Four Spirits (24 page)

WHEN ELLIE SIGNALED THROUGH THE LIBRARY QUIET FOR
Stella to wait, Stella had already gathered up her books and was about to leave the Birmingham-Southern College library to get a bus to town, then see the gynecologist, then maybe kill some time at Parisian's, then on to Fielding's and her Friday evening work on the switchboard. But Ellie said, “Wait.” Stella stopped beside the railing around a large opening down to Circulation. Ellie leaned close to Stella's ear to whisper the news. Then Ellie drew back, her eyes locked on Stella, the corners of her mouth curiously turning slightly up.

Ellie was a friend, a talented actress, a liberal. Ellie certainly wasn't
amused
. Stella felt hysterical, as though she might lose her balance, pitch over the railing, and land down below, headfirst, onto the circulation desk. She saw her head breaking into two neat pieces. Her heart seemed to be caving in, and the book-lined world was filmed with tears.

But why this stupid twitching of the lips, as though I might smile?
Stella asked herself.

Ellie added, still slightly smiling, “I can't believe it.”

“Maybe it's a rumor,” Stella whispered back. “Like ‘The War of the Worlds'?”

“I don't think so. It was a real reporter. Dan Rather in Dallas, Texas.”

They were taking turns leaning toward each other's ears in a strange, weaving choreography.

“But who's he?”

“The local reporter, in Dallas.”

Now they controlled the curling of their lips; they assumed immobile expressions like stunned, fixed masks.

“I don't believe it,” Stella said. “I have to go catch my bus.” She didn't say
Today I take charge of my body, I get birth control pills
. “I have to go to work this evening.”

As she pushed through the door, she heard a loud voice saying from the circulation desk: “May I have your attention. May I have your attention, please. We have terrible news….” But now she was outside.

Stella ran as fast as she could on the grass around the library, then pell-mell like a child, down the steep hill toward Arkadelphia Road and the bus stop.
It can't be. Not after the bombing.
During that funeral, Stella had looked at herself in the mirror in her bedroom and said over and over “Coward!” Trees should burst into flame while she ran down the hill away from the college.

A new atrocity?
Run!
I won't believe it
. It probably was true.

In 1956, she had wanted so badly for Kennedy to get the nomination for vice president.
Can't they see? Can't they see?
She was thirteen. How could they choose that plain Estes Kefauver? And the Democrats had lost
(Can my side really lose?)
, though even her Aunt Krit had admired Adlai Stevenson, and voted for him. Aunt Krit said Stevenson was
actually intelligent
. Her voice had been choked with emotion, as though she, too, at last, had something in common with the life of the nation.

Then Krit had said, “You like Kennedy so much, read this.” Aunt Krit's voice had to fight its way up from her throat. She wanted so ardently to instill her niece with values precious to herself that she scarcely dared represent them with words or deeds. “I bought it in the book department at Loveman's,” Krit said proudly. “Kennedy wrote it.
Profiles in Courage
.”

Stella had made herself read each of the biographical sketches.
Aunt Krit doesn't want me to love somebody just because of his looks
, she had thought. Even then, Stella knew that Aunt Krit, in her gruff way, was trying to protect her from a dangerous susceptibility:
look-love
. But Kennedy was smart enough to write a history book. Aunt Krit revered that. “He wrote it while he had a broken back.”

And now the man was cut down, in all his prime and glory.

Divorced from her body, Stella ran lickety-split down the wooded hillside from the college to the street. She leapt over rocks without noticing them.

When Kennedy had been elected president, Stella had thought smugly of
her own ability to recognize his promise: yes, she herself had had some insight into politics and
intuition
about who was going to count. And his wife was beautiful and loved classical music and spoke French. Ellie, her friend, looked something like Jackie Kennedy.

Why had Ellie smiled?
Was it the smile of embarrassment—that they lived in such an unbelievably cruel world?

