Then he removed the apron and we ate it at the kitchen table, with the bottle of claret Uncle Gavin and I always furnished. Then with the coffee and the decanter of whiskey we moved (as always) to the little immaculate room he called his parlour, with the spotlessly waxed melodeon in the corner and the waxed chairs and the fireplace filled with fluted green paper in the summer but with a phony gas log in the winter, now that progress had reached, whelmed us, and the waxed table in the centre of the room on which, on a rack under a glass bell, rested the Allanovna necktie — a rich not-quite-scarlet, not-quite-burgundy ground patterned with tiny yellow sunflowers each with a tiny blue centre of almost the exact faded blue of his shirts, that he had brought home from New York that time three or four years ago when he and Gavin went to see Linda married and off to Spain, that I would have cut my tongue out before I would have told him it probably cost whoever (Gavin I suppose) paid for it around seventy-five dollars; until that day when I inadvertently said something to that effect and Ratliff said, “I know how much.
I paid it. It was a hundred and fifty dollars.” “What?” I said. “A hundred and fifty?” “There was two of them,” he said. “I never saw but one,” I said. “I doubt if you will,” he said. “The other one is a private matter.” — and beside it, the piece of sculpture that Barton Kohl had bequeathed him that, if Gavin was still looking for first base, I had already struck out because I didn’t even know what it was, let alone what it was doing.
“All it needs is that gold cigarette-lighter she gave him,” I said. “The Linda Snopes room.”
“No,” he said. “The Eula Varner room. It ought to have more in it, but maybe this will do. Leastways it’s something. When a community is lucky enough to be the community that every thousand years or so has a Eula Varner to pick it out to do her breathing in, the least we can do is for somebody to set up something; a . . . monument ain’t quite the word I want.”
“Shrine,” I said.
“That’s it,” he said. “A shrine to mark and remember it, for the folks that wasn’t that lucky, that was already doomed to be too young. . . .” He stopped. He stood there quite still. Except that you would think of him as being quizzical, maybe speculative, but not bemused. Then I said it:
“You were wrong. They aren’t going to.”
“What?” he said. “What’s that?”
“She’s not going to marry Gavin.”
“That’s right,” he said. “It will be worse than that.”
Now it was me that said, “What? What did you say?” But he was already himself again, bland, serene, inscrutable.
“But I reckon Lawyer can stand that too,” he said.
Ten
Gavin Stevens
I COULD HAVE suggested that, told her to do that, and she would have done it — torn the card up at once, quickly, immediately, with passion and exultation. She was like her mother in one thing at least: needing, fated to need, to find something competent enough, strong enough (in her case, this case, not tough enough because Kohl was tough enough: he happened to be mere flesh and bones and so wasn’t durable enough) to take what she had to give; and at the same time doomed to fail, in this, her case, not because Barton failed her but because he also had doom in his horoscope.
So if the Communist party, having already proved itself immune to bullets and therefore immortal, had replaced him, not again to bereave her, of course she would have torn her card up, with passion and exultation and joy too. Since what sacrifice can love demand more complete than abasement, abnegation, particularly at the price of what the unknowing materialist world would in its crass insensitive ignorance dub cowardice and shame? I have always had a sneaking notion that that old Christian martyr actually liked, perhaps even loved, his aurochs or his lion.
But I did suggest something else. It was 1940 now. The Nibelung maniac had destroyed Poland and turned back west where Paris, the civilised world’s eternal and splendid courtesan, had been sold to him like any whore and only the English national character turned him east again; another year and Lenin’s Frankenstein would be our ally but too late for her; too late for us too, too late for all the western world’s peace for the next hundred years, as a tubby little giant of a man in England was already saying in private, but needs must when the devil etcetera.
It began in my office. He was a quiet, neat, almost negative man of no particular age between twenty-five and fifty, as they all appear, who showed me briefly the federal badge (his name was Gihon) and accepted the chair and said Thank you and opened his business quietly and impersonally, as they do, as if they are simply delivering a not-too-important message. Oh yes, I was doubtless the last, the very last on his list since he would have checked thoroughly on or into me without my knowing it as he had days and maybe months ago penetrated and resolved and sifted all there was to be learned about her.
“We know that all she has done, tried to do, has been done quite openly, where everybody would have a chance to hear about it, know about it—”
“I think you can safely say that,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “ — quite openly. Quite harmless. With the best of intentions, only not very . . . practical. Nothing in fact that a lady wouldn’t do, only a little . . .”
“Screwy,” I suggested.
“Thank you. But there you are. I can tell you in confidence that she holds a Communist party card. Naturally you are not aware of that.”
Now I said, “Thank you.”
“And, once a communist — I grant you, that’s like the old saying (no imputation of course, I’m sure you understand that), Once a prostitute. Which anyone after calm reflection knows to be false. But there you are. This is not a time of calmness and reflection; to ask or expect, let alone hope for, that from the government and the people too, faced with what we are going to have to meet sooner probably than we realise—”
“Yes,” I said. “What do you want me to do? What do you assume I can do?”
“She . . . I understand, have been informed, that you are her earliest and still are her closest friend—”
“No imputation of course,” I said. But he didn’t say Thank you in his turn. He didn’t say anything, anything at all. He just sat there watching me through his glasses, grey, negative as a chameleon, terrifying as the footprint on Crusoe’s beach, too negative and neuter in that one frail articulation to bear the terrible mantle he represented. “What you want then is for me to use my influence—”
“ — as a patriotic citizen who is intelligent enough to know that he too will be in this war within five years — I set five years as an outside maximum since it took the Germans only three years before to go completely mad and defy us into that one — with exactly who for our enemy we may not know until it is already too late—”
“ — to persuade her to surrender that card quietly to you and swear whatever binding oath you are authorised to give her,” I said. “Didn’t you just say yourself that Once a whore (with no imputations) always a whore?”
“I quite agree with you,” he said. “In this case, not the one with the imputations.”
“Then what do you want of me — her?”
He produced a small notebook and opened it; he even had the days of the week and the hours: “She and her husband were in Spain, members of the Loyalist communist army six months and twenty-nine days until he was killed in action; she herself remained, serving as an orderly in the hospital after her own wound, until the Loyalists evacuated her across the border into France—”
“Which is on record even right here in Jefferson.”
“Yes,” he said. “Before that she lived for seven years in New York City as the common-law wife—”
“ — which of course damns her not only in Jefferson, Mississippi, but in Washington too.” But he had not even paused.
“ — of a known registered member of the Communist party, and the close associate of other known members of the Communist party, which may not be in your Jefferson records.”
“Yes,” I said. “And then?”
He closed the notebook and put it back inside his coat and sat looking at me again, quite cold, quite impersonal, as if the space between us were the lens of a microscope. “So she knew people, not only in Spain but in the United States too, people who so far are not even in our records — Communists members and agents, important people, who are not as noticeable as Jewish sculptors and Columbia professors and other such intelligent amateurs—” Because that was when I finally understood.
“I see,” I said. “You offer a swap. You will trade her immunity for names. Your bureau will whitewash her from an enemy into a simple stool pigeon. Have you a warrant of any sort?”
“No,”
