Summary
Book Three, Chapter 1
Vivaldo has a terrifying dream in which he is running to nothing, knowing he has forgotten something. Rufus pushes him up high, and he glimpses Ida below. In the dream Rufus clings to him and he welcomes the embrace, but when he wakes he is with Eric. He is frightened and starts to pull away but realizes this is something he wants, and the two of them have sex. He enjoys it and knows Eric loves him, but he understands he is still “condemned to women” (385).
Afterward they lay together and Vivaldo is comforted by the thought that there is a man who loves him. They both agree it was wonderful.
The phone rings and it is Cass. Eric tries to calm her as she explains what happened with Richard, and when they get off the phone Eric tells Vivaldo what happened. He says Richard was suspicious of Vivaldo, which shocks him, and that Richard is talking about divorce and trying to get custody of the children. Vivaldo rolls his eyes that Richard is probably going to try and get a scarlet A for Cass, and Eric replies to be gentle because Richard is wounded. For his part, he hopes Cass will never hate him, and Vivaldo assures him no one could hate him.
Eric is planning to meet Cass at the Museum of Modern Art, but as he stares outside into the pouring rain he wonders how she will ever get there. His agent calls with dates and plans, and tells Eric he is going to make it big.
Vivaldo and Eric have one final drink and wonder about the future with Ida and Ives. They are emotional, and Vivaldo has to be blunt with Eric that although he wishes in some way they could be together, he knows it would never work.
Before Vivaldo leaves, the phone rings and it is Ida. She is relieved to know he is there, but says Richard came by and was a wreck. He was angry that Vivaldo betrayed him by not telling him about the affair. Ida urges Vivaldo to come home, and he feels a wave of relief that she is not angry with him.
Eric meets Cass at the museum. It is crowded and he wonders why she chose this place. When he sees her, he notes the “blank despair” (402) in her visage. She says she cannot stay long because she left the kids alone, but she did tell Richard she was coming here to see him. She tells him everything—about Richard’s hurt, his rage, how he tried to frighten her and wound her with his words. Eric feels immense sorrow for her, more than any love he felt, and considers that he “used her in the hope of avoiding a confrontation with himself which he had, nevertheless, and with a vengeance, been forced to endure” (404). She explains that she now thinks “growing just means learning more and more about anguish” (405). She guesses Richard will try to weather this for the kids, but does not know if she wants that. Everything in her life is trapping her, and she concludes the country itself is filled with unhappy cowards. She thanks Eric for everything he did for her, and they say goodbye.
Ida welcomes Vivaldo home. They talk about poor Richard, Ida telling Vivaldo that she felt so sad for him even though he was trying to make her mad.
They begin talking about their own problems, Ida commencing by saying that when Rufus died something happened to her. She laments that he should not have ended up as he did, and that when he died all light when out of her house. When her family saw Rufus’s body it wrecked them. It seemed like Rufus had been robbed, and she vowed not to let that happen to her.
Vivaldo asks what any of this has to do with being Black, which is what she said she was going to explain, and wonders why suffering has to have a color.
She continues her story, saying she knew she had to get out of the neighborhood. She would not stay on Seventh Avenue, so she, as Rufus would always say, hit the A train and headed down into the Village. Most people disgusted her, but she did like Vivaldo because he was nice to her and she felt a little protected from the others when she was with him.
Ida had decided she wanted to sing and knew she needed help, and finally tells Vivaldo the truth that she was sleeping with Ellis. She says she felt like she owed Ellis a lot, that she liked how he treated her to fancy dinners, that he was never jealous of Vivaldo and was tickled that she was with him.
Ida says tentatively that she figured Vivaldo knew, which made her resent him since he said nothing, and he admits he sort of did know but did not want to challenge her and lose her. She explains that she actually dislikes Ellis and could not stand having sex with him, but she did not hate him the way she hated herself and Vivaldo.
She says she has been trying to get through it and eventually get away, but last night was the final straw. Ida explains how when she and Ellis were at the club, he made her sing with the band even though she did not want to and they did not want her to. The band, comprised of Black men who knew her and played with Rufus, said coarse things to her and mentioned her brother and slapped her on the ass, and she was humiliated. Ellis grinned, though, as if it were a big joke on her, and she could not stop thinking about Rufus and Vivaldo. She felt like she had fallen so low and could not go any lower, and did not know what to do when she saw Vivaldo.
She accidentally drops her glass when trying to drink out of it, and sinks down, weeping. Vivaldo is afraid to touch her, repulsed by the thought of Ellis, but then he goes to her, “resigned and tender and helpless” (426). He helps her get up, and says she should go wash her face and he will make coffee. As he undertakes this task, his mind is a blank.
The phone rings and it is Eric. He says Cass thinks she might go to New England but the couple’s future is unknown, as Richard is not home yet. Eric asks, knowing it is awkward, if Vivaldo and Ida want to come over and meet Yves the next night. Vivaldo says of course, and asks if Eric is glad Yves is almost here. Eric says yes, but says he is mostly scared. They say goodnight.
Ida comes out and tells him humbly that she wants him to know that she would not have been with him for so long if she did not love him. Vivaldo wants to say he loves her back but the words will not come. He watches her passive, sad face and then turns his gaze to his black coffee. He thinks that “Not many things in the world were really black, not even the night, not even the mines. And the light was not white, either, even the palest light gelled within itself some hint of its origins, in fire” (430). He knows he got what he wanted—the truth about Ida—but does not know how he will live with it.
