Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Stella glanced across the street at the Lyric Theatre, where a lone girl sat behind glass in the lighted ticket booth a half-block ahead. Stella was glad it was not her job to be a girl behind glass. Over the lighted ticket booth, the movie marquee read La Dolce Vita. At home, Aunt Pratt would be tracing the outlines of large red roses in her wallpaper, trying to keep her eyes active and moving, but with the bedroom lights off, the roses are dark as old scabs.

  Maybe Aunt Pratt would picture not Stella but her own childhood self playing with her siblings over fifty years ago in the sunny yard at Helicon. Stella pictured the small house and the dusty red clay around it raked into swirls and parallel lines. Aunt Pratt, young and able, ran across the yard. The sound of squirrel guns resounded through the pine-fragrant woods. Fifteen years later Aunt Krit would be born, and she, too, would play in the yard. Perhaps pour water on the ground and make mud pies from the red dust. Lift her head at the sound of a gun.

  A city car horn blared, and Stella remembered the blast of a trumpet, a young man leaning out the window of the YMCA, but what had it meant? That these times were medieval, or would seem medieval in five hundred years; that a herald was needed?

  It meant nothing. The sharp blast of the trumpet had been the descant to the continual sound of footfalls on the pavement in the late afternoon. The trumpet shall sound, Handel’s Messiah proclaimed, and the dead shall be raised—incorruptible!

  Stella saw three men come out of the theater; they passed the girl in the glass box.

  Two came toward her; the third walked toward Twentieth Street. And who was that third man? She saw only his straight back, his longish wavy hair. She thought it might be Don Cartwright. A half-block ahead and on the other side of the street, Don might be walking to catch the bus on Twentieth Street. She picked up her pace; he walked swiftly.

  He had such a beautiful straight back, such movie star hair. She seldom went to foreign films, but La Dolce Vita, yes; wanting a window on the sweet life, she had gone with Ellie. What had Don thought of it? It must have been poorly attended, or had the three men walked out in the middle? No one else stood now in front of the glass box waiting to buy tickets to the last show.

  If she had been sure the man ahead of her was Don, Stella would have called to him. Sometimes she and Don sang greetings to each other, operatically. But not downtown at night, not across a city street, with a few cars passing between, and him half a block ahead. But she felt more and more certain that it must be Don—the short, quick steps. She lengthened her stride to cover the distance between them. She seldom talked to Don unless Cat was with her.

  Perhaps when she was only twenty steps behind him, she would sing to him sotto voce, “Donny,” starting high and then descending a ragged octave.

  But she slowed her pace. She began to match her steps to his. She knew she would not catch up unless she walked faster, but this way, she seemed more connected to him. She would hypnotize herself with the measure of their walking.

  A block traversed, and already it felt that the top of her head was lifted away like the lid off a coffin, and her essence was rising upward, dissipating into the night. Ah, yes, something of her spirit could move like breath, transcend the pavement and the street between him and her to curl around Don’s shoulders like a cape. Comfort him.

  And what comfort did Don need? That he could not make his sister free of her disease? That he was destined to watch Cat grow less and less capable over the years? Surely any brother would need to be comforted, when knowledge and caring became impotent.

  At the Gaslight, after she and Don had returned to their table, when the elegant black waiter had swirled Cat on the dance floor and returned her to the table, the waiter batted his curled eyelashes and said, “Oh, I wish everybody could just dance together, don’t you?”

  Don walked on, back straight, across the gulf of the street. Sometimes the passing cars, gliding as quietly as ghosts, interposed themselves between her and him on the other side of the street. But hadn’t something like her breath crossed over and settled like a scarf over his shoulders? And wasn’t she with Don, then, though his back was to her? Again, she seemed to feel spirits in the air, a murmuring. Perhaps the Muses hovered around Don’s shoulders when he painted.

