“A handsome evening,” Phil was saying. “Look at that steam come off the street. Beautiful.” He paused, and I nodded, all the while admiring my cigar.

“I really ought to get married,” he concluded, as if the evening’s beauty had begotten the inference.

Again, I nodded; I understood him perfectly. We were standing on the south side of Fourteenth Street under Ohrbach’s shelter, having paused there fifteen minutes before to wait out a summer shower.

I had worked all day delivering circulars and earlier that evening had called on Phil, who was idle at the time, being in mourning for his father, and invited him to eat dinner with me. After beef stew, cheese cake, and coffee at the Automat, we strolled west on Fourteenth ready to enjoy ourselves.

“Are you going to buy that jug?” Phil asked.

“Nope. Only got two bucks left and there’s no work tomorrow.”

He drew on his cigar and rocked back on his heels. We both knew that it was a question of when, not whether, I would buy the jug. To have roused him from his bed of mourning merely to eat dinner and smoke a cigar would have been a violation of our friendship.

“Shall we mosey across the street?” I asked.

He did not answer because he wanted to be about the evening’s business without further waste of time. We stood there several more minutes listening to the purr of auto tires on the wet pavement and flicking the ashes from our cigars. To my right, on the corner of Broadway, Ammon Hennacy was selling the Catholic Worker.

“Hennacy keeps busy,” I said.

“He’s a convert,” Phil said, out of the side of his mouth.

“Glory be to God!”

“It is a lovely evening, though,” he said earnestly.

Whereupon, without further conversation, we stepped off the curb and crossed the street to Union Square park. The Square is a convenient and sometimes an amusing place to loaf in warm weather. At that time, the early 1950’s, there were a couple of highly accomplished comedians who frequented the park and who improved the temper of everyone who heard them. It was a Wednesday evening, however—a slow night in the Square—and the recent shower had no doubt kept the comedians at home or in the Automat.

Whitey and his dog were there but Whitey required a larger crowd before resuming his series of lectures on the progress of the Polish economy under Socialism. I said hello to John Brown but got only a curt nod in reply. I had proved him wrong on a point having to do with industrial production just prior to the outbreak of the Korean war and he had not yet recovered from his chagrin. We did sit awhile with George Middle, and Phil borrowed his copy of the Daily Worker to read the sports’ page.

“Are you going to buy that jug?” he asked me, handing the Worker back to George.

“What’s going on over there?” I asked back, pointing to a small crowd gathered at the far side of the Washington monument.

“Religion,” George Middle said.

“God help us,” said Phil.

But I got up and strolled over. My curiosity was aroused because I had not seen any of our regular preachers enter the park.

“That ain’t right,” a woman was saying. “God saith, Thou shalt not steal, and takin’ a man’s property, that there is stealin’.”

“Don’t bring God into this, mother.”

“I ain’t bringin’ Him in. He’s in. I’m just recognizin’ Him.”

Now of all the shows in the park, Phil liked the religious ones least. Or so he said. I think they bothered him because he is basically a pious man; then, too, his father had died recently and Phil has since told me that very often, in the year following his father’s death, he would chance to gaze down at his shoes and actually shiver with an intimation of his own mortality. He was the last of the Fay boys among the living and he was close to forty and still without wife or child. For over twenty years Phil had been the black sheep of the family; now he was the only sheep. He was a bum, not a nihilist, and he did not relish being reminded of his delinquency. Nevertheless, Phil came with me. I had the money and he needed the wine badly enough to make sure I was not distracted overlong.

On the west side of the monument a small group was listening with amusement, which was not without its portion of contempt, to a small Negro woman. Her hair was pure white and she wore no hat. Her dress was also white, not fashionable at all, and she wore low-heeled brown shoes. Her stance on the top step below the monument was unlike most of our orators for she was bent over slightly from the waist as if she was talking, not to an audience, but to one person in particular, that is, to the last one who had questioned her.

“Well, mother,” someone said, “if you’re recognizin’ Him, I just wish you’d introduce us. We ain’t seen Him yet.”

“You can’t see Him,” she replied, “not unless He wants you to.”

Her reply was odd because she seemed to take the young man’s jibe as a serious comment worthy of a serious response. Everyone else knew that he was joshing her.

“Can you see Him?” another man asked.

“Not now,” she said. “But He is seeable; I know that.”

“You do?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell us, mother, please, how you know you can see Him when you can’t see Him.”

The man’s mockery was plain to hear and the crowd laughed, all the more at ease because the mocker was also Negro and nobody could be accused of race prejudice for joining in. She seemed to be puzzled by the question; then softly, but quite distinctly, she said: “The reason I know I can see Him is that I have. That’s how.”

“You seen Him?”

“Yes.”

“In the flesh?”

“Yes.”

There was a bit of slack in the mockery now. It was, of course, some crazy thing but nevertheless nobody wanted to be the first to call her bluff.

