Four Spirits (29 page)

Coming toward Stella on the sidewalk was a Negro woman in a stylish green coat, with a poodle pin glittering on the collar. Her hair was straightened to smoothness and turned under in a glamorous pageboy at the length of her shoulders. She walked confidently in high heels. Her face was sober, and she
wore a black cloth around the upper sleeve of her coat. Stella wondered if it was safe for the colored woman—if one could mourn this way, safely? The woman's face was drained of expression. Stella wanted to catch her eye, but there was no contact. Stella touched her own upper arm, clasped it as though to say, My hand is forming a mourning band. I grieve.

The green-coated woman's high heels clacked past. A teenage boy with his hair swept back into a ducktail walked past; he had a transistor radio clamped against the side of his head.
Why should I disdain him?
Stella asked herself. These were just ordinary people. She'd known them, or people like them, always.

 

WHEN SHE TOOK HER
seat at the switchboard and looked over the balcony into the store, she saw one of the women clerks take the arm of Mr. Hall, who was well dressed because he worked in men's suits, and swing herself into a little jig around him. Mr. Hall was too dignified for that; he let her go but gave her a quick nod and smile.

Mr. Fielding climbed up the steps from the first floor to her balcony. His eyes were fastened on her, and behind her chair, he paused to say, “You're not happy about it, are you, Miss Silver?”

“No,” she answered.

He gave her a quick nod (agreeing?) and disappeared into his office, closed the door.

(I mourn, too—
surely that was what he meant.
Yes
.)

Between the ringings of the phone, Stella talked with her friends. In a low voice, so that Mr. Fielding wouldn't hear her chatting, she asked Ellie how her therapy session had gone—“It helps,” Ellie said. Stella reported that Dr. Bradstreet had delayed her birth control prescription. “She said she'd prescribe a tranquilizer though.” (
What's wrong with you!)

Down below, the store busied itself with the flow and ebb of Thanksgiving customers. The pillars were decorated with pictures of turkeys and overflowing cornucopias in colors of brown and orange. Stella called Nancy, who said that she thought people were mostly appalled by the assassination, that no true American could be happy, but Stella told her what she'd seen with her own eyes that day in Birmingham, how white children cheered and clerks danced in the aisles.

Because they always talked the longest, she last called Cat, who had been
watching television and told Stella that Lyndon Johnson was already sworn in, on the flight from Dallas.

When Stella went to the bathroom, she found the cleaning maid in there, crying. She was wiping the mirror, her face washed in tears. “Sadie!” Stella exclaimed, and they opened their arms to each other and wept.

 

TOWARD CLOSING, SUDDENLY
there was—
Oh!
—Darl, climbing up the steps. (Mr. Fielding, Stella told herself, was out of his office, making his good-night rounds.) Darl pitched himself into the seat; his face worn and conciliatory; he said he'd talked things over with his dad.

“We're going to drive to Washington,” Darl said. “To pay our respects. He's taking time off. Dad said I could ask you if you wanted to come.”

So Darl was sorry, Stella thought. So he, after all, was one of the true Americans (or his dad was) that Nancy had mentioned.

Stella asked if Darl's mother was going.

“She might. You could share the room with her, and Dad and I would bunk together. He said you could chip in on the gas money, if you wanted to.”

She watched the customers come and go (Talking of? Michelangelo?—she'd always admired Eliot's rhyme in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Talking of the dead president?).

When she looked at Darl, Stella said bluntly, “I thought you were glad.” (Her hand reached out to caress the buttons of the switchboard.)

“Not really,” he said, eager to set things straight. “I just hate the violence. I wish people would be patient. Let things evolve naturally.”

“Another hundred years?” She pictured prehistoric palm trees crashing in slow motion into a swamp. Her fingertips brushed the bland plastic buttons.

“It could be quicker than that,” he said.

(But she had wept in Sadie's arms. Now she was strong for change.)

