The Faces of Angels (8 page)

The crying winds down to whimpers, thin shreds of sound that slip from the apartment opposite and drift away like smoke. A window opens, and against the background noise of the city, I can hear the murmur of a woman's voice, low and soothing. I imagine her bending to pick up the dropped toast, moving to get the pastry after all or refill the glass of juice, and I wonder what it must be like to be that child, and to grow up in that apartment in a city like this, so surrounded by beautiful things you don't even know where to look.

Beautiful things were in pretty short supply where I grew up. Going to Mass on Sunday mornings, to the Rotary Social on Saturday nights, sneaking cigarettes behind the High School auditorium and coming home to fall asleep and dream you were from somewhere else—somewhere like this, maybe, except you didn't know it existed—that was about it for Acadia, Pennsylvania. Billy grew up in Indiana, somewhere outside Fort Wayne, which her mother called Fort Pain. In certain parts of Indiana, Billy says, that passes for a joke.

When she told me where she came from, I laughed, and then, embarrassed, explained that I'd never actually met anybody who grew up outside Fort Wayne before. At that, Billy looked at me over the rims of the granny glasses she sometimes wears, and said, ‘Don't be such a snot, Mary Thorcroft. I bet you don't come from anywhere so special.' And she's right, of course. I don't.

Coal and quarries.
Deer Hunter
country. A town that lived, thrived only moderately, and finally died at the hands of the mining industry. The land around Acadia was too scrappy to farm, and the town too far from anything to be much use once the mines closed, so by the time the sixties rolled around most of the men, like my uncles and my dad, ended up first unemployed, then in Vietnam.

Afterwards, the ones who made it home bought hunting rifles and collected disability and got mean on their own bitterness. And I guess that might have happened to my father too, and probably would have, if he'd lived long enough to find out exactly what things like napalm and Agent Orange really do to the inside of your head. But he didn't. Instead, he made it all the way through the war and came home to get himself killed, drunk as a skunk one Christmas, driving my mother back from a party at the veterans' club.

Not that I understood that too clearly at the time. I was seven, and on the night my parents died, my aunt Rose, who was married to my daddy's older brother Frank, just told me they couldn't come home for a while but that they loved me more than anything in the world. I can remember her, in her party dress, kneeling by the edge of my bed. Her perfume smelled like air freshener, and the light that fell in a shaft from the hall made the red sparkles on her sleeves and earrings twinkle like stars. She had a big Santa Claus pin on her shoulder, and if you pulled the white cotton ball on top of his hat he sang the first bar of ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.'

Aunt Rose was crying. Her nose ran and she kept wiping it on the back of her hand and muttering ‘damn,' then she unpinned the Santa and gave him to me. And since I didn't really want to listen to what she was saying, I pulled the ball on his hat, once, then twice, and then over and over again. ‘God rest ye merry, gentlemen, God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay,' Santa sang. And long after Aunt Rose stood up, and kissed my forehead and tiptoed out, he kept singing. Over and over he sang his single phrase until the high tinny notes drowned out the noises of grown-ups downstairs, of crying and the clinking of glasses, and the opening and closing of the door, and the stray words—‘drunk' and ‘shame' and ‘speed'—that drifted up the stairs along with the blasts of cold air and the noise of cars coming in and out of the driveway.

I told Billy that story mostly to make up for laughing about Indiana, and when I finished, she lit a cigarette and looked at me for a second. Then she said, ‘That's sad.' But I shook my head. That wasn't why I told it. And besides, I explained, really, it isn't. All it is is proof of what I found out early: that the Good Lord giveth and he taketh away. Mainly because he feels like it. All of which may or may not go some way towards explaining why I have always hated Christmas.

Billy frowned through the smoke. Then she asked, ‘What happened next?' So I told her how I went to live with Mamaw.

Mamaw was my mother's aunt, and her only living relative. Her real name was Mary Margaret Tulliver, and she ran a bookkeeping business called Tulliver Accounting out of her den. She kept the books for most of the not very many businesses in town, so we always knew exactly how bad or good it was for Dave's Hardware, where we bought nails and duct tape, and for Real Brite Dry Cleaners, and for the Pig Stand that sold corkscrew fries and soft ice cream in the summer.

Mamaw wore navy-blue nylon pants suits five days a week, dresses on Sundays, and lipstick every day that left bright red bands on the filters of her Lucky Strikes. She didn't believe in walking under ladders or stepping on cracks, and she taught me how to say ‘good morning' to single crows in case they brought bad luck, and how to throw spilled salt over my left shoulder to blind the devil's eye, and how to be Catholic. ‘There's no sin in being alone,' Mamaw told me once, in a voice so hushed she sounded like she was sharing a secret. ‘But if you are, and you belong to the church, then you'll always belong to something, and no matter what happens, even if nobody else loves you, Jesus will.'

Mamaw's daddy had been a miner and a rock hound, and when he died all he had to leave her was his collection of polished rocks and the house she was born in. She was still living there when I moved in. Mamaw's house had a steep gable roof, ugly black shutters and a front porch nobody ever sat on, and it didn't look an awful lot different from my parents' house, which had been all of three streets away. There was the same maple tree in the yard and the rooms were even laid out the same, so I didn't get lost. Kitchen and den at the back, dining room and living room at the front, three bedrooms and a bathroom with liver-coloured shower tiles upstairs, all of it covered in avocado-green shag carpet that smelled like cigarettes.

There was a front walk, a lawn, and a back yard with a Webber grill and picnic table too, just like my parents'. But Mamaw's house had theirs beat flat on one count. At Mamaw's, I could lie in bed on winter nights and look straight out of my bedroom window through the bare branches of the maples to the flying horse on the gas station sign down the street.

