The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks by Russell Banks Page B

neatly into your breast pocket to hide the purple stains from view of the audience, who can see you clearly up here stage center. Someone in that audience is coughing, nervous, repeated coughs coming from her throat, habitual and not the consequence or sign of illness. It will have a slight, negative effect on your recitation, for, unless you can pick up the rhythm, the pattern of her coughing, and can arrange always to be speaking at the same time, she will succeed in coughing while you are silent between stanzas or when you pause momentarily for dramatic effect, and it may have the effect of silencing you completely. You listen closely for the pattern of her coughs, and, surreptitiously, you hope, slip your watch from your vest pocket and study its face, while the Reverend Doctor Woolsey continues his lengthy introduction of the poet Edgar Poe and the unseen woman coughs, then coughs again, and, after thirty-two seconds, yet again. You calculate that if you commence reciting the poem seventeen seconds after a given cough, she will cough again in the middle of the third line and after that at the middle of every twelfth line (the fifteenth, twenty-seventh, thirty-ninth, et cetera) and at the end of every twelfth line from the beginning (the twelfth, twenty-fourth, thirty-sixth, et cetera). This particular spacing will minimize the effect of her coughing, will make it only slightly negative. But negative just the same, for it means that you will have to run each of those twelfth end-stopped lines rapidly into the following line, which will blur your every sixth rhyme and somewhat diminish the dramatic structure of the poem. As for its effect on the raven’s harsh refrain, you can only hope that the audience is sufficiently familiar with the poem to hear with its collective ear the croak of Nevermore in the very coughing of the woman, as it were, as if you Edgar Poe the poet said nothing, as if you merely mouthed the words, for the raven, for the unseen woman in the audience coughing, for the woman in your dream, for your mother dying in an attic room in Richmond, Virginia, your mother, whose consumptive cough and groans and finally her shrieks are muffled into silence by the women in the kitchen wrapping your head with a scarf so that you cannot hear your mother dying, will not remember this awful time in your life, and will not remember your mother.
    You return to the hotel, sober and alone, exchange greetings and complaints about the midsummer heat with the desk clerk, and climb the carpeted stairs to your room on the second floor. The recitation went well. You overcame the woman’s coughing interruptions just as you’d planned, and at the end the audience rose and applauded with gratitude. A few women near the front, when they rose from their seats to thank you for reciting your “magnificent and profound” poem, could be seen with tears washing their cheeks. Afterwards, when you departed the stage, you discovered that someone, a janitor probably, had removed your half-emptied bottle as a blessing and a sign, and later, at the Reverend Doctor Woolsey’s gathering for the literary ladies and gentlemen of Richmond, Virginia, you declined the sherry and asked for water, a glass of cool, clear water with a bruised leaf of mint dropped into it. And so now you arrive at your hotel room sober. But late, past midnight, for, because tonight you were sober, you spoke to the ladies and gentlemen with a lucidity driven by logic that astonished them and made them beg you to stay and continue to mystify, enchant, and bewilder them. One is always amazed by what is most rational, you muse as you enter your darkened room. The irrational, even though it makes one feel helpless, out of control, childlike, seems more “natural” to one. You light the lamp, sit on the bed, and slowly remove your shoes. You think: And one is right to believe in the “naturalness” of unreason. And right to be amazed by what is most rational, to be