Thus we brought the hero home. Now we could see Jefferson, the clock on the courthouse, not to mention her father’s water tank, and now the duck voice was saying Ratliff. “Bart liked him. He said he hadn’t expected to like anybody from Mississippi, but he was wrong.” What Gavin wrote this time was obvious, since the voice said: “Not even you. He made me promise—I mean, whichever one of us it was, would give Ratliff one of his things. You remember it—the Italian boy that you didn’t know what it was even though you had seen sculpture before, but Ratliff that had never even seen an Italian boy, nor anything else beyond the Confederate monument in front of the courthouse, knew at once what it was, and even what he was doing?” And I would have liked the pad myself long enough to write What was the Italian boy doing? only we were home now, the hero; Gavin said:
“Stop at the bank first. He should have some warning; simple decency commands it. Unless he has had his warning and has simply left town for a little space in which to wrestle with his soul and so bring it to the moment which it must face. Assuming of course that even he has realised by now that he simply cannot foreclose her out of existence like a mortgage or a note.”
“And have a public reception here in the street before she has had a chance to fix her makeup?” I said.
“Relax,” he said again. “When you are a little older you will discover that people really are much more gentle and considerate and kind than you want right now to believe.”
I pulled up at the bank. But if I had been her I wouldn’t even have reached for the pencil, duck quack or not, to say, “What the hell? Take me on home.” She didn’t. She sat there, holding his hand in both hers, not just on her lap but right against her belly, looking around at the Square, the duck voice saying, “Gavin. Gavin.” Then: “There goes Uncle Willy, coming back from dinner.” Except it wasn’t old man Christian: he was dead. But then it didn’t really matter whether anybody wrote that on the pad or not. And Gavin was right. Nobody stopped. I watched two of them recognise her. No, I mean they recognised juxtaposition: Gavin Stevens’s car at the curb before the bank at twenty two minutes past one in the afternoon with me at the wheel and Gavin and a woman in the back seat. Who had all heard about Linda Kohl I mean Snopes Kohl, anyhow that she was female and from Jefferson and had gone near enough to a war for it to bust her eardrums. Because he is right: people are kind and gentle and considerate. It’s not that you dont expect them to be, it’s because you have already made up your mind they are not and so they upset you, throw you off. They didn’t even stop, just one of them said Howdy Gavin and went on.
I got out and went into the bank. Because what would I do myself if I had a daughter, an only child, and her grandfather had plenty of money for it and I could have afforded myself to let her go away to school. Only I didn’t and nobody knew why I wouldn’t, until suddenly I let her go, but only as far as the University which was only fifty miles away; and nobody knew why for that either: only that I aimed to become president of the bank that the president of it now was the man everybody believed had been laying my wife ever since we moved to town. That is, nobody knew why until three months later, when my wife went to the beauty parlor for the first time in her life and that night shot herself carefully through the temple so as not to disarrange the new permanent, and when the dust finally settled sure enough that fornicating bank president had left town and now I was not only president of his bank but living in his house and you would have thought I wouldn’t need the daughter any more and she could go wherever the hell she wanted provided it wasn’t ever Jefferson, Mississippi, again. Except I wouldn’t even let her do that until we could both sit in the car and see the monument over her mother’s grave unveiled, sitting there defenseless before the carved face and the carved defenseless taunt:
A VIRTUOUS WIFE Is A CROWN TO HER HUSBAND
HER CHILDREN RISE AND CALL HER BLESSED
and then I said, “All right. You can go now.” And I came back out.
“Mr Snopes has taken the afternoon off,” I said. “To go home and wait there for his daughter.” So we went there, on to the colonial monstrosity which was the second taunt. He had three monuments in Jefferson now: the water tank, the gravestone, and the mansion. And who knows at which of the windows he lurked his wait or waited out his lurk, whichever way you prefer. “Maybe I should come in too,” I said.