I loved that horse. As far as I was concerned, he was the most beautiful thing in our town, and over time he became more important to me than anything else, even Jesus. For a start, the horse stayed lit up all night long, so no matter when I woke up, if I had bad dreams, or heard the tinny notes of the Santa Claus song, there he'd be, flying through the winter trees with his bright hooves and his snow-white wings.

I dreamed of those wings, as big and strong as an angel's. And of the whooshing sound they made, and of his hooves, which were as black as patent leather and threw sparks that turned into stars as we galloped down the streets. I dreamed of my hands wound in his mane as we went, faster and faster, until finally we left the ground, and rose through the shredded night clouds, and flew.

I told Pierangelo about my horse not long after we met, and he put his arms around me and asked, ‘Where,
cara
? Where did you fly to?' But I told him that back then I didn't know, and I didn't care. Anywhere. Just anywhere at all where there weren't liver-coloured tiles and shag carpets. ‘Closed' signs nailed to downtown windows. Mountains of frozen slush that lasted till Easter. And Santa Claus pins that sang in the dark.

‘That's her! That's the woman from the apartment!' Billy tweaks my sleeve, but I'm not paying attention. Instead, I'm leaning as far as I can over the parapet of the Ponte Vecchio watching the fish.

Centuries ago, before the gold merchants who are here today moved in, butchers lined this bridge. Carcasses hung here, and there were those who believed the future could be read in the entrails of the slaughtered animals. For a penny or two you could have intestines thrown down onto the blood-slicked cobbles, and love, death, fortune—your whole life—would be divined by those who knew how to read the patterns. Then, every night at sunset, the offal would be swept up and dumped into the Arno to feed the ancestors of these same fish which, four centuries later, still come and hang just below the clouded green surface of the water, driven by ancient hunger.

I love the fish. I admire them for gobbling up the future, but Billy, who is definitely more interested in gold than prophecy, thinks my fixation with them is stupid. More than once I've told her I'm sorry for them, and that I think they should somehow be rewarded for their persistence. Secretly, I've contemplated bringing them a steak. I've imagined pulling the pink slab from a bag, allowing it to slither out of its wrapping, and hearing the splash as it hits the water below.

Billy tweaks me again. ‘It is her!' she hisses, and I pull myself back from the parapet and turn to see where she's pointing.

It's marginally warmer this evening, and the
passeggiata
is in full swing. At least half of Florence must be out here, promenading up and down, moving along the box-like fronts of the jewellery stores, inspecting the rows of gold bangles and rings and charms displayed in the brightly lit windows. This is serious business, the viewing and comparing of merchandise, and on a nice night the bridge and the avenue all the way up to the Duomo will be packed solid, full of couples holding hands, tourists and students, and pairs of squat middle-aged ladies in suits and expensive shoes, all of them eating ice cream and examining displays of jewellery and handbags and gloves.

A woman pushing a bicycle with a little white dog in the basket weaves through the crowd in front of us, momentarily blocking our view, then Billy pulls at the elbow of my sweater.

‘There,' she hisses, ‘over there. I swear that's her.'

And she's right, it is the woman from the apartment opposite. I know, because I've seen her too. In fact, I saw her just yesterday. She was attempting to manoeuvre her way through the security gate under the archway of our building, her child's empty stroller in one hand and a shopping bag in the other, and she nearly fell down the steps. Standing nearby, I leaned out to help, grabbing the bottom rung of the stroller and lifting it to the sidewalk, and afterwards, as I stepped up and took the edge of the gate before it could swing closed, she thanked me, murmuring the way strangers do. Our eyes met, and I saw the telltale red rims and pink blotches on her cheeks, and knew she'd been crying. Now, she's pushing the stroller again, but this time her child is in it. A man in an overcoat walks beside her, his hands dug in his pockets.

The man is handsome, in a saturnine sort of way. He has dark hair and a beaky nose. It's a face you would call ‘horsey' if they were poor, but is ‘patrician' because they're obviously not.

‘Phew,' Billy whispers, ‘get the cut of that cashmere. Overcoats like that mean serious real estate.'

I nod, but the truth is, neither the man nor his overcoat interest me. It's her I keep looking at. Everything about the woman from the apartment opposite is curved, from the ample rise of her chest, to her hips, to the curls of pale colourless hair that fall over the black collar of her coat. Her cheeks are round and still slightly flushed, as if she has been crying since yesterday, and the child she pushes looks way too old to be in a stroller. Six or seven at least and dark like his father, the little boy sits staring straight ahead. Wrapped in a scarf and coat and hat, as if this is the Arctic winter instead of spring in Florence, he looks like a large doll, a boy made of wax. To be honest, he looks not quite human.

‘The kid looks kind of retarded,' Billy whispers.

We watch as they draw parallel to us, fascinated and slightly guilty because we know something about them the rest of the world doesn't. Out here, they're a nice young family; handsome, prosperous father and plump, pink-cheeked mother taking their little doll boy for a stroll. But behind the walls of our palazzo, we've heard them shriek and call each other names.

‘She's pretty,' Billy murmurs, ‘but she's fat. I never noticed before that she was fat. I bet he's having an affair,' she adds. ‘I bet that's it.'

Billy lowers her voice, even though there's no earthly way they could hear us. ‘I think it's the kid,' she says. ‘I mean, look at him. I bet he's one of those guys who just can't stand kids that have something wrong with them—you know, perfection freaks. Or,' she whispers, ‘maybe he doesn't like fat. If she got her act together, fixed her hair and lost fifteen pounds, he probably wouldn't screw around.' She shrugs, losing interest. ‘I mean, with a body like that,' she says, ‘what do you expect? Guys like perfection, or at least something close to it, you know?'