Four Spirits (28 page)

Someone from the street shouted back, “The South will rise again!”

The trumpeter withdrew, and the window was lowered.

Blake sang loudly, in French, the opening of the French national anthem, the call to arms, as he stalked along. He sounded crazed with grief, but nobody accosted him.

Soon she would enter the garden. The golden sandstone church was just ahead. First a small building connected by a stone archway to the tower and sanctuary.

When Stella stepped through the arch, she saw the iron gate was closed. She put her hand on the knob above the keyhole, but the gate was locked. The black lacquered upright bars of the gate were too tall to go over. Her hope wilted. The church had let her down. What leadership had the white church provided in integrating Birmingham? Well, some
had
tried. What, for that matter, had Stella done for integration? She
thought
right. At least she had done that.

Through the grille, she saw the brick walk, gracefully curved, flanked with a short, clipped box hedge, still green.

Again, her hand grasped the black lacquered knob and tried again to turn it. Clearly locked. Timmy had taken her once to the Episcopal mass, on Christmas Eve, and she had been shocked at the censer and incense, at the ceremony of it all. Before the service, all the children had played together, not segregated by age, as in her own Methodist youth groups. Timmy had told her that a lot of these people were against racial segregation, were
working
against it, but when Stella was there, the air was full of Christmas.

“Make me fly,” one of the little girls had said to Timmy, and his hands encircled her little waist, and he had lifted her above his head—he was a dancer in the Birmingham Civic Ballet. And then all the little girls had clamored, and stood in a line, and one by one, he made them beautiful as flying ballerinas. Some pedaled the air as they flew; some stretched out one arm, or both. One stood in the air with folded arms, stiff as a totem pole. Timmy had taken off his suit jacket, but his white shirt was sticking to his skin with sweat.

How he lived within his body, Timmy Beaton. Like Don, Cat's brother. Somehow proud to inhabit that particular body. Even if he walked across the room, his body said,
This is my life. I contain myself. I move myself from here to there. Proudly.

She wished she could whisper to Timmy,
Make me fly
. But he was gone from
her life. He was dancing with the New York City Ballet. He had braved his family and sought his
different
life, but he came back to visit, people said. He didn't call Stella.

In a corner of the November garden stood Saint Catherine—carved perhaps from cypress, she and the wheel that broke her, all carved from the same piece of wood, except perhaps for the outcropping spokes, which were stuck like removable pegs into the outer rim of the wheel. Saint Catherine rose from the ground like the curve of a calla lily. Deadwood, she was; the ghost of a tree that once grew, perhaps, in a Louisiana bayou, hung with Spanish moss. Stella remembered firing a pistol as a small child, in the woods at Helicon, shooting trees.

The carved whites of Saint Catherine's eyes had been painted silver, and Stella found the effect garish. The flow of the woman's body reminded her of Munch's
The Scream.
A thoroughly modern shape, a flame of anguish.

The silver of her eyes proclaimed
I am unnatural, the ghost of a tree. Return me to the swamp.
“Return me to my life, where scaly alligators brushed against my knees.” Stella was shocked to find that she had spoken aloud for the statue of Saint Catherine.
Return me to Helicon.

Stella shook the iron gate that barred her from the garden.

Before he left Birmingham, Timmy had kissed her.

Standing on the porch before her front door, she had hugged him. Sensing he did not want to kiss, she had chosen not to imply that he should. She had turned but found she turned within the circle of his arm, so that he brought her to face him again. Yes, he was kissing her, and the universe thrummed between their lips.

He had given her her wish, fulsomely without stint, and she had given back. Then quickly, she was inside her aunts' living room. She leaned against the wall, her legs weak, her body effervescent.

Oh, kissing, how she wanted it, forever! (With one finger, she caressed a vertical bar on the garden gate, felt under her fingertip how the black lacquer covered a roughness of chipped and pitted underlayers, for all its shiny bravado.)