“Maybe we should each have a pad and pencil,” Uncle Gavin said. “Then everybody could hear.” We were expected. Almost at once the Negro yardman-chauffeur came out the front door. I got the luggage out onto the sidewalk while they still stood there, she as tall as him and Gavin in her arms just as much as she was in his, kissing right on the street in the broad daylight, the duck voice saying “Gavin Gavin” not so much as if she still couldn’t believe it was him at last but as if she still hadn’t got used to the new sound she was convinced she made. Then she turned him loose and he said, “Come on,” and we got back in the car, and that was all. The hero was home. I turned in the middle of the block and looked not back, I would have liked to say, if it had been true: the houseman still scuttling up the walk with the bags and she still standing there, looking at us, a little too tall for my taste, immured, inviolhe n silence, invulnerable, serene.
That was it: silence. If there were no such thing as sound. If it only took place in silence, no evil man has invented could really harm him: explosion, treachery, the human voice.
That was it: deafness. Ratliff and I couldn’t beat that. Those others, the other times had flicked the skirt or flowed or turned the limb at and into mere puberty; beyond it and immediately, was the other door immediately beyond which was the altar and the long line of drying diapers: fulfillment, the end. But she had beat him. Not in motion continuous through a door, a moment, but immobilised by a thunderclap into silence, herself the immobile one while it was the door and the walls it opened which fled away and on, herself no mere moment’s child but the inviolate bride of silence, inviolable in maidenhead, fixed, forever safe from change and alteration. Finally I ran Ratliff to ground; it took three days.
“Her husband is sending you a present,” I said. “It’s that sculpture you liked: the Italian boy doing whatever it was you liked that Gavin himself who has not only seen Italian boys before but maybe even one doing whatever this one is doing, didn’t even know where first base was. But it’s all right. You dont have a female wife nor any innocent female daughters either. So you can probably keep it right there in the house.—She’s going to marry him,” I said.
“Why not?” he said. “I reckon he can stand it. Besides, if somebody jest marries him, maybe the rest of us will be safe.”
“The rest of them, you mean?” I said.
“I mean jest what I said,” Ratliff answered. “I mean the rest of all of us.”
NINE
CHARLES MALLISON
Gavin was right. That was late August. Three weeks later I was back in Cambridge again, hoping, I mean trying, or maybe what I mean is I belonged to the class that would or anyway should, graduate next June. But I had been in Jefferson three weeks, plenty long enough even if they had insisted on having banns read: something quite unnecessary for a widow who was not only a widow but a wounded war hero too. So then I thought maybe they were waiting until they would be free of me. You know: the old road-company drammer reversed in gender: the frantic child clinging this time to the prospective groom’s coattail, crying “Papa papa papa” (in this case Uncle uncle uncle)
“please don’t make us marry Mrs Smith.”
Then I thought (it was Thanksgiving now; pretty soon I would be going home for Christmas) Naturally it wont occur to any of them to bother to notify me way up here in Massachusetts. So I even thought of writing and asking, not Mother of course and certainly not Uncle Gavin, since if it had happened he would be too busy to answer, and if it hadn’t he would still be too busy either dodging for his life if he was the one still saying No, or trying to learn her enough language to hear Please if he was the one sayi
ng Yes. But to Ratliff, who would be an interested bystander even if you couldn’t call that much curiosity about other people’s affairs which he possessed merely innocent014;maybe even a wire: Are they bedded formally yet or not? I mean is it rosa yet or still just sub, assuming you assume the same assumption they teach us up here at Harvard that once you get the clothes off those tall up-and-down women you find out they aint all that up-and-down at all.
Then it was Christmas and I thought Maybe I wronged them. Maybe they have been waiting for me all along, not to interrupt my education by an emergency call but for the season of peace and good will to produce me available to tote the ring or bouquet or whatever it is. But I didn’t even see her. Uncle Gavin and I even spent most of one whole day together. I was going out to Sartoris to shoot quail with Benbow (he wasn’t but seventeen but he was considered one of the best bird shots in the county, second only to Luther Biglin, a half farmer, half dog trainer, half market hunter, who shot left-handed, not much older than Ben-bow, in fact about my age, who lived up near Old Wyottsport on the river) and Uncle Gavin invited himself along. He—Gavin—wouldn’t be much of a gun even if he stopped talking long enough but now and then he would go with me. And all that day, nothing; it was me that finally said:
“How are the voice lessons coming?”
