Requiem for a Nun Page 10

  Temple

  Yes.

  Governor

  Would you tell it if he were here?

  (Temple is staring at the Governor. Unnoticed by her, Stevens makes a faint movement. The Governor stops him with a slight motion of one hand which also Temple does not notice)

  Now that you have come this far, now that, as you said, you have got to tell it, say it aloud, not to save Nan—this woman, but because you decided before you left home tonight that there is nothing else to do but tell it.

  Temple

  How do I know whether I would or not?

  Governor

  Suppose he was here—sitting in that chair where Gav—your uncle is—

  Temple

  —or behind the door or in one of your desk drawers, maybe? He’s not. He’s at home. I gave him a sleeping pill.

  Governor

  But suppose he was, now that you have got to say it. Would you still say it?

  Temple

  All right. Yes. Now will you please shut up too and let me tell it? How can I, if you and Gavin won’t hush and let me? I can’t even remember where I was.—Oh yes. So I saw the murder, or anyway the shadow of it, and the man took me to Memphis, and I know that too, I had two legs and I could see, and I could have simply screamed up the main street of any of the little towns we passed, just as I could have walked away from the car after Gow—we ran it into the tree, and stopped a wagon or a car which would have carried me to the nearest town or railroad station or even back to school or, for that matter, right on back home into my father’s or brothers’ hands. But not me, not Temple. I choose the murderer—

  Stevens

  (to Governor)

  He was a psychopath, though that didn’t come out in the trial, and when it did come out, or could have come out, it was too late. I was there; I saw that too: a little black thing with an Italian name, like a neat and only slightly deformed cockroach: a hybrid, sexually incapable. But then, she will tell you that too.

  Temple

  (with bitter sarcasm)

  Dear Uncle Gavin.

  (to Governor)

  Oh yes, that too, her bad luck too: to plump for a thing which didn’t even have sex for his weakness, but just murder—

  (she stops, sitting motionless, erect, her hands clenched on her lap, her eyes closed)

  If you both would just hush, just let me. I seem to be like trying to drive a hen into a barrel. Maybe if you would just try to act like you wanted to keep her out of it, from going into it—

  Governor

  Don’t call it a barrel. Call it a tunnel. That’s a thoroughfare, because the other end is open too. Go through it. There was no—sex.

  Temple

  Not from him. He was worse than a father or uncle. It was worse than being the wealthy ward of the most indulgent trust or insurance company: carried to Memphis and shut up in that Manuel Street sporting house like a ten-year-old bride in a Spanish convent, with the madam herself more eagle-eyed than any mama—and the Negro maid to guard the door while the madam would be out, to wherever she would go, wherever the madams of cat houses go on their afternoons out, to pay police-court fines or protection or to the bank or maybe just visiting, which would not be so bad because the maid would unlock the door and come inside and we could—

  (she falters, pauses for less than a second; then quickly)

  Yes, that’s why—talk. A prisoner of course, and maybe not in a very gilded cage, but at least the prisoner was. I had perfume by the quart; some salesgirl chose it of course, and it was the wrong kind, but at least I had it, and he bought me a fur coat—with nowhere to wear it of course because he wouldn’t let me out, but I had the coat—and snazzy underwear and negligees, selected also by salesgirls but at least the best or anyway the most expensive—the taste at least of the big end of an under-world big shot’s wallet. Because he wanted me to be contented, you see; and not only contented, he didn’t even mind if I was happy too: just so I was there when or in case the police finally connected him with that Mississippi murder; not only didn’t mind if I was happy; he even made the effort himself to see that I was. And so at last we have come to it, because now I have got to tell you this too to give you a valid reason why I waked you up at two in the morning to ask you to save a murderess.

  She stops speaking, reaches and takes the unlighted cigarette from the tray, then realises it is unlit. Stevens takes up the lighter from the desk and starts to get up. Still watching Temple, the Governor makes to Stevens a slight arresting signal with his hand. Stevens pauses, then pushes the lighter along the desk to where Temple can reach it, and sits back down. Temple takes the lighter, snaps it on, lights the cigarette, closes the lighter and puts it back on the desk. But after only one puff at the cigarette, she lays it back on the tray and sits again as before, speaking again.

  Temple

  Because I still had the two arms and legs and eyes; I could have climbed down the rainspout at any time, the only difference being that I didn’t. I would never leave the room except late at night, when he would come in a closed car the size of an undertaker’s wagon, and he and the chauffeur on the front seat, and me and the madam in the back, rushing at forty and fifty and sixty miles an hour up and down the back alleys of the red-light district. Which—the back alleys—was all I ever saw of them too. I was not even permitted to meet or visit with or even see the other girls in my own house, not even to sit with them after work and listen to the shop talk while they counted their chips or blisters or whatever they would do sitting on one another’s beds in the elected dormitory. . . .

