The Angel on the Roof

Assisted Living

Mother and son entered the restaurant talking, their statements overlapping, “I’m sorry, no, Teddy, it wasn’t like that at all,” she said, and he said, “The only way the two things make sense, moral sense, is if they’re cause and effect. The old man used you, Mom, he used you pure and simple.”

Caught at the door by everyone, they stopped talking, smiled, nodded good morning to Della behind the counter and the several customers they recognized. And looked hard into one another’s face.

“That’ll be enough out of you,” Emily said, and smiled. A joke.

Teddy touched his lips with an index finger, bowing to her authority. His joke. He towered over her, bulky as a bear in his camel hair coat and silk scarf.

Emily loved Teddy and was grateful to him but sometimes felt he should just let things go, or let her go. She poked her bladed nose and chin up at him like a fist. The woman was eighty-one, and the events were nearly a half century old — she didn’t even think they were interesting anymore, let alone connected. On her own she never would have connected them. Fine, if he wanted to worry over the distant past as if it explained his and her present, but he shouldn’t make her do it, too.

Teddy was very intelligent, though, and knew a lot more about the world and men — his father included — than she. He was a man himself, after all, and a college-educated professional, a pharmacist who owned his drugstore and the minimall that contained it. Teddy had moved his mother up here to New Hampshire barely a year ago from her house in Somerset, Massachusetts, where, after her divorce from Teddy’s father, Wayne, and after Teddy and his younger brother and sister finished their educations and married and raised children and even after their divorces and remarriages, she’d stayed on alone. She had grown old in that modest, suburban house, the cookie-cutter ranch that she first saw back in the fall of 1953, when it was freshly built, the paint barely dry, and the yard and neighborhood still a raw construction site.

She and Wayne had sat in the green Studebaker he liked so much and stared at the house from the unpaved street. She was behind the wheel, and he was in the passenger’s seat; they were peering out her open window. “It’s too small,” she said. “We’ll never fit.”

He reached over and wrapped her shoulders in his thick arm and smiled at the house as if appraising a villa. “Not to worry, m’dear. The place itself will grow, until we do fit.”

He was mostly right. A more than competent carpenter, Wayne that first year built a large screened porch off the kitchen and the following year added an el with a master bedroom and second bathroom. Emily and the kids planted grass and maple saplings and a boxwood hedge. Before long, the tract house had become a proper American home in the suburbs, the envy of the preceding generation of Americans and the desire of the one that followed. Then came the divorce from Wayne — because of his drinking and womanizing, and she was better off without him anyhow, everyone said so — and the kids left home for college, secretarial school, the military, and Emily’s sixties arrived and went, and she grew ever more alone, and her seventies passed, when most of her friends died. Until she turned eighty, and it became evident to Teddy, and to Emily, too, that, even though she was still relatively healthy and clearheaded, she could no longer manage basic household tasks. She had the early signs of Parkinson’s and what she said was a leaky heart and claimed to have had a stroke, although her own doctor doubted it: she seemed to have suffered no lasting effects from it, except an occasional loss of peripheral vision, and called it my stroke, not a stroke.

Of her three children, Teddy was the custodial child and the one, at least in his siblings’ eyes, with the money. His brother was still in the Army, a noncommissioned officer ready to retire, and his sister was an administrative assistant for a college dean. With their easy approval and Emily’s reluctant consent, Teddy had moved their mother to this town, his town, the neat, self-contained village in southern New Hampshire where he had settled with his newly begun second marriage a decade ago, and installed her in an efficiency apartment in an assisted-living facility. Teddy paid all her bills and let her use her small social security check for pin money. The facility offered nutritious, balanced meals in a dining hall on the first floor, regularly scheduled entertainment and recreation periods, laundry service, and housecleaning. And, as Teddy often reminded her, a comprehensive “life-care” health plan with a clinic and visiting physician right there on the premises. “If you broke your hip and needed round-the-clock medical care for months, you could stay right here at St. Hubert’s,” he said. “Down there in Somerset, all alone, you’d have to go straight into a nursing home.”

She agreed. Old age was dangerous, and assisted living looked like the best protection available.

