The Gospelteers opened with “Consideration”:
Tide rolling high billows…
Lord, when you smile on all creations, consider me,
Mad winds may blow; mad breakers roar
They beat on every side
By the time they had reached the refrain of “Walk Over God’s Heaven,” Vivian knew the group had reached that sometimes elusive part of the program when the church belonged to them. Those moments were at the center of her life, those moments when the audience, if given a choice of all the things to do on the earth, would have chosen to go on listening to them forever. If I could pick my time to die…she had once thought. When the group reached the end of the program with “What Could I Do if It Wasn’t for the Lord,” the congregation and Reverend Ritter refused to let them go. And so they sang “Move on up a Little Higher” and “Jesus Met the Woman at the Well,” and then they went into “Amazing Grace” all over again.
When it was all over, they had a bite to eat at the church, mingling with those who could not get enough of hearing and talking about the old man. Diane said she had a most important call to make and went off while the others were eating, and when she returned the group made its good-byes. Outside, they hugged Counsel good night, and the four women set off in Vivian’s car. It had been snowing, and each of the four was full of the satisfying warmth at knowing the evening had gone so well. Five blocks or so from the church, Diane asked if they could stop a minute at the corner of 14th and Fairmont. There, she stepped out into the night and the snow.
“I be right back,” Diane said before closing the door. She did not look before crossing the street and in a few steps she was at the passenger side of a car that was waiting with its motor on. When she opened the door, the light came on, and in that instant, Vivian could see a bit of the driver, a man who took off his hat. It took her breath away to see him do that. And in that instant before the light went out, she saw Diane and the man lean toward each other. The kiss came in the dark, the two figures silhouetted against the dull light in the area behind the car. The kiss lasted but a second, but for Vivian it was a most unkind second.
The three women waited in silence for many minutes, until Maude asked where was Diane and what was taking her so long. Anita told her what she was seeing.
“Could you tell if it’s Harry?” Maude said.
“I don’t think it is,” Anita said. “It sure isn’t Harry’s car.”
At the word car Maude seemed to fall to pieces. “Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord,” she said. “She sure is playin with fire doin that. What’s wrong with her? What in the world is wrong with her?”
Before long, Diane got out of the car, but midway across the empty street, she hesitated and looked back at the man, then she went to him again, and the man rolled down his window. She nodded to him. To Vivian, it was the nod of a woman who had lost her heart, a woman she did not know, had never met in her life. There was an inch or so of snow everywhere, and in the street there were Diane’s footprints, coming and going, two intersecting dotted lines on an otherwise unblemished canvas. Vivian looked away when she saw the small clouds their words made.
“I ain’t your gotdamn chauffeur!” Vivian said when Diane had returned and shut the door. “I don’t get paid for sittin here and waitin for you!”
“Vi, I’m sorry. It took longer than I expected. I’m really sorry.”
Vivian started up the car. “If you think all I got to do with my time is sit here with all your foolishness, you got another thought comin.”
“Vi, I told you I’m sorry. What more do you want? Jesus!”
“Vi,” Maude said, seeking peace, “it’s all right. Take it easy. Let’s just get out of here.”
“Maude, this my car and I’ll say what I want in it.”
Except for occasional mumblings from Vivian that she was not a chauffeur, they drove the distance to Maude’s apartment building without words. Diane was crying quietly. At the building, Vivian double-parked as Maude and Anita, who had decided to stay the night with the old woman, prepared to get out.
“I want you two to make up, y’hear?” Maude said before leaving. “Yall come too far to let somethin come between you.”
But Diane got out of the car. “I’ll call for a ride from your place, Maude, if it’s all right.”
“I thought you wanted a ride home.” Vivian said.
“I’ll call Harry or Cherry to come pick me up,” Diane said.
“Now you both goin in the same direction,” Maude said. “Why don’t you let Vi take you home?” She stood on the sidewalk, her arm through Anita’s.
“Suit yourself,” Vivian said. She reached across the seat to close the door and drove away.
The streets were empty of life, though the snow was still falling lightly. Vivian circled the block and went down M Street until, at Thomas Circle, she realized that that was not the way home. She could still see him…. And when she had turned the car around, it took a while to understand that she was only going in the general direction of home. She turned her windshield wipers up to their fullest speed and made her way through Northwest, Northeast, and then to Southeast, where she pulled into the parking lot of a High’s store a few blocks from the Navy Yard and the river Anacostia. She thought it would take only a moment or two to collect herself.
She could still see him, and it came to her as she watched people go in and out of the High’s that she had not seen a man take off his hat in that old-fashioned way in a long, long time. It was a respectful gesture out of a country time when a little girl would watch dark young men tall as trees stand respectfully close to young women and say things that made the women put their hands to their mouths to stifle a giggle. The young women’s cotton print dresses billowed slightly with the summer breezes, and even the billowing itself seemed to a little girl a part of all the secrets and romance that she could not yet take part in. And the young women always leaned back against the shadiest of trees with such utter self-assurance, holding a glass of lemonade that the men had brought out from the kitchen. And when the young women’s parents thought that there was too much in the giggles, they would tell the women to come up to the porch and bring so-and-so and get some more lemonade.
It was a time of perfect lemonade chilled with hunks of ice cut from larger blocks that were covered with straw and kept in root cellars. It was a time of pound cake baked to such a wondrous golden that it must have been a small sin to even cut into it. But perhaps God forgave, as he went on forgiving a little girl who watched the young men courting the young women, who watched them for so long that the flies set up house on her cake and all the ice in her glass melted and made her drink unpalatable.
Where had all such men gone when she herself came of age? Had the same things been said to the other women that were later said to her as she leaned back against her own tree?
In a cheap metal box in her closet in the house where Ralph Slater waited, she kept the licenses from her three marriages, along with the divorce documents. And from the first common-law marriage, she kept a letter, in childlike block letters and misspelled words, that the man had written to her from two thousand miles away, promising that they would be one forever.