I grabbed him around the waist; I all but tackled him and dragged him to the floor. I held on with all my strength, my face buried in his back, screaming, screaming.
“Don’t you dare!” I screamed. “Don’t you dare go out there! Damn you, John Howard, don’t you dare go out there and get yourself killed; I can’t stand it! I won’t let you! What the hell is the matter with you….”
Even as I screamed, even as I held him with all my strength, feeling the muscles in his back and legs straining away from me, feeling the wool of his suit coat scrubbing into my face, I thought, I can’t stop Luke now, but I will die before I let John go. I will die before I do. And I held on, and I held on, and I sobbed.
Abruptly the tension went out of his body and he slumped down onto the seat. I fell backward onto it, too, and sat gasping for breath and staring wildly at him, shuddering with my terror. He sat quietly for a moment, his hands pressed together in front of him as if in prayer, and then he began to cry. It was a terrible crying; a grotesque, choking weeping; an anguished sobbing wrung from a man whom you knew had not wept for a very long time, and never in public. He sat with his hands raised in front of him like a child, his mouth squared away from his teeth in a rictus of grief, his eyes blind with tears. They left opaque silver tracks on his bronze face. He made an awful sound, a keening, but it was very low.
“I never meant this,” he gasped. “Before Christ, I never meant this….”
I slid over on the seat and put my arms around him and drew his head down on my shoulder, and he slumped against me, and we sat like that for a long time, both of us weeping, he by far the hardest, his sobs racking me as if he had taken my shoulders in his hands and shaken me. I could feel every ragged breath he drew; feel his face hot and wet in my neck; feel the muscles of his body contorted against my hands. We sat like that for a long time. I do not remember how long.
In the pew behind us, a white woman in a fur coat, her hair mussed and her dress over her thighs, massaged her crushed instep and said over, and over, “This is ridiculous. We only came because our chauffeur’s boy was singing. This is absolutely ridiculous.”
It was not much of a riot, really, as riots go. The icy rain defused it. The Panthers melted away like ground mist and were, as Luke said, halfway to Montgomery before Boy Slattery’s hastily summoned state troopers got their bearings. There was no threat at all in the concert crowd. There had never been; the Panthers had been nothing if not orderly. But the ring of troopers and the television lights and cameras, and the chugging generators, and the spinning lights, and the city police screaming in soon after, and the screaming spectators and the students running from the dormitories to see what was going on, all gave it the immediacy and menace of yet another of the awful scenes we had all seen during the summer before, burning on television screens from half a dozen cities. It was the students, confused and furious, who had thrown the first rocks at the troopers, and it had been the cold and panicked young troopers, first one and then another, who had shot into the crowd.
No one was killed. Only a few were injured. One Buckhead attorney had a bullet in his shoulder; he had been treated at Piedmont and released. A small black boy, brother of one of the singers, had been shot in the foot, and was in Grady Memorial Hospital, resting after surgery. There were some sprains and fractures. Two or three troopers had stone and brick injuries, and many of the crowd were treated for minor cuts and abrasions suffered in the backwash of the panicked retreat into the chapel. An elderly woman had a heart attack and died in the projects after she got home from the concert, but no one could positively link the attack with the riot. She was very old. Her great-grandson had been singing.
For Atlanta, however, the City Too Busy to Hate, it was a stinging, shameful blow. It was a fiasco of a riot, a joke, a laughing matter: the fat, racist lieutenant governor of Georgia had gotten wind that the Panthers were attending a concert of Christmas carols—Christmas carols, for God’s sake—and called in the state troopers and the media, the troopers managed to shoot a rich lawyer and a little black boy, and then the lieutenant governor holed up in his office under heavy personal guard. Ben Cameron was grim and furious in the newspapers and on television news the next day, denouncing Boy Slattery and calling for calm heads to prevail. Don’t go down to Atlanta University looking for trouble, Ben said. There is no trouble there in that fine institution. The trouble sits barricaded in the governor’s office, laughing with his racist cronies and counting his votes in the next gubernatorial election. Don’t compound his dirty work, Ben said. Let this sorry thing die.
