Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Among the figures on the enormous library mural was Brunhilde, the warrior maiden, her blond braids hanging beside her armored breasts, her horned helmet. Confucius spoke to those who would learn. Cleopatra sat on her throne, fanned by an Ethiope. She offered a wink to Stella and she made something stir the air—the sound of distant flutes?

  Stella looked across the room into the bespectacled eyes of the conductor of the Birmingham Youth Orchestra, Herbert Levinson, who was also the concertmaster of the Birmingham Symphony. Crossing the floor of the reading room, he returned her gaze. When she was in high school, she had played the cello under his baton. He remembered her. She should take up the cello again, change her life, honor her mother and the music her mother held dearer than God.

  The conductor didn’t speak. (His own instrument, like her mother’s favorite, was the violin.) Reading misery in each other’s eyes, he continued to move. It was enough. The blank oak library table had signaled like a flag. This glance. Yes, a slight shaking of their heads. Tears standing in their eyes. Not embrace. His lips moved without sound. (This was the library and one did not speak.) I’m sorry, he mouthed.

  It was those transformed by pain that Herbert Levinson cared about. Aye, yi, yi, yi, yih—from her own bones came the lament, in a minor key. Darl had wanted her body and made himself wait, and now he would never have her.

  Nor she him.

  I’m sorry, she whispered to the air. Theirs had been a delicious intimacy, kissing.

  Mr. Levinson had known Stella’s sense of rhythm was unsteady, that it faltered (though her mother’s never did), that Stella would never be reliable as a leader of her section, but he had seen her store of grief, was unendingly kind to her, and honored the way she had tried to steady her erratic heart.

  Wait, she wanted to call after him. You don’t know about Darl! I was engaged, and now I’m not.

  Stella pushed her wooden chair back from the table, let the legs scrape on the floor. An ugly noise in the library. She glanced at the newspapers suspended by long bamboo canes, hanging in a rack. Here was the news from around the world: the London Times was there, Le Figaro, Dïe Welt, El País, and others, but none proclaimed Today from its headlines. None yet hurled the message with bold, three-inch letters of Right Now:JFK ASSASSINATED.

  It’s time. I will walk back up Twentieth Street to Third Avenue; I will turn the corner and walk three more blocks to work. I will feel cold, and I’ll walk fast. “Hurry up, please, it’s time”—a refrain from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land echoed vaguely in her mind.

  She lifted her books and purse from the floor and thought from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “I grow old…I grow old…/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” She revolved through the brass door into the darkening outer world. “There will be time, there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;/…And for a hundred visions and revisions.”

  Would she revise the scene with Darl, if she could? No, she told herself, she would not. Now she was free. She was cold but she was free. She walked more rapidly.

  The dusk air of the city was festive, as though it were late December and approaching Christmas. Everyone walked briskly. They were exhilarated, these shoppers and commuters of Birmingham. No, there was a sad face. But was it some personal grief or the public grief that this was a country of assassins, of racists? Aye, yi, yi, yi, yih…She needed her mother’s Yiddish to sing an ancient sorrow.

  Stella passed a woman dressed in a winter coat, wearing a black cloche hat, an old-fashioned one. Let it be my mother. With one hand, she held the hand of her little daughter (also overly bundled against the cold). Let me be her. The woman’s other hand held the handle of a blunt-nosed black violin case, gliding two feet above the pavement like a baby alligator. The texture of the case completed the masquerade of shape with a bumpy, reptilian skin.

  Someday this city and all its inequity would sink back into being a swamp for amphibians, as it had been millions of years before, when the lush vegetation of ferns and palms laid itself down, and laid itself down again and again over the aeons, was sealed by the weight of water into a decay of dark ooze, till the patient mud compressed itself into the black seams of coal that lay everywhere in the hills, fueling the current steel industry. While Stella’s green leather shoes hurried over the pavement, past the YMCA, she thought of the earth under the concrete, which would someday in the far future become broken and pitiful, useful for crushing her bones and those of all who now walked the street.

