“There’s your ol’ lady, man!” Roy yelled, and for an instant Amerigo contemplated dashing his brains out on the rails below. Instead he fled to the other side of the street and half stumbled, half walked up the hill, alone, his eyes fixed upon the ground, and tried to pretend that he had not heard the derisive “Huh!” that had issued from the lips of one of the girls.
Was it Cosima? he wondered. That she had to hear it from that bastard! Like that! Her!
His diminished black body moved laboriously toward the summit of the great hill. Over the hazardous terrain of the age of her knowing.
Finally, after a tremendous effort, he entered the music room and took his seat a little before the bell rang. The hated room bubbled with the telling of the events of the last summer. Things had changed. There were several new men in the choir. Roscoe, Edna, Earline, Cecil, Virgil, and Sidney were gone. Dave was going with Susie now, and Betty was “sweet” on John, Willie and Pauline had had a “falling out,” Odell had been a playground instructor, Lydia had dropped out of school and had a job. Cosima entered the room and took a seat just in front of him.
Rrrrrrrring!
As the sound died away, Mr. Rogan entered in a flutter of nervous effeminate movement, in a perfectly tailored new blue serge suit, an off-white silk shirt, a soft blue tie, and a new pair of tan shoes.
“Look at that cat!” Carrol T. exclaimed, at which the others also exclaimed and whistled.
“All right!” cried Mr. Rogan, feigning anger, but the uproar continued.
“I said all right! Shut up! or get the hell out of here!” Silence. Then after two minutes, posing now behind the desk, his nose stuck up in the air, as though the room were filled with a bad smell, he began in an artificial tone: “I’m — eh — verreh pa-leased to see that seo meneh of you — eh — ledes and gentlemen have managed to return to us.” He spoke of the schedule of concerts the choir was to give in the coming year, and concluded by announcing that the choir was to have an accompanist. “To those of you who don’t know her,” shooting a facetious look at Amerigo, “I’d like to introduce Miss Cosima Thornton, who has been studying music at the conservatory and is one of our most promising young pianists. Miss Thornton, would you be seo kind as to take a seat at the piaaaano!” She rose and seated herself at the piano. “All right,” he resumed, “we’re going to run down the old repertoire so that Miss Thornton can get acquainted with some of our standard arrangements.” He raised his arms, held them suspended for a second, and then down! — at which the word, “OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” issued from sixty-five mouths. “My good LO — ORD — show me the WAAAAAAY!”
He studied her face in profile, as her fingers flitted excitedly, nervously over the keys, as her lips trembled and her eyes darted over the notes on the page.
She looks kinda like Mom. He studied her large brown eyes and the strong ridge that outlined her lips. But her eyebrows were different, rather heavy and almost meeting over the bridge of her nose, while a soft, barely perceptible fuzz grew on the side of her face. Her hair was different, too, a thick mass of reddish brown curls, which made her head seem too large for her thin neck and sloping shoulders. She’s sort of ugly! he thought with astonishment, suddenly smiling as a burst of warm affection flooded his senses. She reminded him of Toodle-lum! His smile deepened, a smile of remembering. How ridiculous it was, and yet how accurate the comparison seemed! But then, there was in her nature a nervous explosive quality that Toodle-lum did not have, not merely thinness, fragility, but the flighty fragility of a butterfly! And she always wore flowing things with a close neckline and skirts just a little too long. Now she made him think of Aunt Rose! Something about the lively expression in her eyes, they seemed to talk, to give expression to nuances of feeling that rendered words unneccessary. He stared at her neck.
Gradually he became aware of a dead silence that seemed to engulf him and interrupt the flow of his reverie like an intrusive sound. It woke him up. He looked about him, at Mr. Rogan, at her, sitting at the piano with her hands folded in her lap. She looked at the piano keys, but the rest of the class looked at him with expectant smiles on their faces.
“Mister Jones!” said Mr. Rogan in a cold incisive tone, “please forgive me for disturbing you, but would you be so kind as to tell me who — in your opinion — is directing this choir?”