He thanks her for telling him, but inside he is full of competing emotions. He admits there are some things he does not understand but wants to, and she replies wearily, saying she does not want him to understand or be kind. He looks at her, saying she seems to forget he loves her, and there is a spark of something almost like hatred between them. But then he grabs her and covers her with kisses and she buries her head in his chest and he weeps violently as she is “stroking his innocence out of him” (431).
Later he puts on a record and washes his face. She sleeps and he works. While sleeping she calls his name but he does not reply. She does it again, then is still.
Chapter 2
Yves is on the plane about to land in the city. As they land, he looks for the Statue of Liberty but does not see it.
He imagines scanning the crowd for Eric’s red hair, excitement filling him. This turns to “an extraordinary peace and happiness” (433), though he is a bit embarrassed by his behavior on the flight, wondering if the conversations he had with people made him seem too French.
All that trepidation and worry vanishes, though, when he glimpses Eric in the airport. He senses everything will be all right, and strides through the barrier into the “city where the people from heaven had made their home” (436).
Analysis
Another Country ends with ambiguity in regards to some of the central relationships of the text—we do not know if Cass and Richard reconcile, if Ida and Vivaldo truly make it work, or if Yves and Eric can make it in New York together. This is intentional on Baldwin’s part, as he is suggesting that nothing is permanent, that identity is always mutable and in flux, and that in order to truly live one must be open to change. Serpa Salenius notes, “Overall, Baldwin's characters avoid any fixed categorization; their identities are in a constant flux, reflected also in the transgression of borders— physical, racial, social, and sexual… Baldwin seems to argue that the world and life itself consist of shades and hues that make up complex fluid realities.”
Ida and Vivaldo finally address some of the thorny issues in their relationship. Ida confesses that she has been sleeping with Steve Ellis and that she assumed Vivaldo knew, which made her resent him for his “pretending to believe me because you didn’t want to know what was happening to me” (422). Vivaldo responds by saying that he was afraid she would leave him if he said something. Ida also confesses that through the pain she was causing Vivaldo, she had “got my revenge” (422), but that “I really don’t know what I was thinking” (422). After Rufus’s death and the fraying of her family, she had come down to Greenwich Village to escape Harlem—and to cause pain. She reflects, “I used to see the way white men watched me, like dogs. And I thought about what I could do to them. How I hated them, the way they looked, and the things they’d say, all dressed up in their damn white skin, and their clothes just so, and their little weak, white pricks jumping in their drawers” (419). She hadn’t planned on falling for anyone, but she tells Vivaldo that “I liked you, and the few times I saw you it was a kind of —relief—from all those other, horrible people” (419). She wanted to sleep with him but “not… have an affair with [him]” (419), but it did not exactly work out that way. She fell into a relationship with him and then, still seeking revenge, a way to further her career, and a way to assuage her self-hatred, she became involved with Ellis and eventually “felt that I couldn’t fall much lower” and decided “I might as well go all the way and get it over with. And we’d see if there was anything left of me after that, we’d see” (426). Amy Reddinger sums up Ida’s choices and how the incident with the Black bandmates plays out: “However, Ida's plan to use her body to exact revenge and gain power eventually comes undone and she is, by the end of the novel, tired and humiliated… Ida's humiliation is an effect of her powerlessness in relationship to both black and white men. Forced to steal the limelight from the band by her powerful white lover, her brother's former friend and fellow musician reminds her that she is also subject to the violence and will of black men that she attempted to avoid by fleeing Seventh Avenue.” Ida’s recognition of her motivations, her shame at falling so low, and her acknowledgements of both her love for Vivaldo and her guilt about Rufus provoke a change in her, symbolized by her taking off of the snake ring and earrings that are associated with Rufus.
Vivaldo began his process of growth by admitting to Eric that he potentially failed Rufus that night he did not give the fading man the closeness he desired. When he sleeps with Eric, Michael Lynch suggests, his “infidelity ends his judgement of [Ida] and completes his duty and debt to Rufus” because he “subconsciously realizes he must join Rufus in a psychic death and loss of self which will enable him to go beyond the borders of self to another country, to loving Eric, and, finally, Ida.”
Clearly, though Rufus died in Book One, he never left the text. Lynch explains Vivaldo, Cass, Ida, and Eric reflected on Rufus’s “meaning in their lives past and present and whether they could have helped avert his disaster. Their doubt and guilt over their roles in his life augment their suffering over problems with loving and being loved. His suffering is redemptive in that it forces these people who call themselves his friends to perform a rigorous self-examination, which leads them to difficult but essential insight, to a new of a deepened ability to love others, and to a baptism of suffering… which becomes a sacramental source of others’ consolation.”
At the very end of the novel, the young and excited Yves arrives in the city. Stephanie Dunning offers a mixed view of whether or not this represents a hopeful situation: “Yves is both arriving from and to another country; this suggests that his movement from one emotional state (reluctance)... to another (joy and certainty) represents a literal and emotional emigration from one country to another… The sight of Eric inspires within Yves the same hope the Statue of Liberty is said to inspire in immigrants. But the novel has taught us to be skeptical.” Given the progress Eric has made, and what we know of Yves, there is hope here, but Baldwin is no fantasist, and we must accept that the cruelty of the city and the pressures of holding suffering at bay might hold sway over our characters in the end.