  And now that Kennedy was dead, would the Soviet Union take advantage? Across from her at the Tutwiler, would Russian generals someday review their conquering troops? She knew not a word of Russian. Would Birmingham become a shell, bombed into rubble big-time, and not by the local racists? (But which was worse—to die at the hands of one’s fellow citizens or of Communist strangers?)

  Because of the steel industry, people always said (proudly) that Birmingham was high on the list as a Russian target. Number three, some claimed, after New York City and Washington, D.C. Or number five, after Pittsburgh and probably Atlanta, or Chicago. Perhaps Cuban missiles were aimed at Birmingham.

  Seldom had the city seemed so triumphant, to Stella, as on this early evening in the wake of the president’s death. This time someone else, far away in Texas, had done the dirty work. This time it wasn’t a matter of a church and of children, who, by anybody’s measure, were absolutely innocent. Or was the air charged not with triumph but excitement? She felt none of it.

  She was a stranger in her city—Aye, yi, yi, yi, yih—though she had been born here, at old Jefferson-Hillman Hospital. Because of her people—her father not of the city but from the country; her mother not southern, but northern—had she ever belonged? Or was it something of her own sensibility, first her rigid faith, now her growing skepticism, that made her irrevocably odd? She was too thin, that was part of it.

  She was cold. Even the fast walking failed to warm her. But up ahead—where was it coming from?—those voices humming. Three or four high, childish voices so ambiguous she could not interpret their mood. Remember us, perhaps they said. Spirit voices of those four little girls, sacrificed, like Kennedy, on the national altar. Had they come to guide him home? “ ‘And flights of angels’ ”—she thought of the mayhem at the end of Hamlet—“ ‘sing thee to thy rest.’ ”

  If war comes to this country, Aunt Krit had always said before the car wreck, her voice choking itself, we’ll all gather at Helicon and hide in the woods. Stella scanned the sky, but there was only the rosy sunset in the west, a lone passenger plane—Eastern Air Lines—circling the city before it headed for Norwood, and beyond, to the runway and the terminal. But who was left to gather? Her family already lay in the cemetery at Helicon. Now Aunt Krit couldn’t bear to say the word gather.

  Coming toward Stella on the sidewalk was a Negro woman in a stylish green coat, with a poodle pin glittering on the collar. Her hair was straightened to smoothness and turned under in a glamorous pageboy at the length of her shoulders. She walked confidently in high heels. Her face was sober, and she wore a black cloth around the upper sleeve of her coat. Stella wondered if it was safe for the colored woman—if one could mourn this way, safely? The woman’s face was drained of expression. Stella wanted to catch her eye, but there was no contact. Stella touched her own upper arm, clasped it as though to say, My hand is forming a mourning band. I grieve.

  The green-coated woman’s high heels clacked past. A teenage boy with his hair swept back into a ducktail walked past; he had a transistor radio clamped against the side of his head. Why should I disdain him? Stella asked herself. These were just ordinary people. She’d known them, or people like them, always.

  WHEN SHE TOOK HER seat at the switchboard and looked over the balcony into the store, she saw one of the women clerks take the arm of Mr. Hall, who was well dressed because he worked in men’s suits, and swing herself into a little jig around him. Mr. Hall was too dignified for that; he let he
r go but gave her a quick nod and smile.

  Mr. Fielding climbed up the steps from the first floor to her balcony. His eyes were fastened on her, and behind her chair, he paused to say, “You’re not happy about it, are you, Miss Silver?”

  “No,” she answered.

  He gave her a quick nod (agreeing?) and disappeared into his office, closed the door.

  (I mourn, too—surely that was what he meant. Yes.)

  Between the ringings of the phone, Stella talked with her friends. In a low voice, so that Mr. Fielding wouldn’t hear her chatting, she asked Ellie how her therapy session had gone—“It helps,” Ellie said. Stella reported that Dr. Bradstreet had delayed her birth control prescription. “She said she’d prescribe a tranquilizer though.” (What’s wrong with you!)

  Down below, the store busied itself with the flow and ebb of Thanksgiving customers. The pillars were decorated with pictures of turkeys and overflowing cornucopias in colors of brown and orange. Stella called Nancy, who said that she thought people were mostly appalled by the assassination, that no true American could be happy, but Stella told her what she’d seen with her own eyes that day in Birmingham, how white children cheered and clerks danced in the aisles.

