For a moment they simply stared at each other. Another musician, entering the bar, passed between them. Then, Vivaldo said, “So there you are. I didn’t really believe you’d make it; I didn’t really believe you’d be back.”
“But I’m here,” said Eric, grinning, “now, what do you think of that?”
Vivaldo suddenly raised his arms and laughed — and the policeman moved directly behind him, glowering, seeming to wait for an occult go-ahead signal — and covered the space between himself and Eric and threw both arms around him. Eric nearly dropped the glass he was holding, for Vivaldo had thrown him off balance; he grinned up into Vivaldo’s grinning face; and was aware, behind Vivaldo, of Ida, inscrutably watching, and the policeman, waiting.
“You fucking red-headed Rebel,” Vivaldo shouted, “you haven’t changed a bit! Christ, I’m glad to see you, I’d no idea I’d be so glad to see you.” He released Eric, and stepped back, oblivious, apparently, to the storm he was creating. He dragged Eric out of the bar, into the street, over to Ida. “Here’s the sonofabitch we’ve been talking about so long, Ida; here’s Eric. He’s the last human being to get out of Alabama.”
The policeman seemed to take a dim, even a murderous view of this, and, ceasing to wait on occult inspiration, peered commandingly into the bar. The signal he then received caused him, slowly, to move a little away. But Vivaldo beamed on Eric as though Eric were his pride and joy; and said again, to Ida, staring at Eric, “Ida, this is Eric. Eric, meet Ida.” And he took their hands and placed them together.
Ida grasped his hand, laughing, and looked into his eyes. “Eric,” she said, “I think I’ve heard more about you than I’ve ever heard about any living human being. I’m so glad to meet you, I can’t tell you. I’d decided you weren’t nothing but a myth.”
The touch of her hand shocked him, as did her eyes and her warmth and her beauty. “I’m delighted to meet you, too,” he said. “You can’t have heard more about me — you can’t have heard better about me — than I’ve heard about you.”
They held each other’s eyes for a second, she still smiling, wearing all her beauty as a great queen wears her robes — and establishing that distance between them, too — and then one of the musicians came to the doorway, and said, “Ida, honey, the man says come on with it if you coming.” And he disappeared.
Ida said, “Come on, follow me. They’ve got a table for us way in back somewhere.” She took Eric’s arm. “They’re doing me a favor, letting me sit in. I’ve never sung in public before. So I can’t afford to bug them.”
“You see,” said Vivaldo, behind them, “you got off the boat just in time for a great occasion.”
“You should have let him say that,” said Ida.
“I was just about to,” said Eric, “believe me.” They squeezed through the crowd to the slightly wider area in the back. Here, Ida paused, looking about her.
She looked up at Eric. “What happened to Richard and Cass?”
“They asked me to apologize for them. They couldn’t come. One of the kids was sick.”
He felt, as he said this, a faint tremor of disloyalty — to Ida: as though she were mixed up in his mind with the colored children who had attacked Paul and Michael in the park.
“Today of all days,” she sighed — but seemed, really, scarcely to be concerned about their absence. Her eyes continued to search the crowd; she sighed again, a sigh of private resignation. The musicians were ready, attempts were being made to silence the mob. A waiter appeared and seated them at a tiny table in a corner next to the ladies’ room, and took their order. The malevolent heat, now that they were trapped in this spot, began rising from the floor and descending from the ceiling.
Eric did not really listen to the music, he could not; it remained entirely outside him, like some minor agitation of the air. He watched Ida and Vivaldo, who sat opposite him, their profiles turned toward the music. Ida watched with a bright, sardonic knowingness, as though the men on the stand were beating out a message she had commanded them to convey; but Vivaldo’s head was slightly lowered and he looked up at the bandstand with a wry, uncertain bravado; as though there were an incipient war going on between himself and the musicians, having to do with rank and color and authority. He and Ida sat very still, very straight, not touching — it was as though, before this altar, touch was forbidden them.
The musicians sweated on the stand, like horses, played loudly and badly, with a kind of reckless contempt, and failed, during their first number, to agree on anything. This did not, of course, affect the applause, which was loud, enthusiastic, and prolonged. Only Vivaldo made no sound. The drummer, who, from time to time, had let his eyes travel from Ida to Vivaldo — then bowed his head to the drums again — registered Vivaldo’s silence with a broad, mocking grin, and gestured to Ida.
“It’s your turn now,” he said. “Come on up here and see what you can do to civilize these devils.” And, with the merest of glances at Eric and Vivaldo, “I think you might have had enough practice by now.”
Ida looked into his eyes with an unreadable smile, which yet held some hint of the vindictive. She crushed out her cigarette, adjusted her shawl, and rose, demurely. “I’m glad you think I’m ready,” she said. “Keep your fingers crossed for me, sugar,” she said to Vivaldo, and stepped up on the stand.
She was not announced; there was merely a brief huddle with the piano-player; and then she stepped up to the mike. The piano-player began the first few bars, but the crowd did not take the hint.
“Let’s try it again,” said Ida, in a loud, clear voice.
At this, heads turned to look at her; she looked calmly down on them. The only sign of her agitation was in her hands, which were tightly, restlessly clasped before her — she was wringing her hands, but she was not crying.
Somebody said, in a loud whisper, “Dig, man, that’s the Kid’s kid sister.”
There were beads of sweat on her forehead and on her nose, and one leg moved out, trembling, moved back. The piano-player began again, she grabbed the mike like a drowning woman, and abruptly closed her eyes:
You
Made me leave my happy home.
You took my love and now you’ve gone,
Since I fell for you.
She was not a singer yet. And if she were to be judged solely on the basis of her voice, low, rough-textured, of no very great range, she never would be. Yet, she had something which made Eric look up and caused the room to fall silent; and Vivaldo stared at Ida as though he had never seen her before. What she lacked in vocal power and, at the moment, in skill, she compensated for by a quality so mysteriously and implacably egocentric that no one has ever been able to name it. This quality involves a sense of the self so profound and so powerful that it does not so much leap barriers as reduce them to atoms — while still leaving them standing, mightily, where they were; and this awful sense is private, unknowable, not to be articulated, having, literally, to do with something else; it transforms and lays waste and gives life, and kills.
She finished her first number and the applause was stunned and sporadic. She looked over at Vivaldo with a small, childish shrug. And this gesture somehow revealed to Eric how desperately one could love her, how desperately Vivaldo was in love with her. The drummer went into a down-on-the-levee-type song, which turned out to be a song Eric had never heard before: