Then there were two children, an heir and a princess too, when Harriss died with his two esses in a New Orleans barber’s chair of his ordinary thirty-eight-calibre occupational disease. Whereupon the horses and their grooms and valets became sold and the house closed except for a caretaker, vacant now of Mrs Harriss with her two esses and the two children and the five maids and couriers and nannies and secretaries, and now Mother and the other ones who had been girls with her in the old Academy days would get the letters and post cards from the fashionable European cities telling how just the climate at first but presently, in time, the climate and the schools both were better for the children and (on Mother’s naturally) she hoped Gavin was well and maybe even married. “So at least he’s safe from that one,” I told Ratliff, who said,
“Safe?”
. . “Why the hell not? She not only got too big for the fairy tale, she’s got two children and all that money: what the hell does she want to marry anybody for? Or not Gavin anyway; he don’t want money: all he wants is just to meddle and change. Why the hell isn’t he safe now?”
“That’s right,” Ratliff said. “It looks like he would almost have to be, don’t it? At least until next time.” Joke. And still worth repeating two hours ago when he declined to come with us. And Gavin sitting there drinking a cup of what whoever ran the airport restaurant called coffee, looking smug and inscrutable and arrogant and immune as a louse on a queen’s arse. Because maybe Linda Kohl (pardon me, Snopes Kohl) had plenty of money too, not only what her mother must have left her but what Uncle Gavin, as her guardian, had managed to chisel out of old Will Varner.
Not chiselled out of her father too because maybe old Snopes was glad to stump up something just to have what Gavin or Ratliff would call that reproachless virgin rectitude stop looking at him.
But she didn’t have two children so all Ratliff and I had to trust, depend on this time was that old primary condition founded on simple evanescence, that every time a moment occurred they would be one moment older: that they had to be alive for him to notice them, and they had to be in motion to be alive, and the only moment of motion which caught his attention, his eye, was that one at which they entered puberty like the swirl of skirt or flow or turn of limb when entering, passing through a door, slowed down by the camera trick but still motion, still a moment, irrevocable.
That was really what saved him each time: that the moment had to be motion. They couldn’t stop in the door, and once through it they didn’t stop either; sometimes they didn’t even pause long enough to close it behind them before going on to the next one and through it, which was into matrimony — from maturation to parturition in one easy lesson you might say. Which was all right. Uncle Gavin wouldn’t be at that next door. He would still be watching the first one.
And since life is not so much motion as an inventless repetition of motion, he would never be at that first door long before there would be another swirl, another unshaped vanishing adolescent leg. So I should have thought to tell Ratliff that, while I was in Memphis helping Uncle Gavin say good-bye to this one, he might be looking around the Square to see who the next one was going to be, as Linda had already displaced Melisandre Backus probably before Melisandre even knew she had been dispossessed. Then in the next moment I knew that would not be necessary; obviously Uncle Gavin had already picked her out himself, which was why he could sit there placid and composed, drinking coffee while we waited for the plane to be announced.
Which it was at last. We went out to the ramp. I stopped at the rail. “I’ll wait here,” I said. “You’ll want a little privacy while you can still get it even if it’s only anonymity and not solitude. Have you got your slate ready? or maybe she’ll already have one built in on her cuff, or maybe strapped to her leg like aviators carry maps.”
But he had gone on. Then the plane taxied up, one of the new DC 3’s, and in time there she was. I couldn’t see her eyes from this distance, but then it wasn’t them, it was just her ears the bomb or shell or mine or whatever it was blew up — the same tall girl too tall to have a shape but then I don’t know: women like that and once you get their clothes off they surprise you even if she was twenty-nine years old now. Then I could see her eyes, so dark blue that at first you thought they were black. And I for one never did know how or where she got them or the black hair either since old Snopes’s eyes were the colour of stagnant pond water and his hair didn’t have any colour at all, and her mother had had blue eyes too but her hair was blonde.
So that when I tried to remember her, she always looked like she had just been raided out of a brothel in the Scandinavian Valhalla and the cops had just managed to fling a few garments on her before they hustled her into the wagon. Fine eyes too, that probably if you were the one to finally get the clothes off you would have called them beautiful too.
And she even had the little pad and pencil in her hand while she was kissing Gavin. I mean, kissing him. Though evidently he would need a little time to get used to using it or depending on it because he said aloud, just like she was anybody else:
“Here’s Chick too,” and she remembered me; she was as tall as Gavin and damn near as tall as me, as well as a nail-biter though maybe that had come after the shell or perhaps after the bereavement.
And when she shook hands she really had driven that ambulance and apparently changed the tyres on it too, speaking not loud but in that dry harsh quacking voice that deaf people learn to use, even asking about Mother and Father as if she really cared, like any ordinary Jefferson woman that never dreamed of going to wars and getting blown up. Though Uncle Gavin remembered now, or at least was learning fast, taking the pad and pencil and scrawling something on it, baggage I reckon, since she said, “Oh yes,” just like she could hear too, and got the checks out of her handbag.
I brought the car up while they untangled the bags. So she had lived with the guy for years before they married but it didn’t show on her. And she had gone to Spain to the war and got blown up at the front, and that didn’t show on her either. I said, “Why don’t you let her drive? Then maybe she won’t be so nervous because she can’t talk to you.”
“Maybe you’d better drive then,” he said. So we did, and brought the hero home, the two of them in the hack. And somebody may have said, “Why don’t we all ride in front? the seat’s wide enough.” Though I don’t remember it. Or at least nobody did. Or anyway at least they got into the back seat. So I don’t remember that either: only Uncle Gavin: “You can relax now. You’re quite safe. I’m holding her hand.”
Which they were, she holding his hand in both hers on her lap and every mile or so the duck voice would say, “Gavin,” and then after a mile or so, “Gavin.” And evidently she hadn’t had the pad and pencil long enough to get used to them either or maybe when you lose hearing and enter real silence you forget everything does not take place in that privacy and solitude.
Or maybe after he took the pencil from her to answer on the pad, she couldn’t wait to get the pencil back so both should have had slates: “Yes it does. I can feel it, somewhere in my skull or the back of my mouth. It’s an ugly sound. Isn’t it?” But evidently Gavin was learning because it was still the duck voice: “Yes it is. I can feel it, I tell you.” And still the duck voice: “How?
If I try to practise, how can I know when it’s right?” Which I agree with myself: if you’re going to take time out from your law practice and being county attorney to restore to your deaf girl friend the lost bridehead of her mellifluity, how would you go about it. Though what a chance for a husband: to teach your stone-deaf wife that all she needed to make her tone and pitch beautiful was merely to hold her breath while she spoke.
Or maybe what Uncle Gavin wrote next was simply Jonson (or some of that old Donne or Herrick maybe or even just Suckling maybe — any or all of them annotated to that one ear — eye now — by that old Stevens) Vale not these cherry lips with vacant speech But let her drink instead thy tender Yes. Or maybe what he wrote was simpler still: Hold it till we get home. This is
