Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

He had chosen an ornate gold frame for the picture, and he liked the beading on it, the leafy corners and the wide margin it established between the world of the picture and the faded wallpaper of the little room.

The guardian angel was huge and womanly with streaming golden hair and great white blue-tipped wings, and she wore a mantle over her flowing white tunic as she stood above a small boy and girl who made their way together over a treacherous bridge with gaping holes in it.

How many millions of little children have seen that picture?

"Look," Toby would say to Emily and Jacob when they knelt down for night prayers. "You can always talk to your guardian angel." He told them how he talked to his angel, especially on those nights downtown when the tips were slow. "I say, Bring me more people, and sure enough, he does it." He insisted upon it though Jacob and Emily both laughed.

But it was Emily who asked if they could pray to Mother's guardian angel too and stop her from getting so drunk so much.

This shocked Toby, because he had never spoken the word "drunk" under his own roof. He had never used the word "drunk" to anyone, not even his confessor. And he marveled that Emily, who was only seven at this time, knew everything. The word sent a dark shiver through him, and he had told his little brother and sister that life would not always be like this, that he would see to it that things got better and better.

He meant to keep his word.

At Jesuit High, Toby soon rose to the top of his class. He played fifteen hours at a stretch on Saturdays and Sundays to make enough that he didn't have to play after school, and could keep up his musical education.

He was sixteen when a restaurant hired him for Saturday and Sunday nights, and though he made a little less, he knew he could count on it.

When needed, he waited tables and made good tips. But it was his spirited and unusual playing that was wanted of him and he was glad of it.

All this money over the years he hid in various places around the apartment--in gloves in his drawers, beneath a loose board, beneath Emily's mattress, under the bottom of the stove, even in tinfoil in the refrigerator.

On a good weekend, he was making hundreds, and when he passed his seventeenth birthday, the Conservatory gave him a full college scholarship to study music in earnest. He had made it.

That was the happiest day of his life and he came home brimming with the news. "Ma, I did it, I did it," he said. "Everything's going to be good, I'm telling you."

When he would not give his mother money for drink, she took his lute out and smashed it over the edge of the kitchen table.

The breath went out of him. He thought he might die. He wondered if he could make himself die simply by refusing to breathe. He became sick and sat down on the chair with his head down and his hands between his knees, and he listened as his mother went roaming the apartment, sobbing and murmuring and cursing in foul language all those whom she blamed for all that had become of her, arguing with her dead mother in turns, and then blubbering, "Dan, Dan, Dan," over and over again.

"You know what your father gave me?" she screamed. "You know what he gave me from those women downtown? You know what he left me with?"

These words terrified Toby.

The apartment stank of booze. Toby wanted to die. But Emily and Jacob were due to get off the St. Charles car a block away at any minute. He went to the corner store, bought a flask of bourbon, though he was underage, and brought it home and forced it down her throat, swallow after swallow, until she passed out cold on the mattress.

After that, her cursing increased. As the children dressed for school, she'd call them the worst names imaginable. It was like a demon lived inside her. But it wasn't a demon. The booze was eating her brain, and he knew it.

His latest teacher gave him a new lute, a cherished lute, one far more expensive than the one that had been broken.

"I love you for this," he said to her and he kissed her on her powdered cheek, and she told him again that someday he'd make a name for himself with his lute and a string of recordings of his own.

"God forgive me," he prayed as he knelt in Holy Name Church, looking up the long shadowy nave to the high altar, "I wish my mother would die. But I can't wish it."

The three children cleaned the place from top to bottom that weekend as they always did. And she, the mother, lay drunk like an enchanted princess under a spell, her mouth open, her face smooth and youthful, her drunken breath almost sweet, like sherry.

Under his breath, Jacob whispered, "Poor drunk Mommy."

This shocked Toby as much as the time Emily had said something like it.

When he was halfway through his senior year, Toby fell in love. It was with a Jewish girl from Newman School, the coeducational prep school in New Orleans that was as good as Jesuit. Her name was Liona and she came to Jesuit, an all-boys' school, to sing the lead in a musical that Toby made time to attend, and when he asked her to go with him to the prom, she said yes immediately. He was overwhelmed. Here was a lovely dark-haired beauty with a marvelous soprano voice, and she took to him completely.

In the hours after the prom they sat in her backyard uptown, outside of her beautiful home on Nashville Avenue. In the warm, fragrant garden, he broke down and told her about his mother. She had nothing but sympathy and understanding for him. Before morning they had slipped into her family guesthouse and been intimate together. He didn't want her to know that it was his first time, but when she confessed it was hers, he admitted it.

He told her that he loved her. This made her cry, and she told him that she had never known anyone like him.

With her long black hair and dark eyes, her soft soothing voice, and her immediate understanding, she seemed everything that he could ever desire. She had a strength he greatly admired, and something of a searing intelligence. He felt dreadful fear of losing her.

Liona came down to be with him in the heat of spring as he played on Bourbon Street; she brought him cold Cokes from the grocery store, and stood only a few paces away listening to him. Only her studies kept her away from him. She was clever and had a great sense of humor. She loved the sound of the lute, and she understood why he cherished this instrument for its unique tone and its beautiful shape. He loved her voice (which was much better than his), and soon they attempted duets. Her songs were Broadway songs and this brought a whole new songbook to his repertoire, and when time would allow, they played and sang together.

One afternoon--after his mother had been all right for a little while--he brought Liona home, and try as she might, she couldn't conceal her shock at the small overcrowded apartment, and at his mother's drunken slatternly manner as she sat smoking and playing solitaire at the kitchen table. He could tell that Emily and Jacob were ashamed. Jacob had asked him afterwards, "Toby, why did you ever bring her here with Mom like that? How could you do that?" Both his sister and brother looked at him as if he'd been a traitor.