Lost in the City

GOSPEL

As the House of the Solitary Savior Baptist Church burned to the ground one December Sunday morning, Vivian L. Slater was in her bath, arranging a program of gospel songs her group was to sing at the church. A Sunday morning bath was just about the only constant in her life, and every Sunday God sent she stretched out in a fragrant mixture of baby oil and water and the most expensive bubble bath she could find. On a stool beside the tub, she always placed a huge glass of soda, grape or some kind of cola. She chilled the drink with several small plastic balls containing water that had been frozen. And beside the glass was a large transistor radio tuned to WYCB or to some station broadcasting church services that offered more spirituals and gospel songs than preaching.

If someone telephoned for her while she was in the tub, her husband, Ralph, would answer and tell the caller that Mrs. Slater was indisposed for the time being. From time to time, without her even calling to him, Ralph would get up from reading the Sunday newspaper and come in without knocking and refilled her glass and replace the colored balls of ice. He was seven years older than she and a man of extreme handsomeness, with no sign of sickness, and when she accompanied him to D.C. General every week for his treatments, men and women of all ages would stare at him, pitying a man who was saddled with a cancer woman perhaps not long for this world. It bothered her that the world did not know which of them was sick. As Ralph refilled her glass and dropped in fresh balls of ice, he never once would look at her nakedness.

As the House of the Solitary Savior burned down, she was also arranging a program for the Holy Tabernacle AME Zion, a magnificent church of three thousand members where her group, the Gospelteers, was to sing later in the day. She knew it was the sin of pride, but Vivian no longer got any pleasure from singing at the House, as the members called it; it was something she did only because she knew that for singing there, God would make some small, positive notation beside her name in that book of His.

The House of the Solitary Savior had had but one pastor in its thirty years — a tall, gaunt man who made his living as a plumber’s helper. His wife, an elementary school teacher, was as tall and gaunt as her husband, so that anyone seeing the couple would have mistaken them for brother and sister. In all the time that Vivian had known the Reverend Wesley Saunders, the church had never had more than fifty members, despite the reverend’s boast that he preached more of God’s truth than any pastor in Washington.

About eleven o’clock she was dressed and ready to go. Ralph was in the easy chair in the living room, and that was undoubtedly where she would find him, drunk, combative, that night when she came home.

He said, “Paper say maybe some snow tonight, sugar.” He was a man who loved profoundly and he had not stopped looking at her since she came into the room. He watched her now as she put on her coat and considered herself in the mirror on the back of the hall closet door. She said, “If it does snow, them new snow tires’ll get a workout.” She turned to the side and considered herself in the mirror that way. He said, “You look real good today, sugar.” From the closet she took the slippers and gown she wore when singing. She turned her other side to the mirror. Finally, she leaned over him, put her finger an inch from her lightly rouged lips and touched it to his cheek. She said, “I’ll see you when I get back.” He said, “Okay, sugar. Be careful.”

To get to Diane McCollough, her best friend and the first member she had recruited for the Gospelteers, she came down Martin Luther King, Jr., Avenue and crossed the bridge over the Anacostia River. Generally, she did not like driving, particularly not over the bridge, for having so many cars around her made her feel as if she were a part of some uncontrollable tide and could only be helplessly swept along. But on a Sunday morning the traffic was tolerable, and after she had crossed the river, she relaxed and reviewed the day’s programs in her head. Now and again, she looked at herself in the rearview mirror.

Diane lived in a house half the size of Vivian’s on 9th Street Southeast, not far from Lincoln Park. Vivian let herself into the house with her own key. Diane lived with her second husband, Harry, and her youngest daughter from her first marriage, along with her daughter’s only child, an overweight boy of four who had been spoiled beyond redemption. Two of Diane’s sons were in Lorton for selling cocaine. “She ain’t had a happy life, I can tell you that,” Vivian would say in defending her friend to people who thought she had raised her children wrong. “Have a little sympathy.”

Diane, dressed and made up, was at the kitchen sink, drinking the last of her coffee. Everyone said good morning except for the little boy, who sat beside his mother at the table, playing with a truck that was as big as his head. Vivian sat down across from the boy, as far away from him as she could get. The boy would have thought nothing of touching her with his greasy hands. The odor of coffee and bacon had settled about the room, and Vivian counted off the weeks she had been on her diet.

“Vi, don’t get comfortable, cause I’m all ready,” Diane said.

“We got plenty of time,” Vivian said. “A minute or two won’t hurt.”

“Who yall got today?” Cherry, Diane’s daughter, asked. She was, like her mother, a very plain and charming woman who could immediately put the world at ease. She had waited until she was thirty-one to marry, but it was to a man she now fought with night and day. And usually after the worst fights, she ran away to stay with Diane, until her husband came and knocked contritely at his mother-in-law’s door. “And think of that poor ugly daughter of hers,” Vivian would say to people as she defended her friend.

“The House first, ain’t it, Vi?” Diane said, coming up behind her grandson. “The Hoouuse…” She dragged the word out as if the sound of it could frighten the boy, and then she tickled his sides. “The House gonna get you.” The boy, moving the truck along the edge of the table, ignored her.

“The House in the early afternoon,” Vivian said, “then Holy Tabernacle in the evening.”

Diane’s husband said, “That House got that Reverend Saunders, ain’t it? God’s gift to the world, ain’t he?”

“So he think,” Vivian said. In the world of Washington gospel, Vivian’s Gospelteers, a group of four women and a piano player, had a respectable reputation that she felt had outgrown a storefront like the House. But twenty-five years before, just after the group’s birth, Reverend Saunders was the first to say, “Come and sing before my people.” She felt she owed him. It was an obligation he could remind her of on the phone with no more than a “God bless you and a good evenin to you, Sister Slater.” Reverend Saunders, even with a flock that could fit into one Metrobus, was a proud man, and though Vivian always told him the church owed them nothing, he would have the Gospelteers wait at the end of the program while he and his wife went about the church collecting what the members could contribute to the group. At the large churches built to last until kingdom come, payment came in a check with the church’s name in bold, unflinching letters at the top center.

“Yall gonna sing, ‘I’m a Pilgrim’?” Diane’s husband said. “I do like that song. Reminds me of what they used to sing back home. I could listen to it all day long.”

Vivian said, “We’ll do it at the House, but not at Holy Tabernacle. Reminds you of bein back in your mama’s arms, huh?” She reached across to pinch his cheek. He was a large light-skinned man and he blushed.

She began to sing to him, and for the first and only time the boy raised his head and looked at her.

I have trouble on ev’ry hand

But I’ve started for the city…

I’m goin down to the river Jordan

I’m gonna bathe my weary soul.

“Oh, get outta here,” he said, and she sang on because she liked seeing that she had pleased. When she had finished, he asked, “You think your no-count piano player’ll show up this time?”

“He’d better,” Diane said.

“You got that right,” Vivian said. “Just thinkin about last Sunday sets my teeth on edge.”

Despite being a young man who spent most of his Sundays in churches hitting the ivory keys for God, the piano player, Counsel Smith, lived a fast life, much of it packed into Friday and Saturday nights. So it was often difficult for him to collect himself on Sunday morning, to pull himself away from a willing woman and clear his head of alcohol, and to go off to be with four other women, one of whom was old enough to be his grandmother, two of whom were old enough to be his mother, and one of whom had a ring through her nose about another man.

“We already told him if he miss one more time or be late one more time, he’s finished,” Diane said. She set her cup in the sink, then looked sternly at her daughter and pointed into the sink full of dirty dishes. “There ain’t nothin worse in the world than gettin up at some church and havin to make up excuses about why you didn’t bring your piano player.”

“Yall should be able to sing without a piano player by now,” her husband said.

“Ain’t that much singin in the world,” Vivian said. The adults laughed, and then the boy, as if afraid he was being left out, laughed as well.

“You ready?” Vivian said to Diane.

“As ready as I’ll ever be.” She gave her husband a passionate kiss on the lips, a kiss that Vivian thought was too much for a Sunday morning at the kitchen table. Diane then pinched the boy’s cheeks. “Ooh, ooh,” she said. “Ooh, my little butterball.” The boy wiggled away.

