Stella’s Odyssey

WHEN ELLIE SIGNALED THROUGH THE LIBRARY QUIET FOR Stella to wait, Stella had already gathered up her books and was about to leave the Birmingham-Southern College library to get a bus to town, then see the gynecologist, then maybe kill some time at Parisian’s, then on to Fielding’s and her Friday evening work on the switchboard. But Ellie said, “Wait.” Stella stopped beside the railing around a large opening down to Circulation. Ellie leaned close to Stella’s ear to whisper the news. Then Ellie drew back, her eyes locked on Stella, the corners of her mouth curiously turning slightly up.

Ellie was a friend, a talented actress, a liberal. Ellie certainly wasn’t amused. Stella felt hysterical, as though she might lose her balance, pitch over the railing, and land down below, headfirst, onto the circulation desk. She saw her head breaking into two neat pieces. Her heart seemed to be caving in, and the book-lined world was filmed with tears.

But why this stupid twitching of the lips, as though I might smile? Stella asked herself.

Ellie added, still slightly smiling, “I can’t believe it.”

“Maybe it’s a rumor,” Stella whispered back. “Like ‘The War of the Worlds’?”

“I don’t think so. It was a real reporter. Dan Rather in Dallas, Texas.”

They were taking turns leaning toward each other’s ears in a strange, weaving choreography.

“But who’s he?”

“The local reporter, in Dallas.”

Now they controlled the curling of their lips; they assumed immobile expressions like stunned, fixed masks.

“I don’t believe it,” Stella said. “I have to go catch my bus.” She didn’t say Today I take charge of my body, I get birth control pills. “I have to go to work this evening.”

As she pushed through the door, she heard a loud voice saying from the circulation desk: “May I have your attention. May I have your attention, please. We have terrible news….” But now she was outside.

Stella ran as fast as she could on the grass around the library, then pell-mell like a child, down the steep hill toward Arkadelphia Road and the bus stop. It can’t be. Not after the bombing. During that funeral, Stella had looked at herself in the mirror in her bedroom and said over and over “Coward!” Trees should burst into flame while she ran down the hill away from the college.

A new atrocity? Run! I won’t believe it. It probably was true.

In 1956, she had wanted so badly for Kennedy to get the nomination for vice president. Can’t they see? Can’t they see? She was thirteen. How could they choose that plain Estes Kefauver? And the Democrats had lost (Can my side really lose?), though even her Aunt Krit had admired Adlai Stevenson, and voted for him. Aunt Krit said Stevenson was actually intelligent. Her voice had been choked with emotion, as though she, too, at last, had something in common with the life of the nation.

Then Krit had said, “You like Kennedy so much, read this.” Aunt Krit’s voice had to fight its way up from her throat. She wanted so ardently to instill her niece with values precious to herself that she scarcely dared represent them with words or deeds. “I bought it in the book department at Loveman’s,” Krit said proudly. “Kennedy wrote it. Profiles in Courage.”

Stella had made herself read each of the biographical sketches. Aunt Krit doesn’t want me to love somebody just because of his looks, she had thought. Even then, Stella knew that Aunt Krit, in her gruff way, was trying to protect her from a dangerous susceptibility:look-love. But Kennedy was smart enough to write a history book. Aunt Krit revered that. “He wrote it while he had a broken back.”

And now the man was cut down, in all his prime and glory.

Divorced from her body, Stella ran lickety-split down the wooded hillside from the college to the street. She leapt over rocks without noticing them.

When Kennedy had been elected president, Stella had thought smugly of her own ability to recognize his promise: yes, she herself had had some insight into politics and intuition about who was going to count. And his wife was beautiful and loved classical music and spoke French. Ellie, her friend, looked something like Jackie Kennedy.

Why had Ellie smiled? Was it the smile of embarrassment—that they lived in such an unbelievably cruel world?

After he had been safely elected president, people had said Kennedy never would have been allowed on the ticket for president if he’d been the vice presidential nominee running with Stevenson, who would have lost in any case. No Stevenson-Kennedy nor any other possible combination could have beaten Ike. That’s what people said, and then Stella’s smugness melted, and she knew how ignorant she was of the ways of the world and of politics. If, in 1956, she had gotten her wish, it would have doomed Kennedy.

But he was doomed. Shot or dead?

She’d reached the bus stop. It was a miracle she hadn’t fallen down the hill. But she must have turned her foot. Her ankle was throbbing. Her body, too, was cramping. She felt as though her body was opening to bleed. It was supposed to be tomorrow, not today. The gynecologist didn’t want her to schedule her appointment during her period. Maybe it wasn’t much flow. But she could feel herself starting to bleed. He was bleeding in Texas. He might be dying.

Her books weighed so heavily that she felt too weak to hold them. They fell around her feet. She felt as though she might faint. This was the president. It was like saying God was dead, and that was what Nietzsche had said.

Stella gasped for air as she watched cars drive past the bus stop. Did they know? The president was shot. Her stomach roiled. When Stella’s philosophy professor had enunciated Nietzsche’s “God is dead” in his lecture, she had thought she was going to be sick. But the teacher said that for existentialists the death of the idea of God meant a certain kind of freedom. Exhilaration! But for others, that we were doomed to freedom.

She knelt to pick up her books. The professor had turned around and recreated on the blackboard a cartoon he’d seen. He’d written “God is dead” and attributed the quotation to Nietzsche. Then he’d crossed out the quote and written under it: “Nietzsche is dead” and under that line, he signed “God.”

