Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Which they were, she holding his hand in both hers on her lap and every mile or so the duck voice would say, “Gavin,” and then after a mile or so, “Gavin.” And evidently she hadn’t had the pad and pencil long enough to get used to them either or maybe when you lose hearing and enter real silence you forget that everything does not take place in that privacy and solitude. Or maybe after he took the pencil from her to answer on the pad, she couldn’t wait to get the pencil back so both should have had slates: “Yes it does. I can feel it, somewhere in my skull or the back of my mouth. It’s an ugly sound. Isn’t it?” But evidently Gavin was learning because it was still the duck voice: “Yes it is. I can feel it, I tell you.” And still the duck voice: “How? If I try to practise, it didnan I know when it’s right?” Which I agree with myself: if you’re going to take time out from your law practice and being county attorney to restore to your deaf girl friend the lost bridehead of her mellifluity, how would you go about it. Though what a chance for a husband: to teach your stone-deaf wife that all she needed to make her tone and pitch beautiful was merely to hold her breath while she spoke. Or maybe what Uncle Gavin wrote next was simply Jonson (or some of that old Donne or Herrick maybe or even just Suckling maybe—any or all of them annotated to that one ear—eye now—by that old Stevens) Vale not these cherry lips with vacant speech But let me drink instead thy tender Yes. Or maybe what he wrote was simpler still: Hold it till we get home. This is no place to restore your voice. Besides, this infant will have to go hack to Cambridge next month and then we’ll have plenty of time, plenty of privacy.

Thus we brought the hero home. Now we could see Jefferson, the clock on the courthouse, not to mention her father’s water tank, and now the duck voice was saying Ratliff. “Bart liked him. He said he hadn’t expected to like anybody from Mississippi, but he was wrong.” What Gavin wrote this time was obvious, since the voice said: “Not even you. He made me promise—I mean, whichever one of us it was, would give Ratliff one of his things. You remember it—the Italian boy that you didn’t know what it was even though you had seen sculpture before, but Ratliff that had never even seen an Italian boy, nor anything else beyond the Confederate monument in front of the courthouse, knew at once what it was, and even what he was doing?” And I would have liked the pad myself long enough to write What was the Italian boy doing? only we were home now, the hero; Gavin said:

“Stop at the bank first. He should have some warning; simple decency commands it. Unless he has had his warning and has simply left town for a little space in which to wrestle with his soul and so bring it to the moment which it must face. Assuming of course that even he has realised by now that he simply cannot foreclose her out of existence like a mortgage or a note.”

“And have a public reception here in the street before she has had a chance to fix her makeup?” I said.

“Relax,” he said again. “When you are a little older you will discover that people really are much more gentle and considerate and kind than you want right now to believe.”

I pulled up at the bank. But if I had been her I wouldn’t even have reached for the pencil, duck quack or not, to say, “What the hell? Take me on home.” She didn’t. She sat there, holding his hand in both hers, not just on her lap but right against her belly, looking around at the Square, the duck voice saying, “Gavin. Gavin.” Then: “There goes Uncle Willy, coming back from dinner.” Except it wasn’t old man Christian: he was dead. But then it didn’t really matter whether anybody wrote that on the pad or not. And Gavin was right. Nobody stopped. I watched two of them recognise her. No, I mean they recognised juxtaposition: Gavin Stevens’s car at the curb before the bank at twenty two minutes past one in the afternoon with me at the wheel and Gavin and a woman in the back seat. Who had all heard about Linda Kohl I mean Snopes Kohl, anyhow that she was female and from Jefferson and had gone near enough to a war for it to bust her eardrums. Because he is right: people are kind and gentle and considerate. It’s not that you dont expect them to be, it’s because you have already made up your mind they are not and so they upset you, throw you off. They didn’t even stop, just one of them said Howdy Gavin and went on.