But then I saw Chick; he entered too, carrying the book, and then I thought how if I had only thought to fill a glass with water, to count off slowly sixty seconds, say, to cover the time Skeets McGowan, the soda squirt, would need to tear his fascinations from whatever other female junior or senior and fill the order, then drink the water slowly to simulate the Coke; thinking But maybe she did take the banana split; maybe there is still time, already across the office, the screen door already in my hand before I caught myself: at least the County Attorney must not be actually seen running down his office stairs and across the street into a drugstore where a sixteen-year-old high-school junior waited.
And I was in time but just in time. They had not even sat down, or if they had she had already risen, the two of them only standing beside the table, she carrying four books now and looking at me for only that one last instant and then no more with the eyes you thought were just dark gray or blue until you knew better.
C;I’m sorry I’m late,” I said. “I hope Chick told you.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I have to go on home anyway.”
“Without a Coke even?” I said.
“I have to go home,” she said.
“Another time then,” I said. “What they call a rain check.”
“Yes,” she said. “I have to go home now.” So I moved so she could move, making the move first to let her go ahead, toward the door.
“Remember what you said about that quarter,” Chick said.
And made the next move first too, opening the screen for her then stopping in it and so establishing severance and separation by that little space before she even knew it, not even needing to pause and half-glance back to prove herself intact and safe, intact and secure and unthreatened still, not needing to say Mister Stevens nor even Mister Gavin nor Good-bye nor even anything to need to say Thank you for, nor even to look back then although she did. “Thank you for the book,” she said; and gone.
“Remember what you said about that quarter,” Chick said.
“Certainly,” I said. “Why the bejesus dont you go somewhere and spend it?”
Oh yes, doing a lot of things Chick wasn’t old enough yet himself to do. Because dodging situations which might force me to use even that base shabby lash again was fun, excitement. Because she didn’t know (Must not know, at least not now, not yet: else why the need for that base and shabby lash?), could not be certainly sure about that afternoon, that one or two or three (whatever it was) minutes in the drugstore; never sure whether what Chick told her was the truth: that I actually was going to be late and had simply sent my nephew as the handiest messenger to keep her company until or when or if I did show up, I so aged and fatuous as not even to realise the insult either standing her up would be, or sending a ten-year-old boy to keep her company and believing that she, a sixteen-year-old high-school junior, would accept him; or if I had done it deliberately: made the date then sent the ten-year-old boy to fill it as a delicate way of saying Stop bothering me.
So I must not even give her a chance to demand of me with the temerity of desperation which of these was right. And that was the fun, the excitement. I mean, dodging her. It was adolescence in reverse, turned upside down: the youth, himself virgin and—who knew?—maybe even more so, at once drawn and terrified of what draws him, contriving by clumsy and timorous artifice the accidental encounters in which he still would not and never quite touch, would not even hope to touch, really want to touch, too terrified in fact to touch; but only to breathe the same air, be laved by the same circumambience which laved the mistress’s moving limbs; to whom the glove or the handkerchief she didn’t even know she had lost, the flower she didn’t even know she had crushed, the very ninth- or tenth-grade arithmetic or grammar or geography bearing her name in her own magical hand on the flyleaf, are more terrible and moving than ever will be afterward the gleam of the actual naked shoulder or spread of unbound hair on the pillow’s other twin.
That was me: not to encounter; continuously just to miss her yet never be caught at it. You know: in a little town of three thousand people like ours, the only thing that could cause more talk and notice than a middle-aged bachelor meeting a sixteen-year-old maiden two or three times a week would be a sixteen-year-old maiden and a middle-aged bachelor just missing each other two or three times a week by darting into stores or up alleys. You know: a middle-aged lawyer, certainly the one who was County Attorney too, could always find enough to do even in a town of just three thousand to miss being on the one street between her home and the school house at eight-thirty and twelve and one and three-thirty oclock when the town’s whole infant roster must come and go, sometimes, a few times even, but not forever.
Yet that’s what I had to do. I had no help, you see; I couldn’t stop her suddenly on the street one day and say, “Answer quickly now. Exactly how much were you fooled or not fooled that afternoon in the drugstore? Say in one word exactly what you believed about that episode.” All I could do was leave well enough alone, even when the only well enough I had wasn’t anywhere that well.
So I had to dodge her. I had to plan not just mine but Yoknapatawpha county’s business too ahead in order to dodge a sixteen-year-old girl. That was during the spring. So until school was out in May it would be comparatively simple, at least for five days of the week. But in time vacation would arrive, with no claims of regimen or discipline on her; and observation even if not personal experience had long since taught me that anyone sixteen years old not nursing a child or supporting a family or in jail could be almost anywhere at any time during the twenty-four hours.
