If Angels Fight (9 page)

But this was no innocent herded Upstream, dazed by all she saw around her. Lady Wexford needed no help from anybody.

“And you will get to stay with Dorrie whom you love,” said Olivia. “And with Mrs. Wood,” she added and suddenly asked, “What is your Mrs. Wood like?”

Before Linda could interrupt, Sally frowned and replied, “She’s a TV.”

As they parked, Roy said, “Train’s here,” jumped out of the car like he was escaping, and came around for his kisses and hugs. Perfunctory for Linda, fervent in the case of his daughter. “See you ladies this evening,” he said. Sally had eyes only for him as he bounded onto the platform, mingled with the crowd, and boarded the 7:49.

Linda felt Roy on the train. He nodded to a pair of vets who were comparing Ike and MacArthur, slid into the seat behind them, and buried himself in work. More than that she couldn’t know.

His fellow commuters had learned all that men needed to find out about Roy from chance remarks exchanged in line at the hardware store, leaning against a fence at a backyard barbecue.

He was from the West Coast, had flown with the Air Force in Korea, had his own small import/export company, and traveled a lot.

They rode the train together. But once in the city, all went their separate ways. They joked with Roy about how much time he spent out of his office. When Frank Hacker or George Stanley remembered that they were supposed to invite him to play golf that weekend, or solicit a contribution to the Fresh Air Fund, they would get his secretary, a formidable lady with a slight and unplacable accent. Roy usually wouldn’t return their calls until the end of the day.

Even catching him as they left the train at Grand Central wasn’t possible. They might notice him, attaché case in hand, newspaper under his arm, walking through a now crowded car as they pulled out of Pelham Manor. Asked, he’d mentioned getting off at 125th street to see a man at Columbia University who translated his business correspondence with Iran.

Because he was so adept, but mainly because none of them could envision such a thing, no one ever saw Roy walk into Time. That usually happened in the confusion of their imminent arrival in the city.

With a brisk step or two and the help of the train’s motion, he would stride away from 1956. Sometimes he went up towards ’59 for liaison with a neighboring Station Chief. Or back toward ’50, a recurrent trouble spot where tensions were always near a boiling point.

That morning while Olivia, unaccompanied, sang Froggy Went A’Courting to an audience of enraptured six-year-olds and their teacher, Linda wondered if she knew any more about her husband than did the men on the train.

When Olivia began the story of the Ferryman and the Wolf, Linda half listened.

Once there was a ferryman who lived with his wife in a little house on a river bank. When his son was born, the father asked the river to be the boy’s godfather. In answer, a stout tree branch floated ashore. The father carved it into a pole for his son.

Linda began to pay attention. Rangers were recruited as children. She recognized a tale of the Stream, worn smooth by passage up and down the human ages.

The boy grew up to be a ferryman also. He carried passengers from one side of the river to the other. The river was very wide and each day he could only make three trips one way and three trips the other. His boat was small and on each trip he could carry only one load beside himself.

The story was a riddle, a challenge. As she listened, Linda wondered if Lady Wexford told this more out of boredom than contempt, or the other way around.

One day a farmer asked him to carry a prize cabbage as big as a small child across the river where the king’s own cook would give him a silver coin for it. The Ferryman agreed. But before he could start out, a shepherd appeared with a hungry lamb and asked the Ferryman to take her across the river to a field of clover. As payment the Ferryman could have her wool, which was soft as silk.

The Ferryman agreed, but he noticed how the lamb looked at the cabbage and knew he must never leave them alone together. He was about to take the cabbage across, when a wolf appeared with a sack on its shoulder and said, “Kind sir, I must cross the river. Carry me and I will give you what is inside this sack.”

In this story of choice and chance, Linda noticed, only the wolf and the ferryman spoke. Only they were acting on their own behalf. Cabbage and lamb were just baggage.