Half the class had laughed, relieved, and half the class had only looked thoughtful, including Ellie her new friend, who resembled Jackie Kennedy and was one of the few married students.

Kennedy couldn’t die. What kind of world would this be, essentially, if the president was assassinated? But presidents had been assassinated before. Lincoln, the great Lincoln. What kind of country was this, that killed its great leaders?

Stella was starting to sob, and she knew this was hysteria. If her parents weren’t gone, she wouldn’t be crying like this. “I was too little,” she whispered to the vacant bus stop. She’d study psychology, not graduate on time, but stay an extra year and be a psychology major instead of an English major. Just stay on at the college. She brushed dirt off her books. Maybe she wouldn’t have sex, not yet. Maybe she wouldn’t go to the gynecologist. Maybe she’d just go to work. She felt encased by drudgery, numb, and impenetrable.

But who was pulling up to the curb? Who was driving a strange car? An old two-toned Chevrolet Bel-Air? Who had come to release her?

Who but her fiancé, reaching across the seat to open the door for her, who but Darl?

She flung herself across the seat into his arms, closed her eyes, exploded into tears, pressed her cheek against his. Inside! She was safe inside. Her cheek was pressed tight against his freckles. She’d always loved his freckles. It made him pure in some strange way. Unique. Veiled. His face proclaimed for him that his essence was behind a curtain, as all of us were always doomed to be. She was trying to get past the veil with her pressing, to enter the safety of his mind, to merge. Not to be alone.

“Hey, hey,” Darl said, laughing a little. “I know it’s a cool car, but, hey, maybe I should have got a Cadillac.”

All she could do was sob.

He took time to put the car in gear, then he reached his right arm around her. “Hey, Stella, baby. Is something wrong?”

She sobbed, moved her eyes down to his shoulder, and blubbered into his shirt. Baby! How could he call her that? She hated it.

“You like the car, don’t you?”

She couldn’t speak.

“Just try to calm down, darling—”

Darling. Darl called her darling and no one ever had before. She took a deep breath. It rattled all the way down into her lungs.

“That’s right. Calm down now. Don’t get unhinged. Try to calm yourself, Stella.”

She opened her eyes. They were driving down Eighth Avenue. He was guiding the car among the sparse traffic.

“Oh, Darl. They’ve shot the president.”

He kept his eyes on the road. “I know,” he said. “I heard.” He spoke quietly. He continued to steer the car.

“Is he all right?”

Darl needed his right hand to steer, to shift again.

“He died.”

“Oh no!” The sobbing was stunned out of her. The car smelled of sulfur. Stella looked straight ahead at cars and delivery trucks flowing down a river. No, a road. “Oh no. Oh no.” The two words flapped like a metal hinge winging through nothingness. She became that hinge becoming unhinged; the phrase broke into two parts, and dropped. Sometimes she moaned “Oh” and sometimes she ineffectually punched the word “No” into the air.

Darl remained quiet for a time. Finally he said, “It’s a pity.”

“Is he really gone?” Stella’s voice quavered. “Are you sure?”

“They say so. On all the stations. I heard it in the cafeteria. The car doesn’t have a radio.”

She said nothing.

“But it’s got a good engine.” He sounded quietly happy. “And I like the colors. Cream and turquoise.”

She said nothing.

“Did you notice the colors?”

“Darl, the president is dead.”

“It’s a pity. I don’t believe in murder. I hate violence.”

“His life is over. It’s all over for him.” The handsome president with the beautiful family was lying someplace on a cold slab. The fluids of his body were being drained away.

“I’m sorry he’s dead,” Darl said soberly. “But in some ways, I guess he deserved it.”

“What do you mean?” She felt like a volcano erupting.

“If he hadn’t backed King and Shuttlesworth and all the colored people, we wouldn’t have had that mess.”

“I’m for integration.”

“Most people think Kennedy’s ruined the South.”

Stella sat up straight, away from him. Out the car window, she watched a large black bird with an ivory bill languidly rowing through the air. “Kennedy was trying to help save the South.”

“I’m sorry he’s dead. I wish he had just pulled back. Been patient.” Darl sighed. “My dad said we’ll never be the same, after Kennedy.”

“But your dad’s not glad?” She noticed her books spilled on the floor of the car. That was the way it was with books: you forgot they existed; you carried them around as though they were part of your own body. Then you looked down, and you were wading in them. She reached down to stack the spilled books onto her lap. How Does a Poem Mean? by John Ciardi. Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be.

“I haven’t talked to Dad yet,” Darl said. “You need a satchel for your books.”

The car seemed to be slowing down. The world seemed to be slowing, or was it time?All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren, still lay beside her foot.

“Darl, I think you might be glad.”

“I’d say, more like relieved.”

“Those four girls weren’t doing anything. They were attending their church.”

“But he was doing something. He was backing up their leaders.”

“Murder is murder.” Stella made herself sit perfectly still. Without any movement of her eyes, she stared at the street flowing under the hood of the car. She breathed as shallowly as she could. She wanted to apply the brakes to the flow of time. Pain is pain.

Then she slowly asked Darl to do something she never regretted, not once. She asked him to stop the car. She told him, calmly, that she wanted to get out. She preferred to ride the bus, she said. Before Stella got out, she held out his ring toward him.

“I can’t marry you,” she said.

He gripped the steering wheel hard. Behind his brown freckles, his skin turned pink. His face was like a strange fabric: brown dots on a pink field.

