WHILE STELLA DROVE MR. CARTWRIGHT’S LUMBERING OLD car back toward Norwood, she thought about what Mr. Parrish had gone on to say about safety. That his life was in the Lord’s hands, and he supposed everybody else’s was, too. That was all the insurance he needed. And Cat had asked him if he ever did any preaching. Mr. Parrish had said sure he was a preacher, sold funeral insurance, too, on weekends, since even those in the hands of the Lord would need it sooner or later. (That was the way A. G. Gaston got to be a millionaire, wasn’t it?)
During the day Mr. Parrish taught math at Parker High School. Stella interrupted to say her Aunt Krit taught math at Phillips High. And Cat boldly asked Mr. Parrish if Parker was still the largest all-black school in the world, and they had all felt a kind of triumph over the whole continent of Africa, which, after all, could have been expected to have the largest all-black high school. Cat had said the word black, not colored or Negro, to a black man, and she had said it like it meant nothing in the world except the word she needed to use to ask her question.
But Stella liked remembering the interview better than she had liked being at Miles.
The car moved a lot like Mr. Cartwright, looked like him, too. Kind of a wreck. Had seen better days. Don was too urbane to drive such a car; he preferred the bus. In Tonga, he walked. He’d written that the king of Tonga—too heavy to walk, his subjects were proud to say—was carried everywhere on a litter.
When they drove by the Municipal Auditorium, Stella’s knees felt empty; she remembered playing the cello there in the Christmas Festival, in the youth orchestra with five hundred high school singers on the risers, pastel puffs of yellow, minty green, blue, cotton-candy pink amid the boys’ dark suits. None of them were Negroes. She hoped they had had their own music festival at least. How would they have dressed?
She herself had worn a hoopskirt under her white net evening dress for the first time—she’d just entered high school—and the curve of the hoop had to be bashed in so she could get the cello between her knees. During the “Hallelujah Chorus,” it had sprung out and zoomed the cello forward, but she had caught it by the scroll while it flew away and reeled it back in.
“Right when the basses come in,” Stella told Cat, “in the ascending four-note scale.” She sang it for Cat, pulsing the gas pedal with each word. “That’s when the cello boinged out and skittered into the music stand.”
Stella liked to tell Cat about ridiculous situations she’d gotten herself into. She thought it might console Cat a little, make her feel less bad that she couldn’t walk. The large illuminated star was shining over Carraway Methodist Hospital, on the edge of Norwood.
(CAT IMAGINED THEY ILLUMINATED the star so ambulances could find their way to the hospital more easily.) But Cat was remembering how she’d met Stella at Phillips. It was a fire drill, and she’d still been able to get around on crutches then. The students all thought she’d had polio because her crutches were the metal type that didn’t come all the way up under the armpit, the type you saw on posters. But she’d lost her balance and fallen in the crowded, rushing hall. She had been afraid of being trampled, but somebody (Stella) had stopped and stood in front of her, facing the stream of students. “Go round, go round,” Stella had said over and over, quietly, but in the face of the oncoming students.
When the hall was empty, the fire drill an apparent success, Stella had sat down on the floor with Cat, and they had talked until the custodian happened by and said he’d just carry Cat out, though she hadn’t wanted him to. Stella went out first to hold open one of the massive front doors of Phillips High School. When Mr. Wingard stepped out with Cat draped in his arms like a res-cued princess, somebody saw them, and 1,700 students set up a mighty sentimental roar of approval. But the building hadn’t been on fire.
Cat felt her own cheeks burn pink, but Cat saw that this new girl, Stella, could hardly keep back the tears that sprang to her eyes when they cheered. Stella was one of them and moved by their approval; she had had to wipe her runny nose with the back of her hand. For a moment Cat knew Stella was brimming with it:We’re all good people.
It was the week after the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth had been beaten with chains and brass knuckles in front of the school.
It turned out Stella was not exactly one of them: the normals. She was an orphan. Cat discovered Stella believed naively in being good and following the rules, as though that compliance would be a shield against the injustice of the universe. As the car moved toward home, Cat remembered her mother’s laughter, a quiet cackle, almost delightfully out of control. Cat missed her mother, who was always amused by Stella.
After Stella’s visits that first year to Cat’s home, back in Phillips High School days, either Cat or her mother would laugh and say, “Well, she did it again.” They meant Stella had eaten all of the baked apple, core and seeds, to be polite.
That was the past, when they first met in high school. Cat was tired now. Both she and Stella felt flat as pancakes, united in their fatigue. Our essential sameness, Cat thought comfortably. Together.
Good night.
Good night.
After Stella helped her out of the car, Cat insisted on wheeling herself up the ramp onto the porch. When she looked over her shoulder, Stella was already half a block away, walking into the night shadows toward home, some twelve blocks away. The door was unlocked—her father and his gun slept inside, waiting for the graveyard shift—and Cat entered the dark living room. His toenails clicking on the bare hardwood floor, Goliath came to greet her. He leapt into her lap before she had time to set the brakes. The chair rolled back a little.
AT MIDNIGHT, MR. CARTWRIGHT rose, listened to his daughter snoring in the next room, the dog snoring, too. At least the midget dog had a loud yapper. Mr. Cartwright strapped on his holster. Well, the timing worked out just like she’d said—getting the car back, he meant. Tomorrow when he went off to work, there’d still be some real protection in the house.