managing to get loose and seizing a brass lamp one of her relatives gave them for a wedding present and if Jinx hadn't seen the bitch lifting it to bring down on his skull he'd be knocked cold but he's got her, he's got her, he's got the bitch, walking her backward into the bedroom crying, Whore! Cunt! Dirty cunt! into her face as she's crying, Fucker! Shithead! Why don't you die. into his and they're wrestling together, Sissy's fancy clothes are being torn, the maroon wig knocked off, Jinx is saying, You no fit mother, I'm gonna take my boys from you, and Sissy screams, Anybody tries to take my children from me gonna have to kill me first, and them too! and on the bed amid the rumpled sheets and blanket Jinx is straddling Sissy's fleshy hips, Sissy is tearing at his undershirt, her long nails drawing blood from his nipples so suddenly his sweaty near hairless chest is gleaming blood and he knees her thighs apart, kneels between her thighs so swollen and primed to fuck it's as if his penis is hauling him down into her, grunting and pushing him down, down into her, her spread lips and the scratchy pubic hair she'd shaved off when they first were lovers so it's grown in uneven and she's clutching at him murmuring, Uhhhhhhh uhhhhhhh like she does, her spike heeled shoes now hanging from her ankles by their straps, her ankles locked behind his thrusting hips, and suddenly without knowing what he does Jinx is pumping his life into the woman, his fury into her, his hatred, his need to hurt, wormlike veins are standing out in his forehead, his lips bared from his teeth in a silent scream and Jesus how he'd like to draw blood from her how he'd like to kill her but all that will come of it is Sissy's wild rhythmic screams in another few seconds and her violent thrashing and pummeling and Jinx will go limp inside her, lost deep inside her, dead suddenly, collapsed on top of her heated body, limp and discarded. his breath whistling thinly as he sinks into something like sleep.
Jinx you crazy asshole you know I love you, huh, lion? You know you ma man her eyes purplish bruised but soft and damp and acquiescent You know I'm not serious, don't you, any crazy old thing I say? and Jinx Fairchild laughs saying, Nobody's serious, girl, naw, nobody.
It's a much folded, badly creased, yellowing document, this birth certificate: VERLYN RAYBURN FAIRCHILD born August 18, 1939, Hammond General Hospital, Hammond, New York. Contemplating it, Jinx Fairchild rubs his thumb repeatedly against the cheap embossed seal of the State of New York.
Strange: you expect your birth certificate to be a large document , the size of a diploma at least. But Jinx Fairchild's is small, the size of an ordinary sheet of tablet paper.
A pale glowering windy day, snowflakes blowing like tiny chips of mica.
Birth certificate carefully folded in his inside jacket pocket, Jinx Fairchild takes the bus uptown on this Saturday morning in November 1963 to the United States Army recruiting station on South Main Street and first thing he sees, shyly entering the office, is that the smartly uniformed man behind the counter, seated at a desk, is black. which he hadn't envisioned.
At once he's flooded with re lief.
Then the second amazing thing: this man Jinx Fairchild doesn't know, could swear he has never laid eyes on before, strong boned handsome face, skin dark as Jinx's own, a man in his mid thirties at least, is evidently from Hammond, for it seems he knows Jinx, or recognizes him: rising quickly to his feet, re aching across the counter to shake Jinx's hand, smiling, happy, deep booming voice: Iceman isn't it?
Something is wrong, something is happening.
Graice Courtney's one o'clock American literature class, held in a third floor lecture hall in the antiquated Hall of Languages, Syracuse University, a Gothic structure of fifteen foot cracked ceilings and falling plaster and violently clanking radiators, isn't dismissed so much as abandoned, shortly before 1:50 P. M. of this Friday in November: an undercurrent of mysterious unrest beyond the room, stray lifting voices, isolated shouts, running feet both in the corn dor outside and down in the quadrangle below have by degrees so distracted the gentlemanly professor at the lectern that he gives up on his commentary on Walt Whitman, goes to the door, opens it, turns back a moment later to announce to the fifty odd staring students in the room, It's an emergency the President has been shot.
After this, confusion.
In a crowd of others Graice Courtney makes her way downstairs and out of the building, unwisely taking the spiral staircase in the center of the building, a nightmare structure, narrow, creaking, vertiginous.
President? Which president? Graice and a companion are wondering.
The president of the university?
Then from all sides comes the news, disjointed and semi hysterical: it's Kennedy who has been shot.
President Kennedy, in Dallas, Texas.
In a motorcade. By a sniper. An assassin.
And others have been shot: the Governor of Texas?.. Vice President Lyndon Johnson?. Jackie Kennedy?
Has Jackie Kennedy been shot?
Are they all dying? Dead?
An armed uprising in Dallas, Texas: the John Birch Society no it's a Communist uprising.. Cuban attack. the rrorists Castro's re venge for the Bay of Pigs.
Breathless and strangely exhilarated, Graice is drawn with a stream of people, many of them from her American literature class into one of the dining halls off Walnut Avenue where the public address system is tuned in to network news, news from Dallas, deafeningly loud. Her quick darting eyes take in the fact, in itself alarming because unprecedented, that the university's rigid self contained world has been shaken: there are undergraduates jammed in beside their professors, professors jammed in beside their students; there are secretaries, maintenance workers, kitchen help in their white uniforms. a sprinkling of black faces, workers' faces, amid the sea of Caucasians. And how stiff and silent and expression less everyone is, like frightened children, like people crowded into the cabin of a sinking ship, and Graice breathless among them, wondering why she is here, who all these people are, listening as the radio broadcaster keeps up a continual stream of words in which certain key terms re cur: Emergency operation Parkland Hospital.. critically wounded.
.
neck wound. head wound lone sniper. not yet apprehended.
motorcade. Dealy Plaza Governor of Texas John Connolly wounded assassin not yet apprehended.
