Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [80]
She asked: ‘And what you going to do, Richard? What you want to be?’
And his face clouded. ‘I don’t know. I got to find out. Looks like I can’t get my mind straight nohow.’
She did not know why he couldn’t—or she could only dimly face it—but she knew he spoke the truth.
She had made her great mistake with Richard in not telling him that she was going to have a child. Perhaps, she thought now, if she had told him everything might have been very different, and he would be living yet. But the circumstances under which she had discovered herself to be pregnant had been such to make her decide, for his sake to hold her peace awhile. Frightened as she was, she dared not add to the panic that overtook him on the last summer of his life.
And yet perhaps it was, after all, this—this failure to demand of his strength what it might then, most miraculously, have been found able to bear; by which—indeed, how could she know?—his strength might have been strengthened, for which she prayed to-night to be forgiven. Perhaps she had lost her love because she had not, in the end, believed in it enough.
She lived quite a long way from Richard—four underground stops; and when it was time for her to go home, he always took the underground uptown with her and walked her to her door. On a Saturday when they had forgotten the time and stayed together later than usual, he left at her door at two o’clock in the morning. They said good night hurriedly, for she was afraid of trouble when she got upstairs—though, in fact, Madame Williams seemed astonishingly indifferent to the hours Elizabeth kept—and he wanted to hurry back home and go to bed. Yet, as he hurried off down the dark, murmuring street, she had a sudden impulse to call him back, to ask him to take her with him and never let her go again. She hurried up the steps, smiling a little at this fancy: it was because he looked so young and defenceless as he walked away, and yet so jaunty and strong.
He was to come the next evening at supper-time, to make at last, at Elizabeth’s urging, the acquaintance of Madame Williams. But he did not come. She drove Madame Williams wild with her sudden sensitivity to footsteps on the stairs. Having told Madame Williams that a gentleman was coming to visit her, she did not dare, of course, to leave the house and go out looking for him, thus giving Madame Williams the impression that she dragged men in off the streets. At ten o’clock, having eaten no supper, a detail unnoticed by her hostess, she went to bed, her head aching and her heart sick with fear; fear over what had happened to Richard, who had never kept her waiting before; and fear involving all that was beginning to happen in her body.
And on Monday morning he was not at work. She left during the lunch hour to go to his room. He was not there. His landlady said that he had not been there all week-end. While Elizabeth stood trembling and indecisive in the hall, two white policemen entered.
She knew the moment she saw them, and before they mentioned his name, that something terrible had happened to Richard. Her heart, as on that bright summer day when he had first spoken to her, gave a terrible bound and then was still, with an awful, wounded stillness. She put out one hand to touch the wall in order to keep standing.
‘This here young lady was just looking for him,’ she heard the landlady say.
They all looked at her.
‘You this girl?’ one of the policemen asked.
She looked up at his sweating face, on which a lascivious smile had immediately appeared, and straightened, trying to control her trembling.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Where is he?’
‘He’s in ja