“All right,” he finally said. He shifted into neutral, then raised up the palm of his hand to receive the ring. “I won’t be asking again, Stella. You better be sure.” His eyes were full of hurt pride, or was it pain?

She pressed the ring deep against the skin of his palm and into the flesh. Theringmadescarcelyadentinhisskinbutsatroundandinviolateaseternity in the palm of his hand. The little diamond shattered light prismatically.

 

AND THEN SHE WAS standing in the gutter, a pile of four books held in the crook of her arm.

Stella watched the back of the turquoise and cream Chevy as he drove away. He seemed sealed up in the car. He became the departing car.

A yellow Volkswagen Beetle crept past her, and she thought Yes, Darl is a peanut inside a one-hump shell, though Darl was not in the Volkswagen. Her gaze shifted to Vulcan, lame-footed in the distance with his arm extended high against a cloudy horizon. Furious with herself for knowing Darl so little, she stamped her hurt foot. Her Aunt Krit was right: she wasn’t going to marry Darl. Not ever.

She looked at the stack of books in her arm, hardcovers with stiff edges, countless pages held between. All the King’s Men. Whatever the books might tell seemed unavailable, as though she had lost the ability to read. But she remembered—sitting beside her mother on the lime green sofa, her mother saying “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men / Couldn’t put Humpty together again.” Two fat tears ran down Stella’s cheeks. Impatiently, she brushed the tears aside.

What did all that matter? Darl and her? A couple of college kids. Unhinged. John F. Kennedy was dead.

She watched the cream roof of Darl’s car receding in the distance. Another car, an old red Buick, pulled into the lane behind Darl, and he was gone. She was not in any car; if it rolled and scrambled its passengers in a wash of blood, she would not be among them this time.

 

WITH DISBELIEF, SHE LOOKED at the sunshine. There were no trees to shade the ugly, concrete place where she waited. Here was a gas station, a metal sign proclaiming BUS STOP screwed to a creosote-soaked pole. She had to get to her doctor’s appointment. She had to go to work. Why was everyone moving slowly?

It took an attendant many minutes—was it five? ten?—merely to walk around the front of a red Thunderbird convertible with its ragtop up. (How could a car be so fetching? So beautifully shaped and sexy?) The attendant’s name was embroidered in chain stitch on his pocket:Ryder. He was wearing an old black cowboy hat. He stepped so slowly that she knew Ryder would rather be riding the plains of the West, being a cowboy, out in the open, not confined to this greasy apron of concrete, bending to get an order for gasoline, what octane, how many gallons?

Ryder hadn’t reached the car window yet and already he was preparing a smile, showing his ruined mouth full of bad teeth and the black dead spaces between his teeth. He was still young, not more than thirty, Stella thought, giving his life over to being a grease monkey with filthy hands. He bent his body as though he were old, as though he had already entered his future.

He has grown old, wasted his life bending and smiling. This job has broken his body and spirit. Stella hated what life had dealt this nondescript man named Ryder, how life had cheated him, left him ignorant, fit only for this, a greasy black rag streaming from his hip pocket. Grease the color of midnight splotched his blue trousers. Love his humanity, she enjoined herself.

I can love him.

And after all why not him? Not just as neighbor, fellow human being. Why not accept the card that life dealt us? Call this man not Ryder but Romeo?

When she was twelve and had played with the boy next door, she had wondered Why not marry him? Aren’t any two human beings basically suitable for each other? If they let each other be and also try to help each other? They had played together, shooting each other with rubber suction-cup darts. He was fat, something of an outcast, but she had understood: she was different, too. She liked playing with him. Wasn’t everybody off the mark of normal, she had wondered naively then. So why pick and choose? Why say to anybody:You are not suitable.

Mama had once said to her, “Stella, try not to go to extremes in your thinking.”

But why not? Why not follow logic to the end? Why wasn’t logic as good as faith?

Only there didn’t seem to be any life-logic unless it was all a matter of faith, of God’s plan.

Certainly not her plan.

She watched the too-slender young attendant leaning toward the window that the driver was cranking down. Slender, not skinny, was the term she applied to herself. Poor Ryder. Poor nutrition probably. Bad diet, rotten teeth, yes, she’d seen the evidence in other such men. Ignorant, he didn’t understand the importance of taking care of his teeth. What if she gave herself to one such as Ryder? Would he feel his life was blessed?

Ryder spoke to the driver. “Would you like a flag?” How strange—arrogant—his tone. Full of swagger. “We’re giving them away free today.”

He held out a windshield decal: the Stars and Bars. A Confederate flag.

“No thanks,” the driver answered.

Today! Today, he’s offering a free Confederate flag! Stella felt her pity for the dirty attendant draining away.

Ignorant and poor, he was from the underclass, who served the upper class. The underclass who turned much of their hatred and bitterness toward the blacks. He proudly imagined that it was possible for him to own the car he served, to sit in the driver’s seat. After all, in a free country he could drive a Thunderbird into a filling station, same as anybody.

Ryder straightened up, slightly turned his head. He spat onto the greasy concrete. Was it contempt, this spitting? Maybe his lungs were bad, maybe his sinuses ruined with smoking cigarettes, and he simply had to clear himself.

The driver accepted the spitting as meaningless and told how many gallons to pump.

