So that when I got home Christmas I said to Gavin: “Tell her to tear up that god-damn party card, if she’s got one. Go on. Tell her. She cant help people. They are not worth it. They dont want to be helped any more than they want advice or work. They want cake and excitement, both free. Man stinks. How the hell can she have spent a year in a war that not only killed her husband and blew the bejesus out of the inside of her skull, but even at that price the side she was fighting for still lost, without finding that out? Oh sure, I know, I know, you and Ratliff both have told me often enough, if I’ve heard Ratliff one time I’ve heard him a hundred: ‘Man aint really evil, he jest aint got any sense.’ But so much the more reason, because that leaves him completely hopeless, completely worthless of anybody’s anguish and effort and trouble.” Then I stopped, because he had put his hand on my head. He had to reach up to do it now but he did it exactly as he used to when I was half as tall and only a third as old, gentle and tender and stroking it a little, speaking quiet and gentle too:
“Why dont you tell her?” he said. Because he is a good man, wise too except for the occasions when he would aberrate, go momentarily haywire and take a wrong turn that even I could see was wrong, and then go hell-for-leather, with absolutely no deviation from logic and rationality from there on, until he wound us up in a mess of trouble or embarrassment that even I would have had sense enough to dodge. But he is a good man. Maybe I was wrong sometimes to trust and follow him but I never was wrong to love him.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Dont be,” he said. “Just remember it. Dont ever waste time regretting errors. Just dont forget them.”
So I ran Ratliff to earth again. No: I just took advantage of him. It was the regular yearly Christmas-season supper that Ratliff cooked himself at his house and invited Uncle Gavin and me to eat it with him. But this time Gavin had to go to Jackson on some drainage-district business so I went alone, to sit in Ratliff’s immaculate little kitchen with a cold toddy of old Mr Calvin Bookwright’s corn whiskey that Ratliff seemed to have no trouble getting from him, though now, in his old age, with anybody else Mr Cal might sell it to you or give it to you or order you off his place, you never knew which; sipping the cold toddy as Ratliff made them—first the sugar dissolved into a little water, then the whiskey added while the spoon still stirred gently, then rain water from the cistern to fill the glass—while Ratliff in a spotless white apron over one of the neat tieless faded blue shirts which he made himself, cooked the meal, cooking it damnewell, not just because he loved to eat it but because he loved the cooking, the blending up to perfection’s ultimate moment. Then he removed the apron and we ate it at the kitchen table, with the bottle of claret Uncle Gavin and I always furnished. Then with the coffee and the decanter of whiskey we moved (as always) to the little immaculate room he called his parlor, with the spotlessly waxed melodeon in the corner and the waxed chairs and the fireplace filled with fluted green paper in the summer but with a phony gas log in the winter, now that progress had reached, whelmed us, and the waxed table in the center of the room on which, on a rack under a glass bell, rested the Allanovna necktie—a rich not-quite-scarlet, not-quite-burgundy ground patterned with tiny yellow sunflowers each with a tiny blue center of almost the exact faded blue of his shirts, that he had brought home from New York that time three or four years ago when he and Gavin went to see Linda married and off to Spain, that I would have cut my tongue out before I would have told him it probably cost whoever (Gavin I suppose) paid for it around seventy-five dollars; until that day when I inadvertently said something to that effect and Ratliff said, “I know how much. I paid it. It was a hundred and fifty dollars.” “What?” I said. “A hundred and fifty?” “There was two of them,” he said. “I never saw but one,” I said. “I doubt if you will,” he said. “The other one is a private matter.”—and beside it, the piece of sculpture that Barton Kohl had bequeathed him that, if Gavin was still looking for first base, I had already struck out because I didn’t even know what it was, let alone what it was doing.
“All it needs is that gold cigarette lighter she gave him,” I said. “The Linda Snopes room.”
“No,” he said. “The Eula Varner room. It ought to have more in it, but maybe this will do. Leastways it’s something. When a community is lucky enough to be the community that every thousand years or so has a Eula Varner to pick it out to do her breathing in, the least we can do is for somebody to set up something; a … monument aint quite the word I want.”
“Shrine,” I said.
“That’s it,” he said. “A shrine to mark and remember it, for the folks that wasn’t that lucky, that was already doomed to be too young …” He stopped. He stood there quite still. Except that you would think of him as being quizzical, maybe speculative, but not bemused. Then I said it:
“You were wrong. They aren’t going to.”
“What?” he said. “What’s that?”
“She’s not going to marry Gavin.”
“That’s right,” he said. “It will be worse than that.”
Now it was me that said, “What? What did you say?” But he was already himself again, bland, serene, inscrutable.
“But I reckon Lawyer can stand that too,” he said.
