Chapter 6
Through the Looking Glass
Yes, in the next year, more than a century after the Emancipation Proclamation! How long does it take to get the law, claimed and voted upon by the greatest democracy on Earth, to come alive? How long, O Lord?
The Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes. The Magna Charta and the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Emancipation Proclamation. All alight in a literate nation. All saying the same. All self-evident. All reasonable. All rational. All plain.
So who cares? But the hosing had caught Fits Jr.’s attention. Like the post-Civil War carpetbaggers, he saw an opportunity. So he enlisted Oliver in his campaign, as he had squeaked into the Whitehouse by margin given him by his promises to black people, and by adults and young people who felt he was cute or saw he was young or both, and by Jewish people to whom he promised to support oppression in Canaan, by a narrow margin of many small people. Oliver, of course, knew what was up, and didn’t officially endorse him, but he kept quiet and let him win, and held Linden to his word for the Civil Rights Act.
Of course black voters might not have been so docile to such presidency, had they been permitted to learn to read. But Oliver turned Fits Jr.’s narrowness into a broad jump across the line the governor of Alabama had drawn in the dust, a broad leap for the literacy that can keep such private prying out of power. So, onward Oliver marched to St. Augustine, an American city named for an African saint. As Lev said, it isn’t all about the French. Neither is it all about Alabama. Oliver was after Columbus.
The most beautiful monument in the Puritans’ Boston is that bronze statue of Mary Dyer. The most beautiful monument in the Conquistadores’ St. Augustine is a bronze statue of Isabella, the Spanish queen who sent Columbus here. Mary is seated in serenity, while Isabella is seated on a mule as a servant assists her down a treacherous mountainside. Ponce de Leon founded St. Augustine, seeking the fountain of youth.
Symbolism is rampant, ramping down the rocky path through Columbus’s second voyage, with the seeker of the fountain of youth whose name means lion bridge, to the primroses and other flowers of Florida, and on through the birth of a nation, to modern St. Augustine. The horror of it is what Oliver found at the end of that primrose path to that oldest of lived-in American cities, that city named for Augustine of Numidia.
The French colonized Numidia, which is now called Algeria and is still full of French influence. Oliver found horror in St. Augustine, more horror than in any other place he’d traveled. He found it in the streets and in the courts.
“Racism is more rampant here than in any other place I’ve seen,” he replied.
He could hardly do anything there. Beatings and killings were commonplace, and the state judiciary supported it, even more than in Alabama. One of Oliver’s nineteen stays in jails of these United States was there, and no one could get him to speak about what happened to him there, not even Theresa. How horrible it must have been, to keep Oliver quiet about it. Somehow Oliver failed in St. Augustine, and he did not return.
Instead, he moved on to Selma. But Oliver, like Odysseus, is never at a loss. So he used whatever he learned from Saint Augustine to make Selma a success without a sacrifice of children, but not without beatings and bloodshed of others. Lev, cared he not more for peace than for war, would have admired what the governor’s gendarmes did to Oliver’s people as they tried to march to Montgomery to try to take Theresa’s movement one more step. The police let the people cross a bridge just outside their city of origin, then turned them back and attacked them on it, as they tried to retreat.
Police on horseback, like Cossacks and hussars, stormed onto the bridge and into the acquiescing people, flailing and clubbing, on national TV. Like Fits Jr. in Birmingham, Linden refused support for that march, but this time TV forced him to support another attempt a few days later, with Theresa and Oliver together heading the final steps of this march. The final steps were in Montgomery to the Alabama capitol, while the governor skulked inside, as the people crossed his line. So televising the bridge at Selma set the momentum for the voting rights act of that year.
So we'd long lost need for Fits Jr. And that was fortuitous, because I’d had him killed as soon as he’d committed his political party to the momentum that pushed through our legislation. Fits Jr. was gone, and the mighty stream rolled on.