Stella listened to the soft swish of cars in the street, passing her at dirge speeds. She saw no sign of the bus. The cars crept forward. Darl had driven on without her, and surely there was relief in that. This was the real world, standing on concrete, isolated, struggling against fatigue to hold her books, her ankle throbbing. The world was not a male cheek curtained with freckles. Not that cheek she could wet with her own tears, kiss, playfully lick, if they lay under a giant oak on the grass of Norwood Boulevard.

Surely it was taking the grease monkey more than five minutes to fill the tank. Was he dawdling on purpose? (Darl had squirmed away, laughing, when, on that humid night so oppressive you had to create jokes to endure, she’d licked inside his ear, tasted the bitter wax from deep in the canal.) The driver showed no impatience. Ever so slowly the man in the driver’s seat lit a cigarette. Stella wanted to run to him, to say Stop! This is a gas station. Don’t you realize the danger? The man had frizzy red hair, a large nose, a small chin. He wore glasses with a clear rim. The way he dragged on the cigarettes was somewhat theatrical, too slow.

Stella moved her hand to scratch her nose. She saw her own hand had been slowed down, and it occurred to her that her perception might be distorted. The motion had not felt slower; it had only looked slower. John F. Kennedy was dead. Time had woven itself into the air, and now they all lived unreal in a new matrix.

There were no authentic checks or tests to distinguish dream from reality, so said Descartes.

Standing in the doorway of the classroom with his cigarette hand out in the hall, Dr. Drummer had confided to the class that he had thought there were ways to tell the difference between dream and reality. And can you distinguish memory and imagination? she had wanted to ask. Which of them is real? Dizzy with memory, her body was lying in the cemetery on the towel near the giant magnolia tree. And Darl. He had been really there, too. The professor had leaned his body out into the hall to drag on the cigarette: he was obeying the rule for faculty not to smoke in the classroom.

Suddenly the dark men, like ghosts, had been standing on the grass very near her and Darl. It was as though they’d come out of the ground. Nothing had ever seemed so real.

Once, Dr. Drummer had confessed, he himself had had a mental illness, hallucinations. Stella had admired the matter-of-fact way he told the class something stigmatizing and private. Once Dr. Drummer had thought he had seen electric wires running everywhere, but he had tested the perception. He had approached the wall crawling with snakelike electric wires and tried to touch one: then the black cords had disappeared. As he finished his story, he pushed his glasses, black plastic frame, more securely up his nose. Dr. Drummer explained he had used one sense to test the other. You could test reality. Descartes’s “Dream Problem”—solved. She doubted it.

Ryder spoke again. “Didn’t notice the out-of-state plates. Staying down here long?”

“I think so,” the man answered and fished dollar bills out of the slit of his wallet.

Ryder put his hands on his hips. “Fine day, ain’t it?” he said.

She winced to think of Darl, smug behind his freckles, unaffected by murder. Probably it was someone just like this Ryder who had pulled the trigger.

The red-haired driver said nothing about the fineness of the day. “Would you mind to get the windshield?”

Maybe she was watching a contest. But usually the attendant did the windshield without any prompting. (Suppose she never married anybody.) The driver didn’t have to be trying to dominate Ryder. (“Don’t come unhinged,” Darl had said to her.)

Ryder moved suddenly, like a spring uncoiling. “Sure thing.”

How could you interpret motives, when observation itself was subjective? She had not believed Dr. Drummer’s proof. Because she saw that he had taken comfort in it, she’d offered no challenge: Why can’t more than one sense enter into the delusion? Why can’t hallucinations just come and go randomly? Didn’t life? (When she’d given back the ring to Darl, she had pressed the circle hard into his palm.)

In his “Third Meditation,” Descartes had had the honesty to say there was no proof, only faith. His faith was that a universe bleared with illusion would be a cruel joke on humankind, and his faith was that God was no Jokester. But Descartes had not questioned the faith that other civilizations might have in other gods, and those gods not burdened with the attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and kindness might have a different nature, some of them certainly pranksters to be appeased. (She was not going to marry Darl.)

“Now, would you check the air pressure,” the driver said.

And Stella felt certain he was pushing Ryder.

“All the way from New York, huh?” Ryder said. And his voice purposely conveyed suspicion. “My line won’t reach. You’ll have to move back some.” Menace in his tone, a warning: back up, back off.

“I think it’ll reach,” the driver said smoothly. “Would you mind trying?”

For a moment neither of them moved. The driver drew on his cigarette.

Suddenly Ryder spat again, but he walked around, pulled out the air hose and gauge, and checked the pressure.

Stella saw her bus in the distance, just the front of it. By faith, she assumed the unperceived body of the bus followed behind its face. About Darl, she had assumed too much. He had dropped the ring into the open slit of his madras plaid shirt pocket.

“Tires is normal,” Ryder said to the driver. He sounded little and tired, the starch gone out of him.

Again Stella felt a rush of sympathy for Ryder. She wondered if he even owned his own car. What did the Thunderbird driver know about struggle? He looked nothing like a cowboy. If he spins out, Stella decided, I’ll hate him.

The Thunderbird driver reached to his panel, flipped on the radio, and classical music poured out. He drove away carefully. She saw the Empire State on his car tag. Maybe he didn’t know the southern language of contempt, how to lay down rubber at the feet of your opponent. Instead, Chopin’s “Revolutionary” etude was billowing out.

That would be Rubinstein at the keyboard. Rubinstein, Horowitz—her mother seemed to love even their names.

