Four Spirits

  Andy Parrish wondered at the color of the snow, more white even than Ivory soap. He remembered his bathtub soap-cake boat and how he blew on its red sail to make it move. If he held up a red sail—maybe a kite—would the wind blow him out of the yard? Would it blow him up into the clouds? He held his arms out at his sides, hoping to catch the wind.

  The wind blew two cars down the street: a red convertible with a white top and then a blue car. After the cars parked, two white people—Jonathan and Stella—got out of the lead car, and one white woman in a red dress, by herself, got out of the second car.

  And then a third car passed, pale green, with two white men in it. The wind blew that car speedily down the street, past the house and the bundled-up children.

  SEEING THE CHILDREN IN the yard, Jonathan said to Stella, “Spirits in the snow.”

  Agnes and TJ’s children ran forward for hugs, as they always did.

  Diane cocked her arm on one hip and asked, “Is this the best snow you ever seen?”

  “Absolutely,” Jonathan said, and he squeezed her hard and flicked the big sleigh bell sewn in the top of her chartreuse stocking cap. He turned to see that Ellie was picking her way through the snow in her high heels. He glanced at Stella’s warm coat and scarf, her feet in her sensible rubber-soled green flats, and went to help Ellie. Her arms were incongruously bare, and she looked very glamorous with her dark hair and glittering long earrings blowing back. Vulnerable.

  “Ellie’s going to freeze,” Stella remarked, but already Jonathan was putting his arm around her bare shoulders;Ellie’s skin was strikingly warm to the touch.

  Diane danced at his elbow, fearlessly introducing herself to the strange white woman.

  “What was your next best ever snowfall,” Diane demanded of Jonathan, “after this?”

  Somehow the question pierced him, and he remembered when he and Kabita had come out of the Metropolitan Museum into a snow shower at dusk. He remembered how the snowflakes had caught in Kabita’s long dark hair. He pulled Ellie against his side; she was slightly plump, no, voluptuous, like a dark-haired Marilyn Monroe.

  He steered Ellie toward the lighted house, behind Stella.

  “Y’all come on in now,” Agnes called from the porch to the children.

  All the children, a little herd of them, gathered at their elbows and moved toward the house. From the street, a car honked its horn, but Jonathan didn’t bother to turn. Somebody celebrating early.

  Kabita had been as slender as Stella. When he and Kabita had admired the heavy stone sarcophagi in the Egyptian wing, he’d discovered that she’d read all of Shakespeare. Kabita had remarked that you could really tell the difference between genius and talent when you compared Antony and Cleopatra with Dryden’s All for Love. Her innocent remark had made his blood run cold; he had wondered if someday someone would say that about his playing of Chopin in comparison to Rubinstein’s. He had told her so, and Kabita had refused to console him. We’d all better keep practicing, she had teased and winked at him. He had loved her, among the sarcophagi, for her honesty.

  Agnes looked into his eyes. Her gaze startled him, as though he had been found out.

  “You don’t have to be homesick for no snow,” Agnes said. “We gets snow.”

  STELLA WAS DELIGHTED to see Gloria at the party, but she was surprised when Ellie said to Gloria, right off, “You have beautiful skin.”

  Yes, Stella admired more fully the mahogany red of Gloria’s complexion.

  “Thank you,” Gloria said. She was not fazed a bit. “I’m letting my hair go natural.”

  Gloria’s hair surrounded her head like a dark nimbus.

  When Stella introduced Ellie to Lionel Parrish, he said, “You’re most welcome, pretty lady.” Lionel put his arm proudly around Jenny. “We already got two of each. This one’s the bonus.” How at ease Lionel was among all his guests, black and white. In his ease, Stella, too, felt easy and welcome. Usually shy at parties, she suddenly knew she would chatter, perhaps say amazing things. But then she always felt free when she was with Ellie.

  “Y’all come sit in these kitchen chairs and talk to me,” Gloria said to Stella and Ellie.

  Gloria led the way, tooting on a noisemaker, blowing it obnoxiously into people’s faces. Arcola! Stella thought. She’s taken on Arcola’s ways, and she felt a pang of sadness. Cat!