“Mrs Kohl? Fair. But your fresh ear would be the best judge,” and I said:
“When will that be?” and he said:
“Any time you’re close enough to hear it.” And again on Christmas day, it was me. Ratliff usually had Christmas dinner with us, Uncle Gavin’s guest though Mother liked him too, whether or not because she was Uncle Gavin’s twin. Or sometimes Uncle Gavin ate with Ratliff and then he would take me because Ratliff was a damned good cook, living alone in the cleanest little house you ever saw, doing his own housework and he even made the blue shirts he always wore. And this time too it was me.
“What about Mrs Kohl for dinner too?” I asked Mother, and Uncle Gavin said:
“My God, did you come all the way down here from Cambridge to spend Christmas too looking at that old fish-blooded son—” and caught himself in time and said, “Excuse me, Maggie,” and Mother said:
“Certainly she will have to take her first Christmas dinner at home with her father.” And the next day I left. Spoade—his father had been at Harvard back in 1909 with Uncle Gavin—had invited me to Charleston to see what a Saint Cecilia ball looked like from inside. Because we always broke up then anyway; the day after Christmas Father always went to Miami to spend a week looking at horses and Mother would go too, not that she was interested in running horses but on the contrary: because of her conviction that her presence or anyway adjacence or at least contiguity would keep him from buying one.
Then it was 1938 and I was back in Cambridge. Then it was September, 1938, and I was still or anyway again in Cambridge, in law school now. Munich had been observed or celebrated or consecrated, whichever it was, and Uncle Gavin said, “It wont be long now.” But he had been saying that back last spring. So I said:
“Then what’s the use in me wasting two or three more years becoming a lawyer when if yo’re right nobody will have time for civil cases any more, even if I’m still around to prosecute or defend them?” and he said:
“Because when this one is over, all humanity and justice will have left will be the law:” and I said:
“What else is it using now?” and he said:
“These are good times, boom halcyon times when what do you want with justice when you’ve already got welfare? Now the law is the last resort, to get your hand into the pocket which so far has resisted or foiled you.”
That was last spring, in June when he and Mother (they had lost Father at Saratoga though he had promised to reach Cambridge in time for the actual vows) came up to see me graduate in Ack. And I said, “What? No wedding bells yet?” and he said:
“Not mine anyway:” and I said:
“How are the voice lessons coming? Come on,” I said, “I’m a big boy now; I’m a Harvard A.M. too even if I wont have Heidelberg. Tell me. Is that really all you do when you are all cosy together? practise talking?” and he said:
“Hush and let me talk awhile now. You’re going to Europe for the summer; that’s my present to you. I have your tickets and your passport application; all you need do is go down to the official photographer and get mugged.”
“Why Europe? and Why now? Besides, what if I dont want to go?” and he said:
“Because it may not be there next summer. So it will have to be this one. Go and look at the place; you may have to die in it.”
“Why not wait until then, then?” and he said:
“You will go as a host then. This summer you can still be a guest.” There were three of us; by fast footwork and pulling all the strings we could reach, we even made the same boat. And that summer we—I: two of us at the last moment found themselves incapable of passing Paris—saw a little of Europe on a bicycle. I mean, that part still available: that presumable corridor of it where I might have to do Uncle Gavin’s dying: Britain, France, Italy—the Europe which Uncle Gavin said would be no more since the ones who survived getting rid of Hitler and Mussolini and Franco would be too exhausted and the ones who merely survived them wouldn’t care anyway.