Better than she'd ever hoped or imagined, though others had warned her, by dismissing their own first kiss. Nothing special, they had said. But not with Timmy. Not she and Timmy Beaton. No other kiss had ever equaled that—not all the dark, tantalizing night hours spent with Darl on the boulevard while
the lighted planes flew low overhead. There was nothing wrong with her, she should have told Dr. Bradstreet: she loved kissing.

For warmth, Saint Catherine seemed to clutch the wheel to her in the November afternoon. Soon it would be dark. Stella moved her grip on the bars, and the square-edged metal was cold in her hands. The wheel was a part of Saint Catherine's body, embraced like a pregnancy.

(But she would have the Pill. She would!)

Gently Stella shook the gate again. It was right that she should be locked out. An airplane flew overhead. Would they be flying the president's body, his broken body, back to Washington? Or would his flag-draped body be moved by slow train through the country, as Lincoln's body had? Would the porch of the last car of the train display across its vertical grille a swag of red, white, and blue? Stella wondered if, at this moment, Jackie Kennedy was listening to the muffled roar of a jet engine, feeling the thrum through the soles of her shoes, wondering where her life had gone.

Stella released the black grille of the garden gate. She would walk on toward the public library, only a block beyond. It would be open, and she wanted inside. A white angora sweater, even with a close-fitting neck, was not enough for November.

She emptied her mind with the sound of her feet walking. She watched the toes of her green leather flats appear and disappear below the swinging hem of her blue wool skirt till she slipped through the library's revolving door into the hush of the reading room.
What does it mean, my feet are green?
What did anything mean?

 

THE REVOLVING DOOR
turned as she pushed. The quiet library interior accepted her. She wanted a bare table before her. She folded her hands on the wood.

Her eyes lifted to the murals on the wall. What comfort did those painted myths of the world have to offer? Pegasus she had loved. And what was his average altitude, when flying? Cloud high, she thought. Those white wings would churn their way through cumulus, then higher even than stratospheric cirrus into the blank of blue and sunlight. Always, they moved her—the depiction of wings.

Among the figures on the enormous library mural was Brunhilde, the
warrior maiden, her blond braids hanging beside her armored breasts, her horned helmet. Confucius spoke to those who would learn. Cleopatra sat on her throne, fanned by an Ethiope. She offered a wink to Stella and she made something stir the air—the sound of distant flutes?

Stella looked across the room into the bespectacled eyes of the conductor of the Birmingham Youth Orchestra, Herbert Levinson, who was also the concertmaster of the Birmingham Symphony. Crossing the floor of the reading room, he returned her gaze. When she was in high school, she had played the cello under his baton. He remembered her. She should take up the cello again, change her life, honor her mother and the music her mother held dearer than God.

The conductor didn't speak. (His own instrument, like her mother's favorite, was the violin.) Reading misery in each other's eyes, he continued to move. It was enough. The blank oak library table had signaled like a flag. This glance. Yes, a slight shaking of their heads. Tears standing in their eyes. Not embrace. His lips moved without sound. (This was the library and one did not speak.)
I'm sorry,
he mouthed.

It was those transformed by pain that Herbert Levinson cared about.
Aye, yi, yi, yi, yih
—from her own bones came the lament, in a minor key. Darl had wanted her body and made himself wait, and now he would never have her.

Nor she him.

I'm sorry,
she whispered to the air. Theirs had been a delicious intimacy, kissing.

Mr. Levinson had known Stella's sense of rhythm was unsteady, that it faltered (though her mother's never did), that Stella would never be reliable as a leader of her section, but he had seen her store of grief, was unendingly kind to her, and honored the way she had tried to steady her erratic heart.

Wait,
she wanted to call after him.
You don't know about Darl! I was engaged, and now I'm not.

Stella pushed her wooden chair back from the table, let the legs scrape on the floor. An ugly noise in the library. She glanced at the newspapers suspended by long bamboo canes, hanging in a rack. Here was the news from around the world: the London
Times
was there,
Le Figaro, Dïe Welt, El País,
and others, but none proclaimed Today from its headlines. None yet hurled the message with bold, three-inch letters of Right Now:
JFK ASSASSINATED.

