“I might change my mind.”
“Why would anyone change her mind about graduating?”
“I might change my major.”
“Not at this late date. You can’t.”
But Dr. Bradstreet was noting the possibility on her legal pad. With her left hand, encrusted with diamond rings, she steadied the writing pad. Her right hand held a fountain pen, malachite green with a bright steel nib;PARKER was incised vertically, the letters stacked on top of one another down the clip on the cap. Stella couldn’t read what words were being formed by the flow of blue ink from the green stick.
“Am I all right?” Stella asked her.
“What do you mean?” The woman was replacing the cap on her pen, laying the pen on the large replaceable blotter sheet. Four brown leather corners held the blotter board, like the black corners for replaceable pictures in a photograph album.
“Am I healthy?”
“You have a tipped uterus. You might have trouble getting pregnant.”
“I can’t have children?” Stella stared at the shaft of the green malachite pen displayed against the fuzzy, bland green blotter.
“I didn’t say that. You might have difficulty.”
“But I’m all right?” It was the uniformity of the color of the blotter and its repulsive texture that she disdained. Stella made herself look into the doctor’s eyes.
“I saw nothing else of concern. More extensive tests could be run.” The doctor’s eyes bored into Stella. “Would you like more tests?”
“No.” Stella stood up.
“I noticed you’re not wearing an engagement ring,” the doctor accused.
“It’s at the jewelers. The diamond fell out. It’s being repaired.” But yes, she would call this doctor on Monday. She would give her a fictitious date. What could Dr. Bradstreet prove? She didn’t have to see an engagement ring. Really poor people might not have a ring. But Stella was a student at the best college in Alabama.
“Now tell me what’s really wrong with you,” the doctor demanded.
“The president is dead,” Stella blurted. Maybe that was the truth. Maybe she was a person who couldn’t stand murder. Was that so bad?
“You’re deeply upset.” For the first time, the doctor sounded pleasant, surprised.
“I lost my family in a car wreck—”
“When?”
“Years ago—”
“Oh.”
“My father had lung cancer—”
“Then he would have died anyway.”
“I feel bad about the president and—”
“What else?”
“And the four little girls.” Stella exploded in grief. She covered her face with both hands. She could feel the tears dripping through the cracks between her fingers. She leaned toward the blotter. The doctor would think she was crazy, but the words burst out of her like vomit: “I didn’t—go—to their funeral.”
Dr. Bradstreet came around from her desk. Was that her hand, very lightly placed on Stella’s shoulder? Her hand was lighter than a bird coming to rest with tiny feet in the hairs of the partially angora sweater.
“No one really expected you to attend,” Dr. Bradstreet said. Her voice was kind, now that she’d broken Stella open, seen inside with her hot little light. Yes, Stella had felt the warmth of the light trying to shine up into her body when her legs were spread. Then Stella felt the motherly bird-hand fly away, almost imperceptibly, a hand lighter than a dove, a bird small as a finch, white perhaps.
“Birmingham can be a very hard city,” Dr. Bradstreet consoled. Yes, her voice was kind but not especially sympathetic to Stella. Still, there was something of mourning in Dr. Bradstreet’s voice.
Stella stopped crying. She removed her hands from her face. Why, there was a box of tissues on the edge of the desk, all ready for the tragic patient. She took the proffered tissue and wiped her face. Took another and blew her nose. Yes, there was a trash basket beside the desk.
“I’ll call you about the date,” Stella said. She was going to win. She would have the contraceptive pill and she would do as she pleased. “Thank you,” Stella added politely. She had created one hell of a smoke screen. Suppose she had just screamed, “I want to be ready for sex and not get pregnant!”
“If you haven’t calmed down in a few days, I’ll prescribe a mild sedative.”
