This Proud Heart (35 page)

“Blake, Blake!” she cried in herself. She wanted his hand, his touch, his presence, anything to push away this knowledge that she was born a solitary.

“I’d never have been happy if I had never married, if I hadn’t had the children with Mark, and if I hadn’t known what it is to be Blake’s beloved.” It was the old story, she thought half sadly. She had to have everything. And then everything was not enough. Still there was herself, solitary at the core.

“I’ve got to stick this out,” she thought. “I know what I am.” When Mark died it was her will that first began to work—her will, her will! She took up her tools and put them down, the fine strong mallet, the chisel with its exquisite edge. Pencils and paper—she hung the great sheets on the walls and sharpened her pencils. Then she sat down again, staring at the incomparable marbles, and thinking only of Blake. She wanted to run back to him, to see what he was doing, to make sure there was he. But she would not. She would love Blake with all her heart, but for her love could not be an end. It must build into something which was larger than either of them, larger than love. She could not give herself up, because part of her could never be given, however she willed it. Unused, it remained apart to die, and by its death to poison all of her being. Let her remember that terror.

When she went home at noon she was spent and exhausted, but her will was stirring. She braced herself against Blake’s anger. She was ready to tell him plainly, “Blake, perhaps I ought not to have married you. But this is how I am and must be, and if you can’t love me, I must still go on being what I am.”

But he was not angry at all. He came out to meet her from the long drawing room, and smiled at her with all his earliest charm.

“Did you have a good morning, Susanne?” he asked, and hurried on, not waiting for her answer. “I had a wonderful morning—something inspired me. It does me good to hate you, I think!” His voice was so amiable she laughed with relief.

“Did you hate me, Blake?”

“A little,” he said gaily. “Now I love you again. Come and see what I have done!”

He took her lightly by the elbows and walked with her up the stairs. She thought, “Why am I so silly and serious? He forgot me at once. How I shall work tomorrow!”

He opened the door of his studio and there, facing them, stood a hissing cat, in terra cotta. It spurned the pedestal, arched and angry, its claws spreading, full of grace and smartness.

“Oh, Blake!” she cried.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” he said eagerly. “I’m going to call it The Female!”

He laughed and pounced upon her with his kiss. She had wasted her morning, thinking of him. She would never do such a thing again, she promised herself fiercely, under his long kiss.

She had begun work first on the great block of Belgian black in spite of its treachery, because a huge Negress had come tiptoeing in the next morning, treading as lightly as a tigress. She opened the door and closed it softly. Susan, dreaming, waiting, saw her as she might see a vision. The woman was pure African. Her skin was glistening black, her mouth like a split blood orange, and all her body was huge and firm.

“Do you want a lady to clean?” she inquired, and her voice was a viola. “I cleans and washes for some of de bettah class folks on de otheh street.”

“Come in, please,” said Susan. “Tell me your name.”

“I’m Delia,” said the Negress. She came in and seated herself on a piece of white marble and laughed, her lips folding back over big white teeth. “I ain’t evah cleaned rocks before!” she said, laughing.

“Where did you come from?” Susan asked. “Who are you? Who were your ancestors?”

“I haven’t no ancestors,” Delia answered.

“You must have come from somewhere,” Susan urged her. “Your grandfather—”

“My grandpappy was in a fambly in Virginia. He come over the seas, they always said. My pappy he run no’th.”

“But. where were you born?” Susan asked. How had this African escaped the touch of white hands upon her blackness?

“I was born right heah in Noo Yauk,” she said cheerfully, “and heah I is. Ain’t nothin’ more to tell.” She paused, ruminating. “Onct I mahied a real white niggah, but I reckon he wuz too white. He wuz always hittin’ me. Anyways, he was trash. I ain’t seen him in yeahs. I’m goin’ to mahy a dark one sometime, but I don’t get around to it on account of my chillun takin’ so much time. I got six, and the youngest ain’t a yeah yit.”

The Belgian marble, of course, Susan was thinking, not hearing her. She sat silent, feeling this tremendous presence. Those great curves, those massive shoulders and breasts, the mountainous hips! “If I pay you twice what you get cleaning, will you let me make some drawings of you?” she asked.

“You mean just sit?”

“Yes.”