Ryder took the rejected flag sticker out of his shirt pocket. He peeled off the backing and affixed the Stars and Bars of Dixie to the metal side of the gasoline pump.

Stella turned from him and watched the front of the bus gradually loom larger. It seemed enveloped in mystic vapors, as though it were a hot day, not November 22.

 

WHEN SHE BOARDED the bus, Stella saw Ellie sitting by herself, and she slid in beside her. Yes, this was a day for strange recurrences. Maybe Darl will put the Chevy in reverse. Traffic will run backward, and he’ll roll trunk-first back into my life.

“I came after you,” Ellie said, and she smiled her wide-eyed, open-faced half-smile. “You were flying down the hill. Then you got in a car.”

“Did I?” How could she have been flying? Her ankle hurt. She imagined herself gliding, like a robin with outspread wings, at low altitude over the curve of the hill. Maybe time would roll backward, and the assassin’s bullet would fly backward into the barrel of his gun. Kennedy! Her heart groaned.

“I always feel like an egg entering its place in the carton,” Ellie said, “when I sit down on a bus.”

Yes. Stella pictured the configuration inside a bus, the leather seats and chromelike holders for the fleshy vulnerability of passengers. The president was a broken shell, the yoke of him spilled out yellow and liquid. She muttered, “Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall….”

“Are you all right?” Ellie asked.

“I think so.”

Outside the bus window, a preadolescent girl with her mother yelled to a friend who was with her mother, “The wicked witch is dead!”Could she be referring to Kennedy? The friends hurried together. They were all in stylish fall clothes. One mother said, “It’s like the hand of God.” Their faces glowed with excitement. Or was that glee?

“I saw you getting into a car,” Ellie repeated. What did Ellie’s face say to her? You can tell me or not tell me, Stella. The fabric of their skirts overlapped—Ellie’s brown tweed flecked with orange, Stella’s skirt a medium bright blue loose basket weave. For a moment Stella just stared out the bus window. Maybe the bus was stationary and someone was reeling the scenery past, like in an old movie. Beaming businessmen strutted on the sidewalk. Rejoicing. Making V for victory signs with their outstretched fingers.

“It was Darl in his new car.” Then Stella held up her left hand, spread her ring-empty fingers so Ellie would understand.

“Oh, Stella,” Ellie murmured. She reached up and took Stella’s hand out of the air. She brought their clasped hands back to the leather bus seat between them, squeezing Stella’s hand.

“My mother and I used to hold hands when we rode the bus downtown from Norwood,” Stella said. “She never learned to drive.”

(Out the window, a group of teenagers chanted, “One, two, three, four, who you gonna yell for? Johnson, that’s who.”)

Ellie said, “I thought it was the president. I thought you were upset because of him.”

“I was,” Stella said. “I am.”

“I still can’t believe it,” Ellie said, and she held on tighter to Stella’s hand, pressing her knuckles against the seat leather. The skin of an animal no longer alive.

“We have to believe the truth,” Stella said. “But some people don’t care. Some people are glad.”I could never live in the same house with someone like that. How can I live in the same city with people who are glad about death?

“I don’t think so. I think they just don’t know how to react.” Ellie glanced apologetically at Stella. “I didn’t,” she confessed.

Couldn’t Ellie see what was going on outside the bus window?

Stella glanced at the people on the bus, the variety of people. House-dresses; a pale gray business suit gazing out the window. No one was rejoicing. A man in blue jeans was staring unseeing at the black rubber runner covering the bus aisle; a neat cream sweater and a knife-pleated plaid skirt hung decorously over a knee and stopped three inches shy of the dirty floor.

Behind the WHITE ONLY sign, the colored people were mixed, just like the whites, as to cleanliness and fashion. They all stared at the floor, bodies slumped. They were utterly dejected, except for one young woman who sat upright, her chin tilted at an arrogant angle.

Everyone so many eggs, as Ellie had said, with their lives and potential hidden inside. Everywhere the framework of shining steel outlining the seats.

“We have to realize what it means to die,” Stella said. “What it means for him. What it meant for them. The girls, younger than we are.”

“Which girls, Stella?”

“All the dead ones. The four at church.”

“Do you think you can imagine death?” Ellie said. Again there was that mild open look to her brown eyes, the encouraging half-smile on her face. The loving glow to her curiosity.

“Yes. I think so,” Stella answered. Probably with no one but Ellie would she consider having such a conversation. Now she was scraping the words off her bones: to Ellie, who looked as receptive as Jackie Kennedy, she could present this pitiful pulp of words. “Because of what happened to my family. I had to imagine death. I had to grasp it for each of them. As individuals.”

Ellie’s half-smile remained. She said nothing. Nothing in her face tried to block out Stella’s words. Ellie waited for the words to dissolve in the air. Then Ellie asked gently, “Where are you going?”

“To Five Points.”

“I mean where are you going with that idea? That we should make ourselves imagine death.” Ellie’s voice was low and conspiratorial.

“I don’t know,” Stella answered. “For me, it was necessary to do, or I couldn’t go forward with my own life.”

Ellie’s reply was a surprise: “I don’t know if I can. Or if I want to.”

“Maybe it’s not necessary for you.” Stella watched the knife-edge pleats of the woman’s skirt swaying with the movement of the bus. “I mean to imagine death.”

Ellie hesitated, then asked, “Why are you going to Five Points?”

“To the doctor.”

Stella could see desire in her face. What did Ellie want to share?

“I’m going to see my therapist,” Ellie said. “Most people don’t know.”

