Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart Read online

  He's become absurdly fond of Houdini though he disapproves of the cat's sly ways, his pose of innocence until Leslie's back is turned, and, God knows, he's appalled sometimes by the animal's hunger. a nearly metaphysical hunger of the kind that can never be satisfied.

  Whenever I see a picture of myself I think, There's proof' I re ally am here.

  But the camera preserves images only. Images of things dying, or dead.

  Graice said, tears streaking her face, I can't bear to see them! Take them away! Hide them!

  So Leslie has re moved most of the photographs of Persia and Persia and Graice from the front of the shop and has hung them on the walls of his bedroom. In rows, framed, under glass: the earliest was taken in May 1940, Persia Courtney as a lovely, very young bride in a ruffled white dress and a bridal veil; the last was taken in August 1955, here in the studio, Persia and Graice in their pretty summer dresses, seated side by side on the wicker love seat. In chronological order on Leslie's bedroom walls are images of a wide browed smiling woman as she ages subtly yet unmistakably from girlhood to maturity: Persia in a strapless chiffon gown with her dashing husband Duke as The Incomparable Courtneys one of a series of publicity photos Leslie volunteered to take ; Persia just home from the hospital gazing dewy eyed at her infant daughter nestled in her arms; Persia in a Rita Hayworth pose, smiling seductively at the camera, in an off the shoulder Spanish blouse; Persia with dark defined lips and upswept hairdo, her little girl re sting her head against Persia's shoulder and gazing too into the camera with frank smiling eyes and so on and so forth. How many poses, how many years, now completed. The Persia Courtney Leslie last saw, being carried into the emergency room of Hammond General Hospital, a raving, delirious, jaundice skinned woman with matted hair, bears no kin ship to any of these images. none that Leslie can bring himself to acknowledge.

  Leslie has hung the many photographs of Persia Courtney in his bedroom to spare Graice distress when Graice visits him, but Graice rarely visits now that she is in college. Graice is rarely in Hammond now that she is in college. Even her summers, if she can, she spends in part or wholly away from Hammond. And now there is a family in Syracuse, it seems, that has befriended her. she spoke evasively of them, and with girlish pride, the last time she called. She won't be coming home over the lengthy Christmas re cess because she has so much schoolwork to do. And because this family the Savages has been kind enough to invite her for Christmas Eve and for other holiday events.

  Leslie said, I'll miss you, Graice, but I certainly understand.

  Graice didn't say a word to that.

  Leslie said, As long as you re happy, Graice: that's the main thing.

  Graice didn't say a word to that either.

  Leslie Courtney is thinking of these things, sadly but not griev ingly, for he isn't the kind of man to grieve over what's hopeless, as he develops prints in his darkroom until about nine o'clock when he stops to prepare himself a kind of supper. Leslie Courtney's bachelor meals are expeditious affairs but sometimes inspired: eggs whipped with cottage cheese and chunks of canned pineapple; greasy ham burger crumbled and stirred in the skillet amid sizzling onions, t£ r'iatoes, frozen corn kernels, all of it topped with melted Kraft's American cheese and dumped on white Wonder Bread. And it's in the kitchen as he fusses with what he's found in the refrigerator that he hears a furious scratching and muffled meowing close by, and opens the door to the cellar, and out bounds Houdini the midnight black cat, purring in midair, twining himself around Leslie's legs, and trying to climb up his body with needle sharp claws. Leslie is so astonished he forgets to be relieved: Houdini! Where the hell have you been!

  Leslie stoops and pets the frantic cat and feeds him part of his supper tonight, an old favorite, Spam heated and fork crumbled in a pan of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, dumped on white Wonder Bread trying to figure out how Houdini can have been in the cellar all these hours, undetected. The cellar was one of the first places Leslie searched; and since Leslie has been in and out of the kitchen frequently during the past two days, he would certainly have heard the cat clawing at the door. And can Houdini claw. it's as if fresh sharpened knives have been hacking at the wood.

