All the King's Men (19 page)

Sooner or later he would get enough of the music and would drop into one of the other shabby chairs. Or he might remember to get me a drink, or might even take one himself, paler than winter sunlight and about as strong. We’d sit there, not taking, sipping slow, his eyes burning cold and blue in his head, bluer because of the swarthiness of the skin, which was drawn back taut over the bones of the face. It was like when we used to go fishing, when we were kids, back at Burden’s Landing. We used to sit in the boat, under the hot sun, hour after hour, and never a word. Or lie on the beach. Or go camping together and after supper lie by a little smudge fire for the mosquitoes, and never say a word.

Perhaps Adam didn’t mind taking a little time out for me because I made him think back to Burden’s Landing and the other days. Not that he talked about it. But once he did. He was sitting in the chair, looking down at the eyewash in the glass which his long, hard-looking, nervous fingers were slowly revolving. The he looked up at me, and said, “We used to have a pretty good time, didn’t we? When we were kids.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You and me and Anne,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, and thought of Anne. Then I said, “Don’t you have a good time now?”

He seemed to take the question under advisement for a half minute, as though I had asked him a real question, which maybe it was. Then he said, “Well, I don’t suppose I ever thought about it.” Then, “No, I don’t suppose I ever thought about it.”

“Don’t you have a good time?” I asked. “And you a big-shot. Don’t you have a good time being a big-shot?” I didn’t let go. I knew it was a question you haven’t got any right to ask anybody, not with the tone of voice I heard coming out of my mouth, but I couldn’t let go. You grow up with somebody, and he is a success, a big-shot, and you’re a failure, but he treats you just the way he always did and hasn’t changed a bit. But that is what drives you to it, no matter what names you call yourself while you try to stick the knife in. There is a kind of snobbery of failure. It’s a club, it’s the old school, it’s Skull and Bones, and there is no nasty supercilious twist to a mouth like the twist the drunk gets when he hangs over the bar beside the old pal who has turned out to be a big-shot and who hasn’t changed a bit, or when the old pal takes him home to dinner and introduces him to the pretty little clear-eye woman and the healthy kids. There wasn’t any pretty little woman in Adam’s shabby apartment, but he was a big-shot, and I let him have it.

But it didn’t register on him. He simply turned on me the candid, blue gaze, slightly shaded by thought now, and said, “It just isn’t something I ever thought about.” Then the smile did the trick to the mouth which under ordinary circumstances looked like a nice, clean, decisive surgical wound, well healed and no pucker.

So I tried to make what amends I could for being what I was, and pulled out the soft-and sweet stop, and said, “Yeah, we did have a good time when we were kids, you and Anne and me.”

Yes, Adam Stanton, Anne Stanton, and Jack Burden, back in Burden’s Landing, had a good time when they were children by the sea. A squall might, and did, pile in off the Gulf, and the sky blacked out with the rain and the palm trees heaved in distraction and then leaned steady with the vanes gleaming like wet tin in the last turgid, bilious, tattered light, but it didn’t chill us or kill us in the kingdom by the sea, for we were safe inside a white house, their house or my house, and stood by the window to watch the surf pile up beyond the sea wall like whipped cream. And back in the room behind us would be Governor Stanton or Mr. Ellis Burden, or both, for they were friends, or Judge Irwin, for he was a friend, too, and there wasn’t a wind that would ever have the nerve to bother Governor Stanton or Mr. Ellis Burden or Judge Irwin.

“You and Anne and me,” Adam Stanton had said to me, and I had said it to him. So one morning, after I had managed to get out of bed, I called Anne up, and said, “I hadn’t thought about you in a long time, but the other night I saw Adam and he said you and he and I used to have a good time when we were kids. So how about having dinner with me? Even if we are on crutches now.” She said she would. She certainly wasn’t on crutches, but we didn’t have any fun.

She asked me what I was doing, and I told her, “Not a blessed thing. Just waiting for my cash to run out.” She didn’t tell me I ought to do something, and didn’t look it. Which was something. So I asked her what she was doing, and she laughed and said, “Not a blessed thing.” Which_ __I knew was a lie, for she was_ __always fooling around with orphans and half-wits and blind niggers, and not even getting paid for it. And looking at her you could know it was all a waste of something and the something wasn’t money. So I said, “Well, I hope you’re doing it in pleasant company.”