“I ain’t dressed fit to be seen. These is my workin’ rags.”

“I don’t want you dressed at all.”

“You mean—take off my cloes?”

“If you don’t mind,” said Susan.

Delia rose, shaking her head. “No’m, I ain’t nevah took off my cloes before a lady.” She paused, longingly, “Cudn’t I keep on a little somethin’?”

“Yes, of course,” said Susan.

“Kin you bar de do’?”

Susan turned the key.

“Well,” said Delia, and sighed. “I sho’ do need money. Turn yo haid away, honey.”

Susan turned her head.

“Now,” said Delia, “I sho’ do feel funny.”

She was sitting on a block of the white Paros marble, her hands on her great bare black knees, her head hanging, her shoulders hunched. “Sho’ do feel ridiklus,” she muttered.

Susan did not hear the woman. She was drawing upon the big sheets of white paper she had tacked upon the wall yesterday. She had chosen pencils and then she threw them down and took soft black charcoal. Delia stared at her.

“Do I look like dat, honey?” she wailed. “I sho’ have lost my figger!”

“You’re beautiful,” Susan whispered. “Beautiful—beautiful—” She was panting a little. Let her learn this body quickly that she might begin the marble! She drew for hours.

“I’se gettin’ mighty hongry,” she heard Delia say out of the distance. “I usually eats somepin’ befo’ dis.”

Susan looked at her watch. It was long after noon.

“Oh, I am sorry!” she cried. She found her purse and took out a bill. “There,” she said, “put your clothes on and go and have a good dinner.”

“Will I come to clean, Ma’am?”

“Yes,” said Susan. “Tomorrow. There’ll be a great mess on the floor by then.”

She looked at the drawings for a long time. Then she took them and tore them up. Her avid hands had already learned the curves of that black body and she did not want the drawings. They would only bind her with their boundaries. They were Delia. And she saw more than Delia. She would work direct in the marble, feeling not for simple Delia, but for that great dark female creature who, summoned from Africa to serve, poured the stain of her black blood into the white veins of a new America.

It was on this day she began her enormous black statue, one day to become so famous, of a sitting Negress, her legs apart, her hands holding up her full and aching breasts. She called it, from the first blow of the mallet upon the chisel into the marble, American Woman, Black.

… She looked up impatiently. She could no longer see. It was night. The room was darkening, and the darkness was drawing out of her hands this darker solid body. She could not see the outlines of the marble. She could only feel it with her hands. If only the night would not come to break this lifting rising surge of intense certainty of sight! She stood a moment in the dimness, feeling, feeling the creature she now possessed. Then she took off her smock and put on her coat and hat, and went half dazed out into the street and home. Her heart was singing light, though her arms ached. This strange secret lightness—it was sweeter than anything in the world, sweeter than love. It was fulfillment.

Here was a strange thing, she thought. She could do nothing under Blake’s eyes, or under old Mr. Kinnaird’s filmy gaze, but she did not mind in the least when these others came in to see what she was doing. Strange children stared in her window one morning, and going to see, she found they had walked along a narrow ledge and were clinging by their fingertips to the sill.

“Come in, if you like,” she called.

They had come to the door then, shuffling and pushing, breathing hard over each other’s shoulders.

“I’ll go on with my work,” she said. They stood staring. The head of the Negress was free now of the marble and she was beginning the outline of the thick shoulders.

“Chee,” said a hoarse voice, “it’s a dinge.”

“It’s for a grave,” said another. “I seen a cemetery once and they was lots of angels all made out of rock.”

“A dinge can’t be an angel!” a voice whispered scornfully. “Angels is white. I seen ’em at a Christmas show in Radio City!”

They stayed a few panting moments. “Come on, let’s go,” they whispered, “there ain’t nothin’ here.” In a body they were gone, having seen everything. She did not in the least mind them, she thought. Their eyes, so alive, so uncritical, had not disconcerted her at all. She began to sing under her breath, “Oh, that will be—glory for me!” The old deep satisfaction was creeping into every part of her being, like slow rain to the uttermost roots of a thirsting tree. She did not understand it or wonder at its quality. It was enough that it was so. She did not question her being.

She would like to have run to Blake eagerly with her joy. When two people love each other, the joy of one must be the other’s. But Blake was angry these days because his first exhibit of moderns was being ridiculed by one of the directors of the museum.

