The Wedding (18 page)

The schoolteacher did not sit on the edge of her chair. She sat back and unbuttoned her coat to put the tenants at ease. Her hosts impaled her with astonished eyes, and her face flushed a little under the intensity of the gaze. They were almost inclined to offer her a cup of water to cool her off, but they felt she was too high-toned to cool off. A glass was more her style, but they didn’t own one. An old cup could do as well in a baby’s wobbly hand or a grandmother’s. A glass could break the day you bought it, taking away the five cents that might have gone to a loaf of bread. They saw neither her money bag nor her charity box, so they knew she had come not to take what they were bound to give nor to give what they were bound to take but for some unhurried purpose that required their taking part in the encounter with more than dumb obedience.

Opening her notebook, the schoolteacher tapped its pages with her pencil to indicate that one was party to the other. She scanned the faces as if she were looking at an ungraded class and was resigned to letting their limping tongues take the time and a half they would need to spell out their simplistic thoughts with the ramshackle machinery of their minds. She began with the easiest questions, nodding encouragement when the answers came. She wrote them down, her pencil gliding powerfully over the paper. She was listening to their lives, and putting her listening into a visiting book as if it was worth the wearying effort to write it. Their burdened hearts began to stir from the bowels of despair. Nobody knew the trouble they’d seen, nobody knew
but Jesus. And now a comforter had come to ease the crushing load of nobody knowing.

The words poured out of them, faster than her pencil could keep track, faster than her questions could fit in, sounding at first like another language, the accent so mush-mouth Southern, the English so inverted, the idiom so full of gospel images and the whole interwoven with Gullah from a grandmother’s grandmother’s remembering, singing, soaring African words as beautiful as African birds. And their unknown words and phrases, both Gullah and jargon, began to relate to those whose meaning was clearer. Her ear accustomed itself to the slurred speech and separated it into sentences. She understood, and her understanding sifted through the layers of her self-defenses, and the loneliness that links the deprived whatever their pearls of accomplishment became the bond between her area of need and theirs. She listened long and she listened deep, and her involvement, the full measure of her penetration, became complete.

She did not leave until a late hour, and then only because she was sick from exhaustion. Her tiredness stirred in her stomach like nausea. Her spirit was unflagged but her flesh had no feeling; she had remained seated in one cramped spot long past the point of pain. Once she had asked for water and gulped it gratefully from a cup, which if she thought about it at all she thought easier to hold in her trembling hand than water in a slippery glass.

She lost count of the people who crowded into the increasingly fetid and airless room as the glad tidings spread all over the tenement that the Listener had come. No one wanted to wait until tomorrow or any other put-off time.
They did not want her to give it all away before they got some. She was giving out hope and they did not want another day to end without it.

The schoolteacher was hungry when she reached home, and her grumbling house girl had kept her dinner hot for her, but when she tried to eat, her mouth turned to dust. She had seen too many children with bowed legs and soft bones in one day. She tried to stir her tea, but her hand could not hold the spoon on its course. With both hands, she lifted the cup to her lips, unable to wait for it to cool. She took a deep steadying sip, and the rising steam invaded her eyes, her nasal passages. Her nose felt moist, and she mopped it; her eyes began to fill, and she dabbed at them. She felt an agitation in her chest like bubbles in a butter churn. Her breath came in little gasps.

The cup was no easier to hold than the spoon. She set it down, and the tea sloshed onto her trembling hand, scalding her. For a moment, she wondered if she had been burned internally, too—she could not understand what was happening inside her. It was another moment or two before she fully realized that the upheaval inside her was a gathering storm of tears. The first few drops burned her cheeks, and then she was crying, truly crying, an act of contrition she had not performed for years.

She left the table and went upstairs, fumbling blindly along the banister. Behind the closed door of her bedroom she undressed and got into her nightgown, too dazed to perform her usual post-tenement inspection for clinging ghetto filth. She sat on the edge of the bed, shaking her long hair free and twisting it into a braid. Most women don’t
realize it, but their hair is part of their nervous systems, and the schoolteacher was no different. She let the long knotted rope of hair hang over her breast, too indifferent to lift it over her shoulder and let it hang down her back in its nightly place of rest. She stared at the Anglican cross on the far wall, as stark and unadorned as the cross of the crucifixion. In the quiet light from a single shaded lamp it seemed to be held in the air by the luminosity of its polished wood.

