All the King's Men (36 page)

But the tears continued to flow out of George’s eyes, and he didn’t open his mouth. But the jaws weren’t working on the bread now. They were just shut tight.

The old man set the bowl on the floor, and with one hand still holding the spoon to George’s mouth, with the other he patted George on the back soothingly, all the while clucking with that distraught, henlike, maternal little noise. All of a sudden he looked up at me, the spectacles hanging over, and said, peevishly like a mother, “I just don’t know what to do–he just won’t take soup–he won’t eat much of anything but candy–chocolate candy–I just don’t know–” His voice trailed off.

“Maybe you spoil him,” I said.

He put the spoon back into the bowl, which was on the floor beside him, then began to fumble in his pockets. He fished out, finally, a bar of chocolate, somewhat wilted form the heat, and began to peel back the sticky tinfoil. The last tears were running down George’s cheeks, while he watched the process, with his mouth open in damp and happy expectation. But he did not grab with his chubby little mitts.

Then the old man broke off a piece of chocolate and placed it between the expectant lips, and peered into George’s face while taste buds, no doubt, glowed incandescent in the inner dark and gland with a tired, sweet, happy sigh released their juices, and George’s face took on an expression of slow, deep, inward, germinal bliss, like that of a saint.

Well
_, I almost said to the old man,
you said the physical was never cause, but a chocolate bar is physical and look what it’s causing, for to look at that face you might think it was a bite of Jesus and not a slug of Hershey’s had done. And how you going to tell the difference, huh?
_

But I didn’t say it, for I was looking there at the old man, who was leaning over with his spectacles hanging and his coat hanging and his belly hanging from the leaning, and who was holding out another morsel of chocolate and who was clucking soft, and whose own face was happy, for that was the word for what his face was, and as I looked at him I suddenly saw the man in the long white room by the sea, the same man but a different man, and the rain of the squall driving in off the sea in the early dark lashed the windowpanes but it was a happy sound and safe because the fire danced on the hearth and on the windowpanes where the rain ran down to thread the night-black glass with silver, to mix the silver with the flames caught there, too, and the man leaned and held out something and said, “Here’s what Daddy brought tonight, but just one bite now–” and the man broke off a piece and held it out–”just one bite, for your supper’s near ready now–but after supper–”

I looked at the old man over there and my guts went warm and a big lump seemed to dissolve in my chest–as though I had carried a big lump around in there for so long I had got used to it and didn’t realized it had been there until suddenly it was gone and the breath came easy. “Father,” I said, “Father–”

The old man looked up at me and said querulously, “What–what did you say?”

Oh, father, father!
_ but he wasn’t in the long white room by the sea any more and never would be, for he had walked out of it–why? why? because he wasn’t enough of a man to run his own house, because he was a fool, because–and he had walked a long way and up the steps to this room where an old man leaned with the chocolate in his hand and happiness–if that was what it was–momentarily on his face. Only it wasn’t on his face now. There was just the faint peevishness of an old person who hasn’t quite understood the faint peevishness of an old person who hasn’t quite understood something said.

But I had come a long way, too, from that long white room by the sea, I had got up off that hearthrug before the fire, where I had sat with my tin circus wagon and my colored crayons and paper, listening to the squall-driven rain on the glass, and where Daddy had leaned to say, “Here’s what Daddy brought tonight,” and I had come to this room where Jack Burden leaned against the wall with a cigarette in his mouth. Nobody was leaning over him to give him chocolate.

So, looking into the old man’s face, answering his querulous question, I said, “Oh, nothing.” For that was what it was. Whatever it had been was nothing now. For whatever was is not now, and whatever is will not be, and the foam that looks so sun-bright when the wind is kicking up the breakers lies streaked on the hard sand after the tide is out and looks like scum off the dishwater.

But there was something: scum left on the hard sand. So I said, “Yeah, there was something.”

“What?”

“Tell me about Judge Irwin,” I said.

He straightened up to face me, blinking palely behind the spectacles as he had blinked at me upon coming from light into the darkness of the Mexican restaurant below.

“Judge Irwin,” I repeated, “you know–your old bosom pal.”

“That was another time,” he croaked, staring at me, holding the broken chocolate in his hand.

“Sure, it was,” I said, and looking at him now, thought,
It sure-God was
_. And said, “Sure, but you remember.”

“That time is dead,” he said.

“Yeah, but you aren’t.”

“The sinful man I was who reached for vanity and corruption is dead. If I sin now it is in weakness and not in will. I have put away foulness.”

“Listen,” I said, “it’s just a simple question. Just one question.”

“I have put it away, that time,” he said, and made a pushing gesture with his hands.

“Just one question,” I insisted.

He looked at me without speaking.

“Listen,” I said, “was Irwin ever broke, did he ever really need money? Bad?

He stared at me from a long way off, across the distance, beyond the bowl of soup on the floor, over the chocolate in his hand, through time. Then he demanded, “Why–why do you want to know?”

“To tell the truth,” I burst out without meaning to, “I don’t. But somebody does, and that somebody pays me the first of the month. It is Governor Stark.”

“Foulness,” he said, staring across whatever it was between us, “foulness.”

“Was Irwin ever broke?” I said.

“Foulness,” he affirmed.

