Acquainted with the Night (8 page)

“I bet they never heard any customer just sit down and play like that.”

Again no response. She merely puttered over her salad, but with a look that was familiar to me: a concentrated, patient waiting for the proper words and the proper tone to offer themselves to her. I enjoyed feeling I was always a step ahead.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said nastily.

“You do?” She raised her eyes to mine. “I’d be surprised.”

“Yes. I bet you’re thinking we looked as if he was going to abduct me or something.”

The glance she gave in response was more injured than disapproving. She set water to boil and tore open a net bag of potatoes.

“Well, listen, I’ll tell you something. The world has changed since your day.” I was growing more and more agitated, while she just peeled potatoes. Her muteness had a maddening way of making my words seem frivolous. She knew what she knew. “The world has changed! Not everyone is as provincial as they are here in Brooklyn!” I spit out that last word. I was nearly shouting how. “Since when can’t two people walk down the street in broad daylight? We’re both free—” I stopped suddenly. I was going to say free, white, and over twenty-one, an expression I had found loathsome when I heard my father use it.

“Calm down,” my mother said gently. “All I’m thinking is I hope it didn’t embarrass him. It’s him I was thinking about, not you.”

I stalked from the room, my face aflame.

I went to college in Manhattan and lived in a women’s residence near school. For several months I took the subway into Brooklyn every Wednesday so I could have a piano lesson with Mr. Simmons, it being tacitly understood that I was too gifted simply to give up “my music,” as it was called; I slept at home on my old block, then went back up to school on Thursday morning. This became arduous. I became involved with other, newer things. I went home for a lesson every other Wednesday, and soon no Wednesdays at all. But I assured Mr. Simmons I would keep renting the small practice room at school and work on my own. I did for a while, but the practice room was very small and very cold, and the piano, a Steinway, didn’t sound as lush as my new Baldwin back home; there was an emptiness to my efforts without the spur of a teacher; and then there were so many other things claiming my time. I had met and made friends with kindred spirits from the High School of Music and Art, and realized that had I listened to my mother I might have known them three years sooner. The next year I got married, impulsively if not inexplicably; to tell why, though, would take another story.

Naturally my parents invited Mr. and Mrs. Simmons to the wedding. They were the only black people there, among some hundred and fifty guests. I had long been curious to meet Mrs. Simmons but regrettably I could not get to know her that afternoon since I had to be a bride. Flitting about, I could see that she was the kind of woman my mother and her friends would call “lovely.” And did, later. She was pretty, she was dressed stylishly, she was what they would call “well-spoken.” She spoke the appropriately gracious words for a young bride and one of her husband’s long-time students. In contrast to Mr. Simmons’ straightforward earnestness, she seemed less immediately engaged, more of a clever observer, and though she smiled readily I could not imagine her having a thunderous laugh. But she fit very well with Mr. Simmons, and they both fit with all the other middle-aged and middle-class couples present, except of course for their color.

Mrs. Simmons did not know a soul at the wedding and Mr. Simmons knew only the parents of the boy genius and a few of our close neighbors. My mother graciously took them around, introducing them to friends and family, lots of friends and lots of family, so they would not feel isolated. I thought she overdid it—she seemed to have them in tow, or on display, for a good while. I longed to take her aside and whisper, “Enough already, Ma. Leave them alone.” But there was no chance for that. And I knew how she would have responded. She would have responded silently, with a look that meant, “You can talk, but I know what is right to do,” which I could not deny. And in truth she was quite proud of knowing a man as talented as Mr. Simmons. And had she not introduced them they certainly would have felt isolated, while this way they were amicably received. (Any bigots present successfully concealed their bigotry.) My mother was only trying to behave well, with grace, and relatively, she succeeded. There was no way of behaving with absolute grace. You had to choose among the various modes of constraint.

For all I know, though, the Simmonses went home and remarked to each other about what lovely, fine people my parents and their friends were, and how strange it was that they could spend a pleasant afternoon talking just as they would to friends, even though they were all white. How very strange, Mr. Simmons might have said, shaking his head in a puzzled way, taking off his tie and settling down behind his newspaper. It is a soothing way to imagine them, but probably false.

