“All right. Be warned. It’s a void, a sepulcher.”
“I fell in love with you in a cemetery.”
“Is that true? I fell in love with you when you asked me in for tea.”
“That memorable day.”
“I suppose you’re thinking about those books I stole. You know, that was a kind of confession, a clarification. You thought too well of me.”
“You took care of that.”
“I’m not sure I did. I mean, here you are.”
“True.”
As they walked, Jack kept an eye on doorways, the mouths of alleys. The few black men they saw on the street paid them no particular mind. They watched them, of course, and one of them roused himself to step toward them and say, “Where you taking that girl?” But he was small and old and too drunk to be threatening, only trying to threaten because he was drunk. Jack realized he had imagined the impact of his harmless fist against an elderly jaw. Well, of course he was vigilant. Della was on his arm.
She had fallen silent. The two of them walked on like any unoffending couple, but faster, a little less inclined to look up at the people they passed than a couple would be who could actually be sure they would give no offense. They passed quite abruptly into the other side of town, where there were more streetlights to expose them, where those dreadful encounters always happened that sometimes inclined him to drink so that the pain would be dulled in anticipation and he could feel that in fact he had humiliated himself, their laughter and hard fists and taunting thieveries being purely adventitious. What a life.
It is impossible to walk naturally when you really want to run, but they walked quickly and quietly to the corner where the building stood, huddled in the dark of the entryway while he put the right key into the lock the right way, hurried up the stairs to the door of the studio, closed that door and locked it. And then they embraced, and what an embrace it was, as if they two had survived flood and fire, as if they had solved loneliness. Such an embrace.
After a while, Della said, “We have to think about some things.”
“Yes. We do. I agree.”
They were quiet. Then Della said, “There’s something my father made us say. Whenever we quarreled with each other or told a lie or cried over something that didn’t matter, or got a bad grade, my father made us say, ‘I’m a Negro, because my God created me to be what I am, and as I am, so will I return to my God, for He knows just why He created me as he did.’ Marcus Garvey, of course. Teaching us to respect ourselves. To live up to ourselves. I will say it to my children, and they will say it to their children and their grandchildren. They’ll be Negroes and they’ll live Negro lives. And you won’t have any effect on that at all. Does that bother you?”
“No. A little. I haven’t given it much thought, really.” This was probably not true. When he walked through black St. Louis, he felt conspicuous and awkward. He felt no less conspicuous and awkward when he walked through white St. Louis. But he had begun to imagine a child walking with him, to whom he could tell things, which would seem impressive enough until the child, the boy, began to realize that the fragments of world his father had shown him or told him about failed to cohere. Eads’s great bridge and its fossils, Gilead and its forgotten heroics, baseball. How to catch a fish or sew on a button. Psalms and sonnets.
A child is like anyone else. It needs food, clothes, a hand to hold, a place to be out of the dark and the weather. Jack might sometime try his luck with another cat. The child would be six or seven, and they would go out hunting together for a gray kitten with gray stripes, tins of sardines in their pockets. They could sneak into Mount Zion to play chopsticks if the place was somehow still standing. Hutchins would laugh if he caught them at it. Jack had often noticed that children are very ready to laugh. Merriment would be a pleasant addition to his life. He was an unserious man, but that is no fault at all in the eyes of a child. There were two reasons why his thinking on the subject of fatherhood did not go any further than this. It brought to mind that other one, whose laughter entered the world and left it while he tried out cynicism in the big city. His pleasure in the thought of a possible child felt like a slight on the actual, lost child, though it was not clear to him how this could be true, that is, how that child or her mother could feel the slight. And then there was the fact that Della’s child would be colored, and if the two of them went anywhere as father and son, there would be no more to say. Dead to rights. What a phrase. The country had set up this whole crude order to thwart the creation of sons like his. He would see the boy when he saw his mother, by stealth, under cover of night. He would always be half a stranger to him, a puzzle to the child, an embarrassment to the boy, then an object of resentment to the man, very likely. His mother had unaccountably taken up with some old white bum. What gifts could he bring them, what comfort could he give them that would make him remember that man, if not fondly, at least kindly? Jack might try to pass himself off as casually interested, his mind on worldly things, his time spent on a shadowy, masculine elsewhere, except maybe on Christmas Eve, when he’d come by late with some trifle. Slick. The defense of his pride would be a thing he owed his son, however shabby the pretense involved. Ah, Jesus, the loneliness of it all.
“Yes,” he said, “I know there would be problems.”
By then they were sitting side by side, their backs against the wall, their knees drawn up, sharing his blanket and her coat. She said, “I do want children, though. Not right away, of course.”
“You’ll lose your job. You’ve got a good job.”
“That’s happening already. It’s all right. There must be something else I can do. Maybe I could work for a newspaper. You know, one of the colored papers.”
“And I’ll be looking around.”
“Yes.”
None of this sounded like optimism. It sounded like two people saying the kind of thing they thought they should say, though they were too comfortable to rouse themselves to any serious intention. All losses are restored and sorrows end. What more could be needed. Then there were voices in the street. He lit a match so she could see her watch, they pulled themselves together, kissed in the darkness, and he watched her walk away down the street in the near-dawn, close to the curb, away from doorways and the mouths of alleys.
