The Eternal Footman Page 37

  “He’s dead,” said Vicky.

  “Plague?” said Nora.

  “Plague.” A mist enveloped Valerie’s eyes. “Everything we know about art came from him.”

  “After a while we got good enough to tackle Inanna herself,” said Vicky.

  The sisters wrapped Nora in their arms.

  “O Gilgamesh, to where do you run?” said Vicky.

  “When the gods created man, they allotted to him death,” said Valerie, “but immortality they retained for themselves.”

  “Do you still tread the boards?” asked Vicky.

  “If you get off early today,” said Nora, swallowing hard, “come by Saint Paul’s Episcopal in Santa Monica, and you’ll see me do Stella in Streetcar.”

  “We’ll try to make it,” said Valerie.

  “You bet,” said Vicky.

  She never saw them again.

  While emphysema was the enemy battalion in Nora’s life, mirrors were the single spies. She took great effort to avoid beholding the leathery gray bag that had once been her face. If death was indeed a doorway, she hoped that the afterlife might resemble the Sumerian House of Dust, a shadowland where looking glasses were as uncommon as clocks.

  Slowly, spasmodically, she floated toward nothingness on a river of morphine. Often she thought, “This is it. I’m dead now.” But then she was still on the planet, fighting for air. She alternately longed for a miracle and prayed for the end. Death would at least shut down her subconscious, source of those cruel little melodramas in which the Cranium Dei’s victims returned as functioning people aglow with health.

  The worst of Nora’s recurrent dreams began with Kevin standing next to her on a windy shore beside a roaring sea. A wild stallion the color of wheat galloped into view and halted before Kevin.

  “Watch my trick, Mother!” Deftly he vaulted onto the stallion’s back.

  As the horse’s great head dissolved, Kevin melded with its shoulders, sinking into the tawny, muscled flesh as if into quicksand, until the boy’s arms and trunk rose seamlessly from a four-legged body.

  “Climb on up!”

  Nora had no trouble mounting the centaur. Pressing her legs against her son’s flanks, she embraced him from behind…and they were off, racing along the beach, foam splashing their faces. For a brief interval Kevin turned into Percy, bearing her on horseback toward the Chattahoochee River, and then he was himself again.

  “Stop, Kevin.”

  “You’re not having fun?”

  “Please stop.”

  “Is the spray bothering you? I’ll head inland.”

  “This is it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s the end.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “This is it, Kevin. It’s over. Stop.”

  To their profound and lasting regret, Anthony and Cassie couldn’t attend the funeral. Barry was appearing in his third-grade class’s Annunciation pageant later that same day, and even if they left the service early and caught the 4:45 P.M. maglev out of Boston’s South Station, they would still miss the play, monorail service between Manhattan and Cedar Grove being spotty after rush hour. Instead they sent roses.

  As it turned out, Cassie had to forego the pageant too. The previous afternoon she’d contracted strep throat, and now she lay abed, consuming antibiotics. It was a raw December night, bitter by Stephen’s standards, bracing by Anthony’s. Barry’s fathers wanted the old sailor to travel with them via hoverbus, but Anthony insisted on walking the two miles to Cedar Grove Elementary School. When he’d laid the Corpus Dei to rest in its Arctic tomb, the thermometer had stood at –80° centigrade.

  He arrived inside the school auditorium with ten minutes to spare. Stephen and Phillip had saved him two seats, one for his rump, another for his overcoat. Phillip handed his father-in-law a playbill. Anxiously Anthony scanned the cast list, noting with relief that the typesetter hadn’t dropped or mangled Barry’s name.