I had always hoped to resume my piano lessons someday, but never did. And so after the wedding Mr. Simmons disappeared from my life. Why should it still astonish me, like a scrape from a hidden thorn? There were no clear terms on which he could be in my life, without the piano lessons. Could I have invited the Simmonses to our fifth-floor walk-up apartment in a dilapidated part of Manhattan for a couples evening? Or asked him to meet me somewhere alone for a cup of coffee? At what time of day? Could my parents, maybe, have invited the Simmonses over on a Sunday afternoon with their now teen-aged children and with my husband and me? Or for one of their Saturday night parties of mah-jongg for the women and gin rummy for the men and bagels and lox for all? Could Mr. Simmons, too, have made some such gesture? Possibly. For I refuse to see this as a case of
noblesse oblige:
we were all the middle classes.

But given the place and the time and the dense circumambient air, such invitations would have required people of large social imagination, and none of us, including Mr. and Mrs. Simmons, had that. We had only enough vision for piano lessons and cups of coffee and brief warm conversations about families, business, politics, and race relations, and maybe I should be content with that, and accept that because we were small, we lost each other, and never really had each other, either. Nonetheless, so many years later, I don’t accept it. I find I miss him and I brood and wonder about him: where is he and does he still, on summer days, play the piano for eight hours at a stretch, stripped to the waist and sweating?

A
FARMER OF AUSTERE
habits lived some ways from town in a ramshackle farmhouse, and he looked as forlorn and ramshackle as his house with its weatherbeaten wooden slats and cracked shingles. Tall, taciturn, dressed in drab, loose-fitting clothes, he would gaze down at the ground as he walked. He carried a gnarled walking stick and let his mud-colored hair droop around his face, and so he appeared older than he was. Actually he was not old at all, nor crabbed as some believed, merely a solitary. Out of habit he kept his distance, and the people of the town thought it best to keep their distance as well.

His only companion was a greyhound dog, slender, blond, and frolicsome after the manner of her kind. She was fiercely devoted to the farmer and, unlike the townspeople, not frightened off by his gnarled walking stick or his silence or his gaunt, shielded face. Outdoors, in the fields or in town, the farmer and his dog were silent and undemonstrative, yet they had the air of creatures very much attuned and in comfort together. The townspeople were puzzled by the dog. Not a farm dog by any means. Not a dog that could be useful. Her very prettiness and uselessness seemed out of place in that stony countryside, and when she strutted down the main street she drew hostile glances. Rumors sprang up that the dog, for all her prettiness, had sinister powers; possibly even the farmer did. Her origins were mysterious: all anyone knew was that after vanishing for several days the farmer had returned with the dog perched in the front seat of his truck, sniffing in her disdainful way.

In fact he had found her in a nearby and larger market town. The dogcatcher had seemed hesitant to sell her: a well-meaning fellow, he hinted that the dog had brought bad luck to former owners, best leave her to her fate. But the farmer had a sudden craving for the pretty creature, whom he had spied standing in a corner of the yard apart from the pack of other animals; she reminded him of himself, isolated, the butt of nasty tall tales, perhaps even ill-treated when young, as he had been. She had an unearthly howl, the dogcatcher also warned, wild enough to rouse the dead. But she made no sound at all in her corner of the cluttered yard, so the farmer paid no heed and bought her.

Evenings, alone in the house, they romped together in front of the fire, the farmer bellowing and laughing, the dog yelping and snapping playfully. She barked seldom. Her bark was indeed loud and piercing, almost a howl, and it was as if she held it in out of deference to human ears. Despite his carelessness about the outside of the house, the farmer kept the inside pleasant and tidy: the wood floors, with their wide planks, were swept clean, the logs piled near the fireplace had a sweet smoky smell, and the soft cushions on the floor were inviting. Besides all that, the dog got good food to eat; she made a contented, obedient housemate.