The wolf looked longingly at the lamb, anxious to be left alone with her. The ferryman did not think long, but he did think hard. He put the lamb in the boat. Since he knew the wolf would never eat a cabbage, he left those two together. He carried the lamb across the river and on the way he sang:

Oh river deep and river wide

Bring me swift to the other side

The ferryman left the lamb. Returned. Picked up the cabbage and carried it across. As he did, he sang:

Oh, river wide and river deep

I pray you safe my cargo keep

The lamb was happy to see the cabbage. But the ferryman picked her up and took her back with him. When he got to the other bank, it was growing late. The wolf was overjoyed to see the lamb. But the ferryman told him to get in the boat. The wolf was very hungry, but he obeyed. As they went, the ferryman sang:

Oh river brave and river swift

Please send a tide my hopes to lift

The ferryman carried the wolf across and told him to guard the cabbage. The wolf agreed, thinking that when the ferryman returned with the lamb it would be dark and he would snatch his prey.

By the time the ferryman reached the lamb it was almost night and too late to make another trip. But he put the little beast aboard his boat, and as he poled his way across he sang:

Oh river swift and river brave

Grant me now a favoring wave

And in the last moments of light, Godfather River reached up and bore the tiny craft from one side to the other faster than the eye can blink. The wolf was pacing back and forth on the other side.

As the sun fell and the boat put in to shore, the wolf leaped. But the ferryman took his stout pole and whacked him over the head so hard that the wolf dropped his sack and ran away.

The king’s cook was so delighted with the giant cabbage that he gave the ferryman a bag of coins. And the lamb when he brought her to pasture yielded wool as soft as silk.

Over the heads of the children, Linda watched Lady Olivia look at Sally. The wolf and the lamb, she thought to herself. And the cabbage, she added, including herself.

So the ferryman brought home the coins and the wool and the sack to his wife and daughter. His wife opened the sack. And what was inside? Oh, wine and sweets and a jeweled hen who laid a gold egg every morning and could tell your fortune. But The Ferryman’s Wife is a tale for another time.

A story of desire, distortion of Time and even the hint of an oracle. With a happy ending. Real life would not be so nice. Linda was certain of one thing. Olivia and Sally would never be left alone together.

Dinner that evening was under the perpetual Christmas ornaments of the Russian Tea Room. The waiters, old and disdainful, each with an account of aristocratic privileges lost along with the Czar, were deferential around Roy. As if they instinctively detected a greater, scarier fraud than their own.

Over blini, caviar and vodka, Linda watched her husband lean forward and tell Olivia, “This place is a sentimental favorite of mine because of how my wife and I met.”

The Englishwoman wore black and silver. A cameo at her throat showed an ivory profile set against rich blue. The blue caught the color of her eyes. “You mean to say you met in Russia. Two . . . Americans.” She still hesitated on the word. She was amused, curious. Linda watched her.

“Not quite. In Budyatichi,” said Roy. “A miserable town of shacks and mud, far enough into Poland for the population to be surprised when the Red Cavalry Army showed up.” Roy’s eyes grew somewhat misty. He had already put away two double martinis.

“Vladimir Khelemskya was my cover, a junior officer on General Budyonny’s staff. A glorified dispatch rider. But I was twenty and this was my first independent Ranger assignment.”

Linda shook her head. He refused to see this.

“A dashing young subaltern!” Olivia’s expression was the same as that of the children hearing the story that morning. “When was this?”

“On a September in a 1920,” he said. “Always a dangerous passage in Eastern Europe. Things go badly that year but can get worse. The Russian Revolution must succeed but not triumph. In Budyatichi was an International Nursing Station where I had been told there would be allies with information of use to a Ranger. And who did I find?”

Linda looked at him furiously. He never hesitated.

“You were there?” Olivia, all surprise, asked Linda. “So far from home.”

“A summer job, after sophomore year in college.” Linda tried to sound bored. “Other kids were camp counselors, bummed around France. Because of my family connections, I ended up in a hot, dusty hell hole. People lived in filth and terror. No radio, No car. No shampoo. My supervisor was away that afternoon.”

“So much for a Ranger undercover to do,” Roy said. “False orders to deliver. Supplies to misdirect. Seeds of doubt to sew. Downstream college girls to seduce. Especially ones who thought they were going to give me orders.” He laughed.

