Things Invisible to See (12 page)

T
HE TELEPHONE IN DRAKE’S
Sandwich Shop stood in a booth at the back, behind the restrooms. Ben managed to park Hal’s vast Buick in front of the shop. But should he leave Clare in the car or carry her in? Or should he go through the long hassle of getting her on crutches? During the drive after lunch she had begun to liven up, and he saw traces of the spirited girl he’d met in the hospital.

It’s the heat in that house, he thought. It’s enough to put anyone to sleep.

The subject of Mr. Knochen had revived her. He was an itinerant spiritualist, she explained, who arranged séances in private houses. He did not claim to be a medium, only a believer who cleared the air of doubt so the dead could make themselves heard. The dead could speak through anybody they chose—and not only a person, either. They could speak through any object, and they could send you presents from far places. Why, a man in Philadelphia had received, over several years, a two-thousand-year-old coin from India, one English farthing, ten artificial gems, a child’s sleigh bell, a small seashell, and two fresh poppies out of season. He had also been robbed by spirits of a package of Turkish cigarettes. And a dead priest had sent his congregation in New York a ceramic ashtray marked Chicago Hilton. It sprang from the air and plummeted to the altar while the choir was singing “Nearer My God to Thee.” The dead could even gather vibrations and spiritual vapors in the room and put on the appearance of flesh.

“Isn’t there somebody you’d like to talk with in the other world?” asked Clare.

The quickness of his own reply surprised him, as if someone had spoken for him. “My dad.”

Ben was glad to find Drake’s nearly deserted as he shut himself into the telephone booth and dialed home. Glad not to be burdened, at this moment, with Clare. The telephone rang twice. Willie answered it.

“It’s me,” said Ben. “Listen, I have a big favor to ask you.”

“Not a cent,” said Willie.

“It’s not about money. It’s about Marsha.”

“What about Marsha?” asked Willie, in quite a different voice.

“Can you take her to the dance tonight?”

“Why aren’t you taking her?”

“I—things have gotten a little complicated here,” said Ben. “Sort of involved.”

“In what way involved?” persisted Willie.

“Don’t ask,” said Ben.

“Did you tell anyone that you were the—”

“No. Clare doesn’t know I’m the one who messed up her life. It doesn’t seem very important right now. Listen, the dance is at the Barton Hills Boat Club.”

“Gas is twelve cents a gallon,” murmured Willie.

“I’ll pay for the gas.”

Still Willie hesitated. “Lots of debutantes, I suppose.”

Money entered silently, like an eavesdropping operator.

“Oh, lots of them. You’ll have to buy Marsha a corsage. Her dress is black. Buy gardenias. She likes to wear gardenias on her wrist.”

“A corsage on her wrist?”

“You have to ask for it. I’ll pay,” said Ben. He didn’t say that Marsha often bought her own corsage, in case she didn’t like the one Ben bought her.

“What shall I say when she asks why you can’t take her?”

“Anything but the truth. You’ll think of something.”

Climbing into the car beside Clare, Ben felt sad and exhilarated: a traveler leaving home forever bound for the New World.

“Where shall we go now?” she asked.

“How about Island Park?” Again, the quickness of his own reply surprised him, as if someone had spoken for him. “Oh, Clare, I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. I’ve always loved Island Park.”

“Clare—why did you tell your folks I went to the University?”

“So they’d like you. Why did you tell them you’re majoring in geology?”

“God knows,” said Ben.

Indeed,
said God.

In any quiet town you can find a street, a field, a stand of trees, which breaks into the dreams of its citizens years after the dreamers have left home for good. For generations of dreamers in Ann Arbor the Island has beckoned, flickered, faded, and risen again. Yet Island Park is surely not different from other parks in other cities lucky enough to be divided by one of those lazy brown rivers that join shanties and brickyards to golf courses and boathouses. In summer the water is too shallow for a rowboat, but canoes from the livery on Barton Pond thread their way past black willow and wild cherry and crab apple, among islands large enough to offer standing room only to one adult human and five muskrats, or four otters and half a dozen mallards. There are picnic tables on the right bank, where the new road runs, and tall grass along the left bank, where the old road sleeps, and a bridge between them, big enough for one car to pass over. Once, whole families of Negroes who lived by the tracks that followed the river could be seen on that bridge, fishing for carp or crayfish.

