Another Country (14 page)

“Ida,” Vivaldo was saying as she reentered, “if there’s anything I can do to help you find him— anything at all—” He stopped. “Hell,” he said, “I love him, too, I want to find him, too. I’ve been kicking myself all day for letting him get away last night.”

When Vivaldo said, “I love him, too,” Ida looked over at him, her eyes very big, as though she were, now, really meeting him for the first time. Then she dropped her eyes. “I don’t really know anything you
can
do,” she said.

“Well— I could come with you while you look. We could look together.”

She considered this; she considered him. “Well,” she said, finally, “maybe you could come with me to a couple of places in the Village—”

“All right.”

“I can’t help it. I have the feeling they think I’m just being hysterical.”

“I’ll come with you. They won’t think
I’m
hysterical.”

Richard grinned. “Vivaldo’s never hysterical, we all know that.” Then he said, “I really don’t see the point of all this. Rufus is probably just sleeping it off somewhere.”

“Nobody’s seen him,” Ida cried, “for nearly six
weeks!
Until last night! I
know
my brother, he doesn’t do things like this. He always come by the house, no matter where he’d been, or what was happening, just so we wouldn’t worry. He used to bring money and things— but even when he was broke, he come anyway. Don’t tell me he’s just sleeping it off somewhere. Six weeks is a long time.” She subsided a little, subsided to a venomous murmur. “And you know what happened— between him and that damn crazy little cracker bitch he got hung up with.”

“All right,” Richard said, helplessly, after a considerable silence, “have it your own way.”

Cass said, “But there’s no need to go rushing off in the rain right away. Rufus knows Vivaldo is going to be here. He may come by. I was hoping you would all stay for supper.” She smiled at Ida. “Won’t you, please? I’m sure you’ll feel better. It may all be cleared up by this evening.”

Ida and Vivaldo stared at each other, having, it seemed, become allies in the course of the afternoon. “Well?” asked Vivaldo.

“I don’t know. I’m so tired and evil I don’t seem to be able to think straight.”

Richard looked as though he thoroughly agreed with this; and he said, “Look. You’ve been to the police. You’ve told everyone you could. You’ve checked the hospitals, and”— he looked at her questioningly— “the morgue”— and she nodded, not dropping her eyes. “Well. I don’t see any point in rushing out in this damn Sunday-afternoon rain, when you hardly even know where you’re going. And we all saw him last night. So we know he’s around. So why not relax for a couple of hours? Hell, in a couple of hours you may find out you haven’t got to go anywhere, he’ll turn up.”

“Really,” said Cass, “there’s a very good chance he’ll turn up here today.” Ida looked at Cass. Then Cass realized that something in Ida was enjoying this— the attention, the power she held for this moment. This made Cass angry, but then she thought: Good. It means that whatever’s coming, she’ll be able to get through it. Without quite knowing it, from the moment Ida stepped through the door, she was preparing herself for the worst.

“Well,” said Ida, looking at Vivaldo, “I asked Mama to call me here— just in case.”

“Well, then,” said Cass, “it seems to me it’s settled.” She looked at the clock. “The boys should be home in about another hour. I think what I’ll do is fix us all a fresh drink.”

Ida grinned. “That’s a very friendly idea.”

She was terribly attractive when she grinned. Her face, then, made one think of a mischievous street boy. And at the same time there glowed in her eyes a marvelously feminine mockery. Vivaldo kept watching her, a small smile playing around the corners of his mouth.

The snow which had been predicted for the day before Thanksgiving did not begin to fall until late in the evening— slow, halfhearted flakes, spinning and gleaming in the darkness, melting on the ground.

All day long a cold sun glared down on Manhattan, giving no heat.

Cass woke a little earlier than usual, and fed the children and sent them off to school. Richard ate his breakfast and retired into his study— he was not in a good mood. Cass cleaned the house, thinking of tomorrow’s dinner, and went out in the early afternoon to shop and to walk for a little while alone.

She was gone longer than she had intended, for she loved to walk around this city. She was chilled when at last she started home.