  Finally, unable to contain his curiosity, Leslie goes down into the cellar to investigate. finds one of the windows on the alley pushed in. So that's the explanation.

  So Leslie Courtney's anxious vigil has a happy ending. And Leslie is happy. buoyed on waves of re lief rising to euphoria. He sits in his cramped little kitchen scarcely minding saccharine voiced Bing Crosby singing I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas over the radio, eating his Spam supper with Houdini at his feet eating and purring simultaneously.

  Many times in the course of this evening Leslie will murmur to the cat, Damn you, Houdini, you really had me worried. don't ever do that again!

  He's thinking if he weren't an alcoholic, or alcoholic prone, he'd pour himself some Seagram's, to celebrate.

  This much is clear: sometime in the early hours of February 19, 1963, in an apartment on the eighth floor of a slum tenement on Randolph Street, Buffalo, New York, Sugar Baby Fairchild Woodrow Fairchild, Jr.

  , as the newspapers will identify him meets with an appalling death: he's stabbed superficially a dozen times, pushed naked into a bathtub, covered with gallons of boiling water so that his skin reddens blisters, bursts, peels away from his flesh, and, while he's still alive, his several killers stand over him jeering and urinating on him.

  The incident, partly censored for home news consumption, will be reported in the Buffalo Evening News under the headline FIFTH KILLING AS RIVAL DRUG DEALERS FEUD, but the talk on the street in both Buffalo and Hammond is that Sugar Baby Fairchild's own boss Leo Lyman ordered him killed assassinated in a special way as a warning to other young niggers in his organization like Sugar Baby Fairchild who are possibly cheating him of small change and not paying him the respect he deserves.

  When Jinx Fairchild is told the news, it's as if scalding water cascades down his own body: a pain, a horror, an infamy beyond words, that renders him speechless, paralyzed.

  For days it lasts. Days and days. A smothering drowning cascading sensation inside his body and out like applause bouncing off the walls of a gym that just goes on and on. on and on. no end to it. Jinx pushes Sissy away when she tries to comfort him cause he doesn't trust that woman any longer too many times she's tricked him, wheedled him into forgiving her, then tricked him again and he can't face Minnie and Woodrow for a long time cause he can't imagine himself looking them in the eye, the terrible knowledge passing between them of how Sugar Baby died. not just the stabbing and the scalding water, so his body was near unrecognizable, but his killers jeering at him, pissing on him, up to the very moment of his death.

  The Buffalo police won't ever find Sugar Baby's killers, his murder is only one of a number of murders; it's the drug trade, heroin trade; it's black men killing one another. self contained for the most part, like sharks in a feeding frenzy turning on themselves, devouring not only their own kind but occasionally, in maddened ecstasy, their own entrails spilling into the ocean.

  rs. Savage has stopped asking Graice Courtney to call her Gwendolyn.

  But there is an air of both tenderness and conviction in the way missis Savage calls Graice Graice.

  It seems that the older woman has taken a particular liking to the younger, since she invites Graice frequently to her home or conveys invitations to her by way of doctor Savage: invitations to receptions for visiting speakers, to large heterogeneous dinners, an occasional smaller luncheon where the guests are all women. some of them young women in their twenties, the wives of junior faculty at the university.

  It becomes missis Savage's custom to telephone Graice mid week to ask if she might be free to come to the house for a simple family dinner, an early evening, nothing fancy; and Graice always accepts, Graice always accepts with gratitude, saying yes she'd like that very much, yes very much thank you missis Savage, hanging up the phone, thinking, Why am I
doing this? I'm never comfortable with these people.

  Graice has become familiar with missis Savage's manners and mannerisms: the southern accent, the voice inflections, the quick radiant smile and the slower, more contemplative smile in which, at times, there is an air of wistfulness. the frankness of the lovely cobalt blue eyes, turned searchingly upon Graice as if there is a question she wants to put to me she can't formulate. For all Gwendolyn Savage's skill as a hostess, and the pleasure she so clearly takes in that role, she appears at times lonely: rarely alone, but lonely: as Graice Court they, so frequently by her own design alone, is rarely lonely.