A footbridge joins the right bank to the only island that could support a population larger than one adult human and five muskrats or four otters and half a dozen mallards. On the Island—for so it is called, as if no other island were worthy of the name—stands a modest Greek temple with a roof like the lid of a fancy tureen and a colonnade running all around. Is it a circular temple proper to the worship of Hermes in winged cap and winged sandals, sacred to crossroads, the messenger of the dead? Is it sacred to the genius of this place?

No. The temple is sacred to two toilets, hidden at opposite ends behind appropriately marked doors. From far off, the graffiti on the doors do not show and the rough plaster walls might pass for Carrara marble. On a spring morning, when the black willow is leafing and the wild cherry beginning to bloom, if you are taking the Wolverine to Detroit or Battle Creek, you might look out of the train window and think you are passing the temple of love on the sacred island of Cythera, as Watteau painted it. And long after you’ve forgotten where you are going and why you are going there, the temple will appear to you in dreams, and you will wonder if your soul lived here before it put on its burden of flesh.

On this cloudy day the temple hung over the river like a ghostly sepulcher. Snow added its cubits to the stature of the roof, the trees, the picnic tables spread as if with that hidden fabric called “the silence cloth” by housewives who keep it under the finer damask one, to absorb the clatter of dishes and silver. Snow softened the bare limbs of the bushes.

Under its roof of ice, the river sent up bubbles: the telegraphed laments of the fish.

A single twig was now a thing of great beauty: a wand, a power, a glory. A sign.

Ben turned down Catherine Street and passed the open arcade where tomorrow morning at eight the manager of the Farmer’s Market would walk up and down ringing a bell, to signify that the stalls were now open for business. During the winter only a few farmers huddled over small stoves behind their counters. Tomorrow the smell of kerosene would hang over the kale, dug out of snow fresh that morning, and over the cartons of eggs which had to be kept in the back of the trucks to prevent them from freezing.

Beyond the market rose a block of storefronts that belonged indisputably to the Negroes. There was a barbershop, a hardware store, a harness shop—in fine weather the bridles were hung around the doorway for show—and a secondhand store, which as long as anyone on the block could remember had displayed in its window a huddle of green glazed jars and liniment bottles filled with colored water. Sometimes they appeared in a row on the sidewalk. Nobody ever took them. They gave you the feeling they might cry out and the owner would hear them.

Behind the shops—and no white person had ever seen what lay behind the shops—was a graveyard for those who did not or could not get themselves properly buried in the Ebenezer Baptist cemetery. The graves looked like beds for penitents: a long slab of concrete studded with buttons, shells, beads, or nails. An iron pole joined headstone to footstone; in warm weather it held pots of geraniums and marigolds, night shade and devil’s claw. There were names but no inscriptions. In the headstone of Pharaoh Dawson was embedded the headlight of the Cadillac that carried him to a fiery death. From the stone of Sister Harriet Doyle rose an open hand, in whose palm gleamed a mirror, like a tiny frozen pond.

Nothing was broken, kicked over, or disturbed. Perhaps the faces on the little clay pots that grinned on the graves protected them. From deep sockets their eyes, made of mirrors or balls of white clay, seemed to glow, and though their teeth were no more than kernels of corn, a guilty visitor might see his own death grinning there. The Barbershop Cemetery, people said, was a mighty powerful place, and people went there for reasons that had nothing to do with honoring the dead.

The paved road gave way to brick and dipped sharply to the left, toward the river and the stone fortress that was the train station, a granite vision of Byzantium: towers, arches, porches, windows curved like giant keyholes, iced and glittering. Today, behind stained glass hidden by snow, the stationmaster knelt at the hearth and laid a fire. A handful of passengers stood waiting hopefully, listening for trains, postponing the moment when they must rush out to the cold platform where baggage carts waited like large, sad animals, their wheels frozen and clogged with snow.

