Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “No making up with Hunt? No running back to Sea Island? No juggling me and dinner at the Driving Club?”

  “No. None of that. Okay, so how long do you want us to be together, then?”

  “I don’t know. You can’t possibly know, either. Like I said, I don’t see an end. I’ll tell you if I do. I want you to promise the same thing. And if you ever want things to…change, I want to know about that, too.”

  I knew what he meant. He meant that he knew that the day might well come when I would want more, when I would want permanence, a long commitment. Wasn’t it what we all wanted, we young women of this time in the world? Despite all the popular cant about love and freedom, hadn’t all our lives been about that; hadn’t we been drilled and groomed and programmed for just that?

  I sat at his side in the early afternoon sun and realized with surprise that I did not want that, and perhaps never had. Maybe, I thought, that was the source of the blackness after all, not the Church, not guilt, not God. Maybe it was the very heaviness of the rest of my life hanging over me. I did not want the rest of my life to be decided now. I wanted only this moment. I wanted this moment to go on endlessly, without the elephantine weight of St. Philip’s Cathedral hanging over me, of the starter house in Brookwood Hills, of the huge pink shadow of the Sea Island house. If I saw anything ahead of me at this moment it was this moment, stretching out to infinity. Work; laughter; music; talk; Matt and his great, mercurial talent and his quicksilver mind and his blatting Bahamian taxi horn; Tom with his gentleness and his beautiful body and dry sweet smile; Teddy with her staunch, loving heart; Hank with his buoyant constancy; bylines and honors and opening nights and long lunches and blue cocktail hours full of preening and laughter; the bite and shine of Downtown; the days and nights of Lucas Geary; his eyes and my voice together, making life-changing wholes: images, words. His and mine. Just now. Just this.

  There was nothing in any of it to hurt me. Nothing in all of Lucas Geary that could hurt me as Brad Hunt had hurt me with a half a minute’s worth, yesterday, of words.

  “So what else did you do?” Teddy said. “Besides fuck like minks, I mean?”

  We laughed longer at that than it warranted. Then I said, “Oh, Teddy, everything. Nothing. But it was a wonderful day. I think it was the best day I ever spent.”

  “Oh, shit,” she said. “You’re going to be absolutely impossible in love. Some people are.”

  I had spoken the truth. Luke and I had, essentially, done nothing; and yet I still remember the first day we were together as if it were burned into the cells of my brain. There was a clarity about it like bright water; everything shimmered with import. After lunch we had sat long on the little deck, watching the angle of the sun change in the blue bowl of the sky above us, drinking the half bottle of cold white chablis we had found in his small refrigerator, and talking. We talked as if we had been talking together all our lives; there was no sense of beginning in our conversation. Always, Luke’s and my words to each other have been more like continuations to me. I learned more about him and he did about me, and yet, that long, slow afternoon, they did not seem new, but like things we had only, for a little while, forgotten about each other. Under the talk the secret, tickling tug of the new physical wanting lay like a living thing.

  “Who is Sonny Pickens?” I said.

  “I’m not really sure. One of the new ones, one of the Berkeley bunch that wasn’t around at Selma and Lowndes County. I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never met one. Real sharp. Real angry. Real black. Into black power in a big way; the guns and the leather jackets and the berets and the salute, the whole nine yards. A hundred and eighty degrees away from the movement in the South; nothing nonviolent about these cats. Want to take the reins from the SCLC and even the moderate blacks in SNCC and CORE. Want to throw all the whites, even the most liberal ones, completely out of the loop. I know they’ve been recruiting big time in the North, in the places where the riots have been the worst and the war is heavy. What I don’t know is what guys like Sonny are doing down here. If they’re trying to enlist some of King’s guys they’d do better to let the ones like Juanita have a crack at them. At least she’s got a history with the troops down here. She was a proper little freedom rider and a support sister before she turned militant. And she’s got contacts.”

  “John, you mean.”

  “Yeah. But they all remember her from Selma and Lowndes. She was one of the best before she went over.”

