Four Spirits (47 page)

“That was Mr. McCormick called, woke me up,” she explained. “He say he sure need you to come back in a couple weeks, and I say ‘Thank you.' ”

“LISTEN,” STELLA SAID TO CAT AS SHE PUSHED HER
wheelchair across the campus at dusk. “Somebody good is playing the piano. Chopin.” She stopped the chair. “My mother used to play that,” she said excitedly.

“Why don't you go see who it is,” Cat said. “I can wheel myself to class.”

“It's a little Chopin prelude. I used to call it the ‘Raindrop,' but my mother said it was another piece that had been nicknamed ‘Raindrop.' ”

“Go on, see.”

Leaving Cat on the pavement, Stella cut across the grass to what she supposed was the music building. Suppose a budding André Watts were to be discovered at Miles College? Through the window, she saw the back of a pianist who was wearing a wild red wig. Now he was playing a Chopin Nocturne, and though she had not heard the piece for eighteen years, she anticipated and predicted every familiar note of it.

The window was open six inches or so, but Stella boldly grabbed it and sent it on up. At the sound of the rising window, the pianist did not turn around but broke off the Chopin and began to play and sing part of a Christmas carol: “Glo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-oria in ex-cel-sis De-o!” Then he turned and saw Stella, with the upper part of her body thrust through the unscreened window, still standing outside.

“You're not Gloria.”

“Oh!” Stella replied. “You're white.”

“Come right in,” he said.
Right
pronounced with the diphthong in the middle of it—
ie.
He was not from the South.

“I'll come through the door,” Stella said, and she withdrew her upper body to walk around. Across the greensward, Cat was rolling steadily toward the portico. How brave Cat looked, making her own way. Just then Cat's purse tried to slide off her lap, and she moved one hand from the wheel to catch it. The chair curved out of line, but Cat caught the purse and straightened her course. Stella had noticed the purse was curiously heavy tonight.

The pianist had launched into the fanfare from Mendelssohn's “Wedding March” from the incidental music for
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. When Stella came into the door, he stopped.

“And you are?”

“Stella Silver.”

He stood up abruptly with exaggerated politeness. “Miss Stella Silver, may I introduce myself? Jonathan Bernstein Green. No kin to the famous Leonard, though I wish.”

“But do you prefer Bernstein's Beethoven's Ninth to Von Karajan's?” she asked.

“No,” he said, soberly. “Though I fear the great Von Karajan may have had Nazi leanings.”

He was walking toward her, with his hand stretched out.

“Ooooh,” Stella said playfully, putting her hands behind her back. “I wouldn't want to injure a pianist's sacred hand.”

“You're a musician.”

“I used to play the cello. I gave it up.”

They shook hands. His grasp was warm, the squeeze of it modulated to the exact pressure Stella liked best.

“And why did you quit?” He placed both hands on his hips, tilted his head to one side. Stella began to wonder if she had met him before.

She would tell the truth. Succinctly. He would understand. “I could have gotten a little better with a great deal of work, not a lot better. I had more talent in English. I might write stories someday. Or, I might go into psychology.”

He still regarded her, with his hands on his hips. He was rather tall, thin, with crisp red hair, almost kinky. His ivory face was sprinkled with reddish freckles, and he had a large nose that tucked down at the tip, like an owl's. He wore pale glasses.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“In Birmingham? Voter registration. At Miles? I met a teacher who said I could come out here and practice.”

“I tutor in the evenings,” Stella said. “My friend and I. For the GED.”

“Then you might know Gloria Callahan.”

It turned out that Gloria had invited him to practice a Beethoven cello-piano sonata. “I didn't know Gloria played the cello,” Stella said.

“Well, there's two of you now.” He looked puckish again. “I'll accompany both of you.”

“No, I've really quit,” Stella said. She felt sorry. “I always liked chamber music,” she said. “Just the right amount of importance for each player.”

“Let me see your fingers,” he said.

She held out her left hand, and he inspected her fingertips for calluses. “Not a trace,” he said.

“I know.” She took her hand away. “Would you be from New York?” she asked.

“I am.”

“I saw you buying gas at a station on Eighth Avenue. It was the day Kennedy was shot. A policeman walked around kicking your tires.”

“I don't think so.”

“I know that Chopin prelude. The nocturne, too.”

He seated himself at the keyboard. “What would you like to hear, Stella?”

“The Ocean Etude.” The conversation was like somersaulting down a hill on Norwood Boulevard, and she was going too fast. She was five years old; it was summer, and her brothers were tumbling down the grass beside her, and she couldn't stop.

