A Quiet Belief in Angels

  I shook my head. “I am healthy enough—”

  “But in the mind,” she said, “and in the heart, that’s where life invades with its shadows and edges, does it not?” She laughed. She seemed relaxed, self-assured, aware of her attractiveness and unafraid of what might be thought of her. I envied her confidence.

  “People are made of steel and whipcord,” I said. “People survive far greater traumas and losses than those I’ve suffered.”

  “So tell me,” she said. “Tell me what happened in Georgia.”

  “I thought we were going to talk about inconsequential things.”

  She smiled. “You’re the one telling me you haven’t suffered greatly.”

  I talked for the better part of an hour. Once or twice she interrupted me, to clarify a point, to request a greater depth or detail, but for the entire time she seemed content to listen patiently as I spoke of my father, my mother, of Alex and the baby, of the child killings, of Virginia Perlman, of the death of Gunther Kruger. I told her everything, even the letter from the Atlanta Short Story people, the collection of newspaper clippings I had carried with me, and when I was done she rose from the bed and refilled my glass.

  She sat down again, her expression was distant and pensive.

  “I have troubled you, Miss Spragg,” I said.

  She smiled and shook her head, “Not at all, Joseph, and stop calling me Miss Spragg for Christ’s sake.” She laughed. “You are how old?”

  “Twenty-one, twenty-two in October.”

  “And you have already lived the kind of life that could carry a book.”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Have some more wine,” she said, and rose to fill my glass.

  A quarter of an hour later she refilled my glass for a fourth time. Her dress rose over her knee as she crossed her legs. I glanced down, and when I looked up once more she smiled at me. She knew I had looked, and there was a moment of awkwardness.

  “It is not a sin to look,” she said. “Nor can thoughts be sins, Joseph. And more often than not it’s only someone else’s conscience that tells you doing is a sin. If one lives life with an open heart and a sense of integrity . . . well, if one really lives life for the moment then there is never sufficient time to regret.” Miss Spragg leaned forward, and as she leaned she angled her chin toward me and closed her eyes for a moment too long.

  “Are you ready to live for the moment, Joseph?”

  I laughed, a little nervously perhaps. I could smell her perfume and something beneath, and together they translated into promise.

  I set my glass down and leaned forward also, our faces parallel. Our cheeks were merely inches apart.

  “I am ready to live,” I whispered, and rose from the chaise lounge to embrace her. I remembered the sound of her glass hitting the floor on the other side of the mattress, considered it remarkable that it remained unbroken, and then she was over me, seeming to consume me like a wave.

  Later, both dazed from the rush of passion, she lay across me, her head on my chest, and she told me that what had happened was of no great consequence or meaning.

  She turned and looked up at me, and for a moment I saw through her veneer of confidence. The light of her eyes seemed dim, her skin tone fatigued as that of an aged courtesan. Each feature was limned by small shadows, the narrow creases that spoke in epidermal tongues: here, a betrayal; there, a disillusionment; and finally, the outward sign of a broken heart. Each aspiration had been anchored by her pessimism, her attempts to advantage opportunity maladroit and clumsy. Here was a human being who believed the world would always owe her, and to her dying breath would stand testament to its failure to pay.

  Or so I believed in that moment, believed and did not care. For Miss Joyce Spragg, assistant registrar of St. Joseph’s College on De Kalb, appeared to me as a small wish for perfection in a very imperfect world.

  “Consequence and meaning are relative,” I whispered. “Go to sleep.”

  Each time I visited with Joyce, she would remind me that our union was of no consequence or deeper meaning. Each time I would smile. Joyce Spragg was a facade, her ambivalence a veil behind which she hid from the world. Perhaps she believed it necessary to be equivocal and ambiguous. Perhaps she considered such qualities attractive. I never loved her, never fooled myself into thinking I did. Our relationship was a convenience, a means of company, though we did become friends. However, for all her acquired manners and quirks, Joyce did introduce me to the narrow clique of literati who frequented the College Writers’ Forum. We met on Saturday evenings; my introduction was in the first week of July 1949, and here I collided at last with the very people I had yearned to meet when I left Georgia.