“You.”
“Oh? I thought by the way you have been staring at Miss Thornton instead of looking at me that she was directing it!”
General laughter, gales of laughter, splashing against the cobblestones up and down the alley like summer rain, and swirling through the holes in the sewer lid where it whirred like the sound of the sea.
“Now let’s try it — a-gaine!” said Mr. Rogan. “And let us pray that the lunk-head second tenors come in on time!”
“Oooooooh — my good Lo-ord — show me the waaaay!”
Rrrrrrrrring!
He allowed himself to be washed through the door and down the hall into the French class where she sat in the first row, he in the third next to Mary Nixon who sat next to Mary Ann who smiled sympathetically at him, while the pretty-legged French teacher lectured and then asked questions. He stumbled through a translation and got his lip hung up on the eu, and was more than grateful when the bell rang. He fled toward the stinking odor of sulfuric acid that was chemistry under Mr. North, the shy, boy-faced chemistry professor whom he imagined to have been born in a test tube. He sat on the front row two seats from her, lucky Melvin Humphreys on the other side, whispering and smiling about something. By straining a little he could see, without attracting Mr. North’s attention, the tip of her nose and the fine pattern of the hairs on her legs.
Geometry was a desert, a wasteland dominated by a frightful tyrant, a neat brown-skinned man of small stature with wavy slickeddown hair and a mustache and polished fingernails and a mellow voice like Ronald Colman’s. There was a rumor afloat that he was mad as a result of shellshock during the World War and was subject to fits of violence when one could not ascertain the third side of a triangle. Besides, she was not there. And he was hungry, and tired, he could never sit still. The effort of avoiding geometry wearied him. The bell rang and he fled to the cafeteria, where he managed to find an inconspicuous place two tables away, facing her. Once, or was it his fancy only? It seemed that she smiled faintly — ever so faintly! — at him!
After lunch, English. Miss Southern, over forty-five, well preserved, with a worldly, slightly wicked sense of humor, and wise. Like a queen, but not the queen, more like Queen Elizabeth I, but darker, of course. She had a skin like tan satin, with a smudge of pink on her cheeks under her dark burning rimless spectacled eyes. Her speech was perfect and she never washed her face with soap. Creams.
He and Cosima sat side by side! in a heavenly atmosphere that reeked with the scent of sonnets.
“And don’t be afraid when you read Shakespeare!” Miss Southern was saying. “He wasn’t anything but a man. Made out of flesh and blood, just like any other man. They’re all alike, anyway. This one just happens to have been a genius. His language is personal. His sonnets are kind of like — like the blues. Just imagine Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday singing about trouble, about being tired and worried, about being in love with some no-good man. You’re old enough to know love. Think about the one you love, the fair skies and muddy waters you’ve seen — and then read the man! Now who wants to read?”
Fingers popped in the air like whip-ends, while he stared dumbfounded at the page of verse and struggled to discover his voice, to set his tongue, to squeeze an upsurging feeling into audible shape. He squirmed in his seat in order to get his body into the right position, and when the impulse was ready he raised his hand and popped his fingers desperately. But he was too late.
“All right, Miss Appleton — you try,” Miss Southern was saying. She began to read.
NO! That’s not it! That’s not the way to say it! he thought, unable to sit still. Before she could finish he was wriggling in his
seat so excitedly that Miss Southern had to give him a silencing glance, which she, with benevolent humanity, tempered with a smile. When Miss Appleton had finished she nodded to him and said: “All right, Amerigo, say the thing.”
He took the book tenderly in his hands and fixed his eyes upon the opening line, struggling all the while to control the emotion that so overpowered his voice that it was only with the greatest effort that he could utter the first word. It half stumbled, half fell from his lips in a hoarse groan, followed by a fit of stuttering and desperate attempts to pick up the line. Then he fell into the throes of an impotent rage, and then the burning heat of a crushing humiliation, followed by a feeling of dread, and then silence. A terrible infinite silence, ringing with the aftertones of remembered words that intimidated him by the suddenness of the impact with which they bombarded his consciousness:
Now?
