The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (5 page)

I headed painfully back toward the bank, sliding-single-step by sliding-single-step. I imagined that I was pushing off my skate blades from one side to the other and was cruising across the surface of the pond at an incredible speed, when suddenly my father swept out of nowhere, like a moving waterfall, sliced hugely across in front of me, careened powerfully over to my other side. Where he changed direction! Skated
backwards
! And I saw then that I was plodding, step by step, at about one-eighth my normal walking rate.

My father grinned and nodded and said, “Good, good. You’re doing fine.
Real
fine.”

The ride home, about seven miles, seemed to take mere seconds. My father and I talked almost not at all, which, normal for us, seemed especially so that day. My mind was filled with a new sense of my body, a sense that, while it may well have been made of some kind of malleable substance, it nonetheless possessed a shrewd, persistently willful, and possibly cruel mind of its own.

I did not see the trees and fields as we passed, did not even notice that we were home, until my father, having shut off the motor and opened his door, said, “You coming in or going to sit there till dark?” I jumped, but then saw that he was smiling.

As soon as we were inside the house, my mother rushed to me, and I quickly showed her my skates and said that I had learned how to ice-skate. My father did not contradict me. Taking off our coats, he and I stood together near the stove for a few minutes, warming our hands and feet, and when I asked him if we could go skating again soon, he said, “Sure. Tomorrow, if you want.”

I said that I wanted to, right after breakfast, and he grinned at me with appreciation and then at my mother in triumph.

Trying to remember if I’ve ever seen any pictures, snapshots, of my father and me that show us skating together, I realized that none of the pictures that have come down to me from those years shows us, any of us, in the winter. The wintertime snapshots inevitably are of the house banked in with head-high snowdrifts, the dates and descriptive comments always written on the back by my mother.

Jan. 12
^th
, 1943! Wow! The big one!
Taken to impress our cousins living in regions to the south of us, a way for us to brag of our hardiness.

Our house, March 21
^st
, 1946! First day of spring! Ha-ha!
Just the house, or maybe nothing more than the fluff-crowned roof and tops of the windows barely visible above the snow. There are never any people to be seen. My mother and my brother and I must be inside the house, looking out of one of those dark, small-pane windows at my father, who stands out by the road, snow up to his waist. Holding the box camera squarely in front of his belt buckle, he squints down into the viewfinder, finds the view sufficiently desolate, and snaps the picture.

Probably the cameras most people owned in those days were not very effective in the dim, gray light of winter. But even so, it is odd that fully one-half of our yearly existence then is represented by fewer than a dozen pictures of our house and automobile, when the other half of the year seems to have been photographed endlessly.

Another curious aspect is that, even though my memories of those years are almost completely of summertime, it was the winter that dominated our activities, filling our talk and views of the rest of the world, so that we could not even speak of a place without first mentioning that it enjoyed a kinder climate than ours. Of events that took place in summer, however, I recall only the general condition and have obtained my formal knowledge of the events themselves solely as data. It’s as if they could as easily have occurred in someone else’s life.

The context of an event, the textures, physically, emotionally, spiritually, these remain uniquely our own; the particulars of an event, what we use to name it for strangers, are no more ours alone than our dates of birth. Perhaps this is why so much of the act of remembering is an act of the body, and why, sitting in my living room late at night, I can recall none of the particular, isolate experiences that, inevitably, come to me in a solid, complete block when, at the end of a November day, I grab my ice skates off the nail in the barn, walk across the road, and cross through the gray butts of winter grass to the pond. The sky is like a peach-colored sheet drawn taut at the horizon, a high rim miles away that circles the center of the pond. The air is still, thin, and cold. In a week, there will be a thick pelt of snow over everything that today stands before me like gray, brown, and lavender bone, cleaned and scoured by cold alone, neither dead nor dormant, but fixed, held in time the way a snapshot freezes a gesture at its completion or its start. And as long as the fading daylight holds, the pond, black and smooth as a gigantic lens, is the precise center of the sphere of space into which I have placed myself. I cannot see the house or the road from here, can see no way out.

I sit on the steep, rock-hard eastern bank and take off my boots and put on my skates, and when I stand up, I am on the ice, moving across the black surface of the pond like a man running slowly through a dream, on a level plane, but also inside a matrix, as if underwater, free of gravity’s grating tug, and free as well to ply the weight of my body gracefully against it, like a dancer sliding against the felt measures of time.

