Tongues of Angels - Softcover

In 1962 his first novel A Long and Happy Life appeared. It received the William Faulkner Award and has never been out of print. In ensuing years he has published seven more novels. In 1986 his Kate Vaiden received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also published volumes of short stories, poems, plays, essays, translations and a memoir, Clear Pictures. His television play Private Contentment was commissioned by American Playhouse for its first season, and in 1989 his trilogy of plays New Music premiered at the Cleveland Play House.

He is a member of the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His books have appeared in sixteen languages.

Chapter 1

I'm as peaceful a man as you're likely to meet in America now, but this is about a death I may have caused. Not slowly over time by abuse or meanness but on a certain day and by ignorance, by plain lack of notice. Though it happened thirty-four years ago, and though I can't say it's haunted my mind that many nights lately, I suspect I can draw it out for you now, clear as this noon. I may need to try.

I was twenty-one, an official man. I could almost surely have held him back; he deserved to stay. It wouldn't have taken a hero to do it, just a person with more common sense than I had at the time and, as I said, more attention to things. Half the mistakes I've made till now are mistakes of attention. I haven't really watched or I watched too close. And the only consolation I've had, for his death at least, is the hope that I learned a necessary lesson and that -- from his short life, short not small -- I made a part of the work I've done.

I'm a painter, of pictures not houses. From the time I started, back before grade school and down till now, everything I paint tries to look like the world, not just the world behind my eyes. And since I've been lucky and determined enough to support myself with mainly representational pictures, right through the abstract expressionist years, I've used the place and hour of his death a good many times -- the actual air and light of that evening.

It happened the summer of 1954 at a boys' camp in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. I was a counselor there for ten weeks between my third and fourth years of college. He was a camper, age fourteen -- Raphael Noren. That was two syllables, pronounced RAY-field with the d silent. Fourteen was the oldest you could be at Camp Juniper, pending a dispensation in the event of arrested development. All this was two decades before the nutritional boom of the postwar years excited all the hormonal clocks and made us a nation of sexually precocious giants. But even back then, after age fourteen you were too hot to handle and likely to be more of a bad influence than not.

Rafe was a lot of things; but whatever else, he was not a bad influence. Not intentionally, not on boys his own age. He laid down around him, and several steps ahead, the grave and pleasing air of a generous heart. Most children look out, grab a sight or two, run home and think about what it means for them. Rare was the only outward-looking child I ever knew or heard of. Somehow he felt safe enough to watch the world. One way or other, everybody felt that trait as somehow unnerving. And we all responded according to our natures. A surprising lot of Rafe's elders laughed. Though they couldn't admit it, he was plainly too grown. But the one thing nobody did was ignore him.

Rafe's draw worked in all directions, and that too came from his watchful ways. Very few people think that they've been noticed enough, and they almost always rise to the bait. They tend to think it means you like them. And Rare was all but factory-set to believe the best about everybody and everything. Not that he liked everything he saw. But if you were human, Rafe hoped he could please or at least amuse you. And besides his face, he'd already got his grown man's voice. It was a substantial baritone with none of the hints of embryonic preacher, politician or other fund-raiser that some boys get with premature manhood. It helped him a lot.

His face was also well advanced in its walk towards the uncluttered dignity it might have had at forty. And though his body was still supported on the compact bones of childhood, he was taller than his age -- maybe five foot nine -- and the skin of his calves and lower belly had grown the gold hair of first manhood. I'd grown it myself, only seven years before. But young as I' was, I could already see it wearing away on my ankles and losing the metallic luster that makes you feel more like some brand of ram with gold fleece than a helpless boy.

Rafe was so far ahead of most boys his age that he seemed a little pained at the institutional Saturday night mass shower jamborees. We counselors were supposed to make them sound like major entertainment events. But of course they were just a stab at insuring one bath per week for the many reluctant. I never thought Rare was embarrassed for himself; he worried about the others. They'd fix on his plumbing with helpless amazement. And the key to their feeling was, nobody laughed. I suspect he thought his precocity would shame them and he hated that. Since one of his surprising qualities was wit -- most of the good-looking young people I've met have all the wit of a basement door -- he at first tried to joke about it in public.

At the first jamboree of his session, for instance, when Rare saw them staring, he stretched his member to its limit, strummed it like a banjo and sang "You Are My Sunshine." But he must have seen that it saddened the other boys, like standing by helpless at a vandal act. From then out anyhow he took a far corner and kept himself hid. Better samples of his wit will surface later. But I need at the start to warn you against rejecting him early as a sober saint. That he was not. Any hour in Rafe's presence would let you see a dozen ways in which he was still a boy. But what I ask you to see at the start is something difficult. For surprising lengths of time most days, Rafe Noren showed stretches of majesty. And everybody around him knew it, not just the painter in residence, me.

In republican America, majesty's a trait seen mostly in photographs of Yosemite Valley or statues of Lincoln; so I'm hard put to give you parallel examples. Imagine a tall girl stepping towards you from a Botticelli "Spring" with your name on her lips, not knowing she's grander than the life all around. Or try thinking of a tall lean diver who honors the air turning down, slow motion, from a ten-meter board and vanishes sooner than you might hope. Or the eighteen-year-olds on ancient Greek tombstones. They wave you in with what may be the start of a smile towards absolute rest.

But I've run way ahead. Rafe Noren won't appear for some time yet. I need to explain what brought me near him and why I may have a part in his ending. Like all real stories, this one starts with my parents. They had excellent practical sense but were not highly educated. My father was denied college by a lack of family money, the last of eight children. Mother stayed at home because gifts then mostly did, but also her parents died before she was sixteen. Father had aimed to be a civil engineer; Mother dreamed of being an actress.

That may have made them too generous with me, who was their only child. So I have to admit that I got through my first twenty years without ever holding a real job. I made little pieces of money here and there by mowing yards, refinishing furniture and drawing portraits of children and dogs. But summers were mine for loafing, reading, playing with friends and dodging polio. Those were the standard dreamy times, much written about and featured in movies, when middle-class children in green suburbs invented their lazy heedless way, minus money and jobs, between their well-behaved winters in school.

And the reason I got a job when I did had nothing to do with virtue or vigor. My father had died the previous winter, the kind of heart attack that downs you in the midst of trying to phone your wife and say goodbye. And that was followed by more than a week of lingering agony with congestive heart failure. Mother and I weren't penniless yet; but three weeks after we buried Father, she took a job in an office supply store. And I saw that if I really was going to seize my fate and study in Europe after I finished college, then I'd better put shoulder to wheel as well and see if it moved.

Even in 1954 there weren't many jobs for clean white boys with slim common sense