In the car, going to pick up the other two women, Diane inspected her face in a palm-sized mirror she took from her pocketbook. Vivian drove down to Massachusetts Avenue.

“How long Cherry gonna be with you this time?” Vivian said.

“Can’t tell,” Diane said. “Can’t ever tell. Just have to wait till they both come to their senses, and lately it’s takin em longer and longer. Soon they won’t have any sense at all. I’m just thankful for a understandin husband.”

Vivian watched her friend out of the corner of her eye. She noted that Diane was putting on more weight. The two women were both fifty-seven years old, though Vivian would have been quick to tell anyone that she was younger by seven months.

Diane sighed and grew quiet. She put the mirror back in her pocketbook and studied the road before them. Her singing voice was no longer what it had been once upon a time and she knew this, but she and Vivian went back a long way. Then, too, in most of the churches of Washington, the people who heard the Gospelteers were generally more concerned about the message than the messenger’s delivery.

Vivian laughed, shaking her friends’s arm. “Oh, come on now,” she said. “Snap out of it. Pull up them droopy lips.”

“Lord, yes,” Diane said. “It’s gonna be a wonderful day. And”—she drummed her fingers on the pocketbook—“there is a bright spot there out on the horizon.” She shook her head with delight.

“Oh,” Vivian said, “what is this bright spot?”

“Later, I’ll tell you later, when there’s time,” Diane said, and she shook herself some more.

The woman who was old enough to be Counsel Smith’s grandmother was Maude Townsend, a blind woman who lived at Claridge Towers on M Street Northwest, an apartment house for old people and the disabled. On the day the House of the Solitary Savior burned to the ground, Maude was waiting outside Claridge Towers with Anita Hughes, the newest and youngest member of the group.

After Maude and Anita were in the car, Vivian said, “Standin out there like that yall looked like two sportin ladies on the corner waitin for some gentlemen. I had to look twice to make sure I was at the right address.” The four laughed.

“I ain’t lookin for no man,” Maude said after they were on 11th Street. “Thas all finished. All I want is some more Jesus.” Maude, too, was one of the original members of the Gospelteers. She was seventy-eight, and of the dozens and dozens of her people who had been alive when the group sang that very first Sunday at the House, not one was now alive.

“But you sho right about that sportin stuff,” Maude said. “You wouldn’t believe what that place done turned into. Claridge was such a nice place when I first moved in.” She leaned back in her seat and crossed her ankles.

“I keep telling her that she should move out, find someplace else,” Anita said. As she often did the night before the group sang, she stayed with Maude. “John and I will help her find a place.” John was the man with whom she lived, a gentle country man who was in his last year of medical residency at Howard University Hospital. Anita was twenty-five, in the second year of studying for a biology doctorate. She sang gospel because she felt that was the only way she could speak to God.

“Every senior citizen buildin in this city done turned bad,” Maude said. “The only thing to do is to just pick up and move back down South. I got two friends that done that and they say they shoulda done it long ago.”

“Oh, Maude,” Diane said, “I been back South and you ain’t gonna find it no different.”

“She right,” Vivian said.

Maude said nothing. Her head was turned to the window. In one hand she carried her tambourine. On the wrist of the other arm she wore a watch, but it was the type for sighted people, and aside from being a pretty thing on her wrist, it was not any good to her unless someone with eyes looked at it and told her what time it was.

Vivian found a parking space on S Street, between 10th and 11th. Maude walked with her arm through Vivian’s, and Diane and Anita walked behind them. Not until they had reached the corner of 10th Street did the three sighted women notice that a policeman was not allowing traffic to continue on down 10th. Once on 10th Street, they could see a crowd of people on both sides of the street and the fire trucks about midway up the block. And when they got closer, they could see Reverend Saunders and his wife, their heads high above all the others, even the firemen who hurried about them. Counsel, for once, had been early and he stood beside the couple.

Counsel told them what had happened, and the three women could see that not one part of the small building had been saved. As he spoke, a mood of utter sadness swept over the four women. They did not think very much of Reverend Saunders’s work, but they did not believe that anything bad should ever happen to any of God’s houses.