Sometimes, however, the place seemed little more than an oversized boardinghouse filled with nearly mindless, disabled old people, a trio of cold-eyed nurses, and a cadre of bored, cigarette-smoking attendants who’d rather be working in a prison. It seemed those times a strange way to live, with nothing natural about it. Whenever Emily wondered what she was doing in such a place and how had she come to choose it, she recited back to herself the sequence of small, sharply determined steps that had brought her here, starting with her report to Teddy on the phone eighteen months ago that she could no longer lug home her week’s groceries and lived too far from a store that delivered and thus had begun to ride the bus downtown and back daily for her food.

She missed her ranch house in Somerset and her longtime independence and possibly her solitude and wanted them back. Or if not that, then at least to be free to complain about their absence. But she couldn’t even complain. “Consider the alternatives, Mom,” Teddy kept reminding her. “This is not just what’s best for you, it’s your only option. You really can’t live alone anymore.”

True enough, she supposed, and also true that in some ways it was a relief to let Teddy take control of her life and a luxury not to have to worry ever again about anything.

Except, unexpectedly, this — this what? This mystery, which had been nothing at all, a nonexistence in her life. Until this morning, until Teddy, driving her to the diner in his new Lincoln Towncar, created it. In all these years, Emily had not thought to put the two together — her husband Wayne’s car accident down in New Bedford and his sudden decision a few weeks later to sell the partially renovated Victorian house in New Hampshire and buy the barely finished ranch house down in Somerset, Massachusetts. In a matter of days, Wayne had uprooted Emily and their children and replanted them in a fly-by-night housing development a hundred miles to the south. At the time, the accident, which she knew only from Wayne’s account, seemed to have happened to someone other than her husband, to a total stranger, and not to her and her three kids. The move from New Hampshire to Somerset, however, seemed to have happened only to her and the kids, and not to Wayne.

“Look, the connections, Mom, are obvious,” Teddy said. With one hand he stirred nonfat creamer into his coffee and with the other set the empty plastic thimble neatly into the tray of unopened creamers. It was the occasion of their weekly breakfast at the Cascades Diner; a ritual marked and silently honored by the waitresses and the regulars. Teddy Holmes was a good son. A man nearly sixty years old, a local businessman with plenty of responsibilities and a second wife and grown family of his own, yet he still managed to find time once a week to take his elderly mother out for breakfast.

“Not obvious to me,” Emily said. “Not then, and not now, either.”

Della, their waitress, bellied up to the booth, pen poised and order pad out, and asked if they knew what they wanted.

“Yes!” Emily exclaimed and with helpful precision listed small grapefruit juice, two poached eggs medium-soft, toasted English muffin. “With ba-con,” she growled, expressing anticipated pleasure, and added, “Extra crispy, please,” and fluttered her eyelashes.

Della gave her a promissory wink and turned to her son, who ordered his usual scrambled eggs, bacon, and hash browns. Slowly he stirred his coffee. As if to reassure him, Emily rested her hand on his, and he ceased stirring, lifted his cup with his free hand, and took a sip.

“Sometimes I neglect how hard it was for you kids,” she said. “Before my divorce, even.”

Teddy’s father — her late ex-husband, as Emily referred to him — had been a willful man and charming, and in moving them he’d gone against everyone, especially the children, who, after months of anxious resistance, had finally settled into their third school and home in the seven years since Teddy started school. She remembered that Teddy more than the others had hated the move. And though she herself had truly resented living apart from her husband and raising their kids practically on her own, Emily hadn’t wanted to move, either. She loved that small New Hampshire town, the broad, tree-lined streets and large white homes, the grassy commons downtown, and the easy availability of roles that she could fill — church bake-sale chairperson, PTA vice president, Boy Scout mother, Girl Scout mother, member of the women’s auxiliary to the fire department, to the VFW, the Elks. Emily liked small-town organizations and associations — she was the type of woman who is happiest when presented with a clear-cut role in life, when chosen. And she liked the house they’d bought there, a long-neglected, four-bedroom Victorian. After stripping half its walls and woodwork of generations of wallpaper and paint, she had begun to glimpse unexpected possibilities of gentility.

