604
PARTISAN REVIEW
and so to the cloudy pane bearing the faint scratches which, after a
moment, you will descry to be a name and a date;
Not at first, of course, but after a moment, a second, because at first
you would be a little puzzled, a little impatient because of your illness–
at-ease from having been dragged without warning or preparation
into the private kitchen of a strange woman cooking a meal; you
would think merely
What? So what?
annoyed and even a little out–
raged, until suddenly, even while you were thinking it, something has
already happened; the faint frail illegible meaningless even inference–
less scratching on the ancient poor-quality glass you stare at, has
moved, under your eyes, even while you stared at it, coalesced, seem–
ing actually to have entered into another sense than vision: a scent,
a whisper, filling that hot cramped strange room already fierce with
the sound and reek of frying pork-fat: the two of them in conjunction
-the old milky obsolete glass, and the scratches on it: that tender
ownerless obsolete girl's name and the old dead date in April almost
a century ago--speaking, murmuring, back from, out of, across from,
a time as old as lavender, older than album or stereopticon, as old
as daguerreotype itself;
And being a stranger and a guest would have been enough, since, a
stranger and a guest, you would have shown the simple courtesy and
politeness of asking the questions naturally expected of you by the
host or anyway volunteer guide, who had dropped whatever he was
doing (even if that had been no more than sitting with others of
his like on a bench in a courthouse yard or on the sidewalk before a
hotel) in order to bring you here; not to mention your own perfectly
natural desire for, not revenge perhaps, but at least compensation,
restitution, vindication, for the shock and annoyance of having been
brought here without warning or preparation, into the private quarters
of a strange woman engaged in something as intimate as cooking a
meal; but by now you had not only already begun to understand why
your kin or friend or acquaintance had elected, not Jefferson but
such as Jefferson, for his life, but you had heard that voice, that
whisper, murmur, frailer than the scent of lavender, yet (for that
second anyway) louder than all the seethe and fury of frying fat;
so you ask the questions, not only which are expected of you, but
whose answers you yourself must have
if
you are to get back into your
car and fumble with any attention and concentration among the
road signs and filling stations, to get on to wherever it is you had
started when you stopped by chance or accident in Jefferson for an