* * *
So Della went back to Memphis, to the embrace of her family, to dinners made sentimental by favorite dishes and old stories and smiles of abiding love. She will be an impostor of sorts, to all appearances herself and inwardly a stranger to them all, patient with their insistent kindness, waiting to be gone. She will come back to her unmarriage to her unhusband and live as she can, her vocation lost to what they will call turpitude. Eminent Domain will make rubble of the house she lives in, rubble of her church. The world around her falling away, she will still be gracious, her voice still soft. It was almost a habit with him to imagine her loveliness, the same through every change, rarefied, not vanishing, the very idea of loveliness. While I think of thee, dear friend, my heart breaks.
He went to church that Sunday, took his place in the last pew, listened to the hymns, listened to the prayers, heard out the sermon, left before the benediction. The topic had been “the least of these.” Three infants were named and blessed, to applause and rejoicing. Then the minister said, “We all know these verses in the Gospel of Matthew, in the Parable of the Great Judgment. The Lord says that every kindness you do to ‘the least of these,’ you do to the Lord Himself. So these babies give us a thousand chances to wipe away holy tears, and also to hear holy laughter, and to see those creeping things that creep on the face of the earth as the wonders they were on the day the Lord called them good. Yes. Jesus wasn’t speaking of children particularly. We get old and ugly and maybe disappointed, and we don’t see much of the Lord in ourselves or in our brothers and sisters. But the Lord does. This is something we always have to remember. The world can make you feel so small, the very least among society, humanity. And it is just then that the Lord is with you, loving you, s
aying, ‘I know your heart just as well as I know my own! Stranger, prisoner, I know your heart!’ Just think of that!
“But today I’m going to talk about these little ones we just welcomed into our church and into our life. We know that they will need special care. We know they will need the best teaching we can give them, to make good lives in a world that can be hard and cold, a world made difficult in order—in order—to keep them at a distance. We know they won’t learn much we don’t teach them, here in the church and in the schools we have struggled to provide for them. Not many are teachers, the Apostle says. Teaching is a sacred vocation, right up there with preaching and prophesying, according to the Apostle. This would have been true for the early church, when any sort of heathen might have wandered in just looking for a plate of beans, a kind word or two. In need of teaching. And it is still true for us. It wasn’t so long ago that a man had to anchor a raft in the middle of the Mississippi River to teach our children at the high-school level, because it was illegal to do that in Missouri and in Illinois. That was a sacred work he did. Now we have Sumner High School, where this very sacred work goes on today. It is a rare thing among us to enjoy a real education, and it is a heavy burden on us that schooling is what we lack. So those among us who are teachers are like pearls and rubies, the best help we can find for our children. Our teachers must be honored and assisted in this sacred work—”
It was actually at this point that Jack stood up and slipped out the door and out into the street. No one had glanced at him. Hutchins kept his eyes on the front pews. Arnold seemed to be studying his hymnal. A discipline of kindness had set in that made Jack as self-conscious, almost, as if he were sweltering under a collective stare.
Of course, of course. His errors were so obvious when realization dawned. Did the preacher tell him anything he didn’t already know? And yet it was as if a great light had found him in a guilty act, one of those deeds of darkness that seemed so much less nefarious in the dark. Here was consequence again, a gigantic, censorious presence showing him diminished lives, children robbed in their cradles by one Jack Boughton. He had been a little afraid to wonder why he felt implicated in the imminent destruction, and now he knew. If he were an honorable man, he’d have left her alone.
He had one twenty left. He went by the old rooming house to see if Teddy had left money for him lately, and an envelope was there waiting. He went back to his room and put Teddy’s two tens into his pillow with the twenty through a gap in the seam which he closed with a few stitches to keep feathers from floating out and defeating his stealth. Then he began work on a letter.
Dear Della, I have left St. Louis. I can’t stop thinking of you, so I have to go away, too far away to find myself sitting on your stoop again, longing to hear your voice one more time. I know I am not worth the loss you will be to your students if you can’t go on teaching. It is really very simple. I’m ashamed to think of the harm I already have done. I actually in a sense pray that there is still time for things to be all right, for the scandal to end when I am no longer here to be the cause of it. Please understand and believe that I am doing this in deep love and respect. Jack.
It really was simple, adequately dealt with in a few words. He did not mention their marriage, since she should feel completely free to make other choices. He was careful not to make the letter emotional, because then it would be at odds with his purpose in writing it, with the finality of his intentions. He knew that if he got himself a bottle of something to get through the day and the night, his resolve would dissipate or in any case lose itself in the bogs of dissipation. Better to do all this sober. He would turn up at work just to hand back those keys, a responsible ending to the old life. Then he would go off to the dead men’s shoppe to see if some gentleman had departed without his valise. He would leave a note for Teddy at the old rooming house, telling him he was no longer in St. Louis and thanks for everything. He had no intention of sending him a new address when he had one. He was cutting a lifeline. Teddy would interpret. Teddy would grieve. He might not think, That son of a bitch, but he would know he had the right to think it.