But down in Massachusetts, Wayne told her, they’d finally be living close to where his work was located, and he could sleep in his own bed on weeknights for a change. It wasn’t his fault that he resided with his wife and kids only on weekends. He hated it as much as they did. He particularly hated the long drives home on Friday night and back on Sunday. Wayne was a shipyard welder, and he’d followed the construction of the first generation of nuclear submarines south along the New England coast from Portland, Maine, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he’d worked on the Thresher, which so famously sank. From there he’d transferred to Charlestown, Massachusetts, and, after six months, signed on in New Bedford. Which was where the accident happened.

“Times like this,” Teddy said, “I wish the old man was still around. So I could ask him.”

“Ask him what?”

“About the accident. The move. All of it.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” she said. “Your father lied about everything when he was alive, and he’d lie about it dead, too. Lie, lie, lie. The worst thing, Teddy, is he lied to me knowing all the while it would only make me lie unintentionally to you kids.” She gave him a soulful, hurt look.

Teddy feigned sympathy and inwardly smiled. Recently, to his mild surprise, he’d found his mother’s turns of phrase amusing, and sometimes on the phone with his brother or sister he had tried to share his pleasure by repeating some typically disjointed exchange with her. They, however, were not amused. Since high school they had deliberately lived as far from New England and their shared past as possible; both claimed that their mother’s characteristic turns of phrase were merely flags for her self-absorption, her shallow, craven need for attention, and her self-serving ignorance. Teddy’s siblings, when younger and between marriages, had described their childhoods at length and in detail to psychotherapists and had separately concluded that their mother was a fully flowered narcissist. To them, therefore, whatever she unintentionally revealed of herself solely concerned her present, not their past. They weren’t interested.

Teddy, however, was. His mother was his very close neighbor now, and he’d seen much more of her in the last year alone than any of them had in the previous forty, and he was freshly revising many of his earlier assumptions about her character. Leading him to revise certain assumptions about his childhood and youth, and to rethink his memories of his father.

“It wouldn’t matter what he told you, dead or alive, he’d still be lying,” she repeated. “No matter what he described, the point would be to keep me from finding out about some woman he was seeing at the time. There would be one woman for the car accident in New Bedford, and another for the move to Somerset. In those days, women and me not finding out about them are what connected everything in that man’s life.”

Teddy shook his head no, and waited for Della to set their breakfast platters in front of them. Emily stared eagerly at her food, checked out his plate as if comparing portions, and commenced eating. There was more to it than that, he was certain. For one thing, it was the same woman, not two different women, who lurked behind the accident and who was also somehow the direct cause of their having to leave New Hampshire. He was sure of it.

He hadn’t reflected on these memories in decades. All through his adolescence and even after college, Teddy remembered that long-ago summer and fall only in shifting pieces shaded and half-hidden behind a gauze curtain. He had a specific memory of running from the kitchen of their house in New Hampshire to the woods. Of hiding in the woods until after dark, while the family and even some of their neighbors hollered his name and searched for him. Of the peepers shrieking in the dark; of the smell of damp earth and leaves rotting underfoot. He had no memory of being found or of returning to the house or of the actual move to Somerset. There was no sequence to his memories, no clear chronology, no sense to them. His father came home to New Hampshire from New Bedford late one Friday night as usual, and that Sunday morning, whistling and full of good cheer, griddled pancakes for the three children, and when their mother arrived at the table, still in her nightdress and bathrobe, her eyes red and puffy from crying, he announced to the three that they were moving to a new house, a terrific, brand-new house down in Massachusetts, and he would be coming home from work every night, like other daddies did. Teddy remembered his father saying that he hated lawyers, every damned one of them, even his own lawyer. His mother wept; Teddy heard her from his bedroom in the new house, the room that he shared now with both his brother and sister, who were asleep, he was sure, and couldn’t hear their mother crying first in the living room, then in the kitchen, then outside on the back steps, calling, Wayne, Wayne, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean what I said! as his father strode angrily into the suburban night. He wanted to wake his brother and sister, but decided not to. He remembered when he walked into his parents’ bedroom on a snowy Sunday morning and said to them, Who’s Brenda? What’re you guys talking about? his father had looked at him crossly and said, Teddy, for Christ’s sake, get lost! His father couldn’t drive them in his car anywhere anymore. The men that he worked with picked him up on Sunday nights and drove him to New Bedford two hours away and brought him home again on Friday nights late. The family had moved to Massachusetts, but his father still came home only on weekends. He came home drunk. He told them that one of these days he’d be working in the Charlestown Navy Yard again, which was close to Somerset, and then he’d come home every night in time for supper. Won’t that be great, kids? His mother, who was driving the Studebaker in the middle of the week one afternoon, said, Daddy was in an accident and has lost his driver’s license for a year. It upsets him to talk about, so don’t notice it in front of him, okay?

