Because among us white male Jeffersons there was one concert of unanimity, no less strong and even louder at the bottom, extending from the operators of Saturday curb-side peanut- and popcorn-vending machines, through the side-street and back-alley grocers, up to the department store owners and automobile and gasoline agencies, against everybody they called communists now — Harry Hopkins, Hugh Johnson and everybody else associated with N.R.A., Eugene Debs, the I.W.W., the C.I.O. — any and everybody who seemed even to question our native-born Jefferson right to buy or raise or dig or find anything as cheaply as cajolery or trickery or threat or force could do it, and then sell it as dear as the necessity or ignorance or timidity of the buyer would stand.
And that was what Linda had, all she had in our alien capitalist waste this far from home if she really was a communist and communism really is not just a political ideology but a religion which has to be practised in order to stay alive — two Arctic Circle immigrants: one practically without human language, a troglodyte, the other a little quick-tempered irreconcilable hornet because of whom both of them were already well advanced outside the Jefferson pale, not by being professed communists (nobody would have cared how much of a communist the little one merely professed himself to be so long as he didn’t actually interfere with local wage scales, just as they could have been Republicans so long as they didn’t try to interfere with our Democratic town and county elections or Catholics as long as they didn’t picket churches or break up prayer meetings) but Negro lovers: consorters, political affiliators with Negroes.
Not social consorters: we would not have put up with that from even them and the little one anyway knew enough Jefferson English to know it. But association of any sort was too much; the local police were already looking cross-eyed at them even though we didn’t really believe a foreigner could do any actual harm among our own loyal coloured.
So, you see, all they — Gavin and Linda — had left now was marriage. Then it was Christmas 1938, the last one before the lights began to go out, and I came home for the holidays and she came to supper one night. Not Christmas dinner. I don’t know what happened there: whether Mother and Gavin decided it would be more delicate to ask her and let her decline, or not ask her at all. No, that’s wrong. I’ll bet Mother invited them both — her and old Snopes too.
Because women are marvellous. They stroll perfectly bland and serene through a fact that the men have been bloodying their heads against for years; whereupon you find that the fact not only wasn’t important, it wasn’t really there. She invited them both, exactly as if she had been doing it whenever she thought of it maybe at least once a month for the last hundred years, whenever she decided to give them a little pleasure by having them to a meal, or whenever she decided it would give her pleasure to have them whether they thought so or not; and Linda declined for both of them in exactly the same way.
So you can imagine that Christmas dinner in that house that nobody I knew had seen the inside of except Mother (oh yes, she would have by now, with Linda home again) and Uncle Gavin: the dining-room — table, chairs, sideboard, cabinets, chandeliers and all — looking exactly as it had looked in the Memphis interior decorator’s warehouse when he — Snopes — traded in Major de Spain’s mother’s furniture for it, with him at one end of the table and Linda at the other and the yardman in a white coat serving them — the old fish-blooded son of a bitch who had a vocabulary of two words, one being No and the other Foreclose, and the bride of silence more immaculate in that chastity than ever Caesar’s wife because she was invulnerable too, forever safe, in that chastity forever pure, that couldn’t have heard him if he had had anything to say to her, any more than he could have heard her, since he wouldn’t even recognise the language she spoke in.
The two of them sitting there face to face through the long excruciating ritual which the day out of all the days compelled; and nobody to know why they did it, suffered it, why she suffered and endured it, what ritual she served or compulsion expiated — or who knows? what portent she postulated to keep him reminded. Maybe that was why. I mean, why she came back to Jefferson. Evidently it wasn’t to marry Gavin Stevens. Or at least not yet.
So it would be just an ordinary supper, though Mother would have said (and unshakably believed) that it was in honour of me being at home again. And didn’t I just say that women are wonderful? She — Linda: a present from Guess Who — had a little pad of thin ivory leaves just about big enough to hold three words at a time, with gold corners, on little gold rings to turn the pages, with a little gold stylus thing to match, that you could write on and then efface it with a handkerchief or a piece of tissue or, in a mere masculine emergency, a little spit on your thumb and then use it again (sure, maybe he gave it to her in return for that gold cigarette-lighter engraved G L S when he didn’t have L for his middle initial or in fact any middle initial at all, that she gave him about five years ago that he never had used because nobody could unconvince him he could taste the fluid through his cob pipe).
And though Mother used the pad like the rest of us, it was just coincidental, like any other gesture of the hands while talking. Because she was talking to Linda at the same time, not even watching her hand but looking at Linda instead, so that she couldn’t have deciphered the marks she was making even provided she was making marks, just talking away at Linda exactly as she did to the rest of us. And be damned if Linda wouldn’t seem to understand her, the two of them chattering and babbling away at one another like women do, so that maybe no women ever listen to the other one because they don’t have to, they have already communicated before either one begins to speak.
Because at those times Linda would talk. Oh yes, Gavin’s voice lessons had done some good because they must have, there had been too many of them or anyway enough of them, assuming they did spend some of the time together trying to soften down her voice. But it was still the duck’s voice: dry, lifeless, dead. That was it: dead. There was no passion, no heat in it; and, what was worse, no hope.
I mean, in bed together in the dark and to have more of love and excitement and ecstasy than just one can bear and so you must share it, murmur it, and to have only that dry and lifeless quack to murmur, whisper with. This time (there were other suppers during the next summer but this was the first one when I was at table too) she began to talk about Spain. Not about the war. I mean, the lost war. It was queer. She mentioned it now and then, not as if it had never happened but as if their side hadn’t been licked.
Some of them like Kohl had been killed and a lot of the others had had the bejesus blown out of the eardrums and arms and legs like her, and the rest of them were scattered (and in no time now would begin to be proscribed and investigated by the F.B.I., not to mention harried and harassed by the amateurs, but we hadn’t quite reached that yet) but they hadn’t been whipped and hadn’t lost anything at all. She was talking about the people in it, the people like Kohl.
She told about Ernest Hemingway and Malraux, and about a Russian, a poet that was going to be better than Pushkin only he got himself killed; and Mother scribbling on the pad but not paying any more attention to what she thought she was writing than Linda was, saying,
“Oh, Linda, no!” — you know: how tragic, to be cut off so young, the work unfinished, and Gavin taking the pad away from Mother but already talking too:
“Nonsense. There’s no such thing as a mute inglorious Milton. If he had died at the age of two, somebody would still write it for him.”
Only I didn’t bother with the pad; I doubt if I could have taken it away from them. “Named Bacon or Marlowe,” I said.
“Or maybe a good sound synthetic professional name like Shakespeare,” Uncle Gavin said.
But Linda hadn’t even glanced at the pad. I tell you, she and Mother didn’t need it.
“Why?” she said. “What line or paragraph or even page can you compose and write to match giving your life to say No to people like Hitler and Mussolini?” and Gavin not bothering
