Someone had been speaking as she came in, who now sat down. He was very young and he was dressed in the black robes of an evangelist. She wondered if he could be an evangelist, he did not seem to be much more than a boy. But he moved with great authority, the authority indeed of someone who has found his place and made his peace with it. As he sat down, a very thin girl walked up the aisle and the boy in black robes moved to the piano at the side of the altar.
“I remember Rufus,” the girl said, “from when he was a big boy and I was just a little girl—” and she tried to smile at the front-row mourners. Cass watched her, seeing that the girl was doing her best not to cry. “—me and his sister used to sit around trying to console each other when Rufus went off with the big boys and wouldn’t let us play with him.” There was a murmur of amusement and sorrow and heads in the front row nodded. “We lived right next door to each other, he was like a brother to me.” Then she dropped her head and twisted a white handkerchief, the whitest handkerchief Cass had ever seen, between her two dark hands. She was silent for several seconds and, once again, a kind of wind seemed to whisper through the chapel as though everyone there shared the girl’s memories and her agony and were willing her through it. The boy at the piano struck a chord. “Sometimes Rufus used to like me to sing this song.” the girl said, abruptly. “I’ll sing if for him now.”
The boy played the opening chord. The girl sang in a rough, untrained, astonishingly powerful voice:
I’m a stranger, don’t drive me away.
I’m a stranger, don’t drive me away.
If you drive me away, you may need me some day,
I’m a stranger, don’t drive me away.
When she finished she walked over to the bier and stood there for a moment, touching it lightly with both hands. Then she walked back to her seat.
There was weeping in the front row. She watched as Ida rocked an older, heavier woman in her arms. One of the men blew his nose loudly. The air was heavy. She wished it were over.
Vivaldo sat very still and alone, looking straight ahead.
Now, a gray-haired man stepped forward from behind the altar. He stood watching them for a moment and the black-robed boy strummed a mournful hymn.
“Some of you know me,” he said, finally, “and some of you don’t. My name is Reverend Foster.” He paused. “And I know some of your faces and some of you are strangers to me.” He made a brief bow, first toward Cass, then toward Vivaldo. “But ain’t none of us really strangers. We all here for the same reason. Someone we loved is dead.” He paused again and looked down at the bier. “Someone we loved and laughed with and talked with— and got mad at— and prayed over— is gone. He ain’t with us no more. He’s gone someplace where the wicked cease from troubling.” He looked down at the bier again. “We ain’t going to look on his face again— no more. He had a hard time getting through this world and he had a rough time getting out of it. When he stand before his Maker he going to look like a lot of us looked when we first got here— like he had a rough time getting through the passage. It was narrow.” He cleared his throat and blew his nose. “I ain’t going to stand here and tell you all a whole lot of lies about Rufus. I don’t believe in that. I used to know Rufus, I knew him all his life. He was a bright kid and he was full of the devil and weren’t no way in the world of keeping up with him. He got into a lot of trouble, all of you know that. A lot of our boys get into a lot of trouble and some of you know why. We used to talk about it sometimes, him and me— we was always pretty good friends, Rufus and me, even after he jumped up and went off from here and even though he didn’t never attend church service like I— we— all wanted him to do.” He paused again. “He had to go his way. He had his trouble and he’s gone. He was young, he was bright, he was beautiful, we expected great things from him— but he’s gone away from us now and it’s us will have to make the great things happen. I believe I know how terrible some of you feel. I know how terrible I feel— ain’t nothing I can say going to take away that ache, not right away. But that boy was one of the best men I ever met, and I been around awhile. I ain’t going to try to judge him. That ain’t for us to do. You know, a lot of people say that a man who takes his own life oughtn’t to be buried in holy ground. I don’t know nothing about that. All I know, God made every bit of ground I ever walked on and everything God made is holy. And don’t none of us know what goes on in the heart of someone, don’t many of us know what’s going on in our own hearts for the matter of that, and so can’t none of us say why he did what he did. Ain’t none of us been there and so don’t none of us know. We got to pray that the Lord will receive him like we pray that the Lord’s going to receive us. That’s all. That’s all. And I tell you something else, don’t none of you forget it: I know a lot of people done took their own lives and they’re walking up and down the streets today and some of them is preaching the gospel and some is sitting in the seats of the mighty. Now, you remember that. If the world wasn’t so full of dead folks maybe those of us that’s trying to live wouldn’t have to suffer so bad.”