WHEN STELLA LEFT Dr. Bradstreet’s office, she looked at her watch and saw it wasn’t time yet to go to the switchboard. But why go anyway? The world was dead. She would take the bus down to the foot of Twentieth Street to the Church of the Advent. She was not a member—but Timmy Beaton, her high school boyfriend, had been a member. He had taken her there one Easter, shown her the enclosed garden ablaze with yellow daffodils, the largest daffies she’d ever seen. It had felt like Eden. Resurrection, rebirth by beauty. She would take the bus down Twentieth Street and sit in the garden by herself. She needed no one.
What’s the matter with you? The doctor’s harsh question buzzed her nerves. Of course there was plenty the matter with her. She had no parents. She had no president. She had no fiancé. She had school—at least until she graduated—and she had a job. When it was time tonight, she would go to work. Not the right work, only temporary till she graduated.
In the garden of the Church of the Advent, which was the most beautiful spot in Birmingham, she would meditate on the death of the murdered president. She would think about what it meant to be free, both personally and socially.
The bus rolled past Bromberg’s jewelry store with its small discreet windows, past Russell Stover’s candy, where you could buy a single piece for a quarter. A man who looked like Kennedy was pointing to his head, first the back, then the front. He pointed to his throat. His friend smiled while he listened.
A young black woman came out the door of Russell Stover’s with a bag of candy in her hand. Yes, they could go there because there was no place to sit down. Everybody just purchased while standing at the counter. White and black stood at separate ends. White people were served first. Nobody had to rub shoulders for long. She saw the girl thrust her hand into the sack, bite into a piece of candy, and burst into tears. Like lone firecrackers, people were going off all over Birmingham.
Stella used to go into Russell Stover’s with her friend Wanda, and Stella’s favorite was a milk chocolate with a whipped chocolate creme interior. When you peeled the pleated paper cup away from the sides, you saw that its negative was indented in the flaring side of the candy. Usually a few delicate peaks actually rimmed the top of the chocolate on one side. When you bit into the candy, you could see that the whipped interior held a sprinkling of tiny air bubbles. And what had happened to Wanda, whose family moved away?
Be happy, Stella thought to Wanda. Wanda, the new girl in eighth grade, the outsider, had leapt in the broad jump as though she were catapulted across the air, and even seeing it from the rear, Stella knew something extraordinary had happened on the playground of Norwood School. She ran to Wanda, asking, “Did you fly? For just a second, were you flying?”
Be comforted, she thought to the girl with the candy sack. Find a friend to share with.
The bus was passing Lollar’s Camera Shop, and on down the street, past Red Cross Shoes. Across the street was Blach’s “Fair and Square.” The emblem of the store was a carpenter’s square, and within the elbow of that ruled right angle was a lily. Stella thought no other store had so sacred an emblem. It was what she wanted for herself in life: to be accorded the lily of beauty and a portion of character, represented by just calibration.
Martin Luther King Jr. wanted his children reckoned not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. She wished that she had participated last August in the March on Washington.
The bus passed the YMCA; Stella had heard some cities had a YMHA, Hebrew, not Christian—Chicago, New York. Someday she would see those places. His voice floating over the Reflecting Pool before the Washington Monument, King had rated character above appea
rance. She had watched him on TV at the Cartwrights’ as he addressed the demonstrators—everybody who would listen, really.
Even Aunt Krit wanted beauty, though, as well as an upright character. Among Krit’s math papers waiting on the dining room table to be graded would be a copy of the latest Vogue, and once Stella had seen written beside a blue suit, one with a pencil skirt (the model’s bonelike shafts of legs were crossed and ended in high-heeled shoes such as Krit never owned) topped by a short boxy jacket, the words “I want this, size 14.” But surely Krit was only a size ten or twelve, and the fit would bag on her at size fourteen, and the point of the outfit would be squandered.
On the sidewalk, two well-dressed Negro men approached each other with hands outstretched. They shook hands warmly, then embraced each other. They must be ministers, unafraid of Christian embrace. They need each other today.
Down Twentieth Street, the people on the bus jiggled up and down, so many fragile eggs in a carton. On this bus, people were happy that the president was dead, adults with gleaming eyes like wicked children, like predatory animals, foxes. Probably the legless man could not mount the high steps of a city bus. The people on the bus chatted and licked their lips. In code, they spoke of Lyndon Johnson, “the hope of the South,” as though the quiet colored people in the back of the bus didn’t understand what they meant.