So when the time came, which was that last summer before her final year in high school when she would graduate, I didn’t even have the catalogues and brochures from the alien and outland schools sent first to me in person, to be handed by me to her, but sent direct to her, to Miss Linda Snopes, Jefferson, Mississippi, the Mississippi to be carefully spelt out in full else the envelope would go: first, to Jefferson, Missouri; second, to every other state in the forty-eight which had a Jefferson in it, before: third, it would finally occur to somebody somewhere that there might be someone in Mississippi capable of thinking vaguely of attending an Eastern or Northern school or capable of having heard of such or anyway capable of enjoying the pictures in the catalogues or even deciphering the one-syllable words, provided they were accompanied by photographs.
So I had them sent direct to her—the shrewd suave snob-enticements from the Virginia schools at which Southern mothers seemed to aim their daughters by simple instinct, I dont know why, unless because the mothers themselves did not attend them, and thus accomplishing by proxy what had been denied them in person since they had not had mothers driven to accomplish vicariously what they in their turn had been denied.
And not just the Virginia ones first but the ones from the smart “finishing” schools north of Mason’s and Dixon’s too. I was being fair. No: we were being fair, she and I both, the two of us who never met any more now for the sake of her good name, in federation and cahoots for the sake of her soul; the two of us together saying in absentia to her mother: There they all are: the smart ones, the snobble word. We have been fair, we gave you your chance. Now, here is where we want to go, where you can help us go, if not by approval, at least by not saying no; arranging for the other catalogues to reach her only then: the schools which would not even notice what she wore and how she walked and used her fork and all the rest of how she looked and acted in public because by this time all that would be too old and fixed to change, but mainly because it had not mattered anyway, since what did matter was what she did and how she acted in the spirit’s inviolable solitude.
So now—these last began to reach her about Christmas time of that last year in high school—she would have to see me, need to see me, not to help her decide which one of them but simply to discuss, canvass the decision before it became final. I waited, in fact quite patiently while it finally dawned on me that she was not going to make
the first gesture to see me again. I had avoided her for over six months now and she not only knew I had been dodging her since in a town the size of ours a male can no more avoid a female consistently for that long by mere accident than they can meet for that long by what they believed or thought was discretion and surreptition, even she realised by this time that that business in Christian’s drugstore that afternoon last April had been no clumsy accident. (Oh yes, it had already occurred to me also that she had no reason whatever to assume I knew she had received the catalogues, let alone had instigated them. But I dismissed that as immediately as you will too if we are to get on with this.)
So I must make that first gesture. It would not be quite as simple now as it had used to be. A little after half past three on any weekend afternoon I could see her from the office window (if I happened to be there) pass along the Square in the school’s scattering exodus. Last year, in fact during all the time before, she would be alone, or seemed to be. But now, during this past one, particularly since the Levitt troglodyte’s departure, she would be with another girl who lived on the same street. Then suddenly (it began in the late winter, about St. Valentine’s Day) instead of two there would be four of them: two boys, Chick said the Rouncewell boy and the youngest Bishop one, the year’s high-school athletic stars. And now, after spring began, the four of them would be on almost any afternoon in Christian’s drugstore (at least there harbored apparently there no ghosts to make her blush and squirm and I was glad of that), with Coca-Colas and the other fearsome (I was acquainted there) messes which young people, young women in particular, consume with terrifying equanimity not only in the afternoon but at nine and ten in the morning too: of which—the four of them—I had taken to be two pairs, two couples in the steadfast almost uxorious fashion of high-school juniors and seniors, until one evening I saw (by chance) her going toward the picture show squired by both of them.
Which would make it a little difficult now. But not too much. In fact, it would be quite simple (not to mention the fact that it was already May and I couldn’t much longer afford to wait): merely to wait for some afternoon when she would be without her convoy, when the Bishop and the Rouncewell would have to practice their dedications or maybe simply be kept in by a teacher after school. Which I did, already seeing her about a block away but just in time to see her turn suddenly into a street which would by-pass the Square itself: obviously a new route home she had adopted to use on the afternoons when she was alone, was already or (perhaps) wanted to be.
But that was simple too: merely to k-track one block then turn myself one block more to the corner where the street she was in must intercept. But quicker than she, faster than she, so that I saw her first walking fast along the purlieus of rubbish and ashcans and loading platforms until she saw me at the corner and stopped in dead mid-stride and one quick fleeing half-raised motion of the head. So that, who knows? At that sudden distance I might not have even stopped, being already in motion again, raising my hand and arm in return and on, across the alley, striding on as you would naturally expect a county attorney to be striding along a side street at forty-two minutes past three in the afternoon; one whole block more for safety and then safe, inviolate still the intactness, unthreatened again.
There was the telephone of course. But that would be too close, too near the alley and the raised hand. And grüss Gott they had invented the typewriter; the Board of Supervisors could subtract the letterhead from my next pay check or who knows they might not even miss it; the typewriter and the time of course were already mine:
Dear Linda:
When you decide which one you like the best, lets have a talk. I’ve seen some of them myself and can tell you more than the catalogue may have. We should have a banana split too; they may not have heard of them yet at Bennington and Bard and Swarthmore and you’ll have to be a missionary as well as a student.
Then in pencil, in my hand:
Saw you in the alley the other afternoon but didn’t have time to stop. Incidentally, what were you doing in an alley?
