Such Sweet Thunder (70 page)

I hope it never changes!

The thought boomed noisily within the vast voluminous vacuum that was next year when he could go to college, if.…

“A new suit!” Rutherford protested. “Unh! — a tux!” then: “Maybe we could rent one and have it altered. An’ he kin wear my studs, an’ those golden cufflinks Sexton gave me before he died.”

Rutherford rose thoughtfully from the table and took the old battered World War cup from the hook over the sink and turned on the spigot until the cold water bubbled in it.

One cup! he thought, as his father brought the cup to his lips.

After that they went out onto the porch and gazed into the evening filled with stars that fell down into the buildings and shone behind the windows and in the headlights of the cars throughout the great city.

One morning the following week when he met her on the way to school Cosima did not speak to him.

She knows!

He slipped her a note in the music room, but she dropped it into the wastebasket. She turned her back on him in the English class, and acted as though he did not exist. The week dragged on in this desultory way toward Friday night, the night of the senior prom. Only Mary Ann seemed happy over the event, though even
her
eyes avoided his when she and Cosima were together. When they were alone, discussing the prom, her eyes were excited and triumphant and bitter by turns. He
began to be aware of a certain brashness in her laugh that he had never noticed before. Once when they were walking down the hill, he staring moodily at the pavement, she squeezed his arm affectionately, and when he looked at her in that tolerant way of his, she laughed at him in a cruel way that shocked him and threw him into a fit of confusion. He looked at the sky and at the trees, helpless amid the volleys of laughter.

Even when Friday night came and his mother and father fussed excitedly about him, arranging him and telling him how to act and continually asking him if he had forgotten anything — his keys, his handkerchief, his money — he felt ridiculous. His lips quivered with remembered, anticipated pain, which became even more intense as he stood on Mary Ann’s porch, ringing the bell.

Rrrrrrring!

A serious, handsome, well-poised woman of perhaps forty-six appeared at the door. In her expression, her bearing, the critical way she scrutinized him as she welcomed him in, with a distant, subtly skeptical cordiality with which she reacted to all men, a divorced woman.

“Won’t you come in?” indicating the way into the parlor with a gesture of courteous resignation. It was a woman’s parlor, homey, shining, with a piano and a big coal stove with polished chrome fenders, pictures of the family in well-dusted frames on the cobwebless walls, a big old-fashioned sofa with lace doilies on the arms and back where you pressed your head, if you dared taking the liberty of relaxing to that degree, because the lady’s manner was
serious
.

They sat facing each other, he with the box of flowers in his hand, looking expectantly for Mary Ann. “She’ll be down in a minute,” the lady said.

During their casual conversation about school he wondered if she knew about him and Cosima. He thought he perceived a half-condescending, half-resentful twinkle in her eyes. She knows! He fidgeted on his seat. He looked at his hands. His nails were dirty! He tried to hide them. The doilies on the chairs were so white! The ashtrays sparkled as though they hadn’t been used since her husband left — twenty years ago. Within his clinched palms he could
feel
the dirt under his nails. And his stiff white collar was cutting his neck, and a light film of perspiration was causing it to burn a little, and Rutherford’s shorts were beginning to tighten around his thighs because the sofa was covered with velvet material that prevented his pants from sliding evenly when
he moved. But now, to his infinite relief, he heard a noise at the top of the stair.

“Ah!” the lady exclaimed, no doubt as much relieved as he, and a little theatrically, he thought, a pleasant smile beguiling her face, no longer a resenter of men, simply a mother, enjoying the happiness of her only daughter at one of the most important moments of her life. Mary Ann stood at the top of the stair in a blazing white dress.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, carried away by her unexpected beauty.

She smilingly descended the stair with a studied ladylike dignity, her rich black hair falling around her nut-brown skin, eyes shining, the whites with a silvery shimmer broken by those long shadowy lashes that swept downward like the boughs of trees! over rushing waters reflecting moonlight.

When she reached the bottom of the stairs he presented his elegant flower box. It was tied with a luxurious silver ribbon fixed with a long pearl-headed pin.
MUEHLEBACH FLOWER SHOP
was written across one corner in elegant script. She beamed ecstatically as she fumbled with the ribbon and finally opened the box. Within it a lining of white silk paper upon which lay a corsage of three cold pale gardenias.

