The Third Life of Grange Copeland (18 page)

Crouching in the weeds, silently kneading his fingers to keep them from becoming and staying stiff, he kept his eyes on a frail, hugely pregnant woman who was sitting on a bench by the pond. She had been sitting there a long time, obviously waiting for someone. He could discern no ring on her finger. From minute to minute she seemed to shudder, whether from cold or exhaustion he could not tell. She wore a heavy blue coat, somewhat faded, and black boots probably lined with fur. Her hair was cut very short and was blonde almost to whiteness. Her face was broad and from what he could see, very pale and drawn, though her lips, against her white face, seemed incredibly red. When he saw her closer he saw they were painted red, with the lipstick going far out over the edges of her natural lips, so that it was hard to tell where her natural mouth was, and they were bitten red, puffy and swollen, and seemingly inflamed.

He was fascinated by pregnancy, and this woman’s big belly brought forth a mixture of sweet and painful recollections. The creative process was tremendous, he thought. A miracle. But when he thought of Margaret’s belly, bitter grimaces forced themselves to his lips.

While he crouched tremblingly, blowing on his hands, a tall muscular soldier, also very blond, strode up to the woman and they embraced. They walked up and down the length of the pond for several minutes, with him chafing her hands and blowing against her ears. The park was nearly deserted. A park policeman rode by and smiled when he saw the lovers. Grange thought that to the policeman too they must have looked
so real,
so remindfully like somebody that might have been yourself.

Soon they sat down upon the bench by the pond. The soldier, after looking carefully all around, gingerly touched top of the large stomach and the young woman smiled. Grange crept close beside their bench, he did not know why, except that he was drawn to this life that was starting, and drawn to the look of love on the faces of the couple. At least he thought it looked like love. He forgot his hunger for a while watching them kiss in the gathering dusk. Chaste kisses they exchanged, as befitted soon-to-be parents perhaps never-to-be-wed. But the young man, with the light from the park lamps above shining on his gold hair, took from his pocket a silver object. He held it flashing briefly in the light. The young woman sat with her face glowing, calmly, joyously, but, Grange felt, with tears, while he slipped the ring on her finger. He said a few tense words still clutching both her hands and she turned just her shortcropped head on her heavy body and stared incredulously. “Why?” she cried. And the sharp, stricken hurt sound of a woman betrayed touched his ear. He watched them arguing now, the girl trying to throw the silver ring into the pond. The young man prevented her, and finally, woodenly, she dropped the ring to the ground between their feet. They sat in silence making no move to pick it up. From what Grange had managed to hear it appeared the young man already had a wife. Soon, glancing at his watch, the soldier rose to leave and tried to brush his lips across her brow. She ducked her head.

He looked tall and brave and honorable in his uniform. Perhaps that was why the girl’s face set itself in such a sneer of contempt. Grange saw the sneer when she turned her face from the young man. He saw her battered and cruel and shuttered profile. The man poked at the ring with his shoe, muttered something (perhaps concerning its value) and reluctantly took out his wallet. (Had she said she would throw any ring of his into the pond?) Grange had never seen such money; the young man pressed a fat wad of it into the girl’s lifeless hand. On the profile that was turned to Grange a tear must have fallen, for a small thin white hand quickly brushed the area near her eye, down to her chin.

And now he was turning away, and she was not looking at anything, just vacant. Her eyes turned away from the pond and back into the trees and the high hard rocks. When he was out of sight she looked in the direction he had gone, but then the dusk had made empty air of the last sliver of shadow from his strong frame. She began, silently, to cry. Then she sniffled, then the sobs came hard and fast as if she wanted and believed she could, if she tried, cry herself to death, and if not to death, to a long forgetful sleep.

Grange had watched the scene deteriorate from the peak of happiness to the bottom of despair. It was the first honestly human episode he had witnessed between white folks, when they were not putting on airs to misinform the help. His heart ached with pity for the young woman as well as for the soldier, whose face, those last seconds, had not been without its own misery. And now the perhaps normally proud woman sat crying shamelessly—but only because she thought herself alone. There she sat, naked, her big belly her own tomb. Or at least it must have seemed so to her, for from cry to cry she pressed with both hands against her stomach as if she would push it away from her and into the pond.

