Somehow her thin little chest lay close to his, but gently, and the piece was almost over. Will she let me again? He wanted to ask her for the next dance. He cleared his throat in order to ask her for the next dance, and her ear, in anticipation of his utterance, informed her eye, and her nose, which followed suit, touched his!
After that, sometime after that a bell rang, and all that he knew, could remember, was that somewhere in the world, at some time in the world, there had been a dance, and that she had come!
“Son?”
He looked up from his speech into Viola’s face. She knows, he thought, and then he dwelt upon the novelty of hearing her call him son. She very rarely did that. Rutherford did more often. It was his way of being affectionate, of expressing some difficult side of love that he could express no other way. He always said it at some unexpected time, when he felt he least deserved it, but it never surprised him. It warmed him and made him want to cry. Viola usually accomplished this with a kiss or a bowl of soup. For this reason the word son now assumed the gravity of that excess of love and passion reserved only for very serious situations.
“Son?” The word stood suspended, frozen, in the air like a fatal sentence: “Son? Do you know what time it is? It’s almost three o’clock. Even if you do finish that speech by morning, you’ll be too sleepy to say it right, let alone say it by heart.”
He looked at the hysterical scribblings on the page. So banal, so inadequate, not what he wanted at all, not what he really felt. But I’ve got to try! he exclaimed to himself. She’s afraid I’ll mess it up! Resentment against his mother subsumed his feeling of self-pity. She always was afraid! Afraid that if I sang in the amateur contest people would laugh. Afraid that I’d forget the poem in church. Always afraid of what people might say. I don’t care! He bent his eyes upon his speech and gradually became oblivious to her presence; nor had he seen the sandwich and the glass of milk she had placed beside him an hour ago.
The red room echoed with the reverberations of his speech. He tried to catch them with his hands and hold on to them, but they evaded his grasp, they hid in the cool dark channels of his ears and along the banks of the swirling waters of the Western Front of his consciousness:
Amerigo, honey, do you know that you ain’ been born agin? That you still walkin’ in sin? Sister James asked. And he grew smaller under the glare of the multitude of staring eyes.
As he emerged from the baptismal waters, he beheld the tear-stained face of Miss Southern. A feeling of guilt smote him.
“She’s coming,” she said sadly.
“W-h-a-t — d-i-d — s-h-e — s-a-a-a-a-a-y?” the sound of his voice swallowed up by the roaring din of fragmentary words.
“Boy!” Rutherford shouted, “if I have to call you agin —”
He stirred sluggishly, feeling cold and old, like after New Year’s when everything has happened. He lumbered heavily to school through the snow-laden streets of May, dreading the fact that he would have to relive it, to say it again, that which had already been said. His head ached. He ached all over, and inside where you couldn’t see it. In his pocket, the speech, like a piece of counterfeit money. Maybe it’s good! he tried to reassure himself. Maybe there won’t be enough time to hear everyone today and I can try tomorrow! His step quickened to this thought, his hopes revived. As his finger touched a sharply folded corner of the speech in his pocket, he experienced a familiar sensation that he tried desperately to remember, but only meaningless fragmentary images came to mind: of the alley in the rain, of Bra Mo sliding a cake of ice onto his shoulder and how it glistened in the sun and dripped like ice dripping from the wires and shades of the lamppost in the spring, he thought of Next Year when … Yeah! — then I’d have a chance! He hurried now, practically ran, to receive his stay of execution.
Meanwhile three Allied submarines had been blown out of the sea, everybody was talking about a place called Dunkirk, and Mr. Churchill’s voice sounded grave as compared to Mr. Roosevelt’s, which did not, however, stop the bells from ringing.
Stepping into the English class, it occurred to him that it was all the fault of the bells. If they forgot — once! — Stopped! Just didn’t ring — all the bells and clocks — in the world — there would be time!
Rrrrrrring!
Miss Southern, looking like Fate, sat stoically before the class. He sat next to her. She was calm, as though her place in heaven were assured! Mary Ann sat at her side, resigned, to be sure, but confident. Miss Southern cleared her throat and announced in impeccable English, the kind of English that makes you feel a moron, how the speeches were to be judged. She wished everybody good luck, and then she called on the first candidate:
“Amerigo Jones!”
“Come to Je-sus … Come to Jeeee — sus … Come to Je-sus, just now … just now … just now … just now … just now.”
How long had he been sitting on the steps behind the library, amid the roses smelling all over the place, while the birds crapped on the walk? An ant crawled near his foot and he crushed it with a vengance.
“Well,” he said bitterly as Mary Ann came around and sat down beside him, “don’t tell me! Cosima made it. And you made it. And there’ll be four or five of you who are the other white lights!”