He walked up and down behind the altar, behind the bier.
“I know there ain’t nothing I can say to you that sit before me— his mother and father, his sister, his kinfolks, his friends— to bring him back or to keep you from grieving that he’s gone. I know that. Ain’t nothing I can say will make his life different, make it the life that maybe some other man might have lived. It’s all been done, it’s all written down on high. But don’t lose heart, dear ones— don’t lose heart. Don’t let it make you bitter. Try to understand. Try to understand. The world’s already bitter enough, we got to try to be better than the world.”
He looked down, then over to the front row.
You got to remember,” he said, gently, “he was trying. Ain’t many trying and all that tries must suffer. Be proud of him. You got a right to be proud. And that’s all he ever wanted in this world.”
Except for someone— a man— weeping in the front row, there was silence all over the chapel. Cass thought that the man must be Rufus’ father and she wondered if he believed what the preacher said. What had Rufus been to him?— a troublesome son, a stranger while living and now a stranger forever in death. And now nothing else would ever be known. Whatever else had been, or might have been, locked in Rufus’ heart or in the heart of his father, had gone into oblivion with Rufus. It would never be expressed now. It was over.
“There’re some friends of Rufus’s here,” said Reverend Foster, “and they going to play something for us and then we going to go.”
Two young men walked up the aisle, one carrying a guitar, one carrying a bass fiddle. The thin dark girl followed them. The black-robed boy at the piano flexed his fingers. The two boys stood directly in front of the covered corpse, the girl stood a little away from them, near the piano. They began playing something Cass did not recognize, something very slow, and more like the blues than a hymn. Then it began to be more tense and more bitter and more swift. The people in the chapel hummed low in their throats and tapped their feet. Then the girl stepped forward. She threw back her head and closed her eyes and that voice rang out again:
Oh, that great getting-up morning,
Fare thee well, fare thee well!
Reverend Foster, standing on a height behind her, raised both hands and mingled his voice with hers:
We’ll be coming from every nation,
Fare thee well, fare thee well!
The chapel joined them, but the girl ended the song alone:
Oh, on that great getting-up morning,
Fare thee well, fare thee well!
Then Reverend Foster prayed a brief prayer for the safe journey of the soul that had left them and the safe journey, throughout their lives and after death, of all the souls under the sound of his voice. It was over.
The pallbearers, two of the men in the front row, and the two musicians, lifted the mother-of-pearl casket to their shoulders and started down the aisle. The mourners followe
d.
Cass was standing near the door. The four still faces passed her with their burden and did not look at her. Directly behind them came Ida and her mother. Ida paused for a moment and looked at her— looked directly, unreadably at her from beneath her heavy veil. Then she seemed to smile. Then she passed. And the others passed. Vivaldo joined her and they walked out of the chapel.
For the first time she saw the hearse, which stood on the Avenue, facing downtown.
“Vivaldo,” she asked, “are we going to the cemetery?”
“No,” he said, “they don’t have enough cars. I think only the family’s going.”
He was watching the car behind the hearse. Ida’s parents had already entered the car. She stood on the sidewalk. She looked around her, then walked swiftly over to them. She took each of them by one hand.
“I just wanted to thank you,” she said, quickly, “for coming.” Her voice was rough from weeping and Cass could not see her face behind the veil. “You don’t know what it means to me— to us.”
Cass pressed Ida’s hand, not knowing what to say. Vivaldo said, “Ida, anything we can do— anything I can do— anything—!”
“You’ve done wonders. You been wonderful. I’ll never forget it.”
