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Well, that was the way the summer ended. True, there was the rest of the night, with me lying on the iron bed and hearing the leaves drip and cursing myself for a fool and cursing my luck and trying to figure out what A
And as my home movie unrolled, as I drove west, I could not help but reflect that if I hadn't been so noble–if it was nobility–everything would have been different. For certainly if A
There was, as I was saying, the rest of the night after A
When she said "law degree," I didn't really remember right off what she was talking about. But I remembered in time not to express any surprise and had to be satisfied with that.
I helped her with the errands, took her home, and then went to my house for di
I hung around, but it didn't do any good. Governor Stanton sat in the living room and had another drink by himself and looked over the evening paper. We clung together in the porch swing, and listen to his paper rattle when he turned the page, and whispered that we loved each other. Then we just clung without talking, for the words began to lose their meaning, and listened to the rain beat the trees.
When a little break came in the rain, I got up, went inside, and shook hands with the Governor, then came out, kissed A
I went on back to Stat. I felt that I couldn't wait for Christmas when she would come home. We wrote every day, but the letters began to seem like checks drawn on the summer's capital. There had been a lot in the bank, but it is never good business practice to live on your capital, and I had the feeling, somehow, of living on the capital and watching dwindle. At the same time, I was wild to see her.
I saw her Christmas, for ten days. It wasn't like the summer. She told me she loved me and was going to marry me, and she let me go pretty far. But she wouldn't marry me then, and she wouldn't go the limit. We had a row about that just before she left. She had been willing to in September, but now she wouldn't. It seemed that she was, in a way, breaking a promise, and so I got pretty mad. I told her she didn't love me. She said she did. I wanted to know why she wouldn't go on, then. "It's not because I'm afraid and it's not because I don't love you. Oh, I do love you, Jackie, I do," she said, "and it's not because I'm a nasty old nicey-pants. It's because you are the way you are, Jackie."
"Yeah," I sneered, "you mean you don't trust me, you think I wouldn't marry you and then you'd be the ruined maid."
"I know you'd marry me," she said, "it's just because you're the way you are."
But she wouldn't say any more. So we had an awful row. I went back to State a nervous wreck.
She didn't write to me for a month. I held out about two weeks, and then began to apologize. So the letters began again, and far off somewhere in the great bookkeeping system of the universe somebody punched some red buttons every day on a posting machine and some red figures went on the ledger sheet.
She was back at the Landing in June for a few days. But the Governor was not well and before long the doctors packed him off to Maine to get him out of the heat. He took A
For one thing, there was the incident of the new kiss. About the second or third time we were together that fall, she kissed me in a new way, a way she had never used before. And she didn't do it in the discriminating, experimental way she had done thing the summer before. She just did it, in the heat of the moment, you might say. I knew right away she had picked it up from some man up in Maine that summer, some summer bastard in white fla