No, we didn’t have Fits Jr. killed for the United States civil rights movement, but his death didn’t hurt the momentum. The voting rights act went through as a Fits Jr. dream before Linden was settled, and the momentum kept Linden a little in Oliver’s corner from then until Linden did himself in with Vietnam. We knew we wouldn’t have to kill Linden, just let him commit himself to his political suicide, but we had to kill Fits Jr. to save the world from nuclear destruction by his hubris. That would have stopped all Earthlings’ movement, or at least all humans’. We couldn’t think of that as sporting.
Anyway, my main motive in killing Fits Jr. was more personal, and in a sense for civil rights. For me the main motive was what that overweening little prideful drug-soaked spine-broken sliver of humanity did to Beatrice’s friend Norma Jean. Oliver and Slavey, having been knights of Charlemagne, agreed for similar reasons, for the memory of Arthur, and Guinevere. You remember I mentioned Norma Jean in New Orleans.
Norma Jean’s life was tougher than any of ours, even tougher than Slavey’s. Her mother was a Bourbon Street stripper, in one of the bars where Beatrice’s father kept track of the cash for things like that, prostitution and drugs. Norma had no notion who her father was, and she had little notion who she was.
In this, Beatrice showed early how different she was from her siblings. Beatrice’s siblings made a sort of hobby of trying to think of reasons to call other people stupid, and they found that easy with Norma Jean. Norma Jean was blonde, because her mother bleached her hair, and blondes then in the United States were supposed to be dumb. So Beatrice’s siblings decided Norma was dumb and said so, to anyone who listened. They said it to Norma, to her unhappy face.
Beatrice, however, listened to Norma, and Beatrice spoke to me, and I’ve always listened to Beatrice, and so I also listened then to Norma Jean, and so Norma became my friend as well. I listened so well, and she spoke so well, that we might have become more than friends, were I not already in love with Beatrice. Norma liked me because I told her I was going to learn to fly.
“Men don’t let women learn to fly,” she said. “Do you think it’s because we’re too flighty?”
She laughed aloud with a bright ha ha that made me wish to weep.
“You fly like a bird already,” I answered. “Please don’t ever let them clip your wings.”
“I read somewhere,” she replied, looking at me with a little scowl, “that British men call women birds. Do you think that’s why?”
For that, I had no answer, and then she had a long way left to fly, and she spread her wings early, because she had to. The drugs and prostitution got the best of Norma’s mother early, and took her to a mental institution. Slavey wept when I told him about it, for his Earth mother and for all of us.
Anyway, there was nothing dumb about Norma. She was sixteen years old and had a choice of going to an orphanage or getting married, and she was smart enough to seek advice before she decided. Having hardly any friends, she turned to Beatrice. They talked on a bench, before the cathedral.
“What do you think of marriage?” asked Norma.
“I think it must be nice,” answered Beatrice.
“How?” asked Norma.
“Well,” answered Beatrice, “kissing is nice. But it’s more than that. It’s an important job, raising children. Nothing on Earth is more important than making sure that people grow up to be happy being good for each other.”
“My mom says I should be a movie-star,” said Norma. “That’s why she bleaches my hair. She says girls should have fun, not be tied to a man.”
“I guess,” said Beatrice. “If that’s what you want. But I don’t see it as being tied to a man. I see it as being tied with a man, having fun together.
“I love being a girlfriend, and I love my boyfriend. You like him, and he says we’re going to be president of the United States, and I believe him. I believe him, because I believe that together we can do it, and it will be we, not only he.
“I’ll spend more time with our children than he will, and he’ll spend more time with his cabinet than I will. But we’ll make decisions and plan for both together, because we love each other and understand each other and care about all others also.”
“What about church stuff?” asked Norma Jean.
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Beatrice.
“I mean you go to church. You don’t go to this church here, the nuns’ church. But you go to your Presbyterian church every Sunday, you told me. If a person doesn’t have a church, how can a person get married? And, if you can, does it count?”
“I think marriages are made in heaven,” said Beatrice. “But I don’t think that means they’re always made in church. Jesus didn’t have a church, and he preached the Sermon on the Mount beneath the open sky in a field of wildflowers, lilies and such.”
