Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [67]
Mother and Father waited outside the room. When they looked in again Coalhouse was on his knees beside the bed. His head was bowed and with his two hands he held the hand of Sarah. They retreated. Afterward they heard the sepulchral sounds of a grown man’s grief. Mother went home. She held the baby constantly. The family was devastated. They could not seem to keep warm. Everyone wore sweaters. Younger Brother fired the furnace. Toward the end of the week Sarah died.
26
The funeral was made in Harlem. It was lavish. Sarah’s coffin was bronze. The hearse was a custom Pierce Arrow Opera Coach with an elongated passenger compartment and a driver’s cab open to the weather. The top was railed with brass and banked with masses of flowers. Black ribbon flew from the four corners of the roof. The car was so highly polished the boy could see in its rear doors a reflection of the entire street. Everything was black including the sky. The street curved to a precipitous horizon. There were several town cars for carrying the mourners to the cemetery. The mourners were mostly musicians, associates of Coalhouse in the Clef Club Orchestra. They were Negro men with closely cropped hair, tightly buttoned dark suits, rounded collars and black ties. The women with them wore dresses that brushed the tops of their shoes, wide-brimmed hats, and small furs around their shoulders. When the mourners were in the cars and the doors were shut and the chauffeurs had got in behind their wheels, everyone heard a fanfare and there came up the street to take its place in the procession an open omnibus with a five-piece brass band in tuxedos. Coalhouse Walker paid for the funeral with the money he had saved for his wedding. He had secured a plot for Sarah through his membership in the Negro Musicians’ Benevolent Association. The cemetery was in Brooklyn. The band played dirges through the quiet streets of Harlem and all the way downtown. The cortege moved slowly. Children ran behind it and people on the sidewalks stopped to stare. The band played as the cars slowly crossed the Brooklyn Bridge high over the East River. Passengers on the trolley cars along the outer lanes of the bridge stood up in their seats to see the grand parade. The sun shone. Gulls rose from the water. They flew between the suspension cables and settled along the railing as the last of the cars went by.
27
Spring, spring! Like a mad magician flinging silks and colored rags from his trunk the earth produced the yellow and white crocus, then the fox grape, the forsythia flowering on its stalks, the blades of iris, the apple tree blossoms of pink and white and green, the heavy lilac and the daffodil. Grandfather stood in the yard and gave a standing ovation. A breeze came up and blew from the maples a shower of spermatozoic soft-headed green buds. They caught in his sparse gray hair. He shook his head with delight, feeling a wreath had been bestowed. A joyful spasm took hold of him and he stuck his leg out in an old man’s jig, lost his balance, and slid on the heel of his shoe into a sitting position. In this manner he cracked his pelvis and entered a period of declining health from which he would not recover. But the spring was joyful and even in pain he wore a smile. Everywhere the sap rose and the birds sang. Upstate, at Matteawan State Prison Farm, Harry K. Thaw nimbly jumped over a ditch in a road and stepped on the running board of a waiting Locomobile. He hooked his elbow about the roof post, gave an exultant cry, and the car drove off. Thaw escaped to Canada, leaving a trail of outraged waitresses and stunned hôteliers. He abducted and whipped a teenage boy—he was beginning to work out his problems. Eventually he came back across the border. He was discovered on a train near Buffalo and ran through the cars giggling and panting as police detectives set up pursuit. In the dining car he turned and threw heavy silvered individual coffeepots he plucked from the tables of astonished diners. He climbed