TEN
GAVIN SVENS
I could have suggested that, told her to do that, and she would have done it—torn the card up at once, quickly, immediately, with passion and exultation. She was like her mother in one thing at least: needing, fated to need, to find something competent enough, strong enough (in her case, this case, not tough enough because Kohl was tough enough: he happened to be mere flesh and bones and so wasn’t durable enough) to take what she had to give; and at the same time doomed to fail, in this, her case, not because Barton failed her but because he also had doom in his horoscope. So if the Communist party, having already proved itself immune to bullets and therefore immortal, had replaced him, not agai
n to bereave her, of course she would have torn her card up, with passion and exultation and joy too. Since what sacrifice can love demand more complete than abasement, abnegation, particularly at the price of what the unknowing materialist world would in its crass insensitive ignorance dub cowardice and shame? I have always had a sneaking notion that that old Christian martyr actually liked, perhaps even loved, his aurochs or his lion.
But I did suggest something else. It was 1940 now. The Nibelung maniac had destroyed Poland and turned back west where Paris, the civilised world’s eternal and splendid courtesan, had been sold to him like any whore and only the English national character turned him east again; another year and Lenin’s Frankenstein would be our ally but too late for her; too late for us too, too late for all the western world’s peace for the next hundred years, as a tubby little giant of a man in England was already saying in private, but needs must when the devil etcetera.
It began in my office. He was a quiet, neat, almost negative man of no particular age between twenty-five and fifty, as they all appear, who showed me briefly the federal badge (his name was Gihon) and accepted the chair and said Thank you and opened his business quietly and impersonally, as they do, as if they are simply delivering a not-too-important message. Oh yes, I was doubtless the last, the very last on his list since he would have checked thoroughly on or into me without my knowing it as he had days and maybe months ago penetrated and resolved and sifted all there was to be learned about her.
“We know that all she has done, tried to do, has been done quite openly, where everybody would have a chance to hear about it, know about it—”
“I think you can safely say that,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “—quite openly. Quite harmless. With the best of intentions, only not very … practical. Nothing in fact that a lady wouldn’t do, only a little …”
“Screwy,” I suggested.
“Thank you. But there you are. I can tell you in confidence that she holds a Communist party card. Naturally you are not aware of that.”
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Now I said, “Thank you.”
“And, once a communist—I grant you, that’s like the old saying (no imputation of course, I’m sure you understand that), Once a prostitute. Which anyone after calm reflection knows to be false. But there you are. Ty the not a time of calmness and reflection; to ask or expect, let alone hope, for that from the government and the people too, faced with what we are going to have to meet sooner probably than we realise—”
“Yes,” I said. “What do you want me to do? What do you assume I can do?”
“She … I understand, have been informed, that you are her earliest and still are her closest friend—”
“No imputation of course,” I said. But he didn’t say Thank you in his turn. He didn’t say anything, anything at all. He just sat there watching me through his glasses, gray, negative as a chameleon, terrifying as the footprint on Crusoe’s beach, too negative and neuter in that one frail articulation to bear the terrible mantle he represented. “What you want then is for me to use my influence—”
“—as a patriotic citizen who is intelligent enough to know that we too will be in this war within five years—I set five years as an outside maximum since it took the Germans only three years before to go completely mad and defy us into that one—with exactly who for our enemy we may not know until it is already too late—”
“—to persuade her to surrender that card quietly to you and swear whatever binding oath you are authorised to give her,” I said. “Didn’t you just say yourself that Once a whore (with no imputations) always a whore?”
“I quite agree with you,” he said. “In this case, not the one with the imputations.”
“Then what do you want of me—her?”
He produced a small notebook and opened it; he even had the days of the week and the hours: “She and her husband were in Spain, members of the Loyalist communist army six months and twenty-nine days until he was killed in action; she herself remained, serving as an orderly in the hospital after her own wound, until the Loyalists evacuated her across the border into France—”
“Which is on record even right here in Jefferson.”
“Yes,” he said. “Before that she lived for seven years in New York City as the common-law wife—”
“—which of course damns her not only in Jefferson, Mississippi, but in Washington too.” But he had not even paused.
“—of a known registered member of the Communist party, and the close associate of other known members of the Communist party, which may not be in your Jefferson records.”
“Yes,” I said. “And then?”
He closed the notebook and put it back inside his coat and sat looking at me again, quite cold, quite impersonal, as if the space between us were the lens of a microscope. “So she knew people, not only in Spain but in the United States too, people who so far are not even in our records—Communist members and agents, important people, who are not as noticeable as Jewish sculptors and Columbia professors and other such intelligent amateurs—” Because that was when I finally understood.
“I see,” I said. “You offer a swap. You will trade her immunity for names. Your bureau will whitewash her from an enemy into a simple stool pigeon. Have you a warrant of any sort?”
“No,” he said. I got up.
“Then good day, sir.” But he didn’t move yet.