For years, like an archaeologist attempting to reassemble a piece of pottery from a handful of shards, he’d turned the memories over in his mind, trying to construct a coherent narrative, a story with a beginning, middle, and end that would explain the intensity of emotion that he associated with that brief period of his life. He finally gave it up. It was adolescence, that’s all. These emotions, like his brother’s and sister’s overall feelings toward their mother, were displaced from some other, still unexamined part of his life. There was no story here.

Until this morning, when he picked up his mother at St. Hubert’s Assisted Living Facility. The Home, she insisted on calling it. She hitched herself into the passenger seat and with her usual twists and grunts had so much difficulty fastening the seat belt that at last he had to lean over and snap it for her himself. She responded with a sincere, almost blissful smile. Her great pleasure was in being attended to, and it didn’t matter who it came from or whether the attention was large or small: the degree of pleasure it gave was the same. Then she said, “I dreamed about the house in Somerset last night. It was lucky, you know, that Wayne made me put it in my name.”

Teddy said, “He did what?”

In her dream, she rode the bus home from Teddy’s drugstore with a bag of groceries, and after a long walk, when she felt utterly lost in a strange city, she finally found the house, but when she tried to open the door it was locked. Then she noticed a for sale sign on the front lawn, which frightened her. “I said to myself, ‘It’s lucky Wayne made me put the house in my name,’ and then woke up, feeling very relieved that he’d done that. What do you think that means?”she asked. She knew Teddy enjoyed explaining people’s dreams, but she took his interpretations no more seriously than she took her daily horoscope in the newspaper. Still, it flattered Teddy to be asked, and they were her dreams, after all, and her horoscope, so the form of the inquiry was familiar and pleasing to them both.

“That you were relieved?”

“I know why I was relieved. He put the house in my name is why. No, the other.”

“But that’s the most intriguing detail in the dream.”

“It wasn’t just in the dream, Teddy. It was real.”

“What was?”

“Your father putting the house in my name.”

Teddy looked across at her, puzzled and suddenly troubled. “Why the hell would Dad do that? In reality, I mean. I can understand in a dream why, but not in reality.”

Wayne hadn’t even attended the closing at the bank, she told him. She’d gone alone. He was too busy, had to work that day, something. She couldn’t remember. Anyhow, since it was going to be in her name — the deed, the mortgage, the insurance, everything — there actually was no reason for him to go. The car, too, she said, his Studebaker: he’d transferred title of the car to her a few weeks before they passed papers on the house. That’s why it was so much easier later, she explained, when they got divorced, for her to hold on to the house and car. And probably why he felt he didn’t owe her any alimony, either, and didn’t have the guilt of a normal man who wasn’t making his child support payments on time.

“So, yes, I guess there was a negative side to it, as well as a positive,” she said. “Maybe I wasn’t so lucky after all.”

“There’s only one reason he’d sign everything over to you,” Teddy announced.

“The paperwork,” she said quickly. “Your father always hated paperwork. I was the one who paid the bills and corresponded, you know.”

“He must’ve been on the losing end of a lawsuit.”

“No, no. He was just too busy, and he hated paperwork, that’s all. Do you mind if I have some heat?” she asked. “Would you turn the heater on?”

Teddy ignored her. He was remembering his father’s car accident, realizing for the first time that it had occurred close to the time of their move from New Hampshire south to Somerset, the one event in his childhood that Teddy associated with the beginning of disruption, loss, and fear: he believed that, for him, there began the end of family life. Up to that point, Teddy hadn’t noticed the rapidly widening gap between other people’s family lives and his. But from then on, from the autumn of his thirteenth year, the gap defined him.

