The President's Angel (17 page)

“Adulteress! Adulteress!” he repeated to himself, weeping as he remembered his beautiful mother bending over his dead father, and his own sense of abandonment. He wiped the tears from his angry eyes.

He found Susan in the kitchen with Scott. “Adulteress. You whore!” He took a fireplace poker and broke his house apart, in his effort to reach Scotty, his wife, his very heart. Scotty and Susan ran to a neighbor's house. They called the police. The children, thank God, were in school.

He tore the books from the shelves, the groceries from the kitchen cabinets, the goose down from the living room pillows, so that feathers billowed and floated through the house, merging on the upper floors with the stuffing from the huge mattress off the bed that he slashed with a knife and threw down the front stairs.

The police took Jim to a hospital for observation. Susan's house was wrecked.

That same night, as Scotty and Susan lay in bed together, happy in their pillow talk and bonded by lament, the President had his final dream. In his dream the beggar approached. He was barefoot. In rags. At his side was a large black dog. The beggar held out the paperweight to Matt, who took it, at which the man changed before Matt's eyes, was clothed in waves of white so brilliant that the President had to look away.

When he turned back, the beggar was gone, but in his hand Matt held the paperweight. He turned it over and a storm of snowflakes fell over the earth, or white joy, like angels flying everywhere, and they filled the air with a song so sweet that he knew he was dreaming in the dream. He was ravished by the music in his dream.

When he awoke he knew … everything.

They say that a person cannot change, but this is simply not true. He proceeds through life, and if he's successful, goes through transformations that make him more of what he was before, closer to the child; and that is what happened to the President, Matthew Madison Adams, who woke one morning to see an angel at the foot of his bed, and began, against his will, his hero's journey. His revelation came as no powerful fireworks display, bombs bursting in air, enlightenment. Rather, it took a long and gradual opening of the heart, but it was no less heroic because interior and uncoordinated and chronologically unclear. It was his own wilderness he traveled through, slaying the dragons of doubt and insecurity, blindness, egotism, control, and arrogance, staying the numbness that masked his feelings and fear. What he learned was simply to let go. Trust.

It was a descent into Hell. But Hell is also only an attitude of mind, for Heaven is in Hell, as Jakob Böhme wrote, and Hell in Heaven, yet separated by the most immeasurable distance of our point of view.

Matt awoke from his dream (the last one he would ever have of the beggar and the angels). He took command. He held the reins of power firmly in his hands, confident once more, decisive, with a twinkle in his eye, and with a sense of timing that left both his admiring supporters and opposition in awe. His change in attitude alone was enough to abort the coup: Forget Scotty's story, which, scrabbling to catch up to the swiftly changing events, was written and revised a dozen hurried times before it appeared and won the Pulitzer for him. By then the vice-president had dropped into line, as had the two military officers. The President was the alpha dog again, with the rest of his staff at his shoulder, looking to him for leadership, and he to his angels. He felt a promise had been made to him.

He ordered the armed forces on maneuvers, building to Operation Shark, and you could see Time holding its breath as the world moved breathlessly toward this last encounter with death. The little planet would be a Black Hole itself if Matt guessed wrong. But the President pressed on, fearful at times and often caught by doubt, but mostly feeling more excitement than anxiety, after what he'd seen. Some people were scared by his very confidence they had once found wanting.

“Do you think we get out of school so fast?” He laughed. “Not likely. Not yet.”

Some people weren't sure the planet was in school, but who could resist the President? His spirit was infectious. He rode high in the polls again, unconquerable, and when he campaigned for reelection, when he addressed the roaring crowds, he was unbeatable; even Anne took to the hustings, as in the old days—Battling Annie at his side. But I‘m ahead of myself again, for the landslide election did not come until years later; long after Susan's divorce from Jim, long after the armies crossed the border to challenge the Barbarians, after the Ring of Fire was ignited, then extinguished, and after the famous summit meeting that dismantled the Ring forever.

The summit took place on an ancient estate outside Stockholm, during summer days without an end to light. The President walked out with the elderly Eastern Premier, down the path through the pine forest. Only the two walked together, for the Premier spoke the President's language fluently, though Matt knew only a few words of that ancient tongue. The Premier leaned on the cane he had used since his illness the year before.

It would be a lie to say the two had forgotten enmity. They paced slowly up the path, side by side, the scent of pine in their nostrils and the soft green light splashing at their feet. The breeze rocked the branches above and gently nuzzled at their cheeks and the skin at their open shirts.

Ahead of them moved the two angels. The President blinked against the tremendous light.

“You have one too,” the President said.

“It came before the war.”