“But, darling,” she said, astonished at his rage, “so many critics have liked them.” He had sat surrounded with newspapers the morning after the exhibit opened, reading aloud to her at breakfast all that they had said. He read without embarrassment the bright neat phrases, “extraordinary, sharp facility,” “complete grasp of the abstract,” “easily the leading of our moderns.” And then old Joseph Hart had written to the
Times.
She came home, full of her elation, to find him furious. “I could sue him,” he kept saying. “How dare he call my things shallow? Smart—of course they’re smart! They’re meant to be. He’s an old fool. He wants us to keep on doing copies of Michael Angelo and the Greeks. He doesn’t realize that they were modern in their time and that’s why they lived. You’ve got to interpret your own age—it’s all you can know.”

“Darling, one old man!”

“There oughtn’t to be even
one
so stupid as that! Besides, he has influence. The
Times
shouldn’t have paid any attention to him.” Blake’s mouth was a hard line, his eyebrows twitching. He could not sit still. He kept pacing the long length of the drawing room. “I believe I’ll sue him for libel,” he said again.

“Blake, don’t be so foolish!” she exclaimed. “Why do you care?”

“Because I know I am right!” he shouted.

She thought he would never forget it. He was sullen for a week and with no appetite for food or work. Then one day when her patience was nearly gone, she had a letter from Paris. The Kneeling Woman had been rejected by the Salon.

“Damn them, how dare they?” Blake said without rancor. He smiled at her.

“I suppose it wasn’t good enough,” she said quietly, folding the letter. She had abandoned The Kneeling Woman, the woman she had made when she was first falling in love with Blake.

“Don’t you care?” he asked, curiously.

“Of course I care,” she said, “but nothing can stop me.”

“Anyway,” she added, “I feel finished with The Kneeling Woman.”

“Oh, well,” he said, “it’s probably politics there, too. You are a foreigner—the French are so close—Besides, you’re a woman, Susanne. You can’t expect—”

“What?” she inquired calmly.

“Quite as much as a man,” he finished, and for the first time in days he laughed. “Don’t you mind, Susanne,” he said with unusual gentleness, and she perceived with wonder and without caring to understand why that he was somehow comforted.

Spring came and she felt she had not known what spring was before. In the country spring came with a hundred first signs. Snow thawed into whirling streams, willow twigs greened, and under dead leaves pale shoots stirred upward and the changing winds blew winter back and forth. But here in New York it was winter and then one morning it was spring. She walked every day to her studio and now she knew many names to call. The dirty-faced janitor was Dinny King, and Mrs. King had come downstairs to see her one day, a twin on each arm. She had sat staring blankly while Susan worked and when she rose to go away she said, “Well, it’s good you’ve got the time for it, I says to Dinny. I cudn’t, mesilf, with all I have to do.”

She knew Larry and Pietro and Slavga, and Smikey talked to her sometimes and told her the names of others, pointing with a small filthy finger.

“Them’s Connigans and their dad’s dead. Name’s Minty and Jim. Jim’s been to reform, he has—That there’s Izzy—we don’t play wid him ever day—only when we wants to, see?”

“Doesn’t he mind?” Susan asked.

“He’s gotta take it,” Smikey said scornfully. Smikey alone was always very bold.

She learned fragments of stories from voices crying out of windows, from heavy thuds and weepings, from doctors and priests coming in and out. One morning a splayed creature lay on the sidewalk, and a policeman was roaring back the crowd.

“It’s ould Miz Brookes, on the top floor,” young Micky King told her. “She was always a-sayin’ she’d jump one foine day, and now’s she done it. Chee, but my dad’s sore at her, but he can’t do anything to her when she’s dead.”

It was a very fine day, a day so full of spring that it must have been too much for this white-haired twisted shape.

“Is there anything I can do?” she asked the policeman.

“No, Ma’am, unless ye can call off these young devils. Ye’d think it was a show put on fer ’em.”

“Come on, everybody,” she said, “let’s go down to the corner for ice cream.”

She led the way and, counting their heads, paid the soda clerk for an ice cream for each. When she went back the sidewalk was clean. The policeman was on his beat and people were tramping back and forth over where old Mrs. Brookes had lain.