The Caul

You are in Richmond, Virginia, and you can’t remember your mother. She was an actress, she was beautiful, they say. No one remembers your father. Of him they say nothing, and so, you believe, it is “natural” that you do not remember him. But your mother carried you here to the city of Richmond—in her arms, in her arms. She languished through the sweltering months of summer. The play moved on to Charleston without her. Her pain increased daily. The coughing from the attic room, the groans, the sudden shrieks. The women muffled your ears against them. You were bad, a bad boy, bad little boy. She died. You can’t remember her face, her touch, her smell, her voice, all of which were beautiful, they say. They tell you this even today, the few who knew her those last months. Women, young women then, old women now. You remind them of her. If only
they
could remind
you
of her. You are Edgar Poe the poet, author of “The Raven.” In a few moments, you will recite that beloved, that “magnificent and profound” poem to the literary citizens of Richmond, Virginia. Afterwards, in the Reverend Doctor Woolsey’s parlor, you will describe how you actually composed the poem, the rational procedures by which you constructed it, and they will be amazed. You, too, will be amazed at this new account of your ingenuity and self-sufficiency, your mastery of the intricacies and logic of language and emotion. And your mother would be amazed, had she lived to see it, hear it, watch you mystify them by means of demystification, enchant them by means of disenchantment, bewilder them with your clarity. They will feel privileged and released, for you will have demonstrated how any one of them could have written your beloved poem himself, had he merely been willing to apply himself to the task. But you, of course, have been the only one willing to apply himself to the task, and that is the reason the poem is yours, the reason you are its author, Edgar Poe the poet. Anyone could be Edgar Poe the poet, anyone, were he merely willing to apply himself to the task. You believe that, and when you politely excuse yourself and depart from the company of these literary ladies and gentlemen of Richmond, Virginia, they will believe it, too. It will give them a certain relief. How wonderful, they will each separately think, to know that one could be Edgar Poe the poet if one merely applied oneself to the task. And how wonderful, they will each separately think, to be free not to apply oneself to the task! They will each accept one more glass of sherry, and, in your absence, will admire your elegant yet forceful presence upon the stage, your charm and lucidity in private conversation, your erudition, your “profound and tender” eyes, your “musical” voice, all quite as if each person in the room were separately admiring his own presence upon the stage, his own charm, lucidity, erudition, eyes, voice. They will each separately admire your irresistibly beautiful mind. Your fame. Your position among men. Your role with women. Your exotic past. Your dead mother.

You have been seated on a straight-backed chair in the center of the stage. A few feet in front of you, the Reverend Doctor Woolsey reads at the lectern from his prepared introductory speech. You watch his broad back, his speckled hands, his rising fluff of white hair. The thick tube of fat at the base of his skull contracts and hardens, and the Reverend Doctor lifts his gaze to the heavens so as more adequately to praise the poet, Edgar Poe, author of “The Raven.” You. Who cannot remember your mother. In your dreams she appears with her back to you, her arms outstretched before her. She ignores your call of,
Mother! Mother! It is I, Edgar Poe the poet!
But she does not flee or otherwise remove herself from you. She stands there in a white dress, as if at a lectern, with her arms outstretched, her gaze lifted heavenward, as if more adequately to praise her son, or as if to pray for permission for him to join her. For, without permission, you cannot join her, you may not move your feet, you may not take a single step toward her. It is as if you are bad, a bad boy, bad little boy. That is how she appears in your dreams of her and how you also appear there. A moribund tableau vivant, a frieze cut in a wall of darkness. Not a conscious memory, though. When awake, you try to remember your mother, as you do now, and you remember nothing, and since no mind can picture nothing, you remember Mr. Allan and the tobacco warehouses, the canal alongside the James River, your cousin Virginia and her mother. You recall your room at the college in Charlottesville, the parade ground at West Point, and then your half-empty bottle of Madeira on the spindly table offstage right. You remember your white handkerchief, slightly spotted with the wine wiped from your chin, now tucked neatly into your breast pocket to hide the purple stains from view of the audience, who can see you clearly up here stage center. Someone in that audience is coughing, nervous, repeated coughs coming from her throat, habitual and not the consequence or sign of illness. It will have a slight, negative effect on your recitation, for, unless you can pick up the rhythm, the pattern of her coughing, and can arrange always to be speaking at the same time, she will succeed in coughing while you are silent between stanzas or when you pause momentarily for dramatic effect, and it may have the effect of silencing you completely. You listen closely for the pattern of her coughs, and, surreptitiously, you hope, slip your watch from your vest pocket and study its face, while the Reverend Doctor Woolsey continues his lengthy introduction of the poet Edgar Poe and the unseen woman coughs, then coughs again, and, after thirty-two seconds, yet again. You calculate that if you commence reciting the poem seventeen seconds after a given cough, she will cough again in the middle of the third line and after that at the middle of every twelfth line (the fifteenth, twenty-seventh, thirty-ninth, et cetera) and at the end of every twelfth line from the beginning (the twelfth, twenty-fourth, thirty-sixth, et cetera). This particular spacing will minimize the effect of her coughing, will make it only slightly negative. But negative just the same, for it means that you will have to run each of those twelfth end-stopped lines rapidly into the following line, which will blur your every sixth rhyme and somewhat diminish the dramatic structure of the poem. As for its effect on the raven’s harsh refrain, you can only hope that the audience is sufficiently familiar with the poem to hear with its collective ear the croak of
Nevermore
in the very coughing of the woman, as it were, as if you Edgar Poe the poet said nothing, as if you merely mouthed the words, for the raven, for the unseen woman in the audience coughing, for the woman in your dream, for your mother dying in an attic room in Richmond, Virginia, your mother, whose consumptive cough and groans and finally her shrieks are muffled into silence by the women in the kitchen wrapping your head with a scarf so that you cannot hear your mother dying, will not remember this awful time in your life, and will not remember your mother.

