dinner. I have some information about a Radcliffe scholarship which might interest her. That’s practically Harvard too and I can tell her about Cambridge … Yes, if you will: that I’llle witing for her in the drugstore after school this afternoon. Thank you.”
And good-bye. The sad word, even over the telephone. I mean, not the word is sad nor the meaning of it, but that you really can say it, that the time comes always in time when you can say it without grief and anguish now but without even the memory of grief and anguish, remembering that night in this same office here (when was it? ten years ago? twelve years?) when I had said not just Good-bye but Get the hell out of here to Eula Varner, and no hair bleached, no bead of anguished sweat or tear sprang out, and what regret still stirred a little was regret that even if I had been brave enough not to say No then, even that courage would not matter now since even the cowardice was only thin regret.
At first I thought I would go inside and be already sitting at the table waiting. Then I thought better: it must be casual but not taken-for-granted casual. So I stood at the entrance, but back, not to impede the juvenile flood or perhaps rather not to be trampled by it. Because she must not see me from a block away waiting, but casual, by accident outwardly and chance: first the little ones, first-and second-and third-grade; and now already the larger ones, the big grades and the high school; it would be soon now, any time now. Except that it was Chick, with a folded note.
“Here,” he said. “It seems to be stuck.”
“Stuck?” I said.
“The record. The victrola. This is the same tune it was playing before, aint it? Just backward this time.” Because she probably had insisted he read it first before she released it to him. So I was the second, not counting her:
“Not quite the same,” I said. “I dont hear any dollar now.”
“Okay,” he said. “Neither did I. I reckon you aint coming home now.”
“So do I,” I said. So I went inside then and sat down at the table; I owed her that much anyway; the least I could give her was revenge, so let it be full revenge; full satisfaction of watching from wherever she would be watching while I sat still waiting for her long after even I knew she would not come; let it be the full whole hour then since “finis” is not “good-bye” and has no cause to grieve the spring of grief.
So when she passed rapidly across the plate-glass window, I didn’t know her. Because she was approaching not from the direction of the school but from the opposite one, as though she were on her way to school, not from it. No: that was not the reason. She was already in the store now, rapidly, the screen clapping behind her at the same instant and in the same physical sense both running and poised motionless, wearing not the blouse and skirt or print cotton dress above the flat-heeled shoes of school; but dressed, I mean “dressed,” in a hat an high heels and silk stockings and makeup who needed none and already I could smell the scent: one poised split-second of immobilised and utter flight in bizarre and paradox panoply of allure, like a hawk caught by a speed lens.
“It’s all right,” I said. Because at least I still had that much presence.
“I cant,” she said. At least that much presence. There were not many people in the store but even one could have been too many, so I was already up now, moving toward her.
“How nice you look,” I said. “Come on; I’ll walk a way with you,” and turned her that way, not even touching her arm, on and out, onto the pavement, talking (I presume I was; I usually am), speaking: which was perhaps why I did not even realise that she had chosen the direction, not in fact until I realised that she had actually turned toward the foot of the office stairs, only then touching her, her elbow, holding it a little, on past the stairs so that none (one hoped intended must believe) had marked that falter, on along the late spring storefronts—the hardware and farm-furnish stores cluttered with garden and farm tools and rolls of uncut plowline and sample sacks of slag and fertilizer and even the grocery ones exposing neat cases of seed packets stencilled with gaudy and incredible vegetables and flowers—talking (oh ay, trust me always) sedate and decorous: the young girl decked and scented to go wherever a young woman would be going at four oclock on a May afternoon, and the gray-headed bachelor, avuncular and what old Negroes called “settled,” incapable now of harm, slowed the blood and untroubled now the flesh by turn of wrist or ankle, faint and dusty-dry as memory now the hopes and anguishes of youth—until we could turn a corner into privacy or at least room or anyway so long as we did not actually stop.
“I cant,” she said.
“You said that before,” I said. “You cant what?”
“The schools,” she said. “The ones you … the catalogues. From outside Jefferson, outside Mississippi.”
“I’m glad you cant,” I said. “I didn’t expect you to decide alone. That’s why I wanted to see you: to help you pick the right one.”
“But I cant,” she said. “Dont you understand? I cant.”
Then I—yes, I—stopped talking. “All right,” I said. “Tell me.”
“I cant go to any of them. I’m going to stay in Jefferson. I’m going to the Academy next year.” Oh yes, I stopped talking now. It wasn’t what the Academy was that mattered. It wasn’t even that the Academy was in Jefferson that mattered. It was Jefferson itself which was the mortal foe since Jefferson was Snopes.
“I see,” I said. “All right. I’ll talk to her myself.”
“No,” she said. “No. I dont want to go away.”
“Yes,” I said. “We must. It’s too important. It’s too important for even you to see now. Come on. We’ll go home now and talk to your mother—” already turning. But already she had caught at me, grasping my wrist and forearm with both hands, until I stopped. Then she let go and just stood there in the high heels and the silk stockings and the hat that was a little too old for her or maybe I was not used to her in a hat or maybe the hat just reminded me of the one other time I ever saw her in a hat which was that fiasco of a Sunday dinner at home two years ago which was the first time I compelled, forced her to do something because she didn’t know how to refuse; whereupon I said suddenly: “Of course I dont really need to ask you this, but maybe we’d better just for the record. You dont really want to stay in Jefferson, do you? You really do want to go up East to school?” then almost immediately said: “All right, I take that back. I cant ask you that; I cant ask you to say outright you want to go against your mother. —All right,” I said, “you dont want to be there yourself when I talk to her: is that it?” Then I said: “Look at me,” and