“Why, Ellie?” How could anyone so talented and warm need to see a therapist?

“I have depressions.”

But Ellie was married. Once that was settled, wouldn’t life be settled? At least partly? Did I ever love Darl? Yes. When he played the organ I could feel my soul growl. Like a dog chained in a basement.

“My mother had depressions,” Ellie went on. “She was married four times. I’m not going to be like that.” Ellie’s voice dropped to a whisper. (How strange to whisper on a public bus full of strangers.) “I don’t know if you know—she committed suicide. When I was thirteen.”

Stella whispered back, “I’m going to the gynecologist. To get the new birth control pills.”

Ellie’s glance was conspiratorial. “But you’re not engaged now?”

“I want them anyway,” Stella said, surprised at her own answer.

“Do you think you and Darl might make up?” Ellie’s face said she was ready to be hopeful, with her.

“No,” Stella said.

Ellie just stared at her.

“I want the freedom,” Stella said.

“We’re all daft on freedom,” Ellie mused.

Someone dressed like a giant chicken got on the bus and dropped the fare from orange, three-fingered mittens into the collection box, just like anybody else.

A young man in nice slacks, on the long side-facing seat, said with a grin, “Watch out. Chicken King’ll get you.”

The whole bus laughed, and the giant chicken settled on the sideways roost next to the wit.

Somebody in the back of the bus repeated, “What he say was ‘Chicken King gonna get you.’ ” And a new chuckle of laughter rumbled, low and satisfied.

But Stella felt afraid because she and Ellie were laughing on the day the president was murdered. On the day she’d said what she wanted:freedom, whatever that meant. She pulled her hand from beneath Ellie’s. The leather seats—the slaughtering of animals—offended her senses.

“What do you think of Sartre’s idea,” she asked Ellie, “that consciousness is nothingness?”

“I don’t believe it,” Ellie said. “I think consciousness is an energy. Energy is immaterial but it’s not nothingness.”

Suddenly a black woman, the one with the straight posture and tilted chin, spoke. She spoke from the back of the bus, right into the air, not looking at them, but as though she were making a general announcement. Not conversation.

“Energy is an exchange of subatomic particles. Under certain conditions, physics tells us energy and matter are interchangeable.”

Stella wondered if she were hallucinating. Auditory hallucinations. No one seemed to acknowledge the event of that voice. It was as though everyone but her was deaf. But Stella had seen the Negro woman’s lips move. One sense had corroborated the other. Her face was composed of interesting planes—sharp and angular, like a cubist study. The lips were fleshy and curved, contradicting the sharp planes of her face, making her beautiful in an irregular way. Her skin was an average brown, neither especially dark nor light. Her hair had been straightened and fell in a single, sculpted swoop to her chin.

No, Ellie was looking around. Her eyes were seeking contact with the speaker, the colored woman in the back, and Ellie was smiling warmly, but a little shy. “My name is Ellie,” she said. Because Ellie was an actress, she could project her voice, yet it remained soft. Her low, sweet voice traveled the sunlight cave of the bus, all the way to the back. “What’s yours?”

The dejected colored people glanced up, just their eyes, then fastened their eyes again, anxiously, on the floor. The bus driver was watching through his large, circular mirror.

“Christine,” the woman spoke as she rose from her seat. One hand was curled around a chrome rail. With the other hand, she stretched and pulled the bell cord—ding!

The ding hovered in the portable air caged in the bus, canceling out the woman’s name.

The obedient bus swerved to a stop.

Christine looked at no one; she descended the two steps and pushed through the split door onto the pavement. That sound—ding!—echoed again in Stella’s mind. The rubber edges of the exit door bounced against each other.

To Ellie, Stella whispered, “It’s not consciousness that’s nothingness.” She was glad to have Ellie back into a discussion with just herself. For the first time the idea came clear to Stella. “It’s death that is nothingness. If you imagine death, you have to imagine nothingness. A total absence.”

“But what do you think of Tillich?” Ellie asked, patting the cover of The Courage to Be. “The God beyond God? The God that appears when ‘God’ disappears?”

Yes. It was a place where Stella had sent her mind. Tillich’s words had opened a door into an invisible wall, and beyond. She had struggled and struggled with the concept till she thought she knew what it meant. The God beyond God—the other side of nothingness.

“Tillich is the theologian who provides the best hope,” Stella said. Her voice trembled: what was happening to her own belief? Old words played in her memory: “Jesus loves the little children / All the children of the world….”

Maybe someplace there was an abiding love.

Maybe everyplace, a force as universal and natural as gravity. Goodness, or love. A natural force attracting people to one another.

“I have to get off for the clinic,” Ellie said. She stood, and Stella noticed her clothes, a simple white blouse, a straight tweedy wool skirt. She was a bit heavier than Jackie Kennedy, more robust and normal. Less glamorous. Just a college girl. Loafers. Suddenly, Ellie reached down and touched Stella’s shoulder. “Does it ever strike you,” Ellie asked, “what a surreal place Birmingham is?”

But Stella couldn’t consider the question quickly enough to reply.

Ellie added, “I’m sorry about Darl.”

Stella didn’t want her to leave. She needed more of Ellie, but she moved down the aisle and waited before the front door. Stella had wanted to ask about Buford: wasn’t Ellie happy being married to Buford? A perfectly nice man, smart and kind; Stella liked him almost as much as Ellie.

