Memphis tomorrow morning.—No no,” he says, “you dont need to fear contamination from association this time. They’re going to be married. They’re going to Spain to join the Loyalist army and apparently he nagged and worried at her until at last she probably said, ‘Oh hell, have it your way then.? ”
“So he wasn’t a liberal emancipated advanced-thinking artist after all,” I says. “He was jest another ordinary man that believed if a gal was worth sleeping with she was worth deserving to have a roof over her head and something to eat and a little money in her pocket for the balance of her life.”
“All right,” he says. “All right.”
“Except we’ll go on the train,” I says. “It aint that I’m jest simply skeered to go in a airplane: it’s because when we go across Virginia I can see the rest of the place where thatere first immigrant Vladimir Kyrilytch worked his way into the United States.” So I was already on the corner with my grip when he drove up and stopped and opened the door and looked at me and then done what the moving pictures call a double take and says,
“Oh hell.”
“It’s mine,” I says. “I bought it.”
“You,” he says, “in a necktie. That never even had one on before, let alone owned one, in your life.”
“You told me why. It’s a wedding.”
“Take it off,” he says.
“No,” I says.
“I wont travel with you. I wont be seen with you.”
“No,” I says. “Maybe it aint jest the wedding. I’m going back to let all them V. K. Ratliff beginnings look at me for the first time. Maybe it’s them I’m trying to suit. Or leastways not to shame.” So we taken the train in Memphis that night and the next day we was in Virginia—Bristol then Roanoke and Lynchburg and turned northeast alongside the blue mountains and somewhere ahead, we didn’t know jest where, was where that first Vladimir Kyrilytch finally found a place where he could stop, that we didn’t know his last name or maybe he didn’t even have none until Nelly Ratliff, spelled Ratcliffe then, found him, any more than we knowed what he was doing in one of them hired German regiments in General Burgoyne’s army that got licked at Saratoga except that Congress refused to honor the terms of surrender and banished the whole kit-and-biling of them to straggle for six years in Virginia without no grub nor money and the ones like that first V.K. without no speech neither. But he never needed none of the three of them to escape not only in the right neighborhood but into the exact right hayloft where Nelly Ratcliffe, maybe hunting eggs or such, would find him. And never needed no language to eat the grub she toted him; and maybe he never knowed nothing about farming before the day when she finally brought him out where her folks could see him; nor never needed no speech to speak of for the next development, which was when somebody—her maw or paw or brothers or whoever it was, maybe jest a neighbor—noticed the size of her belly; and so they was married and so that V.K. actively did have a active legal name of Ratcliffe, and the one after him come to Tennessee and the one after him moved to Missippi, except that by that time it was spelled Ratliff, where the oldest son is still named Vladimir Kyrilytch and still spends half his life trying to keep anybody from finding it out.
The next morning we was in New York. It was early; not even seven oclock yet. It was too early. “Likely they aint even finished breakfast yet,” I says.
“Breakfast hell,” Lawyer says. “They haven’t even gone to bed yet. This is New York, not Yoknapatawpha County.” So we went to the hotel where Lawyer had already engaged a room. Except it wasn’t a room, it was three of them: a parlor and two bedrooms. “We can have breakfast up here too,” he says.
“Breakfast?” I says.
“They’ll send it up here.”
“This is New York,” I says. “I can eat breakfast in the bedroom or kitchen or on the back gallery in Yoknapatawpha County.” So we went downstairs to the dining room. Then I says, “What time do they eat breakfast then? Sundown? Or is that jest when they get up?”
“No,” he says. “We got a errand first.—No,” he says, “we got two errands.” He was looking at it again, though I will have to do him the justice to say he hadn’t mentioned it again since that first time when I got in the car back in Jefferson. And I remember how he told me once how maybe New York wasn’t made for no climate known to man but at least some weather was jest made for New York. In which case, this was sholy some of it: one of them soft blue drowsy days in the early fall when the sky itself seems like it was resting on the earth like a soft blue mist, with the tall buildings rushing up into it and then stopping, the sharp edges fading like the sunshine wasn’t jest shining on them but kind of humming, like wires singing. Then I seen it: a store, with a show window, a entire show window with not nothing in it but one necktie. “Wait,” I says.
“No,” he says. “It was all right as long as just railroad conductors looked at it but you cant face a preacher in it.”
“No,” I says, “wait.” Because I had heard about these New York side-alley stores too. “If it takes that whole show window to deserve jest one necktie, likely they will want three or four dollars for it.”
“We cant help it now,” he says. “This is New York. Come on.”
And nothing inside neither except some gold chairs and two ladies in black dresses and a man dressed like a congressman or at least a preacher, that knowed Lawyer by active name. And then a office with a desk and a vase of flowers and a short dumpy dark woman in a dress that wouldn’t a fitted nobody, with gray-streaked hair and the handsomest dark eyes I ever seen even if they was popped a little, that kissed Lawyer and then he said to her, “Myra Allanovna, this is Vladimir Kyrilytch,” and she looked at me and said something; yes, I know it was Russian, and Lawyer saying: “Look at it. Just once if you can bear it,” and I says,
“Sholy it aint quite as bad as that. Of course I had ruther it was yellow and red instead of pink and green. But all the same—” and she says,
“You like yellow and red?&201D;
“Yessum,” I says. Then I says, “In fact” before I could stop, and she says,
“Yes, tell me,” and I says,
“Nothing. I was jest thinking that if you could jest imagine a necktie and then pick it right up and put it on, I would imagine one made outen red with a bunch or maybe jest one single sunflower in the middle of it,” and she says,
