Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

They got off the elevator on the second floor and strolled the disorienting racks of suits and ties and French-cuffed shirts. Ruth felt the salesmen watching her, preparing to come forward and offer assistance, and it made her feel powerful to have their attention. A tall, angular man with a jutting chin was the first to step into their path, and with a distracted, harried air borrowed from her mother, Ruth raised her nose in his direction and said, “Where might I find the Levi’s?”

With the help of Donna and the salesman and an embarrassed stock boy roughly Francis’s size, Ruth picked out a pair that looked as if they might fit, admiring each heavy seam, every shiny rivet. Afterward, the handle of the bag tingling in her fingers, she followed Donna down to the salon on the fourth floor.

Donna left the salon with a new compact, and together they went up to the thirteenth floor. At a table overlooking the river, they ordered Maurice salads and Coca-Cola, and while they ate, they talked of nothing. Nothing, at least, that Ruth would later be able to recall. She would have liked to think of the two of them, there on the cusp of adulthood, discussing what the future held, a world full of possibilities. Their last year of high school was nearly halfway finished, and what then? There was college and marriage. They must have discussed Richard, whether he would propose, and would he like the pebble-grain wallet Donna had chosen for him? In fact, in little more than a year, Donna would become Mrs. Richard Galt, and the two of them would buy a new brick rancher in Royal Oak.

But what about Ruth? Did Donna ask what might happen between her and Francis? If she did, how did Ruth respond? The relationship would end, of course. Everyone knew it would have to end. But Ruth herself could not yet see the end. She was too young to be able to see the end of anything. At eighteen she was less like a young version of her adult self than like some primitive ancestor. There would be many crude steps along the evolutionary path before she became what she was now. And it bewildered her still to look back at this young girl, so lacking in ambition, teenage years spent wanting nothing more than to be her own driver. And having achieved that simple goal with the help of Francis Statler, she found herself tapped out of ideas. There would be college, one wasted year of it in Ann Arbor. And there would be a marriage, almost two decades’ worth of unhappiness and frustration.

But then again, if she had then already possessed the notion to make something of herself, things might not have turned out half as well as they did. At eighteen, the best she could have hoped for was to be taught to type, and no one then wanted to employ a girl who thought she deserved better. Of course, no one did fifteen years later, either, when Ruth’s aspirations finally surfaced. But by then the two daughters she had loved and coddled had taught her patience, and her husband had taught her how to humor men less intelligent than herself.

But such change would not come to Ruth alone. Nor would it always come so slowly.

On July 23, 1967, when the children were four and six years old, the only city Ruth had ever really known would suddenly be set alight. Of course, there would be nothing sudden about it, except that neither Ruth nor anyone else she knew had seen it coming. But that didn’t mean the tinder hadn’t been sparking for years.

Even four decades later, she would remember the day vividly. It was early Sunday morning when the riot broke out. They heard murmurs on the radio of something happening miles away on Twelfth Street. Hours before dawn, police had raided an unlicensed bar, arresting eighty-something patrons, all of them black. In the hours since then, black people across the city had been expressing their anger with fire and bricks.

Having witnessed a few similar flare-ups years before, Ruth and Tom assumed that this one, too, would pass. They were living then not far from Palmer Woods, and at nine-thirty they left for church, their route taking them down Woodward, where they were alarmed to find the street already trashed, all those precious cars overturned like stones. Everything was on fire.

Later that day came reports of a fireman shot dead by a rooftop sniper. The National Guard took up positions — terrified boys who had never seen anything like this. And then, at last, came the tanks and the infantry troops fresh from Vietnam. It took five days for the streets to clear.

And once the streets were cleared, they never really filled again.

Forty-three people died, most of them black. More than a thousand people were injured. The blacks called it a rebellion , claiming they were fighting back against police brutality and discrimination and all kinds of other iniquities, but it would be years before Ruth could understand what that meant, before she could feel anything other than anger. Only then would she come to see them as something more than a mob hell-bent on destruction.

Within a year, all of Ruth’s closest friends (the ones who had not gone already) left the city for the suburbs. For a while, the people she had known were replaced with others she didn’t. Black doctors and lawyers and executives moved into neighborhoods that had always been completely white. Ruth was ashamed sometimes to remember how much she and Tom fretted for their safety, for their prosperity, how they watched moving trucks through curtained windows, wondering where it all would lead. It didn’t take long to find out. At the time, they felt lucky to have gotten out when they did, when it was still possible to sell a house for something. There were only so many black doctors and lawyers and executives to go around. The city emptied faster than it could be filled. First one house at a time went empty, and then entire streets, and then entire blocks, and then entire neighborhoods, and eventually entire zip codes. And nothing would ever be the same again.

§

All that had happened long ago, to someone else, to someone that Ruth, at sixty-eight, truly felt she barely knew. As she looked out now over the river from the third floor of the HSI Building, it occurred to her that the eighteen-year-old girl who had left Francis Statler to stand alone by herself at the Belle Isle fountain would have been staring then at the very spot where she currently sat. Of course, the tower hadn’t been built then. That was a different city in 1958, the sort of city that could still afford to maintain a conservatory and an aquarium and a lavish fountain that shot water forty feet into the air.

Ruth had gone back to Belle Isle for the last time the previous fall, wanting to share the aquarium with her granddaughter before it was permanently closed. Her younger daughter had brought her family in from Connecticut for the weekend. Ruth and little Hannah found the island dead, the casino and the children’s zoo already shuttered. The shoreline roads she’d cruised as a girl were empty, the bushes overgrown, the sidewalks disintegrated. The parking lot in front of the fountain was barricaded, the water shut off. It was fall and overcast, and the leaves were off the trees, and on all the battered grass there wasn’t a single dog or child to be seen. Ruth felt as if she were the last cold war spy, sent to some vast, desolate place for an exchange of top secret microfilm. Even her favorite orchids in the conservatory weren’t enough to mask how far the place had fallen. The bark of the palm trees had been carved up with initials. Squares of plywood covered the broken panes of greenhouse glass.

Hannah kept saying, “Grandma, I think we should go.”

“It didn’t used to be like this,” Ruth tried to explain. But eyes can’t be talked out of what they see.

On all of Belle Isle, only the yacht club had been kept up. It didn’t belong to the city. In its latest manifestation, the building was a Spanish Colonial stucco anomaly with it own private wooden bridge. Ruth couldn’t help suspecting the club had chosen this least logical of architectural styles precisely in order to signal its detachment from the rest of the city. Her second husband was a member, as was virtually everyone else in their circle, as were all the other HSI executives. It was the only reason any of them came onto the island anymore, the place to go when one wanted to feel as though one were somewhere else.