After he had been safely elected president, people had said Kennedy never would have been allowed on the ticket for president if he'd been the vice presidential nominee running with Stevenson, who would have lost in any case. No Stevenson-Kennedy nor any other possible combination could have beaten Ike. That's what people said, and then Stella's smugness melted, and she knew how ignorant she was of the ways of the world and of politics. If, in 1956, she had gotten her wish, it would have doomed Kennedy.

But he was doomed. Shot or dead?

She'd reached the bus stop. It was a miracle she hadn't fallen down the hill. But she must have turned her foot. Her ankle was throbbing. Her body, too, was cramping. She felt as though her body was opening to bleed. It was supposed to be tomorrow, not today. The gynecologist didn't want her to schedule her appointment during her period. Maybe it wasn't much flow. But she could feel herself starting to bleed. He was bleeding in Texas. He might be dying.

Her books weighed so heavily that she felt too weak to hold them. They fell around her feet. She felt as though she might faint. This was the president. It was like saying God was dead, and that was what Nietzsche
had
said.

Stella gasped for air as she watched cars drive past the bus stop. Did they know? The president was shot. Her stomach roiled. When Stella's philosophy professor had enunciated Nietzsche's “God is dead” in his lecture, she had thought she was going to be sick. But the teacher said that for existentialists the death of the idea of God meant a certain kind of freedom. Exhilaration! But for others, that we were
doomed
to freedom.

She knelt to pick up her books. The professor had turned around and recreated on the blackboard a cartoon he'd seen. He'd written “God is dead” and attributed the quotation to Nietzsche. Then he'd crossed out the quote and written under it: “Nietzsche is dead” and under that line, he signed “God.”

Half the class had laughed, relieved, and half the class had only looked thoughtful, including Ellie her new friend, who resembled Jackie Kennedy and was one of the few married students.

Kennedy couldn't die. What kind of world would this be,
essentially,
if the president was assassinated? But presidents had been assassinated before. Lincoln, the great Lincoln. What kind of country was this, that killed its great leaders?

Stella was starting to sob, and she knew this was hysteria. If her parents weren't gone, she wouldn't be crying like this. “I was too little,” she whispered to the vacant bus stop. She'd study psychology, not graduate on time, but stay an extra year and be a psychology major instead of an English major. Just stay on at the college. She brushed dirt off her books. Maybe she wouldn't have sex, not yet. Maybe she wouldn't go to the gynecologist. Maybe she'd just go to work. She felt encased by drudgery, numb, and impenetrable.

But who was pulling up to the curb? Who was driving a strange car? An old two-toned Chevrolet Bel-Air? Who had come to release her?

Who but her fiancé, reaching across the seat to open the door for her, who but Darl?

She flung herself across the seat into his arms, closed her eyes, exploded into tears, pressed her cheek against his. Inside! She was safe inside. Her cheek was pressed tight against his freckles. She'd always loved his freckles. It made him pure in some strange way. Unique. Veiled. His face proclaimed for him that his essence was behind a curtain, as all of us were always doomed to be. She was trying to get past the veil with her pressing, to enter the safety of his mind, to merge. Not to be alone.

“Hey, hey,” Darl said, laughing a little. “I know it's a cool car, but, hey, maybe I should have got a Cadillac.”

All she could do was sob.

He took time to put the car in gear, then he reached his right arm around her. “Hey, Stella, baby. Is something wrong?”

She sobbed, moved her eyes down to his shoulder, and blubbered into his shirt.
Baby! How could he call her that? She hated it
.

“You like the car, don't you?”

She couldn't speak.

“Just try to calm down, darling—”

Darling
. Darl called her darling and no one ever had before. She took a deep breath. It rattled all the way down into her lungs.

“That's right. Calm down now. Don't get unhinged. Try to calm yourself, Stella.”

She opened her eyes. They were driving down Eighth Avenue. He was guiding the car among the sparse traffic.

“Oh, Darl. They've shot the president.”

He kept his eyes on the road. “I know,” he said. “I heard.” He spoke quietly. He continued to steer the car.

“Is he all right?”

Darl needed his right hand to steer, to shift again.

“He died.”

