Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Which she did, right after New Year’s, 1941 now. I knew a lawyer there so she had a small apartment with its own entrance in a private home. And apparently her belief was that, once she was free of Jefferson, at least twelve hours away from interdiction by Sno or me or either or both, nobody could challenge her intention to buy a small car and run it herself, until I threatened to tell the Pascagoula police myself that she was deaf the first time I heard about it. So she agreed to refrain and my lawyer friend arranged for her in a car pool and presently she was at work as a tool checker, though almost at once she wrote that she had almost got them to agree to let her become a riveter, where the deafness would be an actual advantage. Anyway, she could wear overalls again, once more minuscule in that masculine or rather sexless world engaged, trying to cope with the lethal mechanical monstrosities which war has become now, and perhaps she was even at peace again, if peace is possible to anyone. Anyway, at first there were the letters saying When you come we will and then If you come dont forget and then several weeks and just a penny post card saying I miss you and nothing more—that almost inarticulate paucity of the picture cards saying Wish you were here or This is our room which the semiliterate send back, until the last one, a letter again. I mean, in an envelope: It’s all right. I understand. I know how busy the draft board has to be. Just come when you can because I have something to ask you. To which I answered at once, immediately (I was about to add, Because I dont know what I thought. Only I know exactly what I thought) Ask me or tell me? so that I already knew beforehand what her answer would he: Yes. Ask you.

So (it was summer again now) I telegraphed a date and she answered Have booked room will meet what train love and I answered that (who had refused to let her own one) Coming by car will pick you up at shipyard Tuesday quitting time love and I was there. She came out with the shift she belonged in, in the overall, already handing me the tablet and stylus before she kissed me, clinging to me, hard, saying, “Tell me everything,” until I could free myself to write, restricted again to the three-or four-word bursts and gaggles before having to erase:

You tell me what It is

“Let’s go to the beach.” And I:

You dont want to Go home first & Change

“No. Let’s go to the beach.” We did. I parked the car and it seemed to me I had already written Now tell me but she was already out of the car, already waiting for me, to take the tablet and stylus from me and thrust them into her pocket, then took my near arm in both her hands, we walking so, she clinging with both hands to my arm so that we would bump and stagger every few steps, the sun just setting and our one shadow long along the tide-edge before us and I thinking No no, that cant he it when she said, “Wait,” and released me, digging into the other overall pocket from the tablet. “I’ve got something for you. I almost forgot it.” It was a shell; we had probably trodden on a million of them since we left the car two hundred yards back, I still thinking It cant be that. That cant be so “I found it the first day. I was afraid I might lose it before you got here, but I didn’t. Do you like it?”

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“What?” she said, already handing me the tablet and stylus. I wrote

Damn fine now Tell me