  The College Writers’ Forum was a haven for misfits and mavericks, those who could perhaps find company nowhere else; and though they proved to be some of the most intelligent and perceptive people I had ever met, they also proved to be the strangest. “They will try to explain classic poetry that they don’t understand,” Joyce said, “and then they’ll drink copious amounts of cheap red wine and regale everyone with their own hideous attempts at iambic pentameter and free prose.”

  The Forum was held in a meeting hall half a block from the college campus limits. Joyce, as assistant registrar, was permitted to bring as many guests as she wished as long as they were neither dullards, igno ramuses, nor “foreigners.”

  “Foreigners?” I asked. “You mean they consider only American literature of worth?”

  She laughed. “Foreigners are those who attend the rival colleges. Foreigners are not allowed in the Forum.”

  Satisfied that I belonged to none of the excluded groups, we went. We were met by Lance Forrester, second season chairman. The year was divided not into quarters, but “seasons,” and in turn they were “winter’s end,” “aurora,” “equinox” and “solstice.”

  “A literary license,” Joyce explained. “Everything they do, and I mean everything, is granted a far greater profundity and significance than it deserves.”

  Lance Forrester appeared with a sheaf of dog-eared pages. His hair was slicked back to the skull with apple pomade, the center parted straight as a wheel spoke. Appeared to watch lips as we talked, hard of hearing perhaps, or maybe carrying shame enough to forgo eye contact in favor of mouths. An awkward manner, all angles and corners, a spilled jigsaw of body language packed tight inside the man. Seemed to me Lance Forrester needed a good woman to smooth down the edges, iron out emotional wrinkles, but such a woman would require three helpings of patience, and perhaps ulterior motives. When he glanced at Joyce his eyes would spark like wood knots in a fire and his lips would tremble as if fearing words would escape solely to humiliate him. The man seemed envious of beauty, of charm, of friends. Perhaps he’d think of girls and cry, or rub himself, or just hate them. The thoughts also, but mostly the girls: the absence they represented, the emptiness instilled.

  “A rumor,” Lance told us, his tone hushed as if bearing news of suspicion or foul play. “Just a rumor, but word was that Fulton Oursler could visit our little enclave.”

  I frowned, looked at Joyce.

  “Editor . . . was the editor of Liberty magazine—” she started.

  “And Metropolitan. And a published author, you know?” Lance explained.

  We smiled genially, Joyce Spragg and I, and we smoothed our way past Lance Forrester toward the makeshift bar against the furthest wall.

  It was there, that same evening, that I met Paul Hennessy for the first time. A little taller than me, his hair was dirty-blond, cut long on top, short in the back. He seemed to perpetually carry a wry smile, as if smirking at the utter ridiculousness of the world around him. He dressed exceptionally well, and later—having gotten to know him—I realized that his manner and appearance came not from money, but from the degree of care he applied to them. Hennessy had an infinite capacity to make the very best of everything, and with his rugged features, his strong jawline, his slightly brooding eyes, he could have gone to Ho
llywood. Had I known how significant a part he would play in my future, the future that was yet unknown, I would have left the Forum and returned to Georgia. Hennessy was an anachronism displaced both in time and location, and yet his charm was undeniable. That evening he was not alone. A woman stood beside him, seemed to hang breathlessly on every word he uttered. Her hair was fussed and lacquered into a brave and precarious crest, like a tree in full bloom suddenly petrified, and her eyes, low in her face, had a saddened and nostalgic weight to them. When she smiled it seemed she was expressing the deep and beautiful melancholy that could only be expressed in the company of living poets or dead opium addicts.