“You wont suggest it to her?”
“I will not,” I said.
“Your country is in danger, perhaps in jeopardy.”
“Not from her,” I said. Then he rose too and took his hat from the desk.
“I hope you wont regret this, Mr Stevens.”
“Good day, sir,” I said.
Or that is, I wrote it. Because it was three years now and she had tried, really tried to learn lip reading. But I dont know. Maybe to live outside human sound is to live outside human time too, and she didn’t have time to learn, to bother to learn. But again I dont know. Maybe it didn’t take even three years of freedom, immunity from it to learn that perhaps the entire dilemma of man’s condition is because of the ceaseless gabble with which he has surrounded himself, enclosed himself, insulated himself from the penalties of his own folly, which otherwise—the penalties, the simple red ink—might have enabled him by now to have made his condition solvent, workable, successful. So I wrote it
Leave here Go away
“You mean, move?” she said. “Find a place of my own? an apartment or a house?”
I mean leave Jefferson I wrote. Go completely away for good Give me that damn card & leave Jefferson
“You said that to me before.”
“No I didn’t,” I said. I even spoke it, already writing, already planning out the whole paragraph it would take: We’ve never even mentioned that card or the Communist party either. Even hack there three years ago when you first tried to tell me you had one and show it to me and I wouldn’t let you, stopped you, refused to listen: dont you remember? But she was already talking again:
“I mean back there when I was fifteen or sixteen and you said I must get away from Jefferson.”
So I didn’t even write the other; I wrote But you couldnt then Now you can Give me the card & go She stood quietly for a moment, a time. We didn’t even try to use the ivory tablet on occasions of moment and crisis like this. It was a bijou, a gewgaw, a bangle, feminine; really almost useless: thin ivory sheets bound with gold and ringed together with more of it, each sheet about the size of a playing card so that it wouldn’t really contain more than about three words at at, a, like an anagram, an acrostic at the level of children—a puzzle say or maybe a continued story ravished from a primer. Instead, we were in her upstairs sitting room she had fitted up, standing at the mantel which she had designed at the exact right height and width to support a foolscap pad when we had something to discuss that there must be no mistake about or something which wasn’t worth not being explicit about, like money, so that she could read the words as my hand formed them, like speech, almost like hearing.
“Go where?” she said. “Where could I go?”
Anywhere New York Back to Europe of course but in New York some of the people still you & Barton knew the friends your own age She looked at me. With the pupils expanded like this, her eyes looked almost black; blind too.
“I’m afraid,” she said.
I spoke; she could read single words if they were slow: “You? Afraid?” She said:
“Yes. I dont want to be helpless. I wont be helpless. I wont have to depend.”
I thought fast, like that second you have to raise or draw or throw in your hand, while each fraction of the second effaces another pip from your hole card. I wrote quite steadily while she watched Then why am I here and drew my hand back so she could read it. Then she said, in that dry, lifeless, what Chick calls duck’s quack:
“Gavin.” I didn’t move. She said it again: “Gavin.” I didn’t move. She said: “All right. I lied. Not the depend part. I wont depend. I just must be where you are.” She didn’t even add Because you’re all I have now. She just stood, our eyes almost level, looking at me out of, across, something—abyss, darkness; not abject, not questioning, not even hoping; in a moment I would know it; saying again in the quacking voice: “Gavin.”
I wrote rapidly, in three- or four-word bursts, gaggles, clumps, whatever you want to call them, so she could read as I wrote Its all right dont Be afraid I Refuse to marry you 20 years too much Difference for it To work besides I Dont want to
“Gavin,” she said.
I wrote again, ripping the yellow sheets off the pad and shoving them aside on the mantel I dont want to
“I love you,” she said. “Even when I have to tell a lie, you have already invented it for me.”
I wrote No lie nobody Mentioned Barton Kohl
“Yes,” she said.
I wrote No
“But you can me,” she said. That’s right. She used the explicit word, speaking the hard brutal guttural in the quacking duck’s voice. That had be
en our problem as soon as we undertook the voice lessons: the tone, to soften the voice which she herself couldn’t hear. “It’s exactly backward,” she told me. “When you say I’m whispering, it feels like thunder inside my head. But when I say it this way, I cant even feel it.” And this time it would be almost a shout. Which is the way it was now, since she probably believed she had lowered her voice, I standing there while what seemed to me like reverberations of thunder died away.
“You’re blushing,” she said.
I wrote that word
“What word?”
that you just said
“Tell me another one to use. Write it down so I can see it and remember it.”
I wrote There is no other thats the right one only one I am old fashioned it still shocks me a little No what shocks is when a woman uses it & is not shocked at all until she realises I am Then I wrote thats wrong too what shocks is that all that magic passion excitement be summed up & dismissed in that one bald unlovely sound
Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion Page 102