“I know,” said Norma. “I tried to go to church a few times, but I couldn’t get myself to keep doing it. I didn’t have any money, and they passed a plate and talked about their building-fund or this fund or that fund, and I had to just pass the plate on.
“Every time I did it, the people next to me looked at me like there was something wrong with me, and maybe there is. I’m my mother’s daughter, and I love my mother and don’t think I’d love my father, because of what he did to my mother and me.
“And Mom’s going to a nuthouse, and I might be going next. At least that’s what the nuns say, when they think I’m not paying attention. But it isn’t that, and it isn’t the money that makes me feel there’s something wrong with church. It’s sickness there.
“I mean physical sickness. Every time I’ve gone to church, the preacher has asked the people to pray for sick people who couldn’t be there that Sunday because they were sick at home or in the hospital with pneumonia or cancer or some other craziness.
“I’ve read the Bible. I know it says that, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, all things are possible for you. And it tells about a woman with an issue who touches Jesus’s clothes and suddenly doesn’t have the issue anymore. It just stops.
“The Bible says that Jesus turned to the woman and told her that her faith had made her whole! If Jesus says her faith made her whole, why does the person writing that say at the same time that what made her whole was something leaving Jesus?
“I know that Jesus told the truth. When I was little, I was sick all the time, until I got sick of being sick and decided not to be sick anymore. I haven’t been sick since, and I don’t know why those preachers don’t preach the faith that Jesus taught.
“I wonder why something doesn’t come out of those preachers’ mouths to let those people with pneumonia or cancer or mumps or measles know their faith can make them whole, if they’d just muster a speck of it no larger than a mustard seed.
“I don’t get it. I know faith isn’t always easy. But I feel we should try.”
“I know,” said Beatrice. “I wondered that when my mom died. My dad wouldn’t go, but she took me and my brother and sister to church every Sunday. I think maybe she left us because she didn’t feel like she could handle other things, like bringing us up.”
Norma Jean began to weep, sobbing on the bench before the cathedral.
“So that’s why I go to church,” said Beatrice, laying an arm around Norma’s shoulders. “I keep hoping something can come out of my mouth, and that’s why I go to the Presbyterian church, instead of to the nuns’ church, to this cathedral.
“Protestant churches are called protestant because people can speak more freely there. The Catholics treat everyone as though the church knows something the people couldn’t understand, no matter how much intelligence or faith they have.
“Everything’s in the Gospels that anyone needs to know, but the Catholic Church treats it like it’s a big secret that people have to depend on the clergy to use. You’ve heard the stories some of the boys in the boys’ school tell. That’s a secret.
“You’re lucky you’re not a boy,” said Beatrice, hugging her friend.
Norma stopped sobbing and laughed at that.
“You’ll have to get rid of the headache medicine,” she said.
“What headache medicine?” Beatrice asked.
“Once when I was passing the plate,” answered Norma, “I looked into the purse of the woman beside me, when she was groping around for money to put in the plate. It was full of little bottles of different kinds of headache medicine.
“How’s that for faith? How are you going to cure yourself of cancer if you can’t cure yourself of a headache or even have enough faith to wait until it goes away? One thing I like about boys is that they don’t take a lot of headache medicine.
“Maybe not for long,” said Beatrice. “I heard a radio advertisement that said that you should take some of that headache medicine if you have a sprained ankle and want to play football. Think how your ankle will feel if you stop taking the pills.”
“That’s not funny,” said Norma Jean. “It reminds me of my mom. I read somewhere that taking headache medicine makes you get more headaches, too. I think some pain may come from people telling us something’s wrong with us they need to fix.”
“I know what you mean,” said Beatrice. “The pills do more breaking than fixing, and maybe so does the church.”
“I don’t think I could handle the orphanage,” said Norma. “With all those nuns, instead of Mom, to see and hear.”
