having nigger blood.”
“You’re lying,” Elly said.
The other expelled smoke. “All right. Ask your grandmother about his family. Didn’t she used to live in Louisiana too?”
“What about you?” Elly said. “You invited him into your house.”
“I wasn’t hid in the cloak closet, kissing him, though.”
“Oh, yeah?” Elly said. “Maybe you couldn’t.”
“Not till you got your face out of the way, anyhow,” the other said.
That night she and Paul sat on the screened and shadowed veranda. But at eleven o’clock it was she who was urgent and tense: “No! No! Please. Please.”
“Oh, come on. What are you afraid of?”
“Yes. I’m afraid. Go, please. Please.”
“Tomorrow, then?”
“No. Not tomorrow or any time.”
“Yes. Tomorrow.”
This time she did not look in when she passed her grandmother’s door. Neither did she lean against her own door to cry. But she was panting, saying aloud against the door in thin exultation: “A nigger. A nigger. I wonder what she would say if she knew about that.”
The next afternoon Paul walked up onto the veranda.
Elly was sitting in the swing, her grandmother in a chair nearby. She rose and met Paul at the steps. “Why did you come here?” she said. “Why did you?” Then she turned and seemed to watch herself walking before him toward the thin old woman sitting bolt upright, sitting bolt and implacably chaste in that secret place, peopled with ghosts, very likely to Elly at any given moment uncountable and unnamable, who might well have owned one single mouth.
She leaned down, screaming: “This is Mr. de Montigny, Grandmother! ”
“What?”
“Mr. de Montigny! From Louisiana!” she screamed, and saw the grandmother, without moving below the hips, start violently backward as a snake does to strike. That was in the afternoon. That night Elly quitted the veranda for the first time. She and Paul were in a close clump of shrubbery on the lawn; in the wild close dark, for that instant Elly was lost, her blood aloud with desperation and exultation and vindication too, talking inside her at the very brink of surrender loud as a voice: “I wish she were here to see! I wish she were here to see!” when something, there had been no sound, shouted at her and she made a mad awkward movement of recovery. The grandmother stood just behind and above them. When she had arrived, how long she had been there, they did not know. But there she stood, saying nothing, in the long anti-climax while Paul departed without haste and Elly stood, thinking stupidly, ‘I am caught in sin without even having time to sin.’ Then she was in her room, leaning against the door, trying to still her breathing, listening for the grandmother to mount the stairs and go to her father’s room. But the old woman’s footsteps ceased at her own door. Elly went to her bed and lay upon it without undressing, still panting, the blood still aloud. ‘So, she thought,’ it will be tomorrow. She will tell him in the morning.’ Then she began to writhe, to toss lightly from side to side. ‘I didn’t even have a chance to sin,’ she thought, with panting and amazed regret. ‘She thinks I did and she will tell that I did, yet I am still virgin. She drove me to it, then prevented me at the last moment.’ Then she was lying with the sun in her eyes still fully dressed. ‘So it will be this morning, today, she thought dully. ‘My God. How could I. How could I. I don’t want any man, anything.’
She was waiting in the dining-room when her father came down to breakfast. He said nothing, apparently knew nothing. ‘Maybe it’s mother she told, Elly thought. But after a while her mother, too, appeared and departed for town also, saying nothing. ‘So it has not been yet,’ she thought, mounting the stairs. Her grandmother’s door was closed. “When she opened it, the old woman was sitting up in bed, reading a newspaper; she looked up, cold, still, implacable, while Elly screamed at her in the empty house: “What else can I do, in this little dead, hopeless town? I’ll work. I don’t want to be idle. Just find me a job anything, anywhere, so that it’s so far away that I’ll never have to hear the word Jefferson again.” She was named for the grandmother Ailanthia, though the old woman had not heard her own name or her granddaughter’s or anyone else’s in almost fifteen years save when it was screamed at her as Elly now screamed: “It hadn’t even happened last night! Won’t you believe me? That’s it. It hadn’t even happened! At least, I would have had something, something…” with the other watching her with that cold, fixed, immobile, inescapable gaze of the very deaf. “All right!” Elly cried. “I’ll get married then! Will you be satisfied then?”
That afternoon she met Paul downtown. “Was everything all right last night?” he said. “Why, what is it? Did they ”
“No. Paul, marry me.” They were in the rear of the drugstore, partially concealed by the prescription counter, though anyone might appear behind it at any moment. She leaned against him, her face wan, tense, her painted mouth like a savage scar upon it. “Marry me. Or it will be too late, Paul.”
“I don’t marry them,” Paul said. “Here. Pull yourself together.”
She leaned against him, rife with promise. Her voice was wan and urgent. “We almost did last night. If you’ll marry me, I will”
“You will, eh? Before or after?”
“Yes. Now. Any time.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Not even if I will now?”
“Come on, now. Pull yourself together.”
“Oh, I can hear you. But I don’t believe you. And I am afraid to try and find out.” She began to cry. He spoke in thin and mounting annoyance: “Stop it, I tell you!”
“Yes. All right. I’ve stopped. You won’t, then? I tell you, it will be too late.”
“Hell, no. I don’t marry them, I tell you.”
“All right. Then it’s good-bye. Forever.”
“That’s O. K. by me, too. If that’s how you feel. If I ever see you again, you know what it will mean. But no marrying. And I’ll see next time that we don’t have any audience,”
“There won’t be any next time,” Elly said.
The next day he was gone. A week later, her engagement was in the Memphis papers. It was to a young man whom she had known from childhood. He was assistant cashier in the bank, who they said would be president of it some day.
He was a grave, sober young man of impeccable character and habits, who had been calling on her for about a year with a kind of placid formality. He took supper with the family each Sunday night, and when infrequent road shows came to town he always bought tickets for himself and Elly and her mother. When he called on her, even after the engagement was announced, they did not sit in the dark swing. Perhaps he did not know that anyone had ever sat in it in the darkness. No one sat in it at all now, and Elly passed the monotonous round of her days in a kind of dull peace. Sometimes at night she cried a little, though not often; now and then she examined her mouth in the glass and cried quietly, with quiet despair and resignation. ‘Anyway I can live quietly now,’ she thought. ‘At least I can live out the rest of my dead life as quietly as if I were already dead.’
Then one day, without warning, as though she, too, had accepted the armistice and the capitulation, the grandmother departed to visit her son in Mills City. Her going seemed to leave the house bigger and emptier than it had ever been, as if the grandmother had been the only other actually living person in it. There were sewing women in the house daily now, making the trousseau, yet Elly seemed to herself to move quietly and aimlessly, in a hiatus without thought or sense, from empty room to empty room giving upon an identical prospect too familiar and too peaceful to be even saddening any longer. For long hours now she would stand at her mother’s bedroom window, watching the slow and infinitesimal clematis tendrils as they crept and overflowed up the screen and onto the veranda roof with the augmenting summer. Two months passed so; she would be married in three weeks. Then one day her mother said, “Your grandmother wants to come home Sunday. Why don’t you and Philip drive down to Mills City and spend Saturday night with your uncle, and bring her back Sunday?” Five minutes later, at the mirror, Elly looked at her reflection as you look at someone who has just escaped a fearful danger. ‘God,’ she thought, ‘what was I about to do? What was I about to do?’