  As the weeks followed one another, as I became as much a part of the Forum as any other guy, I grew to know Hennessy well. He addressed most men as “Jackson” in some sort of hip, abbreviated jazz-speak; girls were “twists” or “squeezes,” and he would refer to himself in the third person: “Hennessy wouldn’t be seen dead in a place like that!” or “Hennessy wouldn’t take that sort of challenge lying down, you know?” He spoke of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, of Gibran and Tolstoy as though each were a personal friend, and he quoted lines from The Prophet and Thus Spake Zarathustra as if they were the light-minded matters of common folk. When Hennessy entered a room, whether alone or accompanied, he acted as if Sam Falk himself might appear at any moment to take snapshots for the press.

  “We were at the Top of the Mark, you know?” he would say. “That little cocktail lounge on the penthouse floor of the Mark Hop-kins Hotel in San Francisco,” and know full well that none of us had ever been to San Francisco, let alone the penthouse lounge. He would speak of drinking highballs and Tom Collins, and listening to a jazz ensemble: “Extraordinary musicians, really extraordinary! Only problem was that each of them was playing a different piece of remarkable genius in eleven-four time, and me and Clara, you know she was my main squeeze at the time . . . well, I’ll say me and Clara didn’t know whether we were heading south from Carolina or north from Boston!”

  Hennessy mixed his metaphors with greater aplomb than most Manhattan barkeeps mixed their cocktails, and when he was drunk he was merely louder, more insistent, aggressive like a Hearst newspaper-man. He would yawn constantly, giving all and sundry the impression of utter boredom.

  “A medical condition,” he once confided in me. “Low on vitamin E. My body fights for oxygen. Have to eat peanuts and shrimps all the time. If I don’t I become lethargic . . . and such lethargy . . . and I’d be prone to terrible things like thrombophlebitis and diabetic gangrene.”

  For a while I believed I sought out Hennessy for his humor, his incessant conversation. He seemed to be at least a panacea for my loneliness, the sense of hollowness I felt whenever I thought of Alex. After I got to know him I realized that there was something altogether magnetic about him, and through him I made acquaintances with people I would otherwise never have met. It was this whirlwind of activity that assisted me more than anything else. Hennessy was not the reason for any recovery I might have experienced, but he was certainly a signpost along the way.

  For a while he made a habit of bringing another older woman with him, a woman called Cecily Bryan. “I have a catalog of ugly admirers,” she would slur at me, her breath rank with gin and cigarettes. “But frankly my de-ah, I don’t care how ugly they are as long as they continue to admire me.” And then she would laugh, and the sound she generated was not only harsh and styptic, it was sufficiently voluminous to fill the room and incite a need for escape.

  In the fall of that year the parties started, parties that were instigated at the Forum and spilled out into New York, the city their play-ground as if class had ended. Paul Hennessy and Cecily Bryan would always arrive drunk, seemingly able to determine the existence of a gathering from any local in the city. They gravitated toward alcohol as an apparently genetic necessity, and though they were rarely officially invited they always assumed that such an omission had been the fault of the mail, perhaps a messenger with the wrong address. So they came drunk, and they stayed drunk. After a while Hennessy would pretend he was sober, but despite neither moving nor speaking, his slackness of facial tone and laxity of mouth betrayed him. And Cecily: a lush of blowsy, swollen enthusiasm, everything swimming through her field of vision, her existence one of softened corners and indeterminate edges in which no word or action was ever sharp enough to deflate the protective bubble of dipsomania. They would always argue, Cecily and Paul; argue about something meaningless and irrelevant, and then they would grow maudlin and sympathetic and somehow find their way to the bathroom, and he would fuck her noisily as some sort of compensatory atonement for being such an asshole. And afterward, perhaps in the kitchen or on the veranda, Cecily would drink gin and cry for the mothers of boys lost in the war. “They could all have gone to Cornell,” she would say. “They could have gone to Cornell and taken berthing in Ithaca . . . have you been to Ithaca? Do you know Ithaca at all? Perhaps they could have gone to Notre Dame, I mean if they were Roman Catholics, you know? Hundreds of them running through the streets looking for their mothers whose lives are now nothing more than unity in the American Gold Star or the Christian Temperance Union.” And then she would drink more gin, and she would cry some more, and much later Paul Hennessy would lift her from wherever she was seated and carry her to his car.

