Dorothy West, "Prologue to a Life" (1929)
IN 1896 Luke Kane had met and married Lily Bemis. He had been very much in love with her. And she had literally fallen at his feet, stumbling over his bicycle, lying flat before the back door, and sprawling before him, her full skirts billowing about her, and quite all of the calves of her legs showing.
Luke, in an instant, was out of the kitchen, and had gathered the hired girl in his arms, and was cursing his bicycle and soothing her in the same breath.
She was small and soft. Though her face was hidden against his breast, he saw that her arms were golden, and her dark hair wavy and long.
"Is that your old bicycle?" Lily asked tearfully. "You're fixin' to kill somebody." "Ain't I the biggest fool!" he agreed.
She got herself out of his arms and, sitting down on the steps, she tried to do things with her clothes and hair.
"What anybody'd put an old bicycle right in the doorway for—" But he was staring into her eyes.
"How long you been working for Miz Trainor?" "I've seen you before," she told him. "Lots." "Yeh? Don't you speak to nobody?" "Gentlemen to whom I been introduced. Oh, yes." "I'm somebody round these parts," he boasted.
"Ever heard of Manda Kane?" "Sure. We get our fancy cakes from her when we're having parties and things." "I'm her son," he informed her, proudly. "I been up here delivering. My name's Luke." "Yeh?" Her eyes were bright with interest.
Mine's Lily Bemis." "Come from the South?" "Born there. Yes. But I came up with the Mitchells when they came. That's been five years. But then old Miz Mitchell died, and the two girls got married. I never cared much for old Mister Mitchell, so I came on to Springfield.
'Cause Mamie Cole went on to Boston and said I could take her place here. I knew Miz Trainor was good and all, and didn't have no small children. So I sorta thought I'd try it. Gee, I'm young and everything. If I don't like it here, I can travel on." He plumped down beside her.
"Listen," he said softly, "I hope you'll like it here." Her eyes were two slits and dangerous.
"Why—Luke?" " 'Cause, then," he said huskily, "you'll stay. And I can be likin' you." She bent to him suddenly. "You're the funniest coon. Your eyes are blue as blue." "Yeh. It's funny, black as I am," he said modestly.
She put two slim yellow fingers against his cheek. "You're not black at all. You're just dark brown. I think you're a beautiful color." His eyes that were like a deep sea glowed with gratitude. "I sorta like yours the best." "Oh, me, I'm not much!" she said carelessly.
"What makes you think I'm pretty?"
"I dunno. You're so little and soft and sweet. And you ain't so shy."
She was instantly on her feet. "If you think I'm bold, sitting out here with you, when we never been introduced—" "Looka here!" He was on his feet, too.
"Women's the funniest things. I'm liking you 'cause you're not like everyone else, and you're bristling! I can have any girl in this little old town of Springfield I want. But I'm not making up to any 'cause I ain't found none that suited me. My mother's orful particular. We got a name in this town. You're the first girl I'm liking, and you're cutting up!" But she was inside of the screen door now, and he saw her hook it. She came very close to it, but she was careful not to press her nose against it.
"Listen, Mr. Kane, I like you, too. I want to meet you proper. What would folks say if they knew we met like this? Me with two buttons off my shirtwaist and my hair net torn? But tomorrow's prayer meeting night, and I'm going. I'm an A. M. E. If that's your church, too, you come on over. I'll get Miz Hill to get Reverend Hill to introduce us proper."
He gulped. "Can I bring you home after?"
She considered it. "Maybe I'll let you be keeping my company," she promised.
There followed a whirlwind month of courtship. Lily had a hundred moods. They were a hundred magnets drawing Luke. She did not love him. Deep within her was an abiding ambition to see her race perpetuated. Though she felt that her talents were of a high order, she knew she would escape greatness through her lack of early training. And she had the mother instinct. Thus she would rather bear a clever child. In her supreme egoism she believed the male seed would only generate it. She would not conceive of its becoming blood of her child's blood, and flesh of her child's flesh. Men were chiefly important as providers. She would have married any healthy man with prospects. . . .
