Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“And that was all. I mean … nothing. That was just all. Because you—a girl anyway—dont really hate your father no matter how much you think you do or should or should want to because people expect you to or that it would look well to because it would be romantic to—”

“Yes,” I said, “—because girls, women, are not interested in romance but only facts. Oh yes, you were not the only one: Ratliff told me that too, that same day in fact.”

“Vladimir too?” she saidt. div height="0em">

“No: Ratliff,” I said. Then I said, “Wait.” Then I said: “Vladimir? Did you say Vladimir? V.K. Is his name Vladimir?” And now she did sit still, even the hands on the bag that had been like things asleep and breathing their own life apart, seemed to become still now.

“I didn’t intend to do that,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “I know: nobody else on earth knows his name is Vladimir because how could anybody named Vladimir hope to make a living selling sewing machines or anything else in rural Mississippi? But he told you: the secret he would have defended like that of insanity in his family or illegitimacy. Why?—No, dont answer that. Why shouldn’t I know why he told you; didn’t I breathe one blinding whiff of that same liquor too? Tell me. I wont either. Vladimir K. What K.?”

“Vladimir Kyrilytch.”

“Vladimir Kyrilytch what? Not Ratliff. Kyrilytch is only his middle name; all Russian middle names are itch or ovna. That’s just son or daughter of. What was his last name before it became Ratliff?”

“He doesn’t know. His … six or eight or ten times grandfather was … not lieutenant—”

“Ensign.”

“—in a British army that surrendered in the Revolution—”

“Yes,” I said. “Burgoyne. Saratoga.”

“—and was sent to Virginia and forgotten and Via—his grandfather escaped. It was a woman of course, a girl, that hid him and fed him. Except that she spelled it R-a-t-c-l-i-f-f-e and they married and had a son or had the son and then married. Anyway he learned to speak English and became a Virginia farmer. And his grandson, still spelling it with a c and an e at the end but with his name still Vladimir Kyrilytch though nobody knew it, came to Mississippi with old Doctor Habersham and Alexander Holston and Louis Grenier and started Jefferson. Only they forgot how to spell it Ratcliffe and just spelled it like it sounds but one son is always named Vladimir Kyrilytch. Except that like you said, nobody named Vladimir Kyrilytch could make a living as a Mississippi country man—”

“No,” I said, cried. “Wait. That’s wrong. We’re both wrong. We’re completely backward. If only everybody had known his name was really Vladimir Kyrilytch, he would be a millionaire by now, since any woman anywhere would have bought anything or everything he had to sell or trade or swap. Or maybe they already do?” I said, cried. “Maybe they already do?—All right,” I said. “Go on.”

“But one in each generation still has to have the name because Via—V.K. says the name is their luck.”

“Except that it didn’t work against Flem Snopes,” I said. “Not when he tangled with Flem Snopes that night in that Old Frenchman’s garden after you came back from Texas.—All right,” I said. “ꀘSo that was all because you dont really hate your father—’ ”

“He did things for her. That she didn’t expect, hadn’t even thought about asking for. That young girls like, almost as though he had put himself inside a young girl’s mind even before she thought of them. He gave me the money and sent us both to Memphis to buy things for her graduation from high school—not just a graduating dress but one for dancing too, and other things for the summer; almost a trousseau. He even tried—offered, anyway told her he was going to—to have a picnic for her whole graduating class but she refused that. You see? He was her father even if he did have to be her enemy. You know: the one that said ‘Please’ accepting the clothes, while the one that defied him to stop her refused the picnic.

“And that summer he gave me the money and even made the hotel reservations himself for us to go down to the coast—you may remember that—”

“I remember,” I said.

“—to spend a month so she could swim in the ocean and meet people, meet young men; he said that himself: meet young men. And we came back and that fall she entered the Academy and he started giving her a weekly allowance. Would you believe that?”

“I do now,” I said. “Tell me.”

“It was too much, more than she could need, had any business with, too much for a seventeen-year-old girl to have every week just in Jefferson. Yet she took that too that she didn’t really need just like she took the Academy that she didn’t want. Because he was her father, you see. You’ve got to remember that. Can you?”

“Tell me,” I said.