Then on Thursday when the Clarion came out, almost half of the front page was the announcement of the formal opening, saying Ladies Especially Invited, and at the bottom: Tea. “What?” I said. “I thought it was going to be a studio.”
“It is,” Uncle Gavin said. “You get a cup of tea with it. Only he’s wasting his money. All the women in town and half the men will go once just to see why he kept the door locked.” Because Mother had already said she was going.
“Of course you wont be there,” she told Uncle Gavin.
“All right,” he said. “Most of the men then.” He was right. Montgomery Ward had to keep the opening running all day long to take care of the people that came. He would have had to run it in sections even with the store empty like he rented it. But now it wouldn’t have held hardly a dozen at a time, it was so full of stuff, with black curtains hanging all the way to the floor on all the walls that when you drew them back with a kind of pulley it would be like you were looking through a window at outdoors that he said one was the skyline of Paris and another was the Seine river bridges and ks whatever they are and another was the Eiffel tower and another Notre Dame, and sofas with black pillows and tables with vases and cups and something burning in them that made a sweet kind of smell; until at first you didn’t hardly notice the camera.
But finally you did, and a door at the back and Montgomery Ward said, he said it quick and he kind of moved quick, like he had already begun to move before he had time to decide that maybe he better not:
“That’s the dark room. It’s not open yet.”
“I beg pardon?” Uncle Gavin said.
“That’s the dark room,” Montgomery Ward said. “It’s not open yet.”
“Are we expected to expect a dark room to be open to the public?” Uncle Gavin said. But Montgomery Ward was already giving Mrs Rouncewell another cup of tea. Oh yes, there was a vase of flowers too; in the Clarion announcement of the opening it said Flowers by Rouncewell and I said to Uncle Gavin, where else in Jefferson would anybody get flowers except from Mrs Rouncewell? and he said she probably paid for half the advertisement, plus a vase containing six overblown roses left over from another funeral, that she will probably take out in trade. Then he said he meant her trade and he hoped he was right. Now he looked at the door a minute, then he looked at Montgomery Ward filling Mrs Rouncewell’s cup. “Beginning with tea,” he said.
We left then. We had to, to make room. “How can he afford to keep on giving away tea?” I said.
“He wont after today,” Uncle Gavin said. “That was just bait, ladies’ bait. Now I’ll ask you one: why did he have to need all the ladies in Jefferson to come in one time and look at his joint?” And now he sounded just like Ratliff; he kind of happened to be coming out of the hardware store when we passed. “Had your tea yet?” Uncle Gavin said.
“Tea,” Ratliff said. He didn’t ask it. He just said it. He blinked at Uncle Gavin.
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “So do we. The dark room aint open yet.”
“Ought it to be?” Ratliff said.
“Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “So did we.”
“Maybe I can find out,” Ratliff said.
“Do you even hope so?” Uncle Gavin said.
“Maybe I will hear about it,” Ratliff said.
“Do you even hope so?” Uncle Gavin said.
“Maybe somebody else will find out about it and maybe I will be standing where I can hear him,” Ratliff said.
And that was all. Montgomery Ward didn’t give away any more cups of tea but after a while photographs did begin to appear in the show window, faces that we knew — ladies with and without babies and high school graduating classes and the prettiest girls in their graduation caps and gowns and now and then a couple just married from the country looking a little stiff and uncomfortable and just a little defiant and a narrow white line between his haircut and his sunburn; and now and then a couple that had been married fifty years that we had known all the time without really realising it until now how much alike they looked, not to mention being surprised, whether at being photographed or just being married that long.
And even when we begun to realise that not just the same faces but the same photographs of them had been in the same place in the window for over two years now, as if all of a sudden as soon as Montgomery Ward opened his atelier folks stopped graduating and getting married or staying married either, Montgomery Ward was still staying in business, either striking new pictures he didn’t put in the window or maybe just selling copies of the old ones, to pay his rent and stay open.
Because he was and maybe it was mostly dark room work because it was now that we begun to realise that most of his business was at night like he did need darkness, his trade seeming to be mostly men now, the front room where he had had the opening dark now and the customers going and coming through the side door in the alley; and them the kind of men you wouldn’t hardly think it had ever occurred to them they might ever need to have their picture struck.
And his business was spreading too; in the second summer we begun to find out how people — men, the same kind of usually young men that his Jefferson customers were — were beginning to come from the next towns around us to leave or pick up their prints and negatives or whatever it was, by that alley door at night.
“No no,” Uncle Gavin told Ratliff. “It cant be that. You simply just cant do that in Jefferson.”
“There’s folks would a said you couldn’t a looted a bank in Jefferson too,” Ratliff said.
“But she would have to eat,” Uncle Gavin said. “He would have to bring her out now and then for simple air and exercise.”
“Out where?” I said. “Bring who out?”
“It cant be liquor,” Ratliff said. “At least that first suhjestion of yours would a been quiet, which you cant say about peddling whiskey.”
“What first suggestion?” I said. “Bring who out?” Because it wasn’t whiskey or gambling either; Grover Cleveland Win-bush (the one that owned the other half of Ratliff’s café until Mr Flem Snopes froze him out too. He was the night marshal now.) had thought of that himself.
He came to Uncle Gavin before Uncle Gavin had even thought of sending for him or Mr Buck Connors either, and told Uncle Gavin that he had been spending a good part of the nights examining and watching and checking on the studio and he was completely satisfied there wasn’t any drinking or peddling whiskey or dice-shooting or card-playing going on in Montgomery Ward’s dark room; that we were all proud of the good name of our town and we all aimed to keep it free of any taint of big-city corruption and misdemeanor and nobody more than him.
Until for hours at night when he could have been sitting comfortably in his chair in the police station waiting for the time to make his next round, he would be hanging around that studio without once hearing any suspicion of dice or drinking or any one of Montgomery Ward’s customers to come out smelling or even looking like he had had a drink.
In fact, Grover Cleveland said, once during the daytime while it was not only his legal right but his duty to his job to be home in bed asleep, just like it was right now while he was giving up his rest to come back to town to make this report to Uncle Gavin as County Attorney, even though he had no warrant, not to mention the fact that by rights this was a job that Buck Connors himself should have done, he — Grover Cleveland — walked in the front door with the aim of walking right on into the dark room even if he had to break the door to do it since the reason the people of Jefferson appointed him night marshal was to keep down big-city misdemeanor and corruption like gambling and drinking, when to his surprise Montgomery Ward not only didn’t try to stop him, he didn’t even wait to be asked but instead opened the dark room door himself and told Grover Cleveland to walk right in and look around.
So Grover Cleveland was satisfied, and he wanted the people of Jefferson to be too, that there was no drinking or gambling or any other corruption and misdemeanor going on in that back room that would cause the christian citizens of Jefferson to regret their confidence in appointing him night marshal which was his sworn duty to do even if he didn’t take any more pride in Jefferson’s good name than just an ordinary citizen, and any time he could do anything else for Uncle Gavin in the line of his sworn duty, for Uncle Gavin just to mention it.
Then he went out, pausing long enough in the door to say:
“Howdy, V.K.,” before going on. Then Ratliff came the rest of the way in.
“He come hipering
