Three Days Before the Shooting ... (29 page)

I wanted to roar, to scream, but held it inside. I turned back. I bent forward, head upon knees. I held my breath. I shut my eyes and bit my lips. But as it continued, I saw that I couldn’t contain it and got up and hurried past the elevator to the other end of the corridor and turned the corner. And there, under a dim light and facing a wall, I stuffed a handkerchief into my mouth and let go.

It was a painful laughter, tearing at the lining of my empty stomach, a laughter springing from my sudden awareness that each second I had waited for the outcome of the Senator’s wounding and had searched my mind for the motives behind it, I was being forced steadily back upon
myself
. It was as though Sunraider, McGowan, Minifees, McMillen, the fellows at the club, Vannec, and countless forgotten or unknown others had combined to force me into retracing my movements, not only over the last several hours, but over a period which I’d long ago forced from my mind.

Even Laura had come back to haunt me. How had I ever managed to forget her? How had I exorcised that painful period so completely from my mind after having been so intensely involved? Loving her, I’d lost myself in
Harlem for a highly intense time, had surrendered to its fascination as to some great foreign city. And willingly, as one gives one’s heart and mind to Paris. I had spent every free moment of my time there. I had wandered for hours among its street scenes, I had haunted its bars and nightclubs, spent hours in its dance halls and burlesque houses. And Laura had taught me to see the life there as not exotic but as extensions of her own life (a life quite different from that of which McGowan ranted) in the South. And through my fascination with language—languages are best learned in bed, it is said—I had come to see its speech idioms and its slang as extensions of Southern speech modified and amplified by the exciting contrasts of the Harlem melting pot. Ever concerned with children, Laura had even taught me to understand the games played and danced by kids in the streets as versions of games and jingles which she had played and sung in Georgia. I’d been so spellbound, so enthralled, so captured by the black magic of the area that for a time I had come to see the crime and squalor which I found there as part of the poetry of the place; and the street characters, the eccentrics, the pimps, the drunks, the criminals (I had known no preachers, not even one like Hickman, and only a few teachers, a labor organizer, and two physicians)—all as part of a vital and somehow hopeful scene. Then I had approached the people then through my love for Laura, had seen them, in effect, through her own eyes. And then when it had reached its end in the basement nightclub, and I went there no longer, I had resolved my pain and my inability to deal with the problem of marriage and her mother’s rejection by substituting instead the theories and definitions of sociologists and politicians. I had, in effect, accepted their formulas as a means of ordering that sense of chaos which had been released in me by my loss of love.

But what else could I have done after the shock and disappointment I sustained? I was not given to lost causes, I had to establish myself in life, and with Harlem no longer a place of adventure, Laura out of sight was Laura out of mind—until at this great distance in time and place, the depths, as old Hickman had put it, had been stirred.

Now everything had been stewed together, the mighty, the lowly, the past and the present, the seen and the unseen. And I was in trouble because, in putting Laura behind me, I had developed a different quality of attention, a different sense of direction. Events had come to possess a more limited extension of significance, and I no longer thought of the world in which she moved—wherever she now moved—as relevant. I lived in a quite different sphere, bound by different values, and events drew their meaning from within a different frame of reference. All else was beyond the pale, lost in the abyss of the past or in the mist of the future. All tock and tick with nothing in between. And there was nothing I could do about it.

Actually, I could hardly remember the sensation of love, the thrill of being with Laura, or the sense of release and power-over-life which she had afforded me. I did realize that the sense of daring which I had felt had come not so much from the unabashed gratification of forbidden emotions, but from the fact that the atmosphere in which we moved had then seemed to condone and encourage broad freedom of expression. For there life had seemed generally more openly expressive. Thoughts were uttered, actions were taken—even violent actions, erotic actions—with a facility and openness that was unknown to my own background. But now, even as these thoughts came painfully to me in an agony of laughter, I realized that I had seen and experienced only a part of the truth, for I knew now that Aubrey McMillen was here in the hospital, and Jessie Rockmore had died his strange death for his own strange motives, and Miss Duval had been present to create a situation which would have made McGowan’s wildest fantasies seem tame by comparison. I’d touched another world.

