Because she said,
“Charley,” and Father said:
“Maybe Miss Snopes will excuse me this time.” He was talking at Linda now.
“You see, whenever we have a pretty girl to eat with us, the prettier she is, the harder I try to make jokes so they will want to come back again. This time I just tried too hard. So if Miss Snopes will forgive me for trying too hard to be funny, I’ll forgive her for being too pretty.”
“Good boy,” Uncle Gavin said. “Even if that one wasn’t on tiptoe, at least it didn’t wear spikes like the joke did. Let’s go out to the gallery where it’s cool, Maggie.”
“Let’s,” Mother said. Then we were all standing there in the hall, looking at Linda. It wasn’t just being scared in her face now, of being a sixteen-year-old girl for the first time in the home of people that probably had already decided not to approve of her. I didn’t know what it was. But Mother did, maybe because it was Mother she was looking at it with.
“I think it will be cooler in the parlor,” Mother said. “Let’s go there.” But it was too late. We could hear the horn, not missing a note: da DA da DA da DA getting louder and louder then going past the house still not missing a note as it faded on, and Linda staring at Mother for just another second or two with the desperation. Because it — the desperation — went too; maybe it was something like despair for a moment, but then that was gone too and her face was just rigid again.
“I’ve got to go,” she said. “I … excuse me, I’ve got …” Then at least she kind of got herself together. “Thank you for my dinner, Mrs Mallison,” she said. “Thank you for my dinner, Mr Mallison. Thank you for my dinner, Mr Gavin,” already moving toward the table where she had put the hat and her purse. But then I hadn’t expected her to thank me for it.
“Let Gavin drive you home,” Mother said. “Gavin—”
“No no,” she said. “I dont — he dont—” Then she was gone, out the front door and down the walk toward the gate, almost running again, then through the gate and then she was running, desperate and calm, not looking back. Then she was gone.
“By Cicero, Gavin,” Father said. “You’re losing ground. Last time you at least picked out a Spanish-American war hero with an E.M.F. sportster. Now the best you can do is a Golden Gloves amateur with a home-made racer. Watch yourself, bud, or next time you’ll have a boy scout defying you to mortal combat with a bicycle.”
“What?” Mother said.
“What would you do,” Father said, “if you were a twenty-one-year-old garage mechanic who had to work until six p.m., and a white-headed old grandfather of a libertine was waylaying your girl on her way home from school every afternoon and tolling her into soda dens and plying her with ice cream? Because how could he know that all Gavin wants is just to form her mind?”
Only it wasn’t every afternoon anymore.
It wasn’t any afternoon at all. I dont know what happened, how it was done: whether she sent word to Uncle Gavin not to try to meet her after school or whether she came and went the back way where he wouldn’t see her, or whether maybe she stopped going to school at all for a while. Because she was in high school and I was in grammar school so there was no reason for me to know whether she was still going to school or not.
Or whether she was still in Jefferson, for that matter. Because now and then I would see Matt Levitt in his racer after the garage closed in the afternoon, when Linda used to be with him, and now and then at night going to and from the picture show. But not anymore now. He would be alone in the racer, or with another boy or man. But as far as I knew, Matt never saw her any more than Uncle Gavin did.
And you couldn’t tell anything from Uncle Gavin. It used to be that on the way home from school I would see him and Linda inside Christian’s drugstore eating ice cream and when he or they saw me he would beckon me in and we would all have ice cream.
But that — the fact that there was no longer any reason to look in Christian’s when I passed — was the only difference in him. Then one day — it was Friday — he was sitting at the table inside waiting and watching to beckon me inside, and even though there was no second dish on the table I thought that Linda had probably just stepped away for a moment, maybe to the perfume counter or the magazine rack, and even when I was inside and he said, “I’m having peach. What do you want?” I still expected Linda to step out from behind whatever for the moment concealed her.
“Strawberry,” I said. On the table was the last book — it was John Donne — he had ordered for her.
“It will cost the same dime to mail it to her here in Jefferson that it would cost if she were in Memphis,” he said. “Suppose I stand the ice cream and give you the dime and you take it by her house on the way home.”
“All right,” I said. When Mr Snopes first came to Jefferson he rented the house. Then he must have bought it because since he became vice president of the bank they had begun to fix it up. It was painted now and Mrs Snopes I reckon had had the wistaria arbor in the side yard fixed up and when I came through the gate Linda called me and I saw the hammock under the arbor.
The wistaria was still in bloom and I remember how she looked with her black hair under it because her eyes were kind of the color of wistaria and her dress almost exactly was: lying in the hammock reading and I thought Uncle Gavin didn’t need to send this book because she hasn’t finished the other one yet. Then I saw the rest of her school books on the ground beneath the hammock and that the one she was reading was geometry and I wondered if knowing she would rather study geometry than be out with him would make Matt Levitt feel much better than having her eat ice cream with Uncle Gavin.
So I gave her the book and went on home. That was Friday. The next day, Saturday, I went to the baseball game and then I came back to the office to walk home with Uncle Gavin. We heard the feet coming up the outside stairs, more than two of them, making a kind of scuffling sound and we could even hear hard breathing and something like whispering, then the door kind of banged open and Matt Levitt came in, quick and fast, holding something clamped under his arm, and shoved the door back shut against whoever was trying to follow him inside, holding the door shut with his braced knee until he fumbled at the knob until he found how to shoot the bolt and lock it. Then he turned. He was good-looking.
He didn’t have a humorous or happy look, he had what Ratliff called a merry look, the merry look of a fellow that hadn’t heard yet that they had invented doubt. But he didn’t even look merry now and he took the book — it was the John Donne I had taken to Linda yesterday — and kind of shot it onto the desk so that the ripped and torn pages came scuttering and scattering out across the desk and some of them even on down to the floor.
“How do you like that?” Matt said, coming on around the desk where Uncle Gavin had stood up. “Dont you want to put up your dukes?” he said. “But that’s right, you aint much of a fighter, are you. But that’s O.K.; I aint going to hurt you much anyway: just mark you up a little to freshen up your memory.”
He didn’t, he didn’t seem to hit hard, his fists not travelling more than four or five inches it looked like, so that it didn’t even look like they were drawing blood from Uncle Gavin’s lips and nose but just instead wiping the blood onto them; two or maybe three blows before I could seem to move and grab up Grandfather’s heavy walking stick where it still stayed in the umbrella stand behind the door and raise it to swing at the back of Matt’s head as hard as I could.
“You, Chick!” Uncle Gavin said. “Stop! Hold it!” Though even without that, I wouldn’t have thought Matt could have moved that fast. Maybe it was the Golden Gloves that did it.
Anyway he turned and caught the
