“Good morning, Linda,” Mother said. “You’ve torn your sleeve.”
“It caught on a nail,” Linda said.
“I can see,” Mother said. “Come on up to my room and slip it off and I’ll tack it back for you.”
“It’s all right,” Linda said. “If you’ve just got a pin.”
“Then you take the needle and do it yourself while I see about dinner,” Mother said. “You can sew, cant you?”
“Yessum,” Linda said. So they went up to Mother’s room and Uncle Gavin and I went to the office so Father could say to Uncle Gavin:
“Somebody been mauling at her before she could even get here? What’s the matter, boy? Where’s your spear and sword? Where’s your white horse?” Because Matt didn’t blow the two-toned horn when he passed that time so none of us knew yet what Linda was listening for, sitting at the dinner table with the shoulder of her dress sewed back all right but looking like somebody about ten years old had done it and her face still looking rigid and scared. Because we didn’t realise it then. I mean, that she was having to do so many things at once: having to look like she was enjoying her dinner and having to remember her manners in a strange house and with folks that she didn’t have any particular reason to think were going to like her, and still having to wonder what Matt Levitt would do next without letting anybody know that’s what was mainly on her mind. I mean, having to expect what was going to happen next and then, even while it was happening having to look like she was eating and saying Yessum and Nome to what Mother was saying, and that cut-down racer going past in the street again with that two-toned horn blowing this time, blowing all the way past the house, and Father suddenly jerking his head up and making a loud snuffing noise, saying, “What’s that I smell?”
“Smell?” Mother said. “Smell what?”
“That,” Father said. “Something we haven’t smelled around here in … how long was it, Gavin?” Because I knew now what Father meant, even if I wasn’t born then and Cousin Gowan just told me. And Mother knew too. I mean, she remembered, sinced even had heard the other one when it was Mr de Spain’s cut-out. I mean, even if she didn’t know enough to connect that two-toned horn with Matt Levitt, all she had to do was look at Linda and Uncle Gavin. Or maybe just Uncle Gavin’s face was enough, which is what you get for being twins with anybody. Because she said,
“Charley,” and Father said:
“Maybe Miss Snopes will excuse me this time.” He was talking at Linda now. “You see, whenever we have a pretty girl to eat with us, the prettier she is, the harder I try to make jokes so they will want to come back again. This time I just tried too hard. So if Miss Snopes will forgive me for trying too hard to be funny, I’ll forgive her for being too pretty.”
“Good boy,” Uncle Gavin said. “Even if that one wasn’t on tiptoe, at least it didn’t wear spikes like the joke did. Let’s go out to the gallery where it’s cool, Maggie.”
“Let’s,” Mother said. Then we were all standing there in the hall, looking at Linda. It wasn’t just being scared in her face now, of being a sixteen-year-old girl for the first time in the home of people that probably had already decided not to approve of her. I didn’t know what it was. But Mother did, maybe because it was Mother she was looking at it with.
“I think it will be cooler in the parlor,” Mother said. “Let’s go there.” But it was too late. We could hear the horn, not missing a note: da Da da Da da Da getting louder and louder then going past the house still not missing a note as it faded on, and Linda staring at Mother for just another second or two with the desperation. Because it—the desperation—went too; maybe it was something like despair for a moment, but then that was gone too and her face was just rigid again.
“I’ve got to go,” she said. “I … excuse me, I’ve got.… ” Then at least she kind of got herself together. “Thank you for my dinner, Mrs Mallison,” she said. “Thank you for my dinner, Mr Mallison. Thank you for my dinner, Mr Gavin,” already moving toward the table where she had put the hat and her purse. But then I hadn’t expected her to thank me for it.
“Let Gavin drive you home,” Mother said. “Gavin—”
“No no,” she said. “I dont—he dont—” Then she was gone, out the front door and down the walk toward the gate, almost running again, then through the gate and then she was running, desperate and calm, not looking back. Then she was gone.
