Of Love and Evil (The Songs of the Seraphim 2)

“Well, yeah, you’re crying. You looked heartbroken.”

“I’m not heartbroken. But I think I could be. My fault for listening to the Schoolmen,” he said. He meant the theologians of the universities, the men like Thomas Aquinas.

“You mean the men who say you have no heart.”

“You made me cry, the three of you,” he said.

“Why?”

He shrugged. “In your love for one another, I heard the echo of Heaven.”

“Now you’re bringing tears to my eyes,” I said. I couldn’t stop looking at him, at the depth of his expression. I wanted to put my arms around him.

“You needn’t comfort me,” he said with a smile. “But I’m moved that you want to do it. You can’t know how mysterious it is to us, the way that humans love, yearning for completeness. Each angel is complete. Men and women on Earth are never complete, but when they reach for that completion in love, they reach for Heaven.”

“Talk about mystery,” I said. “You look like a man, you sound like a man, but you’re not a man.”

“No, I’m most certainly not.”

“How do you look when you’re before the Throne of God?” I asked.

He gave one of those soft reproving laughs. “I am a spirit before the Throne of the Maker,” he said softly. “I’m a spirit now inhabiting a body made for this world. You know that.”

“Are you ever lonely?”

“What do you think?” he asked. “Can I be lonely?”

“No,” I said. “Hollywood movie angels are lonely.”

“So true,” he said smiling broadly. “Even I feel sorry for them. There’ll come a time when you’ll understand what I am because you will be like me, but I will never really know what it’s like to be you now. I can only marvel at it.”

“I don’t want ever to be separated from them,” I said. “My mind’s working overtime on that. If I can’t be with them, they’ll hear my voice over the miles regularly and often. They’re going to have anything that I can provide for them.”

A sharp panic stopped me suddenly. The money I’d piled up all these years was blood money. But it was all I had, and I could use it for them, and it could be cleansed in that way, couldn’t it? I couldn’t take back the trust funds I’d already created. I prayed Malchiah would say nothing on this score.

“You belong to one another now,” he said.

“What are you suggesting?” I asked. “Does that mean that someday somehow I might be with Liona and Toby under the same roof?”

He appeared to reflect for a moment, then he said:

“Consider what’s already happened. By the love you now share, you’re already transformed. Look at you. And in this brief visit you’ve altered the course of Liona’s life and Toby’s life forever. You’ll never go a day of your life without knowing you have them, that they need you, that you mustn’t disappoint them. And they will never experience a moment without knowing they have your love and acknowledgment. Don’t you grasp the changes already taking place? Living under the same roof, that would be one aspect of this.”

“That’s a bloodless way of looking at it,” I said, before I could check myself. “You don’t know what it means for humans to live under the same roof.”

“Yes, I do,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

He waited. I did see it, see how very enormous it was, what had happened with Liona and Little Toby, yet the concept of infinite possibilities spinning out from the moments we’d shared did not stop me from longing for so much more, I had to confess it.

“You know how to love,” he said. “That is key. You can love not just those people you meet in the embracing illumination of Angel Time. You can love people in your own time. The woman and the boy didn’t frighten you. Your heart beats with a new and practical love that two days ago was unimaginable to you.”

I was too overwhelmed to reply. I pictured them again, Liona and Little Toby, as they’d looked when I first set eyes on them. “No. I didn’t know I could love like that,” I whispered.

“I know you didn’t,” he said.

“And I’ll never disappoint them,” I said. “But be merciful, Malchiah. Tell me I might one day live under the same roof with them. Tell me it’s at least conceivable, whether I deserve it or not. Tell me I might somehow someday deserve it. Bear with me.”

He was quiet for a moment. The tears were gone from his eyes. He looked placid and wondering. His eyes moved over me as though he were studying me. Then he looked at me directly.

“Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps there is world enough and time for that. Eventually. But you mustn’t think on it now. Because now, it most likely cannot be.” He paused as if he meant to say something else, and then thought the better of it.

“Can you make a mistake?” I asked. “I don’t mean that I want you to, I only want to know. Can you be mistaken about something?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Only the Maker knows all things.”

“But you can’t sin.”

“No,” he said simply. “Long ago, I chose for the Maker.”

“Good God, can’t you tell me—?”

“Not now, perhaps not ever,” he said. “I’m not here to give you the history of the Maker and His angels, beautiful young man. I’m here to know you, and guide you, and ask of you that you give me your devoted service. Now leave your cosmic questions to Heaven, and let’s get on with the work you must do.”

“Oh, give me world enough and time to make up for the things I did, and world enough and time—.”

“Yes, remember those words,” he said, “where I’m sending you, because it will be a complex series of tasks. You don’t go now to England, or that age, but rather to another in which things for the Jewish children of God are both better and worse.”

“Then it’s Jewish prayers we’ll answer.”

“Yes,” he said, “and this time it is a young man named Vitale, and he is praying both desperately and faithfully for help, and you will go to him and find a complex of mysteries which only you can understand. But come. It’s time we were on our errand.”

WITHIN AN INSTANT WE HAD LEFT THE VERANDA behind.

I don’t know what others saw if they saw anything.