The Member of the Wedding (13 page)

"Do you think very frequently about Ludie?" F. Jasmine asked.

"You know I do," said Berenice. "I think about the years when
me and Ludie was together, and about all the bad times I seen since. Ludie would never have let me be lonesome so that I took up with all kinds of no-good men. Me and Ludie," she said. "Ludie and me"

F. Jasmine sat vibrating her leg and thinking of Ludie and Cincinnati. Of all the dead people out of the world, Ludie Freeman was the one F. Jasmine knew the best, although she had never laid eyes on him, and was not even born when he had died. She knew Ludie and the city of Cincinnati, and the winter when Ludie and Berenice had gone together to the North and seen the snow. A thousand times they had talked of all these things, and it was a conversation that Berenice talked slowly, making each sentence like a song. And the old Frankie used to ask and question about Cincinnati. What exactly they would eat in Cincinnati and how wide would be the Cincinnati streets? And in a chanting kind of voice they talked about the Cincinnati fish, the parlor in the Cincinnati house on Myrtle Street, the Cincinnati picture shows. And Ludie Freeman was a brickmason, making a grand and a regular salary, and he was the man of all her husbands that Berenice had loved.

"Sometimes I almost wish I had never knew Ludie at all," said Berenice. "It spoils you too much. It leaves you too lonesome afterward. When you walk home in the evening on the way from work, it makes a little lonesome quinch come in you. And you take up with too many sorry men to try to get over the feeling."

"I know it," F. Jasmine said. "But T. T. Williams is not sorry"

"I wasn't referring to T. T. He and me is just good friends."

"Don't you think you will marry him?" F. Jasmine asked.

"Well, T. T. is a fine upstanding colored gentleman," said Berenice. "You never hear tell of T. T. raring around like a lot of other mens. If I was to marry T. T., I could get out of this kitchen and stand behind the cash register at the restaurant and pat my foot. Furthermore, I respect T. T. sincerely. He has walked in a state of grace all of his life."

"Well, when are you going to marry him?" she asked. "He is crazy about you."

Berenice said: "I ain't going to marry him."

"But you just now was saying—" said F. Jasmine.

"I was saying how sincerely I respect T. T. and sincerely regard him."

"Well, then—?" F. Jasmine said.

"I respect and regard him highly," said Berenice. Her dark eye was quiet and sober and her flat nose widened as she spoke. "But he don't make me shiver none."

After a moment F. Jasmine said: "To think about the wedding makes me shiver."

"Well, it's a pity," said Berenice.

"It makes me shiver, too, to think about how many dead people I already know. Seven in all," she said. "And now Uncle Charles."

F. Jasmine put her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes, but it was not death. She could feel the heat from the stove and smell the dinner. She could feel a rumble in her stomach and the beating of her heart. And the dead feel nothing, hear nothing, see nothing: only black.

"It would be terrible to be dead," she said, and in the wedding dress she began to walk around the room.

There was a rubber ball on the shelf, and she threw it against the hall door and caught it on the rebound.

"Put that down," said Berenice. "Go take off the dress before you dirty it. Go do something. Go turn on the radio."

"I told you I don't want that radio on."

And she was walking around the room, and Berenice had said to go do something, but she did not know what to do. She walked in the wedding dress, with her hand on her hip. The silver slippers had squeezed her feet so that the toes felt swollen and mashed like ten big sore cauliflowers.

"But I advise you to keep the radio on when you come back," F. Jasmine said suddenly. "Some day very likely you will hear us speaking over the radio."

"What's that?"

"I say very likely we might be asked to speak over the radio some day."

"Speak about what, pray tell me," said Berenice.

"I don't know exactly what about," F. Jasmine said. "But probably some eye-witness account about something. We will be asked to speak."

"I don't follow you," said Berenice. "What are we going to eyewitness? And who will ask us to speak?"

F. Jasmine whirled around and, putting both fists on her hips, she set herself in a staring position. "Did you think I meant you and John Henry and me? Why, I have never heard of anything so funny in my whole life."

John Henry's voice was high and excited. "What, Frankie? Who is speaking on the radio?"

"When I said
we,
you thought I meant you and me and John Henry West. To speak over the world radio. I have never heard of anything so funny since I was born."

