There were towns bigger than Jefferson that didn’t have a girl — woman — in it that the second you saw her eight years ago getting out of an airplane you were already wondering what she would look like with her clothes off except that she was too old for you, the wrong type for you, except that that was exactly backward, you were too young for her, the wrong type for her and so only your uncle that you had even spent some of the ten months in the Nazi stalag wondering if he ever got them off before he got married to Aunt Melisandre or maybe even after and if he didn’t, what happened, what was wrong. Because his uncle would never tell him himself whether he ever did or not but maybe after three years and a bit he could tell by looking at her, that maybe a woman really couldn’t hide that from another man who was . . . call it simpatico.
Except that when he finally saw her on the street on the third day there was nothing at all, she had not changed at all, except for the white streak which didn’t count anyway — the same one that on that day eight years ago when he and his uncle had driven up to the Memphis airport to get her, was at that first look a little too tall and a little too thin for his type so that in that same second he was saying Well that’s one anyway that won’t have to take her clothes off on my account and then almost before he could get it out, something else was already saying Okay, buster, who suggested she was going to? and he had been right: not her for him, but rather not him for her: a lot more might still happen to him in his life yet (he hoped), but removing that particular skirt wouldn’t be one even if when you got the clothes off the too tall too thin ones sometimes they surprised you.
And just as well; evidently his soul or whatever it was had improved some in the three years and a bit; anyway he knew now that if such had been his fate to get this particular one off, what would happen to him might, probably would, have several names but none of them would be surprise.
With no more ships to rivet now, and what was worse: no need any more for ships to rivet. So not just he, Charles, but all the town in time sooner or later would see her — or be told about it by the ones who had — walking, striding, most of the time dressed in what they presumed was the same army-surplus khaki she had probably riveted the ships in, through the back streets and alleys of the town or the highways and lanes and farm roads and even the fields and woods themselves within two or three miles of town, alone, walking not fast so much as just hard, as if she were walking off insomnia or perhaps even a hangover. “Maybe that’s what it is,” Charles said. Again his uncle looked up, a little impatiently, from the brief.
“What?” he said.
“You said maybe she has insomnia. Maybe it’s hangover she’s walking off.”
“Oh,” his uncle said. “All right.” He went back to the brief. Charles watched him.
“Why don’t you walk with her?” he said.
This time his uncle didn’t look up. “Why don’t you? Two ex-soldiers, you could talk about war.”
“She couldn’t hear me. I wouldn’t have time to write on a pad while we were walking.”
“That’s what I mean,” his uncle said. “My experience has been that the last thing two ex-soldiers under fifty years old want to talk about is war. You two even can’t.”
“Oh,” he said. His uncle read the brief. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. His uncle read the brief. “Is it all right with you if I try to lay her?” His uncle didn’t move. Then he closed the brief and sat back in the chair.
“Certainly,” he said.
“So you think I can’t,” Charles said.
“I know you can’t,” his uncle said. He added quickly: “Don’t grieve; it’s not you. Just despair if you like. It’s not anybody.”
“So you know why,” Charles said.
“Yes,” his uncle said.
“But you’re not going to tell me.”
“I want you to see for yourself. You will probably never have the chance again. You read and hear and see about it in all the books and pictures and music, in Harvard and Heidelberg both. But you are afraid to believe it until you actually see it face to face, because you might be wrong and you couldn’t bear that, and be happy. What you can’t bear is to doubt it.”
“I never got to Heidelberg,” Charles said. “All I had was Harvard and Stalag umpty-nine.”
“All right,” his uncle said. “The high school and the Jefferson Academy then.”
Anyway he, Charles, knew the answer now. He said so. “Oh, that. Even little children know all that nowadays. She’s frigid.”
“Well, that’s as good a Freudian term as another to cover chastity or discretion,” his uncle said. “Beat it now. I’m busy. Your mother invited me to dinner so I’ll see you at noon.”
So it was more than that, and his uncle was not going to tell him. And his uncle had used the word “discretion” also to cover something he had not said. Though Charles at least knew what that was because he knew his uncle well enough to know that the discretion applied not to Linda but to him. If he had never been a soldier himself, he would not have bothered, let alone waited, to ask his uncle’s leave: he would probably already have waylaid her at some suitable secluded spot in the woods on one of her walks, on the innocent assumption of those who have never been in a war that she, having come through one, had been wondering for days now what in hell was wrong with Jefferson, why he or any other personable male had wasted all this time.
Because he knew now why young people rushed so eagerly to war was their belief that it was one endless presanctioned opportunity for unlicensed rapine and pillage; that the tragedy of war was that you brought nothing away from it but only left something valuable there; that you carried into war things which, except for the war, you could have lived out your life in peace with without ever having to know they were inside you.
So it would not be him. He had been a soldier too even if he had brought back no wound to prove it. So if it would take physical assault on her to learn what his uncle said he didn’t know existed, he would never know it; he would just have to make one more in the town who believed she was simply walking off one hangover to be ready for the next one, having evidence to go on, or at least a symptom. Which was that once a week, Wednesday or Thursday afternoon (the town could set its watches and calendars by this too), she would be waiting at the wheel of her father’s car outside the bank when it closed and her father came out and they would drive up to what Jakeleg Wattman euphemiously called his fishing camp at Wyott’s Crossing, and lay in her next week’s supply of bootleg whiskey.
Not her car: her father’s car. She could have owned a covey of automobiles out of that fund his uncle was trustee of from her grandfather, old Will Varner rich out at Frenchman’s Bend, or maybe from Varner and her father together as a part of or maybe a result of that old uproar and scandal twenty years ago when her mother had committed suicide and the mother’s presumed lover had abandoned the bank and his ancestral home both to her father, not to mention the sculptor she married being a New York Jew and hence (as the town was convinced) rich.
And driven it — them — too, even stone deaf, who could have afforded to hire somebody to sit beside her and do nothing else but listen. Only she didn’t. Evidently she preferred walking, sweating out the hard way the insomnia or hangover or whatever the desperate price she paid for celibacy — unless of course Lawyer Gavin Stevens had been a slicker and smoother operator for the last eight years than anybody suspected; though even he had a wife now.
And her supply: not her father’s. Because the town, the county, knew that too: Snopes himself never drank, never touched it. Yet he would never let his daughter make the trip alone. Some were satisfied with the simple explanation that Wattman, like everybody else nowadays, was making so much money that he would have to leave some of it somewhere, and Snopes, a banker, figured it might as well be in his bank and so he called on Jakeleg once a week exactly as he would and did look in socially on any other merchant or farmer or cotton ginner of the bank’s profitable customers or clients.
But there were others, among them his Uncle Gavin and his uncle’s special crony, the sewing machine agent and rural bucolic grass-roots philosopher and Cincinnatus, V. K. Ratliff, who went a little further: it was for respectability, the look of things: that on those afternoons Snopes was not just a banker, he was a