Ben drove past the station and over the bridge. It was icier than it looked. He crept down the road to the picnic area and parked opposite the Island. Snow was falling now, weaving itself into a single fabric. He could barely make out the temple. Every familiar thing was taking itself away.

“We’d better go back,” said Ben. If the car got stuck, he would have to walk a mile for help and leave Clare to freeze in the front seat. But Clare stared out the window as if she saw through the snow to next summer and the picnic tables crowded with families.

“We were walking over there. Grandpa had just asked me why the devil is called Lucifer. And I told him it meant Light-Bringer, and I was just saying the verse, ‘How thou art fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning, how art thou cut to the ground.’ Then it happened. We didn’t know anybody was playing baseball across the river. We never heard their voices.”

“Did it hurt?” asked Ben. A dumb question, he knew. But he hungered for details. He needed to know what happened on her side of the river when he hit that ball into the dark.

“Not right away. I didn’t know what hit me. I woke up in the hospital. Then it hurt a lot.”

The snow hissed softly against the windshield.

“Maybe someday you’ll meet the fellow that did it.” Thin ice here.

“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

“Of course you were ready to kill him. Whoever it was.”

“I was angry at first, yes.”

“But you aren’t now?”

“It was an accident. It’s like being angry at the river because it drowns people.”

Ben shivered. The water, the earth, the very air, would take them all someday. It would take Clare and her father and mother, it would take her grandmother and her aunts and Davy and Wanda and Willie and Marsha and himself, would take all of them, would stop at nothing.

I could have killed her.

He kissed her, and without warning a piercing joy in the year’s first snow filled him. Good sledding. Good packing. No school today. Time opened at his feet and unrolled its white carpet into eternity.

Clare was watching him, bright-eyed as a squirrel.

“If we take off our clothes, we’ll freeze.” She laughed. “How do the Eskimos do it?”

“Like this,” he answered and lifted his body over hers to shield her from whatever could snatch her from him, out of this life.

W
ANDA SAT IN THE
kitchen, rubbing Crisco into her heels, listening for the click of the receiver.

“Was that Ben on the phone?”

“Um,” said Willie.

“Is something wrong? Was he in an accident?”

“Car trouble,” said Willie. He began flipping through the Yellow Pages with great purpose.

“He didn’t take the car,” Wanda remarked.

“He took somebody else’s car. I didn’t follow the whole story.”

“He hit somebody in somebody else’s car?” exclaimed Wanda.

“Mother, don’t worry. He called to say he’ll be coming home late.”

“He’s taking Marsha to the dance tonight, isn’t he?”

Willie shook his head. “I’m taking her.”

Now she felt certain Willie was shielding her from some terrible calamity.

“If Ben is in trouble, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you? I’ve always trusted you, Willie. Of course,” she added, “I’ve always trusted Ben, too.”

“I would, Mother. You know that.”

“Sit down. I’ll get my slippers on and make you a cup of coffee.” He looks as if he needs one, she thought.

He sat down opposite her at the kitchen table, still lost in the Yellow Pages, then jumped up.

“The florist closes at five on Friday. I’ve got to fly.”

He arrived at Pearson’s as a skinny girl with short blond curls was locking the door. She opened it a crack, just enough for her words to squeak through.

“I’m sorry, we’re closed.”

“You aren’t closed yet,” said Willie. “You just opened the door.”

“I opened it to tell you we’re closed.”

“But you opened it,” he reminded her, and, stepping back, he threw himself against the door. It flew open with a bang. The girl backed off, terrified. Willie hadn’t meant to scare her. In the green smock and white collar all Pearson employees were required to wear, she looked as pious as a choirboy.

“I need a corsage!” he exclaimed. The girl stepped behind the counter. “Did you order one?” she asked in a trembling voice.

“No. Don’t you have them already made up?”

“We have the individual orchids,” she answered.

“How much are the orchids?”

“All we have left are the three-dollar fancies.”

Willie winced. “Haven’t you got anything cheaper?”

“Our miniature orchid corsages are all sold.” His disappointment filled the room, and the girl felt vaguely responsible. “You might find something in the glass case. What color is her dress?”

“Whose?”

“The girl you’re getting the flowers for.”