TEMPLE
(to Governor)
And what does that matter either? Whether he knows or not? What can another face or two or name or two matter, since he knows that I lived for six weeks in a Manuel Street brothel? Or another body or two in the bed? Or three or four? I’m trying to tell it, enough of it. Can’t you see that? But can’t you make him let me alone so I can. Make him, for God’s sake, let me alone.
GOVERNOR
(to Stevens: watching Temple)
No more, Gavin.
(to Temple)
So you fell in love.
TEMPLE
Thank you for that. I mean, the ‘love.’ Except that I didn’t even fall, I was already there: the bad, the lost: who could have climbed down the gutter or lightning rod any time and got away, or even simpler than that: disguised myself as the nigger maid with a stack of towels and a bottle opener and change for ten dollars, and walked right out the front door. So I wrote the letters. I would write one each time . . . afterward, after they — he left, and sometimes I would write two or three when it would be two or three days between, when they — he wouldn’t ——
GOVERNOR
What? What’s that?
TEMPLE
— you know: something to do, be doing, filling the time, better than the fashion parades in front of the two-foot glass with nobody to be disturbed even by the . . . pants, or even no pants. Good letters ——
GOVERNOR
Wait. What did you say?
TEMPLE
I said they were good letters, even for ——
GOVERNOR
You said, after they left.
(they look at one another. Temple doesn’t answer: to Stevens, though still watching Temple)
Am I being told that this . . . Vitelli would be there in the room too?
STEVENS
Yes. That was why he brought him. You can see now what I meant by connoisseur and gourmet.
GOVERNOR
And what you meant by the boot too. But he’s dead. You know that.
STEVENS
Oh yes. He’s dead. And I said ‘purist’ too. To the last: hanged the next summer in Alabama for a murder he didn’t even commit and which nobody involved in the matter really believed he had committed, only not even his lawyer could persuade him to admit that he couldn’t have done it if he had wanted to, or wouldn’t have done it if the notion had struck him. Oh yes, he’s dead too; we haven’t come here for vengeance.
GOVERNOR
(to Temple)
Yes. Go on. The letters.
TEMPLE
The letters. They were good letters. I mean — good ones.
(staring steadily at the Governor)
What I’m trying to say is, they were the kind of letters that if you had written them to a man, even eight years ago, you wouldn’t — would — rather your husband didn’t see them, no matter what he thought about your — past.
(still staring at the Governor as she makes her painful confession)
Better than you would expect from a seventeen-year-old amateur. I mean, you would have wondered how anybody just seventeen and not even through freshman in college, could have learned the — right words. Though all you would have needed probably would be an old dictionary from back in Shakespeare’s time when, so they say, people hadn’t learned how to blush at words. That is, anybody except Temple Drake, who didn’t need a dictionary, who was a fast learner and so even just one lesson would have been enough for her, let alone three or four or a dozen or two or three dozen.
(staring at the Governor)
No, not even one lesson because the bad was already there waiting, who hadn’t even heard yet that you must be already resisting the corruption not only before you look at it but before you even know what it is, what you are resisting. So I wrote the letters, I don’t know how many, enough, more than enough because just one would have been enough. And that’s all.
GOVERNOR
All?
TEMPLE
Yes. You’ve certainly heard of blackmail. The letters turned up again of course. And of course, being Temple Drake, the first way to buy them back that Temple Drake thought of, was to produce the material for another set of them.
STEVENS
(to Temple)
Yes, that’s all. But you’ve got to tell him why it’s all.
TEMPLE
I thought I had. I wrote some letters that you would have thought that even Temple Drake might have been ashamed to put on paper, and then the man I wrote them to died, and I married another man and reformed, or thought I had, and bore two children and hired another reformed whore so that I would have somebody to talk to, and I even thought I had forgotten about the letters until they turned up again and then I found out that I not only hadn’t forgot about the letters, I hadn’t even reformed ——
STEVENS
All right. Do you want me to tell it, then?
