Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“No no,” he says. “I mean, yes. But not the kind you are talking about.”

“I thought you was set on her going to a college up there.”

“That was before,” he says. “Too much has happened to her since. Too much, too fast, too quick. She outgrew colleges all in about twenty-four hours two weeks ago. She’ll have to grow back down to them again, rnaybe in a year or two. But right now, Greenwich Village is the place for her.”

“What is Greenwich Village?” I says. “You still aint told me.”

“It’s a place with a few unimportant boundaries but no limitations where young people of any age go to seek dreams.”

“I never knowed before that place had no particular geography,” I says. “I thought thatere was a varmint you hunted anywhere.”

“Not always. Not for her, anyway. Sometimes you need a favorable scope of woods to hunt, a place where folks have already successfully hunted and found the same game you want. Sometimes, some people even need help in finding it. The particular quarry they want to catch, they have to make first. That takes two.”

“Two what?” I says.

“Yes,” he says. “Two.”

“You mean a husband,” I says.

“All right,” he says. “Call him that. It dont matter what you call him.”

“Why, Lawyer,” I says, “you sound like what a heap, a right smart in fact, jest about all in fact, unanimous in fact of our good God-fearing upright embattled Christian Jeffersons and Yoknapatawphas too that can proudly affirm that never in their life did they ever have one minute’s fun that the most innocent little child couldn’t a stood right there and watched, would call a deliberate incitement and pandering to the Devil hisself.”

Only Lawyer wasn’t laughing. And then I wasn’t neither. “Yes,” he says, “It will be like that with her. It will be difficult for her. She will have to look at a lot of them, a long time. Because he will face something almost impossible to match himself against. He will have to have courage, because it will be doom, maybe disaster too. That’s her fate. She is doomed to anguish and to bear it, doomed to one passion and one anguish and all the rest of her life to bear it, as some people are doomed from birth to be robbed or betrayed or murdered.”

Then I said it: “Marry her. Naturally you never thought of that.”

“I?” he says. It was right quiet: no surprise, no nothing. “I thought I had just been talking about that for the last ten minutes. She must have the best. &ill be impossible even for him.”

“Marry her,” I says.

“No,” he says. “That’s my fate: just to miss marriage.”

“You mean escape it?”

“No no,” he says. “I never escape it. Marriage is constantly in my life. My fate is constantly to just miss it or it to, safely again, once more safe, just miss me.”

So it was all fixed, and now all he needed was to get his carved marble face back from Italy, nagging by long-distance telephone and telegraph dispatch ever day or so in the most courteous affable legal manner you could want, at the Italian consul in New Orleans, so he could get it fastened onto the monument and then (if necessary) take a holt on Flem’s coat collar and shove him into the car and take him out to the cemetery and snatch the veil offen it, with Linda’s ticket to New York (he would a paid for that too except it wasn’t necessary since the last thing Uncle Billy done before he went back home after the funeral was to turn over to the bank—not Flem: the bank, with Lawyer as one of the trustees—a good-size chunk of what would be Eula’s inheritance under that will of hisn that he hadn’t never changed to read Snopes) in his other hand.