  Narrator

  LETITIA WELCH

  Tony Vonhorn, a sea captain

  ERIC TOWERS

  Yvonne, his conscience

  SUSAN MARZ-NIKOLIC

  Raphael, an angel

  TOM MALENTA

  Gabriel, an angel

  CYNTHIA KUSHNER

  Bob, a night watchman

  BARRY LAWSON-VAN HORNE

  Darryl, an octopus

  DENNIS CHANG

  Anthony had seen Annunciation pageants before, some featuring adult casts, some juvenile, but never one with his own grandson in the key role of the watchman. Beholding himself on stage normally disconcerted Anthony, especially when the actor in question was a child. In the long run he found this weird mirroring, this alien reflection, even more troublesome than the fact that the various Annunciation scripts, while differing from company to company, only intermittently recorded what had actually transpired on that fateful night he met the angel in the Cloisters. At times he considered calling up Newsweek and setting the record straight, but none of the errors was significant enough to justify compromising his privacy. The average citizen of the new millennium believed that “Tony Vonhorn” had died about ten years ago, and Anthony was glad to leave that misapprehension intact.

  While the houselights dimmed, Barry’s teacher, plump and bubbly Mrs. Roeder, strode into the orchestra pit and mounted the conductor’s podium. She thanked everyone for coming, noted that the playbill had failed to credit Oscar Merkyl, the gym teacher, as the show’s technical director, and reminded the audience that the children themselves had written this particular treatment of the Annunciation.

  A spotlight hit the far edge of the curtain, illuminating nervous little Letitia Welch. Her tones were liquid and high-pitched, the voice of a cartoon starfish. “Our story takes place in the Cloisters, an old-looking fake monastery in New York City that happens to be an art museum too. The year is a very long time ago, 1992, during the last millennium, and it’s late at night. Tony Vonhorn, a sea captain, needs to take a shower.”

  Letitia beat a hasty retreat. The curtain rose on a cardboard facsimile of a fountain. Blue paper streamers, set rippling by an invisible fen, conveyed an impression of flowing water. Dressed in swimming trunks and carrying a bath towel, the sea captain, a handsome Asian boy, entered stage right, stepping into the fountain. The night watchman—Barry—strode onto the scene, shining his flashlight in the captain’s face.

  “Who’s there?” demanded the watchman.

  “I’m Tony Vonhorn, the sea captain. Who are you?”

  “I’m Bob, the night watchman. You’re not supposed to be here.” He snapped his fingers. “Hey, wait a minute—aren’t you the same Tony Vonhorn who smashed up that big oil tanker in Texas last year?”

  “That’s me all right.”

  “I heard you dumped ten million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and killed a lot of otters.”

  “It’s true, Bob. Ever since then, it’s been like the oil was stuck all over me. I thought maybe if I washed myself in a sacred fountain, I’d start feeling clean again. It should take me only about ten minutes.”

  “I have to make my rounds. Be sure to close the door behind you, Tony, and don’t steal any of our valuable paintings.”

  “I promise, Bob.”

  As the watchman exited stage left, a chubby black girl in a bathing suit entered stage right.

  “Who are you?” asked Tony.

  “I’m Yvonne, your conscience. Not many people in the twentieth century have consciences, but you do, which is why you feel so guilty.”

  “The fountain isn’t helping.”

  “Fossil fuels are yucky. They don’t wash off.” Yvonne joined Tony at the nexus of the spray. “If only God would die or something. It might wake people up.”

  Two children charged onto the stage, a cherubic boy and a willowy girl, each outfitted with a plastic halo and papier-mâché wings.

  “Who are you?” asked Tony.

  “The Angel Raphael,” said the boy. “Fear
not.”

  “The Angel Gabriel,” said the girl. “Fear not. We’re here to tell you God just died.”

  “That’s exactly what my conscience was hoping would happen!” said Tony.

  “Well, we don’t think it’s good news,” said Raphael. “It makes us want to cry.”

  Curling their fists into tight balls, both angels rubbed their eyes and sobbed pitifully for ten seconds.

  “Right now,” said Gabriel, “God’s very large body is floating in the Atlantic Ocean near Africa. We want you to sail your supertanker there and wrap a chain around God’s big toe, so you can haul Him to a special tomb we made from an iceberg at the North Pole.”

  “We’ve written down the directions,” said Raphael, handing the captain a 3 × 5 card. “Can we count on you?”

  “I’d better talk it over with my conscience,” said Tony.

  “Return here tomorrow, midnight, and give us your answer,” said Gabriel. “If you don’t take the job, we’ll probably beat you up.”

