The Angel on the Roof by Russell Banks
It happened on a Saturday morning, a day washed with new sunshine and dry air, with the whole family standing somberly in the kitchen, summoned there from their rooms by their mother’s taut, high-pitched voice, a voice that had an awful point to prove. “Come out here! Your father has something important to say to you!”
They obeyed, one by one, and gathered in a line before their father, who, dressed in pressed khakis and shined work shoes and cap, sat at the kitchen table, a pair of suitcases beside him, and in front of him a cup of coffee, which he stirred slowly with a spoon. His eyes were filled with dense water, the way they almost always were on Sunday mornings, from his drinking the night before, the children knew, and he had trouble looking them in the face, because of the sorts of things he and their mother were heard saying to one another when they were at home together late Saturday nights. This Sunday morning it was only a little worse than usual—his hands shook some, and he could barely hold his cigarette; he let it smolder in the ashtray and kept on stirring his coffee while he talked. “Your mother and me,” he said in his low, roughened voice, “we’ve decided on some things you kids should know about.” He cleared his throat. “Your mother, she thinks you oughta hear it from me, though I don’t quite know so much about that as she does, seeing as how it’s not completely my idea alone.” He studied his coffee cup for a few seconds.
“They should hear it from you because it’s what you want!” their mother finally said. She stood by the sink, her hands wringing each other dry, and stared at the man. Her face was swollen from crying, which, for the children, was not an unusual thing on a Sunday morning when their father was home. They still did not know what was coming.
“Adele, it’s not what I want,” he said. “It’s what’s got to be, that’s all. Kids,” he said, “I got to leave you folks, for a while. A long while. And I won’t be comin’ back, I guess.” He grabbed his cigarette with thumb and forefinger and inhaled the smoke fiercely, then placed the butt back into the ashtray and went on talking, as if to the table: “I don’t want to do this, I hate it, but I got to. It’s too hard to explain, and I’m hoping that someday you’ll understand it all, but I just… I just got to live someplace else now.”
Louise, the girl, barely six years old, was the only one of the three children who could speak. She said, “Where are you going, Daddy?”
“Upstate,” he said. “Back up to Holderness. I got me an apartment up there, small place.”
“That’s not all he’s got up there!” their mother said.
“Adele, I can walk outa here right this second,” he said smoothly. “I don’t have to explain a goddamned thing, if you keep that kinda stuff up. We had an agreement.”
“Yup, yup. Sorry,” she said, pursing her lips, locking them with an invisible key, throwing the key away.
Finally, Earl could speak. “Will … will you come and see us? Or can we maybe come visit you, on weekends and like that?”
“Sure, son, you can visit me, anytime you want. It’ll take a while for me to get the place set up right, but soon’s I get it all set up for kids, I’ll call you, and we’ll work out some nice visits. I shouldn’t come here, though, not for a while. You understand.”
Earl shook his head somberly up and down, as if his one anxiety concerning the event had been put satisfactorily to rest.
George, however, had turned his back on his father, and now he was taking tiny, mincing half-steps across the linoleum-covered kitchen floor toward the outside door. He stopped a second, opened the door, and stood on the landing at the top of the stairs, and no one tried to stop him, because he was doing what they wanted to do themselves, and then they heard him running pell-mell, as if falling, down the darkened stairs, two flights, to the front door of the building, heard it slam behind him, and knew he was gone, up Perley Street, between parked cars, down alleys, to a hiding place where they knew he’d stop, sit, and bawl, knew it because it was what they wanted to do themselves, especially Earl, who was too old, too scared, too confused, and too angry. Earl said, “I hope everyone can be more happy now.”
