Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Until it finally occurred to him to do the reasonable and logical thing that anybody else would have thought about doing at first: ask Ratliff himself what he meant or thought he meant or was afraid he meant. So he did. It was summer now, June; McKinley Smith’s cotton was not only up, Essie was pregnant. The whole town knew it; she had made a public announcement in the bank one morning as soon as the doors opened and the first depositors had lined up at the windows; in less than two months she and McKinley had won old MeadowfilPs wheel chair.

“Because this aint enough,” Ratliff said.

“Enough what?” Charles said.

“Enough to keep her busy and satisfied. No ships to rivet, and now she’s done run out of colored folks too for the time being. This here is peace and plenty—the same peace and plenty us old folks like me and your uncle spent four whole years sacrificing sugar and beefsteak and cigarettes all three to keep the young folks like you happy while you was winning it. So much plenty that even the downtrod communist shoe patchers and tinsmiths and Negro children can afford to not need her now. I mean, maybe if she had asked them first they never actively needed her before neither, only they couldn’t afford in simple dollars and cents to say so. Now they can.” He blinked at Charles. “She has done run out of injustice.”

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Charles said.

“That’s right,” Ratliff said. “So she will have to think of something, even if she has to invent it.”

“All right,” Charles said. “Suppose she does. If she was tough enough to stand what we thought up around here, she can certainly stand anything she can invent herself.”

“I aint worried about her,” Ratliff said. “She’s all right. She’s jest dangerous. I’m thinking about your uncle.”

“What about him?” Charles said.

“When she finally thinks of something and tells him, he will likely do it,” Ratliff said.

SIXTEEN

They met that morning in the post office, as they often did by complete uncalculation at morning mail time, she dressed as usual in the clothes she seemed to spend most of her time walking about the adjacent countryside in—the expensive English brogues scuffed and scarred but always neatly polished each morning, with wool stockings or socks beneath worn flannel trousers or a skirt or sometimes what looked like a khaki boiler-suit under a man’s stained burberry; this in the fall and winter and spring; in the summeit would be cotton—dress or skirt or trousers, her head with its single white plume bare even in the worst weather. Afterward they would go to the coffee shop in the Holston House and drink coffee but this time instead Stevens took the gold- cornered ivory tablet he had given her eight years ago and wrote:

An appointment At the office To see me

“Shouldn’t you make an appointment to see lawyers?” she said.

His next speech of course would be: “So it’s as a lawyer you need me now.” And if they both could have used speech he would have said that, since at the age of fifty-plus talking is no effort. But writing is still an effort at any age, so even a lawyer pauses at the obvious if he has got to use a pen or pencil. So he wrote Tonight after supper At your house

“No,” she said.

He wrote Why

“Your wife will be jealous. I dont want to hurt Milly.”

His next of course would be: “Melisandre, jealous? Of you and me? After all this, all this time?” Which of course was too long to write on a two-by-three-inch ivory tablet. So he had already begun to write Nonsense when he stopped and erased it with his thumb. Because she was looking at him, and now he knew too. He wrote You want her To be jealous

“She’s your wife,” she said. “She loves you. She would have to be jealous.” He hadn’t erased the tablet yet; he needed only to hold it up before her face until she looked at it again. “Yes,” she said. “Being jealous is part of love too. I want you to have all of it too. I want you to have everything. I want you to be happy.”

“I am happy,” he said. He took one of the unopened envelopes just out of his mailbox and wrote on the back of it I am happy I was given the privilege of meddling with impunity in other peoples affairs without really doing any harm by belonging to that avocation whose acolytes have been absolved in advance for holding justice above truth I have been denied the chance to destroy what I loved by touching it Can you tell me now what it is here or shall I come to your house after supper tonight

“All right,” she said. “After supper then.”

At first his wife’s money was a problem. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the greater hysteria of the war, the lesser hysteria of that much sudden money could have been a serious one. Even four years later Melisandre still tried to make it a problem: on these warm summer evenings the Negro houseman and one of the maids would serve the evening meal on a flagged terrace beneath a wistaria arbor in the back yard, whereupon each time there were guests, even the same guest or guests again, Melisandre would say, “It would be cooler in the dining room” (in the rebuilt house the dining room was not quite as large as a basketball court) “and no bugs either. But the dining room makes Gavin nervous.” Whereupon he would say, as he always did too, even before the same guest or guests again: “Dammit, Milly, nothing can make me nervous because I was already born that way.”

They were sitting there now over the sandwiches and the iced tea. She said, “Why didn’t you invite her out here.” He merely chewed so she said, “But of course you did.” So he merely chewed and she said, “So it must be something serious.” Then she said, “But it cant be serious or she couldn’t have waited, she would have told you right there in the post office.” So then she said, “What do you suppose it is?” and he wiped his mouth and dropped the napkin, rising, and came around the table and leaned and kissed her.

“I love you,” he said. “Yes. No. I dont know. Dont wait up.”

Melisandre had given him a Cadillac roadster for her wedding present to him; this was during the first year of the war and God only knew where she had got a new Cadillac convertible and what she had paid for it. “Unless you really dont want it,” she said.

“I do,” he said. “I’ve always wanted a Cadillac convertible—provided I can do exactly what I want to with it.”