“How nice,” Miss Eunice said. “Is Linda going on a trip?”
“Oh yes,” Mother said. “Very likely. At least probably to one of the eastern girls’ schools next year perhaps. Or so I heard.”
“How nice,” Miss Eunice said. “I always say that every young boy and girl should go away from home for at least one year of school in order to learn how the other half lives.”
“How true,” Mother said. “Until you do go and see, all you do is hope. Until you actually see for yourself, you never do give up and settle down, do you?”
“Maggie,” Uncle Gavin said.
“Give up?” Miss Eunice said. “Give up hope? Young people should never give up hope.”
“Of course not,” Mother said. “They dont have to. All they have to do is stay young, no matter how long it takes.”
“Maggie,” Uncle Gavin said.
“Oh,” Mother said, “you want to pay cash for it instead of charge? All right; I’m sure Mr Wildermark wont mind.” So Uncle Gavin took two twenty dollar bills from his wallet and took out one of his cards and gave it to Mother.
“Thank you,” she said. “But Miss Eunice probably has a big one, that will hold all four names.” So Miss Eunice gave her the big card and Mother held out her hand until Uncle Gavin uncapped his pen and gave it to her and we watched her write in the big sprawly hand that still looked like somebody thirteen years old in the ninth grade:
Mr and Mrs Charles Mallison Charles Mallison Jr
Mr Gavin Stevens
and capped the pen and handed it back to Uncle Gavin and took the card between the thumb and finger of one hand and waved it dry and gave it to Miss Eunice.
“I’ll send it out tonight,” Miss Eunice said. “Even if the graduation isn’t until next week. It’s such a handsome gift, why shouldn’t Linda have that much more time to enjoy it.”
“Yes,” Mother said. “Why shouldn’t she?” Then we were outside again, our three reflections jumbled into one walking now across the plate glass; Mother had Uncle Gavin’s arm again.
“All four of our names,” Uncle Gavin said. “At least her father wont know a white-headed bachelor sent his seventeen-year-old daughter a fitted travelling case.”
“Yes,” Mother said. “One of them wont know it.”
FIFTEEN
Gavin Stevens
THE DIFFICULTY WAS, how to tell her, explain to her. I mean, why. Not the deed, the act itself, but the reason for it, the why behind it — say point blank to her over one of the monstrous synthetic paradoxes which were her passion or anyway choice in Christian’s drugstore, or perhaps out on the street itself: “We wont meet anymore from now on because after Jefferson assimilates all the details of how your boyfriend tracked you down in my office and bloodied my nose one Saturday, and eight days later, having spent his last night in Jefferson in the county jail, shook our dust forever from his feet with the turbulent uproar of his racer’s cut-out; — after that, for you to be seen still meeting me in ice cream dens will completely destroy what little was left of your good name.”
You see? That was it: the very words reputation and good name. Merely to say them, speak them aloud, give their existence vocal recognition, would irrevocably soil and besmirch them, would destroy the immunity of the very things they represented, leaving them not just vulnerable but already doomed; from the inviolable and proud integrity of principles they would become, reduce to, the ephemeral and already doomed and damned fragility of human conditions; innocence and virginity become symbol and postulant of loss and grief, evermore to be mourned, existing only in the past tense was and now is not, no more no more.
That was the problem. Because the act, the deed itself, was simple enough. Luckily the affair happened late on a Saturday afternoon, which would give my face thirty-six hours anyway before it would have to make a public appearance. (It wouldn’t have needed that long except for the ring he wore — a thing not quite as large as a brass knuckle and not really noticeably unlike gold if you didn’t get too close probably, of a tiger’s head gripping between its jaws what had been — advisedly — a ruby; advisedly because the fact that the stone was missing at the moment was a loss only to my lip.)
Besides, the drugstore meetings were not even a weekly affair, let alone daily, so even a whole week could pass before
(1) it would occur to someone that we had not met in over a week, who
(2) would immediately assume that we had something to conceal was why we had not met in over a week, and
(3) the fact that we had met again after waiting over a week only proved it.
By which time I was even able to shave past my cut lip. So it was very simple; simple indeed in fact, and I the simple one. I had planned it like this: the carefully timed accident which would bring me out the drugstore door, the (say) tin of pipe tobacco still in plain sight on its way to the pocket, at the exact moment when she would pass on her way to school: “Good morning, Linda—” already stepping on past her and then already pausing: “I have another book for you. Meet me here after school this afternoon and we’ll have a coke over it.”
Which would be all necessary. Because I was the simple one, to whom it had never once occurred that the blow of that ruby-vacant reasonably almost-gold tiger’s head might have marked her too even if it didn’t leave a visible cut; that innocence is innocent not because it rejects but because it accepts; is innocent not because it is impervious and invulnerable to everything, but because it is capable of accepting anything and still remaining innocent; innocent because it foreknows all and therefore doesn’t have to fear and be afraid; the tin of tobacco now in my coat pocket because by this time even it had become noticeable, the last book-burdened stragglers now trotting toward the sound of the first strokes of the school bell and still she had not passed; obviously I had missed her somehow: either taken my post not soon enough or she had taken another route to school or perhaps would not leave home for school at all today, for whatever reasons no part of which were the middleaged bachelor’s pandering her to Jonson and Herrick and Thomas Campion; crossing — I — the now-unchildrened street at last, mounting the outside stairs since tomorrow was always tomorrow; indeed, I could even use the tobacco tin again, provided I didn’t break the blue stamp for verity, and opened the screen door and entered the office.
She was sitting neither in the revolving chair behind the desk nor in the leather client’s one before it but in a straight hard armless one against the book-case as though she had fled, been driven until the wall stopped her, and turned then, her back against it, not quite sitting in the chair nor quite huddled in it because although her legs, knees were close and rigid and her hands were clasped tight in her lap, her head was still up watching the door and then me with the eyes the McCarron boy had marked her with which at a distance looked as black as her hair until you saw they were that blue so dark as to be almost violet.
“I thought …” she said. “They — somebody said Matt quit his job and left — went yesterday. I thought you might.…”
“Of course,” I said. “I always want to see you,” stopping myself in time from I’ve been waiting over there on the corner until the last bell rang, for you to pass though this is what I really stopped from Get up. Get out of here quick. Why did you come here anyway? Dont you see this is the very thing I have been lying awake at night with ever since Saturday? So I merely said that I had bought the can of tobacco which I must now find someone capable or anyway willing to smoke, to give it to, to create the chance to say: “I have another book for you.
I forgot to bring it this morning, but I’ll bring it at noon. I’ll wait for you at Christian’s after school and stand you a soda too. Now you’ll have to hurry; you’re already late.”
I had not even released the screen door and so had only to open it again, having also in that time in which she crossed the room, space to discard a thousand frantic indecisions: to remain concealed in the office as though I had not been there at all this morning, and let her leave alone; to follow to the top of the stairs and see her down them, avuncular and fond; to walk her to the school itself and wait to see her through the actual door: the family friend snatching the neighbor’s child from the rife midst of truancy and restoring it to duty — family friend to Flem Snopes who had no more friends than Blackbeard or Pistol, to Eula Varner who no more had friends than man or woman either would have called them that Messalina and Helen had.
So I did all three: waited in the office too long, so that I had to follow down the stairs too fast, and then along