  “You think she’s trying to get John to be a Panther? From what you tell me that’s a losing battle. At least, if he’s all that loyal to Dr. King.”

  “He is,” Luke said. “It’s just that…he thinks some things that should be happening aren’t. Or aren’t happening fast enough. Or maybe never will. He’s really vulnerable right now. I wish to hell she’d go on back to wherever her home base is. I think old Sonny was a bad mistake and she probably knows that. Never should have brought that dude into the epicenter of the movement. She’ll probably take him and go on home now. Get him out of Dodge.”

  “I wonder,” I said. “It looked to me like she had more in mind than turning John into a Panther.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, Lord, Luke, don’t be dense. You’ve got eyes. Didn’t you see how she was hanging all over him? Like getting him back into bed.”

  “That would be the lesser of several evils,” Luke said.

  “Maybe not,” I said thoughtfully.

  “Listen, I’ve got some champagne,” he said. “You want some? Let’s drink a little, and then I’m going to go develop some film before John comes by. Can you find something to do, read or listen to music, or something?”

  “Or something,” I said, and reached over and ran my fingernail down his stomach to the top of the towel.

  “I’ll develop fast,” he grinned, and went and got the champagne. It was lovely, silky, tingling stuff, in a beautiful dark green bottle with a red wax seal. I did not know the brand, only that it must be expensive.

  “Where’d you get it?” I said.

  “My landlady. I fixed her transmission. Or her transition, as she calls it.”

  He got up and went into the small darkroom off his minuscule kitchen, taking his glass with him. I dressed and combed my hair and sat, bare feet tucked under me, on the big velvet sofa in his living room, sipping at the champagne left in my glass and looking around the place where he lived.

  It was not like any of the singles’ apartments I had been in in Atlanta; it had about it, in the pale afternoon sunlight, a feeling of age and a kind of elegant oddness that struck me as exotic, foreign. I remembered then that his landlady the widow had furnished the little house with her own pieces, and that she had been born in Vienna and was said to be wealthy in the fusty, dark, mittel-European way of many Viennese. The carriage house looked it, with its tall glass bookcases and enormous, dark, carved armoires and wing chairs and its many faded, tasseled silk pillows and its large, dark, gilt-framed paintings of deep-bosomed women and bearded men. Bits of decorative china and glass were scattered everywhere, and I knew that they were not Luke’s, but somehow the overall ambience of the place suited him. The hundreds upon hundreds of books and records and the sound equipment and a few pieces of African sculpture were, I knew, his additions. Oddly, they did not clash with the widow’s things. The place spoke of Luke Geary even with little actual physical evidence of him.

  I was stretched out on the sofa listening to Carmina Burana and reading Walker Percy when a light rap on the screened door broke into my mindless contentment and I looked up to see John Howard standing just outside it, on the cottage’s doorstep.

  “Come in,” I called, and he did, and stood looking at me, squinting his yellow wolf’s eyes against the gloom.

  “Hey, Smoky,” he said, as if he was accustomed to finding me alone in Luke’s living room. “Luke around?”

  “Processing film,” I said. “He’ll be done in a little while. Want some champagne? We opened a bottle and
didn’t drink much, and it’s just sitting there going flat. It’s lovely stuff. Let me get you a glass.”

  “Well…yeah. Thanks. Champagne sounds just right for a September Saturday,” he said, smiling, and I padded out to the kitchen and came back with the bottle and a clean, stemmed glass. It had small flowers etched on the bowl, millefleur, I thought they were called. The widow again.

  Luke called a greeting from the closed door of the darkroom and John Howard yelled back affably, and raised his glass to me.

  “Cheers, Smoky,” he said. “To Andre. And don’t worry about the Life thing. Luke said you were. It’s not going to have any repercussions. Nobody much reads it in my crowd.”

  “Little do you know,” I said. “But thanks. John, I loved last night. Meeting Dr. King was something I’ll never forget. There’s just such—I don’t know—goodness about him. It must mean a lot to work with him. How did you get hooked up with him, anyway?”

