Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  That would be Rubinstein at the keyboard. Rubinstein, Horowitz—her mother seemed to love even their names.

  Ryder took the rejected flag sticker out of his shirt pocket. He peeled off the backing and affixed the Stars and Bars of Dixie to the metal side of the gasoline pump.

  Stella turned from him and watched the front of the bus gradually loom larger. It seemed enveloped in mystic vapors, as though it were a hot day, not November 22.

  WHEN SHE BOARDED the bus, Stella saw Ellie sitting by herself, and she slid in beside her. Yes, this was a day for strange recurrences. Maybe Darl will put the Chevy in reverse. Traffic will run backward, and he’ll roll trunk-first back into my life.

  “I came after you,” Ellie said, and she smiled her wide-eyed, open-faced half-smile. “You were flying down the hill. Then you got in a car.”

  “Did I?” How could she have been flying? Her ankle hurt. She imagined herself gliding, like a robin with outspread wings, at low altitude over the curve of the hill. Maybe time would roll backward, and the assassin’s bullet would fly backward into the barrel of his gun. Kennedy! Her heart groaned.

  “I always feel like an egg entering its place in the carton,” Ellie said, “when I sit down on a bus.”

  Yes. Stella pictured the configuration inside a bus, the leather seats and chromelike holders for the fleshy vulnerability of passengers. The president was a broken shell, the yoke of him spilled out yellow and liquid. She muttered, “Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall….”

  “Are you all right?” Ellie asked.

  “I think so.”

  Outside the bus window, a preadolescent girl with her mother yelled to a friend who was with her mother, “The wicked witch is dead!”Could she be referring to Kennedy? The friends hurried together. They were all in stylish fall clothes. One mother said, “It’s like the hand of God.” Their faces glowed with excitement. Or was that glee?

  “I saw you getting into a car,” Ellie repeated. What did Ellie’s face say to her? You can tell me or not tell me, Stella. The fabric of their skirts overlapped—Ellie’s brown tweed flecked with orange, Stella’s skirt a medium bright blue loose basket weave. For a moment Stella just stared out the bus window. Maybe the bus was stationary and someone was reeling the scenery past, like in an old movie. Beaming businessmen strutted on the sidewalk. Rejoicing. Making V for victory signs with their outstretched fingers.

  “It was Darl in his new car.” Then Stella held up her left hand, spread her ring-empty fingers so Ellie would understand.

  “Oh, Stella,” Ellie murmured. She reached up and took Stella’s hand out of the air. She brought their clasped hands back to the leather bus seat between them, squeezing Stella’s hand.

  “My mother and I used to hold hands when we rode the bus downtown from Norwood,” Stella said. “She never learned to drive.”

  (Out the window, a group of teenagers chanted, “One, two, three, four, who you gonna yell for? Johnson, that’s who.”)

  Ellie said, “I thought it was the president. I thought you were upset because of him.”

  “I was,” Stella said. “I am.”

  “I still can’t believe it,” Ellie said, and she held on tighter to Stella’s hand, pressing her knuckles against the seat leather. The skin of an animal no longer alive.

  “We have to believe the truth,” Stella said. “But some people don’t care. Some people are glad.”I could never live in the same house with someone like that. How can I live in the same city with people who are glad about death?

  “I don’t think so. I think they just don’t know how to react.” Ellie glanced apologetically at Stella. “I didn’t,” she confessed.

  Couldn’t Ellie see what was going on outside the bus window?

  Stella glanced at the people on the bus, the variety of people. House-dresses; a pale gray business suit gazing out the window. No one was rejoicing. A man in blue jeans was staring unseeing at the black rubber runner covering the bus aisle; a neat cream sweater and a knife-pleated plaid skirt hung decorously over a knee and stopped three inches shy of the dirty floor.

  Behind the WHITE ONLY sign, the colored people were mixed, just like the whites, as to cleanliness and fashion. They all stared at the floor, bodies slumped. They were utterly dejected, except for one young woman who sat upright, her chin tilted at an arrogant angle.

  Everyone so many eggs, as Ellie had said, with their lives and potential hidden inside. Everywhere the framework of shining steel outlining the seats.