“By Cicero, Gavin,” Father said. “You’re losing ground. Last time you at least picked out a Spanish-American War hero with an E.M.F. sportster. Now the best you can do is a Golden Gloves amateur with a homemade racer. Watch yourself, bud, or next time you’ll have a boy scout defying you to mortal combat with a bicycle.”
“What?” Mother said.
“What would you do,” Father said, “if you were a twenty-one-year-old garage mechanic who had to work until six p.m., and a whe-headed old grandfather of a libertine was waylaying your girl on her way home from school every afternoon and tolling her into soda dens and plying her with ice cream? Because how could he know that all Gavin wants is just to form her mind?”
Only it wasn’t every afternoon any more. It wasn’t any afternoon at all. I dont know what happened, how it was done: whether she sent word to Uncle Gavin not to try to meet her after school or whether she came and went the back way where he wouldn’t see her, or whether maybe she stopped going to school at all for a while. Because she was in high school and I was in grammar school so there was no reason for me to know whether she was still going to school or not.
Or whether she was still in Jefferson, for that matter. Because now and then I would see Matt Levitt in his racer after the garage closed in the afternoon, when Linda used to be with him, and now and then at night going to and from the picture show. But not any more now. He would be alone in the racer, or with another boy or man. But as far as I knew, Matt never saw her any more than Uncle Gavin did.
And you couldn’t tell anything from Uncle Gavin. It used to be that on the way home from school I would see him and Linda inside Christian’s drugstore eating ice cream and when he or they saw me he would beckon me in and we would all have ice cream. But that—the fact that there was no longer any reason to look in Christian’s when I passed—was the only difference in him. Then one day—it was Friday—he was sitting at the table inside waiting and watching to beckon me inside, and even though there was no second dish on the table I thought that Linda had probably just stepped away for a moment, maybe to the perfume counter or the magazine rack, and even when I was inside and he said, “I’m having peach. What do you want?” I still expected Linda to step out from behind whatever for the moment concealed her.
“Strawberry,” I said. On the table was the last book—it was John Donne—he had ordered for her.
“It will cost the same dime to mail it to her here in Jefferson that it would cost if she were in Memphis,” he said. “Suppose I stand the ice cream and give you the dime and you take it by her house on the way home.”
“All right,” I said. When Mr Snopes first came to Jefferson he rented the house. Then he must have bought it because since he became vice president of the bank they had begun to fix it up. It was painted now and Mrs Snopes I reckon had had the wistaria arbor in the side yard fixed up and when I came through the gate Linda called me and I saw the hammock under the arbor. The wistaria was still in bloom and I remember how she looked with her black hair under it because her eyes were kind of the color of wistaria and her dress almost exactly was: lying in the hammock reading and I thought Uncle Gavin didn’t need to send this book because she hasn’t finished the other one yet. Then I saw the rest of her school books on the ground beneath the hammock and that the one she was reading was geometry and I wondered if knowing she would rather study geometry than be out with him would make Matt Levitt feel much better than having her eat ice cream with Uncle Gavin.
So I gave her the book and went on home. That was Friday. The next day, Saturday, I went to the baseball game and then
I came back to the office to walk home with Uncle Gavin. We hethe feet coming up the outside stairs, more than two of them, making a kind of scuffling sound and we could even hear hard breathing and something like whispering, then the door kind of banged open and Matt Levitt came in, quick and fast, holding something clamped under his arm, and shoved the door back shut against whoever was trying to follow him inside, holding the door shut with his braced knee until he fumbled at the knob until he found how to shoot the bolt and lock it. Then he turned. He was good-looking. He didn’t have a humorous or happy look, he had what Ratliff called a merry look, the merry look of a fellow that hadn’t heard yet that they had invented doubt. But he didn’t even look merry now and he took the book—it was the John Donne I had taken to Linda yesterday—and kind of shot it onto the desk so that the ripped and torn pages came scuttering and scattering out across the desk and some of them even on down to the floor.