Pulling his mechanical lever beside his high seat, the driver opened the bus door for Ellie.HOWARD STILES, Stella read the white lettering incised into his little black plastic nameplate above the large front window. Because the metal frame for the nameplate was open at one end,HOWARD STILES could slide out and another name be inserted. “Have a great day,” he yelled after Ellie. “Nigger lover!”

Ellie was walking rapidly down the sidewalk. She didn’t hear his taunt. Her round buttocks moving within the tube of the brown tweed skirt, Ellie swayed purposefully past a green trash can. Pitch-in! the can said.

Stella felt shocked and frightened. With Kennedy dead, did people think they could freely insult colored people?

Very slightly, Ellie nodded her head to acknowledge a Negro man, dressed in a royal blue business suit, coming toward her on the sidewalk. Stella had seen him before. The striking thing about him was that his trouser legs were cut off just below the torso. His legs had been amputated, and instead of shoes he had pegs. He seemed perfectly healthy. Not like Cat. In each hand he held a wooden mallet, like a potato masher, but more sturdy, of varnished oak. The base of the mallet was a rubber tread; the mallet handles were covered with leather. The man swung his body between his strong arms. Somehow Birmingham had allowed this: a black man dressed as well as any white man, a black man without legs who moved as confidently and swiftly as most people walked. He was a more successful human being than the bus driver.

Would his bed be a pallet conveniently close to the floor? Would his chairs sit legless on the floor? Nice chairs upholstered in white silk brocade. Would the walls reach only half as high before his ceiling capped them off? Suppose she and Darl lived in such an apartment. Would they crawl in the short door like dogs? Perhaps being half the size of normal, the sidewalk man in royal blue, swinging his body through his arms with utmost dignity, could have two stories in a single room, twice the space usually allotted.

Why hadn’t the earth run out of space allotted for the dead? Some damp earthy space waited now to receive the president. Her heart groaned; where were the words for grief? “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded”—Bach’s melody. That was what she longed for, but she needed Darl to play it. Her heart groaned. Perhaps it was an act of generosity to be cremated. But no, she, Stella, would want her own allotted space, underground, should she ever die.

Why not marry a black man? Even here in Birmingham? People did in the North. Why not marry a legless, successful one?

At the next stop, every Negro person on the bus got off. A great stream of them. Silently, she cheered: they were rejecting this driver who shouted “Nigger lover” and the transportation he provided. On the sidewalk some of them hugged and patted each other. In perfect dignity, they walked in separate directions. Stella felt she wanted to crawl somewhere on the pavement, like a penitent.

HOWARD STILES, she could report him to the authorities, the bus company. Useless. She had to be on time; she would free her body from its own female biology.

 

IN THE GYNECOLOGIST’S OFFICE, the woman doctor prepared to give Stella a premarital examination; had her lie on her back, feet in the stirrups, to inspect her virginity. This is penitence enough, Stella thought.

When she was dressed again, Stella took satisfaction in her clothes—a blue pleated skirt, full and loose at the hem, box-pleated neatly at the waist, a white turtleneck sweater, slightly angora—an outfit in Madonna colors, innocent blue and cloud white. But Dr. Bradstreet was not considering Stella’s clothes; she was writing about Stella on her yellow legal pad, taking notes like a stenographer.

When Dr. Bradstreet looked up, she asked harshly, “What’s the date for the wedding?”

The question entered Stella’s heart like a stake. But she would not be slain. Why shouldn’t any woman have a right to the Pill?

“Oh, we haven’t decided yet,” Stella lied.

Through round-lens glasses framed with clear pinkish plastic, Dr. Bradstreet, the wisest owl in Christendom, peered at Stella. Where had Stella seen such glasses before? Oh, on the frizzy red-haired driver of the Thunderbird, the emissary from the Empire State. Wise Dr. Bradstreet knew a miscreant when she saw her—never mind the masquerade of blue and white. Stella returned the gaze. Dr. Bradstreet believed she had a remedy named The Truth ready to pierce the defenses of any subversive Liar.

“When you know, telephone me. Then I’ll prescribe the contraceptive a month before.” She was grim and firm. Her graying hair was oily, dowdy. But she was a medical doctor. For women.

“Oh, it will be within the month.”

“You can call me when you’re sure of the exact date.” Dr. Bradstreet wore her name on a plastic bar, blood red, pinned into a starched white jacket. LOUISE BRADSTREET, M.D., the name tag proclaimed. What did it mean to tell the world your name? That you yourself were surely something other? Not who you were pretending to be at all, but someone much darker, with hidden motives. Not a doctor for w omen, after all, perhaps. But there was the diploma on the wall:Louise Bradstreet. Beyond the veil of freckles, who was Darl?

“You don’t seem comfortable.”

“I was admiring your diploma.” Stella felt found out. She blew out a smoke screen of words: “I’m going to graduate from Birmingham-Southern in May.” Then she remembered her new decision about her studies. “At least I think I may.”

“You may graduate in May?” The woman was cruel. She wanted to torture. “Why wouldn’t you graduate in May? Are you in grade trouble?” She wanted to torture any woman who was not a doctor like herself.

“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 appearance. 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 said. 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.

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 her 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 pleasant 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.

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 the 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 the 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.