The other students had begun waving their hands. He cleared his throat and struggled to speak.
“Ruth,” said Miss Southern.
NO! he thought, It’s coming! It’s coming!
His lips quivered.
“Ruth — you try.…”
Ruth read, and when she had finished, Miss Southern and all the members of the class agreed that she had read the sonnet very well. He could only shake his head in protest. That was not it. She had not said it. The anguish one felt due to the indifference of his beloved was not like that at all. He searched for the right words with which to explain to the class and to her what he meant. But the spiteful bell rang before he had a chance to gather his murdered feeling into his arms and breathe the breath of life into it. He was the last to leave the room. As he passed through the door, his eyes met those of Miss Southern who regarded him with the faint trace of a sympathetic smile.
She knows, he thought, and proceeded wearily to the next class, and to the next, and ever and ever to the next, filled with the reverberations of the questions that he burned to answer, but failed to answer, again and again, because the magnitude of his feeling dammed up the stops of his sensibility, rang in his eyes and ears, filled his mouth, his nostrils, like the pealing of a great bell, filled the channels of his being with a great roaring wind that broke up into a flux of incoherent intonation, as though of a world being consumed by flames. Through season after season of still another year.
“You sick?” Viola asked. They were having supper.
“No.”
“You look kinda peaked to me. Stick out your tongue.”
He stuck out his tongue. Rutherford looked up from his paper and looked at him searchingly.
“What’s the matter, son?”
“Nothin’.”
“That all you gonna eat?” Viola asked, noticing that he had eaten only one pork chop.
“I’m not hungry.”
Rutherford returned to his paper, to the big headlines spread out across the front page of the Star telling about the war that was raging in Europe. It said that England was in it, alone now, and that France had fallen and that the president was urging all-out aid to the Allies and that an increase in the national budget was requested. There were maps with the countries of Europe drawn on them with scales and numbers at the bottom to indicate the distances and arrows to show where the German armies were, where the submarines were, and where the Allies were retreating to and from.
Over the sea and over the sea and over the sea to … he thought, relieved to be able to articulate a thought, any thought, as he slipped into the bloodred room, regretting and yet strangely welcoming the loud Boom of war. It made him smile, then snigger, and then slobber, and choke, and momentarily awaken to the thought: I did it! He laughed, as he sank deeper into the depths of the room that was as red as blood, through the bottom of the redness that was blacker than he.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! exploded from the porch six times.
“Let me have a crack at it!” T. C. cried. He stepped beside Rutherford and leveled the big forty-five upon a nearby star.
AWHOOM! AWHOOM! AWHOOMAWHOOM! AWHOOM! AWHOOM!
“Hot damn!” Rutherford exclaimed:
AWHOOM! the forty-five replied, amid the ringing of bells and other bursting, exploding sounds that echoed throughout the city. Like a big chain reaction, he thought, from over the sea and over the sea.… And from a strange part of the South Pacific, hearing the tramp tramp tramp of marching feet and the banners of war interspersed with stars heralding the coming of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the King of Peace.
“F-o-r — unto us a child is bor-orn!” he could hear the choir singing, “unto us, a Son is given! Unto us —”
AWHOOM! AWHOOM! AWHOOM! hallelujahed the smoking forty-five.
He looked at his mother and father and the host who gathered in the front room, their faces flushed with optimism, animated by a frenzied relief due to the fact that at last something was happening.
“God is on our side!” exclaimed the bells and Joe Louis.
“Pray,” Miss Jenny whispered.
God bless A — merica! Kate Smith sang out, just after the moon had gone over the mountain.
“This our country, too!” Rutherford’s voice exclaimed. “If they let us fight. And then — when it’s all over — they’ll see how loyal we were. They gotta give us our rights then!”
