“All right, all right, beat it. Don’t forget the time,” and Hoake saying,
“Yes yes, we’ll be at Twenty-One for dinner and afterward at the Stork Club if you need to telephone.” Then they was gone and the rest of the company went too except three other men that I found out was newspapermen too, foreign correspondents; and Kohl his-self helped his new tenant’s wife cook the spaghetti and we et it and drunk some more wine, red this time, and they talked about the war, about Spain and Ethiopia and how this was the beginning: the lights was going off all over Europe soon and maybe in this country too; until it was time to go to the ship. And more champagne in the bedroom there, except that Lawyer hadn’t hardly got the first bottle open when Linda and Hoake come in.
“Already?” Lawyer says. “We didn’t expect you for at least a hour yet.”
“She — we decided to skip the Stork Club,” Hoake says. “We took a fiacre through the Park instead. And now,” he says, that hadn’t even put the derby hat down.
“Stay and have some champagne,” Lawyer says, and Kohl said something too. But Linda had done already held out her hand.
“Good-bye, Mr McCarron,” she says. “Thank you for the evening and for coming to my wedding.”
“Can’t you say ‘Hoake’ yet?” he says.
“Good-bye, Hoake,” she says.
“Wait in the cab then,” Lawyer says. “We’ll join you in a minute.”
“No,” Hoake says. “I’ll take another cab and leave that one for you.” Then he was gone. She shut the door behind him and came toward Lawyer, taking something outen her pocket.
“Here,” she says. It was a gold cigarette-lighter. “I know you won’t ever use it, since you say you think you can taste the fluid when you light your pipe.”
“No,” Lawyer says. “What I said was, I know I can taste it.”
“All right,” she says. “Take it anyway.” So Lawyer taken it. “It’s engraved with your initials: see?”
“G L S,” Lawyer says. “They are not my initials. I just have two: G S.”
“I know. But the man said a monogram should have three so I loaned you one of mine.” Then she stood there facing him, as tall as him almost, looking at him. “That was my father,” she says.
“No,” Lawyer says.
“Yes,” she says.
“You don’t mean to tell me he told you that,” Lawyer says.
“You know he didn’t. You made him swear not to.”
“No,” Lawyer says.
“You swear then.”
“All right,” Lawyer says. “I swear.”
“I love you,” she says. “Do you know why?”
“Tell me,” Lawyer says.
“It’s because every time you lie to me I can always know you will stick to it.”
Then the second sentimental pilgrimage. No, something else come first. It was the next afternoon. “Now we’ll go pick up the necktie,” Lawyer says.
“No,” I says.
“You mean you want to go alone?”
“That’s right,” I says. So I was alone, the same little office again and her still in the same dress that wouldn’t fitted nobody already looking at my empty collar even before I put the necktie and the hundred and fifty dollars on the desk by the new one that I hadn’t even teched yet because I was afraid to. It was red jest a little under what you see in a black-gum leaf in the fall, with not no single sunflower nor even a bunch of them but little yellow sunflowers all over it in a kind of diamond pattern, each one with a little blue centre almost the exact blue my shirts gets to after a while. I didn’t dare touch it.
“I’m sorry,” I says. “But you see I jest can’t. I sells sewing machines in Missippi. I can’t have it knowed back there that I paid seventy-five dollars apiece for neckties. But if I’m in the Missippi sewing machine business and can’t wear seventy-five dollar neckties, so are you in the New York necktie business and can’t afford to have folks wear or order neckties and not pay for them. So here,” I says. “And I ask your kindness to excuse me.”
But she never even looked at the money. “Why did he call you Vladimir Kyrilytch?” she says. I told her.
“Except we live in Missippi now, and we got to live it down. Here,” I says. “And I ask you again to ex—”
“Take that off my desk,” she says. “I have given the ties to you. You cannot pay for them.”
“Don’t you see I can’t do that neither?” I says. “No more than I could let anybody back in Missippi order a sewing machine from me and then say he had done changed his mind when I delivered it to him?”
“So,” she says. “You cannot accept the ties, and I cannot accept the money. Good. We do this—” There was a thing on the desk that looked like a cream pitcher until she snapped it open and it was a cigarette-lighter. “We burn it then, half for you, half for me—” until I says,
“Wait! Wait!” and she stopped. “No,” I says, “no. Not burn money,” and she says,
“Why not?” and us looking at each other, her hand holding the lit lighter and both our hands on the money.
“Because it’s money,” I says. “Somebody somewhere at some time went to — went through — I mean, money stands for too much hurt and grief somewhere to somebody that jest the money wasn’t never worth — I mean, that ain’t what I mean . . .” and she says,
“I know exactly what you mean. Only the gauche, the illiterate, the frightened and the pastless destroy money. You will keep it then. You will take it back to — how you say?”
“Missippi,” I says.
“Missippi. Where is one who, not needs: who cares about so base as needs? Who wants something that costs one hundred fifty dollar — a hat, a picture, a book, a jewel for the ear; something never never never anyhow just to eat — but believes he — she — will never have it, has even long ago given up, not the dream but the hope — This time do you know what I mean?”
“I know exactly what you mean because you jest said it,” I says.
“Then kiss me,” she says. And that night me and Lawyer went up to Saratoga.
“Did you tell Hoake better than to try to give her a lot of money, or did he jest have that better sense his-self?” I says.
“Yes,” Lawyer says.
“Yes which?” I says.
“Maybe both,” Lawyer says. And in the afternoon we watched the horses, and the next morning we went out to Bemis’s Heights and Freeman’s Farm. Except that naturally there wasn’t no monument to one mercenary Hessian soldier that maybe couldn’t even speak German, let alone American, and naturally there wasn’t no hill or ditch or stump or rock that spoke up and said aloud: On this spot your first ancestral V.K. progenitor forswore Europe forever and entered the United States.
And two days later we was back home, covering in two days the distance it taken that first V.K. four generations to do; and now we watched the lights go out in Spain and Ethiopia, the darkness that was going to creep eastward across all Europe and Asia too, until the shadow of it would fall across the Pacific islands until it reached even America. But that was a little while away yet when Lawyer says,
“Come up to the office,” and then he says, “Barton Kohl is dead. The airplane — it was a worn-out civilian passenger carrier, armed with 1918 infantry machine guns, with home-made bomb bays through which the amateur crew dumped by hand the home-made bombs; that’s what they fought Hitler’s Luftwaffe with — was shot down in flames so she probably couldn’t have identified him even if she could have reached the crash. She doesn’t say what she intends to do now.”
“She’ll come back here,” I says.
“Here?” he says. “Back here?” then he says, “Why the hell shouldn’t she? It’s home.”
“That’s right,” I says. “It’s doom.”
“What?” he says. “What did you say?”
“Nothing,” I says. “I jest said I think so too.”
Eight
Charles Mallison
LINDA KOHL (SNOPES that was, as Thackeray would say. Kohl that was too, since he was dead) wasn’t the first wounded war hero to finally straggle back to Jefferson. She was just the first one my uncle bothered to meet at the station. I don’t mean the railroad station; by 1937 it had been a year or so since a train had passed through Jefferson that a paid passenger could have got off of. And not even the bus depot because I don’t even mean Jefferson. It was the Memphis airport we went to meet her, my uncle apparently discovering at the last minute that morning that he was not able to make an eighty-mile trip and back alone in his car.
She was not even
