually they had known the same whore, first Danny and then Jimmy.

  Danny’s head fell down on his desk. Jimmy’s moved further down his arm. The algebra teacher, a man named Wedge, decided to ignore Danny and Jimmy. They were football players and couldn’t be held to the standards of the other students.

  Down at his law office, my husband, Eric, was also having plenty of excitement. A water heater company he represented had just been presented with a petition for a union election. If there was one thing my husband hated it was a union trying to organize a company he represented when the management was already doing everything in their power to be fair and pay good wages and take care of their employees. It was Eric’s job to make sure they did those things so he would never have to oversee and win a union election. He could do it. He had done it a hundred times successfully, which is why he is rich, but he hated doing it. His other job was to oversee his companies’ hiring practices. He had been on his way to Chicago when the call came from the water heater company i
n Alabama. Now he would have to change his plans. The first thing he did was call me but I didn’t answer the phone. If there was one thing Eric hated more than letting union organizers slip through his hiring nets it was having me not answer the phone when he wanted to talk to me.

  Finally the maid answered the phone and told him I had gone to Mandeville for the day. “Tell her I’ll be home for supper after all,” he told the maid. “You all get something for me to eat. Cook me some of your fantastic fried chicken.”

  “I’ll do it,” she said. “And biscuits too. But Mrs. Pais isn’t coming back. They went to spend the night and quit eating.”

  “Where are the boys going to be?”

  “Over at your momma’s.”

  “Okay. Go on home to your children as soon as you fry the chicken. How much is she paying you now, Charleen?”

  “Twenty dollars a day.”

  “It’s not enough. I’m giving you a raise. When do you get paid?”

  “Friday.”

  “Expect a raise.”

  “Do you want me to call Mrs. Pais and tell her to send the boys home?”

  “No, I’ll do it when I get there. I don’t know how late I’ll be.”

  “Nothing ever happens anymore,” I was telling Abby. “We need to have a party. There hasn’t been a party in weeks.”

  “Let’s go to your mother’s house on the coast instead. We could take the children for Easter weekend like we did last year. Maybe your cousins will be there from North Carolina.”

  “We might.” I rolled over on my back and felt the sun melt down into my skin. We were on beach blankets right at the edge of the water on the little private beach on the river. Sunlight and shadow, the cool smell of the small brown river. Luxury. It didn’t matter if I was bored. At least Eric was gone to Chicago and I didn’t have to stay home and get supper ready. I sank my head down into the sweet-smelling blanket. I started making up poems I might write down in a little while. Poems about Eric and me when we were madly in love and trying to figure out a way to get married. About holding hands with him and telling him there was nothing to fear, nothing we couldn’t do together, no obstacles we couldn’t overcome.