  “We have to realize what it means to die,” Stella said. “What it means for him. What it meant for them. The girls, younger than we are.”

  “Which girls, Stella?”

  “All the dead ones. The four at church.”

  “Do you think you can imagine death?” Ellie said. Again there was that mild open look to her brown eyes, the encouraging half-smile on her face. The loving glow to her curiosity.

  “Yes. I think so,” Stella answered. Probably with no one but Ellie would she consider having such a conversation. Now she was scraping the words off her bones: to Ellie, who looked as receptive as Jackie Kennedy, she could present this pitiful pulp of words. “Because of what happened to my family. I had to imagine death. I had to grasp it for each of them. As individuals.”

  Ellie’s half-smile remained. She said nothing. Nothing in her face tried to block out Stella’s words. Ellie waited for the words to dissolve in the air. Then Ellie asked gently, “Where are you going?”

  “To Five Points.”

  “I mean where are you going with that idea? That we should make ourselves imagine death.” Ellie’s voice was low and conspiratorial.

  “I don’t know,” Stella answered. “For me, it was necessary to do, or I couldn’t go forward with my own life.”

  Ellie’s reply was a surprise: “I don’t know if I can. Or if I want to.”

  “Maybe it’s not necessary for you.” Stella watched the knife-edge pleats of the woman’s skirt swaying with the movement of the bus. “I mean to imagine death.”

  Ellie hesitated, then asked, “Why are you going to Five Points?”

  “To the doctor.”

  Stella could see desire in her face. What did Ellie want to share?

  “I’m going to see my therapist,” Ellie said. “Most people don’t know.”

  “Why, Ellie?” How could anyone so talented and warm need to see a therapist?

  “I have depressions.”

  But Ellie was married. Once that was settled, wouldn’t life be settled? At least partly? Did I ever love Darl? Yes. When he played the organ I could feel my soul growl. Like a dog chained in a basement.

  “My mother had depressions,” Ellie went on. “She was married four times. I’m not going to be like that.” Ellie’s voice dropped to a whisper. (How strange to whisper on a public bus full of strangers.) “I don’t know if you know—she committed suicide. When I was thirteen.”

  Stella whispered back, “I’m going to the gynecologist. To get the new birth control pills.”

  Ellie’s glance was conspiratorial. “But you’re not engaged now?”

  “I want them anyway,” Stella said, surprised at her own answer.

  “Do you think you and Darl might make up?” Ellie’s face said she was ready to be hopeful, with her.

  “No,” Stella said.

  Ellie just stared at her.

  “I want the freedom,” Stella said.

  “We’re all daft on freedom,” Ellie mused.

  Someone dressed like a giant chicken got on the bus and dropped the fare from orange, three-fingered mittens into the collection box, just like anybody else.

  A young man in nice slacks, on the long side-facing seat, said with a grin, “Watch out. Chicken King’ll get you.”

  The whole bus laughed, and the giant chicken settled on the sideways roost next to the wit.

  Somebody in the back of the bus repeated, “What he say was ‘Chicken King gonna get you.’ ” And a new chuckle of laughter rumbled,
low and satisfied.

  But Stella felt afraid because she and Ellie were laughing on the day the president was murdered. On the day she’d said what she wanted:freedom, whatever that meant. She pulled her hand from beneath Ellie’s. The leather seats—the slaughtering of animals—offended her senses.

  “What do you think of Sartre’s idea,” she asked Ellie, “that consciousness is nothingness?”

  “I don’t believe it,” Ellie said. “I think consciousness is an energy. Energy is immaterial but it’s not nothingness.”

  Suddenly a black woman, the one with the straight posture and tilted chin, spoke. She spoke from the back of the bus, right into the air, not looking at them, but as though she were making a general announcement. Not conversation.

  “Energy is an exchange of subatomic particles. Under certain conditions, physics tells us energy and matter are interchangeable.”

