Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

Toby played every tender song that he knew.

The crowd shifted, paid, and filled out again. The pudgy old man stood listening to all of it.

Over and over the pudgy man reminded him to collect the bills out of his case and hide them. The money kept coming.

When Toby was too tired to play anymore, he started to pack up but the pudgy old man said, "Wait a minute, son." And he asked him to play Neapolitan songs that Toby had never played, but he knew them by ear and it was easy.

"What are you doing here, son?" asked the man.

"Looking for a job," said Toby, "any kind of job, dishwasher, waiter, anything, I don't care, just work, good work."

He looked at the man. The man was wearing decent trousers and a white dress shirt open at the neck with the sleeves rolled just below the elbows. The man had a soft fleshy face, graven with kindliness.

"I'll give you a job," said the man. "Come inside. I'll fix you something to eat. You've been out here all night playing."

By the end of his first week he had a little second-floor hotel apartment downtown, and a fake set of identification papers saying that he was twenty-one (old enough to serve wine) and he had the name Vincenzo Valenti because the name had been suggested to him by the gentle old Italian who had hired him. A real birth certificate had come with the suggestion.

The man's name was Alonso. The restaurant was beautiful. It had huge glass windows facing the street, and very bright lights, and in between their waiting tables, the waiters and waitresses, students all, sang opera. Toby was the lutist beside the piano.

It was good, good for Toby who didn't want to remember that he had ever been Toby.

Never had he heard such fine voices. On many a night, when the restaurant was crowded with convivial parties, and the opera was sweet, and he could play his lute in a ripping fashion, he felt almost good and didn't want for the doors to close, or the wet pavements to be waiting for him.

Alonso was good-hearted, smiling, and took a special liking to Toby, who was his Vincenzo.

"What I wouldn't give," he said to Toby, "just to see one of my grandchildren."

Alonso gave Toby a little pearl-handled gun and told him how to shoot it. It had a soft trigger. It was just for protection. Alonzo showed him the guns he kept in the kitchen. Toby found himself fascinated with these guns, and when Alonso took him into the alley behind the restaurant and let him shoot with these guns, he liked the feel of them, and the deafening sound that echoed up the high blind walls on both sides of them.

Alonso got work for Toby at weddings and at engagement parties, paid him well, bought him fine Italian suits for the job, and sometimes sent him to serve private dinners in a house only a few blocks from the restaurant. People unfailingly found the lute to be elegant.

This house where he played was a handsome place, but it made Toby uneasy. Though most of the women living there were old, and kind, there were a few young women, and men came to see them. The woman who ran the place was named Violet and she had a deep whiskey voice, and wore heavy makeup, and treated all the other women as her young sisters or children. Alonso loved to sit for hours and talk to Violet. They spoke Italian mostly but sometimes English and they seemed involved in times gone by, and there were hints they had once been lovers.

There were card games there, and sometimes little birthday gatherings, mostly of elderly men and women, but the young women smiled at Toby lovingly and teasingly.

One time, behind a painted dressing screen, he played the lute for a man who made love to a woman, and the man hurt her. She hit the man and the man slapped her.

Alonso waved it away. "She does that all the time," he explained as if the conduct of the man had not been involved in it. Alonso called the girl Elsbeth.

"What kind of name is that?" Toby asked.

Alonso shrugged. "Russian? Bosnian? How do I know?" He smiled. "They have blond hair. The men love them. And she's run away from some Russian, that I can tell you. I'll be lucky if the bastard doesn't come looking for her."

Toby grew to like Elsbeth. She did have an accent that might have been Russian, and once she told him that she had made up her name, and as Toby was now calling himself Vincenzo, he felt a certain sympathy with that. Elsbeth was very young. Toby wasn't sure she was past sixteen. The makeup she wore made her look older and less fresh. With a bit of lipstick only on Sunday morning, she was beautiful. She smoked black cigarettes on the fire escape as they talked together. Alonso sometimes took Toby home for a plate of spaghetti with him and his mother. This was in Brooklyn. Alonso served Northern Italian food at the restaurant, since that was what the world wanted now, but as for the old man, he liked his meatballs and red gravy. His own sons lived in California. His daughter was dead from drugs when she was fourteen. He pointed to her picture once and that was the last of it.

He would sneer and wave his hand at the mere mention of his sons.

Alonso's mother didn't speak English, and would never sit at the table. She poured the wine, cleaned up the dishes, and stood against the stove, with her arms folded, staring at the men as they ate. She made Toby think of his grandmothers. They had been women like that, who stood while the men ate. Such a dim memory.

Alonso and Toby went to the Metropolitan Opera several times, and Toby concealed what a revelation this was, to be hearing one of the greatest companies in the world, to be sitting in good seats with a man who knew the story and the music perfectly. Toby knew something in those hours that was the perfect imitation of happiness.

Toby had been to operas in New Orleans, with his teacher from the Conservatory. And he had heard the students at Loyola sing opera too, and been moved by these dramatic spectacles. But the Metropolitan Opera was infinitely more impressive.

They went to Carnegie Hall and also to the symphony.

It was a thin emotion, this happiness, drawn like a gossamer sheet over the things he remembered. He wanted to be joyful as he looked around these great auditoriums and listened to the dazzling music, but he didn't dare to trust in anything.

One time he told Alonso he needed a beautiful necklace to send to a woman.

Alonso laughed and shook his head.

"No, my music teacher," said Toby. "She taught me for free. I have two thousand dollars saved up."

Alonso said, "You leave it to me."

The necklace was stunning, "an estate piece." Alonso paid for it. He wouldn't take a dime from Toby.

Toby shipped it to the woman at the Conservatory because that was the only address he had for her. He put no return address on the package.