I mean leave Jefferson I wrote. Go completely away for good Give me that damn card & leave Jefferson
“You said that to me before.”
“No I didn’t,” I said. I even spoke it, already writing, already planning out the whole paragraph it would take: We’ve never even mentioned that card or the Communist party either. Even back there three years ago when you first tried to tell me you had one and show it to me and I wouldn’t let you, stopped you, refused to listen: don’t you remember? But she was already talking again:
“I mean back there when I was fifteen or sixteen and you said I must get away from Jefferson.”
So I didn’t even write the other; I wrote But you couldn’t then Now you can Give me the card & go She stood quietly for a moment, a time. We didn’t even try to use the ivory tablet on occasions of moment and crisis like this. It was a bijou, a gewgaw, a bangle, feminine; really almost useless: thin ivory sheets bound with gold and ringed together with more of it, each sheet about the size of a playing card so that it wouldn’t really contain more than about three words at a time, like an anagram, an acrostic at the level of children — a puzzle say or maybe a continued story ravished from a primer. Instead, we were in her upstairs sitting-room she had fitted up, standing at the mantel which she had designed at the exact right height and width to support a foolscap pad when he had something to discuss that there must be no mistake about or something which wasn’t worth not being explicit about, like money, so that she could read the words as my hand formed them, like speech, almost like hearing.
“Go where?” she said. “Where could I go?”
Anywhere New York Back to Europe of course but in New York some of the people still you & Barton knew the friends your own age She looked at me. With the pupils expanded like this, her eyes looked almost black; blind too.
“I’m afraid,” she said.
I spoke; she could read single words if they were slow: “You? Afraid?” She said:
“Yes. I don’t want to be helpless. I won’t be helpless. I won’t have to depend.”
I thought fast, like that second you have to raise or draw or throw in your hand, while each fraction of the second effaces another pip from your hole card. I wrote quite steadily while she watched Then why am I here and drew my hand back so she could read it. Then she said, in that dry, lifeless, what Chick calls duck’s quack:
“Gavin.” I didn’t move. She said it again: “Gavin.” I didn’t move. She said: “All right. I lied. Not the depend part. I won’t depend. I just must be where you are.” She didn’t even add Because you’re all I have now. She just stood, our eyes almost level, looking at me out of, across, something — abyss, darkness; not abject, not questioning, not even hoping; in a moment I would know it; saying again in the quacking voice: “Gavin.”
I wrote rapidly, in three- or four-word bursts, gaggles, clumps, whatever you want to call them, so she could read as I wrote Its all right don’t Be afraid I Refuse to marry you 20 years too much Difference for it To work besides I Don’t want to
“Gavin,” she said.
I wrote again, ripping the yellow sheets off the pad and shoving them aside on the mantel I don’t want to
“I love you,” she said. “Even when I have to tell a lie, you have already invented it for me.”
I wrote No lie nobody Mentioned Barton Kohl
“Yes,” she said.
I wrote No
“But you can me,” she said. That’s right. She used the explicit word, speaking the hard brutal guttural in the quacking duck’s voice. That had been our problem as soon as we undertook the voice lessons: the tone, to soften the voice which she herself couldn’t hear. “It’s exactly backward,” she told me. “When you say I’m whispering, it feels like thunder inside my head. But when I say it this way, I can’t even feel it.” And this time it would be almost a shout. Which is the way it was now, since she probably believed she had lowered her voice, I standing there while what seemed to me like reverberations of thunder died away.
“You’re blushing,” she said.
I wrote that word
“What word?”
that you just said
“Tell me another one to use. Write it down so I can see it and remember it.”
I wrote There is no other thats the right one only one I am old fashioned it still shocks me a little No what shocks is when a woman uses it & is not shocked at all until she realises I am Then I wrote that’s wrong too what shocks is that all that magic passion excitement be summed up & dismissed in that one bald unlovely sound
“All right,” she said. “Don’t use any word then.”
I wrote Do you mean you want to
“Of course you can,” she said. “Always. You know that.”
I wrote That’s not what I asked you She read it. Then she didn’t move. I wrote Look at me She did so, looking at me from out or across what it was that I would recognise in a moment now.
“Yes,” she said.
I wrote Didn’t I just tell you you don’t ever have to be afraid and this time I had to move the pad slightly to draw her attention to it, until she said, not looking up:
“I don’t have to go away either?”
I wrote No under her eyes this time, then she looked up, at me, and I knew what it was she looked out of or across: the immeasurable loss, the appeaseless grief, the fidelity and the enduring, the dry quacking voice saying, “Gavin. Gavin. Gavin.” while I wrote
because we are the 2 in all the world who can love each other without having to the end of it tailing off in a sort of violent rubric as she clasped me, clinging to me, quite hard, the dry clapping voice saying,
“Gavin. Gavin. I love you. I love you,” so that I had to break free to reach the pad and write
Give me the card
She stared down at it, her hands arrested in the act of leaving my shoulders. “Card?” she said. Then she said, “I’ve lost it.”
Then I knew: a flash, like lightning. I wrote your father even while I was saying out loud: “Oh the son of a bitch, the son of a bitch,” saying to myself Wait. Wait! He had to. Put yourself in his place. What else could he do, what other weapon did he have to defend his very existence before she destroyed it — the position he had sacrificed everything for — wife home friends peace — to gain the only prize he knew since it was the only one he could understand since the world itself as he understood it assured him that was what he wanted because that was the only thing worth having.
Of course: his only possible weapon: gain possession of the card, hold the threat of turning it in to the F.B.I. over her and stop her before she destroyed him. Yet all this time I was telling myself You know better. He will use it to destroy her. It was he himself probably who scrawled Jew Communist Kohl on his own sidewalk at midnight to bank a reserve of Jefferson sympathy against the day when he would be compelled to commit his only child to the insane asylum. I wrote
Ransacked your room drawers desk
“Somebody did,” she said. “It was last year. I thought—” I wrote
It was your father
“Was it?” Yes, it was exactly that tone. I wrote
Don’t you know it was
“Does it matter? They will send me another one I suppose. But that doesn’t matter either. I haven’t changed. I don’t have to have a little printed card to show it.”
This time I wrote slowly and carefully You don’t have to go I won’t ask any more but when I do ask you again to go will you just believe me & go at once I will make all plans will you do that
“Yes,” she said.
I wrote Swear
“Yes,” she said. “Then you can marry.” I couldn’t have written anyway; she had caught up both my hands, holding them between hers against her chest. “You must. I want you to. You mustn’t miss that. Nobody must never have had that once. Nobody. Nobody.” She was looking at me. “That word you didn’t like. My mother said that to you once too, didn’t she.” It wasn’t even a question. “Did you?”
I freed my hands and wrote You know we didn’t
“Why didn’t you?”
I wrote Because she felt sorry for me when you do things for people just because you feel sorry for them what you do is probably not very important to you
“I don’t feel sorry for you. You know that. Don’t you know it will be important to me?”
I wrote Then maybe it was because I wasn’t worthy of her & we both knew it but I thought if we didn’t maybe she might always think maybe I might have been and ripped the sheet off and crumpled it into my pocket and wrote I must go now
“Don’t go,” she said. Then she said, “Yes, go. You see, I’m all right now, I’m not even afraid any more.”
I wrote why should you ever