A girl beside Graice says, in a whisper, Oh, God, I just can't believe this, can you?
Graice says, No. Oh, no.
Though instructing herself carefully: It's nothing to you re ally, you're here with all these others the way, the other night, you were with the Savages and their relatives, but it's nothing to you re ally, if Kennedy lives, if Kennedy dies, if any stranger lives or dies.
Still, she waits out the news with the others, in dread.
Seeming to know that Kennedy must die: the phenomenon of such an event, so public an occasion, can only mean disaster.
She only hopes the lone sniper will not turn out to be black.
The President of the United States is dead. I re peat, President of the United States John F. Kennedy is Immediately, Graice Courtney turns to push her way out of the dining hall, out of this press of people, desperate to escape. Suddenly she must escape. The collective stunned silence, the downcast teary bright eyes, the first sobs and cries of, No, oh, no. She can't bear it, simply has to escape.
Out into the fresh cold November air where she can breathe.
As others are pushing in, frightened, excited, near hysterical, trying to gauge from Graice Courtney's face what has happened.
A girl whose name Graice knows but could not, at this confused moment, have said, cries, clutching at her arm, Oh, Graice, is he. ? Is he.
?
Graice draws away. She says, scarcely moving her lips, He's dead.
Stepping quickly out into the lightly drizzling rain, resisting the instinct to run.
Her eyes have filled with tears.
Angry tears: Hypocrite, liar, what has any of this to do with you!
She's climbing the steep hill up from University Place past the Hall of Languages with its tall narrow gaunt windows now back lit against the dimming afternoon light, past the Administration
Building whose windows too are lit, past Maxwell Hall where, on the wide fanning stone steps, several students, young men, stand talking quietly together, their accents foreign. She breathes in the sweet brackish air of late autumn, an odor of rot, of wet, of earth, of damp foliage and bark, heart pounding hard, senses keenly alert. So often, walking alone on this campus in the early morning or at dusk, she feels herself on the brink, the quivering brink of a revelation: but of what?
There's a needle fine cold rain falling on her uncovered head, soaking into her cloth coat. It's a handsome coat, a deep winey red, with black buttons, a stylish collar, but it's a cheap fabric and the lining has begun to rip, the relentless wind off Lake Ontario easily penetrates its seams. Alan Savage has said, gazing at Graice Courtney with his kindly, wondering eyes, How lovely you are, Graice, how flattering that color is to your skin.
Yes? Really?
How lovely. My love.
Really?
In Strouse Hall, where the Art History Department is located Graice runs up the stairs to the third floor, to doctor Savage's office, to the Journal office, with the vague intention of speaking with doctor Savage not about Kennedy's death, not that, that's too immediate, too raw, too public, too impersonal, but about. it isn't clear to her yet. but she believes that when she sees him and he grasps her hand in his, in both his hands, as he does, saying, smiling, in that voice of absolutely genuine pleasure, Why, Graice! How good to see you, and how well you're looking! she'll know then what she wants to talk with him about, what issue must be decided.
I don't love your son but I love you.
I don't love Alan Savage but I love. Savages.
Yes, I love Alan Savage, he is one of you.
And I love, I love, I love. you.
missis Savage will embrace her, missis Savage is a sof:£ melting lovely woman, she'll be grieving for Kennedy and for his widow and when she and Graice are together soon: tomorrow evening she'll certainly want to embrace Graice Courtney, her son's young woman friend, her own dear young friend, and, yes, they'll very likely weep together over this national tragedy.
Though, as Alan Savage has several times pointed out, missis Savage is after all a Makepeace from North Carolina: there's a deep conservatism bred in her bones regarding liberals, Negroes, government interference in private lives.
The door to Byron Savage's office is shut, however, and locked, of course it's locked; Byron Savage is away in London, lecturing at the Courtauld Institute.
As Graice Courtney must know, since she'd helped him prepare for the trip, assembled and annotated his numerous slides.
As Graice Courtney must know, since only the other evening at the Savages' Byron Savage's absence was conspicuous, and missis Savage said, Don't we all miss Byron? This house is so placid without him.
And the door to the office of The Journal of art and Aesthetics is locked too, a disappointment to Graice; she'd hoped perhaps to begin work a little earlier that afternoon now that classes are canceled for the day, now that time seems to have pleated in a way that frightens and exhilarates her, as in a protracted eclipse of the sun. She's eager, it might be she's desperate, to get inside the office to sit at her familiar little table to resume proofreading galleys for the next issue of theJournal the previous afternoon she'd been forced to break off in the middle of a difficult and much footnoted article on Caravaggio 's The Last Supper at Emmaus this past year she's become nervously irritated if forced to break off any task before its satisfactory completion. Sometimes she discovers an actual eruption on her skin, thin weltlike rashes on her forearms, on the soft skin of her wrists.
Her skin is becoming as sensitive as Alan Savage's.
So you're a perfectionist, Graice! missis Savage has observed, with her chiding, affectionate smile. Just like Byron and Alan. I wish you would all keep in mind, perfection can lacerate the heart.
Can it?
For some minutes Graice Courtney simply stands with her hand on the doorknob of the door to the office of The Journal of art and Aesthetics, Room 346, Strouse Hall. She is not thinking of anything, not even of the assassination, not even of the practical fact that she might go home to her room on South Salina Street and crawl into bed with the covers over her and wait out this strange and inexplicable arousal of her soul this sense of loss and of lostness, true terror.
She might do that. She might give herself up to tears.
And: Alan Savage will be coming to see her that evening, at least that was their plan; he'll take her out to dinner, he wants to discuss something serious with her, his future plans, her future plans, too long nebulous But the prospect of re turning to that room fills Graice with dread.
