Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Good day, sir,” I said.

Or that is, I wrote it. Because it was three years now and she had tried, really tried to learn lip reading. But I dont know. Maybe to live outside human sound is to live outside human time too, and she didn’t have time to learn, to bother to learn. But again I dont know. Maybe it didn’t take even three years of freedom, immunity from it to learn that perhaps the entire dilemma of man’s condition is because of the ceaseless gabble with which he has surrounded himself, enclosed himself, insulated himself from the penalties of his own folly, which otherwise—the penalties, the simple red ink—might have enabled him by now to have made his condition solvent, workable, successful. So I wrote it

Leave here Go away

“You mean, move?” she said. “Find a place of my own? an apartment or a house?”

I mean leave Jefferson I wrote. Go completely away for good Give me that damn card & leave Jefferson

“You said that to me before.”

“No I didn’t,” I said. I even spoke it, already writing, already planning out the whole paragraph it would take: We’ve never even mentioned that card or the Communist party either. Even hack there three years ago when you first tried to tell me you had one and show it to me and I wouldn’t let you, stopped you, refused to listen: dont you remember? But she was already talking again:

“I mean back there when I was fifteen or sixteen and you said I must get away from Jefferson.”

So I didn’t even write the other; I wrote But you couldnt then Now you can Give me the card & go She stood quietly for a moment, a time. We didn’t even try to use the ivory tablet on occasions of moment and crisis like this. It was a bijou, a gewgaw, a bangle, feminine; really almost useless: thin ivory sheets bound with gold and ringed together with more of it, each sheet about the size of a playing card so that it wouldn’t really contain more than about three words at at, a, like an anagram, an acrostic at the level of children—a puzzle say or maybe a continued story ravished from a primer. Instead, we were in her upstairs sitting room she had fitted up, standing at the mantel which she had designed at the exact right height and width to support a foolscap pad when we had something to discuss that there must be no mistake about or something which wasn’t worth not being explicit about, like money, so that she could read the words as my hand formed them, like speech, almost like hearing.

“Go where?” she said. “Where could I go?”

Anywhere New York Back to Europe of course but in New York some of the people still you & Barton knew the friends your own age She looked at me. With the pupils expanded like this, her eyes looked almost black; blind too.

“I’m afraid,” she said.

I spoke; she could read single words if they were slow: “You? Afraid?” She said:

“Yes. I dont want to be helpless. I wont be helpless. I wont have to depend.”

I thought fast, like that second you have to raise or draw or throw in your hand, while each fraction of the second effaces another pip from your hole card. I wrote quite steadily while she watched Then why am I here and drew my hand back so she could read it. Then she said, in that dry, lifeless, what Chick calls duck’s quack:

“Gavin.” I didn’t move. She said it again: “Gavin.” I didn’t move. She said: “All right. I lied. Not the depend part. I wont depend. I just must be where you are.” She didn’t even add Because you’re all I have now. She just stood, our eyes almost level, looking at me out of, across, something—abyss, darkness; not abject, not questioning, not even hoping; in a moment I would know it; saying again in the quacking voice: “Gavin.”

I wrote rapidly, in three-or four-word bursts, gaggles, clumps, whatever you want to call them, so she could read as I wrote Its all right dont Be afraid I Refuse to marry you 20 years too much Difference for it To work besides I Dont want to

“Gavin,” she said.

I wrote again, ripping the yellow sheets off the pad and shoving them aside on the mantel I dont want to

“I love you,” she said. “Even when I have to tell a lie, you have already invented it for me.”

I wrote No lie nobody Mentioned Barton Kohl

“Yes,” she said.

I wrote No

“But you can me,” she said. That’s right. She used the explicit word, speaking the hard brutal guttural in the quacking duck’s voice. That had been our problem as soon as we undertook the voice lessons: the tone, to soften the voice which she herself couldn’t hear. “It’s exactly backward,” she told me. “When you say I’m whispering, it feels like thunder inside my head. But when I say it this way, I cant even feel it.” And this time it would be almost a shout. Which is the way it was now, since she probably believed she had lowered her voice, I standing there while what seemed to me like reverberations of thunder died away.

“You’re blushing,” she said.

I wrote that word

“What word?”

that you just said

“Tell me another one to use. Write it down so I can see it and remember it.”

I wrote There is no other thats the right one only one I am old fashioned it still shocks me a little No what shocks is when a woman uses it & is not shocked at all until she realises I am Then I wrote thats wrong too what shocks is that all that magic passion excitement be summed up & dismissed in that one bald unlovely sound