The farewells at the elevator door were followed by a second round down below on the sidewalk while the doorman was blowing his whistle for cabs.
“Can we drop you?” Ellen Hunter called.
“No. You’re going downtown, and it would be out of your way,” Celia Coleman said.
The Colemans walked two blocks north on Park and then east. The sidewalks of Manhattan were bare, the snow the weatherman promised having failed to come. There were no stars, and the night sky had a brownish cast. From a speaker placed over the doorway of a darkened storefront human voices sang “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” The drugstore on the corner was brightly lighted but locked, with the iron grating pulled down and no customers inquiring about cosmetics at the cash register or standing in front of the revolving Timex display unable to make up their minds.
The Venetian-red door of the Colemans’ house was level with the sidewalk and had a Christmas wreath on it. In an eerie fashion it swung open when Dan Coleman tried to fit his key in the lock.
“Did we forget to close it?” Celia said and he shook his head. The lock had been jimmied.
“I guess it’s our turn,” he said grimly as they walked in. At the foot of the stairs they stood still and listened. Nothing on the first floor was disturbed. There was even a silver spoon and a small silver tray on the dining-room sideboard. Looking at each other they half managed to believe mat everything was all right; the burglars had been frightened by somebody coming down the street, or a squad car perhaps, and had cleared out without taking anything. But the house felt queer, not right somehow, not the way it usually felt, and they saw why when they got to the top of the first flight of stairs.
“Sweet Jesus!” he exclaimed softly, and she thought of her jewelry.
The shades were drawn to the sills, so that people on the sidewalk or in the apartments across the way could not see in the windows. One small detail caught his eye in the midst of the general destruction. A Limoges jar that held potpourri lay in fragments on the hearth and a faint odor of rose petals hung on the air.
With her heart beating faster than usual and her mouth as dry as cotton she said, “I can understand why they might want to look behind the pictures, but why walk on them?”
“Saves time,” he said.
“And why break the lamps?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I have never gone in for housebreaking.”
A cigarette had been placed at the edge of a tabletop, right next to an ashtray, and allowed to burn all the way down. The liquor cupboard was untouched. In the study, on that same floor at the back of the house, where the hi-fi, the tape deck, and the TV should have been there was a blank space. Rather than bother to unscrew the cable, the burglars had snipped it with wire cutters. All the books had been pulled from the shelves and lay in mounds on the floor.
“Evidently they are not readers,” he said, and picked up volume seven of Hakluyt’s Voyages and stood it on an empty shelf.
She tried to think of a reason for not going up the next flight to the bedrooms, to make the uncertainty last a little longer. Rather than leave her jewelry in the bank and never have the pleasure of wearing it, she had hidden it in a place that seemed to her very clever.
It was not clever enough. The star ruby ring, the cabochon emeralds, the gold bracelets, the moonstones, the garnet necklace that had been her father’s wedding present to her mother, the peridot-and-tourmaline pin that she found in an antique shop on a back street in Toulon, the diamond earrings — gone. All gone. Except for the things Dan had given her they were all inherited and irreplaceable, and so what would be the point of insuring them.
“In a way it’s a relief,” she said, in what sounded to her, though not to him, like her normal voice.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that you can’t worry about possessions you no longer have.”
She opened the top right-hand drawer of her dressing table and saw that the junk jewelry was still there. As she pushed the drawer shut he said, “The standard procedure,” and took her in his arms.
The rest was also pretty much the standard procedure. Mattresses were pulled half off the beds and ripped open with a razor blade, drawers turned upside down, and his clothes closet completely empty, which meant his wardrobe now consisted of the dark-blue suit he had put on earlier this evening to go to the Follansbees’ Christmas party. Her dresses lay in a colored confusion that spilled out into the room from the floor of her walk-in closet. Boxes from the upper shelves had been pulled down and ransacked — boxes containing hats, evening purses, evening dresses she no longer had occasion to wear, since they seldom went out at night except to go to the theater or dine with friends.