And it did. The Panthers were long gone to Montgomery or wherever. They had no comment; never did. The university was quiet under a blanket of debris and ice. The ice rained down all the next day, and Atlanta’s sad, silly Christmas Carol riot was history. Luke barely got enough good shots for a spread in Life.
John Howard left Atlanta the day after that.
Luke had gone by to see how he was doing, and found him packing his Mustang. He was silent and stricken and would not tell Luke, at first, where he was going. But he did, finally. Luke told me that night, tears in his eyes for the first time I had ever known him, that John was going to try and make some sort of peace with his wife in Detroit, and to see his child. It had been a long time since he had tried. His wife had never let him before, but now he wanted to try again.
“He needs a family,” he had told Luke. “Everybody needs that. I should have done this long before.”
“Did Dr. King make him leave?” I said.
“No. He says not. He says Dr. King wanted him to come on back to the SCLC office and get on with things. He doesn’t blame John. I think a lot of the other guys do, though.”
“Do you think he’ll ever come back?”
I was beginning to cry now. I could not bear the thought of John Howard driving, in his sorrow and pain, out of town alone in the flashy Mustang.
“I really don’t know, babe. Want to go see him off?”
“Yes. Yes I do, Luke.”
And so the next morning, before full daylight, Luke and I stood beside the icy curb on the Atlanta University campus as John Howard slammed the trunk of the Mustang on the last of his bags and few belongings. Ice glazed, crazily, an old electric fan; roped piles of books were covered with it. He turned to us.
“I’ll be in touch,” he said to Luke, and hesitated, and then hugged him, hard. Luke hugged him back, and hit him lightly on the bicep with his fist.
“Smoky,” John Howard said, and looked down at me. I said nothing, only looked up at him, trying not to cry.
“You always go the distance, don’t you, Smokes?” John Howard said softly, and smiled, and touched me on the cheek.
And then he got in the Mustang and drove away, traveling, as he always had, alone.
15
ON THE SECOND SUNDAY OF JANUARY, LUKE AND I WENT over to Teddy’s apartment to watch the pro playoff game with her and Hank. It was still nominally my apartment too, I suppose; my name was still on the lease, and what little mail I got came there. But I had paid no rent since I had moved in with Luke in the weeks after we had begun our relationship. Teddy would not allow it. She had a trust fund from her grandmother that made rent a small matter, she said. Better I pooled my share with Luke. And it did make a difference to us. Movies and an occasional dinner at an Italian restaurant and even one or two budget weekends in the Georgia mountains were not out of range now.
I never thought about it being a duplicitous arrangement. Many young Atlanta women were, I knew, keeping nominal apartments in one place and living with their young men in others. I wonder how many mothers were fooled. It was, if not the first wave of the new permissiveness, the last gasp of the old nonpermissiveness. The pill was a great enabler in more ways than one.
It was good to get out of the dark apartment in Ansley Park for an evening, good to sprawl on the familiar old furniture laughing and jibing with friends, good to mooch about the tiny kitchen, laughing helplessly a
s Teddy’s and my attempt at a cheese soufflé fell flatter than an old inner tube. Luke and I had not been out to speak of, except for work, for a long time. The Spelman-Morehouse concert had been the last significant event we had attended. Even Christmas we spent by ourselves, eating the smoked turkey Matt had given us, along with everyone else on the staff, and drinking Rhine wine from the widow. New Year’s Eve we spent at Johnny Escoe’s restaurant on Peachtree Road in the company of raucous, half-drunk strangers, a belated decision made when Luke said, about four o’clock on the dark afternoon of New Year’s Eve, that we ought at least try to kick-start the New Year out of the Slough of Despond. It was a bad mistake. We liked Escoe’s, but we both hated it that evening.
“Never again,” Luke said, when we got home and collapsed gratefully on the floor in front of the fire. “I will never again spend New Year’s Eve anywhere but at home. The Slough of Despond is better any day.”
“It hasn’t been so bad,” I said, curling up with my head in his lap. “It’s been good to just be home with you. That won’t happen again until the next Christmas holidays. And you just can’t imagine how much better this New Year’s Eve is than the last one.”