Grange had about made up his mind to speak to her and offer what help he could, for he feared she would harm herself with her crying and staying out so long in the freezing weather. But abruptly, when she apparently considered she had cried enough, the young woman stopped, blew her nose and wiped her eyes. Quite containedly. He could almost see the features settle into a kind of haughty rigidity that belied the past half-hour. Her face became one that refused to mark itself with suffering. He knew, even before he saw them, that her eyes would be without vital expression, and that her lips and cheeks and old once-used laugh wrinkles would have to do all her smiling from then on. He did not even feel she would regret it.

Somehow this settling into impenetrability, into a sanctuary from further pain, seemed more pathetic to him than her tears. At the same time her icy fortitude in the face of love’s desertion struck him as peculiarly white American. No blues would ever come from such a saving of face. It showed a lack of self-pity (and Grange believed firmly that one’s self was often in need of a little sympathetic pity) that also meant less sympathy for the basic tragedies that occurred in the human situation. She appeared to him to be the kind of woman who could raise ten sons to be killed in war, sending them off with a minimum of tears one at a time, collecting a stack of flags to prove her own bravery.

How did he expect her to act? He really didn’t know. Shivering, he stepped over the low green fence and skirted the edge of the shrubbery. She was just rising to leave. The silver ring still lay in the worn dirt before the bench. The money she had let drop, carelessly, from her fingers. Bills fluttered, folded in half, in a small bright green pile. Grange had a hard time noticing anything else once he saw that the money was about to be abandoned and that it was not counterfeit. (Such tantalizingly green bills could not be!)

He had stolen so much and from so many sources in New York that stealing had become a useful and ready tool to be used at will, not unlike a second language. He knew tricks and he knew sob stories (unfortunately more true than not) to melt his victims’ hearts (if caught) and he knew cunning and he knew violence. He had had few qualms about stealing before, but now, when it was simply a matter of taking, he felt a totally unprecedented hesitation.

The woman had walked some distance along the pond when he picked up both the ring and the money and counted it. His breath came in a joyful gasp of disbelief when he counted seven hundred dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills and twenties. In his excitement he dropped down upon the bench and rested his head against the back. He was lightheaded from hunger and his body could barely sustain the excitement without making him black out. He struggled with dizziness and nausea, clamping his teeth hard together and gripping his left hand with his right. The money, like a heavy paper frog, seemed to jump in his inside coat pocket, but it was his heart thumping against it and drowning out everything else. He darted up briefly to look after the woman; when he was sitting down he couldn’t see her, but standing he could see that she had stopped some distance away beside the deep end of the pond and that she stood, seeming to blow in the wind—perhaps his tired eyes made her waver. His first thought was to run away as fast as he could, to get out of the park as quickly as his shaking legs would carry him. Already he thought he could hear a couple of park policemen on horses patrolling nearby. But there had been something so poignant, so sad, and so infinitely pathetic about the scene he had witnessed that he found himself unable simply to disappear. Instead, in a matter of seconds, his feet turned themselves in the direction of the young woman.

All thought of his shaggy, unkempt appearance, his bushy beard and stinking underarms and breath, had ceased with his first acquaintance with starvation. He did not consider the possibility that the young woman might find cause to object to foul body odor, or to a black tramp appearing out of nowhere to solace her. He should have thought of those things, he thought later on, when the woman and her baby were dead. But he did not really then; in fact, at the time, he could think of no matterable difference between them. Misery leveled all beings, he reasoned, going after her.

Hastily he divided the money; he would give her three hundred, he would keep four hundred. She could also have the ring.

He approached her cautiously, looking over his shoulder each few steps to be sure the police were not around. He stopped four feet from her, and like her, began to stare into the pond. Gradually, for he had begun to feel unsure of what he planned to do, he moved closer, inch by studiedly nonchalant inch.

At that time of the year only the center of the pond was free from ice, the sides near the banks were white with it. It was a dismal sight; the fallen leaves had drifted down to the edge of the water and turned into a sort of patterned slime, the ice keeping them from disintegrating altogether. There was not much to look at that was not depressing. The night was grayish and cold; the park lights offered only brightness, no warmth or cheerfulness.