Why had Stella’s heart beat hard when she rolled through the center of her city, down Twentieth Street, past Bromberg’s (with diamond engagement rings in the small, strong windows)? Why did her heart roar when she passed all the dear stores? They constituted the context and thus testament to her own living. Why couldn’t the city strive to be fair and square?
And on the right, the garden at the Church of the Advent was coming up, and now it was time to get off, to give the signal:ding.
She couldn’t expect the church garden to boast flamboyant daffies—this was November—just a place to sit, to be away from the crowd (but she loved the people of her city). It was beauty she needed, the beauty of the garden no matter what its season. Beauty would save her.
General Omar Bradley, her mother had whispered long ago amid the patriotic people turned out for the parade. Blessed boys with blessed guns had saved the world from Hitler. How cold and stiff with standing Stella’s body had been, a much colder November day than today. Blessed guns? Mama meant the liberators of the death camps. But who or what could liberate Birmingham from its violence and racism?
Stella wanted away from it all. If not Chicago, New York. No, she wanted to be alone in the garden with her essential self. She wanted to be without friends or strangers or family.
She walked rapidly, passed an acquaintance on the sidewalk, the liberal high school boy in her speech class, Blake, who had been a freshman when she was a senior. He had an undeveloped hand: that was what was wrong with him. He had a small pad of a hand that ended not in fingers but in little balls. The boy’s eyes were coated with a glaze of unfallen tears, his lips swollen with grief. Oddly, she had been told at some party how Blake loved the president and idolized Jackie Kennedy. Bereft, Blake stalked Twentieth Street, toward downtown, grieving for his beloved president. He looked through Stella as though she were a window. No mirror for what he felt.
Stella reached out her hand to try to stop him. Blake could sit with her, in the garden. He pulled away and continued down the street.
Someone blared a trumpet. She looked back and saw a young man leaning out a window of the YMCA, the trumpet in his hand. He tongued the first measure, joyfully, of “Dixie.”
Someone from the street shouted back, “The South will rise again!”
The trumpeter withdrew, and the window was lowered.
Blake sang loudly, in French, the opening of the French national anthem, the call to arms, as he stalked along. He sounded crazed with grief, but nobody accosted him.
Soon she would enter the garden. The golden sandstone church was just ahead. First a small building connected by a stone archway to the tower and sanctuary.
When Stella stepped through the arch, she saw the iron gate was closed. She put her hand on the knob above the keyhole, but the gate was locked. The black lacquered upright bars of the gate were too tall to go over. Her hope wilted. The church had let her down. What leadership had the white church provided in integrating Birmingham? Well, some had tried. What, for that matter, had Stella done for integration? She thought right. At least she had done that.
Through the grille, she saw the brick walk, gracefully curved, flanked with a short, clipped box hedge, still green.
Again, her hand grasped the black lacquered knob and tried again to turn it. Clearly locked. Timmy had taken her once to the Episcopal mass, on Christmas Eve, and she had been shocked at the censer and incense, at the ceremony of it all. Before the service, all the children had played together, not segregated by age, as in her own Methodist youth groups. Timmy had told her that a lot of these people were against racial segregation, were working against it, but when Stella was there, the air was full of Christmas.
“Make me fly,” one of the little girls had said to Timmy, and his hands encircled her little waist, and he had lifted her above his head—he was a dancer in the Birmingham Civic Ballet. And then all the little girls had clamored, and stood in a line, and one by one, he made them beautiful as flying ballerinas. Some pedaled the air as they flew; some stretched out one arm, or both. One stood in the air with folded arms, stiff as a totem pole. Timmy had taken off his suit jacket, but his white shirt was sticking to his skin with sweat.
How he lived within his body, Timmy Beaton. Like Don, Cat’s brother. Somehow proud to inhabit that particular body. Even if he walked across the room, his body said, This is my life. I contain myself. I move myself from here to there. Proudly.