So she took her faith to the river and found on the moonwalk a young Merchant Marine, fresh into the service and fresh off a freighter in the port of New Orleans. With his pockets full of port-money, they were married as quickly as Louisiana would let them be, and Norma was on a bus for Jimmy’s mother’s house in San Diego, while he went back to sea. Norma rolled out to California, while Jimmy sailed into the Gulf.
San Diego, Saint James. Somehow I’ve ever confused the two folk songs, “Saint James Infirmary” and “The House of the Rising Sun”, before and after Norma Jean. Norma graduated by her wiles from the prostitution of New Orleans to that other port in California, without so much as setting step in any Louisiana house of ill repute or knowing she was walking into her own morgue by way of a city named for angels.
And Norma was happy enough with Jimmy’s mother there. She got a job in one of those diners people think of when they think of the fifties, with the chrome-trimmed red-leather-topped swiveling stools and the little jukeboxes on the counter.
There, in light, from the electricity inside, from the sun outside the big front windows in daytime, and from the streetlights and the headlights of cars pulling up outside at night, she served pie from glass cases and stuck little green order-slips on a spindle on the sill of the window to the kitchen in smell of eggs and hamburger grease. Some might call that low in life, but it surely beat the bars of Bourbon Street.
And she was good at it. She balanced plates of salad and plates of French fries on her arms all day and after returned home to supper with her mother-in-law, a sad but smiling widow of the most-recently-ended world-war. Norma laughed and played Scrabble with her mother-in-law and waited for her Jimmy to come home from the sea. She listened to the radio, danced with herself in the little house, and waited.
You might wonder how I know all this. Being an immortal alien has its perks, and one is access to Heaven. Norma told me all this later, including that she loved her Jimmy also. His stops at home were heaven for her then.
They didn’t do much, Norma and Jimmy. It was mostly days on the beach and nights in bed. When she couldn’t get time off from the diner, he came there and hung around drinking coffee and playing the pinball machine, and playing the songs he knew she loved on the jukebox. She balanced the plates with glances at him, as he tilted the machine and swore, then quickly smiled at her. That for a time ‘til he was gone again.
One weekend, he drove her to Los Angeles, in a car he had bought for her and his mother, a Ford and not new, but a convertible. They put the top down and drove the coastal highway, the wind blowing through Norma’s hair she still kept blonde.
Riding up with him in the driver-seat, she saw the sea he traveled blue and white beyond the sand, and driving in the city she saw sights she’d never seen. She saw the large lawns of Beverly Hills, bigger and more-tended than any in the New Orleans garden district. She saw the houses of pink stucco like some dream she’d never known to dream. She saw herself and Jimmy stopping for a hotdog, as though they were in San Diego. She saw the waitress in the diner where they stopped.
“I wonder if they need someone,” she said.
“They could use someone,” said Jimmy. “Look at her.”
“She’s just seen better days,” said Norma Jean.
Back in her diner in San Diego, she kept her habit of not wasting time. She talked extra to every man in a car she saw to have Los Angeles County license plates. Next time Jimmy came home from the sea, she looked less at him when he played pinball. Her focus was more often elsewhere. She wasted less time waiting now.
“What’s wrong with you?” asked Jimmy, after a day of being ignored.
“What’ll you do if I end up looking like that waitress in Los Angeles?” she said.
“Paint you maybe,” answered Jimmy. “That’s what sailors do with old stuff.”
He laughed, but Norma didn’t, and next day the question settled quickly. A man of her new pink stucco dreams sailed in and wafted the tails of his pin-striped double-breasted suit as he sat on one of the chrome and vinyl saddles, spun around to the counter and plopped his porkpie hat on top of the little jukebox there. He looked around and ordered mincemeat pie, and coffee straight up, like a man.
He glanced around while Norma brought it, and he spoke before she did.
“That guy over there likes you,” he said to Norma Jean.
“Which guy?” she asked, a hand on the counter.
“That sailor playing pinball,” said the pink stucco dream.
“Sailors like every girl they see,” she answered. “That’s why they’re sailors. They just grab any breeze they can catch, and then sail on. It’d be nice if a flyboy would sail in here. Where are you sailing from?”
