He’d lie in his expensive apartment listening to the old slow songs of Roy Orbison, or to the many recordings of opera singers he had, or listening to the recordings of music written for the lute especially in the time of the Renaissance when the lute had been such a popular instrument.
How had he come to be this thing, this darkling human, banking money for which he had no use, killing people whose names he didn’t know, penetrating the finest fortresses his victims might construct, bringing death as a waiter, a doctor in a white coat, the driver of a hired car, or even a bum on the street, drunkenly careening into the man he would puncture with his fatal needle?
The evil in him made me shudder insofar as an angel can shudder, but the good shining forth attracts me utterly.
Let’s return to those early years, when he’d been Toby O’Dare, with a younger brother and sister, Jacob and Emily—to the time when he’d been struggling to get through the strictest prep school in New Orleans, on a full scholarship, of course, as he’d worked as many as sixty hours a week playing music on the street to keep the children and his mother fed, and clothed, and manage an apartment which no one but the family ever entered.
Toby paid the bills. He stocked the refrigerator. He talked to the landlord when his mother’s howling woke the man next door. He was the one who cleaned up the vomit, and put out the fire when the grease spilled out of the frying pan into the gas flame, and she fell back with her hair ablaze, shrieking.
With another spouse, his mother might have been a tender and loving thing, but her husband had gone to prison when she was pregnant with the last child, and she’d never gotten over it. A cop who preyed on prostitutes in the French Quarter streets, the man was stabbed to death at Angola.
Toby was only ten when that happened.
For years, she drank herself drunk, and lay on the bare boards murmuring her husband’s name, “Dan, Dan, Dan.” And nothing Toby ever did could comfort her. He’d buy her pretty dresses, and bring home baskets of fruit or candy, and for a few years there before the toddlers went off to kindergarten, she’d been an evening drunk more than anything else, and had even scrubbed herself and her children well enough to take them all to Mass on Sundays.
In those days Toby watched TV with her, the two on her bed, and she shared his love of the police kicking in doors and catching the most depraved killers.
But once the little ones weren’t underfoot, his mother drank by day and slept by night, and Toby had to become the man of the house, dressing Jacob and Emily every morning with care, and taking them to school early so he had time to make it to his own classes at Jesuit on time, a bus ride away, with perhaps a few moments to go over his homework.
By the age of fifteen, he’d been studying the lute and composition for it every afternoon for two years, and now Jacob and Emily did their homework in a practice room nearby and his teachers still taught him for nothing.
“You have a great gift,” his teacher told him, and urged him to move on to other instruments which might have given him a living later on.
But Toby knew he could not give enough time to that, and having trained Emily and Jacob as to how to watch and handle their drunken mother, he was out on the French Quarter streets all Saturday and Sunday, the lute case open at his feet as he played, earning every cent he could to supplement his father’s meager pension.
Fact was, there was no pension, though Toby never told anyone that. There were just the silent stipends of the family and the regular handouts of other policemen, who had been no worse and no better than Toby’s father.
And Toby had to bring in the money for anything extra or “nice,” and for the uniforms his brother and sister required, and any toys they were to have in the miserable apartment that Toby so detested. And though he worried every moment as to the condition of his mother at home, and the abilities of Jacob to keep her quiet should she go into a rage, Toby took great pride in his playing, and in the attitudes of the passersby who never failed to drop large bills in the case if they lingered.
Even though the earnest study of music went slowly for Toby, he still dreamed of entering the Conservatory of Music when he came of age, and of landing a job playing in a restaurant where his income would be steady. Neither plan was beyond possibility by any means, and he lived for the future, while struggling desperately through the present. Nevertheless when he played the lute, when he made enough money easily to pay the rent and buy the food, he knew a joy and a sense of triumph that was solid and beautiful.
He never ceased trying to cheer and comfort his mother and assure her that things would be better than they were now, that her pain would go away, and that they would someday live in a real house in the suburbs, and have a backyard for Emily and Jacob and a real front lawn and all the other things that normal life offered.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought that someday, when Jacob and Emily were grown and married and his mother had been cured by all the money he would make, he would perhaps think again about the seminary. He couldn’t forget what it had meant to him once, to serve Mass. He couldn’t forget that he had felt called to take the host in his hands and say, “This is My Body,” thereby making it the very flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ. And many a time as he played on a Saturday evening, he turned to liturgical music that delighted the ever-shifting crowd as much as the familiar tunes of Johnny Cash and Frank Sinatra that so delighted the audience. He cut a sharp picture as a street musician, hatless and trim in a blue wool jacket and dark wool pants, and even these traits gave him a sublime advantage.
The better he became, playing requests effortlessly and pulling the full range out of the instrument, the more the tourists and the natives grew to love him. He soon came to recognize regulars on certain nights, who never failed to give him the largest bills.
He sang one modern hymn, “I am the bread of life, he who comes to Me will not hunger …” It was a rousing hymn, one that used his full range, and his full ability to forget everything else as he played, and those who clustered around him always rewarded him for it. In a daze, he’d look down and see the money that could buy him a little peace for a week or even more. And he’d feel like crying.
