Blood and Water and Other Tales Read Free Page A

he composed his sentences with scrupulous care and lingered indulgently over his more graceful phrases. “I doubt I would have done well in business,” he was saying, inconsequentially; “I just haven’t the kidney for it. One needs strong nerves, and I was always much too effete. Anson used to say that the world was a brothel, and he was right, of course. So where is one to turn? I can tell you where I turned: straight into the arms of Mother Church!” He swallowed the rest of his gin. “But that’s another story, and forgive me, Bernard, I seem to be digressing again. All this happened so very long ago, you see, that I tend to confuse the order in which things occurred...
    “There are two questions, Bernard, that have to be addressed to an angel. One concerns his origins; the other, his purpose.”

    At these words I began to pay active attention once more. This angel business was, of course, nonsense; but I had come to suspect that something rather fantastic, or even perverse, might lie behind it.
    “About his origins I could learn almost nothing,” Harry continued. “People said he arrived in New York during the last year of the first war; he had apparently been raised in Ireland by his mother, who was from Boston and had married into an obscure branch of the Havershaws of Cork, an eccentric family, so they said; but then, you see, well-born Europeans with cloudy origins have always been drifting into New York, and so long as their manners and their money are adequate —particularly the latter—they’re admitted to society and no one’s very bothered about where they’ve come from. We are, after all, a republic.”
    Boston! At the mention of Boston an idea suddenly occurred to me. Harry was old Boston, this I knew, and I wondered whether this angel of his might be nothing more than an elaborate sexual disguise. Anson Havershaw, by this theory, was simply an alter ego, a detached figment of Harry’s neurotic imagination, a double or other constructed as a sort of libidinal escape valve. In other words, Harry transcended his own guilty carnality by assuming at one remove the identity of an angel—this would explain the physical resemblance between the two, and the contradictory themes of hedonism and spirituality; what Catholic, after all, lapsed or otherwise, could ever believe the body was a temple in which nothing was unclean? I watched Harry smiling to himself, and his expression, in the twilight, and despite the patrician dignity of the nose, seemed suddenly silly, pathetic.
    “And his purpose?” I said drily.
    “Ah.” The pleasure slowly ebbed from his face, and he began to make an unpleasant sucking noise with his dentures. “Who knows?” he said at last. “Who knows what an angel would be doing in a century like this one? Maybe he was just meant to be an angel for our times.” There was a long pause. “Immortal spirit burned in him, you see.... Sin meant nothing to him; he was pure soul. This was his tragedy.”
    “His tragedy?”
    Harry nodded. “To be pure soul in an age that would not believe its existence.” He asked me to give him more gin. I was feeling very irritable as I poured his gin.

    We sat there, Harry and I, in silence, he no doubt contemplating these spurious memories of his, while I wondered how soon I could decently escape. Harry had taken from his pocket a small jade compact and was powdering his face with rapid, jerky movements, his eyes averted from me so I had only the beaky profile. “Pure soul,” he repeated, in a murmur, “in an age that would not believe its existence.”
    “What happened to him?” I said wearily.
    “Oh,” he replied, snapping shut the compact, “I lost sight of him. I believe he came to a bad end; I believe he was sent to prison.”
    “No he wasn’t.”
    Harry looked at me sharply. There was, for the first time in our relationship, a genuinely honest contact between us. All the rest had been indulgence on his part and acquiescence on