Such Sweet Thunder (64 page)

“A-men!” shouted a sister, and he involuntarily frowned, enraged by the earthen gruffness of her voice.

“He’s the Lil-laaaaay!” the reverend was shrieking in his old-time religion voice: “of the va-laaaaaay!”

“A-MEN!”

“— he’s the bright and mor-ning star!” The congregation began to sing. And he listened disdainfully to the laboring voices, which sounded amateurish and pathetic against the polished phrases of the North High Choir, as the noble strains of: Jaaaaaaaa-su, pri-i-ce-less trea-ea-sure! wafted in his memory. That’s Bach! A secret uncontrollable pleasure caused him to glance discreetly from left to right, and then at the trees through the crack in the transom, and at the sky. He felt
his
body growing in stature, while the church and the reverend grew smaller, until, finally, he sat a giant among a throng of dwarfs. Realleh!

With a great feeling of relief he stepped out into the frosty afternoon decked with autumn-tinged clouds and finally into the dinner-scented atmosphere that was home.

One meal … one Sunday dinner, after which Rutherford dozed among the pages of the
Star
and the
Voice
and Viola busied herself around the house and Amerigo made his way through the town to the art gallery.

As he passed through its columns he noted with pride that they were Corinthian columns because they looked like baskets of fruit, different from Doric and Ionian. The marble had been imported from Italy, the home of Michelangelo, the Renaissance, and Mrs. Crippa. He entered the hall with a feeling of easy familiarity, glancing only casually at the medieval implements of war, the tapestries, and even the mural upon which Socrates spoke to his companions under the eternally fair skies of ancient Greece.

He followed the stream of quiet, discreet, well- but simply dressed people into the auditorium and listened to the sons and daughters of the society folks of the city stumble through Mozart, Bach, and the pas de deux. Ahem!

Then he boarded the streetcar and stayed on until all the pleasant prosperous colors and forms ran out of sight, and the streetcar gradually took on a dusky hue that was animated by sonorous gusty voices that caused him to think of the alley and streets like the alley that he could only escape via the redeeming light of Sunday afternoon.

He got off at Nineteenth Street. It was cluttered with dirt and poverty. He listened to its noisy jocular fatalism. He glanced in the windows of the beer halls with disdain, and tried to reconcile Bach and Mozart, English Literature and the broadly articulated
a
to the impulse that forced him up towards the Gem Theater.

You a mean an’ evil woman — an’ you don’ mean no one man no good!
screamed an earthy voice through a loudspeaker, and his heart involuntarily beat faster, while his eyes ravished, against his will, the shapely bowlegs and broad swaying hips of a cocoa-brown young woman who walked proudly beside a tall willow-limbed young man dressed in a zoot suit — fifteen bottoms, thirty-two in the knee, triple a’s shining like the reverend’s, snow-white big-apple hat spreading like a gable … Clark … over a big fine house.

But I don’t blame you, baaa — bay — I’d be the same way — if I could!

A sadness — a mixture of envy, loneliness and proud defiance — welled up inside him. It caused him to walk straight, too straight, as he passed the cluster of boys and girls whom he recognized from North High. They were from the south side. They talked and laughed familiarly, arm in arm, waist in arm. I don’t care! he thought as their voices faded out of hearing. He walked straighter, straining not to allow the haunting music to filter through the channels of his ears, his bones! Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones … Malleus, Inkus, Stapes! And still the impatient rhythms pounded in his blood and in the hard tight secret bound by a thousand snares within the wrinkled folds of Rutherford’s shorts.

After the show he walked up Eighteenth Street past
her
house. As he drew near he shot a guarded glance from the opposite side of the street. A tall, lean white-looking man sat in the doorway of the funeral parlor and a short slightly rotund white-looking woman sat opposite him. Mrs. Thornton. And
she
sat between them, though he did not really see her because he dared not look at her, as he blindly nodded a greeting and tipped his hat, noticing that she was hemmed in the vortex of the triangle formed by her parents’ knees. Nor could he tell if they had returned his greeting, because he was afraid to look back, but he felt that they hadn’t returned it, he couldn’t remember having imagined that they had, nor could his breath quicken to the conjured up afterimage of a possible smile.