His father smiled and looked at him for the first time and clapped him on the shoulder. “Right, son,” he said. “You, you’re the man of the house now. I know you can do it. You’re a good kid, and, listen, I’m proud of you. Your mother, your brother and sister, they’re all going to need you a hell of a lot more than they have before, but I know you’re up to it, son. I’m countin’ on you,” he said, and he stood up and rubbed out his cigarette. Then he reached beyond Earl with both hands and hugged Earl’s sister, lifted her off her feet and squeezed her tight, and when the man set her down, he wiped tears away from his eyes. “Tell Georgie … well, maybe I’ll see him downstairs or something. He’s upset, I guess…” He shook Earl’s hand, drew him close, quickly hugged him, and let go and stepped away. Grabbing up his suitcases in silence, without looking once at his wife or back at his children, he left the apartment.
For good. “And good riddance, too,” as their mother immediately started saying to anyone who would listen. Louise said she missed her daddy, but she seemed to be quickly forgetting that, since for most of her life he had worked away from home, and George, who stayed mad, went deep inside himself and said nothing about it at all, and Earl—who did not know how he felt about their father’s abandoning them, for he knew that in many ways it was the best their father could do for them and in many other ways it was the worst—spoke of the man as if he had died in an accident, as if their mother were a widow and they half orphaned. This freed him, though he did not know it then, to concentrate on survival, survival for them all, which he now understood to be his personal responsibility, for his mother seemed utterly incapable of guaranteeing it, and his brother and sister were still practically babies. Often, late at night, lying in his squeaky, narrow cot next to his brother’s, Earl would say to himself, “I’m the man of the house now,” and somehow just saying it, over and over, “I’m the man of the house now,” like a prayer, made his terror ease back from his face, and he could finally slip into sleep.
Now, with his father gone six months and their mother still fragile, still denouncing the man to everyone who listens, and even to those who don’t listen but merely show her their faces for a moment or two, it’s as if the man were still coming home weekends drunk and raging against her and the world, were still betraying her, were telling all her secrets to another woman in a motel room in the northern part of the state. It’s as if he were daily abandoning her and their three children over and over again, agreeing to send money, and then sending nothing, promising to call and write letters, and then going silent on them, planning visits and trips together on weekends and holidays, and then leaving them with not even a forwarding address, forbidding them, almost, from adjusting to a new life, a life in which the man who is their father and her husband does not betray them anymore.
Earl decides to solve their problems himself. He hatches and implements, as best he can, plans, schemes, designs, all intended to find a substitute for the lost father. He introduces his mother to his hockey coach, who turns out to be married and a new father; and he invites in for breakfast and to meet his ma the cigar-smoking vet with the metal plate in his skull who drops off the newspapers at dawn for Earl to deliver before school. But the man turns out to dislike women actively enough to tell Earl, right to his face: “No offense, kid, I’m sure your ma’s a nice lady, but I got no use for ’em is why I’m single, not ’cause I ain’t met the right one yet or something.” And to the guy who comes to read the electric meter one afternoon when Earl’s home from school with the flu and his mother’s at work down at the tannery, where they’ve taken her on as an assistant bookkeeper, Earl says that he can’t let the man into the basement because it’s locked, he’ll have to come back later when his mom’s home, so she can let him in herself. The man says, “Hey, no problem, I can use last month’s reading and make the correction next month,” and waves cheerfully good-bye, leaving Earl suddenly, ut
For a moment, he blames his mother for his longing and hates her for his fantasies. But then quickly he forgives her and blames himself and commences to concoct what he thinks of as more realistic, more dignified plans, schemes, designs: sweepstakes tickets; lotteries; raffles—Earl buys tickets on the sly with his paper route money. And he enters contests: essay contests for junior high school students that provide the winner with a weeklong trip for him and a parent to Washington, D.C.; and the National Spelling Bee, which takes Earl only to the county level before he fails to spell alligator correctly. A prize, any kind of award from the world outside their tiny, besieged family, Earl believes, will make their mother happy at last. He believes that a prize will validate their new life somehow and will thus separate it, once and for all, from their father. It will be as if their father never existed.