  (she pauses again, continues in a sort of surprise, amazement)

  Yes, it was like the dormitory at school: the smell: of women, young women all busy thinking not about men but just man: only a little stronger, a little calmer, less excited—sitting on the temporarily idle beds discussing the exigencies—that’s surely the right one, isn’t it?—of their trade. But not me, not Temple: shut up in that room twenty-four hours a day, with nothing to do but hold fashion shows in the fur coat and the flashy pants and negligees, with nothing to see it but a two-foot mirror and a Negro maid; hanging bone dry and safe in the middle of sin and pleasure like being suspended twenty fathoms deep in an ocean diving bell. Because he wanted her to be contented, you see. He even made the last effort himself. But Temple didn’t want to be just contented. So she had to do what us sporting girls call fall in love.

  Governor

  Ah.

  Stevens

  That’s right.

  Temple

  (quickly: to Stevens)

  Hush.

  Stevens

  (to Temple)

  Hush yourself.

  (to Governor)

  He—Vitelli—they called him Popeye—brought the man there himself. He—the young man—.

  Temple

  Gavin! No, I tell you!

  Stevens

  (to Temple)

  You are drowning in an orgasm of abjectness and moderation when all you need is truth.

  (to Governor)

  —was known in his own circles as Red, Alabama Red; not to the police, or not officially, since he was not a criminal, or anyway not yet, but just a thug, probably cursed more by simple eupepsia than by anything else. He was a houseman—the bouncer—at the nightclub, joint, on the outskirts of town, which Popeye owned and which was Popeye’s headquarters. He died shortly afterward in the alley behind Temple’s prison, of a bullet from the same pistol which had done the Mississippi murder, though Popeye too was dead, hanged in Alabama for a murder he did not commit, before the pistol was ever found and connected with him.

  Governor

  I see. This—Popeye—

  Stevens

  —discovered himself betrayed by one of his own servants, and took a princely vengeance on his honor’s smircher? You will be wrong. You underrate this precieux, this flower, this jewel. Vitelli. What a name f
or him. A hybrid, impotent. He was hanged the next year, to be sure. But even that was wrong: his very effacement debasing, flouting, even what dignity man has been able to lend to necessary human abolishment. He should have been crushed somehow under a vast and mindless boot, like a spider. He didn’t sell her; you violate and outrage his very memory with that crass and material impugnment. He was a purist, an amateur always: he did not even murder for base profit. It was not even for simple lust. He was a gourmet, a sybarite, centuries, perhaps hemispheres before his time; in spirit and glands he was of that age of princely despots to whom the ability even to read was vulgar and plebeian and, reclining on silk amid silken airs and scents, had eunuch slaves for that office, commanding death to the slave at the end of each reading, each evening, that none else alive, even a eunuch slave, shall have shared in, partaken of, remembered, the poem’s evocation.

  Governor

  I dont think I understand.

  Stevens

  Try to. Uncheck your capacity for rage and revulsion—the sort of rage and revulsion it takes to step on a worm. If Vitelli cannot evoke that in you, his life will have been indeed a desert.

  Temple

  Or don’t try to. Just let it go. Just for God’s sake let it go. I met the man, how doesn’t matter, and I fell what I called in love with him and what it was or what I called it doesn’t matter either because all that matters is that I wrote the letters—

  Governor

  I see. This is the part that her husband didn’t know.

  Temple

  (to Governor)

  And what does that matter either? Whether he knows or not? What can another face or two or name or two matter, since he knows that I lived for six weeks in a Manuel Street brothel? Or another body or two in the bed? Or three or four? I’m trying to tell it, enough of it. Can’t you see that? But can’t you make him let me alone so I can. Make him, for God’s sake, let me alone.

  Governor

  (to Stevens: watching Temple)

  No more, Gavin.

  (to Temple)

  So you fell in love.

  Temple

  Thank you for that. I mean, the ‘love.’ Except that I didn’t even fall, I was already there: the bad, the lost: who could have climbed down the gutter or lightning rod any time and got away, or even simpler than that: disguised myself as the nigger maid with a stack of towels and a bottle opener and change for ten dollars, and walked right out the front door. So I wrote the letters. I would write one each time . . . afterward, after they—he left, and sometimes I would write two or three when it would be two or three days between, when they—he wouldn’t—

  Governor

  What? What’s that?

  Temple

  —you know: something to do, be doing, filling the time, better than the fashion parades in front of the two-foot glass with nobody to be disturbed even by the . . . pants, or even no pants. Good letters—

  Governor

  Wait. What did you say?

  Temple

  I said they were good letters, even for—

  Governor

  You said, after they left.