She pressed their hands again and turned away. She got into the car and the door closed behind her. The hearse slowly moved out from the curb, and the car, then a second car, followed. Others who had been at the funeral service looked briefly at Cass and Vivaldo, stood together a few moments, and then began to disperse. Cass and Vivaldo started down the Avenue.
“Shall we take a subway?” Vivaldo asked.
“I don’t,” she said, “think I could face that now.”
They continued to walk, nevertheless, aimlessly, in silence. Cass walked with her hands deep in her pockets, staring down at the cracks in the sidewalk.
“I hate funerals,” she said, finally, “they never seem to have anything to do with the person who died.”
“No,” he said, “funerals are for the living.”
They passed a stoop where a handful of adolescents stood, who looked at them curiously.
“Yes,” she said. And they kept walking, neither seeming to have the energy it would have demanded to stop and hail a cab. They could not talk about the funeral now; there was too much to say; perhaps each had too much to hide. They walked down the wide, crowded Avenue, surrounded, it seemed, by an atmosphere which prevented others from jostling them or looking at them too directly or for too long a time. They reached the mouth of the subway at 125th Street. People climbed up from the darkness and a group of people stood on the corner, waiting for the bus.
“Let’s get that cab,” she said.
Vivaldo hailed a cab and they got in— as, she could not help feeling they had been expected to do— and they began to roll away from the dark, the violent scene, over which, now, a pale sun fell.
“I wonder,” he said. “I wonder.”
“Yes? What do you wonder?”
Her tone was sharper than she had intended, she could not have said why.
“What she means when she says she’ll never forget it.”
Something was going on in her mind, something she could not name or stop; but it was almost as though she were her mind’s prisoner, as though the jaws of her mind had closed on her.
“Well, at least that proves that you’re intelligent,” she said. “Much good may it do you.” She watched the cab roll down the Avenue which would eventually turn into the Avenue she knew.
“I’d like to prove to her— one day,” he said; and paused. He looked out of the window. “I’d like to make her know that the world’s not as black as she thinks it is.”
“Or,” she said, dryly, after a moment, “as white.”
“Or as white,” he said, mildly. She sensed that he was refusing to react to her tone. Then he said, “You don’t like her— Ida.”
“I like her well enough. I don’t know her.”
“I guess that proves my point,” he said. “You don’t know her and you don’t want to know her.”
“It doesn’t matter whether I like Ida or not,” she said. “The point is, you like her. Well, that’s fine. I don’t know why you want me to object. I don’t object. But what difference would it make if I did?”
“None,” he said, promptly. Then, “Well, some. I’d worry about my judgment.”
“Judgment,” she said. “has nothing to do with love.”
He looked at her sharply, but with gratitude, too. “For it’s love we’re talking about—?”
“For what you seem to be trying to prove,” she said, “It had better be.” She was silent. Then she said, “Of course, she may also have something to prove.”
“I think she has something to forget,” he said. “I think I can help her forget it.”
She said nothing. She watched the cold trees and the cold park. She wondered how Richard’s work had gone that morning; she wondered about the children. It seemed, suddenly, that she had been away a long time, had failed very great obligations. And all she wanted in the world right now was to get home safely and find everything as she had left it— as she had left it so long ago, this morning.
“You’re so juvenile,” she heard herself saying. She was using her most matronly tone. “You know so little”— she smiled— “about life. About women.”
He smiled, too, a pale, weary smile. “All right. But I want something real to happen to me. I do. How do you find out about”— he grinned, mocking her— “life? About women? Do you know a lot about men?”
The great numbers above faraway Columbus Circle glowed in the gray sky and said that it was twelve twenty-seven. She would get home just in time to make lunch.
Then the depression she had been battling came down again, as though the sky had descended and turned into fog.
“Once I thought I did,” she said. “Once I thought I knew. Once I was even younger than you are now.”