“My brothers and I, some of the kids, raced snails on our front porch. The house across from where I live now. We’d set the snails down in a line on the porch tiles, and they’d creep forward. We each had a snail. We crawled behind the snails on our hands and knees.” Her knees had been bare and bony against the hard red tiles, and the black soot from McWanes Cast Iron Pipe Company—“fallout,” her mother labeled it—pressed into her skin while she crawled behind the snails. “We could steer our snails in a straighter path by touching the tips of their antennae.” (She remembered the tentative tenderness of their touch on the ends of those stalks. Some kids said snails carried their eyes there.) After the antennae slowly retracted, the snail would straighten its path. “They left silver trails behind that would last for days. My mother never minded.”

“It must have taken patience to be a snail jockey.” Still, he held out the ring, his fingers curling more and more inward like a mimosa leaf closing for the night.

“I’d take the ring,” she said, “if you meant it.”

“Really engaged? To be married?”

She nodded. One quick dip of the head.

He looked away. He looked worried. But he looked back and met her eyes. “Would you like to marry me, Miss Silver?”

She reached out and took the ring. Suddenly instead of putting it on her finger, she stuck out her tongue and put the tip of it through the ring. She drew it inside and closed her mouth and smiled for a second. She pretended she was a frog, green as the plastic ring.

He laughed out loud, and she stuck her tongue out again. He took off the wet ring and put it on her finger.

“There’s a hitch or two,” he said.

“What?”

“Well, I’ve signed up for the Peace Corps. I’m going to Tonga, in the South Pacific, for two years. I leave in a week.”

“We can have an engagement party before you go.”

“It’s a long time to be separated.”

“We’ll write.”

“We hardly know each other,” he reminded her. Then he added with a laugh, “Maybe that’s best. Like an arranged marriage.”

“Only we arranged it ourselves. Approximately ten-twenty-five P.M., November 22. On the 15 Norwood bus.”

“After a chance meeting.” He stared at her. Seemed happy. “Thus,” he said, “we embrace absurdity.”

“Yes,” she said. “No. We embrace each other.”

They both sat still.

“You could sign up to come to Tonga, too.”

“I think I’d rather stay here. Maybe take some more classes.”

The two boys and their mother from the back of the bus stood up. The mother pulled the bell cord and led her children to stand at the back door.

The older little boy, about eight, Stella thought, with hair close cropped so she could see the beautiful egg of his skull, approached them. His eyes spread wide, he spoke to Don. “You really gonna marry this lady?”

“Really,” Don answered.

“With that there Cracker Jack ring?”

“Edmund Powers!” his mother said sharply. “Get over here now and get off this bus with me!”

Stella smiled at him. “You’re invited to come.”

The mother pushed through the swinging door, and her children plopped out after her. “You just about got left behind, Edmund,” she said loudly from outside, a public reprimand, really an apology for her son’s intrusion.

This stop was the last one on Vanderbilt Road. Stella imagined the family walking down the side of Stoner’s Grocery in the dark into the Quarters. The bus turned left, up Norwood Boulevard.

“This will be my stop, next,” Stella said. She thought Don probably didn’t know exactly where she lived. She would get home intact, after all. Engaged.

Don stood up. “The least I can do is walk my fiancée home.”

Down the black rubber aisle Stella and Don progressed to the front of the bus. The driver pulled the door open for them—how mighty must be the muscles in his right arm, the one that worked the lever all day—and they were disgorged into Norwood.

The empty lighted box of the bus rambled on without them up the hill of the boulevard.

They walked down a little slope under the sweetgum tree, bare of leaves now, but they stepped on the decaying prickly balls, gone soft with a month of lying on the ground.

Don took her hand, his fingers lacing into hers. “You do mean it, Stella?”

Yes, yes. Let me attach my life to something, she thought. Something that lasts forever and is real. Something random because there’s nothing wrong with me. She was glad, but she could not speak. She felt caught in a revolving door: it showed her the outer world, the inner world, but she was too unreal to step away from their whirling to enter either. She felt like a ghost trapped in the unreal.

“We can stop this anytime you want,” he said.

Quick as that, she halted. She seemed to hear a sound like a phonograph winding down. Like disembodied voices dying of despair. She stood still—a mashed sweetgum ball under the instep of her foot—and something in her went dead.

How could he suggest they stop? They were engaged; they had taken every step together. They had mutually agreed. Her happiness died.

“Yes,” she said. Maybe her words could overlay his. She resumed walking. Her shoe toe scuffed through the dead sweetgum leaves, each one a brown star-shape. “Yes, I want us to marry,” she said. But she felt dead and vacant inside.

It was useless. Why had he said they could stop? Didn’t he care? Had he no desire of his own? Was he afraid she might sue him for entrapment? At every step, they had agreed.

But it was all right, she told herself, though he had ruined it: we can stop this anytime you like. Her soul had flared toward him, and now it struggled, shrank, and winked, as though it might sink and die.

She walked quickly forward, toward home. He was a human being and therefore someone she could marry. A man she admired and respected. This was the way it was done in many countries. The couple learned to love each other after the promise was made.

Her fingers were still laced into Don’s fingers. She liked that. But because he had offered to retreat from the alliance, now her hand seemed detached, turned wooden at her wrist.

Stella glanced back quickly at the disappearing illuminated bus shouldering its way up the dark hill. Empty of passengers, it rose toward the crest of the first hill of the boulevard. Almost she could forget that it rolled on rubber tires. Almost she could imagine that it rose disconnected, immaterial, like a lighted box conveying invisible souls. She’d forgotten to read the nameplate of the driver. Her omission seemed horrible: she’d neglected to acknowledge who he was.