Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [56]
By this time, however, the course of events could not be changed. In the late winter Sarah said she would see Coalhouse Walker in the parlor. For days there was a flurry of preparation. Mother gave her one of her own dresses and helped her to take it in. She came downstairs, beautiful and shy. Her hair was combed and pomaded and she sat on the sofa with her eyes lowered as Coalhouse Walker Jr. spoke his formal conversation and played the piano for her. It was only when they were seen together that it became apparent he was a good deal older than she was. Mother insisted that the members of the family excuse themselves so that the courtship could go on in privacy. Nothing was speeded by this. After the visit Sarah looked irritated and even angry. She was slow to forgive, and in some peculiar way her stubbornness seemed the only appropriate response to his persistence. Sarah had attempted to kill her newborn child. Life was not something either of these people took carelessly. They lived in brutal subjection to their hopes and feelings. They suffered themselves. Mother’s Younger Brother understood this perhaps more clearly than anyone in the family. He had spoken to Coalhouse Walker just once but admired him immensely. He saw in the way the black man acted upon his intentions more manhood than he himself possessed. He brooded over this. Younger Brother understood the love in some hearts as a physical tenderness in that part of the body, a flaw in the physiological being equivalent to rickets of the bones or a disposition of the lungs to congest. He was afflicted with this and so was Sarah, colored though she was. He thought she was some displaced African queen; her very awkwardness as she moved suggested that it would be grace in another country. And the more reluctant she seemed to accept Coalhouse Walker’s offer of marriage, the more Younger Brother understood what a terribly afflicted heart she had.
But one Sunday in March, with the wind blowing softer and small brown buds visible on the branches of the maple trees, Coalhouse arrived in his shining Ford and left the motor idling. Neighbors in their yards came out to watch the strange intense black man, burly and correct, with his dark, dark eyes on the verge of crossing, and the beautifully awkward Sarah, wearing a pink shirtwaist and a black skirt and jacket and one of Mother’s wide-brimmed hats, as they walked under the Norwegian maples and down the concrete steps to the street. She carried her baby. He helped her into the car and got up behind the wheel. They waved to the family and drove off through the suburban streets to the farmlands at the north end of town. They parked at the side of the road. They watched a cardinal skim the hard brown earth, then beat its way to the highest thinnest branch of a tree. This was the day he asked her to marry and she accepted. The appearance of these magnificent lovers in the family’s life had been startling; the conflict of their wills had exercised an almost hypnotic effect.
22
And now Mother’s Younger Brother began again his trips to New York. He would work at his drawing table past the dinner hour and then catch an evening train. He had made friends of some ordnance officers on duty at the armory on Lexington Avenue and 34th Street. They complained about the Springfield rifle. They showed him their small arms and their grenade bombs. He knew immediately that he could design better weapons. He drank with the officers. He became known at the stage doors of several Broadway theatres. He stood in the alleys, like others, never so well-groomed as some of the older men, nor so carelessly handsome as the collegians from Princeton or Yale. But there was an intensity of expectation about his eyes that attracted a fair number of women. He was always so serious and unhappy that they were persuaded he loved them. They took him for a poet.
Still,