Fare thee well, fare thee well!
Then Reverend Foster prayed a brief prayer for the safe journey of the soul that had left them and the safe journey, throughout their lives and after death, of all the souls under the sound of his voice. It was over.
The pallbearers, two of the men in the front row, and the two musicians, lifted the mother-of-pearl casket to their shoulders and started down the aisle. The mourners followed.
Cass was standing near the door. The four still faces passed her with their burden and did not look at her. Directly behind them came Ida and her mother. Ida paused for a moment and looked at her — looked directly, unreadably at her from beneath her heavy veil. Then she seemed to smile. Then she passed. And the others passed. Vivaldo joined her and they walked out of the chapel.
For the first time she saw the hearse, which stood on the Avenue, facing downtown.
“Vivaldo,” she asked, “are we going to the cemetery?”
“No,” he said, “they don’t have enough cars. I think only the family’s going.”
He was watching the car behind the hearse. Ida’s parents had already entered the car. She stood on the sidewalk. She looked around her, then walked swiftly over to them. She took each of them by one hand.
“I just wanted to thank you,” she said, quickly, “for coming.” Her voice was rough from weeping and Cass could not see her face behind the veil. “You don’t know what it means to me — to us.”
Cass pressed Ida’s hand, not knowing what to say. Vivaldo said, “Ida, anything we can do — anything I can do—anything—!”
“You’ve done wonders. You been wonderful. I’ll never forget it.”
She pressed their hands again and turned away. She got into the car and the door closed behind her. The hearse slowly moved out from the curb, and the car, then a second car, followed. Others who had been at the funeral service looked briefly at Cass and Vivaldo, stood together a few moments, and then began to disperse. Cass and Vivaldo started down the Avenue.
“Shall we take a subway?” Vivaldo asked.
“I don’t,” she said, “think I could face that now.”
They continued to walk, nevertheless, aimlessly, in silence. Cass walked with her hands deep in her pockets, staring down at the cracks in the sidewalk.
“I hate funerals,” she said, finally, “they never seem to have anything to do with the person who died.”
“No,” he said, “funerals are for the living.”
They passed a stoop where a handful of adolescents stood, who looked at them curiously.
“Yes,” she said. And they kept walking, neither seeming to have the energy it would have demanded to stop and hail a cab. They could not talk about the funeral now; there was too much to say; perhaps each had too much to hide. They walked down the wide, crowded Avenue, surrounded, it seemed, by an atmosphere which prevented others from jostling them or looking at them too directly or for too long a time. They reached the mouth of the subway at 125th Street. People climbed up from the darkness and a group of people stood on the corner, waiting for the bus.
“Let’s get that cab,” she said.
Vivaldo hailed a cab and they got in — as, she could not help feeling they had been expected to do — and they began to roll away from the dark, the violent scene, over which, now, a pale sun fell.
“I wonder,” he said. “I wonder.”
“Yes? What do you wonder?”
Her tone was sharper than she had intended, she could not have said why.
“What she means when she says she’ll never forget it.”
Something was going on in her mind, something she could not name or stop; but it was almost as though she were her mind’s prisoner, as though the jaws of her mind had closed on her.
“Well, at least that proves that you’re intelligent,” she said. “Much good may it do you.” She watched the cab roll down the Avenue which would eventually turn into the Avenue she knew.
“I’d like to prove to her — one day,” he said; and paused. He looked out of the window. “I’d like to make her know that the world’s not as black as she thinks it is.”
“Or,” she said, dryly, after a moment, “as white.”
“Or as white,” he said, mildly. She sensed that he was refusing to react to her tone. Then he said, “You don’t like her — Ida.”
“I like her well enough. I don’t know her.”
“I guess that proves my point,” he said. “You don’t know her and you don’t want to know her.”
“It doesn’t matter whether I like Ida or not,” she said. “The point is, you like her. Well, that’s fine. I don’t know why you want me to object. I don’t object. But what difference would it make if I did?”
“None,” he said, promptly. Then, “Well, some. I’d worry about my judgment.”
“Judgment,” she said. “has nothing to do with love.”
He looked at her sharply, but with gratitude, too. “For it’s love we’re talking about—?”
“For what you seem to be trying to prove,” she said, “It had better be.” She was silent. Then she said, “Of course, she may also have something to prove.”
“I think she has something to forget,” he said. “I think I can help her forget it.”
She said nothing. She watched the cold trees and the cold park. She wondered how Richard’s work had gone that morning; she wondered about the children. It seemed, suddenly, that she had been away a long time, had failed very great obligations. And all she wanted in the world right now was to get home safely and find everything as she had left it — as she had left it so long ago, this morning.
“You’re so juvenile,” she heard herself saying. She was using her most matronly tone. “You know so little”—she smiled—“about life. About women.”
He smiled, too, a pale, weary smile. “All right. But I want something real to happen to me. I do. How do you find out about”—he grinned, mocking her—“life? About women? Do you know a lot about men?”
The great numbers above faraway Columbus Circle glowed in the gray sky and said that it was twelve twenty-seven. She would get home just in time to make lunch.
Then the depression she had been battling came down again, as though the sky had descended and turned into fog.
“Once I thought I did,” she said. “Once I thought I knew. Once I was even younger than you are now.”
Again he stared at her but this time said nothing. For a moment, as the road swerved, the skyline of New York rose before them like a jagged wall. Then it was gone. She lit a cigarette and wondered why, in that moment, she had so hated the proud towers, the grasping antennae. She had never hated the city before. Why did everything seem so pale and so profitless: and why did she feel so cold, as though nothing and no one could ever warm her again?
Low in his throat Vivaldo hummed the blues they had heard at the funeral. He was thinking of Ida, dreaming of Ida, rushing ahead to what awaited him with Ida. For a moment she hated his youth, his expectations, possibilities, she hated his masculinity. She envied Ida. She listened to Vivaldo hum the blues.
3
On a Saturday in early March, Vivaldo stood at his window and watched the morning rise. The wind blew through the empty streets with a kind of dispirited moan; had been blowing all night long, while Vivaldo sat at his worktable, struggling with a chapter which was not going well. He was terribly weary — he had worked in the bookstore all day and then come downtown to do a moving job — but this was not the reason for his paralysis. He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him. They were all named, more or less, all more or less destined, the pattern he wished them to describe was clear to him. But it did not seem clear to them. He could move them about but they themselves did not move. He put words in their mouths which they uttered sullenly, unconvinced. With the same agony, or greater, with which he attempted to seduce a woman, he was trying to seduce his people: he begged them to surrender up to him their privacy. And they refused — without, for all their ugly intransigence, showing the faintest desire to leave him. They were waiting for him to find the key, press the nerve, tell the truth. Then, they seemed to be complaining, they would give him all he wished for and much more than he was now willing to imagine. All night long, in an increasing rage and helplessness, he had walked from his worktable to his window and back again. He made himself coffee, he smoked cigarettes, he looked at the clock — and the night wore on, but his chapter didn’t and he kept feeling that he ought to get some sleep because today, for the first time in several weeks, he was seeing Ida. This was her Saturday off, but she was having a cup of coffee with one of her girl friends in the restaurant where she worked. He was to meet her there, and then they were to visit Richard and Cass.