Again he stared at her but this time said nothing. For a moment, as the road swerved, the skyline of New York rose before them like a jagged wall. Then it was gone. She lit a cigarette and wondered why, in that moment, she had so hated the proud towers, the grasping antennae. She had never hated the city before. Why did everything seem so pale and so profitless: and why did she feel so cold, as though nothing and no one could ever warm her again?
Low in his throat Vivaldo hummed the blues they had heard at the funeral. He was thinking of Ida, dreaming of Ida, rushing ahead to what awaited him with Ida. For a moment she hated his youth, his expectations, possibilities, she hated his masculinity. She envied Ida. She listened to Vivaldo hum the blues.
3
On a Saturday in early March, Vivaldo stood at his window and watched the morning rise. The wind blew through the empty streets with a kind of dispirited moan; had been blowing all night long, while Vivaldo sat at his worktable, struggling with a chapter which was not going well. He was terribly weary— he had worked in the bookstore all day and then come downtown to do a moving job— but this was not the reason for his paralysis. He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him. They were all named, more or less, all more or less destined, the pattern he wished them to describe was clear to him. But it did not seem clear to them. He could move them about but they themselves did not move. He put words in their mouths which they uttered sullenly, unconvinced. With the same agony, or greater, with which he attempted to seduce a woman, he was trying to seduce his people: he begged them to surrender up to him their privacy. And they refused— without, for all their ugly intransigence, showing the faintest desire to leave him. They were waiting for him to find the key, press the nerve, tell the truth. Then, they seemed to be complaining, they would give him all he wished for and much more than he was now willing to imagine. All night long, in an increasing rage and helplessness, he had walked from his worktable to his window and back again. He made himself coffee, he smoked cigarettes, he
looked at the clock— and the night wore on, but his chapter didn’t and he kept feeling that he ought to get some sleep because today, for the first time in several weeks, he was seeing Ida. This was her Saturday off, but she was having a cup of coffee with one of her girl friends in the restaurant where she worked. He was to meet her there, and then they were to visit Richard and Cass.
Richard’s novel was about to be published, and it promised to be very successful. Vivaldo, to his confusion and relief, had not found it very remarkable. But he had not had the courage to say this to Richard or to admit to himself that he would never have read the novel if Richard had not written it.
All the street sounds eventually ceased— motors, and the silky sound of tires, footfalls, curses, pieces of songs, and loud and prolonged good nights; the last door in his building slammed, the last murmurs, rustling, and creaking ended. The night grew still around him and his apartment grew cold. He lit the oven. They swarmed, then, in the bottom of his mind, his cloud of witnesses, in an air as heavy as the oven heat, clustering, really, around the desired and unknown Ida. Perhaps it was she who caused them to be so silent.
He stared into the streets and thought— bitterly, but also with a chilling, stunned sobriety— that, though he had been seeing them so long, perhaps he had never known them at all. The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived— nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died— through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life. For if he had ever been present, then he was present still, and his world would open up before him.
Now the girl who lived across the street, whose name, he knew, was Nancy, but who reminded him of Jane— which was certainly why he never spoke to her— came in from her round of the bars and the coffee houses with yet another boneless young man. They were everywhere, which explained how she met them, but why she brought them home with her was a somewhat more sinister question. Those who wore their hair long wore beards; those who wore theirs short felt free to dispense with this useful but somewhat uneasy emphasis. They read poetry or they wrote it, furiously, as though to prove that they had been cut out for more masculine pursuits. This morning’s specimen wore white trousers and a yachting cap, and a paranoiac little beard jutted out from the bottom half of his face. This beard was his most aggressive feature, his only suggestion of hardness or tension. The girl, on the other hand, was all angles, bone, muscle, jaw; even her breasts seemed stony. They walked down the street, hand in hand, but not together. They paused before her stoop and the girl staggered. She leaned against him in an agony of loathing, belching alcohol; his rigidity suggested that her weight was onerous; and they climbed the short steps to the door. Here she paused and smiled at him, coquettishly raising those stony breasts as she pulled back her hair with her hands. The boy seemed to find this delay intolerable. He muttered something about the cold, pushing the girl in before him.
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