Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

And in the drawing room afterward also, with coffee and brandy for the ladies and port and a cigar for Charles though his uncle still stuck to the cob pipes which anyway used to cost only a nickel. Still happy, satisfied; and that other thing which Charles had sensed, recognised: proprietorial. As if Linda herself had actually invented the whole business: his Uncle Gavin, his Aunt Melisandre, Rose Hill—the old, once-small and -simple frame house which old Mr Backus with his Horace and Catullus and his weak whiskey-and-water would not recognise now save by its topographical location, transmogrified by the New Orleans gangster’s money as old Snopes had tried to do to the De Spain house with his Yoknapatawpha County gangster’s money and failed since here the rich and lavish cash had been spent with taste so that you didn’t really see it at all but merely felt it, breathed it, like warmth or temperature; with, surrounding it, enclosing it, the sense of the miles of white panel fences marking the combed and curried acres and the electric-lighted and -heated stables and tack rooms and grooms’ quarters and the manager’s house all in one choral concord in the background darkness—and then invented him, Charles, to be present to at least look at her creation whether he approved of what she had made or not.

Then the hour to say Thank you and Good night and drive back to town through the April or May darkness and escort Linda home, back to her father’s Frenchman’s Bend-dreamed palace, to draw up at the curb, where she would say each time in the harsh duck voice (he, Charles, thinking each time too Which maybe at least wouldn’t sound quite so bad in the dark whispering after you finally got the clothes off thinking If of course it had been you): “Come in for a drink.” Nor enough light in the car for her to have read the ivory tablet if she had offered it. Because he would do this each time too: grin, he would hope loud enough, and shake his head—sometimes there would be moonlight to help—Linda already opening the door on her side so that Charles would have to get out fast on his to get around the car in time. Though no matter how fast that was, she would be already out, already turning up the walk toward the portico: who perhaps had left the South too young too long ago to have formed the Southern female habit-rite of a cavalier’s unflagging constancy, or maybe the simple riveting of ships had cured the old muscles of the old expectation. Whichever it was, Charles would have to overtake, in effect outrun her already halfway to the house; whereupon she would check, almost pause in fact, to glance back at him, startle14;not alarmed: just startled; merely what Hollywood called a double-take, still not so far dissevered from her Southern heritage but to recall that he, Charles, dared not risk some casual passerby reporting to his uncle that his nephew permitted the female he was seeing home to walk at least forty feet unaccompanied to her front door.

So they would reach that side by side anyway—the vast dim homemade columned loom of her father’s dream, nightmare, monstrous hope or terrified placatement, whichever it was, whatever it had been; the cold mausoleum in which old Snopes had immolated that much of his money at least without grace or warmth, Linda stopping again to say, “Come in and have a drink,” exactly as though she hadn’t said it forty feet back at the car, Charles still with nothing but the grin and the shake of the head as if he had only that moment discovered his ability to do that too. Then her hand, hard and firm like a man’s since after all it was a ship riveter’s or at least an ex-ship riveter’s. Then he would open the door, she would stand for an instant in it in the midst of motion against a faint light in the hall’s depth; the door would close again.