Falling Angels Read online

  Mary Jane strutted over to it and in an exasperated, motherly manner straightened its bow. A man who owned a doll factory made it, she said, from pictures Aunt Betty gave him. Just its head cost a hundred dollars.

  “What’s her name?” Sandy whispered. She had a pain in her throat. “Is it Mary Jane?”

  “No. It’s Annette.”

  “Annette Funicello?”

  “Annette Funicello Field.”

  Sandy went around behind the doll, and that was better, not seeing the face. With the very tips of her fingers she touched its hair.

  “Careful,” Mary Jane scolded. “Her head’s breakable.”

  Sandy quickly dropped her hand. Naturally she was jealous, but what had her on the verge of tears was the doll’s ugliness (for even at eight years old Sandy was an aesthete), and more crushing still, the realization that Aunt Betty, whom she had always envisioned wishing upon a star for a beautiful daughter, wanted more Mary Janes, wanted Mary Jane to have a sister, or a baby … whatever a doll this big was.

  Norma said, generously,“It’s neat,” although she didn’t play with dolls and couldn’t imagine how her cousin was anything but tortured by this one. Norma gave the doll another glance and felt herself blush. Everyone said that Norma and Mary Jane were the ones who looked like sisters.

  “It’s fat,” Lou said. She pulled up the doll’s dress. “Big fat bum,” she sang. “Big fat bum.”

  “Leave her alone,” Mary Jane screamed. “I’m telling.”

  “Oh, who cares,” Lou said, falling on the pink wall-to-wall carpet.

  Mary Jane fussed with Annette’s bow. “I know something that you don’t know,” she sang.

  Sandy asked,“Is it about Annette Funicello Field?” She couldn’t resist lowering one of the doll’s arms and sliding her finger into its curled-up hand. What if the hand squeezed hers? She would scream.

  Mary Jane didn’t answer. She just kept singing that she knew something they didn’t know, until Lou twisted her arm behind her back and ordered her to tell.

  “Okay,” Mary Jane said, not putting up a fight. “Just remember, you made me.”

  They went down the basement to Uncle Eugene’s workroom. When they were all inside, Mary Jane shut the door behind them and pulled the string on the light bulb that hung down on a wire. Uncle Eugene’s tools were in a mess on the bench. Where they belonged on the wall, he had painted their outlines in white. Norma said,“That’s what they do around your body when you get murdered on the street.”

  “Hey!” Lou yelled. “Aunt Betty! Ha ha! Va-va-va-voom!” She pointed at a calendar that had a colour picture above it of a strange lady, with gigantic bare breasts, sitting with her legs crossed on top of a ladder, filing her nails with a saw.

  “Found it,” Mary Jane said, lifting a small metal box out from behind a stack of planks.

  “So, big deal,” Lou said. “What’s in it?”

  Norma asked,“Is it a dead man’s hand?”

  “You’d never believe it in a million years if I told you.” Mary Jane lifted the box up onto a chair and opened the lid.

  Papers, letters inside. That’s all.

  Lou shoved Mary Jane. “Let’s see.”

  “Quit it!” Mary Jane said in a furious voice. She rifled down through the pile, and near the bottom pulled out a paper. A piece of folded-up old newspaper. She slammed down the lid and opened the paper on it.

  “Read that!” she screamed at Lou. “You just read that, big smarty pants. I hate you!”

  Norma had a premonition. Inside her head there was a cold light that she knew was God’s warning, but she read too, over Lou’s shoulder. “Monday, May thirty-first, nineteen forty-eight,” Norma read out loud. “Gee, before we were even born.”

  Lou pulled the paper closer. “Is that Mommy?” she said. “That’s Mommy.”

  “That’s your mother!” Mary Jane cried.

  “Let me see!” Sandy cried, squeezing between her big sisters.

  There was a photograph of their mother in a dark suit and in a hat that had a little white feather sticking out of it. She looked surprised. Behind her was their father’s face, looking mad and too young to be their father.

  Norma started to read the headline out loud: “No changes—”

  “Charges,” Lou interrupted. “No charges laid—”

  “—in Niagara Falls baby death,” Norma and Lou read together.