Even thinking of the cold, bitter holidays at my parents’ house in Corkie the year before was oppressive. I had thought then I would never really go back; now I was not only sure of it, but I knew where, if I were permitted to follow my delirious star, I would go from here. I would go where Luke went. Or rather, stay where he stayed. I realized, as 1967 slid into 1968 and we toasted each other with white wine, that despite the darkness than hung over my familiar landscape now, where I wanted us to stay was Atlanta and Downtown.
Somehow I was reluctant to ask Luke if that was what he wanted, too. He had not said differently, but the reluctance was peculiarly strong. It was not, I realized, anything I was ready to probe. So far, this new year was for waiting.
Teddy had said Hank would be joining us, but when we got to Colonial Homes I realized that it was more than a casual presence. He was in the kitchen mixing Bloody Marys when we got there, and when he came out to greet us he kissed me on the cheek and Teddy, lightly and with a sweet familiarity, on her lips.
I followed Teddy upstairs when she took our coats.
“You and Hank?” I said, flopping on the twin bed that had been mine. It was pushed close to the other to make a large bed, and the whole was rumpled. I grinned at it, and then at her, and she blushed.
“Well, I guess so,” she said.
“When did all this happen?”
She stood in front of the mirror over her bureau, fiddling with her hair, and then she turned and smiled at me, joy blazing out of her face. My own smile deepened. No one could have failed to smile at Teddy Fairchild on this day.
“It’s been happening all fall, if you hadn’t been blinder than a bat and deafer than a post over Luke. Ever since you and Luke, as a matter of fact. Hank finally decided you were a lost cause and looked around, and there I was. Boy, you bet there I was. I’ve been waiting for him to get over you for a solid year.”
“Lord, Teddy, that’s not so,” I said, honestly shocked. “Hank Cantwell? Me? He had never said. I had never thought—”
“Oh, yes. He’s been in love with you since college. I’m not even sure he really knows it, but anybody with half a brain could tell. He never did think Brad was going to last, you could just tell he didn’t. But Luke was a different matter. He gave up then. It didn’t take me long to move in on him. Nature abhors a vacuum, you know. I cooked for him, and took him home to Mother and Daddy, and helped him fix up that disaster area of an apartment, and one thing led to another, and…here we are. It’s right, Smoky. I always knew it would be. He is a very, very good man.”
“Yes,” I said, tears stinging my eyes, “he is. And you are a very, very good woman. I love you both. I hope it lasts for three lifetimes.”
“It will,” she said, her face a lit candle, and I hugged her. One way or another, I thought, Teddy had been in the wilderness a long time.
“Do your parents care that he’s not…you know, Buckhead? All that stuff?”
“I think my dad may, a little, but he really likes Hank and he’s coming around. It would be silly to worry about whether or not Hank’ll be able to support me in the manner to which, blah, blah. I’ll have enough, one way or another, for us to live almost anyway we want to. Hank’s being stubborn about that, but he’s not stupid. As for Mother, she’s so grateful I’m involved with anybody at all that she’s walking on air. She’s had the Cathedral and the Driving Club reserved for a month.”
“Teddy! Is it that far along?”
“No. Not to anybody but Mother. But it could happen, I guess. I don’t want to think any further ahead than now—”
“I know,” I said. “I feel that way, too.”
“You want to talk about that?”
“I don’t think so. Not right now. After a drink, maybe.”
When we went back downstairs Luke and Hank were sprawled in front of the television set, and a frantic preppy in a pre-freak brush cut was starting the pregame countdown, or whatever it was called. Hank looked up at me as I came into the room.
Is it okay? he said silently, with his lifted eyebrows and a small, questioning smile.
“Okay for you, Hank Cantwell,” I said aloud, and went over and kissed his mouse-fur hair. I noticed that it was thinning just a little, on the very top of his head. Somehow that wrung my heart.
“You be happy,” I whispered in his ear. He reached back and squeezed my hand.
“You be, too,” he whispered back.