Teddy’s memories of his father’s accident were as sketchy and unreliable as his memories of the move to Somerset, and his mother was as reluctant to talk about both events now as she had been back when they occurred. Teddy, however, was not in the slightest reluctant to reconstruct the events of that summer and fall of 1953 and then to substitute for his tattered memory of the original his closely woven reconstruction.

It was a warm June weeknight on the south shore of Cape Cod. Wayne Holmes and his lady friend were out for the evening in Wayne’s green Studebaker, heading down Route 28 from a roadhouse in Hyannis to a tavern in Falmouth. As they entered the village proper, Wayne reached to tune the car radio, trying to pick up Vaughn Monroe and his orchestra, broadcast live from the Norumbega Ballroom all that week. He took his eyes off the road for a second, when a child, a boy maybe ten years old or possibly as old as Teddy, stepped between two parked cars, and Wayne’s right front fender caught the boy and tossed him into the air. There were screams, shouts, tires squealing — and then an awful silence, except for Vaughn Monroe’s theme song, “Racing with the Moon.”

The boy was killed instantly. The middle son of a Portuguese fisherman, he was on his way home from the butcher shop where he worked part-time as a delivery boy. Wayne’s lady friend had slammed her head against the dashboard, causing a concussion and possible fracture, and her neck and back had been seriously injured by whiplash, but she would in time recover from her injuries completely. Wayne was drunk. He could walk and talk coherently, but he had consumed half a dozen Manhattans in the Hyannis roadhouse and a bottle of beer on the drive to Falmouth. Arrested at the scene, he was thrown into jail for the night and released the next morning on bail posted by his union shop steward at the New Bedford shipyard.

Teddy didn’t know the name of his father’s lady friend, but he thought it might be Brenda. To the police, to his insurance company’s lawyers, to the lawyer for the parents of the dead boy, and to the judge and jury, Wayne denied that he had been drinking — the police at the scene were wrong, that’s all. There were no breath tests then, no proof, and Brenda, perjuring herself, backed him up. The charge of driving-while-intoxicated was dropped, and because the boy had stepped into moving traffic at midblock, Wayne was found not responsible for his death, which should have ended the case.

Except that Wayne reneged on his promise to divorce Emily and marry Brenda. He didn’t even visit Brenda in the hospital to comfort her or to thank her for testifying falsely on his behalf. The accident had frightened Wayne deep in his bones and made him decide temporarily to give up drinking and womanizing. Besides, he’d lost his driver’s license for a year, an automatic penalty when the driver of a moving vehicle causes a fatality, and his car insurance policy had been canceled, and he was going to need the help of his wife and friends just to get back and forth between work in Massachusetts and home in New Hampshire. It was time to end the affair.

Brenda disagreed. She loved him and had lied for him at considerable risk to herself and did not expect to be repaid with abandonment and indifference. She had spent three weeks in the hospital and now suffered recurrent migraines, serious and continuing back and neck pain, and so on, a long list of complaints and deprivations that he would have to pay for. It was going to cost him tens of thousands of dollars. She promised she’d strip him of everything he owned.

Brenda revealed her intentions to Wayne in New Hampshire one Saturday afternoon in July. He was in the living room half asleep on the sofa, listening to a Red Sox game on the radio, when the phone rang. Emily, passing through the room at that moment, answered it, handed the receiver to him, and said, “It’s a woman for you.” She then went into the kitchen and sat at the window and stared dry-eyed out at her children playing in the yard.

A few moments later, Wayne entered the kitchen and stood behind her. He placed his heavy, wide hands on her shoulders and said, “We’re going to have to sell the house and move. Out of state. And I’ve got to put the car in your name, along with everything else I own or we own jointly. It’s because of the accident, Emily. The parents of the kid, they’re suing me for everything I own.”

Emily nodded, accepting his explanation, but not believing it, either. The truth, whatever it was, would wreck her life and the lives of her children. The truth would have to wait.

“Teddy, please,” Emily said, “may I have the heat turned up? It’s quite cool in here.”

