But by that time Mother was gone. And this time she sure needed somebody like Miss Melisandre, with all her friends (all Jefferson for that matter) on the watch to tell her whenever Uncle Gavin and Linda stopped in Christian’s drugstore after school while Linda ate another banana split or ice cream soda, with the last book of poetry Uncle Gavin had ordered for her lying in the melted ice cream or spilled coca cola on the marble table top.
Because I reckon Jefferson was too small for a thirty-five-year-old bachelor, even a Harvard M.A. and a Ph.D. from Heidelberg and his hair already beginning to turn white even at just twenty-five, to eat ice cream and read poetry with a sixteen-year-old high school girl. Though if it had to happen, maybe thirty-five was the best age for a bachelor to buy ice cream and poetry for a sixteen-year-old girl. I told Mother that. She didn’t sound like a snake because snakes cant talk. But if dentists’ drills could talk she would have sounded just like one.
“There’s no best or safe age for a bachelor anywhere between three and eighty to buy ice cream for a sixteen-year-old girl,” she said. “Forming her mind,” she said. But she sounded just like cream when she talked to Uncle Gavin. No: she didn’t sound like anything because she didn’t say anything. She waited for him to begin it. No: she just waited because she knew he would have to begin it. Because Jefferson was that small. No, I mean Uncle Gavin had lived in Jefferson or in little towns all his life so he not only knew what Jefferson would be saying about him and Linda Snopes and those banana splits and ice cream sodas and books of poetry by now, but that Mother had too many good friends to ever miss hearing about it.
So she just waited. It was Saturday. Uncle Gavin walked twice in and out of the office (we still called it that because Grandfather had, except when Mother could hear us. Though after a while even she stopped trying to call it the library) where Mother was sitting at the desk adding up something, maybe the laundry; he walked in and out twice and she never moved. Then he said:
“I was thinking—” Because they were like that. I mean, I thought the reason they were like that was because they were twins. I mean, I assumed that because I didn’t know any other twins to measure them against. She didn’t even stop adding.
“Of course,” she said. “Why not tomorrow?” So he could have gone out then since obviously both of them knew what the other was talking about. But he said:
“Thank you.” Then he said to me: “Aint Aleck Sander waiting for you outside?”
“Fiddlesticks,” Mother said. “Anything he will learn about sixteen-year-old girls from you will probably be a good deal more innocent than what he will learn someday from sixteen-year-old girls. Shall I telephone her mother and ask her to let her come for dinner tomorrow, or do you want to?”
“Thank you,” Uncle Gavin said. “Do you want me to tell you about it?”
“Do you want to?” Mother said.
“Maybe I’d better,” Uncle Gavin said.
“Do you have to?” Mother said. This time Uncle Gavin didn’t say anything. Then Mother said: “All right. We’re listening.” Again Uncle Gavin didn’t say anything. But now he was Uncle Gavin again. I mean, until now he sounded a good deal like I sounded sometimes. But now he stood looking at the back of Mother’s head, with his shock of white hair that always needed cutting and the stained bitt of the corncob pipe sticking out of his breast pocket and the eyes and the face that you never did quite know what they were going to say next except that when you heard it you realised it was always true, only a little cranksided; that nobody else would have said it quite that way.
“Well, well,” he said, “if that’s what a mind with no more aptitude for gossip and dirt than yours is inventing and thinking, just imagine what the rest of Jefferson, the experts, have made of it by now. By Cicero, it makes me feel young already; when I go to town this morning I believe I will buy myself a red necktie.” He looked at the back of Mother’s head. “Thank you, Maggie,” he said. “It will need all of us of good will. To save Jefferson from Snopeses is a crisis, an emergency, a duty. To save a Snopes from Snopeses is a privilege, an honor, a pride.”
“Especially a sixteen-year-old female one,” Mother said. “Yes,” Uncle Gavin said. “Do you deny it?”
“Have I tried to?” Mother said.
“Yes, you have tried.” He moved quick and put his hand on the top of her head, still talking. “And bless you for it. Tried always to deny that damned female instinct for uxorious and rigid respectability which is the backbone of any culture not yet decadent, which remains strong and undecadent only so long as it still produces an incorrigible unreconstructable with the temerity to assail and affront and deny it — like you—” and for a second both of us thought he was going to bend down and kiss her; maybe all three of us thought it.
Then he didn’t, or anyway Mother said:
“Stop it. Let me alone. Make up your mind: do you want me to telephone her, or will you do it?”
“I’ll do it,” he said. He looked at me. “Two red ties: one for you. I wish you were sixteen too. What she needs is a beau.”
“Then if by being sixteen I’d have to be her beau, I’m glad I’m not sixteen,” I said. “She’s already got a beau. Matt Levitt. He won the Golden Gloves up in Ohio or somewhere last year. He acts like he can still use them. Would like to, too. No, much obliged,” I said.
“What’s that?” Mother said.
“Nothing,” Uncle Gavin said.
“You never saw him box then,” I said. “Or you wouldn’t call him nothing. I saw him once. With Preacher Birdsong.”
“And just which of your sporting friends is Preacher Bird-song?” Mother said.
“He aint sporting,” I said. “He lives out in the country. He learned to box in France in the war. He and Matt Levitt—”
“Let me,” Uncle Gavin said. “He—”
“Which he?” Mother said. “Your rival?”
“ — is from Ohio,” Uncle Gavin said. “He graduated from that new Ford mechanic’s school and the company sent him here to be a mechanic in the agency garage—”
“He’s the one that owns that yellow cut-down racer,” I said. “And Linda rides in it?” Mother said.
“ — and since Jefferson is not that large and he has two eyes,” Uncle Gavin said, “sooner or later he saw Linda Snopes, probably somewhere between her home and the school house; being male and about twenty-one, he naturally lost no time in making her acquaintance; the Golden Gloves reputation which he either really brought with him or invented somewhere en route, has apparently eliminated what rivals he might have expected — —”
“Except you,” Mother said.
“That’s all,” Uncle Gavin said.
“Except you,” Mother said.
“He’s maybe five years her senior,” Uncle Gavin said. “I’m twice her age.”
“Except you,” Mother said. “I dont think you will live long enough to ever be twice any woman’s age, I dont care what it is.”
“All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “What was it I just said? to save Jefferson from a Snopes is a duty; to save a Snopes from a Snopes is a privilege.”
“An honor, you said,” Mother said. “A pride.”
“All right,” Uncle Gavin said. “A joy then. Are you pleased now?” That was all, then. After a while Father came home but Mother didn’t have much to tell him he didn’t already know, so there wasn’t anything for him to do except to keep on needing the wolf whistle that hadn’t been invented yet; not until the next day after dinner in fact.
She arrived a little after twelve, just about when she could have got here after church if she had been to church. Which maybe she had, since she was wearing a hat. Or maybe it was her mother who made her wear the hat on account of Mother, coming up the street from the corner, running. Then I saw that the hat was a little awry on her head as if something had pulled or jerked at it or it had caught on something in passing, and that she was holding one shoulder with the other hand.
Then I saw that her face was mad. It was scared too, but right now it was mostly just mad as she turned in the gate, still holding her shoulder but not running now, just walking fast and hard, the mad look beginning to give way to the scared one.
Then they both froze into something completely different because then the car passed, coming up fast from the corner — Matt Levitt’s racer because there were other stripped-down racers around now but his was the only one with that big double-barrel
