“Did Rufus ever have you up here?” she asked. “To visit his family, I mean.”
“Yes,” said Vivaldo. “A long time ago. I had almost forgotten it. I had forgotten it until Ida reminded me. She was in pigtails then, the cutest little colored girl you ever saw. She was about fifteen. Rufus and I took her to Radio City.”
She smiled at his description of Ida, and at his tone, which was unconsciously erotic. The cab crossed the Avenue and stopped on the far corner of the block they had come through, where the chapel stood. Two women stood on the steps of the chapel, talking together in low tones. As Cass watched and Vivaldo paid the driver, a young man joined them and they went inside.
Suddenly, with a curse, she put her hand on her uncovered head.
“Vivaldo,” she said, “I can’t go in there.”
He stared at her blankly, while the taxi driver paused in the act of handing him his change.
“What’re you talking about?” he asked. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing. Nothing. But a woman’s head has to be covered. I can’t go in there without a hat.”
“Of course you can!” But at the same moment he remembered that he had never in his life seen a bareheaded woman in a church.
“No, no, I can’t. They’re all wearing hats, all of them. It would be an insult if I didn’t, it would be like coming here in slacks.” She paused. “It’s a church, Vivaldo, it’s a funeral, it would be an insult.”
He had already conceded her point and he stared at her helplessly. The cab driver still held the change and watched Vivaldo with a careful lack of expression.
“Well, haven’t you got a scarf, or something?”
“No.” She dug in her handbag, the pockets of her coat, close to tears. “No. Nothing.”
“Listen, buddy,” the driver said.
Vivaldo’s face lightened. “What about your belt? Can’t you tie that around your head? It’s black.”
“Oh, no. That’ll never work. Besides — they’d know it was my belt.”
“Try it.”
To end the argument and prove her point, she took off her belt and tied it around her head. “You see? It’ll never work.”
“What’re you people going to do?” the driver asked. “I ain’t got all day.”
“I’ll have to buy something,” Cass said.
“We’ll be late.”
“Well, you go on in. I’ll just drive to a store somewhere and I’ll come right back.”
“Ain’t no stores around here, lady,” the driver said.
“Of course there are stores somewhere near here,” Cass said, sharply. “You go on in, Vivaldo; I’ll come right back. What’s the address here?”
Vivaldo gave her the address and said, “You’ll have to go to 125th Street, that’s the only place I know where there are any stores.” Then he took his change from the driver and tipped him. “The lady wants to go to 125th street,” he said.
The driver turned in his seat resignedly, and turned on his meter. “You go on in, Vivaldo,” Cass said again. “I’m sorry. I’ll be right back.”
“You have enough money on you?”
“Yes. Go on in.”
He got out of the cab, looking helpless and annoyed, and turned into the chapel as the cab pulled away. The driver left her at the corner of 125th Street and Eighth Avenue and she realized, as she hurried down the wide, crowded street, that she was in a strange, unnameable state, neither rage nor tears but close to both. One small, lone, white woman hurrying along 125th Street on a Saturday morning was apparently a very common sight, for no one looked at her at all. She did not see any stores with ladies hats in the window. But she was hurrying too fast and looking too hard. If she did not pull herself together, she might very well spend the day wandering up and down this street. For a moment she thought to stop one of the women — one of the women whose faces she watched as though they contained something it was necessary for her to learn — to ask directions. Then she realized that she was mysteriously afraid: afraid of these people, these streets, the chapel to which she must return. She forced herself to walk more slowly. She saw a store and entered it.
A Negro girl came toward her, a girl with red, loosely waved hair, who wore a violently green dress and whose skin was a kind of dusty copper.
“Can I help you?”
The girl was smiling, the same smile — as Cass insisted to herself — that all salesgirls, everywhere, have always worn. This smile made Cass feel poor and shabby indeed. But now she felt it more vehemently than she had ever felt it before. And though she was beginning to shake with a thoroughly mysterious anger, she knew that her dry, aristocratic sharpness, however well it had always worked downtown, would fail of its usual effect here.
“I want,” she stammered, “to see a hat.”
Then she remembered that she hated hats and never wore them. The girl, whose smile had clearly been taught her by masters, looked as though she sold at least one hat, every Saturday morning, to a strange, breathless, white woman.
“Will you come with me?” she asked.
“Well — no,” Cass said, suddenly — and the girl turned, impeccably made up eyebrows arched—“I mean, I don’t really want a hat.” Cass tried to smile; she wanted to run. Silence had fallen over the shop. “I think I’d just like to get a scarf. Black”—and how the word seemed to roll through the shop! — “for my head,” she added, and felt that in another moment they would call the police. And she had no way of identifying herself.
“Oh,” said the girl. Cass had managed to wipe away the smile. “Marie!” she called, sharply, “will you take care of this lady?”
She walked away and another, older and plainer girl, who was also, however, very carefully dressed and made-up, came over to Cass, wearing a very different smile: a bawdy, amused smile, full of complicity and contempt. Cass felt herself blushing. The girl pulled out boxes of scarves. They all seemed sleazy and expensive, but she was in no position to complain. She took one, paid for it, tied it around her head, and left. Her knees were shaking. She managed to find a cab at the corner and, after fighting a small duel with herself, gave the driver the address of the chapeclass="underline" she had really wanted to tell him to take her home.
The chapel was small and there were not many people in it. She entered as silently as she could, but heads turned at her entrance. An elderly man, probably an usher, hurried silently toward her, but she sat down in the first seat she saw, in the very last row, near the door. Vivaldo was sitting further up, near the middle; the only other white person, as far as she could tell, in the place. People sat rather scattered from each other — in the same way, perhaps, that the elements of Rufus’ life had been scattered — and this made the chapel seem emptier than it was. There were many young people there, Rufus’ friends, she supposed, the boys and girls who had grown up with him. In the front row sat six figures, the family: no amount of mourning could make Ida’s proud back less proud. Just before the family, just below the altar, stood the bier, dominating the place, mother of pearl, closed.
Someone had been speaking as she came in, who now sat down. He was very young and he was dressed in the black robes of an evangelist. She wondered if he could be an evangelist, he did not seem to be much more than a boy. But he moved with great authority, the authority indeed of someone who has found his place and made his peace with it. As he sat down, a very thin girl walked up the aisle and the boy in black robes moved to the piano at the side of the altar.