She remained silent.
“Don’t pity me, damnit!” he shouted.
“You made battalion adjutant,” she said in a monotone.
“But I didn’t make major, did I! NO!”
She pretended not to have caught the irony of this remark.
“Has anybody asked you to go to the prom yet?”
She lowered her eyes.
“Why not?” he shouted. “You read your damned speech as good — as well — as she did, didn’t you? You play the piano! And nobody could doubt your virtue! Why not? The sun’s yellow! How-how is it that everything it touches turns black? How’s that? What are you going to do?”
“What are you going to do?” Mary Ann retorted.
“She said no?”
“She didn’t say it, her father said it,” said Mary Ann, shrugging her shoulders. “He’s going to take her himself.”
“W-H-A-T? You mean he’s going to humiliate her like that! He’ll be the only father in the whole school! Well, my momma isn’t coming with me. I’m a man!”
“What are you going to do?” she asked again.
Confronted by the all-out boldness of her gaze, he retreated across the choppy canal of a humiliating silence.
“I’ll go with you, if you want me to,” said Mary Ann. Her voice was still, like a depth charge: down … down … down.
Boom!
“Let’s go!” he heard himself saying, in a voice that was younger. The words were enshrouded in an aura of release subsumed by a feeling of dread. The alley flashed through his mind, vaguely, painfully, hot and cold sensations shot through his body. He involuntarily rubbed his knee and wiggled his toe.
“Do you mean it!” Mary Ann was saying.
He looked into her smiling face without really seeing her, his eyes filled with blood, his ears filled with the sound of sirens screaming, the pavement burning under his feet, like the world was on fire, unaware now that they, he and Mary Ann, were racing homeward, hand in hand, as though they were being pursued by some common enemy who could follow them anywhere.
That evening at the table bright with tomato salad and iced tea, Viola, noticing the nervous light in his eyes, asked:
“Who you takin’ to the prom?”
“Mary Ann said she’d go,” he said sullenly.
“Oh! That’s nice!” Viola exclaimed.
“I thought you was takin’ that little Thornton girl!” said Rutherford with a sly grin.
“Aaaaaaw!” he muttered, avoiding his father’s gaze in an effort to conceal his confusion, a mixture of shame and hatred.
“All that callin’ up you been doin’, an’ love-letter writin’. What’s the matter — she turn you down?”
Viola looked into her plate as she spoke
:
“Mary Ann’s one a the nicest girls in town — an’ one a the most respected. She’s pretty, too! I’d be proud to take her, if I were Amerigo.”
“Who’s takin’ your gal?” Rutherford asked with a seriousness in his tone that betrayed the smile on his face.
“Her father!” he answered contemptuously.
“Her father! Ain’ that a killer!”
“She wanted to go! I asked her. But her father wouldn’t let her.”
“It must be terrible for her,” said Viola.
“I think I kin git the old man’s car.…” said Rutherford quietly.
“Naw!” said Viola.
“Yeah! He come up to me taday an’ said, Well, Rutherford, I see they gonna take you away from me. Looks like it, I said. He bit down on that stogie an’ then he said, I hear that boy a yours is graduatin’? Yes, sir, I said. An’ then he asked me if he could drive, an’ I said no, an’ then he said, ‘Why don’t you take the limousine an’ drive ’um to the ball?’ An’ I said, that’d be a killer. An’ he’ll need flowers for the young lady, he said, an’ a little change to put in his pocket — an’ then he handed me this twenty-dollar bill!”
“Wasn’ that nice!” Viola said.
They all smiled now, each from within his own private world of remembering, up from the depths of cherished hopes and disappointments and speculations that had stretched out through the days, the years, as the sun rose, and the moons, and the clocks keeping time with the falling snows and with the rains falling.
“I have to start at the defense plant Mond’y,” Rutherford was saying.
He’s too old. Amerigo studied his father’s forehead for traces of his receding hairline, for a gray hair or two, and, finding none, marveled that he was older just the same. He’s heavier, he thought, remembering the first time he had really noticed it. Then, too, his voice and his movements were more solid now, something in him seemed set, finished, irrevocably fixed.
“You’ll need a new suit!” Viola was saying, in much the same tone as she used to say, “I’ll need a new formal,” caressing the words embodied in the reflection that she had never gone to the circus after Uncle Ruben had died. Still fondling the green velvet suit that Miss Sadie had given him, remembering suddenly that she had not taken him to the circus, either. The star! he exclaimed to himself, as though he were answering a question that he could no longer remember having asked.
As the evening light grew softer the ghostly voices blended into the song that rose from the alley.
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.
Such Sweet Thunder Page 54