“Well,” Counsel said in a voice only Vivian could hear, “that’s one excuse for a piano I have won’t have to coax some life into again.”

Vivian watched the reverend’s wife clinging to her husband, her face buried in the shoulder of his coat. There was a general stench of burnt wood, and above the murmurs of the crowds on both sides of the street, Vivian could hear the water falling through the charred skeleton of what was left of the church. She watched the water rain down and flow with black debris over the sidewalk into the gutter and the street. People stepped back from it. She could see clear through the church now into what had passed for a backyard. Now and then, a small burst of dark smoke would escape from the structure and dissipate a few feet above it. The busy firemen spoke to each other as if they had all been raised together from birth.

Reverend Saunders turned around and took note of the four women. He shook their hands and he thanked them for coming. And then the members of his church came up to the women and they, too, thanked them for coming. Most of the members were women who were nearly as old as Maude. Vivian could see that most of the women had been crying and it tore into her heart. From program to program, she never remembered any of them except in some vague way, and whenever she happened to meet one of them in any other place on any other day she was never able to recall from where she knew them.

The firemen were now packing up to leave, rolling up the fire hoses and taking off their suits. The fireman who seemed to be in charge came to Reverend Saunders and said a few final words to him, then he went back to helping his men. The sun was at the top of the sky. In a voice loud and undeniable, Reverend Saunders asked his people to pray and everyone on both sides of the street fell silent. Some of the firemen would occasionally stop what they were doing for a second or two, but for the most part, they continued on.

When the prayers were done, Reverend Saunders asked the Gospelteers to sing one song.

“Vi, I feel ‘Amazin Grace’ in my heart right now,” Maude said. The four women locked their arms and began to sing, and again the people fell silent. And though he did not usually sing, Counsel joined the four women.

“We gonna build us another one, Sister Slater,” Reverend Saunders said when the hymn was over. “And I hope yall will come to sing at the dedication.” His words still had a touch of that boastful quality. He turned back and took a few steps toward what was left of the church, and his wife, her arm still in his, followed. “Everything is a sign from the Master,” he said to no one in particular. Vivian could see, for the first time ever, that he was no longer a young man. “And maybe tomorrow or the next day, I’ll figure out what it is.” His wife had not said a word the whole time.

The group now had a few hours before the program at Holy Tabernacle. Counsel had parked near Vivian’s Cadillac and he walked the four women to the car. Though none of them was very hungry, they decided to go to the Florida Avenue Grill, because Anita’s aunt was a waitress there. Counsel told the women he would meet them at the church. Vivian warned him not to be late and Maude, teasing, told him not to bring one of his women along.

The second assistant pastor and a deacon at Holy Tabernacle greeted the Gospelteers just outside one of the dressing rooms in the basement just off 14th Street. The hall was crowded with groups going in and out of other dressing rooms and offices being used as dressing rooms. Vivian could see Counsel at the end of the hall, where he was conversing with a young woman in the corner.

That Sunday was the last day of a month of festivities inaugurating the new head pastor, Reverend Melvin Ritter, the son of the last pastor, Reverend Louis Ritter. The older man had turned over most of his duties to his son a year before, and he began spending most of his time at a home he and his wife had bought in North Carolina, where he had been born and raised and where God had called him. Six months before he had gone for a walk in the dark and drowned in the river that bordered their property.

Upstairs, the old man’s son was speaking to those assembled in the church, and he was telling them about his father and the river. There were speakers installed in just about every ceiling corner of the building and the son’s words rained down on the people in the basement hall and in the rooms.

As the Gospelteers got ready in their dressing room (they were to be the third group to sing, after the Watchers, and Jesse Mae Carson and the Heavenly Choir), they remembered the day a year before when the old man had been preaching and had seemed to lose his way. The women and Counsel and members of a few other groups had been waiting in one of the back halls that led to the church when they heard the old man grow silent. At first they thought the speakers had malfunctioned, but they heard him breathing loudly. Then he said, “Mother,” which was what he called his wife.