The phone rang and she pushed the button-line to connect; she answered in her usual cheerful voice. Before she finished, it rang again, and she said to Ellie, “I'm talking with Darl. He's here.” She listened to the ambivalence of Ellie's silence. Stella added, “We're about to close. I'll call you from home.” Then she hung up, took her time regarding Darl, his brown eyes the color of chestnuts.

“I could give you a ride home. I have the car now.”

“No, thanks, Darl.” She knew he wanted her to ride in his new car again.

“I'm sorry about the way I seemed. I wasn't glad. It's such a shock. I was glad about my car.”

She could feel her hands beginning to tremble. She didn't want to give in. She wanted her freedom. She reached toward the plastic buttons, hoped for a phone ring. She knew now what was behind that mask of freckles—someone who adopted the position of his father. Someone who deferred to authority, the so-called wisdom of his parents. Someone willing to deceive himself.

“I can't—” she began to say.

“I'd like to give you another ring,” he said.

“What happened to the old one? You don't have it?”

“I went up to Vulcan. Threw it off. I'm sorry.”

Her diamond! She imagined it, like a meteorite, skating across a blackness, winking out. She felt his arm again, encircling her back and ribs, how it had been last May, on the balcony below Vulcan. In May, on the balcony she had stood beside him, her body a column of wanting. His arm crossed her back, and his fingers had lain among the spaces between her ribs. Probably he had thrown the ring as hard as he could, and it had sailed over the clearing and then arched into the trees on the long embankment sloping down toward the city. Had he listened to the sound of her ring falling through the bleak branches?

“Now that the trees are bare,” she asked, “could you spot the demonstration?” She felt weak, spent. (He had thrown away their ring. Their chance.) The demonstrations were months ago.

“I didn't think about that.”

Yes, she saw the pain in his face, too. He was numb with what he had done.

“I went to sit in the library, downtown,” she told him. “I saw the conductor of the Birmingham Youth Orchestra.” Did this information mean anything to him? “It was the only place I could think to go. The big reading room. For quiet.” (Still he said nothing.) “To be alone.”

“Won't you ride up to Washington with us? They say the president'll lie in state. Under the rotunda of the Capitol.” He looked at the floor. “We'd be part of history.”

“I need to stay here,” she said. “I should have gone last August.”

She could not imagine presenting herself passing the coffin of the president: she was too insignificant to go. And if she could see herself in the mourners' queue, she could not imagine joining Darl's people for the long car trip from Birmingham to Washington.

She would smother in the car with his family. All those miles. Their unwavering trust in the goodness of God. They would be trying to fold her in because their son perhaps wanted this strange girl. And, betraying herself, she would try to make all her attitudes and thoughts agreeable to them. She imagined the horror of it all: the polite, genteel reverence for the occasion (a few mild jokes as the car hurried along the highway) while each of her bodily organs turned into a screaming mouth, her heart, her lungs, even her silent liver. (That darkness she had seen emerging from her father's body; that had been his liver, his side opened by the auto accident like the pierced side of Christ.) Trapped inside Darl's family car, perhaps when they passed through the Great Smoky Mountains, even her liver would grow a mouth that opened its lips in agony to moan
My president is murdered.

“I'm not comfortable with family car trips,” Stella said and felt ashamed to dissemble.

“I understand,” he said.

In the sincerity of his words, her father's car rolled on its back and over, and over again; her parents, her brothers, herself, tumbled together inside the car. The wash of blood.

“All right,” he said. She saw by the hardening of his face that now he knew she was disconnecting him from her future, not reliving the past. (
But the past had come back. It had just come. And gone again.)
He stood up. “I needed to ask. I'm sorry.”

Her gaze felt like a fumbling key trying to enter the pupil of his eye, to go inside.

“Yes,” she answered. Maybe he'd felt trapped into being engaged, and now he was glad to be free. She remembered their stiff, quick walk over the dark slope of the cemetery. Perhaps being in such danger together had implied an intimacy even more insistently than if they had made love.

Down in the store, people were beginning to leave; she glanced at her watch. She drew the PA mike to her lips and switched it on. “Fielding's will be closing in five minutes. Thank you for shopping with Fielding's and have a pleasant evening.” She felt dazed by the inappropriateness of her language.

