"So you came to L.A.," I said. "Then what?"
"Things were better at first. We got a Mexican dame to hang around with Ansel, and Mary Claire started spending more and more time at the Church. There was a new Speaker then. It was okay with me if it made her happy, even when the bills started to add up and I figured that the Church cost more than everything else in our lives put together. So I was working at the naval station in Long Beach and she was passing out stuff at the Church, and so what? Like I say, it made her feel better."
He tilted his head again in the same listening attitude we'd seen at the door. I hadn't heard anything at all. "Excuse me a minute," he said, standing up.
"May I come with you?" Eleanor said unexpectedly.
He shifted his weight uncertainly. "Sure," he said at last. "I mean, I guess so. You're pretty. He might like to look at you."
We followed him out of the living room and through the kitchen, a fussy, bleak, single man's kitchen with an old chipped gas range. The door at the end of the kitchen was ajar.
"These were the maid's quarters," he said. "I guess everybody had a maid then. Got its own bedroom, bathroom, everything. All I had to do was put in heat. California people don't think maids need heat." He pushed the door the rest of the way open and said, "Quiet, now." Eleanor nodded soberly and we all went through the door.
I stopped in my tracks so suddenly that Eleanor bumped into my back. "Gee," she said.
It was like Dorothy stepping out of the house and into Oz. Here, everything was color. Two walls were painted bright yellow and a third was peach. The fourth, the one that held the door we'd come through, was covered with a kind of middle-earth fairyland, complete with mountains, castles, hobbits, and elves.
The entire ceiling was plastered with pictures. It must have taken Ellspeth days to paste them all up there. Illustrations cut from nineteenth-century children's books were interspersed with pictures of Disney characters, rainbows, waterfalls, an autographed picture of the Roadrunner and the Coyote signed by the genius who created them, Chuck Jones. There must have been two hundred of them.
In the center of the room was a hospital bed cranked halfway up. The chemical smell was strongest here. In the middle of the bed, lying on his back and connected to a gleaming chromium respirator, was a little boy.
He had Angel's golden hair, but his body was contorted and misshapen. His fingers clawed anxiously at the air. The respirator covered the lower half of his face. Ellspeth smiled, and years fell away from his face.
"Hello, darling," he said. "Look, I've brought you some new friends. See the pretty lady?"
"Hi, Ansel," Eleanor whispered. "What beautiful hair you have."
Ansel's fingers extended and two of them pointed toward Eleanor. Some kind of a sound came out of the mask.
"Well, well," Caleb Ellspeth said. "Well, well." Eleanor went past him and took the crooked hand in hers.
"Aren't you the lucky boy?" she said. "Your own room and your own window. I never had my own room when I was little."
It was true. Eleanor had grown up in the back room of a Harlem grocery. She'd slept in a double bunk bed with her two brothers until she was twelve.
Ellspeth picked up a glass and held it in front of Ansel's face. "Lemonade," he said. "I'll make you some lemonade in a few minutes and give it to you." He looked at Eleanor, who was stroking the yellow hair. "Maybe the pretty lady will bring it if you're good."
Ansel's fingers had curled around Eleanor's palm. She looked back at me.
"Sure, I will," Eleanor said. "In fact, why don't I stay here? You finish talking and I'll keep Ansel company. Would you like that, Ansel?" The boy blinked.
"I couldn't ask you," Ellspeth said.
"You don't have to," Eleanor said. "But if you don't think Ansel would like it…"
"He'll like it," Ellspeth said. "Won't you, Ansel?" Ansel held on to Eleanor's hand.
Ellspeth backed slowly away from the bed. "Call if he's any trouble," he said.
"He won't be any trouble," Eleanor said. She was beaming. "I've just thought of a Chinese fairy tale that I'll bet Ansel has never heard. I'll bet you don't know any Chinese fairy tales, do you, Ansel? Is there a chair I could sit on?" she asked Ellspeth.
"Sure, sure," Ellspeth said, as if embarrassed. He pushed a fragile-looking chair over from the wall and Eleanor sat down without letting go of Ansel's hand.
"That's better, isn't it, Ansel?" Eleanor said. "Now we can be closer together. Now, listen, do you know where China is? No? Well, it's a long way away, farther even than New York, where you were born. Things in China take a long time to happen, and this is a long, long story, so if you go to sleep while I'm telling it to you, you won't hurt my feelings. But, boy, this is a good story."
Ellspeth tugged my sleeve. As I followed him into the kitchen, Eleanor said, "Do you see how black my hair is, Ansel? In China everybody's hair is black, just like mine. But this story is about a very special little boy, a little boy with bright gold hair, exactly like yours, but not so pretty."
Ellspeth went to a roll of paper towels hanging on the kitchen wall, tore one off, and blew his nose on it. "The kid needs a woman," he said fiercely.
"How much does he understand?"
"The words? Not much. But he can feel her. He can tell a good person better than I can."
"She's a pretty good person," I said.
"Marry her," he said, "if you're in a position to do it. You're a dope if you don't."
"Well," I said lamely, "we were talking about you."
"Right." He opened a cabinet under the sink and tossed the towel into it. "The big marriage expert. Let's go back into the living room."
In the living room he reseated himself and looked down into his coffee cup. "The Ballad of Caleb and Mary Claire. Like I told you, I was in the Navy," he said after a gulp of cold coffee. "This is about four or five years after we got to L.A., and Mary Claire and I were getting along pretty good, I thought, I mean we were both in the Church and she wasn't picking at me about Ansel anymore. She seemed better, you know? Anyway, when they wanted me to travel I said okay and relinquished my hardship deferment. They sent me to the Philippines, Subic Bay. All these randy, cute little girls, all these guys going ashore, coming back with drip, syph, God knows what. I was the only guy didn't invest that ten bucks in cab fare, the only guy came home with a dry wick. I'd been writing her regular, getting not as many answers back as I wrote letters, but I figure, she's got the kids to worry about all day, and the Church, and what am I doing? Lying around reading Playboy and keeping the machine clean, so I plan this big surprise. I get home three days early, right off the boat I buy a dozen roses, a bottle of champagne, make reservations at Perino's, where I've never even been before-I mean I am ready to party Mary Claire out of her skin. Rent a limousine, get home about eight p.m., choke off the impulse to call out 'Surprise,' and stand in the front door listening to her moving furniture around upstairs. She was like that, you know? Ever since Ansel was born, too much nervous energy. Wake up at four a.m., start shoving the couch around. So I go up the stairs wondering where the bed's going to be this time, and open the door, and the bed's right where I left it, only it's fuller. She's on it with two guys. Two guys from the Church. I mean one of them was my Listener. I told everything to this guy, and here he is trying it all out on my wife with one of his buddies.
"Well, where I come from, Michigan, you don't hit women. So I took it out on the guys. I threw one of them through the window without bothering to open it, we were in a two-story apartment at the time, and the second guy, the Listener, had it easier because, first, the window was already busted, and second, he had the other guy to land on. Then I turn around to her and she's yelling, 'Don't hit me, don't hit me! I just changed the sheets.'