Then his thunderous opening chord anchored the base of her being to the bottom of the sea. The music billowed out of the piano till she thought she would drown in it. She loved the excess of the piece, how it swept over the whole keyboard, starting with the deep notes in the base and running up to the high fringes of foam.
Incessant,
she thought,
the waves are always incessant
. And yes, a melody in all that roaring. She imagined her mother playing to her from the bottom of the ocean. Rivulets of salty tears stung her cheeks as they rolled down, and she thought how tears are distillants of blood.

“Don't turn around,” she said, when he had finished. She fought to control her voice. “Now, play Debussy's ‘The Engulfed Cathedral.' ”

Only for a moment, his hands hesitated above the keyboard—“
La cathédrale engloutie,”
he announced, with a confident French accent—and then turbulence was replaced by solemn rising. She admired the back of his body, how
his shoulders fetched the music up through the sea. The piano took on the resonance of an organ whose music was causing a whole cathedral to slowly ascend from oceanic depths. With the rich swelling of the music, massive stone arches shouldered their way through the water. Bells clanging, the top of the cathedral broke the surface of the sea.

Stella determined to remember only the triumph, not to anticipate the quiet sinking of the cathedral back into the depths.

After the murmuring waves at the end, he said, “Now, my little Christian. Whom did we resurrect?” He didn't turn around.

“My mother,” she said. “I have to go.”

CAT WATCHED STELLA, PALE AS A LILY, A THIN STALK BEARING
radiant blond hair, glide into the classroom.
Not afraid, she walks in here like this is home.

No. She's upset.

Cat backed her chair a few feet from the circle of mismatched chairs to meet Stella. Almost Cat didn't want to make the effort, but she willed her hands and arms to turn the big wheels. She was already beginning to sweat, and she knew she'd forgotten to put on any deodorant. She hated smelling uncivilized. And she'd worn sleeveless to try to promote air circulation.

Without any preliminary, Cat asked Stella, “What's the matter?” She was surprised to hear sternness in her own voice, as though Stella had no right to be upset.

“I've just fallen in love.”

“What?” Cat thought that Stella was joking. Not a funny joke. Cat made herself smile, as though her own future and that of her brother were in no jeopardy at all. “With whom?” Only her careful grammar would have betrayed her to her friend, but Stella looked too harried to notice the clue.

“My mother's ghost.”

“What do you mean?” Cat smiled broadly: Stella was joking. She had to be.

“With a redheaded, New York, hunchbacked genius pianist.”

“Why?”

“Well, I guess he's not hunchbacked.”

Cat was disgusted. She shoved her chair backward, hard. “Yes, and I'm
going to buy myself a motorized chair with my summer wages,” she said. “All three cents.”

She watched Stella slip into the empty desk in her circle.
Not marry Donny!
Stella had no idea how cruel her joke was, a capricious thunderbolt hurled from the Olympus of the able-bodied.

Even before she sat down, Stella was already teaching.
What are the two main parts of a sentence?
she asked, and quick as a wink, Agnes LaFayt was saying “Subject and verb,” and Stella was commanding
Everybody say it,
and they did. Cat felt fear rising from her stomach into her throat. And then Stella asked,
What does singular mean?
And they all said in unison, “One,” and Stella asked,
What does plural mean?
And they all said, “More than one.”
Three,
Cat thought,
Us three: Donny, Stella, and me.
And Stella was off again on the elusive agreement of the third-person singular pronoun and its verb:
Not “He don't” but instead, what, class?
And they said obediently but without conviction, “He doesn't.”

Not marry Donny? What did she mean? She'd
promised.
And then Cat had to smile at herself. Since when did life keep its promises? But her hands jumped in her lap like fresh-killed chickens.

“What are the bones”—she had to swallow hard—“in the backbone called?” Cat asked, but it was hard to pronounce each word of the sentence, hard to articulate one word into the next. She and Stella had agreed: always start with review, whether the other teachers did or not.

“Yes,” she said, “and the ones in the neck are (swallow) the cervical vertebrae.” She had appointed Charles her amanuensis and taught him the meaning of the fancy word. She liked Charles; he was her favorite student. Big, strong, and kind. Over the summer, he'd come to accept her and Stella. Cat knew her hands were getting worse; it took forever to write anything by hand. Now she spelled
c-e-r-vi-c-a-l
for Charles to print on a piece of notebook paper, to display for all to read. They all said it. Then he passed the ragged-edge paper to the person next to him, and each person copied, in turn, the new word. She waited.