She wished she could whisper to Timmy, Make me fly. But he was gone from her life. He was dancing with the New York City Ballet. He had braved his family and sought his different life, but he came back to visit, people said. He didn’t call Stella.
In a corner of the November garden stood Saint Catherine—carved perhaps from cypress, she and the wheel that broke her, all carved from the same piece of wood, except perhaps for the outcropping spokes, which were stuck like removable pegs into the outer rim of the wheel. Saint Catherine rose from the ground like the curve of a calla lily. Deadwood, she was; the ghost of a tree that once grew, perhaps, in a Louisiana bayou, hung with Spanish moss. Stella remembered firing a pistol as a small child, in the woods at Helicon, shooting trees.
The carved whites of Saint Catherine’s eyes had been painted silver, and Stella found the effect garish. The flow of the woman’s body reminded her of Munch’s The Scream. A thoroughly modern shape, a flame of anguish.
The silver of her eyes proclaimed I am unnatural, the ghost of a tree. Return me to the swamp. “Return me to my life, where scaly alligators brushed against my knees.” Stella was shocked to find that she had spoken aloud for the statue of Saint Catherine. Return me to Helicon.
Stella shook the iron gate that barred her from the garden.
Before he left Birmingham, Timmy had kissed her.
Standing on the porch before her front door, she had hugged him. Sensing he did not want to kiss, she had chosen not to imply that he should. She had turned but found she turned within the circle of his arm, so that he brought her to face him again. Yes, he was kissing her, and the universe thrummed between their lips.
He had given her her wish, fulsomely without stint, and she had given back. Then quickly, she was inside her aunts’ living room. She leaned against the wall, her legs weak, her body effervescent.
Oh, kissing, how she wanted it, forever! (With one finger, she caressed a vertical bar on the garden gate, felt under her fingertip how the black lacquer covered a roughness of chipped and pitted underlayers, for all its shiny bravado.)
Better than she’d ever hoped or imagined, though others had warned her, by dismissing their own first kiss. Nothing special, they had sa
id. But not with Timmy. Not she and Timmy Beaton. No other kiss had ever equaled that—not all the dark, tantalizing night hours spent with Darl on the boulevard while the lighted planes flew low overhead. There was nothing wrong with her, she should have told Dr. Bradstreet: she loved kissing.
For warmth, Saint Catherine seemed to clutch the wheel to her in the November afternoon. Soon it would be dark. Stella moved her grip on the bars, and the square-edged metal was cold in her hands. The wheel was a part of Saint Catherine’s body, embraced like a pregnancy.
(But she would have the Pill. She would!)
Gently Stella shook the gate again. It was right that she should be locked out. An airplane flew overhead. Would they be flying the president’s body, his broken body, back to Washington? Or would his flag-draped body be moved by slow train through the country, as Lincoln’s body had? Would the porch of the last car of the train display across its vertical grille a swag of red, white, and blue? Stella wondered if, at this moment, Jackie Kennedy was listening to the muffled roar of a jet engine, feeling the thrum through the soles of her shoes, wondering where her life had gone.
Stella released the black grille of the garden gate. She would walk on toward the public library, only a block beyond. It would be open, and she wanted inside. A white angora sweater, even with a close-fitting neck, was not enough for November.
She emptied her mind with the sound of her feet walking. She watched the toes of her green leather flats appear and disappear below the swinging hem of her blue wool skirt till she slipped through the library’s revolving door into the hush of the reading room. What does it mean, my feet are green? What did anything mean?
THE REVOLVING DOOR turned as she pushed. The quiet library interior accepted her. She wanted a bare table before her. She folded her hands on the wood.
Her eyes lifted to the murals on the wall. What comfort did those painted myths of the world have to offer? Pegasus she had loved. And what was his average altitude, when flying? Cloud high, she thought. Those white wings would churn their way through cumulus, then higher even than stratospheric cirrus into the blank of blue and sunlight. Always, they moved her—the depiction of wings.
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