When the police came she let him do the talking. Christmas Eve, Christmas Day were the prime moments for break-ins, they said. The house had probably been watched. They made a list of the more important things and suggested that Dan send them an inventory. They were pleasant and held out no hope. There were places they could watch, they said, to see if anything belonging to the Colemans turned up, but chances were that … When they left he put the back of a chair against the doorknob of the street door and started up the stairs.
From the stairs he could see into their bedroom. To his astonishment Celia had on an evening dress he hadn’t seen for twenty years. Turning this way and that, she studied her reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of a closet door. Off the dress came, over her head, and she worked her way into a scarlet chiffon sheath that had a sooty footprint on it. Her hair had turned from dark brown to grey and when she woke up in the morning her back was as stiff as a board, but the dress fit her perfectly. While he stood there, watching, and unseen, she tried them on, one after another — the black taffeta with the bouffant skirt, the pale sea-green silk with bands of matching silk fringe — all her favorite dresses that she had been too fond of to take to a thrift shop, and that had been languishing on the top shelf of her closet. As she stepped back to consider critically the effect of a white silk evening suit, her high heels ground splinters of glass into the bedroom rug.
ITS load lightened by a brief stop in the Bronx at a two-story warehouse that was filled from floor to ceiling with hi-fi sets and color TVs, the Chrysler sedan proceeded along the Bruckner Elevated Expressway to Route 95. When the car slowed down for the tollgate at the Connecticut state line, the sandy-haired recidivist, slouched down in the right-hand front seat, opened his eyes. The false license plates aroused no interest whatever as the car came to a stop and then drove on.
IN the middle of the night, the material witnesses to the breaking and entering communicated with one another, a remark at a time. A small spotlight up near the ceiling that was trained on an area over the living-room sofa said, When I saw the pictures being ripped from the walls I was afraid. I thought I was going to go the same way.
So fortunate, they were, the red stair-carpet said, and the stair-rail said, Fortunate? How?
The intruders were gone when they came home.
I had a good look at them, said the mirror over the lowboy in the downstairs hall. They were not at all like the Colemans’ friends or the delivery boys from Gristede’s and the fish market.
The Colemans’ friends don’t break in the front door, the Sheraton sideboard said. They ring and then wait for somebody to come and open it.
She will have my top refinished, said the table with the cigarette scar. The number is in the telephone turnaround. She knows about that sort of thing and he doesn’t. But it will take a while. And the room will look odd without me.
It took a long time to make that star ruby, said a small seashell on the mantelpiece.
Precious stones you can buy, said the classified directory. Van Cleef & Arpels. Harry Winston. And auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby Parke Bernet. It is the Victorian and Edwardian settings that were unusual. I don’t suppose the thieves will know enough to value them.
They will be melted down, said the brass fire irons, into unidenti
fiability. It happens every day.
Antique jewelry too can be picked up at auction places. Still, it is disagreeable to lose things that have come down in the family. It isn’t something one would choose to have happen.
There are lots of things one would not choose to have happen that do happen, said the fire irons.
With any unpleasantness, said the orange plastic Design Research kitchen wall clock, it is better to take the long view.
Very sensible of them to fall asleep the minute their heads hit the pillow, said the full-length mirror in the master bedroom. Instead of turning and tossing and going over in their minds the things they have lost, that are gone forever.
They have each other, a small bottle of Elizabeth Arden perfume spray said. They will forget about what happened this evening. Or, if they remember, it will he something they have ceased to have much feeling about, a story they tell sometimes at dinner parties, when the subject of robberies comes up. He will tell how they walked home from the Follansbees’ on Christmas night and found the front door ajar, and she will tell about the spoon and the silver tray the thieves didn’t take, and he will tell how he stood on the stairs watching while she tried on all her favorite evening dresses.