Her priest had presented it to her as a token of the many years she had devoted to Episcopalian piety. It was she who saw to the altar flowers, she who sent her girl to help at church suppers, she who gave a stained-glass window in her mother’s name in the hope that it would help her Baptist soul move over to the Episcopalian side of heaven. There was never an appeal to which she failed to subscribe. She gave a double measure of her time and money. There was never a day on which she did not serve the church in some capacity, not for her soul alone but for Isaac’s as well. In truth, it was his state of grace she worried about more than her own.

She could not remember when Isaac had received the sacrament. He never took time to kneel at God’s altar. Sometimes she wondered if he, like many men, was an agnostic, who looked to science as his religion, or if, like many ministers’ sons, he was in rebellion from the discipline religion represented. She had tried, Lord knew, to keep enough faith for both of them. The keeping of her husband’s conscience was her duty as a wife. But now, after the day she had had, she did not know but that Isaac had a fundamental faith that was stronger than hers. In a book of the Bible someone had said, “Thou hast faith and I have works. Show me thy faith
without thy works, and I will show thee my faith by my works.” Had Isaac practiced his unorthodox religion in the alleys of the poor while hers had felt more at home in the magnificence of her church? Its magnificent structure was the first owned by colored people in the country, a century-old baroque reminder of the worldly success of its founders. The communicants, proud of their acquisition and the price they had paid for it (it being the custom of New Yorkers to boast where others might bewail), were so deep in church-building debt that their treasury could allocate no portion of its resources to the poor.

Out of the entire congregation, only the schoolteacher had done in some measure what needed to be done, the deed accomplished with the doer’s heart uncommitted, the gift delivered with the giver at arm’s length. From biblical wisdom had come the words “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass…. And though I have … all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor … and have not charity, it proveth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind … beareth all things.” Charity was involvement. Through another shower of tears, the cross seemed to radiate spears of shimmering light, like spokes from God’s center to the center of her consciousness. For the first time in her religious life, she experienced a moment of oneness—which Preacher would have called a revelation—with God, a moment in which the spirit rewards the flesh.

On his way past her room, Isaac heard the sound of
sobbing. In the quiet night the sound was as a cry for help. Still, he knew his wife was not weeping to be heard. Her pride had never permitted her to stoop to self-pity. He could only imagine that she was ill or in pain, and he felt a prickle of remorse because he couldn’t remember how she had looked that morning or when he had looked at her and really seen her. He knocked at her door. The crying cut off as if she had suddenly slit her windpipe, preferring to be caught dead than to be caught crying. He knocked again.

“Yes?” she said in a voice he didn’t recognize. He was aware that her response was not an invitation, but he opened the door, the professional man concerned where the husband he wasn’t might have shied away from the sound of her private sorrow. He saw her seated on the side of the bed, the covers folded back, her robe across them. It had been a long time since he had come into her room at a late hour, delicacy restraining him from disappointing her with matters unrelated to the marriage bed.

“Are you ill?” he asked from the doorway, a little embarrassed that he felt he must explain at once the reason for his intrusion lest she misunderstand. She brushed her tears away roughly with the back of her hand. “Are you ill?” he asked again diffidently from the doorway. His stubborn feet would take him no farther into her room until he had her assurance that she was in need of his medical ministrations and nothing more.

At the sight of Isaac’s discomfort, the schoolteacher grimaced with embarrassment. She was mortified by the idea that he might have misinterpreted her tears as cries for love.
“There’s nothing wrong,” she said, her shaky voice giving lie to her words. “I’ve had a rough day and I’m keyed up. I’ll calm down.”

“Telling me might help you unwind.”

“You’re too tired to listen. You look tired to death. Go on to bed, I’ll be all right.”

