Four Spirits by Sena Jeter Naslund Page B

had taken out her Martini and Rossi from an innocuous paper sack. When she presented the booze as being just for her own personal use, Mr. Constantine had accepted the bottle and put it under the counter. Here white waited on colored. Mr. Constantine kept a skinny jar of green olives for her, too.
    Angular —she liked the word; her own face could be described as angular. She liked it that she had strong facial bones, that her whole body was strong and wiry. Leaning against the back of the booth, Christine’s sore body madeher feel again the hard street when she had fallen and rolled. She was bruised all across her back from the water pressure.
    By dint of nothing but her angry, imperial manner, Christine felt she had brought class to the Athens Cafe. Christine stirred her martini. Like a goddess, she ruled the transparent liquid world inside the glass, made it swirl and sway to the music. She dominated here, relaxing with the drink and a new friend sitting across the table.
    â€œWhose ribs?” Gloria Callahan, her classmate at Miles, asked Christine.
    Gloria was so shy, she could scarcely look at any listener while she uttered a whole sentence, even one two words long. Shy Bird, Christine thought of her that way. Gloria was a shy bird but she had classy, high-toned habits. She brought in all her papers typed on thick paper and without any ink corrections. Gloria couldn’t even look her professors in the eye, let alone a white, but Christine had taken Gloria under her wing. Already, Christine had convinced her to teach in the night school to help the dropouts, but when it came time to demonstrate, Gloria said she had to practice her cello.
    â€œYeah, Gloria,” Christine said slowly. “Reverend Shuttlesworth got broke ribs today. He in the hospital. I witnessed when the hose water struck him down. Me laying on the street.”
    â€œSure am sorry to hear that.” Through her whole utterance, Gloria stared down at Christine’s swirling of her drink.
    â€œYou ever heard Reverend Shuttlesworth preach?” Christine asked sharply.
    â€œNo, ma’am.”
    â€œDon’t you ma’am me. I not but five, six years older than you.” Christine’s speech had shifted into the vernacular. They all had seesaw speech; sometimes they talked home talk, sometimes school talk. Up and down, first one then the other.
    â€œAll right,” Gloria said.
    Christine knew Gloria was forcing her eyes to glance into Christine’s irritation. “I saw the hose get you,” Gloria said to Christine, but she whispered the statement toward the floor. “On TV.”
    â€œYeah? What you think when you see that, you safe at home watching TV?”
    Christine knew Gloria wanted to join the protests.
    â€œPryne, pryne in a gyre!”
    â€œGirl! What you talking about?”
    â€œIt’s from William Butler Yeats. ‘Sailing to Byzantium.’ And he wrote that all will be ‘changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.’ ” Gloria said all this with her rare green eyes fastened on the dirty concrete floor. “That’s from ‘Easter 1916.’ ” She was tracing the cracks, running like tributaries toward some river.
    Sometimes Christine thought Gloria’s complexion had a reddish cast to it like maybe she had Indian blood. Gloria sat still as a sculpture, as though she had no right to move. She sat like a brooding dove, full-breasted, soft, with a short body.
    â€œWhere is Byzantium?” Christine demanded. “Girl, look at me when you answer!”
    â€œIt not but half real.” Gloria studied the floor again, whispered, “Mythological. Constantinople.”
    â€œMr. Constantine,” Christine called out boldly to the Greek bar owner, “you ever been to Constantinople?”
    The man just shook his head while he dried the inside of a glass with a cloth towel.
    Mr. Constantine tried to keep conversation to a minimum