Boom!

A deep dark despair descended upon him.

Like a grave! Suddenly he was thinking of Cosima — as something, someone, dead!

“Aren’t you going to pin them on?” her mother was saying, smiling sweetly at his stupefaction as he fumbled futilely with the corpse of his beloved Cosima, pearl-headed pin in hand, jabbing at the delicate shoulder of Mary Ann’s dress.

“Here, let me!” said the mother, overcome by his confusion, pleased that her daughter had provoked such powerful emotion in the young man, pinning the flower on her own shoulder, pretty much as Viola had relieved his anxiety during the past few months and up to the very last when she had pinned the flower in his lapel, forcing Rutherford to exclaim:

“Aw, let the man go, for Christ sake!” pressing the twenty-dollar bill in his hand — plus five! he had discovered, as he had stepped out the door, as they, he and Mary Ann, were now doing, waving good-bye to the lone figure silhouetted behind the screen.

She’s crying, he thought.

When Mary Ann saw the limousine she could only exclaim: “Ah!” in a short breathless gasp that seemed to complete her feeling of
happiness. Rutherford opened the door with the courteous impersonality of a real chauffeur. In the backseat they held hands, but they did not look at each other. He could not look at Cosima, cold, pale, austere, unforgiving, impaled upon Mary Ann’s shoulder.

When they arrived the ball had already started. Soft music drifted down the corridors in distorted bursts of sound permeated by excited bursts of conversation and laughter. Just before they entered the hall he gave the toe of his new black shoe a quick swipe against the leg of his pants and wondered if his hair pomade was making his forehead greasy. There was nothing he could do about his nails at the moment. Mary Ann looked good enough to eat.

They entered the hall. A bevy of faces rushed up to meet them, all of Cosima’s and Mary Ann’s friends, in long pale organdies and taffetas and crepes, smiling, sparkling, with exclamations of congratulations and dramatic undertones of surprise, while he stood amid them covered with confusion subsumed by a feeling of blasphemy, of sacrilege, that such merriment should take place in the presence of the martyred dead. He looked stealthily around to see if
she
were there, but before he could complete his survey, he felt himself being swept away and flung into the midst of another group. Mary Ann showed her corsage to all her friends and flaunted her triumph he thought suddenly. He felt sick in the stomach. He felt dizzy. He made an attempt to escape.

“Come on, Mary Ann,” he said, “let’s dan —” but before he could utter the words, she let out a delighted squeal and ran toward the corner where
she
stood, alone: in a wine-colored organdy dress with a hooped skirt and a long stole of the same color draped over her shoulders. She looked as though she might have stepped out of another century, a lovely century peopled with beautiful, sad ladies who had suffered with dignity in the hands of misfortune, some queen whose king had abandoned her through some unavoidable importunity of fate, one to whom “something had happened.” Moved by the impact of his thought, a sense of fatality stole upon him and forced him to try to measure up to the tragic import of the moment.

“Oh, Cosima! I’m so
happy!
” Mary Ann was saying, throwing her arms around her. “Look!” thrusting forward the austere corsage on her shoulder. The gardenias looked so white, as though they had been compressed of the purest snow, the flesh of snow, at the feet of the ice-laden trees. Cosima kissed Mary Ann on the cheek without smiling, at which instant her gaze met his. It was as cold as death!

He and Mary Ann were moving away. While they were dancing he
noticed that Cosima’s father had reappeared. No one asked her to dance. She danced with her father, a tall, lean, thin-boned man with sensuous pink lips, who looked at the world through the slits of spectacled eyes, as they turned about, she like a moth imprisoned by the flame, the bright globes burning in the ceiling reflecting in the polished rims of his glasses.

They went home early. He caught a glimpse of her — behind Mary Ann’s ear — just as her stole whisked through the door.

After that Mary Ann’s ebullience became oppressive, the dance grew tiresome, the gardenias on her shoulder began to wither in the heat, to be crushed in the jostle of the dance. Finally the last piece had been played and the senior class had filed out of the hall in pairs. The “hip cats” were going to a nightclub and have a “ball,” and the “squares” were going home. Mary Ann leaned heavily on his shoulder, smiling a dreamy smile. As he slipped her wrap over her shoulders, she fell back into his arms and turned her face to his — under the staircase near the main entrance, they were alone.