“What is the largest organ of the body?” she asked. After review, she and Stella had resolved in their pedagogical discussions to pose an interesting question: step two.
Step,
Cat thought bitterly. The metaphor of the ambulatory.

Now the students guessed. They didn't know. They hadn't been taught. It had to be 105 degrees in the room. She was melting. She was afraid. Her future was melting, but she would keep going, keep up the teaching. She was determined. She had her gun in her purse.

It was good for them to guess; guessing excited the imagination, made the answer more memorable.

“It's the skin,” Cat said. “The skin of an average person weighs sixteen pounds.”

“ ‘Sixteen tons, and what'ya get,' ” a student sang, “ ‘another day older and deeper in debt.' ” His voice was high and reedy, not at all like Tennessee Ernie Ford's resonant bass.

“Sixteen pounds,” Cat insisted, “not tons,” but she smiled. Spontaneous expression, free association, were to be encouraged in a free school. Step three. Not suppressed, as Christine seemed to think.

“Skin ain't no
organ,”
another young man said. And he killed a mosquito on his cheek, for emphasis. Blood lay splattered like a red seal on his dark skin.

“Yes, it is,” Cat said. It wasn't
them
she was afraid of anymore. It was what was outside. The Klan, always ready to pull the trigger, to light the fuse. And the students and teachers were sitting ducks in the lighted room on the ground level. To keep from baking, they had to throw the sashes up, and still the schoolhouse was a brick oven. A white-skinned hand with a pistol in it would thrust over the windowsill, and the pistol would fire.
No!
She would fire first. She fingered the zipper on her purse.

“The skin serves the whole body. It protects us from germs,” she explained. “It regulates temperature;without the sweat glands, which are part of the skin, we couldn't sweat and cool off. The skin has little holes in it, called pores, so the skin can breathe.”

“I thought lungs was for breathing. That's what you said.”

“They are. But the skin has to let in air, too. Through the pores. Now tell me three functions of the body's largest organ, the skin.”

But they could only remember two. No one remembered that the skin kept out germs.

“If you have a cut,” Cat explained, “then germs can enter the body through the skin. The tissue can become infected. You have to put disinfectant on a wound, if the skin is broached.” Across the room, Agnes was looking at her, leaning toward her to learn.

“Don't ever give in to fear,” Cat said.

They just stared at her.

Finally Charles said, “No, ma'am. We won't.”

“If you do,” she said, “it just makes it that much harder next time.”

“It can be a
habit,”
one said, as though he knew.

Cat took a deep breath. She had never been so afraid. She could feel the hair of her head trying to rise.
Stella crazy in love.
And yet it was just an ordinary night, sweltering hot. The mosquitoes were hungry. The moths were visiting. Out there, the tree frogs and cicadas were yelling for rain. Beyond the open windows, it was pitch-black.

“Would somebody mind fanning me hard, just for a minute?” Cat asked.

“I'll fan you, Miss Cartwright,” Charles said gently. “We know you been sick.” He took the Jesus fan out of her lap and flapped it vigorously.

She closed her eyes. “That feels so good.” They all just sat there.
You ought to be a nurse,
she heard herself murmur to Charles Powers. And he murmured in reply,
Just womens is nurses.
Finally, she said, “I guess that was a minute.”

Sam West said, “I fan you, too, if you want?”

“Thank you,” she said. “But for now, back to human anatomy. Another thing about skin. Our hair follicles are located in the skin, and we also have oil glands in the skin. Two more things to remember about skin.” She could feel her forehead breaking out in new sweat. “And skin has pigment in it. Different colors of pigment.”

A moth flew against Cat's cheek, and she prayed,
Make me brave. Please, God, make me brave tonight.
But never had she wanted so much to be able to run. If only she could get up out of her chair, run to the car, wings on her feet, drive home fast, the cooling wind on her face.

Soon it would be break time, she told herself, and the night would be half over. And she would have to talk to Stella about Donny. Stella was firing machine-gun questions at the students; she was relentless. They would learn; every one of them. She pushed too much. Like Christine. Not like Christine. Stella was completely organized and confident about what she knew. Christine was less certain, had a leading edge of aggression instead of confidence. Stella's students were starting to squirm. At break time, Cat would remind her of step four: introduce humor. Break the tension.

In the distance, there was an explosion. Everyone in the room fell silent. The sound was muffled and far away. They couldn't be sure. How many times had bombs wrecked the homes, churches, businesses of Negro people in Birmingham? Around forty, and increasing. But,
thank God,
only four dead. Denise, Carole, Cynthia, Addie Mae—
how could one thank God for that?