And then one day after spending almost a week away at the nearby market town, the farmer and his dog came home with a bright-eyed wife, who also excited curiosity among the townspeople, and a few of the more outspoken wondered slyly whether he had found her in the same mysterious way as he had found the dog. She was small and rounded, with rosy cheeks, milky skin, and black curls. She smiled indulgently at the confusion of the dog, who bristled when she stroked her blond fur. She laughed at the farmer’s long shield of hair and brushed it off his really rather handsome face with a tender gesture. Nor was she much bothered by the ramshackle appearance of the house, for she saw that the inside was cheerful and tidy. The vegetable garden behind the house was her delight: under the farmer’s care, tomatoes and beans and peas were flourishing in such abundance she could hardly pick them fast enough. The people of the town, who could find nothing to fault her with since she was unfailingly courteous and proper, were astonished that so sprightly a creature could be happy living with the taciturn farmer, yet she appeared quite happy. When the three of them walked down the main street, it was the farmer and his wife, now, who were silent and undemonstrative, yet seemed very much attuned and in comfort together. The dog fretted alongside. Occasionally she gave out her lacerating howl, which made passersby start, and startled even the farmer, who hastened to quiet her. The dog was not neglected—the farmer still stroked her and spoke kindly to her and took her along daily to the fields, but in the nature of things it was not the same.

Evenings, in the broken-down house, the farmer and his wife lay on rugs in front of the fire, while the dog fussed in a cold corner, ignoring their beckonings. The farmer had never been so happy in his life. He had grown up lonely and lived lonely, and, given the awkward shyness that no one till now had found appealing, had never expected to be other than lonely till the day he died. He was no less astonished than the townspeople that this pretty, loving wife welcomed his company and settled so easily into his house. It was a gift he could not fathom, dared not even question, and while it did not change his appearance—he still dressed in drab, nondescript clothing—or the appearance of his house—still forlorn and ramshackle—he felt himself a changed man. For this his heart was full of gratitude to his wife, and in his innocence, he envisioned living with her serenely to the end of his days.

What the farmer loved most about his wife was not her prettiness or her sweet nature, but her voice. It was like music; it could sing out low like a cello or high like a flute, and flit through the whole range in between. When she called to him in the fields, midday, her pure long-lasting note cut a path through the air. When she rushed to greet him or tell him news of the garden her voice was full, impelled by energy. And when she lay with him before the fire its timbre was more than deep—dense, as if the sound itself might be grasped and held, caressed. To the farmer her voice expressed all moods and possibilities; living with her after living silent for so long with the dog was like embracing another dimension, having a sixth sense.

The dog clearly did not love the sound of the wife’s voice, although it was never anything but gentle and cajoling, in a futile effort to win her trust. The dog still bristled at her touch and took food grudgingly from her hands. If the farmer whistled her over while his wife was nearby, she hung back and needed to be coaxed. And when the two were alone, the dog would snap at her skirts, or snarl, or set up a howling the wife could not stop. In the garden she stepped across the wife’s path to trip her up. In the kitchen she knocked over a tureen of soup—the wife had to jump aside so as not to be scalded. She reproached the dog softly, in dismay more than anger. The wife did not mention these incidents to the farmer—they seemed, after all, so petty. She was a tolerant soul who took what came along. She too had been lonely and ill-treated as a child, and also, because of her prettiness, suspected of evils she did not commit, so she found herself fortunate in her new life; her thoughts were rooted in its daily pleasures. She was hardly one to brood over the fussing of a dog: surely the creature would come round in time.

This happy period in the farmer’s life lasted for three years, and then the wife took sick with a mysterious illness, not painful but enervating. It had never been seen before in that region, and there seemed nothing anyone could do to save her. The farmer fed her with his own hands and pleaded with her to rally, if only for his sake, but she shook her head gravely, like one already past the threshold. In despair he wanted to take the very strength from his own body and feed it to her. But she was doomed. Stunned with grief, he buried her some distance from the house. After a time, though his grief remained acute, there mingled with it a feeling that, just as he had grown up lonely and lived lonely, so he was to remain lonely till the day he died, and that the time with his wife was a fleeting interlude given to him unfathomably. He sought solace in the company of his dog, who became frolicsome and good-tempered as in the early days. When they walked together in the town they once again had the air of creatures very much attuned and in comfort together. As for the townspeople, after paying their condolences they kept their distance as before.