He also played and sang songs that he made up, variations on themes he’d heard in the records his teacher gave him. He wove together the airs of Bach and Mozart and even Beethoven, and other composers whose names he couldn’t remember.
At one point he began to jot down some of his compositions. His teacher would help him to copy them outright. Music for the lute wasn’t written like ordinary music. It was written in tabulature, and this he specially loved. But the real theory and practice of written music was hard for him. If only he could learn enough to teach music someday, he thought, even to little children, that would be a workable life.
Soon enough, Jacob and Emily were able to dress themselves, and they too had the grave look of little adults as did he, riding alone on the St. Charles car to school, and never bringing anyone home as their brother had forbidden it. They learned how to do the wash, to iron the shirts and blouses for school, and how to hide the money from their mother, and distract her if she became maddened and started to tear the house to pieces.
“If you have to pour it down her throat, then do it,” Toby told them, for in truth there were times when nothing but the drink would stop his mother from raving.
I observed all these things.
I turned the pages of his life and raised the light to read the finer print.
I loved him.
I saw the Daily Prayer Book ever on his desk, and beside it another book, which he read from time to time for pure delight, and sometimes read to Jacob and Emily.
This book was The Angels by Fr. Pascal Parente. He’d found it in the same Magazine Street shop where he’d found his books on crime and bloody murder, and he bought it, along with a life of St. Thomas Aquinas by G. K. Chesterton, which he struggled from time to time to read to himself though it was difficult.
You mig
ht say that he lived a life in which what he read was as important as what he played on the lute, and these things were as important to him as his mother, and Jacob and Emily.
His guardian angel, always desperate to guide him on the right path in the most chaotic of times, seemed perplexed by the combination of loves that gripped Toby’s soul, but I didn’t come to observe that angel, but only to see Toby, not the angel who labored so hard to keep faith blazing in Toby’s heart that Toby would somehow save all of them.
One summer day, as Toby read on his bed, he turned over on his belly, clicked open his pen, and underlined these words:
As of faith we need only hold that the Angels are not endowed with cardiognosis (knowledge of the secrets of the heart) nor with a certain knowledge of future acts of the free will; these being exclusively divine prerogatives.
He had loved that sentence, and he had loved the atmosphere of mystery that enveloped him when he read this book.
In truth, he didn’t want to believe that angels were heartless. Somewhere once he’d seen an old painting of the crucifixion in which the angels above had been weeping, and he liked to think that the guardian angel of his mother wept when he saw her drunken and despondent. If angels didn’t have hearts or know hearts, he didn’t want to know it, yet the concept enthralled him, and angels enthralled him, and he talked to his own angel as often as he could.
He taught Emily and Jacob to kneel down every night and say the age-old prayer:
Angel of God, my guardian dear,
to whom God’s love commits me here,
ever this day be at my side,
to light and guard, to rule and guide.
He even bought a picture of a guardian angel for them. It was a common enough picture, and he’d first seen a print of it himself in a grade school classroom. This print he matted and framed with the materials he could buy in the drugstore. And he hung it on the wall in the room the three of them shared, he and Jacob in the bunk bed and Emily against the far wall on her own cot, which could be folded up in the morning.
He had chosen an ornate gold frame for the picture, and he liked the beading on it, the leafy corners and the wide margin it established between the world of the picture and the faded wallpaper of the little room.
The guardian angel was huge and womanly with streaming golden hair and great white blue-tipped wings, and she wore a mantle over her flowing white tunic as she stood above a small boy and girl who made their way together over a treacherous bridge with gaping holes in it.
How many millions of little children have seen that picture?
“Look,” Toby would say to Emily and Jacob when they knelt down for night prayers. “You can always talk to your guardian angel.” He told them how he talked to his angel, especially on those nights downtown when the tips were slow. “I say, Bring me more people, and sure enough, he does it.” He insisted upon it though Jacob and Emily both laughed.
But it was Emily who asked if they could pray to Mother’s guardian angel too and stop her from getting so drunk so much.
This shocked Toby, because he had never spoken the word “drunk” under his own roof. He had never used the word “drunk” to anyone, not even his confessor. And he marveled that Emily, who was only seven at this time, knew everything. The word sent a dark shiver through him, and he had told his little brother and sister that life would not always be like this, that he would see to it that things got better and better.
He meant to keep his word.
At Jesuit High, Toby soon rose to the top of his class. He played fifteen hours at a stretch on Saturdays and Sundays to make enough that he didn’t have to play after school, and could keep up his musical education.
He was sixteen when a restaurant hired him for Saturday and Sunday nights, and though he made a little less, he knew he could count on it.
When needed, he waited tables and made good tips. But it was his spirited and unusual playing that was wanted of him and he was glad of it.
All this money over the years he hid in various places around the apartment—in gloves in his drawers, beneath a loose board, beneath Emily’s mattress, under the bottom of the stove, even in tinfoil in the refrigerator.
On a good weekend, he was making hundreds, and when he passed his seventeenth birthday, the Conservatory gave him a full college scholarship to study music in earnest. He had made it.