“Now I do believe,” Agnes said, “that was just something letting down at the steel mill.”

“Let's take a break now,” Christine said.

The students scraped their wooden desk legs over the floor as they got up. It sounded like a great clearing of the throat. Cat rolled herself closer to an open window. Hoping for a breeze, she held her hands out the opening.

“Squeeze hard,” Arcola said, behind Cat, “and I believe you wring water out of this air.”

“I like your braid,” Cat said.

“Yeah, I thought I'd better look like a queen, hot night like this.”

But Arcola didn't look hot, and she smelled like Evening in Paris. Just the thought of the little dark blue bottle and the idea of eau de cologne made Cat feel cooler. Stella came over: and Cat noted critically that Stella was wearing faded red pedal pushers; they were old, and the fabric would be worn thin and cool. She'd had them when she was thirteen, an underage high school freshman, when she came to visit Cat on Saturdays. How easily Stella walked; how thoroughly she took movement for granted. Just below the knee the faded pedal pushers fastened modestly with metal D-rings.

“You feeling okay, Cat? You look flushed.”

“I'm the one what's flushed,” Christine said. “I'm just too dark-complected for you to see.” She smiled at Stella. “You sure on 'em tonight. Like a duck on a line of june bugs.” Exuberantly, Christine snatched a bug out of the air. She threw it on the floor and stepped on the shell. Cat heard it crunch, but she refused to look at the mess of fluid and broken shell on the floor. She might vomit.

“I'm inspired,” Stella said. And then she commanded, “Listen!” She paused. “He's playing again.”

“He been visiting the churches,” Gloria said. “Talking 'bout voter registration. I told him, come over here and practice his music.”

“It's Chopin,” Stella said. “ ‘The Revolutionary Etude.' ”

“Stella's smitten,” Cat said.

“Naw!” Arcola said. “You tell us you gonna marry Cat's brother!”

That was Arcola going to the heart of the matter—quick and unafraid.

“But you don't have to,” Gloria said softly. “I'd marry that music, I was you.”

For a moment, Cat hated Gloria.

“Marry him yourself,” Cat snapped.

“I don't find white men
attractive,”
Gloria said, smiling. “I want to marry somebody like my daddy.”

“Don't you marry a Yankee, Stella,” Arcola teased. “We want you to stay down here with us.”

Cat pictured Donny sitting under a palm tree on the sand, looking out at the ocean, and opening a disengagement letter from Stella. Maybe the piano guy was married. Stella couldn't be serious. And even if she was, she couldn't
make
it happen. But how would Donny feel?

Stillness welled up in Cat. How would he feel to be disengaged? Donny wouldn't much care.

He liked Stella. He respected her. But Donny didn't love her. (Cat imagined she was sitting with Donny in the sand.) He wouldn't much care if they never married. It was she, Cat, who cared. And if Donny did love Stella, she herself would be jealous. That was why it had seemed all right for Donny to marry her.

She pictured him alone reading the letter, then he looked up, looked out at sea. “Well,” he said. He frowned slightly. A thousand times she'd seen that slight frown of disapproval about something that really mattered very little. He got up from the sand.

“What you thinking about?” Gloria asked.

But Cat said nothing. She looked anew at the people around her: pretty Arcola with her brilliant smile; Gloria with the lime green eyes, strange and startling; wiry Christine, all efficiency and ambition, softening every day. Over in her student seat, dear Mrs. Agnes LaFayt, who had come to them finished, soft and wise, always ready for lessons to begin again, slowly waving her fan. Now Agnes took out a dainty white handkerchief, edged with crocheted lace. These were Cat's new friends. They were chatting all around her, grabbing a few minutes to relax. People she more than liked; people she would protect. She touched her purse to feel the shape of her gun inside. She felt alone in her weakness and power.

“Stella,” she said, “sometimes I think about what if we needed to move fast.”

Stella uncocked her ear from the window. She reached over and pressed Cat's hand against her purse. “We'd run for our lives. You'd be going the same speed as I would. Only you'd be in front.”

Cat felt tears glaze her eyes. “It's just so
damn
hot,” she said.

“Cat!”
all her friends chorused, except for Agnes, who hadn't heard, sitting at a remove.

Cat smiled, pleased to have shocked them. She took a deep breath, smelled the odor of the students' cigarettes from out on the portico. “What's he playing now?” Cat asked. Sometimes she feared that her hearing was duller than it used to be, and that her eyesight was a little worse.