* * *
Late in the summer Lily and Luke were married. Lily didn't want a church wedding. They were married in Reverend Hill's front parlor. Miz Hill and Manda Kane stood up with them. Ma Manda was tearful. She was losing her only son to a low-voiced yellow woman. She knew the inescapable bond of soft skin and hair.
Lily, standing quietly by Luke's side, felt a vast contentment. She respected the man she was marrying. She faced the future calmly. She only wanted their passion to be strong enough to yield a smart and sturdy son. Later that day they were on a train that was bound, by the back door route, for Boston. They sat in the coach with their little belongings piled all about them. Luke made sheep's eyes at Lily and felt very proud. He was wondering whether it was obvious that they had just been married.
He rather wanted the phlegmatic passengers to admire his golden bride.
He drew her round dark head on to his shoulder, and caught his hand in the tendrils of her hair.
"Guess I'm the happiest man in the world, and the proudest." "Ho, you're not proud of me!" "You are the moon and the stars, Lily, and the bright sun." She twisted her head and looked deep into his kind eyes.
"Luke, do you love me as much as that?" "You watch me," he told her. "I'll bring you the world on a silver platter. Lily, I'll make you jL queen." She rubbed her little hand up and down his arm.
"How much money we got now, Luke?"
"Enough," he boasted, "to live like millionaires for maybe a week in Boston."
"Luke," she said earnestly, "we're not going back. Ever."
He was pleased. "Our honeymoon will last wherever we are." She was almost impatient. "It ain't that! He drew away from her and stared down at her hard.
"What in the name of God—"
"Let's eat," she said, and dug about for Ma Manda's hamper.
She put the linen napkin on her lap and laid out the sandwiches, licking her fingers when the mayonnaise or jam or butter had oozed through.
"Chicken," she announced, "and ham, and I reckon this is po'k, Luke! "
He balanced the coffee on his knee. "There's cups somewheres, Lily." Presently they were hungrily eating, Luke almost wolfishly.
"We've caught our train," said Lily, with a little nervous laugh. He was making her rather ill.He took a great gulp of coffee.
"Always was a fast eater. Father before me was." Her hand tightened over his.
"You could die," she said with real concern, "of indigestion."
He ducked his head suddenly and kissed her wrist. "But I'll make you your million before I do." Thus she let him go back to his eating, and she gave him an almost indulgent smile.
Once in the vast South Station they stood for a moment, bewildered. They both felt newly married and foolishly young. Lily had a sudden sense of panic. Suppose Ma Manda never forgave them. Suppose Luke died or deserted her. Suppose she was never able to bear a child.
And then she saw Mamie Cole coming toward them. She flew into her arms. "The blushing bride and groom! " cried Mamie, and offered her cheek to Luke.
"Well, it's nice to see you," said Luke, rather shyly kissing her.
"I'm only off for an hour," she explained, "so we better get up to the flat. I got you three real nice rooms, Lily, in front."
"Three—?" echoed Luke. His voice fell in disappointment. "I kinda thought—a hotel—"
"Luke!" Lily caught his arm fast. Her brown eyes were dark with pleading. "Luke, it's not a hotel room I want. It's a home."
He asked in bewilderment: "Here—in Boston?"
"Listen, we're not going back. We're laying our corner-stone here. There's far and away more business in Boston than in Springfield. Just you see. I want my husband. Luke, I want my home. I want my—son. Back home we'd have to live with your mother. She's got that big house. And, Luke, I can't get along with no women. I almost hate women. They're not honest. They're weaklings. They care about cheap things. God knows you're going to find it hard to live with me—and you love me. I don't want nothing but my man and my son. That's me, Luke."
He had the most terrible longing to take her in his arms.
"Your man and your son? Lily, my girl, you've got your man. By God, you'll have your son. . . ."
* * *
In 1898 Lily gave birth to twins.
They were boys, with Lily's soft yellow skin and fine brown eyes, and all about them the look of her, somehow. Jamie and John. They were completely sons of Lily. To her they were gods.
