“Does that mean you can’t marry me now?”
“No. You have plenty of money.”
“Then let us understand each other.”
“All right.”
“I don’t know whether I can succeed.”
“I know you don’t.”
“It seems the wildest sort of thing to do.”
“Yes.”
“We had better make it fast.”
“All right.”
“I am so afraid.”
Kate’s forefinger begins to explore the adjacent thumb, testing the individual spikes of the feathered flesh. A florid new Mercury pulls up behind us and a Negro gets out and goes up into the church. He is more respectable than respectable; he is more middle-class than one could believe: his Archie Moore mustache, the way he turns and, seeing us see him, casts a weather eye at the sky; the way he plucks a handkerchief out of his rear pocket with a flurry of his coat tail and blows his nose in a magic placative gesture (you see, I have been here before: it is a routine matter).
“If I could be sure you knew how frightened I am, it would help a great deal.”
“You can be sure.”
“Not merely of marriage. This afternoon I wanted some cigarettes, but the thought of going to the drugstore turned me to jelly.”
I am silent.
“I am frightened when I am alone and I am frightened when I am with people. The only time I’m not frightened is when I’m with you. You’ll have to be with me a great deal.”
“I will.”
“Do you want to?” “Yes.”
“I will be under treatment a long time.”
“I know that.”
“And I’m not sure I’ll ever change. Really change.”
“You might.”
“But I think I see a way. It seems to me that if we are together a great deal and you tell me the simplest things and not laugh at me — I beg you for pity’s own sake never to laugh at me — tell me things like: Kate, it is all right for you to go down to the drugstore, and give me a kiss, then I will believe you. Will you do that?” she says with her not-quite-pure solemnity, her slightly reflected Sarah Lawrence solemnity.
“Yes, I’ll do that.”
She has started plucking at her thumb in earnest, tearing away little shreds of flesh. I take her hand and kiss the blood.
“But you must try not to hurt yourself so much.”
“I will try! I will!”
The Negro has already come outside. His forehead is an ambiguous sienna color and pied: it is impossible to be sure that he received ashes. When he gets in his Mercury, he does not leave immediately but sits looking down at something on the seat beside him. A sample case? An insurance manual? I watch him closely in the rear-view mirror. It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus?
It is impossible to say.
Epilogue
SO ENDED MY THIRTIETH year to heaven, as the poet called it.
In June Kate and I were married. It was practicable to wind up my business affairs in Gentilly and to accompany my aunt to North Carolina sooner than I expected, since Sharon, now Mrs Stanley Shamoun, had become so competent that she was able to transact the light summer business without assistance, at least until my replacement could be found. In August Mr Sartalamaccia purchased my duck club for twenty five thousand dollars. When medical school began in September, Kate found a house near her stepmother, one of the very shotgun cottages done over by my cousin Nell Lovell and very much to Kate’s taste with its saloon doors swinging into the kitchen, its charcoal-gray shutters and its lead St Francis in the patio.
My aunt has become fond of me. As soon as she accepted what she herself had been saying all those years, that the Bolling family had gone to seed and that I was not one of her heroes but a very ordinary fellow, we got along very well. Both women find me comical and laugh a good deal at my expense.
On Mardi Gras morning of the next year, my Uncle Jules suffered a second heart attack at the Boston Club, from which he later died.
The following May, a few days after his fifteenth birthday, my half-brother Lonnie Smith died of a massive virus infection which was never positively identified.
As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject. For one thing, I have not the authority, as the great Danish philosopher declared, to speak of such matters in any way other than the edifying. For another thing, it is not open to me even to be edifying, since the time is later than his, much too late to edify or do much of anything except plant a foot in the right place as the opportunity presents itself — if indeed asskicking is properly distinguished from edification.
Further: I am a member of my mother’s family after all and so naturally shy away from the subject of religion (a peculiar word this in the first place, religion; it is something to be suspicious of).
Reticence, therefore, hardly having a place in a document of this kind, it seems as good a time as any to make an end.
The day before Lonnie died, Kate took a notion to pay him a visit. Ordinarily I pick her up at Merle’s office, drop her off at her stepmother’s and drive downtown where I transact a few odds and ends of business for her, my aunt, at Uncle Jules’ office. But today we have only to walk across the street from Merle’s office to Touro Infirmary.
I had my doubts about Kate’s idea. It was an extravagant womanish sort of whim, what I call privately a doubling, or duplication: like the time she took a notion to fly to Dallas in a state of rapture and hear Marian Anderson; it sounded to her like the sort of thing one might well do. I don’t mean she worries about what is the fashionable thing to do; no, it just sounded like a good thing to do — what one does under the circumstances if one is the sort of person who etc etc — so she did it. Also: she had not seen Lonnie since the onset of his illness and although I tried to prepare her for the change, she was not prepared.
Afterwards in the street, she went stumbling ahead of me, knuckles in her mouth and blind with tears.
“Oh my God, how dreadful.”
“I shouldn’t have let you go.”
“It was like a blow in the face.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That poor little boy — he’s so hideously thin and yellow, like one of those wrecks lying on a flatcar at Dachau. Why is he so yellow?”
“He’s got a hepatitis.”
“How can you be so cold-blooded? Are you going to be thick-skinned and bumptious like a medical student? How I hate that! He’s dying, Binx!”
“I know.”
“What was that he whispered to you?”
“He told me he had conquered an habitual disposition.”
“What is that?”
“He also said you were a very good-looking girl.”
“He breaks my heart!” We walk in silence. “And his poor parents. Did you see the way Mr Smith stepped out into the hall and dashed the tears from his eyes like a countryman?”
“Yes.”
“It is so pitiful.”
She stops to blow her nose. Her heavy gunmetal hair is separated by a wide ragged part. I kiss the thick white skin of her scalp. “You are very good-looking today.” In the past year, she has fattened up; her shoulders are sleek as a leopard.
Kate is horrified. “Please don’t.” She plucks at her thumb. “There is something grisly about you.”
“I have to find the children.” When Lonnie took a turn for the worse early this morning, my mother had to bring all the children with her, all but Jean-Paul. They’ve been sitting in the car since eight o’clock.