  Stella wondered if she were hallucinating. Auditory hallucinations. No one seemed to acknowledge the event of that voice. It was as though everyone but her was deaf. But Stella had seen the Negro woman’s lips move. One sense had corroborated the other. Her face was composed of interesting planes—sharp and angular, like a cubist study. The lips were fleshy and curved, contradicting the sharp planes of her face, making her beautiful in an irregular way. Her skin was an average brown, neither especially dark nor light. Her hair had been straightened and fell in a single, sculpted swoop to her chin.

  No, Ellie was looking around. Her eyes were seeking contact with the speaker, the colored woman in the back, and Ellie was smiling warmly, but a little shy. “My name is Ellie,” she said. Because Ellie was an actress, she could project her voice, yet it remained soft. Her low, sweet voice traveled the sunlight cave of the bus, all the way to the back. “What’s yours?”

  The dejected colored people glanced up, just their eyes, then fastened their eyes again, anxiously, on the floor. The bus driver was watching through his large, circular mirror.

  “Christine,” the woman spoke as she rose from her seat. One hand was curled around a chrome rail. With the other hand, she stretched and pulled the bell cord—ding!

  The ding hovered in the portable air caged in the bus, canceling out the woman’s name.

  The obedient bus swerved to a stop.

  Christine looked at no one; she descended the two steps and pushed through the split door onto the pavement. That sound—ding!—echoed again in Stella’s mind. The rubber edges of the exit door bounced against each other.

  To Ellie, Stella whispered, “It’s not consciousness that’s nothingness.” She was glad to have Ellie back into a discussion with just herself. For the first time the idea came clear to Stella. “It’s death that is nothingness. If you imagine death, you have to imagine nothingness. A total absence.”

  “But what do you think of Tillich?” Ellie asked, patting the cover of The Courage to Be. “The God beyond God? The God that appears when ‘God’ disappears?”

  Yes. It was a place where Stella had sent her mind. Tillich’s words had opened a door into an invisible wall, and beyond. She had struggled and struggled with the concept till she thought she knew what it meant. The God beyond God—the other side of nothingness.

  “Tillich is the theologian who provides the best hope,” Stella said. Her voice trembled: what was happening to her own belief? Old words played in her memory: “Jesus loves the little children / All the children of the world….”

  Maybe someplace there was an abiding love.

  Maybe everyplace, a force as universal and natural as gravity. Goodness, or love. A natural force attracting people to one another.

  “I have to get off for the clinic,” Ellie said. She stood, and Stella noticed her clothes, a simple white blouse, a straight tweedy wool skirt. She was a bit heavier than Jackie Kennedy, more robust and normal. Less glamorous. Just a college girl. Loafers. Suddenly, Ellie reached down and touched Stella’s shoulder. “Does it ever strike you,” Ellie asked, “what a surreal place Birmingham is?”

  But Stella couldn’t consider the question quickly enough to reply.

  Ellie added, “I’m sorry about Darl.”

  Stella didn’t want her to leave. She needed more of Ellie, but she moved down the aisle and waited before the front door. Stella had wanted to ask about Buford: wasn’t Ellie happy being married to Buford? A perfectly nice man, smart and kind; Stella liked him almost as much as Ellie.

  Pulling his mechanical lever beside his high seat, the driver opened the bus door for Ellie.HOWARD STILES, Stella read the white lettering incised into his little black plastic nameplate above the large front window. Because the metal frame for the nameplate was open at one end,HOWARD STILES could slide out and another name be inserted. “Have a great day,” he yelled after Ellie. “Nigger lover!”

  Ellie was walking rapidly down the sidewalk. She didn’t hear his taunt. Her round buttocks moving within the tube of the brown tweed skirt, Ellie swayed purposefully past a green trash can. Pitch-in! the can said.

  Stella felt shocked and frightened. With Kennedy dead, did people think they could freely insult colored people?

  Very slightly, Ellie nodded her head to acknowledge a Negro man, dressed in a royal blue business suit, coming toward her on the sidewalk. Stella had seen him before. The striking thing about him was that his trouser legs were cut off just below the torso. His legs had been amputated, and instead of shoes he had pegs. He seemed perfectly healthy. Not like Cat. In each hand he held a wooden mallet, like a potato masher, but more sturdy, of varnished oak. The base of the mallet was a rubber tread; the mallet handles were covered with leather. The man swung his body between his strong arms. Somehow Birmingham had allowed this: a black man dressed as well as any white man, a black man without legs who moved as confidently and swiftly as most people walked. He was a more successful human being than the bus driver.