He half walked, half marched up the street and turned the corner south to Nineteenth Street until he came to the boulevard and down
the boulevard to Eighteenth Street again where he stood and stared at the frightening procession of apparently happy people who were making the best of the early hours of the evening. He spoke to a few North High students as he made his second round up Eighteenth Street and entered the ice cream parlor almost a block west of where he had encountered the Thornton family. He drank a milk shake without tasting it.

Somebody clicked a nickel in the music box and he tried not to hear the insistent tenor sing:
If I-ee diddidn’t care … more than words ca-an say-ee, If I— ee diddidn’t care, would I— ee feel thissss way — ee. If thissss isn’tttt love, then why — ee do I — ee thrillll?

As he stepped into the street the singer was asking:

And what makes my head go ’round and ’round — while my heart stands still?

He worked his way through the jostling crowd that gathered around the entrance to Lincoln Hall and climbed the stair and paid for his ticket at the door and strode with great dignity into the funky bluesy atmosphere simmering with the heat of the sensuously swaying bodies. He cautiously scanned the faces he encountered with a barely perceptible smile, which projected — offered up for sacrifice — a timid question that quivered upon his lips. He moved toward the orchestra at the far end of the hall, past the crowded chairs that lined the wall. He unobtrusively approached a girl who sat alone. Her eyes, the set prim line of her lip, said, No. He pretended not to have noticed her and greeted with exaggerated cordiality her companion, Stacy, who had just returned with a bottle of Coca-Cola. He swaggered on, flinging a greeting here, one there, eyeing the dancers with an air of critical approval or disapproval, interested now only in the more anthropological aspects of the dance, until he reached the bandstand and became so absorbed in the music that he didn’t care to look for a partner when the music stopped playing. He greeted Alphonso, the drummer.

“Hi, Al!”

“Hi, man!”

Boom boom boom boom
. An invisible foot tapped out the beat and the music started. He inched his way toward a girl who stood near the window in the opposite wall. He cleared his throat and studied the phrase: I beg your pardon, but may I have this dance? No, he decided, that’s not … Eh … would you give me the pleasure of. He drew closer. The trumpet player stood up to take the solo. He was on top of the girl now.

“I beg your pardon!” he blurted out.

“What?” looking at him with an expression of disdain.

“Eh.”

“Come here, bitch!” A young man in draped pants appeared from nowhere and whisked her away. She grinned and fell into his arms and into the pulsing rhythm of the song. He stood gaping at them, and at the same time an excruciating pain smote him in the bowels. He trembled with humiliation and rage as he watched them glide smoothly over the floor, hips coordinating like the gears of a powerful machine, with grace, improvising, now that the trumpet solo was over, to the double beat of the bass.

I would have treated her like a lady, he thought, and then he sadly found himself wondering why the sky was blue and why birds sang. Why was blood red? And then all the faces in the hall blended into one face, the movement became one movement, and he was swept involuntarily into the dance.

He bought a Coca-Cola he didn’t want and took a seat and became a spectator. Suddenly Roscoe and Earline appeared smiling and, without knowing why he did it, he turned his back on them with a confused mocking gesture, and quickly turned around again, but they were gone. “Wait!” his voice trailing sadly into the thought: I was just … just playing. But they were gone, swallowed up in the crowd. He fretted impatiently in his chair, crossed his legs and studied the hall, the ugly naked lights over the bar, the dark musty recesses of the cloakroom into which couples now and then disappeared and reappeared rearranging their clothes. He studied all the shoes with their pointed toes and Cuban heels, all the sharp creases and high-waisted pants, pimp chains swinging, all the glistening sheens of pomaded hair and sweating foreheads bent with religious concentration upon the dance.

The orchestra was playing the last piece. He looked around with desperation. “Would you like to dance?” he asked a skinny-looking girl who sat two seats from him. She nodded. He took her by the hand and trembled onto the dance floor. He took a breath and shifted to his right hip, and then to his left, the way Viola and Rutherford had said.

“Git the beat,” he heard Rutherford saying, “an’ then shuffle to the right an’ to the left, or slightly forward, or back, an’ then turn — s-m-o-o-t-h! — without bendin’ your knees too much.”

He tried it, but he was trembling so violently that he stumbled. He started again — and stumbled again. The girl sighed impatiently. He
was afraid to look at her, but he grinned self-consciously and tried again. Gradually he lost consciousness of himself and of the girl. He was moving within the warm swirl of the music. The girl settled her belly within the smooth rhythmic space of two swift backward strides, and his shorts, damp with sweat, tightened about his groin, and in the pause, just before the turn, he pushed her away, smitten with shame, and fled through the crowd and down into the street, his ears full of the mocking laughter that did not stop until he finally fell into the deep velvet reaches of the black room.

