“No,” I said. “I never want to break that vow, never. I owe the world a crushing debt for the things I did. Thank God, you’ve shown me a way to pay that debt.”
“I will go on showing you,” he said. “And in the meantime be strong for her, the mother of your son, be strong for him and the man he can become. And don’t delude yourself as to the things you once did, the enormity of them. Remember that beautiful young woman has her angel, too. She doesn’t begin to guess who you’ve been all these years. If she did, she might not let you near that child. Or so her angel reminds me.”
I nodded. It was too painful to think about, too obvious to deny.
“Let me tell you something,” he said. “Even if I left you now, if you never saw me again, if you came to believe that my visitations had been a dream, you could never slip into a settled domestic life without your conscience destroying you. Extraordinary deeds require extraordinary amends. Indeed, conscience can demand things of human beings that the Maker does not, and which angels do not suggest, because they have no need to do it. Conscience is part of being human. And your conscience was destroying you before I ever came to you. You’ve never been without conscience, Toby. Your guardian angel, Shmarya, could tell you that.”
“I’m sorry,” I said under my breath. “I’m sorry for all of this. I’ve failed you here. Malchiah, don’t give up on me.”
He laughed. It was a gentle reassuring laugh.
“You haven’t failed me!” he said kindly. “Miracles happen in time for humans. And there isn’t world enough and time for humans to get used to them. They never do. And I have been watching them since the dawn of time, yes. And humans are always surprising me.”
I smiled. I was spent and far from serenity about any of it, but I knew he was speaking the utter truth, of course. The anger was gone.
“One thing more,” he said warmly. His face was softened by an undeniable compassion. “Shmarya prompts me to say this,” he confided, raising his eyebrows a little as he spoke. “He says if you cannot be a saint, or a monk or a priest, then think in terms of being a hero.”
I laughed. “That’s good,” I said. “That’s extremely good. Shmarya knows what buttons to press, doesn’t he?” I laughed again. I couldn’t help it. “When I feel like it, can I talk to him?”
“You’ve been talking to him for years,” Malchiah said. “And now he’s talking to you. And who am I to stand in the way of a beautiful conversation?”
I was alone on the veranda.
Just like that. Alone.
The night was empty. I was in my bare feet and they were freezing.
The next morning, I went to their suite to have breakfast.
Toby was up and dressed, in his blue blazer and khaki pants, and announced to me that he had slept in his own room and in his own bed.
I nodded as if that was what the world expected of young men of ten years of age, even if their mothers had giant king-sized beds in lavish hotel suites.
And we all had room service together at a beautifully draped table replete with hotel silver and the appropriate covers to keep the dishes deliciously hot.
I felt I couldn’t take this parting.
I felt I just couldn’t do it, but I knew full well it was what I had to do.
I’d brought my leather bag with me, and after the breakfast things were cleared away, I took out two folders from it and I put them in her hands.
“What is this?” she asked, naturally, and when I tried to explain that she could read all the material on the plane, she insisted I explain now.
“Trust funds, among other things, one for you, one for him, and an annuity that will pay monthly, a sum that’s no problem for me, and ought to take care of all your expenses and his. And there’s more where that came from.”
“I haven’t asked you for anything,” she reminded me simply.
“You don’t have to ask me. It’s what I want for you both to have. There’s enough there for him to go away to school, if you want him to. He could go to England, to Switzerland, to wherever the best education can be gotten. He could go for the summer, perhaps, and spend his regular years at home. I don’t know about those things. I never did. But you know. And the people at Newman School know. And your father will know too.”
She sat holding these folders, not opening them, and then tears began to slide down her cheeks.
I kissed her. I held her as tenderly as I could.
“Everything I have is now set aside for you and him,” I said. “I’ll send you more information when I have it. There are always so many questions lawyers ask and it takes such time.”
I hesitated, then: “Look, a lot of things will puzzle you. My name doesn’t appear in these papers, but be assured the name that does is one I use for business all the time. It’s Justin Booth. I used it to pay for your airline tickets, and for the rooms at this hotel. And tell your lawyers the gift tax has been paid in full on everything being transferred to you and Little Toby.”
“Toby, I never expected this,” she said.
“Here’s something else. This is a prepaid cell phone. Keep it close to you. The ‘name’ and pin number are on the back. That’s all you need to renew the service. You can pay for it at any number of public places, simple as that. I’ll call you on that cell.”
She nodded gravely. There was something profoundly courteous in her accepting of these things, in not questioning why the secrecy, why the alias.
Again I kissed her, kissed her eyelids and her cheeks and then her lips. She was as tender and yielding as she’d ever been. The fragrance of her hair was the same as it had been so many years ago. I wanted to pick her up, carry her into the bedroom, take her, and bind her to me forever.
It was late. The car was already waiting downstairs. Little Toby had just come in to say that he was packed and ready for the plane. I don’t think he liked my kissing his mother. He took a stand beside her, looking at me resolutely. And when I kissed him, too, he asked suspiciously, “When will we visit you again?”
