A Quiet Belief in Angels Read Online Free PDF Page B

seen.
    “You mustn’t say a word. Not a word, mind,” she stressed. “Elena Kruger has epileptic fits, grand mal seizures they are called, and both her mother and father have sometimes to hold her tight to the mattress or the floor to stop her injuring herself.”
    I asked why she had fits; my mother smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Why does one man have a crooked leg, or an eye that doesn’t work? Who knows, Joseph . . . it is the nature of things.”
    I imagined strong hands holding Elena down, hands that would prevent her shuddering and trembling across the floor, how her skirt would soil, how she would perhaps bite down on six inches of rough-hewn leather belt to prevent her severing her own tongue.
    After that Elena’s needling and name-calling never bothered me as much. I just had to picture the terrifying violence of such a physical affliction and my heart, small and insubstantial though it was, went out to her. She already hurt more than she could ever hurt me, and I believed if I took some of that hurt she might get better. I was naïve, foolish perhaps, but it seemed to make sense at the time. I believe that was the point at which I began to see her in a different light, and though she had two elder brothers—Hans at twelve, and Walter at sixteen the better part of a man—I felt some fraternal pull toward her. She seemed fragile and disconsolate, adrift in a world where the words of her father, her brothers, seemed to hold sway. I imagined her as some gentle, lonely soul, a soul without tether or anchor, and I determined that I—in some small way—would attempt to make her life somehow happier.
     
    Christmas came and went. I wrote my story, “The Broken-Field Run,” about Red Grange, and how he used to catch the ball and take off down the field like a long dog after a short rabbit. I had seen him at the movies one time, a Saturday afternoon matinee with my father: an RKO Radio Pictures newsreel, a half-hour Pete Smith Specialty, and then a short before the main feature. Red Grange, perhaps the greatest runner in football history, legs like steam pistons going one after the other. I used words like fleet and mercurial , athletic and Herculean . Miss Webber changed them to words she thought everyone would understand, and then she stood ahead of the class and told everyone to close their eyes.
    “That’s right,” she said quietly. “Close your eyes, and don’t open them until I’m done.”
    She read my story to the class. I wish she hadn’t. My heart, thundering like a traction engine, could have powered a steamboat all the way from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. It was a feeling I would never forget, and it almost served to dissuade me from pursuing my dream to write.
    When she was done there seemed to be a small chasm of silence into which I fell. No one said a word. Miss Webber reached out her figurative hand and rescued me from that chasm.
    She did not compliment the story, nor negate it. She did not hold it up as some sort of example to the other children in the class. She merely asked who had been able to see Red Grange as he struck out on his broken-field run.
    Ronnie Duggan raised his hand.
    So did Laverna Stowell. Virginia Grace Perlman. Catherine McRae, her brother Daniel.
    I kept my head facing forward and my eyes inside it. The color swelled in my cheeks.
    Soon there were more children with their hands up than those without.
    And then Miss Webber said, “Good, good indeed. That is called imagining , and imagining is a vital and necessary ability in this world. Every great invention came about because folks were able to imagine things. You should nurture and cultivate your ability to imagine. You should let your head fill up with pictures of the things you think about and describe them to yourself. You should make believe . . .”
    I listened to her. I loved her. Years later, a very different time, I would think of stopping my work, and then I would remember Alexandra Webber and