Vivian had gone to the hall door leading into the church and had seen the old man absently flipping the pages of his Bible. He said “Mother” once more, took up the Bible, walked to the edge of the pulpit, and extended his hand, as if for help, to his wife. Only those near him could hear him say “Mother” yet again. She got up from her place in the Amen Corner, came to him, and led him back to a seat behind the lectern and just in front of the church’s choir. Eventually, the second assistant pastor, a deacon, and his wife helped the old man out of the church. The old man’s son had come to help his father as well, but his mother shook her head and pointed to the pulpit. The old man and his wife and one of the pastors and the deacon passed by Vivian. The old man’s eyes gave her nothing, and though they were leading him, she could see that his legs were still strong. His son, who was then the first assistant pastor, went to the pulpit.

“Did you see what Jesse Mae was wearing?” Diane said now. The room was not very big but it was large enough to accommodate two dressing tables, a lounge chair, and a settee. “I tell you: If Jesus gave out seats in heaven accordin to how good a dresser you are, she’d go straight to hell.” She sat at one of the tables and Anita was at the other. Vivian was helping Maude button her gown.

“What did she have on?” Maude asked. “Somebody tell me what that little hussy had on.”

The words of the old man’s son came out of the speaker. He said that the river where his father had died was the same one he had swum in as a boy, and it was the same one where he had been baptized.

“Fur,” Diane said.

“Fur?” said Maude. “You mean a fur coat?”

“No, fur trim, Maude. Fur for her collar. Fur round the sleeves. Fur round the hem a that gown a hers.”

“Everybody in the group wearin gowns like that?” Maude asked.

“You kiddin?” Vivian said. “She wouldn’t be the Queen of Sheba if she let everybody wear what she has on.”

Jesse Mae Carson and her Heavenly Choir had the greatest reputation of any gospel group in Washington. They were wealthy enough to have paid to cut three record albums with a D.C. company. To sell the records Jesse Mae’s great-grandson would set up a table in the lobbies of the churches where they were singing and offer as a bonus a photograph of the group that had been autographed by Jesse Mae herself. Jesse Mae was eighty-eight years old and stood four feet and some inches high. A person had to stand very close and look real hard to find even one line on her face. She hadn’t sung with the group for more than fifteen years, but would stand before the group and, like a conductor, guide the Heavenly Choir through their numbers. She had had eight husbands. “All of them legitimate,” she had told a radio interviewer once. “God,” she said, “don’t mind you havin a vice. He just don’t want you to abuse it.”

“What color is the gowns they wearin?” Maude wanted to know of the Heavenly Choir.

“Blue, I think. Some kinda blue,” Vivian said. When they wanted to tease her, Vivian’s friends would call her Little Jesse Mae or Jesse Mae, Jr., because she had had five husbands, three “legitimate” and two common-law.

Upstairs, Reverend Ritter had finished his remarks and was introducing the Watchers, a group of five men, all over sixty, who had been his father’s favorite. The Watchers set into “Oh, What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” As the group went into “Deep River,” Anita suggested that she and Maude go on out and catch up on the gossip as they made their way upstairs. “If we see that hussy,” Maude said to Anita, “just turn me loose. Don’t try to hold me back, child.”

Deep River, my home is over Jordan—

“Ain’t nobody in the world can sing that like them,” Diane said of the Watchers. “I musta heard a hundred people sing that spiritual over the years. And they the only ones to give me the goose bumps.”

“Know what you mean,” Vivian said. She rarely had anything to say about any other group, but the Watchers, being older and male, were not in competition with the Gospelteers. “Me and you might as well make our way too. You got the key?” Diane nodded and locked the door after them. In the hall, Jesse Mae was talking to Anita.

The Watchers sang:

Oh, chillun, oh don’t you want to go to that gospel feast

That promised land, that land where all is peace?

“I know, I know,” Anita was saying. “It does sound nice, but I keep telling you I’m happy where I am.”

Vivian came up and put her arm around Anita’s shoulder. “Still trying to steal you away, huh?” she said to Anita.