“Sorry,” he said and flicked the heater switch and set the thermostat at seventy-two degrees. The big, gray Lincoln still impressed Teddy, even after owning it for a year, and he took particular pleasure in operating its onboard electronic systems. Emily, too, liked the car and whenever she was a passenger, for the duration of the ride, ran her fingertips lovingly along the seams of the soft leather upholstery. She’d never noticed the habit, but her son had. So far he’d not mentioned it to her, because he knew that if he brought her pleasure to her attention, she would abandon it.

Emily looked out the car window at the large, white houses crowding the broad, tree-lined street. “It wasn’t the way you say, Teddy. The accident and all. That had nothing to do with our decision to move to Somerset. And there was never anyone he promised to marry. Your father didn’t want a divorce from me, not even later. I was the one who wanted it. Well, not really,” she said. “I did it because of you kids.”

“Us? You’ve got to be kidding, Mom.”

“You know what I mean, Teddy. Please, honey, just leave me alone. This is all water under the dam.” She paused, and they drove on in silence. “We don’t have to rehash everything these many years later, do we?” she asked him.

“I just want to know the truth,” he answered as he pulled the car into the parking lot of the diner.

“The truth about what?”

“The connections. Cause and effect. I need to know if the old man moved us out of our house and home for a reason, no matter how tawdry and selfish. Or was it just on a whim? If it was for a reason, if the one thing, his accident and so forth, caused the other, then I guess I can forgive him. But if there wasn’t any reason, well…” He shut off the engine and opened his door. “I think that’s what’s terrified me for years, Mom. Since it happened, actually, I’ve been afraid that he did it on a whim. That he did it, not because he thought he had to, but because he wanted to! If that turns out the case, I don’t think I’ll spit on his grave, exactly… But you, of all people, should know how I’d feel. I’d sure want to spit on his grave!” He saw that his mother was struggling with her seat belt again, and he reached over and released her.

She smiled up at him, as if she hadn’t heard a word he’d said. “They don’t make these things for old people, do they?”

He didn’t answer. They walked side by side to the entrance of the diner, and once again he stated his need to believe that his father had torn the family from their beloved home to protect himself from the wrath of a spurned woman.

Emily said, as they came through the door, “I’m sorry, no, Teddy, it wasn’t like that at all.”

And he said, “The only way the two things make sense, moral sense, is if they’re cause and effect. The old man used you, Mom, he used you pure and simple.”

Now they were leaving. While Teddy paid the check at the cash register, Emily walked alone to the car. The conversation had left her sadder than she could remember feeling in years. Since her divorce, really. And even then she hadn’t felt this sad. She hadn’t had the time back then to take the measure of her sadness, not with so much happening, so many crises large and small. Her heart in her chest felt changed by the sadness from flesh to stone, fossilized.

Why, she asked herself, was Teddy so obsessed and troubled by the move away from New Hampshire those many long years ago? He had settled in a town very like the town they’d been forced to leave and had made himself a full new life here, almost as if he’d resided and worked here since childhood. He had even taken to calling it his hometown. And he’d bought a house that was in many ways a replica of the Victorian house they’d had to sell for the tacky little ranch in Somerset. Teddy had repaired the breach in his life.

Emily, though, had nothing that was as beautiful and strong and in its proper place as Teddy’s hometown and house. And she never would. She had nothing that could repair or replace the life that her husband had stolen from her that long-ago summer when he decided her life and their children’s were actually his. The children, in time, had taken their lives back, all three of them, especially Teddy. But she had gone on without hers for so long that she had nearly forgotten it ever existed at all — until this morning, when Teddy started questioning her. Now she saw that all she had for a life was the Home, St. Hubert’s Assisted Living Facility. And she knew that the Home wasn’t really hers, either. It was Teddy’s, not hers. He was doing to her what his father had done to him, only softly and slowly, and the person he was lying to was himself.

Teddy came up behind her and opened the car door for her. When she spoke, she turned away, so he wouldn’t see her tears. “You’re right, Teddy. About your father. And that woman, Brenda something. It was like you said, your father didn’t do it on a whim, Teddy. He didn’t. He had his reasons.”

He looked at her now and saw that she was crying. “Oh, Mom, I’m sorry,” he said, but he knew instantly that it was too late. He had done a thing that could not be undone.

She patted his hand. “You’re a good boy, Teddy,” she said. “A good boy.”