“Not particularly,” she said.

I looked at her close and saw what I knew I would see and what I had seen a good many times when she wasn’t sitting across from me. I saw Anne Stanton, who was not exactly a beauty maybe but who was Anne Stanton. Anne Stanton: the brown-toned, golden-lighted face, not as dark as Adam’s, with a hint of the positive structure beneath the skin, which was drawn over the bone with something, a suggestion, of the tension which was in Adam’s face, as though the fabricator of the job hadn’t wanted to waste any material in softness and slacknesses and had stylized the product pretty cleanly. The dark hair drawn smoothly, almost tautly, away from the accurate part. The blue eyes which looked at you like Adam’s eyes, with the same directness, but in which the clear, abstract, ice-blue was replaced by a deeper, coiling, troubled blue. Sometimes, anyway. They looked alike, Adam and Anne. They might have been twins. They even had the same smile. But the mouth it came on was, in Anne’s case, different. It didn’t carry any suggestion of the nice, clean, decisive, well-healed surgical wound. The fabricator had, on this item, allowed himself the luxury of a little extra material. Not too much. But enough.

That was Anne Stanton, and I saw what I knew I would see.

She sat there before me, very erect, with her head held high and straight on the fine, round stalk of her neck above the small, squarish shoulders, and with her rather small but roundly modeled bare arms laid close to her sides in mathematical accuracy. And looking at her, I though how, below the level of the table, her small legs would be laid accurately together, thigh to thigh, knee to knee, ankle to ankle. There was, in fact, always something a little stylized about her–something of the effect one observes in certain Egyptian bas-reliefs and statuettes of princesses of a late period, forms in which grace and softness, without being the less grace or softness, are caught in mathematical formality. Anne Stanton always looked level at you, and you had the feeling that she was looking at something far away. She always held her head high, and you had the feeling that she was waiting for a voice which you wouldn’t be able to hear. She always stood so trim and erect, and you had feeling that all her grace and softness was caught in the rigor of an idea which you could not define.

I said, “You planning on being an old maid?”

She laughed and said, “I’m not planning on anything. I quit making plans a long time back.”

We danced in the handkerchief-big space between the speakeasy tables, in which stood the plates of half-eaten spaghetti or chicken bones and the bottles of Dago red. For about five minutes the dancing had some value in itself, then it became very much like acting out some complicated and portentous business in a dream which seems to have a meaning but whose meaning you can’t figure out. Then the music was over, and stopping dancing was like waking up from the dream, being glad to wake up and escape and yet distressed because now you won’t ever know what it had been all about.

She must have felt the same way about it, for when, later, I asked her to dance again, she said that she didn’t feel like it, she’s rather talk. We talked, quiet a lot, but it was a little bit like the dancing. You can’t keep on taking forever about what a hell of a good time you had when you were kids.

I took her to her apartment building, which was quite a few cuts above Adam’s joint, for Governor Stanton hadn’t died exactly a pauper, and left her in the lobby. She said good night, and, “Be a good boy, Jack.”

“Will you have dinner with me again?” I asked her.

“Any time you want,” she said, “any time in the world. You know that.”

Yes, I knew it.

And she did have dinner with me again, several times. The last time she said: “I’ve seen your father.”

“Yeah,” I said in an unencouraging way.

“Don’t be like that,” she said “Like what?”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” she said. “Don’t you even want to know how he is?”

“I know how he is,” I said. “He is sitting in that hole he lives in down there or he’s helping round that mission with his bums, or writing those damn-fool little leaflet they pass out to you on the street, all about Mark 4:6, and Job 7:5, and his specs are down on the end of his nose and the dandruff is like a snowstorm in the Dakotas down on his black coat collar.”

She didn’t say anything for a minute, then said: “I saw him on the street and he didn’t look well. He looked sick. I didn’t recognize him at first.”

“Trying to pass you some of that junk?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. He held out a piece of paper to me, and I was in a hurry, so I just automatically put out my hand for it. Then I realized he was staring right in my face. I didn’t recognize him at first.” She paused a little. “That was about two weeks back.”