  He laughed. It was a rich sound, relaxed. He looked elegant and remote sitting across from me in the widow’s wing chair, sipping the champagne. He wore jeans and a neatly pressed blue oxford cloth shirt, the sleeves rolled up on his bronze forearms. It was like having a Remington statue for cocktails.

  “I guess you might say I ran away and joined him like you would the circus, because I was mad at my daddy,” he said.

  “Tell,” I said.

  I knew I would not have said that to John Howard the day before. The woman who did it now was not the girl who had gone to lunch yesterday and watched her future crumble at her feet. I did not know what had changed me, not precisely, anyway. Of course, I had crossed the great Rubicon that had always separated girls from women, at least in Corkie; was now someone who had done what had been known in my parochial circles as the Dirty Deed or the Black Act. I had passed over. I could never again be someone who did not know how it was. But I could not think that was why, suddenly, I felt easy and equal with John Howard. Nevertheless, I did. Perhaps it was all simply a part of the vivid, crystal-edged day.

  “Well, I was just out of law school and trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life,” John said. “I was twenty-six years old and I’d been in school one way or another since I was seven. I’d thought I wanted to preach, but somehow the call I thought I had when I was a teenager had sort of faded out; with everything going on in the early sixties preaching just seemed kind of sideline stuff to me. I don’t think I was ever touched with the fire. And to tell you the truth, I think the ministry was always more a way to get at my dad than a real calling. He really wanted me in one of the professions that made some bucks, wanted me to have what he called a decent life out of the ghetto. I don’t know why he thought I’d end up in the ghetto; none of my family ever even saw one. But anyway, I went on to Howard to law school more to make peace with him than from any burning desire to practice law. And, of course, to put off preaching. I’ve done some of that, enough to know that I’m no leader of men, much less a pipeline from God. So I got my degree and went on back to St. Louis that spring to look around some, see where I might get a job. But all the time the Civil Rights movement was pulling at me; it seemed indecent somehow to just sit it out in St. Louis. I thought I ought to go somewhere and get a little taste of it, see what it was all about. The march on Washington came up that summer, and I decided to go. My father went straight into orbit. The last thing he said, as my bus rolled off for Washington, was ‘I hope you get arrested.’”

  “Shit, that’s just what my old man told me when my bus left Baltimore,” Luke said, coming into the room. He slapped John Howard on the shoulder and walked over and dropped a kiss on the top of my head. I felt myself color. I looked obliquely at John Howard, and he smiled back at me and nodded slightly, as if he was conferring a benediction, but he said nothing.

  “Y’all met there,” I said. Luke had told me that much.

  “Yeah, we met very elegantly standing in line for one of the outdoor toilets SCLC had put up behind their headquarters,” Luke said. “We noticed each other immediately. There we were, two skinny kids in seersucker suits and madras ties and brushcuts, standing in line with all the overalls and work shirts and peace pendants and sandals. We looked at each other and started laughing, and I pulled off my tie and he did his, and we balled them up and threw them over behind the toilets and tied our coats around our waists and rolled up our shirt-sleeves, and walked over and shook hands with each other. Pulling that tie off and slinging it behind a Porta Potty was the biggest act of liberation I’d ever made in my life, besides getting on the bus in Baltimore. I think it was for John, too. After that we went to hell pretty fast.”

  “After King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech there wasn’t any doubt that I was going to follow him,” John said. “I didn’t even call home. I got on one of the buses that was going back to Atlanta from Washington and Luke came with me. I didn’t know what to do with him; here was this skinny kid so white his face shone like new money on a bear’s behind, as somebody said about him on the bus, dragging his little Samsonite suitcase and all these cameras around his neck. I liked him, but I didn’t exactly think he was an asset on that bus. But he was like a stray dog; I couldn’t lose him. When we got to Atlanta I went on down to SCLC headquarters and found Dr. King—he was always accessible when he was in town; I just walked into his office—and told him I was a new lawyer and I wanted to work for him and he didn’t have to pay me anything until he saw whether he could use me or not. Luke was right behind me, saying the same thing. Turned out they could use a photographer a lot quicker than they could a lawyer; Luke went out immediately with a bunch of them to cover voter registration in Mississippi, and I got stuck in Atlanta doing pro bono scutwork. It was a year before they even let me get anybody out of jail. I ended up doing some assistant stuff over at Atlanta University, and some tutoring; it gave me a little money and a place to live. I still do that, and I’ve still got that student apartment. Luke, as you know, went on to fame and fortune by getting his foot stepped on by a police hoss in Selma. And the rest is history. As they say.”

