Bereavements (10 page)

Aurelio had forgotten his son was there, but seeing him, smiled his most irresistible, only-for-you smile, his surprise and pleasure, if slightly alcoholic, deeply genuine.

He’d been sitting so long in one position that he groaned in exaggerated pain as he removed his big hairy legs from the couch (on which, opened up, he slept) and placed his feet on the floor, patting the seat next to him—where the boy had spent so many TV years—inviting Angel to curl up in comfort beside him.

“The late show’s goin’ on”—his eyes back on the screen. “Com’on. Le’s see what it is; maybe somethin’ good.”

The MGM lion growled into view, faded and somehow mangy in its small square box, accompanied by some tinny music on flawed, slowed-down tape.

Aware of his son’s deliberate delay, his hesitancy, Auri’s face clouded. He turned from the blue-white blink of the screen that had announced “This Time for Keeps” starring someone called Esther Williams, to coax the boy with a frowning, good-natured if vaguely hurt look of reassurance. “Com’on;
noth
in’s going to happen.” And he patted the seat again.

Angel wet a few ink-stained fingers, rubbed them against his shirt, pretending to clean them, but really to impress his father that he’d been hard at work. Then, all of his muscles tight, without any of the snuggling-up pleasure that had gone on for so many years—since he was five, perhaps, or whatever age his eyes had learned to make story-telling sense of the TV screen—sat down beside his father.

It was one o’clock and he should be in bed, that is, if he intended to go to school the next day, but Auri never cared how late he stayed up. If he did fall asleep during the show, which of course had happened more often than not over the years, he seldom knew, for his father would carry the sleeping boy to the studio bed across the room, remove his sneakers and levis and tuck him in.

There had been a growing enjoyment to this ritual and Angel, particularly during the last year and for a reason that revealed its purpose only recently, had sometimes faked or half-faked the sleeping part, letting his head droop and then fall against his father’s smooth, firm shoulder or hairy chest.

Being handled, being touched so lovingly, Auri straining to be quiet and gentle—the tug on the heels of his sneakers, his fly unzipped, the pull of his jeans down his legs—all this had a half-conscious, dream-quality of growing sensual pleasure.

It was to this bedtime ritual, however, surely universal and common to every father with a small sleepy son, that Auri’s “nothin’s going to happen” referred, because Angel, at fourteen, was hardly small, and something had definitely happened just a few weeks before.

Instead of a heavy-lidded head dropping to Auri’s shoulder or chest, it had slipped slowly lower until, like a great round warm stone, it rested in Auri’s lap. The boy—a few heart-pounding moments later, only half asleep, having mixed accident with secret purpose—experience the slow, growing excitement of his father’s sexual arousal.

He almost choked with the horrendous pleasure and terror of the moment, tried to stop what he thought must be a visible beat of his quickened heart through the cage of his underfleshed ribs, and pretended to breathe heavily, groaning slightly, tossing in the deepest of sleeps.

For some moments—and this was the hair-rising, total conspiratorial horror of it—Auri didn’t move, couldn’t move: he was too drowned in pleasure, half-senseless from the shock of finally knowing, with no doubt, what all the intimate games (including the fun-fights and harmless beatings-up) with his son truly meant, were all about. But then, almost instantly afterward, with a moral jerk of purpose, he gathered up the “sleeping” boy in his arms and carried him to bed.

Unable to resist, and never one for too much subtlety, Auri found out what he wanted and needed to know. After undressing Angel as usual, he put a quick, light hand directly on his son’s crotch.

Sleeping or not, the boy trembled with passion, and in a glory of shame came tumbling out all over himself at his father’s merest touch.

There was no call from Angel, the phone didn’t ring, and Mrs. Evans spent a fretful, disappointed morning wondering why. She fussed with her daily mail, signed checks and papers by the dozens, and thumbed almost blindly through
The New York Times.

Had he forgotten the number, or, having written it down, lost it? Had he changed his mind? Had her voice, her manner, her tone, been overly-anxious, insistent: had she frightened him in some odd, unimaginable way? Had his father suspected the lie of the feigned situation and beaten the truth from him, making him promise, the trembling words forced from between bruised lips, never to consummate a meeting with “that strange woman” who wants God-knows-what from a teen-age boy?

She recalled his
yes, yes;
his tens of yes’s, his
that’s easy.
Nothing at all had seemed wrong. No; it was her own impatience, the quality of her neurotic demand that she made of a delayed phone call a life-or-death necessity. She must be calm; there was no reason to doubt he would call as promised. As promised.

Still, except for coffee, she left her 11 o’clock breakfast untouched, and spoke angrily to Rose because there was a hairline crack in the cup. Why hadn’t it been thrown away? Didn’t the foolish girl know that cracks in a cup, on a microscopic scale, were immense harbors for billions of germs the size of ocean liners?

It had been an inordinately silly thing to say, and poor Rose, slightly pink under her carefully-pressed white collar, held the beautiful bone china cup with its arabesque of delicate blue flowers an inch from her nose, searching, intially in vain, for the
Leonardo da Vinci
in its vast polluted pool.