“Not steal, Vi,” Jesse Mae said. “Just…how do I say it? Just…entice. Ain’t that right, baby?” and she winked at Anita. It was said that Anita had a voice beautiful enough to lure the angels down from heaven. Gospel groups up and down the East Coast envied Vivian for having her in the Gospelteers, and for more than a year Jessie Mae had been trying to get Anita to come over to the Heavenly Choir. She had sent her copies of her group’s record albums, lists of the churches along the East Coast where they had sung in recent years, and pictures of the group posed before landmarks in other cities and standing with well-known politicians and soul singers and athletes. And with all she sent, there was always a note that ended, “I look forward to seeing you the next time. Forever Yours in the Lord….”

But Anita had never once wavered in her desire to stay with the Gospelteers, and Vivian took heart from this. Some days, as she sat in her office at the Agriculture Department, she would think of Anita arrayed in the pasture-green gown the Gospelteers wore on the fourth Sunday. She would be solo, standing just in front of the other women acting as chorus, and Anita’s voice would take hold of the church and all the people in the church would be telling her to bring it on home, bring it on home, child.

“Oh, Jessie Mae, why don’t you just give it up,” Diane said. “You just gonna have to face the fact that Vivian got you beat on this one.” It sometimes irritated Vivian that Diane, of all people, came to her defense.

Jessie Mae offered each of the four women a practiced smile, a patient smile a tired adult gives a small child who has said one too many absurd things.

“And how is Ralph?” Jessie Mae asked Vivian. “Still handsome as ever? My my my.”

“Yes,” Vivian said. “Still the most handsome in the world. Still the best in the world.” She had told no one that Ralph was dying.

Jessie Mae wished them well with their program and went to be with her group. Vivian and Diane spent the remaining time in the dining hall, sipping tea. The portraits of all the church’s pastors were on the walls, and near the door to the kitchen there was the place where Reverend Louis Ritter’s picture would be one day.

The congregation applauded generously when the Gospelteers came on. Vivian stepped forward and told the congregation that the group would be singing some of the favorites of Mahalia Jackson, and the congregation broke into applause again. Anita would be singing the first songs solo, and the young woman took Vivian’s place in front of the group. She looked briefly at Counsel and he nodded once and began to play. Anita closed her eyes for a few seconds and began to sing as she always did — for God and for her father. Once, as she was singing at the Virgin Mother Baptist Church on Kentucky Avenue, Jesus had come down the aisle and sat down in a pew near the front. He told her that her voice pleased him. He had said no more than that, but she had taken his words to mean that he forgave her for living with John without marriage. And each time she saw her father, who would not forgive her, she wanted to tell him what Jesus had done and said. But she could not create the words. Perhaps the words were in the music, but it did no good, because her father did not come anymore to hear her sing.

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.

She could still see him…. How much more grandness, beyond the gesture with the hat, was there to him? Her heart ached to know, and with both hands she held tight to the steering wheel, as if she were in danger of being swept away on some swelling tide. She did not want to think, though the words took shape and went in and sat down beside the man in his car — she did not want to think that God did not make such men anymore. And that if he still did, he should waste them all upon women like Diane McCollough.

She could see him, and slowly the image of him as she knew she would find him took hold. She could see him — asleep in the same chair she had left him in that morning: Perhaps the Sunday newspaper would be scattered at his feet, and maybe the wobbly TV-dinner table would be empty, for he would not want to bring down her wrath by keeping the remains of his dinner in the living room. Perhaps, too, he might have peed on himself again. And the television would be on, as it had been all day, but aside from a football score here and there, he would not be able to remember what he had seen throughout the day. But the wobbly table would not be empty — a few empty beer cans and one that would be half empty, along with his bottles of medicine and a tablespoon with which to take the liquid one.

A few people came and went about her, but the snow now covered the windows of her car and all she could make out were shadows moving about. She could hear voices, but she could not understand any of what people said, as if all sound were being filtered by the snow and turned into garble. She could not anymore read her watch, but she continued to tell herself that in the next minute she would start up the car and go home to Ralph. In the end, it grew cold in the car, and colder still, and at first she did not notice, and then when she did, she thought it was the general condition of the whole world, owing to the snow, and that there was not very much she could do about it.