“Take a deep breath.” She did. “Fine … take another.” He watched her breasts rise and subside in a broken rhythm … rise and subside … rise and subside, in a mesmerizing cadence that tied the blood in knots in his temples.

She held out her hands to show him they were quieter. He thought it was a gesture of appeal. He lashed himself for making her beg him to come to her bedside, a simple duty he would have performed without pause if she were a ghetto woman in a gamy gown, sprawled in smelly anguish on a bed unchanged all winter. What perversity made him stop short at the door of a schoolteacher? What other man would have to be summoned to a bed without sickness, a wife without blemish, a beast unbound by straps and stays? Who but himself would take this time to ponder?

He stumbled across the threshold, stubbing his toe hard against the sill. The pain buckled him at the knee and he began to pitch and sway, not from the pain so much as the monumental tiredness that his unhinged leg could not control. He felt like a fool, and he was sure he looked like one. A scalding wave of embarrassment drenched him in waves of sweat as debilitating as a hot bath. Undone, he caught a contagion of trembling. Even a fool could fumble a way to a
woman’s bed. Only an utter fool would fall apart before he reached it. He set his sights on the chair and plopped into it. It stayed under him. Fresh perspiration beaded his forehead from sheer relief at working this miracle without cracking the floor with his face.

“Now,” he said, crossing his legs to use them as clamps, “when you’re ready to talk I’m here to listen. I couldn’t sleep with something upsetting you. It’s useless to tell me to go to bed.”

She saw that it was useless, and she also saw his beaded agony. He had come so far and he could go no farther alone. The crushing weight of the cross he carried had drained him of endurance. Her flash of concern that he would misread her tears and her attire now seemed irrelevant. This man whose manhood was more than maleness, this doctor who served one master and no mistress, was used to the night wait by the bedside of tears; he had seen grief. Nothing about her seduced him.

He smiled at her. She was as startled by that smile as if it had focused a floodlight on his face, illuminating the beauty of his bones. She had never seen him look so striking. It was a moment before she realized that she had never seen his face so defleshed, so skeletally thin that its structural perfection was as starkly emphasized as if a knife had laid him bare. A rhyme flashed across her mind, forgotten since childhood: “Beauty is but skin deep, ugly to the bone. And when beauty fades away, ugly claims its own.” Her mother would sometimes recite this behind the back of some resented friend who was prettier than another woman could appreciate.
But with Isaac, his beauty was embedded in his bones, which would cleave together in their symmetry until the earth’s convulsions smashed them out of their sockets.

Yet that lost flesh diminished all the wealth that she had amassed. In the midst of their prosperous living, he had too often forgotten his daily bread. In the midst of the hunger that he saw everywhere on his daily rounds, bread that could not be broken into loaves for the multitudes would have been a stone in his belly…. She wanted to tell him that her supper had gone untasted, that she too could no longer spread her tablecloth over a coffin. But she had to tell him from the beginning.

“I spent the day in a nightmare. I watched a parade of dead souls. They had died in my houses. They had died hemorrhaging life. But others kept coming up from the South, looking to claim their piece of the promised land. My houses stayed full. My profits never fell. That property paid for itself a hundred times over. But I didn’t know I was making a deal with death. I never deserved to be a doctor’s wife. I wanted the label without the loneliness. You live to make live. You live with a love that mine could never match. Today, I heard your love crying in a tomb. Help me find the faith to roll the stone away. Christ the healer, help me.” She began to moan, not in pain but in passion. She was in the throes of an old-time religious conversion, a convulsive surrender to Christ free of Episcopalian restraints, her naked spirit kneeling and praying for union with his.

He saw her ecstasy. He saw her wholeness, the freshness of a woman in the pink of health, a sight rarer to him than a pearl from the sea. He saw her gown, garnished with ribbon
and lace, and he saw the bed turned back, a clean white bed to tempt a tired man to drink from the well of a woman without blemish. He began to undress, ripping, tearing, his clothes falling helter-skelter around him, a stubborn shoelace snapping, buttons popping. He was breathing as hard as if a sea of blood was pounding his heart against his lungs.