-8-

Her fingers stroke Melvin’s smooth, hard stomach. His body is splayed on the bed like Jesus on the cross. She’s accused him of indifference after they make love, so he’s trying to stay awake, but his eyes are drooping.

Though it’s been many months, it continues to amaze her that he’s here beside her in their own place, their relationship almost sudden. Though a phone call from him was highly improbable, she slipped in her phone number when she mailed the money she owed him.

Not long after, he phoned that he was in New York. That she’d been heavy on his mind. Did she want to see him? She said yes at once. He’d been on her mind since the day they’d met.

All through the spring, with him on scholarship at Columbia and her at work, they spent nearly every evening together. His curiosity about her is as endless as his approval. Both are reciprocal. Their favorite haunt is an old bar on Broadway, though most nights they’re the only interracial couple there. The people that traffic in and out look at them with interest or curiosity.

“Do you want to leave?” she asked on one of their first dates there.

“Why?” he said.

Racism, the war, and how to change society are always on the agenda. Their futures will be ones of devotion to the struggle. It’s a given. Discussing families is more difficult. She’s told him her family wouldn’t be welcoming, because he’s Black. But didn’t say he’d be met with silence. It saddens her. He’s said his mother thinks it’s dangerous for him to be involved with a white woman. She responded to this by asking if he cared that she was white. He took a moment to respond, a moment in which she wished she hadn’t asked. Then he asked if she cared that he was Black. She replied no, at once. But he never did answer her question.

They laughed past the fact that they weren’t virgins. Where she grew up, a virgin over the age of fifteen was deemed an outcast, information she didn’t share. He’d had a few girlfriends, he admitted. She didn’t probe, though did wonder if any of them had been white. None of it matters. She can barely contain her happiness and says so. He, too, says that he’s gladder than he’s been since he was a little kid riding a bike in the wind, which he equated with freedom to be, to just be.

“Being together is a daily blessing,” she whispers, and wraps her arm around his neck.

“Ease up on the choke hold,” he mumbles.

“Let’s walk to the cappuccino place.”

“You’re mad, girl. That’s nearly three miles.”

“Loving you fills me with restless energy.”

“Yeah, baby, well, the act of loving you leads me to contemplation.”

“About what?”

“Why did I know you’d ask? The memory of filling you refills me. Get it?”

“You’re full of royal shit.” She crosses her arms behind her head, stares at the ceiling, content. Both of them are busy with political activities as well as work and school. Today, however, she called into work sick and he cut classes. They had all afternoon together. “Know what the movement lacks?”

“You’re going to tell me.”

“A union. If we had a union, we’d have holidays, bonuses, maybe even vacations.”

“After the revolution.”

“Melvin, there’s not going to be a revolution, not the kind that happened in Cuba or China.”

“So what are we fighting for?”

“Change, major change.”

“Not good enough, baby. Or maybe good enough for your middle-class white friends. They need a fix of morality to go on doing their lives. For us coloreds, honey child, everything must be uprooted, turned around, renamed, reset. It’s a matter of life or death.” He yawns.

“I agree, but it’ll come in stages, not one full sweep. There’s no Winter Palace to . . .”

Propping herself up on her elbow, she sees his eyes close. Even in repose his face doesn’t relax. A tiny muscle beneath his cheek trembles like a trapped moth. He’s told her that growing up in the South taught him to never sleep deep. Though study has kept him grounded these past months, he’s aching to break out, to be in the streets, to organize to make it happen. Miles, who hates the war with a passion, feels the same way. She shares their impatience.

Endless meetings in rooms so smoke filled she might as well take up the habit try her patience. Instead of engaging in infinite debate to reach a consensus on simple decisions, they should be organizing on city streets, country roads, in Laundromats and suburban malls, talking nonstop to any passerby about racism and about the unlawful war where she fears Richie will land.

She taps Melvin’s forehead. “Don’t sleep.”

“Can’t not.”

“Get up and walk with me.”

“Hey, girl, I’m not drunk, just tired. Don’t you know I love you even when I’m asleep?”