Here he was, trying to change his life for an excellent reason and oppressed by that old feeling that he was enmeshed in a web of potential damage that became actual in one way or another if he so much as breathed. All right then, he would keep his eye on the object, protecting Della and her sacred work. Whatever else burned or shattered as he did this one thing he would simply ignore. Little had ever mattered more to him than the loyalty of his brother Teddy, for example, which he had tested severely and had never shaken. Here he was depriving that good man of the possibility of doing further kindness to him, which, loyalty being what it is, was cruel. But he had nothing to tell his brother about where he would be, and he had to spare him the bother and the expense of future trips to St. Louis. If he ever got on his feet, he might begin to pay Teddy back. He imagined re-entering Teddy’s life with a costly gift, a gold watch, say. And Teddy would accept it in that bemused and tentative way he had always accepted gifts he thought were probably stolen.
But painful as it was, this was a minor problem. He had written the letter to Della. Now how was he to get it to her? He did not know her family’s address. It would be best if she were with her sister or her mother when she read it. She hadn’t planned to stay in Memphis long. She could be on her way back already. Then she might come to his rooming house from the station, as she did that other time, and learn he was gone from the desk clerk. That lout as witness to her surprise and hurt. The thought was intolerable. He would have to stay in St. Louis until she came back and give her the letter himself, and wait with her while she read it.
The letter was a problem. If he spoke to her, he could choose his words very carefully, so that he could live with the sorrow he would see in her proud, gentle face. This was clearly his only choice. He tore the letter into very small pieces.
It was still Sunday, a very long day. He thought she might not have left Memphis on the Sabbath when, if things were going well at all, there would be a big dinner, maybe with guests and relatives. So he went out for a walk. To her house, as it happened. Just in case she might have come home and he could speak to her while that sermon was still ringing in his mind. He knew that if he saw her his resolve might dissolve—nerves—but at worst he would see her. Then, as he approached her house, he saw a notice of some kind in the window. It said FOR RENT. There were no lights on. He knocked and there was no answer. He had to sit down on the stoop to get his breath. People passed as he sat there. It was early for him to be haunting their street. What the hell. He stepped off the stoop into the bushes and cupped his hands against the window glass so he could look into the room. No piano. Crates in the middle of the floor. His emotions, unnameable as they were, would be seen and interpreted by any number of passersby. He had to pull himself together and leave with whatever dignity he could manage.
There had to be a letter from her. The desk clerk might or might not mention that mail had come for any of them, as it did so rarely that they never bothered to ask. As soon as Jack was out of the neighborhood where anything would be made of it, he actually ran back to the rooming house, burst through the door, and demanded the letter.
The desk clerk took note of his agitation. “What letter? I mean, which letter?”
“Hand it over.”
“The one that says, Get out of my life, or the one that says, We can still be friends. They both came the same day, so I couldn’t tell which order you should read them in.”
“Hand them over.”
The clerk opened a drawer and took out a stack of envelopes and slips of paper. He removed one letter and gave it to him. It was sealed. He said, “You’ve got to learn to take a joke, Boughton.”
“You said there were two.”
He shrugged. “Kidding.”
“When did this come?”
“The other day.”
He went up to his room to look at it. The postmark said Memphis. She must
have mailed it as soon as she arrived there. Still, she had hardly been gone long enough to have given in to the pleas of her family. She might have written the letter before she left, or on the train. So whatever it said had been decided by her even while they were together that night. There was no return address, which seemed ominous. Why was it so hard for him to catch his breath? At worst, she was writing to tell him more or less what he had decided to tell her, which would be a blow, but also a relief. At best, it was some sort of love note, which would be a disaster, since he could tell by the event it was to hold the letter in his hand that his resolve would not survive the sight of one fond word from her.
To expend some emotion, probably, he went halfway down the stairs and said to the desk clerk, “Somebody’s going to kill you one day.”
He didn’t look up, still sorting through the stack of mail. “Maybe so, but it won’t be you.”
True enough.
“By the way, here’s the other one.” He put a letter down on the counter. “You might want to read it first.” The envelope was sealed, there was no return address, the postmark said Memphis.
The desk clerk could not know what was in the letters. The envelopes were clearly intact. Still, it probably did matter which order he read them in. He used a key to tear open both envelopes, then took the letter from one of them. It began: Dear Mr. Boughton. So he glanced at the signature. Julia Miles. No need to read that one. The second began: Dear Mr. Boughton and was signed Delia Highfield. Why had he assumed they came from Della? The delicate female handwriting. He might have noticed differences if he had thought to look for them. As far as he was concerned, their case was made. He had relinquished his wife to them, for heaven’s sake, granting certain difficulties, for instance Della’s refusal to be relinquished. Neither sister nor aunt had done him the minor courtesy of providing a return address. So he could not tell Della that he would be gone from St. Louis. She might come to this damned flophouse asking after him and the clerk would tell her he was gone and then watch her dear face while she tried to compose herself. Jack could leave a letter for her, but clearly he could not be sure the clerk would give it to her.
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