  (they look at one another. Temple doesn’t answer: to Stevens, though still watching Temple)

  Am I being told that this . . . Vitelli would be there in the room too?

  Stevens

  Yes. That was why he brought him. You can see now what I meant by connoisseur and gourmet.

  Governor

  And what you meant by the boot too. But he’s dead. You know that.

  Stevens

  Oh yes. He’s dead. And I said ‘purist’ too. To the last: hanged the next summer in Alabama for a murder he didn’t even commit and which nobody involved in the matter really believed he had committed, only not even his lawyer could persuade him to admit that he couldn’t have done it if he had wanted to, or wouldn’t have done it if the notion had struck him. Oh yes, he’s dead too; we haven’t come here for vengeance.

  Governor

  (to Temple)

  Yes. Go on. The letters.

  Temple

  The letters. They were good letters. I mean—good ones.

  (staring steadily at the Governor)

  What I’m trying to say is, they were the kind of letters that if you had written them to a man, even eight years ago, you wouldn’t—would—rather your husband didn’t see them, no matter what he thought about your—past.

  (still staring at the Governor as she makes her painful confession)

  Better than you would expect from a seventeen-year-old amateur. I mean, you would have wondered how anybody just seventeen and not even through freshman in college, could have learned the—right words. Though all you would have needed probably would be an old dictionary from back in Shakespeare’s time when, so they say, people hadn’t learned how to blush at words. That is, anybody except Temple Drake, who didn’t need a dictionary, who was a fast learner and so even just one lesson would have been enough for her, let alone three or four or a dozen or two or three dozen.

  (staring at the Governor)

  No, not even one lesson because the bad was already there waiting, who hadn’t even heard yet that you must be already resisting the corruption not only before you look at it but before you even know what it is, what you are resisting. So I wrote the letters, I don’t know how many, enough, more than enough because just one would have been enough. And that’s all.

  Governor

  All?

  Temple

  Yes. You’ve certainly heard of blackmail. The letters turned up again of course. And of course, being Temple Drake, the first way to buy them back that Temple Drake thought of, was to produce the material for another set of them.

  Stevens

  (to Temple)

  Yes, that’s all. But you’ve got to tell him why it’s all.

  Temple

  I thought I had. I wrote some letters that you would have thought that even Temple Drake might have been ashamed to put on paper, and then the man I wrote them to died, and I married another man and reformed, or thought I had, and bore two children and hired another reformed whore so that I would have somebody to talk to, and I even thought I had forgotten about the letters until they turned up again and then I found out that I not only hadn’t forgot about the letters, I hadn’t even reformed—

  Stevens

  All right. Do you want me to tell it, then?

  Temple

  And you were the one preaching moderation.

  Stevens

  I was preaching against orgasms of it.

  Temple

  (bitterly)

  Oh, I know. Just suffering. Not for anything: just suffering. Just because it’s good for you, like calomel or ipecac.

  (to Governor)

  All right. What?

  Governor

  The young man died—

  Temple

  Oh yes.—Died, shot from a car while he was slipping up the alley behind the house, to climb up the same drainpipe I could have climbed down at any time and got away, to see me—the one time, the first time, the only time when we thought we had dodged, fooled him, could be alone together, just the two of us, after all the . . . other ones.—If love can be, mean anything, except the newness, the learning, the peace, the privacy: no shame: not even conscious that you are naked because you are just using the nakedness because that’s a part of it; then he was dead, killed, shot down right in the middle of thinking about me, when in just one more minute maybe he would have been in the room with me, when all of him except just his body was already in the room with me and the door locked at last for just the two of us alone; and then it was all over and as though it had never been, happened: it had to be as though it had never happened, except that that was even worse—

  (rapidly)

  Then the courtroom in Jefferson and I didn’t care, not about anything anymore, and my father and brothers waiting and
then the year in Europe, Paris, and I still didn’t care, and then after a while it really did get easier. You know. People are lucky. They are wonderful. At first you think that you can bear only so much and then you will be free. Then you find out that you can bear anything, you really can and then it won’t even matter. Because suddenly it could be as if it had never been, never happened. You know: somebody—Hemingway, wasn’t it?—wrote a book about how it had never actually happened to a gir—woman, if she just refused to accept it, no matter who remembered, bragged. And besides, the ones who could—remember—were both dead. Then Gowan came to Paris that winter and we were married—at the Embassy, with a reception afterward at the Crillon, and if that couldn’t fumigate an American past, what else this side of heaven could you hope for to remove stink? Not to mention a new automobile and a honeymoon in a rented hideaway built for his European mistress by a Mohammedan prince at Cap Ferrat. Only—

  (she pauses, falters, for just an instant, then goes on)