Suddenly two images flashed through my mind. I could see a fat black woman with a face rouged almost lavender standing on a spotlighted stage, dressed in a white satin suit of tails which gave her a full, pear-shaped, Henry-the-Eighth aspect, as she sang a song of double entendre with a refrain of “Sweet Violets” as a diamond flashed from a tooth in her wide, darkly painted mouth; and that of myself chasing myself desperately around the rim of a depthless crater. It was quite vivid,
but what
, I wondered,
does it all mean?…
I felt faint. I threw it off.

Across the corridor I noticed a window and went over to stand looking out. It was dark. The streetlights silhouetted the tender new leaves of a tree. Down the walk from the hospital a tulip tree showed pink in the light of a street lamp. A white ambulance with lighted interior and roof beacon lazily revolving flashed a rhythmic message of red and white as it cruised silently along the curving drive, moved out into the avenue. There was little traffic and no pedestrians but the world out there in the dark seemed enormously normal and I, the lone disorganized and agitated witness to the scene. I didn’t trust it—I didn’t trust my vision. How could I after such a day? I went back and sat down, expecting anything to erupt and trying to prepare myself. For whatever it would cost me there was a story here, and I meant to get it, come hell, come high water, come fire, come smoke, come laughing gas. And now I had no doubt but that anything and everything could come. And not only once but, I suspected, several times and in several forms and in widely scattered places.

Like the car-burning, which appeared first as a farce only to turn up now as a foreshadowing of something close to tragedy.

All great, world-historical facts and personages occur twice …
, I suddenly recalled from the thirties,
the first as tragedy, the second as farce
, but here this
analysis of history offered no security. For who involved, other than the Senator, could be called “historical”? Could LeeWillie Minifees? Could Laura? Could Hickman? Could Aubrey McMillen? I doubted it. Nevertheless, they each kept popping up in wild reversals. And under the most devious circumstances.

But who, you ask, was McMillen?

CHAPTER 12

I
T WAS LIKE THIS
: Last night, during the drinking and joking at the club, I had completely forgotten that earlier in the day I had agreed to cover for a young colleague who had decided, rather impulsively, I thought, to slip away to Boston to marry a Radcliffe girl. The night editor had left me alone during the evening (he knew where to locate me), but then around four
A.M
. I found myself rushing in a still-drunken and dream-thronged state with notebook and tape recorder to the scene of a killing which had been reported in the vicinity of the Capitol. It was the location which disturbed Scoggins, the night editor, and caused him to awaken me.

The cabbie let me out in front of an old three-storied Georgian house, and I hurried up the steps to find two beefy policemen being directed in a thunderous attack against a door set to the right of a dimly lit vestibule by a sergeant of detectives. He acknowledged my press card with a nod, but when I tried to get a line on what had happened his hands flew to his ears and he gestured toward the two officers who threw themselves forward—
hungh!
— and bounced off the door as though they were made of rubber.

“Hit ‘em again!” a deep voice growled behind me, and I became aware of other faces emerging from the darkness.

Back in the shadow of the vestibule a half dozen or so black folk in night dress stood on the steps of the stairs leading up to the second floor, quietly looking on. Two of the women held their hands over their mouths and eyes, as though suppressing tears or the sound of weeping. I thought,
Grieving servants
. Then a man’s hostile gaze caused me to turn away, thinking,
But you can trust me to tell the truth
. Then came a crash, the door flew open, and I hurried behind the policemen into a blaze of light and brilliant color.