A man talks nostalgically about his youth, Linda knew, when his current life has hit a wall. She remembered that morning they met: the scent of wood smoke and the first hint of autumn, the jingle of spur and slap of holster as he slung himself off his horse, his white teeth and blond mustache.

Once, when she was very young, Linda had been promised that she would know every mind but one. That first morning, she had reached out to touch his and almost jumped when she found she couldn’t.

They had told her that far Upstream there was an implant that blocked telepathy. Just as they had warned her about Upstream boys supplemented in all kinds of ways that Mother Nature never intended. They had, in fact, told her just enough so that she had to see for herself.

“I was there,” said Lady Olivia brightly, interjecting herself into a sudden silence. “In that very year you two were in Poland. At Hendom House outside London,” she said. “I remembered the place from my childhood. My mother’s sister, the Duchess of Dorset, lived there. I’d seen it burn. But in that 1920, it still stood and had become a kind of hospital.”

Hendom House in 1920 on the Main Stream was a private hospital. The Rangers found it convenient to stash various casualties of their own among the trauma victims of the First World War. Linda knew that while recovering from her time with Lord Riot, Olivia Wexford had precipitated several fights and an actual duel between inmates.

Olivia arose. How well she knew the moment to leave a couple to talk about her. And to quarrel. Roy watched her elegant passage, the patron struck numb by the sight of her.

Linda tried to decide when these two had first rutted. Recently. That she knew. Tuesday morning, she decided. Roy had doubled back in Time, returned shortly after they had left for the train. He and Olivia then screwed amid the petticoats. Evidence of that, a stray footprint perhaps, was what he had compulsively scuffed away on Tuesday evening.

Roy took out his silver cigarette case, opened it and offered it to her. She shook her head. “You’re talking too much.” She said, “Upstream they can and will tell her whatever they want. Here we will maintain security.”

“My impression, was.” He drew on his Chesterfield, looked at her from under his lids, suddenly not from this Place or Time. “My impression was, that you two exchanged girlish confidences.”

“How much longer is she supposed to be here?”

“Current plans are that I’m to take her Upstream sometime next week.”

“I want it sooner. I want it immediately.”

“Yes, ma’am. I will do my best, ma’am. A Ranger always obeys. OK?” He stared at her. Right through her.

So, Linda thought, the Ferryman was bored with his job and wife. When the wolf turned out to be a vibrant creature with whom he shared a lot in common, nature took its course. They both felt tenderness for the lamb. Cried, perhaps, as they ate the stew. But both found it easy to ignore the cabbage. Only the lamb loved the cabbage.

She had made the classic mistake of anthropologists and time travelers, Linda realized, gotten too close to the locals and fallen into their pattern. She had become the numb suburban housewife.

Olivia, on her return, tried one of Roy’s Chesterfields. “As a girl I’d half imagined having my secret snuff box when I was old and double chinned,” she said. “Then, in that London where I stayed, everyone had these and thought them wonderful and wicked. I thought them disgusting.” She inhaled, coughed, but inhaled again.

“I smoke a few a day,” Roy told her. “Otherwise, I’d be remembered as the guy who doesn’t smoke.”

“And honor could not countenance that,” said Lady Olivia.

They had been together again that afternoon, Linda knew. While she drove Sally over to stay with Dorrie. Roy could easily return to the house unnoticed. Rangers had their ways.

The only question was, which of the two had thought of sending the black truck to distract her.

“Can Auntie Olives come and see Mrs. Wood and Dorrie?” Sally had asked on the car ride that afternoon.

“I don’t think she’ll have time, honey,” was Linda’s answer.

3.

On Saturdays there was no 7:49. The nearest thing to it was an 8:03. No other trains stopped at Grove Hill for half an hour before or after. So it wasn’t strange that a small knot of people had accumulated on the station platform. Most were locals with early appointments in the city. A few were strangers.

The man who sat in the Buick sedan reading the
Herald Tribune
, his tennis racket cases beside him, had doubtless driven over from another town to catch this particular train. The black woman plainly was returning to Harlem after serving at a party and sleeping over. The man in overalls carrying a tool case was somehow connected to the railway.