“Good-bye,” Darl said.

Now she had severed their connection twice.

She stared at his retreating back. No, she didn't want to marry him. But not
to be engaged! Not to have some stake in the future! How could she even find her way home tonight?

 

AS THE EMPLOYEES WALKED
out into the night, Mr. Fielding stood at the door, like a minister, and shook hands with each of his people. “Be safe,” he said to each of them. They were surprised by his formal valediction. Stella thought,
He doesn't agree with them, but he loves them. He wants them to feel that he cares about them. A patriarch lives.

Yes, that was what made a person be careful—knowing that somebody else cared deeply about her safety. She was Aunt Krit's responsibility; it was helpless Aunt Pratt who cared.

“Be safe, Miss Silver.”

It was like shaking hands with her father. Mr. Fielding's cuff of white hair circled his head.

“I'm not engaged anymore,” she blurted.

“Well,” he said grimly, gathering his thoughts. “It will be all right, Miss Silver. You wait and see.”

And she was out the door—the tail of her reply to him floating after her,
Thank you
—and she was walking rapidly past Brooks Furniture Store (“The working man's friend”) toward Twentieth Street, where she would stand and wait for the bus. On big rubber tires, it would come toward her. Her feet hurried over the gray gloom of pavement toward the bus line. Like a long box of light, the bus would come, and she would ride to Norwood on big rubber tires. That was all. She knew how to get home. But what was there for her at home? An old white dog slowly wagging his tail.

Across the street at Cousin Joe's Pawn Shop, an outline of a diamond in pink neon, big as a wheelbarrow, blazed in the window. She thought of the big simulated diamond that sat on the arthritic finger of her Aunt Pratt; at home, Aunt Pratt would already be in bed—her leg brace with the attached shoe would be vacantly standing sentinel in the corner. So that she could breathe more easily, Aunt Pratt would be lying propped up on a stack of hard pillows, like someone in the eighteenth or nineteenth century.

Stella glanced across the street at the Lyric Theatre, where a lone girl sat behind glass in the lighted ticket booth a half-block ahead. Stella was glad it was not her job to be a girl behind glass. Over the lighted ticket booth,
the movie marquee read
La Dolce Vita.
At home, Aunt Pratt would be tracing the outlines of large red roses in her wallpaper, trying to keep her eyes active and moving, but with the bedroom lights off, the roses are dark as old scabs.

Maybe Aunt Pratt would picture not Stella but her own childhood self playing with her siblings over fifty years ago in the sunny yard at Helicon. Stella pictured the small house and the dusty red clay around it raked into swirls and parallel lines. Aunt Pratt, young and able, ran across the yard. The sound of squirrel guns resounded through the pine-fragrant woods. Fifteen years later Aunt Krit would be born, and she, too, would play in the yard. Perhaps pour water on the ground and make mud pies from the red dust. Lift her head at the sound of a gun.

A city car horn blared, and Stella remembered the blast of a trumpet, a young man leaning out the window of the YMCA, but what had it meant? That these times were medieval, or would seem medieval in five hundred years; that a herald was needed?

It meant nothing. The sharp blast of the trumpet had been the descant to the continual sound of footfalls on the pavement in the late afternoon.
The trumpet shall sound,
Handel's
Messiah
proclaimed, and the dead shall be raised—
incorruptible!

Stella saw three men come out of the theater; they passed the girl in the glass box.

Two came toward her; the third walked toward Twentieth Street. And who was that third man? She saw only his straight back, his longish wavy hair. She thought it might be Don Cartwright. A half-block ahead and on the other side of the street, Don might be walking to catch the bus on Twentieth Street. She picked up her pace; he walked swiftly.

He had such a beautiful straight back, such movie star hair. She seldom went to foreign films, but
La Dolce Vita,
yes; wanting a window on the sweet life, she had gone with Ellie. What had Don thought of it? It must have been poorly attended, or had the three men walked out in the middle? No one else stood now in front of the glass box waiting to buy tickets to the last show.