So I did try to look at it, to see, since even at twenty-four I still seemed to believe what he said just as I believed him at fourteen and (I presume: I cant remember) at four. In fact, the Europe he remembered or thought he remembered was already gone. What I saw was a kind of composed and collected hysteria: a frenetic holiday in which everybody was a tourist, native and visitor alike. There were too many soldiers. I mean, too many people dressed as, and for the moment behaving like, troops, as if for simple police or temporary utility reasons they had to wear masquerade and add to the Maginot Line (so that they—the French ones anyway—seemed to be saying, “Have a heart; dont kid us. We dont believe it either.”) right in the middle of the fight for the thirty-nine-hour week; the loud parliamentary conclaes about which side of Piccadilly or the Champs Elysées the sandbags would look best on like which side of the room to hang the pictures; the splendid glittering figure of Gamelin still wiping the soup from his moustache and saying, “Be calm. I am here”—as though all Europe (oh yes, us too; the place was full of Americans too) were saying, “Since Evil is the thing, not only de rigueur but successful too, let us all join Evil and so make it the Good.”
Then me too in Paris for the last two weeks, to see if the Paris of Hemingway and the Paris of Scott Fitzgerald (they were not the same ones; they merely used the same room) had vanished completely or not too; then Cambridge again, only a day late: all of which, none of which that is, ties up with anything but only explains to me why it was almost a year and a half before I saw her again. And so we had Munich: that moment of respectful silence then once more about our affairs; and Uncle Gavin’s letter came saying “It wont be long now.” Except that it was probably already too late for me. When I had to go—no, I dont mean that: when the time came for me to go—I wanted to be a fighter pilot. But I was already twenty-four now; in six years I would be thirty and even now it might be too late; Bayard and John Sartoris were twenty when they went to England in ‘16 and Uncle Gavin told me about one R.F.C. (I mean R.A.F. now) child who was a captain with such a record that the British government sent him back home and grounded him for good so that he might at least be present on the day of his civilian majority. So I would probably wind up as a navigator or engineer on bombers, or maybe at thirty they wouldn’t let me go up at all.
But still no wedding bells. Maybe it was the voice. My spies—I only needed one of course: Mother—reported that the private lessons were still going on, so maybe she felt that the Yes would not be dulcet enough yet to be legal. Which—legality—she would of course insist on, having tried cohabitation the first time au naturel you might say, and it blew up in her face. No, that’s wrong. The cohabitation didn’t blow up until after it became le
gal, until whichever one it was finally said, “Oh hell then, get the license and the preacher but please for sweet please sake shut up.” So now she would fear a minister or a j.p. like Satan or the hangman, since to appear before one in the company of someone of the opposite sex would be the same as a death warrant. Which she certainly would not wish for Uncle Gavin, since not only was the Yes to him going to be tender enough to have brought her all the way back to Jefferson to say it, he wouldn’t leave enough money to make it worth being his widow in case that Yes wasn’t so tender.
No, that’s wrong too. If she had to shack up with a man for five years before he would consent to marry her, I mean, with a sculptor so advanced and liberal that even Gavin couldn’t recognise what he sculpted, made, he must have been pretty advanced in liberalism. And if he had to quit anything as safe and pleasant as being a Greenwich Village sculptor living with a girl that could afford and wanted to pay the rent and buy the grub whether he married her or not—if he had to quit all this to go to Spain to fight on what anybody could have told him would be the losing side, he must have been advanced even beyond just liberalism. And if she loved him enough to wait five years for him to say All right, dammit, call the parson, and then went to Spain to get blown up herself just to be with him, she must be one of them too since apparently you cant even be moderate about communism: you either violently are or violently are not(I asked him; I mean of course Uncle Gavin. “Suppose she is,” he said. “All right,” I said. “So what the hell?” he said. “All right, all right,” I said. “What the hell’s business is it of yours anyway?” he said. “All right, all right, all right,” I said.) And just being blown up wouldn’t cure it. So there would be no wedding bells; that other one had been a mere deviation due to her youth, not to happen again; she was only for a moment an enemy of the people, and paid quickly for it.
Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion Page 99