  Norma looked up at their cousin. Mary Jane’s cheeks were apple red, the same as her doll’s. “Read it!” Mary Jane cried.

  “Tray—” Lou said, going on to the subheading. She nudged Norma. “What’s this word?”

  “Tragic,” Norma said. “Tragic accident, court rules.”

  Sandy sucked in her breath. “A baby died,” she whispered wide-eyed, covering her mouth with her hands.

  “You had a brother,” Mary Jane burst out. “I knew. I knew before you did!”

  “You never did,” Sandy said. She stood on her tiptoes to see over Lou’s arm. Lou was running a finger under the words as Norma continued to read out loud.

  “A Sunday outing …” Norma read. Pretending to read along with her, Sandy said,“outing.”

  “No whiteness has come forward,” Norma read.

  “No whiteness,” Sandy echoed softly.

  “No witness!” Mary Jane cried. “Stupid! You can’t even read. I’ll read it.”

  “Shut up!” Lou cried, giving her cousin a push. “Shut your big fat trap.”

  Norma went on reading. ‘“He fell out of my arms,’ Mrs. Field test … testif … test …”

  Sandy murmured,“‘He fell out of my arms,’ Mommy said.”

  “The fate of Baby Jimmy …” Norma read.

  “Baby Jimmy,” Sandy repeated, thinking that this must be their father when he was a baby.

  “Read what it says at the end!” Mary Jane cried. Her arm shot by Sandy’s face.

  “Ow!” Sandy protested. The sequins on Mary Jane’s sleeve had scratched her chin.

  “See!” Mary Jane cried, stabbing a roly-poly finger at the bottom of the column. “See, it says, ‘The ruling came in … in spite …”’ She clicked her tongue impatiently. “Well, anyway, it says that your mother threw the baby over Niagara Falls. Threw him, not dropped him. Because he would have landed on the ground if she just dropped him.”

  “Liar! Liar!” Lou shouted.

  “… to span the bank,” Norma read,“between the wall and the water.”

  Lou snatched the paper up, and Norma stepped back. On the radio upstairs a man sang,“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.” Norma thought, that’s what cowboys would do. She swaggered over to the calendar lady and touched her finger to the nipple of the right breast. She froze, her finger in the air, stunned by her daring.

  “You made me show you.” Mary Jane sounded frightened.

  Lou stared at the picture of their mother and father. It felt like a matter of life or death that she remember if she’d seen that feather hat before. “Did the baby die?” Sandy asked. Mary Jane tried to take the newspaper back, but Lou crumpled it into a ball.

  “You’re going to get it!” Mary Jane cried.

  Lou hurled the ball at her, marched over to the workbench and picked up the hammer. Mary Jane screamed. Sandy screamed. Up in the living room they thumped on the floor to keep it down. Taking the hammer with her, Lou left the room and went upstairs. She marched right past the living room, through her name thundering out of there. Down the hall to Mary Jane’s bedroom.

  “Stop!” Annette Funicello’s one raised hand said.

  Lou windmilled the hammer.

  She windmilled the hammer but didn’t step any closer to the doll. Already her intention had deflected from that dumb, innocent, one-hundred-dollar breakable head back to the real Mary Jane.

  No, back to him! (She heard him coming down the hall.)

  Near midnight Sandy tiptoed down to her sisters’ bedroom.

  She wished that it was her and Norma who shared a room. N
orma had a round face with smooth pink half-heart cheeks, and she was big and soft to sit on; she let Sandy sit on her and collapse on her in a game they called Chair. Her voice was low, drifting-off. She never got mad the way Lou did. Lou wasn’t even the oldest, but she thought she was the boss when their father wasn’t around.

  Sandy went over to Norma’s bed. “Are you awake?” she whispered.

  “Yeah, we can’t sleep,” Norma said. She and Lou had been telling each other that’s why there were no photographs after their mother and father got married, none for three years. And remember before their mother stopped going out for drives, the time they were all in the car, and Lou asked if they could ever go to Niagara Falls, and before their father could speak, their mother made him pull over, and she got out and just walked around in some bushes for about half an hour? Remember seeing her purple pillbox hat (that’s all that showed above the bushes) wandering around?

  Norma and Lou had been exchanging these revelations and in long stretches of silence waiting for an entire, lasting sensation of what it was like to have a brother who was dead because your mother dropped him.