That was the happiest day of his life and he came home brimming with the news. “Ma, I did it, I did it,” he said. “Everything’s going to be good, I’m telling you.”
When he would not give his mother money for drink, she took his lute out and smashed it over the edge of the kitchen table.
The breath went out of him. He thought he might die. He wondered if he could make himself die simply by refusing to breathe. He became sick and sat down on the chair with his head down and his hands between his knees, and he listened as his mother went roaming the apartment, sobbing and murmuring and cursing in foul language all those whom she blamed for all that had become of her, arguing with her dead mother in turns, and then blubbering, “Dan, Dan, Dan,” over and over again.
“You know what your father gave me?” she screamed. “You know what he gave me from those women downtown? You know what he left me with?”
These words terrified Toby.
The apartment stank of booze. Toby wanted to die. But Emily and Jacob were due to get off the St. Charles car a block away at any minute. He went to the corner store, bought a flask of bourbon, though he was underage, and brought it home and forced it down her throat, swallow after swallow, until she passed out cold on the mattress.
After that, her cursing increased. As the children dressed for school, she’d call them the worst names imaginable. It was like a demon lived inside her. But it wasn’t a demon. The booze was eating her brain, and he knew it.
His latest teacher gave him a new lute, a cherished lute, one far more expensive than the one that had been broken.
“I love you for this,” he said to her and he kissed her on her powdered cheek, and she told him again that someday he’d make a name for himself with his lute and a string of recordings of his own.
“God forgive me,” he prayed as he knelt in Holy Name Church, looking up the long shadowy nave to the high altar, “I wish my mother would die. But I can’t wish it.”
The three children cleaned the place from top to bottom that weekend as they always did. And she, the mother, lay drunk like an enchanted princess under a spell, her mouth open, her face smooth and youthful, her drunken breath almost sweet, like sherry.
Under his breath, Jacob whispered, “Poor drunk Mommy.”
This shocked Toby as much as the time Emily had said something like it.
When he was halfway through his senior year, Toby fell in love. It was with a Jewish girl from Newman School, the coeducational prep school in New Orleans that was as good as Jesuit. Her name was Liona and she came to Jesuit, an all-boys’ school, to sing the lead in a musical that Toby made time to attend, and when he asked her to go with him to the prom, she said yes immediately. He was overwhelmed. Here was a lovely dark-haired beauty with a marvelous soprano voice, and she took to him completely.
In the hours after the prom they sat in her backyard uptown, outside of her beautiful home on Nashville Avenue. In the warm, fragrant garden, he broke down and told her about his mother. She had nothing but sympathy and understanding for him. Before morning they had slipped into her family guesthouse and been intimate together. He didn’t want her to know that it was his first time, but when she confessed it was hers, he admitted it.
He told her that he loved her. This made her cry, and she told him that she had never known anyone like him.
With her long black hair and dark eyes, her soft soothing voice, and her immediate understanding, she seemed everything that he could ever desire. She had a strength he greatly admired, and something of a searing intelligence. He felt dreadful fear of losing her.
Liona came down to
be with him in the heat of spring as he played on Bourbon Street; she brought him cold Cokes from the grocery store, and stood only a few paces away listening to him. Only her studies kept her away from him. She was clever and had a great sense of humor. She loved the sound of the lute, and she understood why he cherished this instrument for its unique tone and its beautiful shape. He loved her voice (which was much better than his), and soon they attempted duets. Her songs were Broadway songs and this brought a whole new songbook to his repertoire, and when time would allow, they played and sang together.
One afternoon—after his mother had been all right for a little while—he brought Liona home, and try as she might, she couldn’t conceal her shock at the small overcrowded apartment, and at his mother’s drunken slatternly manner as she sat smoking and playing solitaire at the kitchen table. He could tell that Emily and Jacob were ashamed. Jacob had asked him afterwards, “Toby, why did you ever bring her here with Mom like that? How could you do that?” Both his sister and brother looked at him as if he’d been a traitor.
That night, after Toby finished playing on Royal Street, Liona came down to meet him and they talked for hours once more, and crept again into her parents’ darkened guesthouse.
But Toby felt increasing shame that he had confided his deepest secrets to anyone. And he felt in his heart of hearts that he wasn’t worthy of Liona. Her tenderness and warmth confused him. Also he believed it was a sin to make love to her when there was no chance that they could ever be married. He had so many worries that normal courtship through their college years seemed an utter impossibility. He was deeply afraid that Liona pitied him.
As the period of final exams came on, neither of them had time to see each other.
The night of his high school graduation, Toby’s mother began to drink at four o’clock, and finally he ordered her to stay home. He couldn’t bear the thought of her coming downtown, with her slip showing beneath her hem, and her lipstick smeared and her cheeks too rouged, and her hair a mass of tangles. He tried for a time to brush her hair, but she slapped him repeatedly until, gritting his teeth, he grabbed her wrists and yelled, “Stop it, Mama.” He burst into sobs like a child. Emily and Jacob were terrified.