You see? The other afternoon, so that it wouldn’t matter when I mailed it: two days from now or two weeks from now; two whole weeks in which to tear it up, and even addressed the stamped envelope, knowing as I did so that I was deliberately wasting two—no, three, bought singly—whole cents, then tore them neatly across once and matched the torn edges and tore them across again and built a careful small tepee on the cold hearth and struck a match and watched the burn and uncreaked mine ancient knees and shook my trousers down.
Because it was May now; in two weeks she would graduate. But then Miss Eunice Gant had promised to send the dressing case yesterday afternoon and grüss Gott they had invented the telephone too. So once more (this would be the last one, the last lurk) to wait until half past eight o’clock (the bank would not open until nine but then even though Flem was not president of it you simply declined to imagine him hanging around the house until the last moment for the chance to leap to the ringing telephone) and then picked it up:
“Good morning, Mrs Snopes. Gavin Stevens. May I speak to Linda if she hasn’t already … I see, I must have missed her. But then I was late myself this morning … Thank you. We are all happy to know the dressing case pleased her. Maggie will be pleased to have the note … If you’ll give her the message when she comes home to dinner. I have some information about a Radcliffe scholarship which might interest her. That’s practically Harvard too and I can tell her about Cambridge … Yes, if you will: that I’ll lasiting for her in the drugstore after school this afternoon. Thank you.”
And good-bye. The sad word, even over the telephone. I mean, not the word is sad nor the meaning of it, but that you really can say it, that the time comes always in time when you can say it without grief and anguish now but without even the memory of grief and anguish, remembering that night in this same office here (when was it? ten years ago? twelve years?) when I had said not just Good-bye but Get the hell out of here to Eula Varner, and no hair bleached, no bead of anguished sweat or tear sprang out, and what regret still stirred a little was regret that even if I had been brave enough not to say No then, even that courage would not matter now since even the cowardice was only thin regret.
At first I thought I would go inside and be already sitting at the table waiting. Then I thought better: it must be casual but not taken-for-granted casual. So I stood at the entrance, but back, not to impede the juvenile flood or perhaps rather not to be trampled by it. Because she must not see me from a block away waiting, but casual, by accident outwardly and chance: first the little ones, first- and second- and third-grade; and now already the larger ones, the big grades and the high school; it would be soon now, any time now. Except that it was Chick, with a folded note.
“Here,” he said. “It seems to be stuck.”
“Stuck?” I said.
“The record. The victrola. This is the same tune it was playing before, aint it? Just backward this time.” Because she probably had insisted he read it first before she released it to him. So I was the second, not counting her:
Dear Mr Stevens
I will have to be a little late if you can wait for me
Linda
“Not quite the same,” I said. “I dont hear any dollar now.”
“Okay,” he said. “Neither did I. I reckon you aint coming home now.”
“So do I,” I said. So I went inside then and sat down at the table; I owed her that much anyway; the least I could give her was revenge, so let it be full revenge; full satisfaction of watching from wherever she would be watching while I sat still waiting for her long after even I knew she would not come; let it be the full whole hour then since “finis” is not “good-bye” and has no cause to grieve the spring of grief.
So when she passed rapidly across the plate-glass window, I didn’t know her. Because she was approaching not from the direction of the school but from the opposite one, as though she were on her way to school, not from it. No: that was not the reason.
She was already in the store now, rapidly, the screen clapping behind her at the same instant and in the same physical sense both running and poised motionless, wearing not the blouse and skirt or print cotton dress above the flat-heeled shoes of school; but dressed, I mean “dressed,” in a hat an high heels and silk stockings and makeup who needed none and already I could smell the scent: one poised split-second of immobilised and utter flight in bizarre and paradox panoply of allure, like a hawk caught by a speed lens.
“It’s all right,” I said. Because at least I still had that much presence.
“I cant,” she said. At least that much presence. There were not many people in the store but even one could have been too many, so I was already up now, moving toward her.
“How nice you look,” I said. “Come on; I’ll walk a way with you,” and turned her that way, not even touching her arm, on and out, onto the pavement, talking (I presume I was; I usually am), speaking: which was perhaps why I did not even realise that she had chosen the direction, not in fact until I realised that she had actually turned toward the foot of the office stairs, only then touching her, her elbow, holding it a little, on past the stairs so that none (one hoped intended must believe) had marked that falter, on along the late spring storefronts—the hardware and farm-furnish stores cluttered with garden and farm tools and rolls of uncut plow-line and sample sacks of slag and fertilizer and even the grocery ones exposing neat cases of seed packets stencilled with gaudy and incredible vegetables and flowers—talking (oh ay, trust me always) sedate and decorous: the young girl decked and scented to go wherever a young woman would be going at four oclock on a May afternoon, and the gray-headed bachelor, avuncular and what old Negroes called “settled,” incapable now of harm, slowed the blood and untroubled now the flesh by turn of wrist or ankle, faint and dusty-dry as memory now the hopes and anguishes of youth—until we could turn a corner into privacy or at least room or anyway so long as we did not actually stop.
Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion Page 62