  Norma absolutely exonerated their mother. Having held several babies, she knew how they squirmed in your arms, how easy it would be to drop one. She could just picture it—their mother being distracted by Niagara Falls, not paying attention for a second, crying,“Oh, little Jimmy!” but he was gone, rolling across the bank and over the falls. Did he get all smashed up? Since Norma had never seen a waterfall, she imagined calm water at the bottom. She imagined Jimmy in a knitted white bonnet, doing the dog paddle, and his blanket floating around him like a lily pad.

  What if it had been Sandy? On the way back from Uncle Eugene and Aunt Betty’s, Norma had this thought and pulled her little sister over to her and held her until they were home.

  Another thought that kept crossing Norma’s mind was their brother’s age: twelve. Twelve in February if he had lived. She figured it out from the date of the newspaper and how old the story said he was when he fell. He would have played with her—catch, football, road hockey. The two of them would have played games girls don’t play and boys don’t play with her. Twelve. A twelve-year-old brother is what she’d have had now, if their mother hadn’t dropped him by accident.

  Lou didn’t think it was an accident, but she also let their mother off the hook, because who wouldn’t have thrown that damn baby? which Lou now envisioned as their father. A baby him—the brush cut, the shot nerves. Always bawling. At the same time she was furious with their father for not having saved it. Why didn’t he? When he was in the war, he ran from cover and saved a man being shot at. In Mary Jane’s bedroom she tried to whack him one with the hammer, but before she could, he got it away from her, threw her over his knee and spanked her. Then he dragged her down the hall and ordered her to tell Uncle Eugene and Aunt Betty she was sorry. But by then she was thinking,“I’m a doll” (she had turned herself into a doll), so how could she cry or speak or be bad, let alone be sorry? He spanked her again. He kept spanking her until Uncle Eugene hauled him off into the kitchen, where in a low voice that they nevertheless heard out in the hall, he explained about the newspaper cutting downstairs. Their father said,“Jesus fucking Christ”—on Christmas Day. When he came back out of the kitchen, he stalked over to the closet and began throwing out their coats and mittens and hats. Their mother’s pillbox hat rolled down the three stairs into the living room. “Get dressed,” he said.

  “What about dinner?” Aunt Betty screamed.

  In the car Lou tugged the back of their mother’s fur collar. She wanted their mother to speak, even if it was only to whisper “Don’t,” but their mother pretended not to feel anything, and her face in the rearview mirror was dreamy. Lou fell back against the seat. Beside her, Norma and Sandy whispered. Lou looked out her window and let her eyes fill at the unfairness of the spanking and of being the daughter of their father. His tantrums. His yelling and complaining. All his rules. The minute he came back from work, she and Norma and Sandy had better be lined up in the front hall for inspection, or else, and if they didn’t pass muster, he ordered them to wash or change on the double. What other father did this? After inspection he went outside and looked up and down the street for something to get in an uproar about: the neighbours’ dandelions, their dirty cars, their unshovelled driveways, their noisy kids.

  She was glad that the baby of him died. She knew that their mother threw it. But for some reason she kept her mouth shut the rest of the day, kept it shut even now, talking about it with Norma.

  Sandy climbed into Norma’s bed, under the covers. She made a slow, unfurling motion with her arms. “Mommy threw our brother over Niagara Falls,” she said wistfully.

  “Dropped him over,” Norma said.

  “It was a tragic accident,” Lou snapped from the next bed. She didn’t want the damn kid to start crying and get them in trouble.

  “Can you tell us a story?” Sandy asked her.

  “What about?”

  “About David.”

  Lou sighed. “Oh, okay.” She waited until her sisters had climbed into her bed, one on either side of her. “It came to pass,” she said in her quiet, expressive storytelling voice,“that a woman had a boy child that she wanted to save from being murdered by the king, so she covered him with slime and put him in a basket amongst the bulrushes.”

  “No, that’s Moses,” Sandy said.

  “Yeah,” Lou said, realizing it was. “I know.”