Luke had been getting on in a fair sort of way before the twins were born. He had opened a tiny lunch stand in the South End. Lily had been helping with the cooking. After a barely perceptible start, business had picked up nicely. Luke could cook almost as well as his mother. And Lily, growing prettier and plumper every day, and rapidly learning badinage, was an obvious attraction.
She worked until the week before the twins were born. Then Ma Manda, in panicky selfreproach, hurried on to Boston, saw to it that a proper girl was hired, packed Lily off to the New England Hospital, and looked about at houses.
She decided on a red-brick one on a quiet street in Brookline, and bought it through a profiteering agent. She ordered atrocious furniture on the credit plan (Lily returned it piece by piece later), and awaited the birth of her grandchild in grim satisfaction.
To the triumphant Lily the world existed for two golden babies. These were her lives to shape and guide. These were her souls to expand. She, with her constant faith, must quicken their geniuses.
So the years passed. Jamie and John were three and able to read. Then John at four could bang out a harmony on the new upright piano. Jamie at six was doing third grade lessons. . . .
They were nine. And Lily's pride, and joy, and love, and life. They had not cried in their cradle. They had never been jealous of each other. They had given her and Luke wholeheartedly their love. They wrote regularly and beautifully to their grandmother. Their teachers adored them. Despite their talents, they were manly, and popular with children. They had never been ill. They were growing like weeds. John, at the Boston Conservatory, had been singled out as an extraordinary pupil. His little sensitive face had stared out of many daily papers. Jamie, in the seventh grade, leading his class, was the marvel of his school. He could solve the mathematical problems of high school students. He could also discuss his future with calm assurance. . . .
Lily was thirty-two now. And a housewife. Occasionally she swept into the shop which had been yearly enlarged until it comprised three wide windows and twenty-two tables. The doctors and lawyers who frequented the place would rise and eagerly greet her. She was completely complacent. She was fat, but her skin was firm and soft to Luke's touch. Her eyes were clear and content. There were always tender anec- dotes about her boys. Jamie and John. The realization of her dreams, the growing fulfillment of her hopes, the latent genius quickening.
She walked in peace. She knew ten years of utter harmony. She was therefore totally unprepared for any swift disruption.
In 1908 the twins were ten. Though they were young men now with certain futures, they were still very charming, and went swimming or skating with the boys on their block whenever they were called for. . . .
It was on the last day of March, going all too meekly like a Iamb, that Lily, in her kitchen, making the raisin-stuffed bread pudding the twins adored, sat down suddenly with her hand to her throat, and her heart in a lump against it. She was alone, but she knew she was not ill. She made no attempt to cry out to a neighbor. She could see, as clearly as though she stood at the pond’s edge, the twins, their arms tight about each other, crashing through the treacherous ice, making no outcry, their eyes wide with despair, dragged swiftly down, brought up again to break her heart forever, and Jamie's red scarf, that Ma Manda had knitted for him, floating...
Within twenty minutes three frightened children brought her the news. Two days later their bodies were found. Lily identified them in a dim dank morgue.
The twins lay together in a satin-lined casket in the flower-filled parlor. They were very lovely in their last sleep. The undertaker’s art had restored them and enhanced them. There was about their mouths that too exquisite beauty that death brings to the mouths of children who die in pain. Dead, they were more similar than living. And it was James who looked like John...
James and John were Lily. James and John were dead. Only the fact that she had watched her heart and soul flung into the earth with her sons kept Lily’s body alive. She was spiritually a dead woman walking in the patient hope of physical release. There was no youth in her any more. Her body was no longer firm, but flabby. Her eyes were lustreless. Her lips that had always been a little too thin were a line now that went sharply down at each corner. And the voice that had bantered richly with her boys, that had thrilled like a girl’s at the intimate bass of a man, was quavering, and querulous, and, all too often, still...
Ma Manda stayed on. Lily wanted it. They were held by their mutual bereavement. The twins, dead, were more potent than ever they could have been, living. Now Lily and Ma Manda knew there was nothing these boys could not have done, no world they would not have conquered, had they lived.
Ma Manda one week-end returned to Springfield, sold her house and the two fine mares, and her business and her lease to a prosperous German. Her only sentimentalities were two ribboned packets of letters.