“Mine too.” The President nodded absently. “Yours has a sword.” But no sooner had he spoken than the sword of light turned into a column as large as the two haloed, mist-like figures.

“The sword of combat,” growled the Premier, trying to hold on to his failing sense of animosity, and watching as the sword hilt shifted, as before, into that luminous cross.

Observers following fifty yards behind saw the two heads of state, the Emperors, who between them governed half the world, pause and stop. The Premier leaned on his cane. Both men seemed absorbed in gazing at something ahead—a squirrel perhaps? A bird?

“The sword of conflict,” repeated the Premier hoarsely. But as he spoke they saw it once more change into a round and shining globe, held as tenderly as the orb in the other angel's hands. “Yours has one too.” And the two spheres merged into one huge ball, held up by both these beautiful creatures.

The Premier could not stop his flowing tears, and standing in the center of the path, he found he could not move. Then he felt the President's hand on his shoulder, and, looking over, saw that he was weeping too. For angels filled the sky. Their light extended everywhere.

“Is it possible there are more things, Horatio, than this world dreams of?”

From Shakespeare's
Hamlet
, Act I.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

“He was not about to allow an apparition to deflect him from his appointed course.”

The U S Postal Code:

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

And from Herodotus, (485-425),
Histories
writing of the Persians; (trans. A.D. Godley, 1924):

“It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day's journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.”

“By the time of the events recounted here [nuclear weapons] had increased … in landscapes plotted and pieced—fold, fallow…”

Gerard Manley Hopkins,
Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things….

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;…

Concerning oxymoronic military/poets: “…Simply that they hear a different drum.”

Henry David Thoreau, in
Walden
:

“If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away.”

“Infected minds to their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets…”

Shakespeare,
Macbeth
, Act 5, scene 1:

      …infected minds

To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets:

More needs she the divine than the physician.

“winter of his discontent”

Shakespeare.
Richard
III, Act I

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York;

And all the clouds that low'r'd upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

“Dharma bum.”

From the novel of that title by Jack Kerouac.

“But now, the blast of war blown in their ears, they were like tigers, pacing, ready.”

Shakespeare,
Henry
V, Act III, Scene 1.

But when the blast of war blows in our ears

Then imitate the action of the tiger

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood….

“…He walked in halls fit for princes and thousands at his bidding speed.”

Milton,
On His Blindness

      …God doth not need

Either man's work or his own gifts, who best

Bear his milde yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o'er Land and Ocean without rest.

They also serve who only stand and wait.

“How low, how little are the proud, how indigent the great.”

Thomas Gray (1716-71),
Ode on the Spring
.

“What father would give his child a stone when he asks for bread?”

Luke
11:11 and also
Matthew
7:9-10.

“Now there were also people who accepted these horrors as the downside of the best of all possible worlds.”

Voltaire, in
Candide
, in which Dr. Pangloss asserts that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

(Voltaire's scathing and sarcastic response to philosopher Gottfried Liebniz's theodicy on how an omniscient, omnipotent and beneficent God can allow suffering and evil).

“… attention must be paid to these things, attention must be paid.”

Arthur Miller,
Death of a Salesman
. Act I.

“He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

“… the love that moves the sun and stars”

Dante's
Divine Comedy
, the last line of “
Paradiso
“(and the most beautiful stanza ever written, but you have to read all three cantos to get it):

L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stele.

“And a little child shall lead them.”

Isaiah
11:6.

“How to present his true account?”

Milton,
On His Blindness
.

      …though my Soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, least he returning chide….

“…the illusion of insight…”

John Cheever, in
Oh, What a Paradise It Seems
.

“A doctor of the soul…”

Viktor Frankl, title,
Doctor and the Soul;
with resonances also of Shakespeare's,
Macbeth
, Act V, scene 1.

“The Center would not hold.”

Yeats,
The Second Coming
, 1919

      …Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed….

“Of men and arms I sing!”

Virgil: opening lines of
The Aeneid

Arma virumque cano
(I sing of arms and the man).

Sophy Burnham has distinguished herself as a novelist, journalist, nonfiction writer, and award winning playwright. Her nonfiction credits include the New York Times bestsellers
The Art Crowd, A Book of Angels
and
Angel Letters
, as well as
The Landed Gentry, The Ecstatic Journey
and
The Art of Intuition
. Her novel
Revelations
was named a Literary Guild Selection, as was
The Path of Prayer
,
The President's Angel
and
The Treasure of Montségur
. Ms. Burnham's essays and articles have been published in national magazines, including
Esquire, New York, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Town and Country
, and many others. Her work is translated into more than 25 languages. She lives in Washington DC.