Actually, she does. Tenderness and admiration come easy to him, and he never stints on the words to express them.

“I love you too,” she says, and presses her face into his chest. He strokes the back of her head.

When the phone rings they look at each other. “You get it,” she urges.

“Says nothing anywhere about having to answer every call,” he mutters, swinging his long legs off the bed.

“What?” he says. His suddenly tense body alerts her. “I’ll be there.” He hangs up and begins pulling on his pants.

“What? What is it?”

He looks at her. Bewilderment crosses his face. It’s as if he doesn’t recognize her.

“What, Melvin? Tell me.”

“Martin Luther King’s been shot.”

“Dead?”

He nods. “Shot by a white guy.”

“Oh no.” She reaches for her jeans.

“Where you going?” His tone as distant as the planet Mars.

“Melvin, please, I want to go with you. I can’t wait here and do nothing. I want to shout and fight.” It’s her loss too, she doesn’t say.

“What you want and what’s possible are not identical. I’m going up to Harlem. It’ll be dangerous there. I’ll phone you.”

He’s out the door, leaving a vacuum of silence behind. Did something decisive just happen, something apart from King’s death? Did Melvin dismiss her help because she’s white, or because she’s female, or because it’s Harlem? Was he protecting or rejecting her? Only she can’t dwell on that now. Important tasks are at hand. She must find her own way to fight the deplorable killing. Someone has to pay. She saw it in Melvin’s eyes. Though even with brown skin, he’s not safe up there tonight. The cops will be all over Harlem. He’s wearing only a windbreaker. What kind of protection is that?

A cacophony more insistent than the noise of a jet plane enters through the open window. She looks out to see a posse of Black teenagers marching up Broadway, beating ashcan covers with sticks. The man who killed Dr. King was white, like her. Tonight, she’s not welcome to join them.

She switches on the TV. The faces of reporters morph into the faces of Memphis officials, government representatives, white men all. She dials Miles’s number.

“I know, I know,” he says.

“Melvin’s on his way to Harlem. He wants me to wait here. Jesus, how can I? It’s maddening. I’ll take the train to your place. It’s closer to—”

“No, don’t. The guys in my room are making plans to do our own thing.”

“Oh. Okay. Talk to you later.” As soon as she hangs up, the phone rings.

“Did you hear?” It’s Maisie.

“Yes. Melvin is on his way to Harlem. Where are you?”

“Nina and I just got home.”

“I’ll be right there. Gather everyone. We have to respond.”

The phone rings again. “Maisie?”

“You little shit.”

“What?”

“You haven’t called home in weeks.”

“Johnny?”

“You little shit.”

“You want to say something, say it fast. I’m about to hang up.”

“Pa’s in Bronx-Lebanon Hospital. He had a heart attack.”

She runs three never-ending blocks to the subway. An ashy darkness has replaced the April sunlight. The station is empty, the token booth closed. Ducking under a turnstile, she paces the platform. She’ll go to the hospital after the meeting at Maisie’s. Heart attack doesn’t mean instant death. Her family, especially Johnny, view any health problem as if death is the next step. Her father is in a hospital. He’s being taken care of. Dr. King, though, is dead. The note she scribbled to Melvin said nothing about her father. She doesn’t want him showing up at the hospital; her family will not be friendly.

The apartment door is ajar, the air inside filled with cigarette smoke. The TV is on, the volume low, but no one is watching. It’s been a while since she’s been here. Everything looks the same except that now about fifteen people are seated on chairs and the floor. She steps over some pillows and finds a space on the floor beside Ben.

“Pretty awful, isn’t it?” he says.

“It is.”

Ben slides an arm around her shoulder. “Want a toke?”

“Not now.” What she wants now is a short meeting so she can get to the hospital. No one in her family would ever understand the decision to come here first. Though her mother will pointedly say nothing and Celia little, Johnny will announce her absence on the hour perhaps to the distress of her father.

“Dr. King came out against the war. It’s why he was killed,” Maisie states.