  Would his bed be a pallet conveniently close to the floor? Would his chairs sit legless on the floor? Nice chairs upholstered in white silk brocade. Would the walls reach only half as high before his ceiling capped them off? Suppose she and Darl lived in such an apartment. Would they crawl in the short door like dogs? Perhaps being half the size of normal, the sidewalk man in royal blue, swinging his body through his arms with utmost dignity, could have two stories in a single room, twice the space usually allotted.

  Why hadn’t the earth run out of space allotted for the dead? Some damp earthy space waited now to receive the president. Her heart groaned; where were the words for grief? “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded”—Bach’s melody. That was what she longed for, but she needed Darl to play it. Her heart groaned. Perhaps it was an act of generosity to be cremated. But no, she, Stella, would want her own allotted space, underground, should she ever die.

  Why not marry a black man? Even here in Birmingham? People did in the North. Why not marry a legless, successful one?

  At the next stop, every Negro person on the bus got off. A great stream of them. Silently, she cheered: they were rejecting this driver who shouted “Nigger lover” and the transportation he provided. On the sidewalk some of them hugged and patted each other. In perfect dignity, they walked in separate directions. Stella felt she wanted to crawl somewhere on the pavement, like a penitent.

  HOWARD STILES, she could report him to the authorities, the bus company. Useless. She had to be on time; she would free her body from its own female biology.

  IN THE GYNECOLOGIST’S OFFICE, the woman doctor prepared to give Stella a premarital examination; had her lie on her back, feet in the stirrups, to inspect her virginity. This is penitence enough, Stella thought.

  When she was dressed again, Stella took satisfaction in her clothes—a blue pleated skirt, full and loose at the hem, box-pleated neatly at the waist, a white turtleneck sweater, slightly angora—an outfit in Madonna colors, innocent blue and cloud white. But Dr. Bradstreet was not considering Stella’s clothes; she was writing about Stella on her yellow legal pad, taking notes like a stenographer.
<
br />   When Dr. Bradstreet looked up, she asked harshly, “What’s the date for the wedding?”

  The question entered Stella’s heart like a stake. But she would not be slain. Why shouldn’t any woman have a right to the Pill?

  “Oh, we haven’t decided yet,” Stella lied.

  Through round-lens glasses framed with clear pinkish plastic, Dr. Bradstreet, the wisest owl in Christendom, peered at Stella. Where had Stella seen such glasses before? Oh, on the frizzy red-haired driver of the Thunderbird, the emissary from the Empire State. Wise Dr. Bradstreet knew a miscreant when she saw her—never mind the masquerade of blue and white. Stella returned the gaze. Dr. Bradstreet believed she had a remedy named The Truth ready to pierce the defenses of any subversive Liar.

  “When you know, telephone me. Then I’ll prescribe the contraceptive a month before.” She was grim and firm. Her graying hair was oily, dowdy. But she was a medical doctor. For women.

  “Oh, it will be within the month.”

  “You can call me when you’re sure of the exact date.” Dr. Bradstreet wore her name on a plastic bar, blood red, pinned into a starched white jacket. LOUISE BRADSTREET, M.D., the name tag proclaimed. What did it mean to tell the world your name? That you yourself were surely something other? Not who you were pretending to be at all, but someone much darker, with hidden motives. Not a doctor for w omen, after all, perhaps. But there was the diploma on the wall:Louise Bradstreet. Beyond the veil of freckles, who was Darl?

  “You don’t seem comfortable.”

  “I was admiring your diploma.” Stella felt found out. She blew out a smoke screen of words: “I’m going to graduate from Birmingham-Southern in May.” Then she remembered her new decision about her studies. “At least I think I may.”

  “You may graduate in May?” The woman was cruel. She wanted to torture. “Why wouldn’t you graduate in May? Are you in grade trouble?” She wanted to torture any woman who was not a doctor like herself.