“No,” I says.
“I won’t travel with you. I won’t be seen with you.”
“No,” I says. “Maybe it ain’t jest the wedding. I’m going back to let all them V. K. Ratliff beginnings look at me for the first time. Maybe it’s them I’m trying to suit. Or leastways not to shame.”
So we taken the train to Memphis that night and the next day we was in Virginia — Bristol then Roanoke and Lynchburg and turned north-east alongside the blue mountains and somewhere ahead, we didn’t know jest where, was where that first Vladimir Kyrilytch finally found a place where he could stop, that we didn’t know his last name or maybe he didn’t even have none until Nelly Ratliff, spelled Ratcliffe then, found him, any more than we knowed what he was doing in one of them hired German regiments in General Burgoyne’s army that got licked at Saratoga except that Congress refused to honour the terms of surrender and banished the whole kit-and-biling of them to struggle for six years in Virginia without no grub nor money and the ones like that first V.K. without no speech neither.
But he never needed none of the three of them to escape not only to the right neighbourhood but into the exact right hayloft where Nelly Ratcliffe, maybe hunting eggs or such, would find him. And never needed no language to eat the grub she toted him; and maybe he never knowed nothing about farming before the day when she finally brought him out where her folks could see him; nor never needed no speech to speak of for the next development, which was when somebody — her maw or paw or brothers or whoever it was, maybe jest a neighbour — noticed the size of her belly; and so they married and so that V.K. actively did have a active legal name of Ratcliffe, and the one after him come to Tennessee and the one after him moved to Missippi, except that by that time it was spelled Ratliff, where the oldest son is still named Vladimir Kyrilytch and still spends half his life trying to keep anybody from finding it out.
The next morning we was in New York. It was early; not even seven o’clock yet. It was too early. “Likely they ain’t even finished breakfast yet,” I says.
“Breakfast hell,” Lawyer says. “They haven’t even gone to bed yet. This is New York, not Yoknapatawpha County.” So we went to the hotel where Lawyer had already engaged a room. Except it wasn’t a room, it was three of them: a parlour and two bedrooms. “We can have breakfast up here too,” he says.
“Breakfast?” I says.
“They’ll send it up here.”
“This is New York,” I says. “I can eat breakfast in the bedroom or kitchen or on the back gallery in Yoknapatawpha County.” So we went downstairs to the dining-room. Then I says, “What time do they eat breakfast then? Sundown? Or is that jest when they get up?”
“No,” he says. “We got a errand first. — No,” he says, “we got two errands.” He was looking at it again, though I will have to do him the justice to say he hadn’t mentioned it again since that first time when I got in the car back in Jefferson.
And I remember how he told me once how maybe New York wasn’t made for no climate known to man but at least some weather was jest made for New York. In which case, this was sholy some of it: one of them soft blue drowsy days in the early fall when the sky itself seems like it was resting on the earth like a soft blue mist, with the tall buildings rushing up into it and then stopping, the sharp edges fading like the sunshine wasn’t jest shining on them but kind of humming, like wires singing. Then I seen it: a store, with a shop window, a entire show window with not nothing in it but one necktie.
“Wait,” I says.
“No,” he says. “It was all right as long as just railroad conductors looked at it, but you can’t face a preacher in it.”
“No,” I says, “wait.” Because I had heard about these New York side-alley stores too. “If it takes that whole show window to deserve jest one necktie, likely they will want three or four dollars for it.”
“We can’t help it now,” he says. “This is New York. Come on.”
And nothing inside neither except some gold chairs and two ladies in black dresses and a man dressed like a congressman or at least a preacher, that knowed Lawyer by active name.