“What’re you proposing?” someone asks.

“A leaflet to explain this.”

“To distribute where?” Nina asks.

“The campuses.”

“Students already know this crap. Try the streets,” Josie says, her impatience hard to disguise.

“It’s not enough,” Lowell says.

“Let’s take over a radio station, demand twenty-four hours devoted to Dr. King.”

“Feels odd for white people to do it.”

“We need to let them lead.”

“Them? Like we’re the adults?” Josie’s tone too harsh by far.

“It’s just semantics. Cool it,” Ben says.

Cool it? How can she? Her father sick, and Melvin, is he even safe? What if he ends up in a hospital as well?

“Let’s find out if there are already plans in the works,” Nina says.

“Yes,” Josie says. “Meet with Black leaders, see what they need us to do, and then bring up the radio station action.”

“She’s right,” Lowell says. “I can get in touch with one of the Black leaders and bring back any message.”

She leans over and whispers, “Ben, let me know the final details. I have to split now.”

In the quiet hospital lobby, a man lounges on a worn couch, while another sleeps in a large chair. A middle-aged Black woman sits behind the information desk. I’m so sorry Dr. King is dead, she doesn’t say. I loved and respected him.

“My father, Anthony Russo, is a patient here. He had a heart attack. I know it’s past visiting hours, but I came straight from the airport. I’m a student in Michigan.” If they give her a hard time, she’ll refuse to leave. It’s her father. She has a right to see him no matter what time it is.

The woman’s eyes scan a sheet of names. “I’ll find someone to help you.”

She settles into the nearest chair. Promises herself that after her father recovers, she’ll stay more in touch with him. He came to mind when she was reading a book about alienated labor. He likes to hear her talk. She’ll explain why all his years at the leather factory before the restaurant felt so oppressive and why he collapsed at his workstation. That it wasn’t his weakness, as he believed, but a sane response to an intolerable situation. She wants to illuminate his understanding and lighten his burden the way that knowledge is lifting hers.

The woman beckons her to the desk.

“Doctor on call is Wilson. He’ll meet you on the sixth floor. Take a pass.”

She finds a bank of elevators. Waits forever until one arrives.

The elevator doors open on a silent, empty gray lounge with a wall telephone and several plastic chairs. A man in a white coat heads toward her.

“Russo?”

She nods.

“Dr. Wilson. So awfully sorry to be the one to . . .”

Her eyes take him in as if he were made up of tiny particles held together by a strange substance that she needs to discover: white hair, dark eyes, gray moustache, wrinkled cheeks, large chin, creased neck, long arms, and black shiny shoes. He continues to talk, and the sounds bounce around outside her brain. She remembers the black-lined mouths on TV and their useless words.

“Where’s my father now?” she interrupts.

“On the way to the chapel of your family’s choice.”

The doctor extends his hand, but she’s already at the exit door.

At home the note to Melvin is where she left it.

It’s after two; she can’t call her family. She’ll phone Celia at seven. She’ll phone work as well, tell the supervisor her father has died, that she’ll be out for several days. Why does it feel like a lie? As the country laments the loss of Martin Luther King, there seems no room tonight for her father’s death.

Once she attended a friend’s cousin’s funeral and watched everyone cry. She faked a sad face; it seemed the right thing to do. It wasn’t her cousin. But it is her father. Gone. Forever. How does anyone deal with that? The senseless deaths in Vietnam often move her to tears, make her angry, and that fury drives her to action. Now her grief is too sudden, deep, and private to move her in any direction. Please, Melvin, she prays, come home soon.

She switches on the radio news and sits on the bed listening. The DJ says there’s rioting in Harlem. People are probably tearing up the streets, teargas everywhere. A minister is saying that rioting isn’t what Dr. King would want, that there’s a better way. But is there? Rage needs an outlet. People have been throwing things inside their houses for years. Now the frustration has gone outdoors.

The newscaster predicts that the rioting will end with the night. It won’t. It’s about more than Dr. King’s death. It’s about life, which continues, except for her father, who was too tired to wait for change.