AS THEY STARTED THEIR DESCENT DOWN THE NARROW SPIRAL steps inside Vulcan’s pedestal, Darl apologized to Stella. “I’m sorry we couldn’t see anything.”
“The trees blocked the view,” she answered. She was descending the stairs behind him. This way Darl could catch her if she stumbled, break her fall. It was like walking on the street side; his mother had taught him manners: a gentleman should be killed first, if a car jumped the curb. Going up the stairs, he should walk behind, in case she (any she) should slip.
From their high perch, Darl had admired the vast volume of air filling the space over the city in the valley. God’s love was suggested by a tension between immensity and insignificance—sparrows plying the ocean of air. From left to right, all the way to a vague horizon, the city had lain resolved into white, gray, and tan buildings, a monochromatic mosaic of little squares and rectangles. The tops of the bubbling green trees had resembled broccoli heads.
At the head of Twentieth Street stood a green carpet, landscaped with fish-ponds; Darl knew the big trees of the park provided a canopy to the children’s entrance of the library, though the main library was too far away to serve children from his part of town, the West End. That other concentration of green he had seen from the balcony would have been Kelly Ingram Park, where the colored children gathered, the pawns of their leaders. If only people could be patient, God had his plan.
The air over the city had not been invisible but perceptible as a gray haze hovering over the tiny buildings and trees. When Darl had looked up higher, he had seen some real blue, pale and tender. He felt that God had a tender attitude toward Birmingham, despite her shortcomings.
Darl took his time descending the metal steps in the dim light. He needed to decide if he should arrange to see Stella again in the evening.
“Did your folks take you to the library when you were little?” Stella asked, her voice floating down over his shoulder. Sometimes she seemed to follow his unarticulated thoughts.
“We had a branch in West End. Not so grand.” He glanced out a narrow window set in the curve of the stone tower. He wished he had grown up nearer the center of things. Not that he didn’t love his own blue-collar people. He did, and fiercely.
“When I was ten,” Stella said, “my aunt allowed me to take the bus alone to the library.”
He could hear her steps slowing. She lived in Norwood, once the residence of the well-to-do, with its wide boulevard, but now an area that had headed steadily downhill for many decades. Still, he liked its quiet decay, the remnants of elegance.
“It was my first visit to the library,” she went on, “after I lost my family. I turned ten. Aunt Krit said double digits meant I could take the 15 Norwood to town, on my own.”
He paused and turned to look up at her.
“They had been gone five years.” Her upturned face looked peaked and scared.
“I’m sorry, Stella.”
“The library had a revolving brass door.” She had stopped, stood as though suspended in the dim tower, one hand on the metal handrail. “You entered the door from the outside world, pushed, then emerged in another world. A quiet, interior world.” She seemed imprisoned in her sadness. Slowly she took another step down, closer to him; he continued their descent. “That’s how it was,” she said in a little voice. “They died and the world changed. Like passing through a revolving door from one world to another.” She paused again, as though she wanted this spiraling down to last and last. “Actually, it was like crossing a river from one state to another. The driveway passes between my original home with my brothers and parents and where I live now with my father’s sisters, Aunt Pratt and Aunt Krit. I crossed the driveway into another world.”
At the bottom of the tower, they stepped out into the bright May sunshine. Though it had been chilly up on the pedestal, it was pleasantly warm at its base, with a slight breeze. How sad Stella had sounded. Darl took her hand, and they walked forward.
“I need to go on to Fielding’s,” she said, referring to her evening work on the switchboard at one of Birmingham’s large department stores.
He turned to face her. “I’ll pick you up after. On the Vespa.”
“All right,” she said.