Billie Dyer
1
IF you were to draw a diagonal line down the state of Illinois from Chicago to St. Louis, the halfway point would be somewhere in Logan County. The county seat is Lincoln, which prides itself on being the only place named for the Great Emancipator before he became President. Until the elm blight reduced it in a few months to nakedness, it was a pretty late-Victorian and turn-of-the-century town of twelve thousand inhabitants. It had coal mines but no factories of any size. “Downtown” was, and still is, the courthouse square and stores that after a block or two in every direction give way to grass and houses. Which in turn give way to dark-green or yellowing fields that stretch all the way to the edge of the sky.
When Illinois was admitted into the Union there was not a single white man living within the confines of what is now the county line. That flat farmland was prairie grass, the hunting ground of the Kickapoo Indians. By 1833, under coercion, the chiefs of all the Illinois Indians had signed treaties ceding their territories to the United States. The treaties stipulated that they were to move their people west of the Mississippi River. In my childhood — that is to say, shortly before the First World War — arrowheads were turned up occasionally during spring plowing.
The town of Lincoln was laid out in 1853, and for more than a decade only white people lived there. The first Negroes were brought from the South by soldiers returning from the Civil War. They were carried into town rolled in a blanket so they would not be seen. They stayed indoors during the daytime and waited until dark for a breath of fresh air.
Muddy water doesn’t always clear overnight. In the running conversation that went on above my head, from time to time a voice no longer identifiable would say, “So long as they know their place.” A colored man who tried to attend the service at one of the Protestant churches was politely turned away at the door.
The men cleaned out stables and chicken houses, kept furnaces going in the wintertime, mowed lawns and raked leaves and did odd jobs. The women took in washing or cooked for some white family and now and then carried home a bundle of clothes that had become shabby from wear or that the children of the family had outgrown. I have been told by someone of the older generation that on summer evenings they would sit on their porches and sing, and that the white people would drive their carriages down the street where these houses were in order to hear them.
I am aware that “blacks” is now the acceptable form, but when I was a little boy the polite form was “colored people”; it was how they spoke of themselves. In speaking of things that happened long ago, to be insensitive to the language of the period is to be, in effect, an unreliable witness.
In 1953, Lincoln celebrated the hundredth anniversary of its founding with a pageant and a parade that outdid all other parades within living memory. The Evening Courier brought out a special edition largely devoted to old photographs and sketches of local figures, past and present, and the recollections of elderly people. A committee came up with a list of the ten most distinguished men that the town had produced. One was a Negro, William Holmes Dyer. He was then sixty-seven years old and living in Kansas City, and the head surgeon for all the Negro employees of the Santa Fe line. He was invited to attend the celebration, and did. There was a grand historical pageant with a cast of four hundred, and the Ten Most Distinguished Men figured in it. Nine of them were stand-ins with false chin whiskers, stovepipe hats, frock coats, and trousers that fastened under the instep. Dr. Dyer stood among them dressed in a dark-blue business suit, and four nights running accepted the honor that was due him.
Two years later, he was invited back again for a banquet of the Lincoln College Alumni Association, where he was given a citation for outstanding accomplishment in the field of medicine. While he was in town he called on the president of the college, who was a childhood friend of mine. “What did you talk about?” I asked, many years later, regretting the fact that so far as I knew I had never laid eyes on William Dyer. My friend couldn’t remember. It was too long ago. “What was he like?” I persisted, and my friend, thinking carefully, said, “Except for the color of his skin he could have been your uncle. Or mine.”
I HAVE been looking at an old photograph of six boys playing soldier. They are somewhere between ten and twelve years old. There are trees behind them and grass; it is somebody’s backyard. Judging by their clothes (high-buttoned double-breasted jackets, trousers cut off at the knee, long black stockings, high-button shoes), the photograph was taken around 1900. One soldier has little flowers in his buttonhole. He and four of the others are standing at attention with their swords resting on their right shoulders. They can’t have been real swords, but neither are they made of wood. The sixth soldier is partly turned but still facing the camera. As soon as the bulb is pressed he will lead the attack on Missionary Ridge. I assume they are soldiers in the Union Army, but who knows? Boys have a romantic love of lost causes. They must have had to stand unblinking for several minutes while the photographer busied himself under his black cloth. One of them, though I do not know which one, is Hugh Davis, whose mother was my Grandmother Blinn’s sister. And one is Billie Dyer. His paternal grandmother was the child of a Cherokee Indian and a white woman who came from North Carolina in the covered-wagon days.