“As soon as I can arrange it,” I said. God only knows when that will be.
The walk downstairs was the longest walk I’d ever taken, though Toby was delighted to be running up and down five flights of stairs in the rotunda, and listening to his voice echo off the walls.
He lost yet a little bit of his gentleman’s polish at those moments.
All too soon, we were outside in front of the hotel, and the car was there.
It was another cool crisp blue California day, and all the flowers of the inn seemed to be at their most beautiful, and the birds were singing softly in the trees.
“I’ll call you as soon as I can call you,” I told her.
“Do something for me,” she said under her breath.
“Anything.”
“Don’t tell me you’ll call, if you won’t.”
“No, darling,” I said. “I’ll call you. I’ll call you come Hell or high water. I just don’t know when exactly that it will be.” I thought for a moment, and then I said, “Give me world enough and time. Remember those words. If I’m late say them. Give me world enough and time.”
I wrapped my arms around her and this time I kissed her, and I didn’t care who saw us, even if it was Little Toby, and when I let her go, she took a step backwards as if she was as off balance as I was myself.
I picked him up and held him up and looked at him and then I kissed him on the forehead and on both cheeks.
“I knew you’d be like this,” he said.
“If I’d told God Himself that I wanted a perfect son,” I said, “and I’d had the nerve to tell God just how to make him, well, God couldn’t have done any better, as far as I’m concerned.”
Then the car was gone and they were gone, and the great beautiful world of the Mission Inn seemed empty as it had never seemed before.
CHAPTER FOUR
I’D REACHED MY SUITE BEFORE I DISCOVERED MALCHIAH waiting for me. He was seated at the black iron table and he was cryin
g. He had his elbows on the table and his hands over his face.
“What’s wrong with you!” I demanded. “What’s the matter?” I sat down. “Is this my fault? What did I do?”
He sat back and slowly smiled the softest, saddest smile. “You really worried about me?” he asked.
“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.
I knew only we had left the solid world of the Mission Inn, and the solid world of Liona and Toby, and we were once again high in the clouds. If I had a form I couldn’t see it or feel it. All I saw was the moist white swirling around me and here and there the tiniest flicker of a star.
I ached for the celestial music, but it did not come so much as the songs of the wind came, swift and refreshing and wiping me clean, it seemed, of all my thoughts of the recent past.
Suddenly below me I saw spread out an immense and seemingly endless city, a city of domes and rooftop gardens, and rising towers, and crosses beneath the ever shifting layers of clouds.
Malchiah was with me, but I couldn’t see him any more than I could see myself. But I could see the familiar hills and tall pines of Italy, and I knew then that that was where I was going though to which city I was about to find out.
“This is Rome you see beneath you,” said Malchiah. “Leo X sits on the papal throne, and Michelangelo, wearied from the accomplishment of his great chapel ceiling, labors on a dozen other commissions and will soon give himself to restoring St. Peter’s itself. Raphael paints in glory the apartments that millions will come to see for centuries beyond this. But none of this is important to you, nor will I grant you even the smallest amount of time to glimpse the Pope or any of his retinue, for you are sent as always to one particular heart.
“This one young man, Vitale de Leone, prays urgently and faithfully, and so passionately do others
pray for him that they are storming Heaven’s gates.”
Down we were moving, closer and closer to the rooftop gardens, closer to the domes and steeples, until finally we could see the maze of crooked stairways and alleyways that made up the streets of Rome.
“You yourself in this world are a Jew, named Toby, and you are a lutenist as you will soon discover, and let that be a key to you as to how much of your varied talent will be needed to see this venture through. Now you are known as one who is imperturbable and can bring consolation to the troubled through his music, so you will be welcomed when you arrive.
“Be brave, and be loving, and be open to all those who need you—especially to our frantic and much discouraged Vitale, who is a trusting man by nature, and who so valiantly prays for assistance. I count upon your cleverness as always, your nerve, and your cunning. But just as much I count upon your generous and educated heart.”
CHAPTER FIVE
AS I EMERGED ONTO A SMALL PIAZZA BEFORE A HUGE stone palazzo a crowd broke as if it had been waiting for me.
It was not the mob I’d encountered in England on my last escapade for Malchiah, but clearly there were goings-on here and I was being plunged into their very midst.
The crowd were Jews, almost all of them, or so it seemed because so many wore a round yellow circle attached to their clothes, and others wore blue tassels on the ends of their long velvet tunics. These were rich men, men of influence, and their bearing told me this as well as their dress.
As for me, I was dressed in a fine tunic of rolled velvet, with slashed sleeves with silver linings, leggings that were clearly costly and brightly dyed green and tall leather boots. I wore a pair of fine fur-trimmed leather gloves. On my back I carried by its thin leather strap a lute! I wore the round yellow patch as well. And when I realized this, I felt a certain vulnerability I’d never known before.
My hair was shoulder length and blond and curly, and I was more stunned by recognizing myself in this garb than by anything that the crowd before me might do.
They were one and all stepping aside for me and gesturing to the gate of the house through which I could just see the light of the courtyard inside.