They lived just below Twenty-third Street, on the West Side, in a neighborhood that had lately acquired many Puerto Ricans. For this reason it was said that the neighborhood was declining; from what previous height it would have been hard to say. It seemed to Cass very much as it always had, run-down, and with a preponderance of very rough-looking people. As for the Puerto Ricans, she rather liked them. They did not impress her as being rough; they seemed, on the contrary, rather too gentle for their brutal environment. She liked the sound of their talk, soft and laughing, or else violently, clearly, brilliantly hostile; she liked the life in their eyes and the way they treated their children, as though all children were naturally the responsibility of all grownups. Even when the adolescents whistled after her, or said lewd things as she passed and laughed among themselves, she did not become resentful or afraid; she did not feel in it the tense New York hostility. They were not cursing something they longed for and feared, they were joking about something they longed for and loved.

Now, as she labored up the outside steps of the building, one of the Puerto Rican boys she had seen everywhere in the neighborhood opened the door for her with a small, half-smile. She smiled at him and thanked him as forthrightly as she could, and stepped into the elevator.

There was something in Richard’s face as he closed the door behind her, and in the loud silence of the apartment. She looked at him and started to ask about the children— but then she heard them in the living room. Richard followed her into the kitchen and she put down her packages. She looked into his face.

“What is it?” she asked. Then, after the instant in which she checked off all the things it wasn’t, “Rufus,” she said, suddenly, “you’ve got news about Rufus.”

“Yes.” She watched the way a small vein in his forehead fluttered. “He’s dead, Cass. They found his body floating in the river.”

She sat down at the kitchen table.

“When?”

“Sometime this morning.”

“How long— how long ago—?”

“A few days. They figured he must have jumped off the George Washington Bridge.”

“My God,” she said. Then: “Who—?”

“Vivaldo. He called. Just after you went out. Ida had called him.”

“My God,” she said, again, “it’s going to kill that poor girl.”

He paused. “Vivaldo sounded as though he’d just been kicked in the belly by a horse.”

“Where is he?”

“I tried to make him come here. But he was going uptown to the girl— Ida— I don’t know what good he can do.”

“Well. He was much closer to Rufus than we were.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“Yes,” she said, “I think I’d like a drink.” She sat staring at the table. “I wonder if there was anything— we— anyone could have done.”

“No,” he said, pouring a little whiskey in a glass and setting it before her, “there was nothing anyone could have done. It was too late. He wanted to die.”

She was silent, sipping the whiskey. She watched the way the sunlight fell on the table.

Richard put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t take it too hard, Cass. After all—”

She remembered his face as it had been the last time she talked to him, the look in his eyes, and his smile when he asked
Can I come to see you soon?
How she wished, now, that she had stayed and talked to him a little longer. Perhaps— she sipped the whiskey, marveling that the children were so quiet. Tears filled her eyes and dropped slowly down her face, onto the table.

“It’s a dirty, rotten shame,” she said. “It’s a terrible, terrible, terrible thing.”

“He was heading that way,” said Richard, mildly, “nothing, no one, could have stopped him.”

“How do we know that?” Cass asked.

“Oh, honey, you know what he’s been like these last few months. We hardly ever saw him but everybody knew.”

Knew what? she wanted to ask. Just what in hell did everybody know? But she dried her eyes and stood up.

“Vivaldo tried like hell to stop what he was doing to Leona. And if he could have stopped him from doing
that
— well, then, maybe he could have stopped this, too.”

That’s true, she thought, and looked at Richard, who, under stress, could always surprise her into taking his measure again.

“I was very fond of him,” she said, helplessly. “There was something very sweet in him.”

He looked at her with a faint smile. “Well, I guess you’re just naturally nicer than I am. I didn’t think that. I thought he was a pretty self-centered character, if you want the truth.”

“Oh, well,” she said, “self-centered—! We don’t know a soul who isn’t.”

“You’re not,” he said. “You think of other people and you try to treat them right. You spend your life trying to take care of the children— and me—”

“Oh, but you
are
my life— you and the children. What would I do, what would I be, without you? I’m just as self-centered as anybody else. Can’t you see that?”

He grinned and rubbed his hand roughly over her head. “No. And I’m not going to argue about it any more.” But, after a moment, he persisted. “I didn’t love Rufus, not the way you did, the way all of you did. I couldn’t help feeling, anyway, that one of the reasons all of you made such a kind of—
fuss
— over him was partly just because he was colored. Which is a hell of a reason to love anybody. I just had to look on him as another guy. And I couldn’t forgive him for what he did to Leona. You once said you couldn’t, either.”