  “Girl, you still got your cello?” Gloria asked Stella.

  JONATHAN LISTENED TO GLORIA explain that she needed instruments. She wanted to start an orchestra. “Not just teach kids to toot horns.” And then Gloria blew her party horn exuberantly.

  Jonathan turned to look out the window.

  It was dusk and the snow was still falling. The Parrish home was filling with happy people, but he felt sad and told himself that sometimes this was the way it felt when you were away from home on New Year’s, and it was snowing. He remembered the city lights and the lamps in Central Park, how he had put his arm around Kabita. Together they enjoyed the yellow lights against the gray sky, and the white snow still coming down. Here in Birmingham he suddenly felt bereft. It pleased him that snow was covering everything. He wondered how far south the snow would reach? Montgomery, Mobile?

  Then he felt Stella’s arm around him.

  “I love the snow in the evergreens,” she said. “When I was a little girl, Aunt Krit gave me a candle of a little green pine tree, with snow on its boughs. It was my first Christmas without my family. It pleased me that she had picked out just a natural tree for me, not a decorated one. I never said so to her, but it made me feel understood, and I was grateful to her.”

  He hugged her against his side.

  “What did Aunt Pratt give you?”

  “A huge rag doll. She’d made her just my size. She had very pink polished cotton skin and yellow yarn hair.”

  Jonathan put his lips in Stella’s hair and kissed her head. She didn’t doubt that she was his and he was hers—just the way she leaned against him said that.

  “Gloria’s going down to Selma to help with voter registration,” she said. “Ellie’s interested, too.”

  Yes, he loved Stella. She understood him, and he needed her.

  Suddenly, they saw Agnes, all bundled up, out in the yard scooping up snow in a big saucepan. She moved fast, bending and scooping in her gray coat with a gray scarf tied over her head. When Agnes came inside, snow frosting her shoulders and dusting the gray, fringed scarf, she said, “I’m gonna make this Yankee boy some snow ice cream!”

  STELLA GLANCED OVER at Gloria and Ellie, gabbing in the straight chairs like two old country women on a front porch. Ellie reached over and familiarly fingered the miniature harmonica hanging on a ball chain around Gloria’s neck.

  Immediately Gloria took the little thing to her lips and, impromptu, played a rousing rendition of “O, Susanna!” The jaunty, confident tune penetrated the party hubbub. “Play it again,” Stella called, and so did others. There were Gloria’s aunts, colorful as tropical birds, egging her on. And over in the corner, that quiet couple must be Gloria’s parents; Stella had met them at Joseph Coat-of-Many-Colors. Gloria looked like her mother, but she was dressed as flamboyantly as the aunts.

  Everybody sang with gusto, especially Jonathan, right in Stella’s ear: “I come to Alabama with a banjo on my knee….” The room resounded with it. “O, Susanna, O, don’t you cry for me….” Stella looked at the faces, mostly dark, a few light. Some stoic as stone, some singing with twinkling jauntiness, some with patient determination making a promise to the future that there would be no more reason, someday in the South, to cry for me or my children or my people.

  How could Gloria possibly get so much music out of an instrument only an inch long? So much volume and sprightly, saucy hope.

  And there was Ellie, rising above her personal angst, radiant for freedom in some form that combined the personal and the private.

  Gloria was even able to smile as she played; her shoulders danced as she blew herself into an instrument half the
length of her little finger. Stella remembered how Gloria had stepped forward not in joy but in anguish to speak and to sing at the funeral, her soul projected by her voice. No matter who dies, Stella thought, the South will always have more Glorias to step forward, to lead. But then Stella thought of how few they were, gathered in this house, a snowstorm swirling about them.

  When the singing stopped, Jonathan murmured of Gloria, “She’s really very talented.”

  Stella spoke from her heart: “I’m glad she can play the cello, and I don’t have to.” She peeked out the window again. Brigades of bundled-up children were bringing Agnes snow for her ice cream. Yes, Stella remembered, it seemed to take bushels of snow to make snow ice cream. She could smell something hot and savory, too, emanating from the kitchen. They were baking hot breads—banana bread, and something with cinnamon and dates, and there was the special aroma of walnuts baking in batter, a smell that made even your teeth water.