And then a office with a desk and a vase of flowers and a short dumpy dark woman in a dress that wouldn’t a fitted nobody, with grey-streaked hair and the handsomest dark eyes I ever seen even if they was popped a little, that kissed Lawyer and then he said to her, “Myra Allanovna, this is Vladimir Kyrilytch,” and she looked at me and said something; yes, I know it was Russian, and Lawyer saying: “Look at it. Just once if you can bear it,” and I says,
“Sholy it ain’t quite as bad as that. Of course I had ruther it was yellow and red instead of pink and green. But all the same—” and she says,
“You like yellow and red?”
“Yessum,” I says. Then I says, “In fact” before I could stop, and she says,
“Yes, tell me,” and I says,
“Nothing. I was jest thinking that if you could jest imagine a necktie and then pick it right up and put it on, I would imagine one made outen red with a bunch or maybe jest one single sunflower in the middle of it,” and she says,
“Sunflower?” and Lawyer says,
“Helianthe.” Then he says, “No, that’s wrong. Tournesol. Sonnenblume,” and she says Wait and was already gone, and now I says Wait myself.
“Even a five-dollar necktie couldn’t support all them gold chairs.”
“It’s too late now,” Lawyer says. “Take it off.” Except that when she come back, it not only never had no sunflower, it wasn’t even red. It was jest dusty. No, that was wrong; you had looked at it by that time. It looked like the outside of a peach, that you know that in a minute, providing you can keep from blinking, you will see the first beginning of when it starts to turn peach. Except that it don’t do that. It’s still jest dusted over with gold, like the back of a sunburned gal. “Yes,” Lawyer says, “send out and get him a white shirt. He never wore a white shirt before either.”
“No, never,” she says. “Always blue, not? And this blue, always? The same blue as your eyes?”
“That’s right,” I says.
“But how?” she says. “By fading them? By just washing them?”
“That’s right,” I says, “I jest washes them.”
“You mean, you wash them? Yourself?”
“He makes them himself too,” Lawyer says.
“That’s right,” I says. “I sells sewing machines. First thing I knowed I could run one too.”
“Of course,” she says. “This one for now. Tomorrow, the other one, red with sonnenblume.” Then we was outside again. I was still trying to say Wait.
“Now I got to buy two of them,” I says. “I’m trying to be serious. I mean, please try to believe I am as serious right now as ere a man in your experience. Jest exactly how much you reckon was the price on that one in that window?”
And Lawyer not even stopping, saying over his shoulder in the middle of folks pushing past and around us in both directions: “I don’t know. Her ties run up to a hundred and fifty. Say, seventy-five dollars—” It was exactly like somebody had hit me a quick light lick with the edge of his hand across the back of the neck until next I knowed I was leaning against the wall back out of the rush of folks in a fit of weak trembles with Lawyer more or less holding me up. “You all right now?” he says.
“No I ain’t,” I says. “Seventy-five dollars for a necktie? I can’t! I won’t!”
“You’re forty years old,” he says. “You should a been buying at the minimum one tie a year ever since you fell in love the first time. When was it? eleven? twelve? thirteen? Or maybe it was eight or nine, when you first went to school — provided the first-grade teacher was female of course. But even call it twenty.
That’s twenty years, at one dollar a tie a year. That’s twenty dollars. Since you are not married and never will be and don’t have any kin close enough to exhaust and wear you out by taking care of you or hoping to get anything out of you, you may live another forty-five. That’s sixty-five dollars. That means you will have an Allanovna tie for only ten dollars. Nobody else in the world ever got an Allanovna tie for ten dollars.”
“I won’t!” I says. “I won’t!”
“All right. I’ll make you a present of it then.”
“I can’t do that,” I says.
“All right. You want to go back there and tell her you don’t want the tie?”
“Don’t you see I can’t do that?”
“All right,” he says. “Come on. We’re already a little late.” So when we got to this hotel we went straight to the saloon.
“We’re almost there,” I says. “Can’t you tell me yet who it’s going to be?”
“No,” he says. “This is New York. I want to have a little fun and pleasure too.” And a moment later, when I realised that Lawyer hadn’t never laid eyes on him