“So what are you writing?” George demands from the bed. He walks his feet up the wall as high as he can reach, then retreats. “I know it ain’t homework, you don’t write that fast when you’re doing homework. What is it, a love letter?”
“No, asshole. Just take your damned feet off the wall, will you? Ma’s gonna be in here in a minute screaming at both of us.” Earl closes the notebook and pushes it away from him carefully, as if it is the Bible and he has just finished reading aloud from it.
“I want to see what you wrote,” George says, flipping around and setting his feet, at last, onto the floor. He reaches toward the notebook. “Lemme see it.”
“C’mon, willya? Cut the shit.”
“Naw, lemme see it.” He stands up and swipes the notebook from the table as Earl moves to protect it.
“You little sonofabitch!” Earl says, and he clamps onto the notebook with both hands and yanks, pulling George off his feet and forward onto Earl’s lap, and they both tumble to the floor, where they begin to fight, swing fists and knees, roll and grab, bumping against furniture in the tiny, crowded room, until a lamp falls over, books tumble to the floor, model airplanes crash. In seconds, George is getting the worst of it and scrambles across the floor to the door, with Earl crawling along behind, yanking his brother’s shirt with one hand and pounding at his head and back with the other, when suddenly the bedroom door swings open, and their mother stands over them. She grabs both boys by their collars and shrieks, “What’s the matter with you! What’re you doing! What’re you doing!” They stop and collapse into a bundle of legs and arms, but she goes on shrieking at them. “I can’t stand it when you fight! Don’t you know that? I can’t stand it!”
George cries, “I didn’t do anything! I just wanted to see his homework!”
“Yeah, sure,” Earl says. “Innocent as a baby.”
“Shut up! Both of you!” their mother screams. She is wild-eyed, glaring at them, and, as he has done so many times, Earl looks at her face as if he’s outside his body, and he sees that she’s not angry at them at all, she’s frightened and in pain, as if her sons are little animals, rats or ferrets, with tiny, razor-sharp teeth biting at her ankles and feet.
Quickly, he gets to his feet and says, “I’m sorry, Ma. I guess I’m just a little tired or something lately.” He pats his mother on her shoulder and offers a small smile. George crawls on hands and knees to his bed and lies on it, while Earl gently turns their mother around and steers her out the door to the living room, where the television set drones on, Les Paul and Mary Ford, playing their guitars and singing bland harmonies. “We’ll be out in a few minutes for Dobie Gillis, Ma. Don’t worry,” Earl says.
“Jeez,” George says. “How can she stand that Les Paul and Mary Ford stuff? Even Louise goes to bed when it comes on, and it’s only what, six-thirty?”
“Shut up.”
“Up yours.”
Earl leans down and scoops up the fallen dictionary, pens, airplanes, and lamps and places them back on the worktable. The black binder he opens squarely in front of him, and he says to his brother, “You want to see what I was writing? Go ahead and read it. I don’t care.”
“I don’t care, either. Unless it’s a love letter.”
“No, it’s not a love letter.”
“What is it, then?”
“Nothing,” Earl says, closing the notebook. “Homework.”
“Oh,” George says, and he marches his feet up the wall and back again.
Nov. 7, 1953
Dear Jack Bailey,
I think my mother should be queen for a day because she has suffered a lot more than most mothers in this life and she has come out of it very cheerful and loving. The most important fact is that my father left her alone with three children, myself (age 12 ½), my brother George (age 10), and my sister Louise (age 6). He left her for another woman though that’s not the important thing, because my mother has risen above all that. But he refuses to send her any child support money. He’s been gone over six months and we still haven’t seen one red cent. My mother went to a lawyer but the lawyer wants $50 in advance to help her take my father to court. She has a job as assistant bookkeeper down at Belvedere’s Tannery downtown and the pay is bad, barely enough for our rent and food costs in fact, so where is she going to get $50 for a lawyer?