John Henry had climbed up to kneel on the seat of his chair and the blue veins showed in his forehead and you could see the strained cords of his neck. "Who?" he hollered. "What?"

"Ha ha ha!" she said, and then she burst out laughing; she went banging around the room and hitting things with her fist. "Ho ho ho!"

And John Henry wailed and F. Jasmine banged around the kitchen in the wedding dress and Berenice got up from the table and raised her right hand for peace. Then suddenly they all stopped at once. F. Jasmine stood absolutely still before the window, and John Henry hurried to the window also and watched on tiptoe with his hands to the sill. Berenice turned her head to see what had happened. And at that moment the piano was quiet.

"Oh!" F. Jasmine whispered.

Four girls were crossing the back yard. They were girls of fourteen and fifteen years old, and they were the club members. First came Helen Fletcher, and then the others walking slowly in single
file. They had cut across from the O'Neils' back yard and were passing slowly before the arbor. The long gold sun slanted down on them and made their skin look golden also, and they were dressed in clean, fresh dresses. When they had passed the arbor, their single shadows stretched out long and gangling across the yard. Soon they would be gone. F. Jasmine stood motionless. In the old days that summer she would have waited in the hope that they might call her and tell her she had been elected to the club—and only at the very last, when it was plain that they were only passing, she would have shouted in angry loudness that they were not to cut across her yard. But now she watched them quietly, without jealousy. At the last there came an urge to call out to them about the wedding, but before the words could be formed and spoken, the club of girls was gone. There was only the arbor and the spinning sun.

"Now I wonder—" F. Jasmine said finally. But Berenice cut her short:

"Nothing, Curiosity," she said. "Curiosity, nothing."

When they began the second round of that last dinner, it was past five o'clock, and nearing twilight. It was the time of afternoon when in the old days, sitting with the red cards at the table, they would sometimes begin to criticize the Creator. They would judge the work of God, and mention the ways how they would improve the world. And Holy Lord God John Henry's voice would rise up happy and high and strange, and his world was a mixture of delicious and freak, and he did not think in global terms: the sudden long arm that could stretch from here to California, chocolate dirt and rains of lemonade, the extra eye seeing a thousand miles, a hinged tail that could be let down as a kind of prop to sit on when you wished to rest, the candy flowers.

But the world of the Holy Lord God Berenice Sadie Brown was a different world, and it was round and just and reasonable. First, there would be no separate colored people in the world, but all human beings would be light brown color with blue eyes and
black hair. There would be no colored people and no white people to make the colored people feel cheap and sorry all through their lives. No colored people, but all human men and ladies and children as one loving family on the earth. And when Berenice spoke of this first principle her voice was a strong deep song that soared and sang in beautiful dark tones leaving an echo in the corners of the room that trembled for a long time until silence.

No war, said Berenice. No stiff corpses hanging from the Europe trees and no Jews murdered anywhere. No war, and the young boys leaving home in army suits, and no wild cruel Germans and Japanese. No war in the whole world, but peace in all countries everywhere. Also, no starving. To begin with, the real Lord God had made free air and free rain and free dirt for the benefit of all. There would be free food for every human mouth, free meals and two pounds of fatback a week, and after that each able-bodied person would work for whatever else he wished to eat or own. No killed Jews and no hurt colored people. No war and no hunger in the world. And, finally, Ludie Freeman would be alive.

The world of Berenice was a round world, and the old Frankie would listen to the strong deep singing voice, and she would agree with Berenice. But the old Frankie's world was the best of the three worlds. She agreed with Berenice about the main laws of her creation, but she added many things: an aeroplane and a motorcycle to each person, a world club with certificates and badges, and a better law of gravity. She did not completely agree with Berenice about the war; and sometimes she said she would have one War Island in the world where those who wanted to could go, and fight or donate blood, and she might go for a while as a WAC in the Air Corps. She also changed the seasons, leaving out summer altogether, and adding much snow. She planned it so that people could instantly change back and forth from boys to girls, which ever way they felt like and wanted. But Berenice would argue with her about this, insisting that the law of human sex was exactly right just as it was and could in no way be improved. And then John Henry West would very likely add his two cents' worth about this time,
and think that people ought to be half boy and half girl, and when the old Frankie threatened to take him to the Fair and sell him to the Freak Pavilion, he would only close his eyes and smile.