You return to the hotel, sober and alone, exchange greetings and complaints about the midsummer heat with the desk clerk, and climb the carpeted stairs to your room on the second floor. The recitation went well. You overcame the woman’s coughing interruptions just as you’d planned, and at the end the audience rose and applauded with gratitude. A few women near the front, when they rose from their seats to thank you for reciting your “magnificent and profound” poem, could be seen with tears washing their cheeks. Afterwards, when you departed the stage, you discovered that someone, a janitor probably, had removed your half-emptied bottle as a blessing and a sign, and later, at the Reverend Doctor Woolsey’s gathering for the literary ladies and gentlemen of Richmond, Virginia, you declined the sherry and asked for water, a glass of cool, clear water with a bruised leaf of mint dropped into it. And so now you arrive at your hotel room sober. But late, past midnight, for, because tonight you were sober, you spoke to the ladies and gentlemen with a lucidity driven by logic that astonished them and made them beg you to stay and continue to mystify, enchant, and bewilder them. One is always amazed by what is most rational, you muse as you enter your darkened room. The irrational, even though it makes one feel helpless, out of control, childlike, seems more “natural” to one. You light the lamp, sit on the bed, and slowly remove your shoes. You think: And one is
right
to believe in the “naturalness” of unreason. And right to be amazed by what is most rational, to be simultaneously shocked and relieved by a person who presents himself as demystification, disenchantment, and clarity personified. Both right and
good
—for those are the modern vices we set against the ancient virtues of faith, hope, and charity!

You hold your head in your cool palms. Oh my! Oh my! To aspire to purge one’s mind and all its manifestations of every taint of unreason—such an aspiration must be
blasphemy
! To be pure reason, to be self-generating, to be unable to remember your mother—is to be a
god
! Is that why you can’t remember your mother’s face, her smell, her touch, her voice? Is this painful absence the necessary consequence of your o’ervaunting ambition? Evil. You say the word aloud, over and over.
Evil. Evil.
You draw off your socks and your trousers, your jacket, vest, shirt, and necktie, your underclothes, all the while murmuring,
Evil, evil, evil
.

Until at last you are naked, the poet Edgar Poe, author of “The Raven,” naked in the dim light of a hotel room in Richmond, Virginia. You peer down at your toes, bent and battered, each toe topped with a thin wad of black hairs. Your knees, knobbed, the skin gray and crackled, and your gaunt thighs, your genitals, dry, puckered, and soft, half-covered with a smoky patch of hair. You look at your drooping belly and your navel, that primeval scar, and your breasts, like two empty pouches. You study your hands, twin nests of spiders, and your thin arms, the moles, freckles, discolorations, fissures, hairs, and blemishes, and your gray, slack skin.