Also my father was a very cruel man who drinks too much and many times when he was living with us when he came home from work he was drunk and he would yell at her and even hit her. This has caused her and us kids a lot of nervous suffering and now she sometimes has spells which the doctor says are serious, though he doesn’t know exactly what they are.
We used to have a car and my father left it with us when he left (a big favor) because he had a pickup truck. But he owed over $450 on the car to the bank so the bank came and repossessed the car. Now my mother has to walk everywhere she goes which is hard and causes her varicose veins and takes a lot of valuable time from her day.
My sister Louise needs glasses the school nurse said but “Who can pay for them?” my mother says. My paper route gets a little money but it’s barely enough for school lunches for the three of us kids which is what we use it for.
My mother’s two sisters and her brother haven’t been too helpful because they are Catholic, as she is and the rest of us, and they don’t believe in divorce and think that she should not have let my father leave her anyhow. She needs to get a divorce but no one except me and my brother George think it is a good idea. Therefore my mother cries a lot at night because she feels so abandoned in this time of her greatest need.
The rest of the time though she is cheerful and loving in spite of her troubles and nervousness. That is why I believe that this courageous long-suffering woman, my mother, should be Queen for a Day.
Sincerely yours,
Earl Painter
Several weeks slide by, November gets cold and gray, and a New Hampshire winter starts to feel inevitable again, and Earl does not receive the letter he expects. He has told no one, especially his mother, that he has written to Jack Bailey, the smiling, mustachioed host of the Queen for a Day television show, which Earl happened to see that time he was home for several days with the flu, bored and watching television all afternoon. Afterwards, delivering papers in the predawn gloom, in school all day, at the hockey rink, doing homework at night, he could not forget the television show, the sad stories told by the contestants about their illness, poverty, neglect, victimization, and, always, their bad luck, luck so bad that you felt it was somehow deserved. The studio audience seemed genuinely saddened, moved to tears, even, by Jack Bailey’s recitation of these narratives, and then elated afterwards, when the winning victims, all of them middle-aged women, were rewarded with refrigerators, living room suites, vacation trips, washing machines, china, fur coats, and, if they needed them, wheelchairs, prosthetic limbs, twenty-four-hour nursing care. As these women wept for joy, the audience applauded, and Earl almost applauded, too, alone there in the dim living room of the small, cold, and threadbare apartment in a mill town in central
Earl knows that those women’s lives surely aren’t much different than his mother’s life, and in fact, if he has told it right, if somehow he has got into the letter what he has intuited is basically wrong with his mother’s life, it will be obvious to everyone in the audience that his mother’s life is actually much worse than those of many or perhaps even most of the women who win the prizes. Earl knows that, although his mother enjoys good health (except for “spells”) and holds down a job and is able to feed, house, and clothe her children, there is still a deep, essential sadness in her life that, in his eyes, none of the contestants on Queen for a Day has. He believes that if he can just get his description of her life right, other people—Jack Bailey, the studio audience, millions of people all over America watching it on television—everyone will share in her sadness, so that when she is rewarded with appliances, furniture, and clothing, maybe even a trip to Las Vegas, then everyone will share in her elation, too. Even he will share in it.
Earl knows that it is not easy to become a contestant on Queen for a Day. Somehow, your letter describing the candidate has first to move Jack Bailey, and then your candidate has to be able to communicate her sufferings over television in a clear and dramatic way. Earl noticed that some of the contestants, to their own apparent disadvantage, downplayed the effect on them of certain tragedies—a child with a birth defect, say, or an embarrassing kind of operation or a humiliating dismissal by an employer—while playing up other, seemingly less disastrous events, such as being cheated out of a small inheritance by a phony siding contractor or having to drop out of hairdressing school because of a parent’s illness, and when the studio audience was asked to show the extent and depth of its compassion by having its applause measured on a meter, it was always the woman who managed to present the most convincing mixture of courage and complaint who won.