  Because they always talked the longest, she last called Cat, who had been watching television and told Stella that Lyndon Johnson was already sworn in, on the flight from Dallas.

  When Stella went to the bathroom, she found the cleaning maid in there, crying. She was wiping the mirror, her face washed in tears. “Sadie!” Stella exclaimed, and they opened their arms to each other and wept.

  TOWARD CLOSING, SUDDENLY there was—Oh!—Darl, climbing up the steps. (Mr. Fielding, Stella told herself, was out of his office, making his good-night rounds.) Darl pitched himself into the seat; his face worn and conciliatory; he said he’d talked things over with his dad.

  “We’re going to drive to Washington,” Darl said. “To pay our respects. He’s taking time off. Dad said I could ask you if you wanted to come.”

  So Darl was sorry, Stella thought. So he, after all, was one of the true Americans (or his dad was) that Nancy had mentioned.

  Stella asked if Darl’s mother was going.

  “She might. You could share the room with her, and Dad and I would bunk together. He said you could chip in on the gas money, if you wanted to.”

  She watched the customers come and go (Talking of? Michelangelo?—she’d always admired Eliot’s rhyme in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Talking of the dead president?).

  When she looked at Darl, Stella said bluntly, “I thought you were glad.” (Her hand reached out to caress the buttons of the switchboard.)

  “Not really,” he said, eager to set things straight. “I just hate the violence. I wish people would be patient. Let things evolve naturally.”

  “Another hundred years?” She pictured prehistoric palm trees crashing in slow motion into a swamp. Her fingertips brushed the bland plastic buttons.

  “It could be quicker than that,” he said.

  (But she had wept in Sadie’s arms. Now she was strong for change.)

  The phone rang and she pushed the button-line to connect; she answered in her usual cheerful voice. Before she finished, it rang again, and she said to Ellie, “I’m talking with Darl. He’s here.” She listened to the ambivalence of Ellie’s silence. Stella added, “We’re about to close. I’ll call you from home.” Then she hung up, took her time regarding Darl, his brown eyes the color of chestnuts.

  “I could give you a ride home. I have the car now.”

  “No, thanks, Darl.” She knew he wanted her to ride in his new car again.

  “I’m sorry about the way I seemed. I wasn’t glad. It’s such a shock. I was glad about my car.”

  She could feel her hands beginning to tremble. She didn’t want to give in. She wanted her freedom. She reached toward the plastic buttons, hoped for a phone ring. She knew now what was behind that mask of freckles—someone who adopted the position of his father. Someone who deferred to authority, the so-called wisdom of his parents. Someone willing to deceive himself.

  “I can’t—” she began to say.

  “I’d like to give you another ring,” he said.

  “What happened to the old one? You don’t have it?”

  “I went up to Vulcan. Threw it off. I’m sorry.”

  Her diamond! She imagined it, like a meteorite, skating across a blackness, winking out. She felt his arm again, encircling her back and ribs, how it had been last May, on the balcony below Vulcan. In May, on the balcony she had stood beside him, her body a column of wanting. His arm crossed her back, and his fingers had lain among the spaces between her ribs. Probably he had thrown the ring as hard as he could, and it had sailed over the clearing and then arched into the trees on the long embankment sloping down toward the city. Had he listened to the sound of her ring falling through the bleak branches?

  “Now that the trees are bare,” she asked, “could you spot the demonstration?” She felt weak, spent. (He had thrown away their ring. Their chance.) The demonstrations were months ago.

  “I didn’t think about that.”

  Yes, she saw the pain in his face, too. He was numb with what he had done.

  “I went to sit in the library, downtown,” she told him. “I saw the conductor of the Birmingham Youth Orchestra.” Did this information mean anything to him? “It was the only place I could think to go. The big reading room. For quiet.” (Still he said nothing.) “To be alone.”

  “Won’t you ride up to Washington with us? They say the president’ll lie in state. Under the rotunda of the Capitol.” He looked at the floor. “We’d be part of history.”

