Read Online The Faces of Angels by Lucretia Grindle - Free Book Online Page B

skeletal lemon trees in their enormous pots, and disappears, the yellow crown of her hair turning suddenly dark as she steps into the shadow of the archway that leads to the street.
    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