  Don stepped off the curb, crossed Twenty-first Street to the next block. Ah, Twentieth Street ahead; suppose, he caught the bus and she missed it? Then she’d have to stand waiting alone another full half hour; the buses ran infrequently at night. She began to hurry. Why should she go home alone?

  Don turned the corner to Twentieth Street and was lost from view.

  Now she did hurry. She imagined herself Eurydice following Orpheus out of hell. Wasn’t there an opera based on the story? Gluck—and who was he, his name clucking from a crevasse in memory? If only she could sing a snatch of Eurydice’s tunes to Don instead of her stupid slide on his name:Don-ny. But she must not lose sight of him, must not be left to find her way alone.

  The black hand of the universe closed around her body. That hand wanted to squeeze. Am I mad? Perhaps she would talk to Ellie’s therapist about her fear of being alone. But surely everyone wanted a shared life?

  When she turned onto Twentieth Street, Don was nowhere to be seen.

  AT THE BUS STOP stood a poor old woman vending newspapers, with her adult retarded daughter. Stella had seen them many times: two female lumps of human flesh, beside a skinny wire rack holding the Birmingham News.

  Stella stared south, hoping to see the lighted bus moving down the canyon of tall buildings toward her. Had Don been nothing but an apparition?

  Blake walked past her again, his face distraught. Had he been walking the streets all this time while she worked at the switchboard? Did he try to out-walk his grief? Two good feet, one good hand. But was that blood on his face?

  Yes, and bruises. The sleeve of his jacket was partly torn away. He’d been in a fight. One of the pea-like nubbins on his stunted hand was almost torn away and dangled. He must have been beaten. But who would beat someone so vulnerable and why? Stella took a breath to speak to him, but he hurried on.

  No one was trying to help him. It was too late at night to make such efforts. Everyone was isolated in night weariness. He was another obscure witness—still living—to the national violence.

  Aimed south, a bus visited the empty spaces across the street from Stella and emitted two colored men. The Gaslight! They seemed not to know each other, went in opposite directions with no word of parting, but Stella thought she recognized them both from the Gaslight. One was a small black man; past middle age, he and his soft wife had danced like professionals, but unostentatiously with short sure steps. (But Donny had lengthened his step when he danced with her.) And the other Negro man, very handsome, in the prime of life, had worn a sapphire blue tie that flashed out like subtle neon. Yes, maybe she recognized Mr. Blue Tie. Maybe she had seen him dancing, in love, at the Gaslight.

  Both men stopped, turned around as though they’d reached the limits of a giant rubber band, they shook hands warmly, and then parted again.

  On the ridge of Red Mountain, Vulcan stood, thrusting a red torch into the murky night sky. Stella loved that tireless cast-iron arm. She imagined she could see the muscles between his straightened elbow and wrist.

  Half an hour passed. Stella stood first on one foot, then the other. She felt her calves stiffening with cold. To ease her back, she shifted her books from one arm to the other. She idly admired how her purse matched her green shoes. Then she admired her shoes and how they matched the purse. Inside the purse was her Fielding’s check, and she must not forget to take it to the bank.

  When she was little, Mama took her to the Exchange Bank on South Side with its white marble counters. The marble glinted as though impregnated with sugar. After Mama and Stella did business at the high, sugary counters of the bank, they visited Mary Ball Candies next door. On the outside, a frieze of stylized dogwood blossoms crowned the building.

  While she waited for t
he bus, Stella turned to see her reflection in the gleaming purple facade of Russell Stover’s, closed for the night. Suppose the bus never came? But, no—here came the 15 Norwood. Its big lighted face swayed to a stop just one block away. Few people rode so late at night; it must be nearly ten.

  At this distance, she saw the billed cap of a uniformed driver.

  He is just as real as the president. Seated behind the big steering wheel, wrestling it right and left, the driver (an opaque nameless figure at this distance) has a life just as precious to him as John Kennedy’s life was to him. Someday the driver now approaching only me will face death. Just as I will, or anyone will.