It's time. I will walk back up Twentieth Street to Third Avenue; I will turn the corner and walk three more blocks to work. I will feel cold, and I'll walk fast. “Hurry up,
please, it's time”
—a refrain from T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land
echoed vaguely in her mind.

She lifted her books and purse from the floor and thought from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “I grow old…I grow old…/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” She revolved through the brass door into the darkening outer world. “There will be time, there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;/…And for a hundred visions and revisions.”

Would she revise the scene with Darl, if she could? No, she told herself, she would not. Now she was free. She was cold but she was free. She walked more rapidly.

The dusk air of the city was festive, as though it were late December and approaching Christmas. Everyone walked briskly. They were exhilarated, these shoppers and commuters of Birmingham. No, there was a sad face. But was it some personal grief or the public grief that this was a country of assassins, of racists?
Aye, yi, yi, yi, yih
…She needed her mother's Yiddish to sing an ancient sorrow.

Stella passed a woman dressed in a winter coat, wearing a black cloche hat, an old-fashioned one.
Let it be my mother.
With one hand, she held the hand of her little daughter (also overly bundled against the cold).
Let me be her
. The woman's other hand held the handle of a blunt-nosed black violin case, gliding two feet above the pavement like a baby alligator. The texture of the case completed the masquerade of shape with a bumpy, reptilian skin.

Someday this city and all its inequity would sink back into being a swamp for amphibians, as it had been millions of years before, when the lush vegetation of ferns and palms laid itself down, and laid itself down again and again over the aeons, was sealed by the weight of water into a decay of dark ooze, till the patient mud compressed itself into the black seams of coal that lay everywhere in the hills, fueling the current steel industry. While Stella's green leather shoes hurried over the pavement, past the YMCA, she thought of the earth under the concrete, which would someday in the far future become broken and pitiful, useful for crushing her bones and those of all who now walked the street.

And now that Kennedy was dead, would the Soviet Union take advantage? Across from her at the Tutwiler, would Russian generals someday review their conquering troops? She knew not a word of Russian. Would Birmingham become a shell, bombed into rubble big-time, and not by the local racists? (But
which was worse—to die at the hands of one's fellow citizens or of Communist strangers?)

Because of the steel industry, people always said (proudly) that Birmingham was high on the list as a Russian target. Number three, some claimed, after New York City and Washington, D.C. Or number five, after Pittsburgh and probably Atlanta, or Chicago. Perhaps Cuban missiles were aimed at Birmingham.

Seldom had the city seemed so triumphant, to Stella, as on this early evening in the wake of the president's death. This time someone else, far away in Texas, had done the dirty work. This time it wasn't a matter of a church and of children, who, by anybody's measure, were absolutely innocent. Or was the air charged not with triumph but excitement? She felt none of it.

She was a stranger in her city—
Aye, yi, yi, yi, yih
—though she had been born here, at old Jefferson-Hillman Hospital. Because of her people—her father not of the city but from the country; her mother not southern, but northern—had she ever belonged? Or was it something of her own sensibility, first her rigid faith, now her growing skepticism, that made her irrevocably odd? She was too thin, that was part of it.

She was cold. Even the fast walking failed to warm her. But up ahead—where was it coming from?—those voices humming. Three or four high, childish voices so ambiguous she could not interpret their mood.
Remember us,
perhaps they said. Spirit voices of those four little girls, sacrificed, like Kennedy, on the national altar. Had they come to guide him home? “ ‘And flights of angels' ”—she thought of the mayhem at the end of
Hamlet
—“ ‘sing thee to thy rest.' ”

If war comes to this country,
Aunt Krit had always said before the car wreck, her voice choking itself,
we'll all gather at Helicon and hide in the woods.
Stella scanned the sky, but there was only the rosy sunset in the west, a lone passenger plane—Eastern Air Lines—circling the city before it headed for Norwood, and beyond, to the runway and the terminal.
But who was left to gather?
Her family already lay in the cemetery at Helicon. Now Aunt Krit couldn't bear to say the word
gather.