Now? her eyes seemed to whisper.

He beheld her with an expression of hatred that he struggled to disguise by planting a feeble kiss upon her lips. Then he grabbed her by the arm and fled to the safety of the waiting limousine, she laughing all the while as though she were drunk, or a little mad.

He often saw them together during the few remaining days of the semester, but now they both avoided him.
Something had happened
, he knew, but why isn’t she mad at Mary Ann,
too!
And then:
Boom!
COSIMA KNEW IT ALL THE TIME!

In his despair he tried to console himself with the thought that actually she did love him, but had sacrificed him to the will of her father, the will of the white niggers! he added bitterly. Gradually a subtle hope fired his imagination and shone like a little sun upon the horizon of his consciousness in the form of the thought: This can’t be the end!… Somewhere … somehow.

Next Year!
thundered a voice.

BOOM!
retorted the shattering explosion from over the sea and over the sea and over the …

It’s a small miracle
Such Sweet Thunder
wasn’t lost to oblivion. Vincent Carter was living in Bern, Switzerland, when he completed the manuscript in 1963. He found a top-flight agent in New York who believed in the book and worked energetically to find a publisher. She sent many encouraging letters back to Vincent about this or that editor who loved the book but still needed to convince his or her colleagues to agree to take it on. No offer ever came. The book was too long, they said. It needed editing, which would require time and money. And even with further development and revision the chances for a commercial payoff would be too uncertain. By 1970 Vincent had given up on getting the manuscript published, and on the writer’s life, and he turned his attention to other passions. Long before this decision to set aside his typewriter, he had written to a friend in Paris, Herb Lottman, “I write in order to empty my form of its content so that I can stop dying and live once and for all.” Published or unpublished, the manuscript that would become
Such Sweet Thunder
had already achieved this purpose for him.

Though I think it’s fair to say that Vincent
was
Amerigo,
Such Sweet Thunder
is not memoir. It’s high art. Two of Vincent’s heroes were Shakespeare and Duke Ellington. He dedicated his book to Ellington because the Duke’s example was a major inspiration and influence. He wanted to achieve in literature what Ellington had been doing in music for decades, celebrating and embracing a mix of styles that he loved and admired, from classical to African American traditions and innovations to European modernism. But Vincent’s approach did not fit well with what New York publishing houses were looking for from black writers during the angry ’60s. In fact some of the best and widely read black American fiction writers of
the day, such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, were producing stinging works of nonfiction on the topic of race. Vincent’s work mounted no protest, though the content of his fiction makes clear that he was a “race man” to his core.

The only book Vincent Carter managed to publish during his lifetime was
The Bern Book: A Record of a Voyage of the Mind
, a memoir of being the only black man in Bern during the 1950s. It’s a daybook of digressions, filled with observations, insights, and personal biases.
The Bern Book
makes clear Vincent’s devotion to art to the exclusion of social commentary. A recurring theme is his inability, even in the relative isolation of his self-imposed Bernese exile, to escape the human insistence to freight so many considerations with race-based judgments. Goaded by his Swiss friends’ idealization of work songs and spirituals as “pure” expressions of the “true” nature of the Negro, Vincent writes: “The art of Marian Anderson represents the acme of what the Negro’s expression can reach. But what I have just said is ridiculous, for if this great lady can elevate Negro music to the level of ‘fine’ art, how then can I confine her excellence to her race? Is it not the main attribute of a work of art that it transcends itself through the very medium which it employs to express itself?”

Though completed in 1957,
The Bern Book
would not be published until 1973, and even then without much notice or circulation. It found its publisher by virtue of an essay written by the aforementioned Herb Lottman, who had become a biographer and culture critic, and published in 1970 in the journal
Cultural Affairs
. The essay was all about Vincent and called “The Invisible Writer.” If
The Bern Book
hadn’t been published, I’d never have heard of Vincent, and you wouldn’t be holding
Such Sweet Thunder
in your hands now. An author friend of mine came upon a copy of
The Bern Book
in a secondhand bookstore and alerted me to it, because I, like Vincent, am from Kansas City, and in it Vincent makes mention of his boyhood.