“How do you like that?” Matt said, coming on around the desk where Uncle Gavin had stood up. “Dont you want to put up your dukes?” he said. “But that’s right, you aint much of a fighter, are you? But that’s O.K.; I aint going to hurt you much anyway: just mark you up a little to freshen up your memory.” He didn’t, he didn’t seem to hit hard, his fists not travelling more than four or five inches it looked like, so that it didn’t even look like they were drawing blood from Uncle Gavin’s lips and nose but just instead wiping the blood onto them; two or maybe three blows before I could seem to move and grab up Grandfather’s heavy walking stick where it still stayed in the umbrella stand behind the door and raise it to swing at the back of Matt’s head as hard as I could.
“You, Chick!” Uncle Gavin said. “Stop! Hold it!” Though even with that, I wouldn’t have thought Matt could have moved that fast. Maybe it was the Golden Gloves that did it. Anyway he turned and caught the stick and jerked it away from me almost before I knew it and naturally I thought he was going to hit me or Uncle Gavin or maybe both of us with it so I had already crouched to dive at his legs when he dropped the point of the stick like a bayoneted rifle, the point touching my chest just below the throat as if he were not holding me up but had really picked me up with the stick like you would a rag or a scrap of paper.
“Tough luck, kid,” he said. “Nice going almost; too bad your uncle telegraphed it for you,” and threw the stick into the corner and stepped around me toward the door, which was the first time I reckon that any of us realised that whoever it was he had locked out was still banging on it, and shot the bolt back and opened it, then stepped back himself as Linda came in, blazing; yes, that’s exactly the word for it: blazing: and without even looking at Uncle Gavin or me, whirled onto her tiptoes and slapped Matt twice, first with her left hand and then the right, panting and crying at the same time:
“You fool! You ox! You clumsy ignorant ox! You clumsy ignorant stupid son of a bitch!” Which was the first time I ever heard a sixteen-year-old girl say that. No: the first time I ever heard any woman say that, standing there facing Matt and crying hard now, like she was too mad to even know what to do next, whether to slap him again or curse him again, until Uncle Gavin came around the desk and touched her and said,
“Stop it. Stop it now,” and she turned and grabbed him, her face against his shirt where he had bled onto i still crying hard, saying,
“Mister Gavin, Mister Gavin, Mister Gavin.”
“Open the door, Chick,” Uncle Gavin said. I opened it. “Get out of here, boy,” Uncle Gavin said to Matt. “Go on.” Then Matt was gone. I started to close the door. “You too,” Uncle Gavin said.
“Sir?” I said.
“You get out too,” Uncle Gavin said, still holding Linda where she was shaking and crying against him, his nose bleeding onto her too now.
THIRTEEN
GAVIN STEVENS
Go on,” I said. “You get out too.” So he did, and I stood there holding her. Or rather, she was gripping me, quite hard, shuddering and gasping, crying quite hard now, burrowing her face into my shirt so that I could feel my shirt front getting wet. Which was what
Ratliff would have called tit for tat, since what Victorians would have called the claret from my nose had already stained the shoulder of her dress. So I could free one hand long enough to reach around and over her other shoulder to the handkerchief in my breast pocket and do a little emergency work with it until I could separate us long enough to reach the cold-water tap.
“Stop it,” I said. “Stop it now.” But she only cried the harder, clutching me, saying,
“Mister Gavin. Mister Gavin. Oh, Mister Gavin.”
“Linda,” I said. “Can you hear me?” She didn’t answer, just clutching me; I could feel her nodding her head against my chest. “Do you want to marry me?” I said.
“Yes!” she said. “Yes! All right! All right!”
This time I got one hand under her chin and lifted her face by force until she would have to look at me. Ratliff had told me that McCarron’s eyes were gray, probably the same hard gray as Hub Hampton’s. Hers were not gray at all. They were darkest hyacinth, what I have always imagined that Homer’s hyacinthine sea must have had to look like.