“Keep yo’ han’ — on-a the plow — h-o-l-d on!” the choir sang to the congregation of the Methodist church on Nineteenth Street. Mr. Rogan stood before them in his Sunday suit — too big! — his eyes closed, arms outstretched, holding on:

“Hold oooooonnn! Hold ooooonnnnn!”

He searched the faces of the congregation. Mr. and Mrs. Thornton sat in front, with Cosima between them. She plays for the choir. Methodis … 
t!
He stole a glance at her, perusing her face, the simple appropriate dress she wore. Suddenly he became aware of Mr. Rogan’s cutting glance and heard him screaming, though no audible sound escaped his angry lips — Look at
me
, damnit! — as Rutherford’s strap fell across his naked legs.

“Kee — ee — eep yo’ han’s oooon the plow — hooooold on!” followed by approving a-mens throughout the church, and when the service was over he lagged behind in order to catch a glimpse of
her
, but missed her in the confusion, and stalked down toward Nineteenth Street alone.

“Hi, Amerigo!” A soft brown girl with neatly arranged coarse black hair and a pretty face was smiling at him.

“Hi, Mary Ann.” He was somewhat cheered because
she
was Cosima’s best friend! He searched for something to say to her as they made their way to the corner. Then suddenly he thought: Maybe
she
might see us! He glanced up at her house on the corner and wondered which window she might be looking through, the bedroom? the kitchen? He grinned nervously at Mary Ann and tried to imagine Cosima eating.

He uttered a hasty good-bye to Mary Ann and rushed down the street, hurrying he knew not where or why. Gradually a depressed
feeling took hold of him and he became absorbed by the thought of the grueling machinations of still another Sunday night in the year that was swiftly approaching next year.

“Now is the month of May-ing, when Merry lady are playing —”

“NO!” Mr. Rogan shouted. “This is Palestrina, not W. C. Handy! Stop jiving the damned rhythm. It goes like this: Tum
tum
tum
tum
tum
tum
tum, tum
tum
.… tadum tum tum tum. Tada
dum
tum
tum
tum-taa! — Tada
dum
tum
tum tada!
It’s spring! Nature’s pregnant —”

“Hot dog!” Jeff exclaimed.

“Cecil, shut up!” said Mr. Rogan. “Listen! It’s spring. The flowers are blooming, and — and new leaves are budding on the trees. Look! Look out that window!”

Beyond the window spring was ablaze with timid colors fidgeting in the sun. Silver clouds were trying to impose a capricious gloom upon the afternoon, but neither the flowers nor the new leaves, nor the birds nor the slender grasses shooting up from the lawn were taking them seriously.…

“You’re in a wood,” Mr. Rogan was saying. “In a beautiful forest! Perhaps just walking because you’re young, or — or on a picnic. You hear the sound of laughter behind that bush over there! A girl — a beautiful girl — and a boy —”

He likes boys, he thought, his imagination overwhelmed by a sense of mystery.

“More laughter!” he was saying, “playful and gay — in another direction, maybe, burning with the same fever that radiates from the sun. You run here! there! hesitate, trembling, listening, like a bird, like a squirrel, tail high, listening, like a deer, like a faun! You chase the sound, but it’s no longer there. It’s over there! Just beneath that knoll! You run and run, and your whole being sings with a joy that-that would
kill
you if it continued any longer. Listen! Now-is-the-month-of-May-ing! When mer-ry lady
are
play-ing. Tra la-la la la la
laaaa!
Trala la la laaa lala! Now
sing!
”

“Now-is-the-month-of-May-ing —”

“That’s it!” he cried with a passionate smile, his fingers flitting through the air, the voices gladdening to the heat, to the burning, to the painful emergence of that wet shining thing that was spring.

Rrrrrrrring!

They dashed out into the hall, he leaping faunlike up the four steps leading to the upper hall. Just as he turned the corner Lydia screamed. He looked back and saw her standing on the stair, holding her belly with her arms, her face ashy, trembling violently while the blood trickled down her legs and lay in a lump at her feet. A crowd gathered around her and gazed at the lump of blood.