You try to look at your face—but you cannot. There is a dresser mirror across from you to your right a few paces, but that will not do. You want to look upon your face directly. And you cannot. You know that if you look directly at your own face, you will be able to remember your mother’s face. And then her touch, her smell, her voice. You touch your face with your fingertips, rubbing them across nose, lips, eyes, ears, and cheeks. You can get the facts of your face, but you cannot look upon it directly. Just as you can get the facts of your mother’s life, from the memories of the women, those young women now old, but you cannot remember her directly yourself. Is that why you have for so many years aspired to what is evil? Because it was easier for you than to become a “natural” human being, easier than remembering your mother? Easier to be evil than good? You are weeping silently. Which is it? Are you unable to remember your mother because you are evil and persist in blasphemy, or are you evil and persist in blasphemy because you cannot remember your mother? Which? For one must be a cause, the other the effect. Which the cause? Which the effect? Why are you weeping? Why are you naked? Why are you the poet Edgar Poe author of “The Raven”? Why are you not a particular, remembered, and memorialized mother’s son?

In the graveyard beside the church on the hill is your mother’s grave. You will depart this city in an hour by train for Baltimore. You have eaten breakfast alone in the hotel dining room and have arranged for a driver to carry you first to the church on the hill, then back into the city to the railroad station. You pay your bill, lift your satchel, and leave the hotel for the carriage waiting outside. You stop a moment on the veranda and admire the soft morning sunlight on the brick buildings and sidewalks, the elm and live oak trees that line the streets, the white dome of the capital building a few blocks east, and beyond that, with the river between, the white spire of the church next to where your mother’s body was buried nearly four decades ago. This will not be the first time you have visited your mother’s grave, to stand before it with your mind mutely churning, and then, after a few moments of vertigo, to leave. You have made this pilgrimage hundreds of times, as a young boy, as an adolescent, and as a man, even in military uniform, even while drunk. And it has always been the same. From the very first, when Mrs. Allan took you outside the church after the service one Sunday morning and walked to the graveyard and stood hand in hand with you above the freshly cut plaque laid in the ground and told you that your mother’s body was buried here, precisely here, at this spot, from that very first time until this, it has been the same for you. Silence in your ears, no noise from without, no words from within, and a feeling, painful and frightening, of falling, as if down a well that reaches to the center of the earth. Yet, despite that feeling, you have returned to this spot compulsively, like an animal driven by an instinct. You have no sense of there being a reason for it. It is as if you are drawn there by a force that originates there, at the grave, not here inside your own head, among your sensations, memories, and ideas of the sanctified and holy. No, the power lies in that graveyard, in that one, all but unmarked grave. And now, as a middle-aged man in the middle of an illustrious career, as the poet Edgar Poe author of “The Raven,” you find yourself standing once again in that cool, tree-shaded cemetery beside the old Episcopal church on the hill, and once again you descend into a well of silence. Your mind has gone mute, and you no longer hear the wind in the leaves overhead, the wagon and carriage traffic on the cobbled street behind you, the morning twitter of birds and the coo of the doves from the niches of the steeple. You look down at the grassy plot of ground before you, the tarnished plaque at your feet, and you feel yourself begin the descent. But this time, for no cause you can name, now or later, at the point of its beginning, before you have become terrified, you resist. You pull away and step back a few paces as if from a slap, and you bring the entire grave into your gaze and sharply into focus, the rich green grass, the switching patterns of shadow and sunlight on the grass, the square plaque sinking into the ground at the head of the grave. You can see each individual blade of grass, even those bent and crushed beneath the feet of some passing cleric or attendant this very morning. You are still wrapped in silence, as if in a caul. You can hear nothing, nothing. And you have no thought. You watch the shadows cast on the grave by the fluttering leaves of the live oak overhead, and slowly they organize into an image, one that you yourself are surely creating as you watch, but an image which nonetheless exists in the world outside you, a configuration of shade against sunlight on the grassy plot of your mother’s grave. The shades separate, move together, slowly swirl, separate, and come together again, until you begin to see the shape of a single eye, large, wide open, an extraordinary eye, a wholly familiar eye, yet one that you have never seen before. It resembles an eye you have seen in daguerreotypes. And in mirrors. It is the eye of a close blood relation, it is your mother’s eye, it is your own eye. You stare peacefully into it, and feel it stare peacefully back. Then, gradually, the image fades, the shadows move apart, and the eye is gone from your sight. But you can remember it. You instantly recall it to your mind, as if to test the reality of the experience, and it appears there, as tender and filled with love for you as when it first appeared out of the shadows. You turn and slowly leave the cemetery. As you climb into the waiting carriage, you try once again to remember your mother, and you see her beautiful dark eye, her loving gaze on you, her only son, her beloved child.