TEMPLE
And you were the one preaching moderation.
STEVENS
I was preaching against orgasms of it.
TEMPLE
(bitterly)
Oh, I know. Just suffering. Not for anything: just suffering. Just because it’s good for you, like calomel or ipecac.
(to Governor)
All right. What?
GOVERNOR
The young man died ——
TEMPLE
Oh yes. — Died, shot from a car while he was slipping up the alley behind the house, to climb up the same drainpipe I could have climbed down at any time and got away, to see me — the one time, the first time, the only time when we thought we had dodged, fooled him, could be alone together, just the two of us, after all the . . . other ones. — If love can be, mean anything, except the newness, the learning, the peace, the privacy: no shame: not even conscious that you are naked because you are just using the nakedness because that’s a part of it; then he was dead, killed, shot down right in the middle of thinking about me, when in just one more minute maybe he would have been in the room with me, when all of him except just his body was already in the room with me and the door locked at last for just the two of us alone; and then it was all over and as though it had never been, happened: it had to be as though it had never happened, except that that was even worse ——
(rapidly)
Then the courtroom in Jefferson and I didn’t care, not about anything any more, and my father and brothers waiting and then the year in Europe, Paris, and I still didn’t care, and then after a while it really did get easier. You know. People are lucky. They are wonderful. At first you think that you can bear only so much and then you will be free. Then you find out that you can bear anything, you really can and then it won’t even matter. Because suddenly it could be as if it had never been, never happened. You know: somebody — Hemingway, wasn’t it? —
wrote a book about how it had never actually happened to a gir — woman, if she just refused to accept it, no matter who remembered, bragged. And besides, the ones who could — remember — were both dead. Then Gowan came to Paris that winter and we were married — at the Embassy, with a reception afterward at the Crillon, and if that couldn’t fumigate an American past, what else this side of heaven could you hope for to remove stink? Not to mention a new automobile and a honeymoon in a rented hideaway built for his European mistress by a Mohammedan prince at Cap Ferrat. Only ——
(she pauses, falters, for just an instant, then goes on)
— we — I thought we — I didn’t want to efface the stink really ——
(rapidly now, tense, erect, her hands gripped again into fists on her lap)
You know: just the marriage would be enough: not the Embassy and the Crillon and Cap Ferrat but just to kneel down, the two of us, and say ‘We have sinned, forgive us.’ And then maybe there would be the love this time — the peace, the quiet, the no shame that I . . . didn’t — missed that other time ——
(falters again, then rapidly again, glib and succinct)
Love, but more than love too: not depending on just love to hold two people together, make them better than either one would have been alone, but tragedy, suffering, having suffered and caused grief; having something to have to live with even when, because you knew both of you could never forget it. And then I began to believe something even more than that: that there was something even better, stronger, than tragedy to hold two people together: forgiveness. Only that seemed to be wrong. Only maybe it wasn’t the forgiveness that was wrong, but the gratitude; and maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly all the time, is having to accept it ——
STEVENS
Which is exactly backward. What was wrong wasn’t ——
GOVERNOR
Gavin.
STEVENS
Shut up yourself, Henry. What was wrong wasn’t Temple’s good name. It wasn’t even her husband’s conscience. It was his vanity: the Virginia-trained aristocrat caught with his gentility around his knees like the guest in the trick Hollywood bathroom. So the forgiving wasn’t enough for him, or perhaps he hadn’t read Hemingway’s book. Because after about a year, his restiveness under the onus of accepting the gratitude began to take the form of doubting the paternity of their child.
TEMPLE
Oh God. Oh God.
GOVERNOR
Gavin.
(Stevens stops.)
No more, I said. Call that an order.
(to Temple)
Yes. Tell me.
TEMPLE
I’m trying to. I expected our main obstacle in this would be the bereaved plaintiff. Apparently though it’s the defendant’s lawyer. I mean, I’m trying to tell
