HER FOOT PRESSING THE GAS PEDAL, STELLA REMEMBERED the imperative in the classroom thus:stand up—and it was Christine’s voice from inside Stella telling her what she must do. But also, and at the same time, her mother’s voice, as though time had no power at all to separate events. Speaking not so much before Christine’s injunction, but on top of it and before it, finally simultaneously with it:Stand up straight, Ruben, Timothy, Stella. Blessed boys, blessed guns. And again, the troops marched by, the waves of khaki legs swept forward, row on row, down Twentieth Street, past the Tutwiler Hotel, past the reviewing stand:General Omar Bradley.
Stella glanced across the car seat at Cat, lost in her own thoughts. Courageous Cat. Stella felt alone with her fear. Though she spoke of marrying Donny, already he was gone in the mists. Though her maiden aunt planted scraggly rosebushes and expected them to become a garden wall for a wedding, the groom had become a ghost in the bright sunshine of the South Pacific. Unreal.
Real was a sweltering classroom and the command to rise. To rise and face fear.
Lines from T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, came to her, of London, Unreal City. Unreal. Had so many passed over London Bridge? Had Death undone so many?
And then a quartet of voices swirled in her head, sang just above the metal roof of the car, for her who seemed so normal:
How can you ever know us?
You will never know us.
We live like air
We are the air.
Like four stars, not voices, they seemed to wink out, tuck themselves back into blackness. Like four navels, they were round, shallow, and open, then they closed into a seam. Like four closed mouths with sealed lips. But they had sung to her. Would they sing again? Four silver voices, an ethereal descant.
And they sang again, immediately:
And already Stella learned: it is the third voice who loves me most. It is the third child who makes things clear: “We live like air,” that voice had sung on top of and beneath and simultaneously with the others.
Come to haunt her: a quartet of spirits, as high as any random four stars, as inward as the four chambers of her heart. Voices like cloud-high birds. Too high to hear well. Specks hard to discern. Specks entering the ear. “Your living contains us.”
Her ear could hear the uniqueness of each silvery edge. Their voices four wires on an ethereal lyre plucked simultaneously. But Stella liked the third voice best, the open one that didn’t quite cease, and she would follow it, choose it to trust. “Your living contains us.”
She had not gone, could not have gone to their funeral because she was not worthy. And Don was not worthy either. Only Cat had been worthy, and how she got there and how she got home again, she and Don would never know. “Perhaps as mundane as a taxi?” Don seemed to suggest in his dry, ironic voice, almost a monotone but a little lilt at the end:taxi? She cherished that particular tone of Don. She cherished it.
And wasn’t the word cherish part of the marriage ceremony?
All four chambers of her heart contracted, signaled news too subtle to decipher. Perhaps the little twigs of rosebushes planted all along her aunts’ wire fence would grow into a wall of white roses. Those spare green skeletal stems fanning out of the ground might become the backdrop for a white wedding, a garden wedding in two years. No, in only sixteen months, now. Eight months had passed since Donny left.
Donny, that was Cat’s name for her brother, not Stella’s. For Stella, that name registered less intimacy, not more. She squeezed her eyes tightly to envision the wedding.
Stella and Aunt Krit wanted large drooping white roses. Roses hanging like white silk handkerchiefs, heavy with virginity. On their silky petals would be a defiant touch of brown, or speckled red, here and there, marring and perfecting their pristine bloodlessness. Stella imagined the large, white roses gathered into a bridal bouquet and herself looking modestly down into their snowy petals. Brown spots for the nights she’d lain beside Darl kissing and kissing, her virginity intact.
“Good night, Kitty-Cat,” Stella said. (She had taken the chair from the trunk, unfolded the smelly chair, helped Cat into it. Dear Cat.)
“Good night, Stella.”
They had driven home in silence because their minds could not separate from the solidarity of the classroom.
Stella watched Cat muster the energy to propel her wheelchair up the ramp. She didn’t want help. They had not discussed it: what of that terrifying promise to return tomorrow night to the death trap? Stella visualized the lighted building consisting of only one room, a small porch, Greek columns, and a single step at its front. What about that place? But Cat had wheeled away into her world, and now Stella must walk home, leaving the car for Mr. Cartwright to drive to work.
From the leafy summer trees, three voices, not four, sang together for Stella. She recognized them from the opera; she and Don had dressed up before he went to Tonga, attended, inhabited an impressionist painting that night. From The Magic Flute, in German, they sang. Three spirit voices teasing Papageno out of his aloneness, out of his desire to die for lack of a mate. So quick and silvery those Mozartian voices, high and nimble, singing in close harmony, singing a parallel melody. Singing from a time of powdered wigs and knee britches and a place far from Birmingham. But where was the voice she trusted, the voice of the lost child whom she loved most?