“Listen to me,” I said. “Do you want to get married?” Yes, they dont need minds at all, except for conversation, social intercourse. And I have known some who had charm and tact without minds even then. Because when they deal with men, with human beings, all they need is the instinct, the instinct, the intuition before it became battered and dulled, the infinite capacity for devotion untroubled and unconfused by cold moralities and colder facts.
“You mean I dont have to?” she said.
“Of course not,” I said. “Never if you like.”
“I dont want to marry anybody!” she said, cried; she was clinging to me again, her face buried again in the damp mixture of blood and tears which seemed nowcompose the front of my shirt and tie. “Not anybody!” she said. “You’re all I have, all I can trust. I love you! I love you!”
FOURTEEN
CHARLES MALLISON
When he got home, his face was clean. But his nose and his lip still showed, and there wasn’t anything he could have done about his shirt and tie. Except he could have bought new ones, since on Saturday the stores were still open. But he didn’t. Maybe eve
n that wouldn’t have made any difference with Mother; maybe that’s one of the other things you have to accept in being a twin. And yes sir, if dentist’s drills could talk, that’s exactly what Mother would have sounded like after she got done laughing and crying both and saying Damn you, Gavin, damn you, damn you, and Uncle Gavin had gone upstairs to put on a clean shirt and tie for supper.
“Forming her mind,” Mother said.
It was like he could stand just anything except getting knocked down or getting his nose bloodied. Like if Mr de Spain hadn’t knocked him down in the alley behind that Christmas dance, he could have got over Mrs Snopes without having to form Linda’s mind. And like if Matt Levitt hadn’t come into the office that afternoon and bloodied his nose again, he could have stopped there with Linda’s mind without having to do any more to it.
So he didn’t stop because he couldn’t. But at least he got rid of Matt Levitt. That was in the spring. It was her last year in high school; she would graduate in May and any school afternoon I could see her walking along the street from school with a few books under her arm. But if any of them was poetry now I didn’t know it, because when she came to Christian’s drugstore now she wouldn’t even look toward the door, just walking on past with her face straight in front and her head up a little like the pointer just a step or two from freezing on the game; walking on like she saw people, saw Jefferson, saw the Square all right because at the moment, at any moment she had to walk on and among and through something and it might as well be Jefferson and Jefferson people and the Jefferson square as anything else, but that was all.
Because Uncle Gavin wasn’t there somewhere around like an accident any more now. But then, if Uncle Gavin was
n’t sitting on the opposite side of that marble-topped table in Christian’s watching her eating something out of a tall glass that cost every bit of fifteen or twenty cents, Matt Levitt wasn’t there either. Him and his cut-down racer both because the racer was empty now except for Matt himself after the garage closed on week days, creeping along the streets and across the Square in low gear, paralleling but a little behind where she would be walking to the picture show now with another girl or maybe two or three of them, her head still high and not once looking at him while the racer crept along at her elbow almost, the cut-out going chuckle-chuckle-chuckle, right up to the picture show and the two or three or four girls had gone into it. Then the racer would dash off at full speed around the block, to come rushing back with the cut-out as loud as he could make it, up the alley beside the picture show and then across in front of it and around the block and up the alley again, this time with Otis Harker, who had succeeded Gver Cleveland Winbush as night marshal after Grover Cleveland retired after what Ratliff called his eye trouble, waiting at the corner yelling at Matt at the same time he was jumping far enough back not to be run over.
And on Sunday through the Square, the cut-out going full blast and Mr Buck Connors, the day marshal, hollering after him. And now he—Matt—had a girl with him, a country girl he had found somewhere, the racer rushing and roaring through the back streets into the last one, to rush slow and loud past Linda’s house, as if the sole single symbol of frustrated love or anyway desire or maybe just frustration possible in Jefferson was an automobile cut-out; the sole single manifestation which love or anyway desire was capable of assuming in Jefferson, was rushing slow past the specific house with the cut-out wide open, so that he or she would have to know who was passing no matter how hard they worked at not looking out the window.
Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion Page 60