“I haven’t seen him in nearly one year,” I said.

“Oh, Jack,” she said, “you oughtn’t do that! You ought to see him.”

“Look here, what can I say to him? And God knows, he hasn’t got anything to tell me. Nobody made him live like that. Nobody made him walk out of his law office, either, and not even bother to shut the door behind him.”

“But, Jack,” she said, “you–”

“He’s doing what he wants to do. And besides if he was fool enough to do what he did just because he couldn’t get along with a woman–especially a woman like my mother. If he couldn’t give her what she wanted, whatever the hell it was she wanted and he couldn’t give her, then–”

“Don’t talk like that,” she said sharply.

“Look here,” I said, “just because your old man was Governor once and died in a mahogany tester bed with a couple of high-priced doctors leaning over him and adding up the bill in their heads and because you think he was Jesus Christ in a black string tie, you needn’t try to talk to me like an old woman. I’m not talking about your family. I’m talking about mine, and I can’t help seeing the plain unvarnished truth. And if you–”

“Well, you don’t have to talk to me about it,” she said. “Or anybody.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Oh, the truth,” she exclaimed, and clenched her right hand on the tablecloth. “How do you know it’s the truth? You don’t know anything about it. You don’t know what made them do what they did.”

“I know the truth. I know what my mother is like. And you do, too. And I know my father was a fool to let her get him down.”

“Don’t be so bitter!” she said, and reached out to seize my forearm and set her sharp fingers in it, through the coat, and shake it a little.

“I’m no bitter. I don’t give a damn what they did. Or do. Or why.”

“Oh, Jack,” she said, still clutching my forearm, but not hard now, “can’t you love them a little, or forgive them, or just not think about them, or something? Something different from the way you are?”

“I could go for the rest of my life and not think about them,” I said. Then I noticed that she was shaking her head ever so little from side to side, and that her eyes were as dark a blue as they ever got and too bright, and that she had drawn in the edge of her lower lip and had set her teeth to it. I reached my right hand over and took her hand off my left forearm and laid it down flat, palm down, on the tablecloth, and covered it with my hand. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’re not, Jack,” she said, “you’re not sorry. Not really. You aren’t ever sorry about anything. Or glad, either. You’re just–oh, I don’t know what.”

“I am sorry,” I said.

“Oh, you just thing you are sorry. Or glad. You aren’t really.”

“If you think you are sorry, who in the hell can tell you that you aren’t?” I demanded, for I was a brass-bound Idealist then, as I have started, and was not going to call for a plebiscite on whether I was sorry or not.

“That sounds all right,” she said, “but it isn’t. I don’t know why–oh, yes, I do–if you’ve never been sorry or glad then you haven’t got any way to know the next time whether you are or not.”

“All right,” I said, “but can I tell you this: something is happening inside me which I choose to call sorry?”

“You can say it, but you don’t know.” Then, snatching her hand from under my hand, “Oh, you start to feel sorry or glad or something but it just doesn’t come to anything.”

“You mean like a little green apple that’s got a worm in it and falls off the tree before it ever gets ripe?”

She laughed, and answered, “Yes, like little green apples with worms in them.”

“Well,” I said, “Here’s a little green apple with a worm in it: I’m sorry.”

I was sorry, or what went for sorry in my lexicon. I was sorry that I had ruined the evening. But candor compelled me to admit that there hadn’t been much of an evening to ruin.

I didn’t ask her to go to dinner with me again, at least not that time while I was out of a job and doing the sleeping. I had hunted up Adam and heard him play the piano. And I had sat across the spaghetti and the Dado red and looked at Anne Stanton. And as a result of what Anne said to me, I had gone down to the slums and seen the old man, not the very tall man who had once been stocky but whose face now dropped in puffy gray folds beneath the gray hair, with the steel-rimmed spectacles hanging on the end of the nose, and whose shoulders, thin now and snowed with dandruff, sagged down as with the pull of the apparently disjunctive, careful belly which made the vest of his black suit pop up above the belt and the slack-hanging pants. And in every case I had found what I had known I was going to find, because they had happened and nothing was going to change what had happened. I had been sinking down in the sleep like a drowning man in water, and they had flashed across my eyes again the way people say the past flashes across the eyes of the drowning man.