_____________

“Tell us about it,” Phil said from behind me. The woman looked over at us. We were to her left, about ten feet away. Although her hair was pure white, there were no wrinkles whatever on her face and she had the appearance of a person who was irretrievably sure of herself.

“I’ll tell you if you will listen. It is a long story that happened a long time ago when I was just a girl.”

“Go on,” the young Negro said. “It better be good because we’re going to listen to all of it.”

“All right,” she said, folding her arms. She raised her head slightly now, so that she looked out over the crowd.

“Like I say, I was just a girl when I married. Didn’t know nothin’. My mother picked out this man for me. I didn’t want him. I wanted to be a nurse but I was only fifteen and my mother wouldn’t sign the papers for me to enter the nursing school. So I married the man of my mother’s choice.

“Now I knew nothing in those days and I was soon disgusted with my husband. I was so sick in heart that my body got sick. I took diphtheria. My throat closed up and after a while I could take no food or drink.

“We lived on a farm. In those days (I’m goin’ on seventy-six and I was just a girl of fifteen at that time) well, those days the doctor that took care of the horses and the cows and other animals, took care of the people, too. Well, the doctor came and looked at me. She’s gone, he said. Well, my husband was disgusted with me. Here, he’d married a young girl who was no use to him. I couldn’t work around the place and I wasn’t no good to him as a wife. He left me, too: there I was alone in that room, sitting up in a chair by the door. I wasn’t scared of dyin’. I was so miserable I wanted to die. Wasn’t even afraid of hell ’cause I figured hell couldn’t be no worse than the hell I was in already. My parents had told me that Death rode on a pale horse so I just sat there by the door waiting to see if they was right.

“Then I heard a voice in my head telling me to go to bed. I said no. I knew I couldn’t sleep so why lie down. But I was very much in pain and the voice kept asking me ‘Please go lie down. For me.’

“So I said all right. I’ll lie down but I won’t sleep. So I threw the pillows I had at my back on the bed and I sat there amongst them. Then I sort of got dizzy. It seemed the pain was going away the way somethin’ goes down in a whirlpool. But it was a pleasant feeling and I said, my, if this is what death is why do folks mind it so? And then I went to sleep ‘cause I remember settin’ back on those pillows and closing my eyes. And I had a dream.

“I was all alone with a railroad ticket. A big, long ticket. And there was a shiny, silver train on the track. And when I showed my ticket to the conductor he put me up on the train and I went in and sat down. That car was crowded with people. Well, the train started and I could see out ahead of the train somehow. We were going east, toward the rising sun, and the way the sun shone on the tracks they looked like gold. We passed through country, the most beautiful country I had ever seen. I didn’t know where I was going but I was sure glad to go.

“Then we stopped and I got off like everyone else. I didn’t have no bags with me so I walked along into the city till I saw this parade of people dressed up like they was going to a wedding; so me, being a young girl, I followed them to see the bride. The buggies they were in were dressed in white ribbons; the horses, too. And soon I saw the church they were going to and I said I’ll just lean against the church there in the shade and watch them go in. I wouldn’t go in myself ’cause these were all white folk and I knew better than to go in. Nobody said nothing to me and I watched them. But I was tired and after they had all gone into church I thought maybe I could go inside and just sit down in the back and watch and rest my feet. So I went in and sat down and the people in the church they turned around and smiled and made bows to me and I said to myself that it was all right for me to be there. Then I saw an empty seat in the middle of the church and I said to myself that since these people are all so friendly they won’t mind my sitting up there so as to see more what’s going on. And I did. And they smiled.

“And then an usher came and put his hand under my elbow and led me up front. There I saw God the Father. He had long white hair and a broad forehead and a clean white beard and beside Him was a table with a gold cup and a gold pen and a book that was open. God the Son was in front of Him a little, on one knee, with His disciples about Him. The usher led me past God the Son right straight to the Father. He looked at me and wrote in His book. Then he took up the cup and gave it to me. Drink ye all of this, He said, the waters of everlasting life. And I drank it. And in my sleep my throat cleared and I woke well. I could eat and drink.

“And that’s how I know I saw God face to face. Because I saw Him and because He made me healthy again. Nor have I ever had a cold since. And I’ve preached young and old without a hat in snow and rain.”

When she ended, she was looking at us. For about a second there was no sound at all within our group. Then a couple of guys cleared their throats. Phil was right beside me, staring up at the old lady. And she was gazing down at him. I touched his arm.

“You want that bottle?” I asked.

He didn’t budge. Then someone said something about hysteria and delusions and the spell broke.

As we walked out of the park I asked Phil it he thought the old lady had read that somewhere.

“I don’t know,” he said.

We walked almost another block when he added, “And I don’t care. She got herself married, that’s what counts.”

_____________