Luke was sorry that the twins were dead, but his heart was not broken. Lily was his world. While she lived there was hope, and love, and life. He had no real conception of the genius of the twins. He had always thought of them as smart little boys. Now death had shattered their spell for him. He even wondered vaguely why it did not occur to Lily she might have another child.
One night, after a silent meal that Luke had cooked himself to tempt the too light appetite of his women, Lily rose abruptly from the supper table, and with the knuckles of her clenched fists showing white, said in a voice that she tried to keep steady: “Luke, I'm sleeping in the twins’ room tonight. I—I guess I’ll go on up now. G’night, Ma Manda. ’Night, Luke.”
An hour later, when he softly tried the door, it was locked.
A year passed. Lily, a little mad in her constant communion with her dead, had grown somehow hauntingly lovely, with her loosened hair always tangled, her face thin and pale and exquisite, and her eyes large and brightly knowing. Now she was voluble with Ma Manda, though there were no notes in her voice. She kept up a continual stream of pathetic reminiscences. And she went about her house with her hands outstretched briefly to caress some memorial to her boys.
Ma Manda indulged her. To her there was only beauty in Lily's crazy devotion. She had loved Luke’s golden sons more than she had ever loved Luke. As with Lily, throughout their growing, they had become her sole reality. With the ancient’s idea of duty, she kept their memory fresh, her sorrow keen. She went regularly to a Baptist church and wailed when the preacher harangued the dead.
And always for Luke, in his starved normal passion, surprisingly not the brute, Lily’s light body was a golden mesh.
Lily had sat by an open window, staring up at the stars, her bare feet on a chilled floor, her nightgown fluting in the wind. Presently she had begun to sneeze. Soon her eyes and her nose were running. When she got into Jamie’s white bed, she felt a great wave engulf her. In the morning she was very ill.
Lily felt that she was dying. And she was afraid to die. She hated pain. She had given no thought to death before the death of her twins. After that she had thought of her going as only a dreamless sleeping and a waking with her sons. Now there was something in her chest that was making her last hours torture. And a cough that tore her from the hot pillows and started that jerk and pull in her heart. Sometimes her breath was a shudder that shook her body.
In the first hours of the third night, she clutched at Ma Manda and stared up at her with eyes so full of piteous appeal that Ma Manda said sharply and involuntarily: "Lily, my child, you best let Luke in. He's a great one for healing. There's the power of the Almighty in his hands." Lily made a little gesture of acquiescence. Ma Manda went softly, fumbling in her tears.
Luke bent over Lily. His blue eyes burned.
They were dark and deep and glowing. She felt her own eyes caught in them. Felt her senses drowning. He flung one hand up to the sky, the fingers apart and unbending. The other he pressed against her chest till his flesh and her flesh were one. He was exalted and inspired. The muscles leaped in his arm. He was trembling and black and mysterious.
"Lily, my girl, God's going to help you. God in His heaven's got to hear my prayer! Just put your faith in me, my darling. I got my faith in Him. I got a gift from the heavenly Father. Praise His name! Lily, my Lily, I got the power to heal! Strength surged out of him—went swinging down through the arm upraised, flashed through his straining body, then shot down and tingled in his fingers which had melted into her breast.
They were like rays, destroying. Five streams of life, pouring into her sick veins, fierce, tumultous, until the poison and the pain burst into rivulets of sweat that ran swift and long down her quivering body, and presently left her washed clean and quiet and very, very tired.
Then Luke's words came in a rush, in the voice of one who had fought a hard fight, or run a long race, yet deep and tremblingly beautiful.
"God, be praised! God, the Maker, we humbly thank Thee! Thou heard! Thou heard!! Thou gave me strength to heal! O God, this poor child—my Lily—she's well! She can rise and take up her bed and walk! O God, Thou art the Father of all living! Thou art life! Thou art love! Thou art love!! Thou art love III" He slumped down on his knees and burst into wild tears. His head went bumping against Lily's breast.
In her relief and gratitude and wonderment, she felt her first compassion for her husband. In his weakness she was strong. She was a mother.