  Other people came too, the cultured and literarly elite. Later I learned that these were hangers-on, neither artists nor writers. Primarily they were ad agency people, working for such reputable establishments as Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn Inc., the company that held contracts for U.S. Navy Recruitment and Campbell’s Soup. They quoted sections from the Starch Report and wore branded tweeds from Abercrombie & Fitch. They possessed the sort of rangy good looks and athletic frames that spoke of running for the high school track team, and when they could no longer hit a mile in five they’d run for the senate. Their down side was that they were blind to the magic

  There were three brothers who always came together and, though dissimilar in features, there was something quarrelsome and pugnacious about their manner that identified them as strains of the same gene pool. All three worked for E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, and when they appeared Paul Hennessy would laugh and say, “Here come Beetle, Snorkle and Halftrack,” referring to the characters in the Mort Walker cartoon. “Those boys know as much about literature as I know about French Impressionism,” he’d say, and then he would engage them in a conversation about Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, which resulted in nothing but embarrassment for everyone who had the misfortune to overhear. At our first party, at a tall house in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the address of which was as much a mystery to me then as it is now, Hennessy learned I was from the South.

  “Not the Okefenokee Swamp!” he exclaimed, and when I allowed that the Okefenokee Swamp was no more than ten or fifteen minutes on horseback from where I lived, he goaded me by saying: “Horseback? No more’n a quarter of an hour by horseback? Yo’ sho’ cannot be serious, massa! You musta hearda Pogo thay-un,” his voice slurring sideways in a vague approximation of accents south of the Mason-Dixon line. “Pogo who lives in th’ Okefenokee Swamp, Pogo the opossum?”

  I smiled as sincerely as I could, thought the man was a complete ass, and turned to walk away, at which point he grabbed my sleeve and deigned to apologize.

  Later I discovered that there was in fact a cartoon strip by a man called Kelly, and the character he drew was an opossum called Pogo, an inhabitant of the very same swamp. Then it seemed a matter of great hilarity to us, but I believe that our laughter was fuelled by liquor and not the inherent humor in an opossum.

  The second party, he walked right over to me, thrust a glass of champagne in my hand, and said, “You know about the whole civil rights thing?”

  I frowned at him. “Civil rights?”

  “Sure, civil rights. Advocating passive resistance to segregation, you know? You must have heard something about this, surely?”’

  I allowed
that I knew a little of it, insufficient to really hold an opinion of any worth.

  “You know how all that stuff started?” Hennessy asked.

  I shook my head.

  “The Second World War.”

  “What?”

  “The Second World War.”

  I frowned. “I’m not quite sure I understand.”

  “Negro soldiers were posted in England,” Hennessy said. “They went over to England and the girls, white English girls, they treated them like human beings. Hear stories about dances, things like that, dances that were held every week, and white girls would ask Negro American soldiers to dance and the soldiers kept on refusing ’cause they figured if they danced with a white girl someone would come and lynch them.” Hennessy smiled, looked away for a moment. “There was even a Negro soldier accused of raping a white girl someplace. The fellow got court-martialed, found guilty, and they were all set to hang him. The villagers knew he never did it, knew that the girl that had accused him had fabricated the entire thing, and so they got together and signed a petition, sent it all the way to Eisenhower. Eisenhower quashed the court-martial and reprieved the Negro three days before he was due to be executed.”

  I shook my head. “I still don’t think I understand what this has to do with me.”

  Hennessy smiled. “Hang fire there, Vaughan, I’m not finished yet. Like I was saying, Eisenhower reprieved the fellow, and the Negro soldiers, Negro American soldiers from the Southern states, they could not believe it, could not believe that a bunch of dumb white folks would get something like that organized, and it was that, the way they were treated over in England, that made them realize that it wasn’t right to be treated the way they were being treated at home. That’s how this whole resistance to segregation thing got started up.”

  When Hennessy held an opinion, he counseled no one but himself, but when he felt you were ready to receive his opinion, he gave you both barrels.