Evidently she found it. If the crack hadn’t been there, the spunky girl would have fought to the death maintaining its absence. The cup clattered, doom sealed, to its saucer, whereupon Rose picked up the tray, nose high, chin firm, and walked from the room.

Mrs. Evans sighed, feeling guilty and depressed. But then, when Dori came in, she was quite as bad. He appeared, cap in hand, to tell her that Jodi had called to report an unexpected touch of frost that morning and did she remember that last Spring the greenhouse furnace had broken down beyond repair?

Of course she remembered!

“. . . Well!?”
Was that a question? Was this some sort of memory test? Were all the servants conspiring to gather enough evidence to commit her to a state institution?

The chauffeur looked so stunned, it altered her tone instantly.

“Dori! I’m sorry! Don’t look at me so. You’ve seen me this way before. Now what is the question? Should the furnace be replaced? Yes! Of course! Immediately. There’s no need to ask. Am I to allow a thousand glorious flowers to perish in the cold, die, frozen to death, an army of fallen soldiers?”

The metaphor was not only a horror, but forever, eternally unforgivable! If Dori had quit his job on the spot she couldn’t possibly have blamed him.

Well—nevermind. Broken furnaces and cracks in china teacups; the servants had certainly been with her long enough to know and expect the atrocities of which she was sometimes capable.

At that moment, the phone rang: purred, really, so vibrant and soft was its especially wired sound, and one of the four clear plastic buttons on top was blinking. But it was only ridiculous Rose, still unforgiving, announcing in a cool, too-clear voice that one of the attorneys, Mr. Comstock, adding vengefully to annoy her, “of Comstock, Little, Livermore and Greene” was on Number One and did she wish to speak to him.

She didn’t.

Angel called just after three. He was out of school, he said, his mouth full of something, teeth chomping. Did she . . . Would it be all right. . .Did she want. . .Should he come by? That is, “if it ain’t too far.” She did, “din’ she,” live in Manhattan?

“Now!?”
she asked wildly, looking about the perfect, beautiful room as if it were in complete disarray. But she wouldn’t receive him here, in her bedroom, of course. Phone in hand, she turned to a full-length mirror: it was
she
who was in disarray, still in her nightgown, unshowered, unbrushed, uncombed, not to mention the disorder of her emotions.

Sooner murder an infant in its cradle . . .

She must seize the moment, regardless. But the boy had trouble understanding that someone would “pick him up.”

Who?
Who?
he kept demanding, suspicious, as if the plot involved kidnap. Well, Dori, Dori, of course; “he’ll come by in the car; I’m in the Village; not far.”

When he finally understood that Dori was a chauffeur, there was prolonged silence.

“Angel—?”

There was no dial tone, so he hadn’t hung up.

“Are you there? Angel? What’s the matter?”

Faintly—”But how will he know me?”

“Oh,
darling
—!” (was she speaking to Jamie!). “He won’t, of course”—laughing—”unless you carry a red rose or balance a book on your head. But you’ll know him. He’ll be dressed in a uniform and driving a black Rolls Royce.

Another silence, then a doubtful, drawn out, “Well—” as if what she’d said changed everything.

Finally: “I din’ know you was rich.”

She was astonished. “Does it matter? How can it? I don’t understand.” Idiotically—“Somebody has to be rich. That is. . .” She felt in serious danger of losing him. “It’s not personal: my wealth. I mean it isn’t—
mine.
It
is,
but I didn’t do anything, I didn’t earn it, not all, only some, through investments. I’ve been married more than once,
three
times, to be exact, and all my husbands—” was she ruining everything?—“were extremely wealthy men. They’re dead now: all three; I’m a widow. That’s why . . .”

She stopped, and each of them nursed, a little, the silence between them. Had she lost him, so absurdly, because she was rich?

“I’ll tell you what—” Angel said, the first to speak. “I don’ want no
show-fur
and no Rolls Royce in fron’ a’ my house. If my father sees. . .” He paused. “I’ll go to the corner of—le’s see—Madison Avenue an’ 103rd; you turn the corner goin’ west an’ there’s a big red church, St. Agnes. I’ll be in fron’—like one of them statues.” He laughed, more relaxed now. “I’ll be standin’ there like Jesus or St. Joseph.” More laughter. There was evidently someone with him, or behind, because she heard scuffling and a few laughing obscenities thrown over his shoulder.

Then he was back on the phone, his mouth so close and shouting she could almost not hear. “I gotta go home firs’, so I’ll be there, le’s see, aroun’ four. That okay? It ain’t too late . . . ?”

“No,” Mrs. Evans replied. “That will be fine.” Fine. And after he’d hung up, she stood there dazed, the phone cradled to her breast, her face so pale she might just this minute have given a pint of blood to the Red Cross, murmuring to the quiet, cool spaces of her lovely room: “It ain’t too late.”

And, wheeling slowly, disturbed but vaguely pleased with her performance, after all, asked: “Is it?”

He sends his love.

Many kisses . . .