Then it was Christmas and I thought Maybe I wronged them. Maybe they have been waiting for me all along, not to interrupt my education by an emergency call but for the season of peace and good will to produce me available to tote the ring or bouquet or whatever it is. But I didn’t even see her. Uncle Gavin and I even spent most of one whole day together.
I was going out to Sartoris to shoot quail with Benbow (he wasn’t but seventeen but he was considered one of the best bird shots in the county, second only to Luther Biglin, a half farmer, half dog trainer, half market hunter, who shot left-handed, not much older than Benbow, in fact about my age, who lived up near Old Wyottsport on the river) and Uncle Gavin invited himself along. He — Gavin — wouldn’t be much of a gun even if he stopped talking long enough, but now and then he would go with me. And all that day, nothing; it was me that finally said:
“How are the voice lessons coming?”
“Mrs Kohl? Fair. But your fresh ear would be the best judge,” and I said:
“When will that be?” and he said:
“Any time you’re close enough to hear it.” And again on Christmas day, it was me. Ratliff usually had Christmas dinner with us, Uncle Gavin’s guest though Mother liked him too, whether or not because she was Uncle Gavin’s twin. Or sometimes Uncle Gavin ate with Ratliff and then he would take me because Ratliff was a damned good cook, living alone in the cleanest little house you ever saw, doing his own housework and he even made the blue shirts he always wore. And this time too it was me.
“What about Mrs Kohl for dinner too?” I asked Mother, and Uncle Gavin said:
“My God, did you come all the way down here from Cambridge to spend Christmas too looking at that old fish-blooded son—” and caught himself in time and said, “Excuse me, Maggie,” and Mother said:
“Certainly she will have to take her first Christmas dinner at home with her father.”
And the next day I left. Spoade — his father had been at Harvard back in 1909 with Uncle Gavin — had invited me to Charleston to see what a Saint Cecilia ball looked like from inside. Because we always broke up then anyway; the day after Christmas Father always went to Miami to spend a week looking at horses and Mother would go too, not that she was interested in running horses but on the contrary: because of her conviction that her presence or anyway adjacence or at least contiguity would keep him from buying one.
Then it was 1938 and I was back in Cambridge. Then it was September 1938, and I was still or anyway again in Cambridge, in law school now. Munich had been observed or celebrated or consecrated, whichever it was, and Uncle Gavin said, “It won’t be long now.” But he had been saying that back last spring. So I said:
“Then what’s the use of me wasting two or three more years becoming a lawyer when if you’re right nobody will have time for civil cases any more, even if I’m still around to prosecute or defend them?” and he said:
“Because when this one is over, all humanity and justice will have left will be the law,” and I said:
“What else is it using now?” and he said:
“These are good times, boom halcyon times when what do you want with justice when you’ve already got welfare? Now the law is the last resort, to get your hand into the pocket which so far has resisted or foiled you.”
That was last spring, in June when he and Mother (they had lost Father at Saratoga though he had promised to reach Cambridge in time for the actual vows) came up to see me graduate in Ack. And I said, “What? No wedding bells yet?” and he said:
“Not mine anyway,” and I said:
“How are the voice lessons coming? Come on,” I said, “I’m a big boy now; I’m a Harvard A.M. too even if I won’t have Heidelberg. Tell me. Is that really all you do when you are all cosy together? practise talking?” and he said:
“Hush and let me talk awhile now. You’re going to Europe for the summer; that’s my present to you. I have your tickets and your passport application; all you need do is go down to the official photographer and get mugged.”
“Why Europe? and Why now? Besides, what if I don’t want to go?” and he said:
“Because it may not be there next summer. So it will have to be this one. Go and look at the place; you may have to die in it.”
“Why not wait until then, then?” and he said:
“You will go as a host then.
This summer you can still be a guest.” There were three of us; by fast footwork and pulling all the strings we could reach, we even made the same boat. And that summer we — I: two of us at the last moment found themselves incapable of passing Paris — saw a little of Europe on a bicycle. I mean, that part still available: that presumable corridor of it where I might have to do Uncle Gavin’s dying: Britain, France, Italy — the Europe which Uncle Gavin said would be no more since the ones who survived getting rid of Hitler and Mussolini and Franco would be too exhausted and the ones who merely survived them wouldn’t care anyway.
So I did try to look at it, to see, since even at twenty-four I still seemed to believe what he said just as I believed him at fourteen and (I presume: I can’t remember) at four. In fact, the Europe he remembered or thought he remembered was already gone. What I saw was a kind of composed and collected hysteria: a frenetic holiday in which everybody was a tourist, native and visitor alike. There were too many soldiers. I mean, too many people dressed as, and for the moment behaving like, troops, as if for simple police or temporary utility reasons they had to wear masquerade and add to the Maginot Line (so that they — the French ones anyway — seemed to be saying, “Have a heart; don’t kid us.
We don’t believe it either.”) right in the middle of the fight for the thirty-nine-hour week; the loud parliamentary conclaves about which side of Piccadilly or the Champs-Elysées the sandbags would look best on like which side of the room to hang the pictures; the splendid glittering figure of Gamelin still wiping the soup from his moustache and saying, “Be calm. I am here” — as though all Europe (oh yes, us too; the place was full of Americans too) were saying, “Since Evil is the thing, not only de rigueur but successful too, let us all join Evil and so make it the Good.”
Then me too in Paris for the last two weeks, to see if the Paris of Hemingway and the Paris of Scott Fitzgerald (they were not the same ones; they merely used the same room) had vanished completely or not too; then Cambridge again, only a day late: all of which, none of which that is, ties up with anything but only explains to me why it was almost a year and a half before I saw her again. And so we had Munich: that moment of respectful silence, then once more about our affairs; and Uncle Gavin’s letter came saying “It won’t be long now.”
Except that it was probably already too late for me. When I had to go — no, I don’t mean that: when the time came for me to go — I wanted to be a fighter pilot. But I was already twenty-four now; in six years I would be thirty and even now it might be too late; Bayard and John Sartoris were twenty when they went to England in ‘16 and Uncle Gavin told me about one R.F.C. (I mean R.A.F. now) child who was a captain with such a record that the British government sent him back home and grounded him for good so that he might at least be present on the day of his civilian majority. So I would probably wind up as a navigator or engineer on bombers, or maybe at thirty they wouldn’t let me go up at all.
But still no wedding bells. Maybe it was the voice. My spies — I only needed one of course: Mother — reported that the private lessons were still going on, so maybe she felt that the Yes would not be dulcet enough yet to be legal. Which — legality — she would of course insist on, having tried cohabitation the first time au naturel you might say, and it blew up in her face. No, that’s wrong.
The cohabitation didn’t blow up until after it became legal, until whichever one it was finally said, “Oh hell then, get the licence and the preacher but please for sweet please sake shut up.” So now she would fear a minister or a J.P. like Satan or