At halftime we ate the collapsed soufflé and drank the wine Luke and I had brought, and we talked of Matt. It had not been a good January. After Tom Gordon left, Matt spent more and more time out of the office, spending longer and longer at lunches that we no longer attended; coming in smelling of whiskey and almost, but not quite, lurching when he walked; saying curtly that someone had to court the assholes that bought the double-page spreads, make the speeches that kept Culver Carnes happy, guide the chattering flock of freelancers who were doing, now, as the magazine grew larger, more and more of the editorial assignments. When he was in the office, he spent the time with his door closed. We had long known that he kept a bottle of Cutty Sark in his credenza; now, Sister reported worriedly, she fished his empties out of the wastebasket every two or three days. The work of the magazine went forward; Matt had not, so far, stinted on that, but it went forward in solitary segments, and without much of the cartwheeling seat-of-the-pants joy that we were used to. We still went out for lunch together and sat under our mural at the Top of Peachtree and Tony still launched into “Downtown” when we entered, but we entered, now, without Matt, and the song, already bittersweet to me, gained a new poignance, as if Tony were trying, with its chords, to conjure the old Matt Comfort whose anthem it was. The new Matt had no music in him. The lights, for him, no longer seemed brighter downtown.
“Is it Tom, do you think?” Teddy said, giving up on the soufflé and drinking wine. “I know I miss him awfully. I can’t even stand to look in his office and see the new guy, and he’s a nice guy. He’s a good art director. He’s trying so hard to be one of us. But it should be Tom in there—”
“Partly,” Hank said. “It’s partly Tom, and partly Alicia. Partly John Howard, I think, though Matt was never all that close to him. It’s mostly the fact that the unit got broken. For some reason that just outrages and appalls him. He could have made the new guy one of us in a day; poor bastard came here full of Comfort legends and the old Downtown magic, and what does he get? Closed doors and whispering and so much gloom we might be an actuarial office. Probably wishes he’d stayed in advertising. I’m trying to bring him into the gang, but there’s not much gang to bring him into. I wish you guys would open up to him a little.”
The new guy was Whit Wilkerson, a talented young art director recruited from a hot new advertising agency. He was funny, unpretentious, street smart, sw
eet-tempered. Tom Gordon had picked him as his successor, and he was doing a fine job at editorial art direction. But you could tell he was lost and disappointed. Downtown had promised him, tacitly, Matt Comfort and Comfort’s People, and he had gotten a morose recluse of an editor and a silent staff who kept their doors closed and talked, when they did, in hushed monotones. I had meant to do something about making friends with Whit; I think we all had. But I had simply not had the energy. Now I promised myself that on the very next day I would take him to lunch and ask the others to join us, and we would make him laugh and reassure him that the arctic winter emanating from Matt’s office would end. That it always did.
I hoped I could reassure myself as well.
“Speaking of John Howard, have you heard from him?” Hank said to Luke. Luke was lying on his back with his feet propped on the sofa and a can of beer balanced on his chest. He did not lift his head. I looked at the top of it, thinking how I loved the small whorl on the crown where a cowlick was concealed in the thick tangle of red curls. I traced it, in my mind, with my fingertips, as I had a hundred times before. All of a sudden I wanted to be in bed with him, in a darkened room, the shades drawn, the world shut out, clocks stopped, time stopped. I swallowed and looked away.
“He called Friday,” Luke said, and I looked back at him. He had not told me he’d heard from John. I started to speak, and then did not.
“Has he worked it out with his wife and kid?” Hank said.
“Nope. He sees the kid twice a month now, but that’s all she’ll let him do. From noon to six on Sundays, twice a month. She still won’t speak to him. She’s not ever going to forgive him Juanita.”
“Not even after what happened at Christmas? She must know that’s torn him up,” I said, anger flaring.
“I don’t think he told her,” Luke said. “I don’t think he got a chance. He’s not going to stay in Detroit. He’s going to New York in a week or two. There’s some kind of Civil Rights project at Columbia that wants him to edit one of a series of books they’re doing, and they’ve offered him a lectureship that’ll pay him enough to live on. He’ll be close enough to go see his kid twice a month, and this’ll keep him busy for a semester or two. After that, he doesn’t know.”
Downtown Page 41