“Oh no!” The sobbing was stunned out of her. The car smelled of sulfur. Stella looked straight ahead at cars and delivery trucks flowing down a river. No, a road. “Oh no. Oh no.” The two words flapped like a metal hinge winging through nothingness. She became that hinge becoming unhinged; the phrase broke into two parts, and dropped. Sometimes she moaned “Oh” and sometimes she ineffectually punched the word “No” into the air.

Darl remained quiet for a time. Finally he said, “It's a pity.”

“Is he really gone?” Stella's voice quavered. “Are you sure?”

“They say so. On all the stations. I heard it in the cafeteria. The car doesn't have a radio.”

She said nothing.

“But it's got a good engine.” He sounded quietly happy. “And I like the colors. Cream and turquoise.”

She said nothing.

“Did you notice the colors?”

“Darl, the president is dead.”

“It's a pity. I don't believe in murder. I hate violence.”

“His life is over. It's all over for him.” The handsome president with the beautiful family was lying someplace on a cold slab. The fluids of his body were being drained away.

“I'm sorry he's dead,” Darl said soberly. “But in some ways, I guess he deserved it.”

“What do you mean?”
She felt like a volcano erupting.

“If he hadn't backed King and Shuttlesworth and all the colored people, we wouldn't have had that mess.”

“I'm
for
integration.”

“Most people think Kennedy's ruined the South.”

Stella sat up straight, away from him. Out the car window, she watched a
large black bird with an ivory bill languidly rowing through the air. “Kennedy was trying to help
save
the South.”

“I'm sorry he's dead. I wish he had just pulled back. Been patient.” Darl sighed. “My dad said we'll never be the same, after Kennedy.”

“But your dad's not glad?” She noticed her books spilled on the floor of the car. That was the way it was with books: you forgot they existed; you carried them around as though they were part of your own body. Then you looked down, and you were wading in them. She reached down to stack the spilled books onto her lap.
How Does a Poem Mean?
by John Ciardi.
Cry, the Beloved Country
by Alan Paton. Paul Tillich's
The Courage to Be
.

“I haven't talked to Dad yet,” Darl said. “You need a satchel for your books.”

The car seemed to be slowing down. The world seemed to be slowing, or was it time?
All the King's Men,
by Robert Penn Warren, still lay beside her foot.

“Darl, I think you might be glad.”

“I'd say, more like relieved.”

“Those four girls weren't doing anything. They were attending
their church
.”

“But he was doing something. He was backing up their leaders.”

“Murder is murder.” Stella made herself sit perfectly still. Without any movement of her eyes, she stared at the street flowing under the hood of the car. She breathed as shallowly as she could. She wanted to apply the brakes to the flow of time.
Pain is pain
.

Then she slowly asked Darl to do something she never regretted, not once. She asked him to stop the car. She told him, calmly, that she wanted to get out. She preferred to ride the bus, she said. Before Stella got out, she held out his ring toward him.

“I can't marry you,” she said.

He gripped the steering wheel hard. Behind his brown freckles, his skin turned pink. His face was like a strange fabric: brown dots on a pink field.

“All right,” he finally said. He shifted into neutral, then raised up the palm of his hand to receive the ring. “I won't be asking again, Stella. You better be sure.” His eyes were full of hurt pride, or was it pain?

She pressed the ring deep against the skin of his palm and into the flesh. Theringmadescarcelyadentinhisskinbutsatroundandinviolateaseternity in the palm of his hand. The little diamond shattered light prismatically.

 

AND THEN SHE WAS
standing in the gutter, a pile of four books held in the crook of her arm.

Stella watched the back of the turquoise and cream Chevy as he drove away. He seemed sealed up in the car. He became the departing car.

A yellow Volkswagen Beetle crept past her, and she thought
Yes, Darl is a peanut inside a one-hump shell
, though Darl was not in the Volkswagen. Her gaze shifted to Vulcan, lame-footed in the distance with his arm extended high against a cloudy horizon. Furious with herself for knowing Darl so little, she stamped her hurt foot. Her Aunt Krit was right: she wasn't going to marry Darl. Not ever.