  JONATHAN EXCUSED HIMSELF to go to the bathroom. He wanted to be closeted, alone for a while. In the bathroom, he thought again of how Kabita and he had stood on the steps looking at the city in the snowfall. He flushed the toilet. And then he remembered another picture, a photograph of the mothers of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. They too were standing at the top of a flight of stairs in New York, leaving the funeral service for Andrew Goodman. Their black purses dangled from their wrists in front of their linked bodies. They had all lost their sons to the Klan: Schwerner and Goodman, white boys from New York. Goodman killed his first day in Mississippi. Chaney a local worker, Negro, from Mississippi.

  Jonathan looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and wondered if he had a fraction of their strength. He wished someone would compose a trio for three male singers with an amazing piano part, a trio for young male voices, preferably aged twenty-one, twenty-one, and twenty-five, preferably two white and one Negro. And a complementary one for their middle-aged mothers, something that would let them shriek their grief. He thought of the weight of Mississippi earth—an earthen dam constructed with bulldozers—under which Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were found.

  Maybe Jonathan had been in Alabama too long. Maybe his luck was running out and it was time to leave. Stella seemed ready to go to Selma, but how did he feel? Heavy. Depressed. It was New Year’s and he should feel hopeful, be looking forward to change. He thought of Lionel’s sermon at the funeral. He needed something to help him spill his sorrow. He was ashamed of himself for longing for Kabita, for times back then in New York, for wanting now to hold Ellie in her fiery dress and warm body.

  He left the bathroom and wandered the party. Stella was sitting happily between Ellie and Gloria, and he knew that another friendship circle was forming. Ellie might betray her husband but not her friends.

  EVENTUALLY, LIONEL HURRIED among the champagne glasses to get ready for the countdown.

  Ellie stood up quickly, breathlessly happy. When Stella and Gloria stood up, Gloria ecstatically threw her arms around Stella, without reserve, and Stella returned the embrace with the same joyful freedom. Jonathan envied Stella, wanted to ask her for help.

  At Jonathan’s elbow, Jenny said, “This is our first champagne,” but Lionel was popping corks as though he were an old hand at it.

  On the other side of Jonathan, someone quietly raised his glass and said, “Here’s to my friend Medgar Evers, a great leader, assassinated June 12, 1963. Jackson, Mississippi.”

  So others were remembering, too. The big man was standing alone, toasting the air.

  Jonathan lifted his glass. He didn’t want to intrude. He said quietly, “To all the martyrs.” He thought of a thirteen-year-old boy in Birmingham, on a bicycle, murdered the same day as the four girls. Shot by young Eagle Scouts. The boy’s name was Virgil Lamar Ware. Jonathan had still been in New York then, practicing his fool fingers off. But he spent hours rummaging in drawers till he found his old Eagle Scout certificate, which he burned in the kitchen sink, and resolved to prepare himself to try to count for something in the South.

  “To Virgil Lamar Ware,” Jonathan added softly.

  To his surprise, the man next to him glanced at him, and raised his glass.

  “To Johnny Robinson.”

  “Who was he?” Jonathan asked.

  “Killed same day as Virgil. As the girls. Shot in the back by police breaking up a crowd.”

  Jonathan opened his arm to the man, who stepped forward. A big man, full of grief. When the man stepped away, his eyes and nostrils were running tears.

  “Johnny was in with a crowd of kids throwing rocks. I knowed his folks.” He wiped his nose on a square of white handkerchief, then turned away to face the party and the countdown. Lionel hastened to fill their glasses with the sparkling champagne.

  Moments before midnight, Lionel solemnly raised his hand for silence. They all looked at the scar like a star in his palm.

  “We’re here to have a good time,” Lionel said. “To celebrate that we are alive. That we can carry the torch. But we don’t none of us forget. Not September 15, 1963.” He paused to gather his composure. “Not our recent losses—Joseph Coat. Not the losses before or after September 15 due to racism. Not Medgar Evers; not young men from the North this last June in Mississippi and James Chaney; southern children, our own young. Tonight we also honor those young and old, white and black, who may yet lay down their lives for equality and freedom. Martin Luther King’s coming back to Alabama, working in Selma and the rural parts for voter registration.