  Sandy woke up first. She was curled into Norma’s stomach and looking straight at Lou’s face, which had a peaceful aspect that Sandy had never seen when Lou was awake. Eight years later, lying on a vibrating bed in the middle of twin brothers, Sandy would open her eyes from a dream that she wasn’t sleeping between those brothers but between her sisters. “It’s not nymphomania!” she would declare and then cry her heart out with relief and for old times.

  Now, very gently, she braided a lock of Lou’s long dark hair around her own wrist. She made a Lou-hair bracelet. She was very quiet and gentle, but Lou woke up anyway and said,“The TV’S not on.” Sandy shook off the bracelet. “Something’s the matter,” Lou said, jumping out of bed and running down the hall to their parents’ bedroom.

  Their father was standing at the window, reading the thermometer. “Well, your mother’s gone and gotten herself the flu,” he said, as if that didn’t take the cake.

  Norma and Sandy came into the room and went over to stand beside Lou, who was feeling their mother’s forehead. Their mother was asleep on her back, all the blankets thrown off.

  “She’s burning up,” Lou whispered.

  “Even her hand,” Norma whispered, stroking it.

  Sandy felt the other hand, the tapered fingers that were smooth and ladylike from no work. “We’re sorry,” she whispered. She assumed that their mother’s fever was caused by them finding out about their brother.

  The rest of the day, although he was home, their father had them doing the checking-up on her. “When you’re straight commission, you can’t afford to get sick,” he said. She never really woke up. They didn’t think about taking her to the bathroom, and sometime after lunch she wet the bed. Then their father was forced to come in and carry her out into the hall, where he changed her nightgown while Norma and Lou changed the sheets. That night he slept on the chesterfield.

  The next morning she was awake when they went in to see her. She didn’t speak, but she looked at each of them in turn as if she had something important to say. “What?” they urged her. They brought her a bowl of Frosted Flakes and tried to feed her, but she wouldn’t chew or even swallow until Lou got the idea of putting a plastic Flav-R straw in her mouth. After she had sipped up all the milk in the bowl, they walked her to the bathroom, Lou supporting her on one side and Norma on the other. Lou and Norma rubbed deodorant under her arms on top of her nightgown and brushed her teeth as she sat on the toilet, and Sandy combed her long, wavy hair that was as golden as her own, that sh
e twined with her own to enjoy the likeness. All the while they asked her if she was all right and begged her to answer, but she could hardly keep her eyes open.

  “Shovel those liquids into her,” their father ordered when he phoned from work. He suggested soup, Postum, evaporated milk, juice. Any liquid in the house except for her “coffee.”

  For six days she was the same. Sleeping most of the time, feverish, thrashing, incoherent. Obviously upset. “I wonder what she’s dreaming about?” Norma said.

  “Television shows,” Lou decided. “All mixed up together. Hoss and Lassie and the Beaver.”

  “Yeah,” Norma said. “And they’re all fighting, and the show never ends.”

  It didn’t occur to the girls that their mother should have a visit from a doctor. Nobody who wasn’t related to them ever visited. Aunt Betty phoned once, to see if everyone had recovered from Christmas, and Norma told her that their mother had the flu, but she never thought to ask for help. She and Lou did everything around the house anyway. The only job Sandy did was the mending. That started one day when, without being asked, she sewed patches on the worn-through elbows of their father’s red flannel shirt. It turned out that she could darn, too. She had their mother’s talent that way. The fact that she was a miniature of their mother meant that this was no big marvel. It also meant that nobody pressed other chores on her—nobody imagined that she might be good for anything else.

  “How’s the food situation?” Aunt Betty asked.

  “We’re running out of stuff for Mommy to drink,” Norma admitted.

  “Well, there’s a blessing in disguise!” Aunt Betty screamed.

  In fact, it wasn’t just juice and soup and milk that they were out of, it was almost everything. Lou phoned their father to tell him, and he dropped by on his lunch hour with some grocery money.

  Usually Lou didn’t mind doing the shopping. It got her out of the house, and she always picked up a few chocolate bars for herself. But she minded today. She was worried about being away in case their mother died or had to go to the bathroom. And there had been a snowstorm and then freezing rain, so that coming home, it took all her strength to pull the loaded wagon across the shopping-centre parking lot, over bumps where tire tracks had frozen in the snow. Halfway across she had to stop and rest on the running board of a truck.