  The newspaper-vendor mother reached out lovingly to push back a misplaced strand of hair from her retarded daughter’s pale face.

  The bus paused at the red light, then lumbered across the intersection. The driver saw Stella and arced toward the curb.

  At that moment a quiet voice (tinged with irony) said, did not sing, “Miss Stella Silver, I believe.”

  “Don!” she exclaimed. “Where did you come from?”

  “The cafe. I stopped for a glass of wine. I watched you as you waited.”

  Stella glanced at the cafe. She’d paid no attention to it. A thick film of dark amber plastic was drawn down behind the glass, and she’d never thought to try to peer beyond it. She never paid any attention to the cafe, not with purple-fronted Russell Stover’s beside it. And he’d watched her, through the amber film. She didn’t know what to say. He stood erect, his chest high, his stomach in (Donny’s posture would never succumb to night fatigue), while she curved and slouched and shifted her weight with the weight of her books.

  “Actually”—he went on past her uncomfortable silence—“I had two glasses of wine. I was drinking a toast to the film I just saw—”

  “La Dolce Vita!”

  “How did you guess?”

  “I watched you come out.”

  The bus doors flared open to admit them.

  “Really? So first you were watching me—how odd. Please, step on. After you.”

  “And also, it’s the sort of movie you might watch,” she added over her shoulder while mounting the steps. Stella had thought it bewildering, the depicted futility of innocence.

  “Yes. Something to escape from the day’s events.” He spoke ruefully. Too lightly. Maybe he, too, had understood not wisely, but too well?

  What could she say? They were walking down the aisle, on the grooved, black rubber runner.

  “There’s no escaping it,” Stella said.

  “Let’s sit farther back.” He chose a seat for two in the middle of the almost deserted bus. A colored mother and two children sat in the back. “Sister’s watching it all on TV.” When he said Sister—there was a swell of irony under the word, buoying it up.

  No, Stella would not talk again about the tragedy. “I saw Giant a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Ah. The always beautiful Elizabeth Taylor. But La Dolce Vita. I wanted to be transported. To Italy. Land of opera. Don’t you think that’s necessary sometimes, Miss Silver?”

  They sat down on the brown leather seat, side by side, facing forward.

  “Land of Mussolini?” Stella added. (Once, a newsboy had sung out about the man, and her two brothers had picked up the refrain: “Mussolini kicked out of It-a-ly.”)

  Don turned his face away to look out the window.

  “Yes, but that was long ago.”

  The bus softly lumbered past the Church of the Advent; Stella looked at the darkness of the grille and the black garden beyond, the garden now invisible in the darkness. Then the bus turned the corner and passed the Birmingham Public Library, its lights extinguished now. Her places—the places to visit and revisit endlessly. Her city.

  Don tapped the cover of The Courage to Be on the top of Stella’s stack of books and asked, “What’s it about?” And she told him about the God beyond God, about the almost unnameable who might appear when the conventional figure dissolved into doubt. He listened noncommittally.

  The bus slid down Eighth Avenue past the back side of Phillips High School, the shops for wood turning, drafting, metalwork—places she never went, places she was afraid of. These were the rooms frequented by boys who would be gas station attendants, work with their hands. She shuddered, then recriminated herself for her snobbishness. But suppose her destiny were to push plastic keys and to say Hello, good evening, Fielding’s forever?

  “Destiny can leap out of its den and drag you in to be its slave, forever,” she said.

  “What!”

  “Destiny can get you, if you don’t watch out.”

  “Worse,” Don answered ruefully, “it can get you if you do watch out.”

  Now the bus was headed north on Twenty-fourth Street. It passed a strip of unpainted wooden houses. In the dim November light, Stella saw a lone fat woman sitting on her narrow porch. Her arms were bare, crossed on the porch banister. Her head lay on the arms, and she was sobbing. Her head was done up in a white bandanna, her arms were brown and lay across the weather-gray wood of the banister.