“I’m sailing from south of the border,” he said. “Land of beauty where gardenias grow. We’ve just finished filming a movie down there, just south of Tijuana. Now I’m flying back up to Hollywood, to cut it up and put it out. I mean we’re going to flower it out to the public. You want to be in movies?”
‘Yeah, sure,” said Norma, glancing at Jimmy, who was pretending he wasn’t paying attention, while the machine did nothing for his inattention, no ball in the slot, no nickel. “I’m a waitress, not a dreamer.”
“You’re a dreamer,” said the dream. “I’m going to say this quietly and quickly, so your boyfriend won’t come over here and pick a fight, because I don’t have time for it. You’re young, and all young people dream, and not all young people are as beautiful as daylight. You’re young and as beautiful as daylight, and I saw you before I opened that door, like a camera-lens clicking. I caught you smiling at that customer.”
The dream pointed a thumb at a customer at the end of the counter away from the pinball, and the dreamer scowled vowing not to smile now. Jimmy pulled a nickel from a pocket and put it into the machine, but he didn’t pull the knob. Norma made as if to turn away, looking at Jimmy, frowning. But the dream stopped her.
“Alright,” said the man. “Here’s the deal.”
With one hand, he pulled his wallet, from his inside coat-pocket. With the other, he moved his hat from the jukebox onto the stool on that side of him. He pulled a business-card from the wallet, and after it a hundred-dollar bill, with the same hand. He laid the bill upon the counter, and the business-card atop it.
“That’s in case you don’t do what I’m going to ask you to do,” he said. “I’m flying high enough for one day, and so I’m going to land here for tonight. Tomorrow, at 10:00 a.m., I’m going to come back here and park out front, and hope you’ll be there. If you are, we’ll go to Hollywood together, and I’ll make you a star.”
This was the first time she noticed him looking at her, and it was a warm look into her eyes, just as her scowl went away. He was scowling now, and she noticed that also, without a word. She looked down at the card and the money, as he rose from the stool.
“If you’re not here tomorrow, call me,” said the dream, now with its swagger gone. “Come see me. Come to L.A., whatever you want. I shouldn’t have said that I’ll make you a star. You’re a star already. I can just see it. I can see it.”
He still didn’t smile, and he turned away and walked out the door, waiting until he was outside before returning the porkpie hat to his head. Through the front window, Norma saw the Los Angeles license plate as he drove away. The car was a convertible, but not a Ford, and new. The top was up then, but it was down next morning.
After Norma cleaned out the cash-register, paying for the pie and coffee and getting change from the hundred-dollar bill, she turned and saw Jimmy leaning on the counter. She hadn’t seen him leave the machine, and now he was waiting for her with a sadness she had never seen in him. And this look into her eyes was fear.
“What was that guy talking about?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing,” said Norma Jean. “He said he’s a Hollywood hotshot and he’s going to make me a star. People like that come in here all the time. This ought to be a roadhouse. Probably some wacko drunk. Acting crazy, talking crap.”
“You’ll never need painting,” said Jimmy.
Next morning, Jimmy sailed back to the sea, and Norma Jean’s dumb blonde hair flew all the way to Hollywood, after rising late to say goodbye as well as she could to Jimmy’s mother. She thought she had to sneak away, and she didn’t think she had to sneak out much, having no star-clothing anyway. But still she thought she had to say good-bye, and so she did as well as she could. After eggs and coffee, she rose.
“I love you, Mama,” she said. “I’ll be a little late tonight.”
“I know,” said Jimmy’s sad mother. “Jimmy told me.”
Norma Jean didn’t look to see the look in the eyes of her mother-in-law or wonder how Jimmy had told his mother what no one had told him. A touch of the back of her hand to the back of the mother’s hanging limp at the skirt of her housedress was the best Norma Jean could manage before she left that little house, with one dress and one change of underclothes in a big straw handbag she’d bought in Tijuana, maybe for such an occasion. So Norma flew away again, with less excuse, or more.