Thus we brought the hero home. Now we could see Jefferson, the clock on the courthouse, not to mention her father’s water tank, and now the duck voice was saying Ratliff. “Bart liked him. He said he hadn’t expected to like anybody from Mississippi, but he was wrong.” What Gavin wrote this time was obvious, since the voice said: “Not even you. He made me promise — I mean, whichever one of us it was, would give Ratliff one of his things. You remember it — the Italian boy that you didn’t know what it was even though you had seen sculpture before, but Ratliff that had never even seen an Italian boy, nor anything else beyond the Confederate monument in front of the courthouse, knew at once what it was, and even what he was doing?”
And I would have liked the pad myself long enough to write What was the Italian boy doing? only we were home now, the hero; Gavin said:
“Stop at the bank first. He should have some warning; simple decency commands it.
Unless he has had his warning and has simply left town for a little space in which to wrestle with his soul and so bring it to the moment which it must face. Assuming of course that even he has realised by now that he simply cannot foreclose her out of existence like a mortgage or a note.”
“And have a public reception here in the street before she has had a chance to fix her makeup?” I said.
“Relax,” he said again. “When you are a little older you will discover that people really are much more gentle and considerate and kind than you want right now to believe.”
I pulled up at the bank. But If I had been her I wouldn’t even have reached for the pencil, duck quack or not, to say, “What the hell? Take me on home.” She didn’t.
She sat there, holding his hand in both hers, not just on her lap but right against her belly, looking around at the Square, the duck voice saying, “Gavin. Gavin.” Then: “There goes Uncle Willy, coming back from dinner.” Except it wasn’t old man Christian: he was dead. But then it didn’t really matter whether anybody wrote that on the pad or not. And Gavin was right. Nobody stopped. I watched two of them recognise her.
No, I mean they recognised juxtaposition: Gavin Stevens’s car at the curb before the bank at twenty-two minutes past one in the afternoon with me at the wheel and Gavin and a woman in the back seat. Who had all heard about Linda Kohl I mean Snopes Kohl, anyhow that she was female and from Jefferson and had gone near enough to a war for it to bust her eardrums. Because he is right: people are kind and gentle and considerate. It’s not that you don’t expect them to be, it’s because you have already made up your mind they are not and so they upset you, throw you off. They didn’t even stop, just one of them said Howdy Gavin and went on.
I got out and went into the bank. Because what would I do myself if I had a daughter, an only child, and her grandfather had plenty of money for it and I could have afforded myself to let her go away to school.
Only I didn’t and nobody knew why I wouldn’t, until suddenly I let her go, but only as far as the University which was only fifty miles away; and nobody knew why for that either: only that I aimed to become president of the bank that the president of it now was the man everybody believed had been laying my wife ever since we moved to town. That is, nobody knew why until three months later, when my wife went to the beauty parlour for the first time in her life and that night shot herself carefully through the temple so as not to disarrange the new permanent, and when the dust finally settled sure enough that fornicating bank president had left town and now I was not only president of his bank but living in his house and you would have thought I wouldn’t need the daughter any more and she could go wherever the hell she wanted provided it wasn’t ever Jefferson, Mississippi, again.
Except I wouldn’t even let her do that until we could both sit in the car and see the monument over her mother’s grave unveiled, sitting there defenceless before the carved face and the carved defenceless taunt:
A Virtuous Wife Is a Crown to Her Husband
Her Children Rise and Call Her Blessed
and then I said, “All right. You can go now.” And I came back out.
“Mr Snopes has taken the afternoon off,” I said. “To go home and wait there for his daughter.” So we went there, on to the colonial monstrosity which was the second taunt. He had three monuments in Jefferson now: the water tank, the gravestone, and the mansion. And who knows at which of the windows he lurked his wait or waited out his lurk, whichever way you prefer. “Maybe I should come in too,” I said.
“Maybe we should each have a pad and pencil,” Uncle Gavin said. “Then everybody could hear.” We were expected. Almost at once the Negro yardman-chauffeur came out the front door. I got the luggage out on to the sidewalk while they still stood there, she as tall as him and Gavin in her arms just as much as she was in his, kissing right on the street in the broad daylight, the duck voice saying “Gavin Gavin” not so much as if she still couldn’t believe it was him at last but as if she still hadn’t got used to the new sound she was convinced she made.
Then she turned him loose and he said, “Come on,” and we got back in the car, and that was all. The hero was home. I turned in the middle of the block and looked not back, I would have liked to say, if it had been true: the houseman still scuttling up the walk with the bags and she still standing there, looking at us, a little too tall for my taste, immured, inviolate in silence, invulnerable, serene.
That was it: silence. If there were no such thing as sound. If it only took place in silence, no evil man has invented could really harm him: explosion, treachery, the human voice.
That was it: deafness. Ratliff and I couldn’t beat that. Those others, the other times had flicked the skirt or flowed or turned the limb at and into mere puberty; beyond it and immediately, was the other door immediately beyond which was the altar and the long line of drying diapers: fulfilment, the end. But she had beat him.
Not in motion continuous through a door, a moment, but immobilised by a thunderclap into silence, herself the immobile one while it was the door and the walls it opened which fled away and on, herself no moment’s child but the inviolate bride of silence, inviolable in maidenhead, fixed, forever safe from change and alteration. Finally I ran Ratliff to ground; it took three days.
“Her husband is sending you a present,” I said. “It’s that sculpture you liked: the Italian boy doing whatever it was you liked that Gavin himself who has not only seen Italian boys before but maybe even one doing whatever this one is doing, didn’t even know where first base was. But it’s all right. You don’t have a female wife nor any innocent female daughters either. So you can probably keep it right there in the house. — She’s going to marry him,” I said.
“Why not?” he said. “I reckon he can stand it. Besides, if somebody jest marries him, maybe the rest of us will be safe.”
“The rest of them, you mean?” I said.
“I mean jest what I said,” Ratliff answered. “I mean the rest of all of us.”
Nine
Charles Mallison
GAVIN WAS RIGHT. That was late August. Three weeks later I was back in Cambridge again, hoping, I mean trying, or maybe what I mean is I belonged to the class that would, or anyway should, graduate next June. But I had been in Jefferson three weeks, plenty long enough even if they had insisted on having banns read: something quite unnecessary for a widow who was not only a widow but a wounded war hero too. So then I thought maybe they were waiting until they would be free of me. You know: the old road-company drammer reversed in gender: the frantic child clinging this time to the prospective broom’s coat-tail, crying “Papa papa papa” (in this case Uncle uncle uncle) “please don’t make us marry Mrs Smith.”
Then I thought (it was Thanksgiving now; pretty soon I would be going home for Christmas) Naturally it won’t occur to any of them to bother to notify me way up here in Massachusetts. So I even thought of writing and asking, not Mother of course and certainly not Uncle Gavin, since if it had happened he would be too busy to answer, and if it hadn’t he would still be too busy either dodging for his life if he was the one still saying No, or trying to learn her enough language to hear Please if he was the one saying Yes.
But to Ratliff, who would be an interested bystander even if you