  “I need to stay here,” she said. “I should have gone last August.”

  She could not imagine presenting herself passing the coffin of the president: she was too insignificant to go. And if she could see herself in the mourners’ queue, she could not imagine joining Darl’s people for the long car trip from Birmingham to Washington.

  She would smother in the car with his family. All those miles. Their unwavering trust in the goodness of God. They would be trying to fold her in because their son perhaps wanted this strange girl. And, betraying herself, she would try to make all her attitudes and thoughts agreeable to them. She imagined the horror of it all: the polite, genteel reverence for the occasion (a few mild jokes as the car hurried along the highway) while each of her bodily organs turned into a screaming mouth, her heart, her lungs, even her silent liver. (That darkness she had seen emerging from her father’s body; that had been his liver, his side opened by the auto accident like the pierced side of Christ.) Trapped inside Darl’s family car, perhaps when they passed through the Great Smoky Mountains, even her liver would grow a mouth that opened its lips in agony to moan My president is murdered.

  “I’m not comfortable with family car trips,” Stella said and felt ashamed to dissemble.

  “I understand,” he said.

  In the sincerity of his words, her father’s car rolled on its back and over, and over again; her parents, her brothers, herself, tumbled together inside the car. The wash of blood.

  “All right,” he said. She saw by the hardening of his face that now he knew she was disconnecting him from her future, not reliving the past. (But the past had come back. It had just come. And gone again.) He stood up. “I needed to ask. I’m sorry.”

  Her gaze felt like a fumbling key trying to enter the pupil of his eye, to go inside.

  “Yes,” she answered. Maybe he’d felt trapped into being engaged, and now he was glad to be free. She remembered their stiff, quick walk over the dark slope of the cemetery. Perhaps being in such danger together had implied an intimacy even more insistently than if they had made love.

  Down in the store, people were beginning to leave; she glanced at her watch. She drew the PA mike to her lips and switched it on. “Fielding’s will be closing in five minutes. Thank you for shopping with Fielding’s and have a pleasa
nt evening.” She felt dazed by the inappropriateness of her language.

  “Good-bye,” Darl said.

  Now she had severed their connection twice.

  She stared at his retreating back. No, she didn’t want to marry him. But not to be engaged! Not to have some stake in the future! How could she even find her way home tonight?

  AS THE EMPLOYEES WALKED out into the night, Mr. Fielding stood at the door, like a minister, and shook hands with each of his people. “Be safe,” he said to each of them. They were surprised by his formal valediction. Stella thought, He doesn’t agree with them, but he loves them. He wants them to feel that he cares about them. A patriarch lives.

  Yes, that was what made a person be careful—knowing that somebody else cared deeply about her safety. She was Aunt Krit’s responsibility; it was helpless Aunt Pratt who cared.

  “Be safe, Miss Silver.”

  It was like shaking hands with her father. Mr. Fielding’s cuff of white hair circled his head.

  “I’m not engaged anymore,” she blurted.

  “Well,” he said grimly, gathering his thoughts. “It will be all right, Miss Silver. You wait and see.”

  And she was out the door—the tail of her reply to him floating after her, Thank you—and she was walking rapidly past Brooks Furniture Store (“The working man’s friend”) toward Twentieth Street, where she would stand and wait for the bus. On big rubber tires, it would come toward her. Her feet hurried over the gray gloom of pavement toward the bus line. Like a long box of light, the bus would come, and she would ride to Norwood on big rubber tires. That was all. She knew how to get home. But what was there for her at home? An old white dog slowly wagging his tail.

  Across the street at Cousin Joe’s Pawn Shop, an outline of a diamond in pink neon, big as a wheelbarrow, blazed in the window. She thought of the big simulated diamond that sat on the arthritic finger of her Aunt Pratt; at home, Aunt Pratt would already be in bed—her leg brace with the attached shoe would be vacantly standing sentinel in the corner. So that she could breathe more easily, Aunt Pratt would be lying propped up on a stack of hard pillows, like someone in the eighteenth or nineteenth century.