  Stella felt a lump rising in her own throat, for the president, for Darl, for that woman whose bare arms must be cold in November. Yet the lighted bus, with Stella in it, was passing her by.

  “You should try a glass of wine, sometimes,” Don said.

  “I will,” Stella promised vaguely.

  How abstractly her answer floated out. Who was this person beside her, chatting while the late bus carried them toward home?

  “I broke up with Darl, my fiancé, today.”

  “Well.” He glanced at her. “And how are you?” (He seemed afraid; would he have to comfort?)

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “I hope you called Sister.” Now he sounded like the country boy he was; no curl of urban irony lifted the word Sister. “No doubt she’d understand,” and irony—or was it self-doubt?—reappeared.

  He slid to the edge of his seat, turned, so he could look more fully into Stella’s face. Pressing her spine against the back of her seat, she closed her eyes. She felt the tears ooze out. She felt his hand squeeze her shoulder.

  “I thought it would be nice to be married,” she murmured. She could feel the way her underlip was folding down and back on itself, the sob gathering in her chest.

  Don gave something like a little laugh. “Most people do.”

  Stella had never seen a kinder face. It was as though he’d dropped the movie star mask. The beauty and sympathy of his character shone out at her.

  “I’m sorry to burden you,” she said. She felt like a crybaby.

  “What can we do with our stories,” he said, “but tell them?”

  “I guess.” But she was curious. What did he mean?

  “When we tell them, then someone can comfort us.” His beautiful blue eyes were looking at her. “When we tell, or sing, or paint, or make a film, it gives humanity another chance.”

  “A chance for what, Don?” There, under his high cheekbone, was a hollow where she could nest the curve of her face.

  “To be. A chance to live a different life. A chance to sympathize.”

  “Da,” she said. “That’s what the thunder says in The Waste Land. One of the meanings is that we should sympathize.”

  “Da?”

  “It’s Sanskrit. I mean it’s short for a longer word that’s Sanskrit.”

  His eyelids lowered to half-mast. Would he disappear? Would he blink and be gone? When he raised his eyelids, would he also raise the mask? She closed her own eyes.

  “Stella.” He called her name. Summoned her. She looked at him. He sounded frightened. “You seemed to go away,” he said. His tone was formal.

  How much formality does it take to contain the spume of the heart? How much irony and rue?

  “You’ll marry someone else, Stella.”

  “And you?” she asked timidly.

  He laughed. “Who knows?”

  Then they stopped, frozen in their attitudes, he, on t
he edge of the seat, turned to look back at her. She pressed far back against the brown leather.

  Past their reflections in the big bus windows was Norwood, the residential neighborhood that was truly theirs, more so than big Birmingham, though they claimed the city, too. The bus was passing the cluster of businesses on Twelfth Avenue—a photography studio, the Norwood bakery, the little sewing and notions shop, Murray’s drugstore, with the teen hall in its basement. People loved the businesses of their community. How would she know who she was without them? They were as defining as the stack of books on her knee.

  Don was reaching into his pocket. He drew out a large green plastic ring, the slightly adjustable kind that didn’t quite complete its circle. On the top of it was a flat oval, and pasted there like a blank cartouche was a ruby-red piece of shiny paper. “I got it in a Cracker Jack box,” he said. “Would you like to have it? In the meantime?” His face crinkled into a clown smile, as though he were trying to make her laugh. “Until something better comes along.”

  “Would we be engaged?” she asked, smiling a little.

  “Why not? If you want to?”

  “And if you want to,” she said. “Until something better comes along.”

  Still he held it out to her. It reminded her of a large snail, but the red paper caught the light, reflected, like something burning. Perhaps the ring was a little window, and if she put it on, she would see inside her flesh where her blood was burning. But lying in the palm of Don’s hand, the plastic ring was like a large snail.

  “Did you and Cat ever race snails in the country?” Stella asked.

  “We raced each other, Sister and I.”

  Still he held out the green ring, but his fingertips began to curl over it.