We didn’t get far. A few steps inside, a wave of alcohol fumes swept to meet us, and I discovered that I had entered a ragtag museum that had been thrown together according to no easily discernable plan. In the first blinding
glare of light, vague objects and artifacts appeared to have been wrenched from their place, time, and function and thrown together in such volatile and insane juxtaposition that I feared that one false move, one stumble or jog or careless pitch of voice might trigger a debacle. Dust and signs of disuse and decay were everywhere. Crystal flashed from obscure corners, a policeman sneezed from the dust. And yet, it was not the disorder of a junkyard nor attic nor cellar; I sensed a design underneath it all. But whose and to what end,
that was
the perplexing question. It was the last place I would have imagined.

I was familiar with the fashionable notion that the American home has been steadily becoming a combination art gallery and technological museum, but here the process had gotten quite, and most deviously, out of hand. Tables and chairs, divans and chaise longues, cabinets and chests, scale models and sculptures—all of miscellaneous styles and periods, and many in various stages of disrepair—confronted me on every hand, and some of the furniture was loaded with books, musical instruments, objets d’art.

“What the hell kind of joint
is
this?” someone said.

“I was about to ask myself,” I said.

“Yeah, and where the hell is it? Who put it together, that’s what I’d like to know.”

“Hell, men, this is our own, our native land. And I’ll bet you two for one that we’ll find some booze. Isn’t that right, McIntyre?”

I shook my head. “I’m as puzzled as the next man. Besides, I can hardly see.”

“Better put on your shades, McIntyre,” the first man said.

“No luck, I left them at home.”

“Then squint, my friend, and you’ll find your way.”

My trouble was caused by a collection of converted oil lamps and vases, some of which blazed away innocent of shades. Across the room two panels of the long wall were loaded from wainscoting to picture molding with sconces and bracket lamps which threw such a glare that the intention appeared to be deliberate concealment rather than revelation. And while the others moved about, I closed my eyes and puzzled over what made the place so personally disturbing.

Perhaps
, I thought,
it’s simply the fact of finding such a place so close to the Capitol, so near the center of our national source of order. There are slums nearby, of course, but slums are different. They emerged from history and are unhappy marks on the road of progress. What’s more, we were doing something about the slums. But this place—my God, the fact that it exists means that something has been going on that has completely escaped me and everyone else…
.

Suddenly, to my left, a violent rocking began, and my eyes sprang open to see one of the policemen reaching out to catch at a pile of heavy books that were falling from a small colonial table. He missed several, which thudded to the floor, causing the sergeant to swear beneath his breath.

“Now clean it up,” he said. “And from now on watch your step!”

Bending, I helped the officer pick up the books, partially to be helpful, partially out of curiosity. But when I tried to read their titles, there was such a clashing of reds, yellows, and blues lingering in my eyes that I couldn’t read. And the whiskey fumes were heavier now, seeming to roll from beneath the door to the other room, and as I stood and looked around, it came to me that anything could happen in such a place. For it seemed that in an atmosphere so heavily saturated with alcohol the very clutter and the clashing of objects of such divergent styles and intention would lead inevitably to some form of violence, to some excess of emotion or assertion of will, and thus to grave physical conflict and, as the presence of the police indicated, to murder.
The miracle
, I thought,
is that it hasn’t happened before
.

The officers were making their way carefully to the door now, and I felt an urgent need to have the victim’s body found so that I could get my story and leave. It was as though a human agent, who could be definitely identified with all the apparently calculated chaos, was called for to remove what I felt as a mounting threat to us all. Nor did it matter that that agent was dead; what was important was the establishment, once and for all, of the fact that the chaos was his and not ours. Especially not
mine
. And in fact, it might be that his being dead would guarantee that whatever the nature of the force that seemed so threatening, it had been appeased and would strike no more. It was my duty to stay but I felt an urgent need to leave. Because, hell, it was
their
chaos, the Negroes and the police, not mine….

“Say,” one of the officers said, inhaling noisily, “there must be a still hidden around here somewhere. There’s enough booze in the air to get a man tight.”