  Several times, and never with less than consummate tact, missis Savage has asked after Graice's mother, and Graice has provided a few, very few, details: the portrait that emerges of Persia Courtney is of a woman of unusual warmth, vitality, and strength of character who chose not to re marry after an early divorce and who was determined to support herself and her daughter without asking favors of re la tives at a succession of low paying jobs sales clerk, typist, librarian's assistant , a woman who displayed not only extraordinary courage in facing her final illness but who tried to the very end to shield her daughter from guessing the extent of her suffering. missis Savage is warmly sympathetic; missis Savage says in a hushed murmur, Your mother sounds like a remarkable woman, Graice, you were lucky, you know, to have had her. to have had the blessing of her.

  There have been such strong, selfless, unfailingly good women in my family too, and Byron's mother, with whom I was very close, was exemplary. a sort of model, truly. Your mother was a religious woman?

  Graice says hesitantly, Mother didn't belong to any congregation but, yes, she was naturally religious. she seemed to believe.

  missis Savage murmurs, Ah, then, that's enough! I'm sure that's enough!

  The re mark is made in all innocence, merely one of missis Savage's commiserative asides, but Graice Courtney feels a prick of something like anger: Really? Is it enough ? And enough for what, entry into your smug Christian heaven?

  On the subject of Graice's problematic father, so long absent from her life, missis Savage has been even more tactful. Graice has suggested that her father is a politician of some kind. in one of the western states. She remembers him as a very busy man, a brisk, steely eyed man; she hasn't seen him since she was five years old but bears him no ill will since her mother bore him no ill will: just said, simply, that the marriage had not worked out and never dwelled upon it.

  Listening, missis Savage nods gravely; it's clear she is impressed with the pluck, the hardiness, the determination, the extraordinary strength of character of Graice Courtney's mother, Persia.

  She says, sighing, Even her name is so beautiful.

  In turn, missis Savage has confided in Graice. always somewhat obliquely.

  She has suggested that she and her husband are not altogether happy with the life their twenty seven year old daughter Jenny is leading but she has not said why, specifically, except that Jenny is indecisive.

  Jenny has difficulties with men. Jenny rarely telephones, never writes, and lives a life her parents can't under stand. She shows Graice a number of snapshots of a dark haired, stocky, rather plain young woman, several of them photographed on a tennis court in stark overhead sunshine. Graice perceives in this daughter of the Savages an obdurate, stony spirit bearing very little resemblance to either parent.

  About Alan, the Savages' thirty one year old son, former Rhodes scholar, current Guggenheim fellow, so bright, so industrious so serious, and so unfailingly sweet, missis Savage is far more optimistic. I'm truly sorry that Alan didn't get home for Christmas as he'd hoped to, missis Savage says, but it's a long way from Paris. he seems so involved there. You'll meet, though, Graice, I'm sure, very soon. And I think you'll like each other immensely.

  As if she has been trusted with an artifact both precious and mysterious, Graice studies the slender, boyish, dark haired young man of the family snapshots, seeing in his narrow, tensely smiling face certain of the distinctive features of his mother: the set of the eyes, the lean Roman nose, something soft and provisional about the mouth.

  She says thoughtfully, Yes, missis Savage, I'm sure we will.

  Only afterward does she realize her slip of the tongue. But so far as she can re call, missis Savage seemed to notice nothing. She rarely does.

  missis Savage has confided in her young friend Graice that Byron Savage is both the most remarkable man she has ever encountered and one of the most exasperating. Yet even missis Savage's complaints turn mild in her mouth, domestic and wifely: That man is possessed of such energy, such willfulness, I've long ago stopped trying to keep up!