Billie Dyer’s grandfather, Aaron Dyer, was born a slave in Richmond, Virginia, and given his freedom when he turned twenty-one. He made his way north to Springfield, Illinois, because it was a station of the Underground Railroad. It is thirty miles to the southwest of Lincoln, and the state capital. In Springfield, the feeling against slavery was strong; a runaway slave would be hidden sometimes for weeks until the owner who had traced him that far gave up and went home. Then Aaron Dyer would hitch up the horse and wagon he had been provided with, and at night the fugitive, covered with gunnysacks or an old horse blanket, would be driven along some winding wagon trail that led through the prairie. Clop, clop, clopty clop. Past farm buildings that were all dark and ominous. Fording shallow streams and crossing bridges with loose wooden floorboards that rumbled. Arousing the comment of owls. Sometimes Aaron Dyer sang softly to himself. Uppermost in his mind, who can doubt, was the thought of a hand pulling back those gunnysacks to see what was under them.
As for the fugitive concealed under the gunnysacks in the back of Aaron Dyer’s wagon, whose heart beat wildly at the sound of a dog barking half a mile away, what he (or she) was escaping from couldn’t have been better conveyed than in these complacent paragraphs from the Vicksburg, Mississippi, Sun of May 21, 1856:
Any person, by visiting the slave depot on Mulberry Street, in this city, can get a sight of some of the latest importations of Congo negroes.
We visited them yesterday and were surprised to see them looking so well, and possessing such int
elligent countenances. They were very much like the common plantation negro — the only difference observable being the hair not kinking after the manner of the Southern darkey, while their feet, comparatively speaking, being very small, having a higher instep, and well-shaped in every respect.
Some of the younger of these negroes are very large of their age, and are destined to attain a large growth. They all will make first-rate field hands, being easily taught to perform any kind of manual service. Their docility is remarkable, and their aptitude in imitating the manners and customs of those among whom they are thrown, is equally so.
On Decoration Day I saw, marching at the head of the parade, two or three frail old men who had fought in the war that freed them.
Two families lived in our house before my father bought it, in the early nineteen-hundreds. It had been there long enough for shade trees to grow around and over it. The ceilings were high, after the fashion of late-Victorian houses, and the downstairs rooms could not be closed off. My father complained, with feeling, about: the coal bill. Like all old houses, it gave off sounds. The stairs creaked when there was no one on them, the fireplace chimneys sighed when the wind was from the east, and the sound, coming through the living-room floor, of coal being shoveled meant that Alfred Dyer was minding the furnace. Sometimes I went into the pantry and opened the cellar door and listened. The cellar stairs had no railing and the half-light was filtered through cobwebs and asbestos-covered heating pipes, and I never went down there. Sitting in the window seat in the library I would look out and see Mr. Dyer coming up the driveway to the cellar door. If he saw me playing outside he would say “Evening,” in a voice much lower than any white man’s. His walk was slow, as if he were dragging an invisible heaviness after him. It did not occur to me that the heaviness was simply that he was old and tired. Or even that he might have other, more presentable clothes than the shapeless sweater and baggy trousers I saw him in. I was not much better informed about the grown people around me than a dog or a cat would have been. I know now that he was born in Springfield, and could remember soldiers tramping the streets there with orders to shoot anybody who appeared to rejoice in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. I have been told that for many years he took care of my Grandfather Blinn’s horses and drove the family carriage. The horses and carriage were sold when my Uncle Ted persuaded my grandfather to buy a motorcar, and Mr. Dyer went to work for the lumber company.
All the Days and Nights Page 27
