welfare? Now the law is the last resort, to get your hand into the pocket which so far has resisted or foiled you.”
That was last spring, in June when he and Mother (they had lost Father at Saratoga though he had promised to reach Cambridge in time for the actual vows) came up to see me graduate in Ack. And I said, “What? No wedding bells yet?” and he said:
“Not mine anyway:” and I said:
“How are the voice lessons coming? Come on,” I said, “I’m a big boy now; I’m a Harvard A.M. too even if I wont have Heidelberg. Tell me. Is that really all you do when you are all cosy together? practise talking?” and he said:
“Hush and let me talk awhile now. You’re going to Europe for the summer; that’s my present to you. I have your tickets and your passport application; all you need do is go down to the official photographer and get mugged.”
“Why Europe? and Why now? Besides, what if I dont want to go?” and he said:
“Because it may not be there next summer. So it will have to be this one. Go and look at the place; you may have to die in it.”
“Why not wait until then, then?” and he said:
“You will go as a host then. This summer you can still be a guest.” There were three of us; by fast footwork and pulling all the strings we could reach, we even made the same boat. And that summer we—I: two of us at the last moment found themselves incapable of passing Paris—saw a little of Europe on a bicycle. I mean, that part still available: that presumable corridor of it where I might have to do Uncle Gavin’s dying: Britain, France, Italy—the Europe which Uncle Gavin said would be no more since the ones who survived getting rid of Hitler and Mussolini and Franco would be too exhausted and the ones who merely survived them wouldn’t care anyway.
So I did try to look at it, to see, since even at twenty-four I still seemed to believe what he said just as I believed him at fourteen and (I presume: I cant remember) at four. In fact, the Europe he remembered or thought he remembered was already gone. What I saw was a kind of composed and collected hysteria: a frenetic holiday in which everybody was a tourist, native and visitor alike. There were too many soldiers. I mean, too many people dressed as, and for the moment behaving like, troops, as if for simple police or temporary utility reasons they had to wear masquerade and add to the Maginot Line (so that they—the French ones anyway—seemed to be saying, “Have a heart; dont kid us. We dont believe it either.”) right in the middle of the fight for the thirty-nine-hour week; the loud parliamentary conclaes about which side of Piccadilly or the Champs Elysees the sandbags would look best on like which side of the room to hang the pictures; the splendid glittering figure of Gamelin still wiping the soup from his moustache and saying, “Be calm. I am here”—as though all Europe (oh yes, us too; the place was full of Americans too) were saying, “Since Evil is the thing, not only
Then me too in Paris for the last two weeks, to see if the Paris of Hemingway and the Paris of Scott Fitzgerald (they were not the same ones; they merely used the same room) had vanished completely or not too; then Cambridge again, only a day late: all of which, none of which that is, ties up with anything but only explains to me why it was almost a year and a half before I saw her again. And so we had Munich: that moment of respectful silence then once more about our affairs; and Uncle Gavin’s letter came saying “It wont be long now.” Except that it was probably already too late for me. When I had to go—no, I dont mean that: when the time came for me to go—I wanted to be a fighter pilot. But I was already twenty-four now; in six years I would be thirty and even now it might be too late; Bayard and John Sartoris were twenty when they went to England in ‘16 and Uncle Gavin told me about one R.F.C. (I mean R.A.F. now) child who was a captain with such a record that the British government sent him back home and grounded him for good so that he might at least be present on the day of his civilian majority. So I would probably wind up as a navigator or engineer on bombers, or maybe at thirty they wouldn’t let me go up at all.
But still no wedding bells. Maybe it was the voice. My spies—I only needed one of course: Mother—reported that the private lessons were still going on, so maybe she felt that the Yes would not be dulcet enough yet to be legal. Which—legality—she would of course insist on, having tried cohabitation the first time
No, that’s wrong too. If she had to shack up with a man for five years before he would consent to marry her, I mean, with a sculptor so advanced and liberal that even Gavin couldn’t recognise what he sculpted, made, he must have been pretty advanced in liberalism. And if he had to quit anything as safe and pleasant as being a Greenwich Village sculptor living with a girl that could afford and wanted to pay the rent and buy the grub whether he married her or not—if he had to quit all this to go to Spain to fight on what anybody could have told him would be the losing side, he must have been advanced even beyond just liberalism. And if she loved him enough to wait five years for him to say All right, dammit, call the parson, and then went to Spain to get blown up herself just to be with him, she must be one of them too since apparently you cant even be moderate about communism: you either violently are or violently are not(I asked him; I mean of course Uncle Gavin. “Suppose she is,” he said. “All right,” I said. “So what the hell?” he said. “All right, all right,” I said. “What the hell’s business is it of yours anyway?” he said. “All right, all right, all right,” I said.) And just being blown up wouldn’t cure it. So there would be no wedding bells; that other one had been a mere deviation due to her youth, not to happen again; she was only for a moment an enemy of the people, and paid quickly for it.
So there would be no preacher. They were just going to practise people’s democracy, where everybody was equal no matter what you looked like when he finally got your clothes off, right here in Jefferson. So all you had to figure out was, how the bejesus they would manage it in a town no bigger and equal than Jefferson. Or not they: he, Gavin. I mean, it would be his trouble, problem, perhaps need. Not hers. She was free, absolved of mundanity; who knows, who is not likewise castrate of sound, circumcised from having to hear, of need too. She had the silence: that thunderclap instant to fix her forever inviolate and private in solitude; let the rest of the world blunder in all the loud directions over its own feet trying to find first base at the edge of abyss like one of the old Chaplin films.
He would have to find the ways and means; all she would bring would be the capability for compliance, and what you might call a family precedence. Except that she wasn’t her mother, not to mention Gavin not being Manfred de Spain. I mean—I was only thirteen when Mrs Snopes shot herself that night so I still dont know how much I saw and remembered and how much was compelled onto or into me from Uncle Gavin, being, as Ratliff put it, as I had spent the first eleven or twelve years of my existence in the middle of Uncle Gavin, thinking what he thought and seeing what he saw, not because he taught me to but maybe just because he let me, allowed me to. I mean, Linda and Uncle Gavin wouldn’t have that one matchless natural advantage which her mother and Manfred de Spain had, which was that aura, nimbus, condition, whatever the word is, in which Mrs Snopes not just existed,