  And: I'd known as a young bride that it would be a true challenge to live with an intellectual genius, but, Lord, I had no idea!

  She has confided too, in more somber moments, often at the end of a social occasion when she and Graice are alone together awaiting the taxi that, prepaid, will bear Graice back to South Salina Street, that her religion is of paramount significance in her life. She was born and baptized Presbyterian, made her decision for Christ when she was thirteen years old, and has never wavered in her faith despite tribulations, heartaches, betrayals. I don't simply believe in God, missis Savage declares in her exclamatory mid southern accent, I know there is God. And I know that He lives in us. Truly.

  To this, Graice can think of no appropriate re ply.

  missis Savage continues warmly, It seems clear to me that God reveals Himself to us when He is needed, but not otherwise. For the sacred presence is so powerful, Graice, it makes the remainder of the world seem shrunken.

  Does it! Graice murmurs, £shivering.

  She finds herself staring out the window at the mottled late winter sky, fearing she'll find it shrunken. It is bleached out.

  Thinking afterward, borne away by taxi back into the city of Syracuse and the busyness of more ordinary lives, How easy, if you're a Savage, to believe in God! Seeing that, obviously, God believes in you.

  With the passage of months Graice Courtney gradually draws away from her friends, friends her own age, including the young man who imagines he's in love with her; the Savages, in their undemanding way, demand all her concentration. When she doesn't visit with them she stays in her room on the topmost floor of the shabby re d brick house on South Salina Street, preparing her course work, plotting and dreaming her life. In her imagination Gwendolyn and Byron Savage take on the luminosity of gigantic dream figures whose dimensions can only be sensed, not observed.

  Under doctor Savage's guidance she is becoming more career minded.

  Under missis Savage's guidance she is becoming more self effacing, more feminine.

  Occasionally Graice will challenge a dogmatic re mark of doctor Savage's and the two of them will talk together animatedly, with a heady intellectual passion. Less frequently, Graice will challenge a remark of missis Savage's but the two of them never precisely disagree such head on confrontations are not missis Savage's style. When the subject of Martin Luther King comes up, in connection with King's proposed civil rights rally in Washington, D. C. , in late August of 1963, missis Savage says, I do admire Reverend King, it's a blessing from God that the Negroes have such a saintly leader. If it weren't for him there'd be such anger everywhere, and Graice says impulsively, But not to be angry, for some people, is hypocritical, and missis Savage says, Oh! in a small, still, quizzical hurt voice and changes the subject.

  Though missis Savage is convinced that she and Byron are poles apart in temperament let alone intelligence, Graice perceives, as she comes to know them more intimately, that the couple is perfectly matched.

  Each is in possession of a dazzling amplitude of spirit curiously constrained, finely and sharply focused, like a powerful beacon of light shining into the darkness that illuminates not the darkness but its own trajectory of vision. For all her amusing complaints of busyness Gwendolyn Savage is happily caught up in the cyclical tasks of domestic arid social life while showing l
ittle awareness of, let alone concern for, much that lies beyond this life; while Byron, though ebullient with talk of the issues of the day, focuses his prodigious analytical mind exclusively upon his field of specialization: yet, within that field Renaissance, eighteenth and nineteenth century European art , upon minor iconographic and historical problems beside which works of art seem sometimes mere illustrations, proof. Graice perceives too that her friends' very magnanimity is granted them by means of an infrastructure that surrounds and protects them yet re mains unexamined as the air they breathe: their inherited wealth, their social position, the color of their skin.

  The Savages' great good fortune is an accident of history they seem to assume is not accidental but natural. their God given birth right.

  Impossible, Graice Courtney thinks. These people.

  So good, so generous, yet so smug.

  Still, when the telephone rings downstairs and Graice is called to answer it, her heart leaps at the prospect of an invitation from missis Savage. never, never does she say no.

  What am I but a sort of mirror or reflector for them, beaming back their happiness to them? Magnifying their happiness to them?