  The angels rushed away.

  “Well, Tony, what are you going to do?” asked Yvonne.

  “If I bury God, then nobody will know He died. I’d better tell the angels to find another sea captain.”

  “They’ll probably beat you up.”

  “I can take it.”

  “You have made a very brave and wise decision. Now I shall tell you that, even if you stick God in the iceberg, an earthquake will shake Him loose in a few years. Then a Pennsylvania judge will put Him on trial for tuberculosis and Hitler, and His skull will go into orbit and cause a plague of demons.”

  “So when the angels come back tomorrow, I can say I’m going to tow God to the North Pole?”

  “That’s right, Tony. And they’ll be thrilled—so thrilled that they’ll probably take you in their arms, flap their wings, and—”

  Yvonne stopped speaking, her attention claimed by a rubber octopus, a shimmering red beast suggesting a mud heap with tentacles, rising from the fountain. Its huge eyes, constructed from aluminum pie plates, glittered under the stage lights.

  “Good grief!” wailed Yvonne.

  “It’s an octopus!” shouted Tony. “Look out, Yvonne! An octopus is trying to get you!”

  Bellowing like an enraged bull, the octopus extended a suckered arm and curled it around Yvonne’s neck.

  “Help!”

  The commotion brought Bob the watchman on the run. Sizing up the situation, he raised his flashlight high in the air and brought it down hard on the octopus’s head. Stunned, the beast released its grip on Yvonne and slumped back into the fountain.

  “Thank you,” gasped Yvonne.

  “Glad to be of service,” said Bob. He turned to Tony while pointing at Yvonne with the flashlight. “Who’s that?”

  “My conscience,” said Tony.

  “Oh. You two haven’t been stealing any paintings, have you?”

  “No, sir,” insisted Tony.

  “No, sir,” asserted Yvonne.

  The watchman faced the audience, grinned spectacularly, and said, “It’s not good to steal!”

  The curtain descended. It took only forty-five seconds for all seven cast members, octopus included, to array themselves across the stage, bowing proudly amid a storm of cheers and applause.

  “That was sensational,” said Anthony. His grandson’s battle with the cephalopod, he felt, had a certain mythic resonance: Saint George slaying the dragon, Beowulf getting the better of Grendel. He wished that Nora could’ve seen it.

  “He remembered his lines!” cried Phillip, leaping out of his seat. “The kid’s a natural!”

  “I suppose you’d rather eat worms than take the bus home, right, Dad?” said Stephen.

  “You know me,” said Anthony, pulling on his overcoat. “Stubborn.”

  “Stubborn’s the word,” said Stephen.

  “Tell Barry he was brilliant,” said Anthony. “I’ll come by later and read him a bedtime story.”

  “Good plan.”

  The sea captain left the auditorium and slipped into the solitude of a dimly illuminated hallway, the newly waxed floor shining like a frozen stream. A dozen brisk paces brought him to an exit marked with glowing red letters. He pushed it open.

  Snowflakes sifted out of the dark, ungodded sky, settling on fence posts and pine boughs. Burdened with snow, the lowest branch of a dead birch snapped free of the trunk and fell into the drifts. An irreducible strangeness lit the world. To Anthony the universe had never seemed more exhilaratingly enigmatic.

  A crystal spiraled into his open palm, round and spoked, like the wheel of some impossibly small and delicate ship. Briefly he considered joining Barry and his fathers on the bus, then decided against it. The snow was exquisite, the temperature had dropped just slightly, and he had only two nautical miles to go before he slept.

  He shoved his hands into his overcoat pockets, hoisted his collar against the winter wind, and, like a landlubber setting an adventuresome foot on a dory’s wobbly bottom, stepped off the back stoop of Cedar Grove Elementary School and entered the uncertain future.

  JAMES MORROW was born in Philadelphia in 1947. He has won World Fantasy Awards for his novels Only Begotten Daughter and Towing Jehovah. Besides writing, he plays with Lionel electric trains and collects videocassettes of vulgar biblical spectacles.