As she stood downwind from him she quickly sensed his presence. Putting her hand gently against the end of her nose, and looking at him with a typical New York, not-seeing look, she moved.

“Ma’am?” he said, pursuing her, holding out his hand.

She pretended not to hear him, but went to stand on a small platform that jutted out over the pond. He stood below her, watching her, holding the money and the ring in his hand.

“’Scuse me, ma’am,” he said, and as if by rote his arm took his hat from his head. “I found this here back yonder by the bench and I was just wondering if … ?” She had turned a truly paper-white and her eyes held the cold tenseness of a prepared learned scream.

“No!” she cried shortly, holding a thin arm back and up as if to ward him off and strike him. “It’s not mine.” Abruptly she turned her back to him, waiting for him to leave.

“It yours all right,” he said patiently, with one foot raised on the steps to the platform, the fistful of money clenched at his knee. “I seen that young solyer give it to you.”

The small back stiffened. If it had not been so cold Grange would have sworn he saw, in the fleeting moment she turned to look at him, a crimson blush. He stood shivering quietly behind her.

“Give it to me!” she said sharply, turning and looking him up and down in fury. He handed it to her, along with the ring. The ring she laid on the railing, the money she counted.

“This ain’t all of it,” she said. “I want all of it!
You
ain’t going to have any of it; before I let
you
sneak off with it I’ll throw it all into the pond!” She threw one of the twenties into the pond, her painted lips smiling archly as she watched Grange go down instinctively to retrieve it from the ice. When he rose up empty-handed her mouth laughed. “Look at the big burly-head,” she said, and laughed again.

Grange swallowed. He hated her entire race while she stood before him, pregnant, having learned nothing from her own pain, helpless except before someone more weak than herself, enjoying a revenge that severed all possible bonds of sympathy between them.

She stood there like a great blonde pregnant deified cow. She was not pretty, but only a copy of a standardly praised copy of prettiness. She was abandoned, but believed herself infinitely cared for and wanted. By somebody. She was without superiority, but believed herself far above him.

“Give me that money, nigger,” she said, menacingly, moving toward him. His tongue would not work he was so angry.

If she put her hands on me I’m going to knock that white brat right out of her stomach! he thought grimly, watching the almost transparent white face come closer to his own. He felt, as if asleep, a sharp pain in his leg above the ankle. He had to look up into her twisted face and pitiless eyes to believe she had kicked him.

A thousand drums pounded behind his temples. His throat was dry. His eyes, bleary from hunger and fatigue, were red and wolfish as with a lunge he fell on her, bearing her to the stone floor of the platform. She began to scream as he held her by the shoulders and shook her, dragging her finally to her feet. His hunger made his rage shortlived and he could not hit her. He relived his old plantation frustrations as she stood there before him stoically calling him names. She was not afraid of him. It seemed unreal to him that she could persist in calling him nigger when he might have been challenging her to fight for her very life.

Steady on her feet again the woman tried to jump from the platform to the grass. He was standing in front of the steps and she did not “care” to order him to move. She knew his weakness before a single scream from her, and did not fear him as much as she despised him. She would get the police and they would get the money from him, teaching him a lesson in the meantime. Misjudging the distance and the weight of her heavy body, she fell through the ice into the pond. Grange had been standing mute and still, but immediately he raced down the shallow steps to try to reach her from the bank. In a split second he recalled how he had laughed when his grandfather admitted helping white “masters” and “mistresses” out of burning houses. Now he realized that to save and preserve life was an instinct, no matter whose life you were trying to save. He stretched out his arm and nearly touched her. She reached up and out with a small white hand that grabbed his hand but let go when she felt it was
his
hand. Grange drew back his dirty brown hand and looked at it. The woman struggled to climb the bank against the ice, but the ice snagged her clothes, and she stuck in the deep sucking mud near the steep shore. When she had given him back his hand and he had looked at it thoughtfully, he turned away, gathering the scattered money in a hurry. Finally she sank. She called him “nigger” with her last disgusted breath.