He clung to her. He was a man sick with passion.
Presently she said: "Lie with me, Luke," and drew him up into her arms. For Lily, and for Luke, and for Ma Manda, after a week or two, that night, crowded out of their consciousness, might never have been. Lily went back to her inner life ; Ma Manda to the spiritual needs of her daughter-in-law and the physical needs of her son ; Luke to the old apathetic content in Lily's apparent contentment.
But one Sunday morning as he lay staring at a bright patch of sunlight on the wall and hearing faintly the bells of the Mission Church without emotion, the door creaked sharply.
Lily came in and stood at the foot of his bed.
He sat up in real surprise and made a vague gesture toward his bathrobe.
Her eyes were level into his and full of scorn. Her face was pale and proud. Her lips were a thin twist of contempt.
She was so lovely and so terrible in her fury that he caught his breath.
He scuttled down to the foot of the bed and gripped her wrist tight.
"Lily, you sick? For God's sake, what ails you?" She flung her arm free. "I'm going to have a child. Another child! Well, it's yours. I've borne my babies. And I've buried them. This is your little black brat, d'you hear? You can keep it or kill it. If it wasn't for my babies in heaven, I'd get rid of it with the deadliest poison. But I can't damn my soul to hell for a wretched child that may be born dead. And if it lives"— her voice was a wail—"I curse it to my despair!"
For the first time since his childhood, Luke flung himself down full length on the bed and cried. . . .
* * *
In the months that followed, Ma Manda and Luke, in their terrific watchfulness, had a nine months' travail, too.
Lily's child was born on a spring morning in a labor so fierce that both of them, after hours of struggle, lay utterly spent; the child in the big white crib that had been the twins', the mother, for the last time, on her own great mahogany bed.
Lily was conscious, and calm. She was dying as she had wanted to die, painlessly. She felt no curiosity about her baby. She had heard a sharp whisper. "It's a girl," which she had half ex- pected, and had turned her face from the sound of it to summon all of her strength for a bitter chuckle.
Presently Luke came to stare down at her. His eyes were filled with a great desperation. He, too, had forgotten the new baby. Lily was dying.
"Lily"—-his voice was deep and tender—-"just put your faith in God. My Father has never failed me. He'll pull you through."
She was quietly exalted. "I have come through."
"Lily, I love you. Don't act that way. Put your hand in mine. Let me help you, my darling." His hand went out to her. She saw the fingers stiffen, straighten, and the muscles pulling in his arm.
But she made no move.
"Are you too weak? Let me raise your hand. The power of God is in me. It leaps like a young ram. Only touch me, Lily!"
Ma Manda, kneeling at the foot of the bed, wrung her hands and wailed, "Only touch him, Lily!" Her eyes were wide and seeking. Her mouth was tremulous and beautiful. With a tremendous effort she raised herself up from her pillow. Her braids went lopping over her breasts.
Her hands went out, slowly, gropingly. Luke waited, quivering, his heart in his mouth. But then she sighed sharply. Her hands clasped tightly. Her eyes were passionate. Her face was glorious.
It was Ma Manda who scrambled to her feet and laid her back on the pillow, and knew that she was dead, and gently brushed the lids over her eyes.
In the instant when her soul leaped to the sun, the new baby whimpered, once, then again, and was still. Luke turned toward it with a furious oath. He bent over the crib and looked down at the tiny dark bundle that was scarcely anything at all, with its quiet hands and shut eyes.
In the sudden hope that it had died, he put his hand over its heart.
The baby opened its eyes. They were blue as deeply blue as his own, but enormous and infinitely sad. It was their utter despairing that moved him. He felt for this child a possessive tenderness such as the twins had never inspired. It was a woman-child. He understood her frailty.
So he knelt and slapped her face hard, and breathed into her mouth, and cried out Lily! Lily! naming her. He urged the strength in his spatulate fingers to quicken the beat of her heart. He prayed, "God, be merciful!" again and again.
She broke into a lusty wail and fell into a normal sleep, with the tears still wet on her cheeks.
Lily was dead, and Lily was not dead. A mother is the creator of life. And God cannot die.