  “I can’t do better as we greet the New Year, 1965, I can’t do better than to remind you of the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He said that ‘the innocent blood of these little girls may serve as the redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city.’ Remember, friends, Birmingham and the United States got to feel the redemptive force, not just sorrow. We got to bear up that light, each and every one. In my mind, old Vulcan up there watching for the New Year come in—he holding up the light of love in this pure and blessed snow.”

  Lionel lowered his arm and put it around his wife’s shoulders.

  “Now, sisters and brothers,” he said energetically, “count on down.”

  At midnight, the guests all toasted one another and yelled “Happy New Year!” Gloria continuously blew her horn obnoxiously onto noses.

  Stella came to Jonathan and said, “I think we should go now.”

  Ellie said that she wanted to stay longer.

  “We’ll look after her,” Gloria answered.

  At the door, Stella said to Lionel, “I hope 1965 is good to you and Jenny. It’s going to be good to Jonathan and me.”

  Jonathan was shocked at her public forth rightness, her confidence in them.

  “That’s right,” he echoed. Yes, he would let his disappointments and frustration go. Yes, he would embrace this odd and wonderful woman who loved him.

  Lionel announced, “Before they go—a toast to a happy couple!”

  And everyone yelled, “Happy New Year!”

  Stella

  AS THEY WALKED TOWARD THEIR CAR, ANOTHER CAR SPED by, blasting its horn.

  “Wild night,” Jonathan remarked.

  “I love the snow,” Stella said. “I had a wonderful time.” She glanced at him, knew he had seemed troubled during parts of the party. Inside the Thunderbird she leaned over and rubbed her cheek against his prickly whiskers.

  “Would you like to grow a curly red beard?”

  He turned on the motor and pulled away from the curb. The tires crunched in the snow.

  “Anything for you,” he said.

  She believed him. She believed every word his lips and his body uttered.

  He glanced in the rearview mirror, and Stella turned to see a car, iceberg green, hurtle past. There were four men in the car.

  “It’s starting to get slippery,” Jonathan said as he drove on.

  At the next traffic light, the same pale green car rushed up, behind them again, blowing its horn. In this light, it looked too pale, alm
ost white, but definitely the same one.

  A great dread clenched Stella’s heart.

  Irritated, Jonathan glanced in the rearview mirror again. “What’s their problem?” he said. “The light’s red.”

  “Maybe they were afraid they couldn’t stop in time,” Stella said. “That they’d rear-end.”

  “I hope not,” he said. “Does anybody ever ski or ice-skate around here?”

  “There’s an indoor skating rink in Eastlake,” she said. “But the rental skates are worn out, and the ice barely covers the refrigeration pipes.” She remembered how she had begged and begged Aunt Krit to take her ice-skating till finally she’d gotten to go. Her sneaky plan had been to learn to skate and then show off to Nancy. But at the rink, Stella had had to cling to the railing to get around; her ankles were too weak. One patch of ice was a rusty brown smear from the decay of the pipes underneath, and it was harrowing to bump along over the almost exposed pipes. Suppose her blades sliced into the pipes; suppose the pipes had poisonous gas inside? She would never take Nancy to such a dangerous place.

  “I’ll teach you to ski,” Jonathan said. “We’ll go to Maine or Vermont. If we got married tomorrow that could be our honeymoon.”

  “We could,” she said. She glanced over her shoulder. She could see the ice green car. “I’m afraid of that car behind us,” she blurted.

  “I’ll just slow down and let them pass,” he said. “They can make the next light, if they hurry.”

  But the car—two white men in the front seat, two in the back—sped straight toward them. The driver threw on his brakes, and then veered out of control into the oncoming lane. The car coming toward them pulled aside and onto the curb, honking its own horn. Careening past, the men on the passenger sides rolled down their windows and yelled.

  “Yankee, go home! Nigger lovers!”

  “What the hell!” Jonathan said.

  “Speed up,” Stella said.

  “What?”

  “We need to get away from them. Turn down the next side street.”