“I’ve had to think about it since then. I’ve thought about it since then.”

“And what have you thought? You find a way to justify it?”

“No. I wasn’t trying to justify it. It can’t be justified. But now I think— oh, I just don’t know enough to be able to judge him. He must— he must have been in great pain. He must have loved her.” She turned to him, searching his face. “I’m sure he loved her.”

“Some love,” he said.

“Richard,” she said, “you and I have hurt each other— many times. Sometimes we didn’t mean to and sometimes we did. And wasn’t it because— just
because
— we loved— love each other?”

He looked at her oddly, head to one side. “Cass,” he said, “how can you compare it? We’ve never tried to destroy each other— have we?”

They watched each other. She said nothing.

“I’ve never tried to destroy you. Have you ever tried to destroy me?”

She thought of his face as it had been when they met; and watched it now. She thought of all they had discovered together and meant to each other, and of how many small lies had gone into the making of their one, particular truth: this love, which bound them to one another. She had said No, many times, to many things, when she knew she might have said Yes, because of Richard; believed many things, because of Richard, which she was not sure she really believed. He had been absolutely necessary to her— or so she had believed; it came to the same thing— and so she had attached herself to him and her life had taken shape around him. She did not regret this for herself. I want him, something in her had said, years ago. And she had bound him to her; he had been her salvation; and here he was. She did not regret it for herself and yet she began to wonder if there were not something in it to be regretted, something she had done to Richard which Richard did not see.

“No,” she said, faintly. And then, irrepressibly, “But I wouldn’t have had to try.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean”— he was watching her; she sat down again, playing with the glass of whiskey— “a man meets a woman. And he needs her. But she uses this need against him, she uses it to undermine him. And it’s easy. Women don’t see men the way men want to be seen. They see all the tender places, all the places where blood could flow.” She finished the whiskey. “Do you see what I mean?”

“No,” he said, frankly, “I don’t. I don’t believe all this female intuition shit. It’s something women have dreamed up.”

“You can
say
that— and in such a tone!” She mimicked him: “Something women have dreamed up. But
I
can’t say that— what men have ‘dreamed up’ is all there is, the world they’ve dreamed up is the world.” He laughed. She subsided. “Well. It’s true.”

“What a funny girl you are,” he said. “You’ve got a bad case of penis envy.”

“So do most men,” she said, sharply, and he laughed. “All I meant, anyway,” she said, soberly, “is that I had to try to fit myself around you and not try to make you fit around me. That’s all. And it hasn’t been easy.”

“No.”

“No. Because I love you.”

“Ah!” he said, and laughed aloud, “you
are
a funny girl. I love you, too, you know that.”

“I hope you do,” she said.

“You know me so well and you don’t know that? What happened to all that intuition, all that—
specialized
— point of view?”

“Beyond a certain point,” she said, with a sullen smile, “it doesn’t seem to work so well.”

He pulled her up from the table and put both arms around her, bending his cheek to her hair. “What point is that, my darling?”

Everything, his breath in her hair, his arms, his chest, his odor— was familiar, confining, unutterably dear. She turned her head slightly to look out of the kitchen window. “Love,” she said, and watched the cold sunlight. She thought of the cold river and of the dead black boy, their friend. She closed her eyes. “Love,” she said, again, “love.”

Richard stayed with the children Saturday, while Cass and Vivaldo went uptown to Rufus’ funeral. She did not want to go but she could not refuse Vivaldo, who knew that he had to be there but dreaded being there alone.

It was a morning funeral, and Rufus was to be driven to the graveyard immediately afterward. Early on that cold, dry Saturday, Vivaldo arrived, emphatically in black and white: white shirt, black tie, black suit, black shoes, black coat; and black hair, eyes, and eyebrows, and a dead-white, bone-dry face. She was struck by his panic and sorrow; without a word, she put on her dark coat and put her hand in his; and they rode down in the elevator in silence. She watched him in the elevator mirror. Sorrow became him. He was reduced to his beauty and elegance— as bones, after a long illness, come forward through the flesh.