Next Year? He saw his question explode into a great flame and fall around the charred ruins of Harvard and Yale.
He, the battalion adjutant of the North High ROTC, strode through the yellowish blue light of an early Monday morning on his way to school, Sam Brown belt, brass buttons, and shoes shining, glistening saber clanking at his side, a senior who knew and knew that he knew. A worried fretful impatience stole upon him as he proceeded up Eighteenth Street. As he drew near her house his breath quickened. Her door opened and she stepped out and crossed the street, little jets of steam escaping from her mouth. He behind her, but not too close. From the bridge they heard the first bell ring. She quickened her pace. He behind her at a discreet distance. There was no one else on the street. He could hear her tiny feet crunching through the frozen snow.
In a kind of sweet miserable delirium he pursued her, his eyes and nose running from the January cold, but not too close. Her hair bobbled up and down, and by the way she carried her head he knew that she knew that it was he who followed her, though at a respectable distance.
He stared at her neck, and she began to walk faster, as though fired by a sense of urgency. He, too, accelerated his pace, his saber clanking against his leg. Once, when he almost tripped over it, she looked back, and their glances met for a fleeting instant, just as they gained the walk over which they sped in anticipation of the last bell:
Rrrrrrring!
She flung the door open and held it for him, lowering her gaze, while their burning faces were bathed in the wash of hot air from the giant radiators that sent them scuttling down the hall to their lockers. They arrived at the door of the music room at the same time. He smiled confusedly, stupidly, made a slight bow, as to a queen, and allowed her to pass through the door. Then he came after, but not too close.
The snows fell hard throughout January all over the world, according to the Star and the Voice. Headlines came more often now, more maps and arrows and pictures of troops in frozen attitudes, as though the men and machines had suddenly been caught unawares by the hypnotizing winds that had turned them into grimacing statues. The great ubiquitous BOOM! resounded on land and below the freezing waters, and the names of the dead were spewed out upon the pages of the Voice every Friday.…
With the advance of spring, the snows melted and the rains came, laying bare the fallen fruit of the cold season. Blinded by the searing brightness of her eyes, smarting from wounds inflicted by her cutting glances, or supercilious smiles flung at him like hand grenades, he rallied all his strength in order to meet the onslaught of an army of trees writhing in the agony of giving birth to a new generation of leaves. Flowers boomed! And freshets of rain and malicious winds lashed at the ex
posed love-infected nerve.
“Now-is-the-month-of-May-ing!” they sang, and he wondered how long he would be able to stand it.
“Hi, Amerigo.” Mary Ann greeted him with a tender smile that seemed an expression of patient sadness. They had a secret. Only to her had he confessed his love for Cosima, her best friend. It was almost like having confessed to Cosima herself.
“She likes you,” Mary Ann had said one March day when the wind had howled like a hungry dog.
“How do you know?”
“Because she said so, that is, not exactly … in so many words, but she talks about you all the time.”
“I tried to call her, but her father always says she’s busy or not in, or something like that.”
“He doesn’t think anybody’s good enough for her!” said Mary Ann. “Are you going to make the honor roll?”
“I don’t know.”
“They’re going to select the speakers for the commencement exercises from the honor students. If you could just get your name on that list. Maybe that would help.”
“Do you think so, Mary Ann! And I’m already in the choir and the Glee Club and the Special Singers. I’m gonna be the battalion adjutant in the ROTC, and when I have to go to the army I’ll probably make second lieutenant right off. Old Carrol has already been elected editor of the yearbook, but I can make business manager, I think. The one that sells the most ads gets it. And that’ll mean that my picture will be in the book at least ten times! And I’m the chairman of the entertainment committee, too. I proposed at the last meeting that we have dances for the senior class every Friday evening from three-thirty until six-thirty. If Mr. Thornton won’t let her come out at night, maybe he’ll let her stay a little after school. He wouldn’t have to know it. She could tell him she was staying for something else.”
“We could try,” Mary Ann answered sadly.
Such Sweet Thunder Page 52