So the three of them would sit there at the kitchen table and criticize the Creator and the work of God. Sometimes their voices crossed and the three worlds twisted. The Holy Lord God John Henry West. The Holy Lord God Berenice Sadie Brown. The Holy Lord God Frankie Addams. The Worlds at the end of the long stale afternoons.

But this was a different day. They were not loafing or playing cards, but still eating dinner. F. Jasmine had taken off the wedding dress and was barefooted and comfortable in her petticoat once more. The brown gravy of the peas had stiffened, the food was neither hot nor cold, and the butter had melted. They started in on second helpings, passing the dishes back and forth among themselves, and they did not talk of the ordinary subjects that usually they thought about this time of the afternoon. Instead, there began a strange conversation, and it came about in this way:

"Frankie," said Berenice, "Awhile back you started to say something. And we veered off from the subject. It was about something unnatural, I think."

"Oh, yes," F. Jasmine said. "I was going to tell you about something peculiar that happened to me today that I don't hardly realize. Now I don't exactly know how to explain just what I mean"

F. Jasmine broke open a sweet potato and tilted back in her chair. She began to try to tell Berenice what had happened when she had been walking home and suddenly seen something from the tail of her eye, and when she turned to look, it was the two colored boys back at the end of the alley. As she talked, F. Jasmine stopped now and then to pull her lower lip and study just for the right words to tell of a feeling that she had never heard named before. Occasionally she glanced at Berenice, to see if she was following her, and a remarkable look was breaking on Berenice's face: the glass blue eye was bright and astonished, as always, and at first her dark eye was astonished also; then a queer
and conniving look changed her expression, and from time to time she turned her head with short little jerks, as though to listen from different earpoints and make sure that what she heard was true.

Before F. Jasmine finished, Berenice had pushed back her plate and reached into her bosom for her cigarettes. She smoked home-rolled cigarettes, but she carried them in a Chesterfield package, so that from the outward appearance she was smoking store Chesterfields. She twisted off a ragged fringe of loose tobacco and raised back her head when she held the match, so that the flame would not go up her nose. A blue layer of smoke hung over the three of them at the table. Berenice held the cigarette between her thumb and forefinger; her hand had been drawn and stiffened by a winter rheumatism so that the last two fingers could not be straightened out. She sat listening and smoking, and when F. Jasmine had finished, there was a long pause, then Berenice leaned forward and asked suddenly:

"Listen to me! Can you see through them bones in my forehead? Have you, Frankie Addams, been reading my mind?"

F. Jasmine did not know what to answer.

"This is one of the queerest things I ever heard of," Berenice went on. "I cannot get over it."

"What I mean—" F. Jasmine started again.

"I know what you mean," said Berenice. "Right here in this very corner of the eye" She pointed to the red-webbed outside corner of the dark eye. "You suddenly catch something there. And this cold shiver run all the way down you. And you whirl around. And then you stand facing Jesus knows what. But not Ludie and not who you want. And for a minute you feel like you been dropped down a well."

"Yes," F. Jasmine said. "That is it."

"Well, this is mighty remarkable," said Berenice. "This is a thing been happening to me all my life. Yet just now is the first time I ever heard it put into words."

F. Jasmine covered her nose and her mouth with her hand, so
that it would not be noticed that she was pleased about being so remarkable, and her eyes were closed in a modest way.

"Yes, that is the way when you are in love," said Berenice. "Invariably. A thing known and not spoken."

So that was how the queer conversation began at quarter to six on the last afternoon. It was the first time ever they had talked about love, with F. Jasmine included in the conversation as a person who understood and had worthwhile opinions. The old Frankie had laughed at love, maintained it was a big fake, and did not believe in it. She never put any of it in her shows, and never went to love shows at the Palace. The old Frankie had always gone to the Saturday matinee, when the shows were crook shows, war shows, or cowboy shows. And who was it who had caused the confusion at the Palace that last May, when the movie had run an old show on Saturday called
Camille?
The old Frankie. She had been in her seat on the second row and she stamped and put two fingers in her mouth and began to whistle. And the other half-fare people in the first three rows began to whistle and stamp also, and the longer the love picture lasted, the louder they became. So that finally the manager came down with a flashlight and rooted the whole crowd of them out of their seats and marched them up the aisle and left them standing on the sidewalk: done out of their dimes, and disgusted.