Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 263

fering. 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 be 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 be-

cause 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, hap-

pened: 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 any

more, 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 wont 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 actually happened

to a gir-woman, if she 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