  “Yeah,” I said, smiling. “It literally is, isn’t it? And you got as close to Dr. King as anybody ever has. Why you, John?”

  It was a presumptuous question, but I did not intend it that way and he did not take it as such.

  “I think,” he said, leaning back and holding his glass up to the light, so that the pale gold bubbles danced and swirled, “it was because he knew a penitent little elitist when he saw one. He’d been one himself. He wasn’t always a quote, man of the people, you know. He was raised a lot like me; he was sheltered and educated and pretty cultured. He literally made himself over so he could talk the talk and walk the walk; he became the ultimate common man so he could touch and move his people, do something for them. It must have taken an enormous act of love and will. And it changed me to be around him. I’ll never have his total empathy with the rank and file of the movement, but I’ve learned from him that they’re what it’s all about. They’re the important ones, the so-called little people. The poor folks. This is their fight. Martin’s given himself to them utterly, and I’ve tried to follow in his footsteps. I haven’t totally succeeded, but it’s given me myself in a way nothing else ever could. Being with him did that.”

  We were quiet for a spell. It was an extraordinary speech, I thought. The most extraordinary thing about it was that he had spoken it so openly and naturally in front of me. I was moved nearly to tears, but said nothing. To have spoken would have been, somehow, both arrogant and callow.

  “So,” Luke said. “How’d the rest of the party go last night? Didn’t look like Tony and Rosser took to ol’ Sonnyboy too well. Who is he, exactly, John?”

  John Howard made an impatient gesture.

  “One of the new young ones that took up with Huey and Bobby out at Merritt, in Oakland,” he said. “I don’t know much about him beyond that. I think he was at Berkeley for a year, and then he got in on the hoohaw at the California state legislature.
There are a bunch like him coming along; never been South, never marched, never sat-in, never did any jail time, never did have the foggiest notion what Martin is talking about. They’re too young and they’re all mad as shit. They like the guns and the tough talk and the uniforms; it’s like playing war. Nothing’s real to them yet. I’m afraid by the time it is, they’re going to have done a lot of damage. Things got really ugly last night after y’all left. I had to frog-march the little bastard out the back door before somebody beat the shit out of him.”

  “What happened?”

  “He said some bad stuff about Martin. Hell, that’s not unusual, nowadays. It’s just that he picked the wrong place to say it.”

  “I thought last night the vibes were bad,” Luke said. “I told Smokes Dr. King reminded me of an old lion surrounded by jackals, or something.”

  “The king must die,” I said, thinking of a seminar in classical mythology I had had in college. “You know, the myth that the king had to die, to be sacrificed ritually, and another had to take his place to insure that the crops came in and life went on. Almost all cultures have it in one way or another. I thought about it when Kennedy was shot.”

  John Howard looked at me somberly.

  “Yeah, well, that’s almost exactly what Sonny said, although I’d bet my boots that dude wouldn’t know classical mythology from cat piss. What he said was, ‘King is dead, you know.’ Sat right there and said it as Martin was leaving the room with Tony and Rosser. I don’t know if Martin heard him, but the other two were back there like a shot. Asked him what the hell he meant, and he just smiled that jackass smile and said, ‘He was dead when Stokely raised his fist in Greenwood and the crowd hollered “Black Power!” He’s walkin’ around dead, only he don’t know it, and you all don’t, either. That was the beginning of the end for the old movement, brothers.’”

  Luke’s indrawn breath hissed, and I shivered.