“Listen,” I said, “I don’t reckon Governor Stark–if that is what all this foulness stuff is about–takes it to the Lord in prayer, but did you ever stop to think what a mess your fine, God-damned, plug-hatted, church-going, Horace-quoting friends like Stanton and Irwin left this state in? At least the Boss does something, but they–they sat on their asses–they–”

“All foulness!” the old man uttered, and swept his right arm wildly before him, the hand clutching the chocolate hard enough to squash it. A part of the chocolate fell to the floor. Baby got it.

“If you meant to imply,” I said, “that politics, including that of erstwhile pals, I not exactly like Easter Week in a nunnery, you are right. But I will beat you to the metaphysical draw this time. Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the perfection on nonbeing. Which is God. For if God is perfection and the only perfection is in nonbeing, then God is nonbeing. Then God is nothing. Nothing can give no basis for the criticism of Thing in its thingness. Then where do you get anything to say? Then where do you get off?”

“Foolishness, foolishness,” he said, “foolishness and foulness!”

“I guess you are right,” I said. “It is foolishness. But it is no more foolish than all that kind of talk. Always words.”

“You speak foulness.”

“No, just words,” I said, “and all words are alike.”

“God is not mocked,” he said, and I saw that his head was quivering on his neck.

I stepped quickly toward him, stopping just in front of him. “Was Irwin ever broke?” I demanded.

He seemed about to say something, his lips opening. Then they closed.

“Was he?” I demanded.

“I will not touch the world of foulness again,” he said, his pale eyes looking steadily upward into my face, “that my hand shall come away with the stink on my fingers.”

I felt like grabbing him and shaking him until his teeth rattled. I felt like shaking it out of him. But you can’t grab an old man and do that. I had gone at the thing wrong. I ought to have led up to it and tried to trick him. I ought to have wheedled him. But I always got so keyed up and on edge when I got around him that I couldn’t think of anything but getting away from him. And then when I had left I always felt worse until I got him out of my mind. I had muffed it.

That was all I got. As I was going out, I looked back to see Baby, who had finished the piece of chocolate dropped by the old man, meditatively moving his hand about on the floor to locate any stray crumbs. Then the old man leaned slowly and heavily toward him, again.

Going down the stairs, I decided that even id I had tried to wheedle the old man I would probably have learned nothing. It wasn’t that I had gone at it wrong. It wasn’t that I burst out about Governor Stark. What did he know or care about Governor Stark? It was that I had asked him about the world of the past, which he had walked away from. That world and all the world was foulness, he had said, and he was not going to touch it. He was not going to talk about it, and I couldn’t have made him.

But I got one thing. I was sure that he had known something. Which meant that there was something to know. Well, I would know. Sooner or later. So I left the Scholarly Attorney and the world of the past and returned to the world of the present.

Which was: An oblong field where white lines mathematically gridded the turf which was arsenical green under the light from the great batteries of floodlamps fixed high on the parapet of the massive arena. Above the field the swollen palpitating tangle of light frayed and thinned out into hot darkness, but the thirty thousand pair of eyes hanging on the inner slopes of the arena did not look up into the dark but stared down into the pit of light, where men in red silky-glittering shorts and gold helmets and spilled and tumbled on the bright arsenical-green turf like spilled dolls, and a whistle sliced chillingly through the thick air like that scimitar through a sofa cushion.

Which was: The band blaring, the roaring like the sea, the screams like agony, the silence, then one woman-scream, silver and soprano, spangling the silence like the cry of a lost soul, and the roar again so that the hot air seemed to heave. For out of the shock and tangle and glitter on the green a red fragment had exploded outward flung off from the mass tangentially to spin across the green, turn and wheel and race, yet slow in the out-of-timeness of the moment, under the awful responsibility of the roar.

Which was: A man pounding me on the back and screaming–a man with a heavy face and coarse dark hair hanging over his forehead–screaming, “That’s my boy! That’s Tom–Tom–Tom! That’s him–and he’s won–they won’t have time for a touchdown now–he’s won–his first varsity game and it’s Tom won–it’s my boy!” And the man pounded me on the back and grappled me to him with both arms, powerful arms, and hugged me like his brother, his true love, his son, while tears came into his eyes and tears and sweat ran down the heavy cheeks, and he screamed, “He’s my boy–and there’s not any like him–he’ll be All American–boy, did you see him–fast–fast–he’s a fast son-of-a-bitch! Ain’t he, ain’t he?”

“Yes,” I said, and it was true.

He was fast and he was a son-of-a-bitch. At least, if he wasn’t a son-of-a-bitch yet, he had shown some very convincing talent in that line. You couldn’t much blame Lucy for wanting to stop the football–his name always on the sporting page–the pictures–the Freshman Whiz–the Sophomore Thunderbolt–the cheers–the big fat hands always slapping his shoulder–Tiny Duffy’s hand on his shoulder–yeah, Boss, he’s a chip off of the old block–the roadhouses–the thin-legged, tight-breasted little girls squealing, Oh Tom, oh, Tom–the bottles and the tourist cabins–the sea-roar of the crowd and always the single woman-scream spangling the sudden silence like damnation.

But Lucy did not have a chance. For he was going to be All American. All American quarterback on anybody’s team. If bottle and bed didn’t manage to slow down too soon something inside that one hundred and eighty pounds of split-second, hair-trigger, Swiss-watch beautiful mechanism which was Tom Stark, the Boss’s boy, the Sophomore Thunderbolt, Daddy’s Darling, who stood that night in the middle of a hotel room, with apiece of court plaster across his nose and a cocky grin on his fine, clean, boyish face–for it was fine and clean and boyish–while all the hands of Papa’s pals pawed at him and beat his shoulders, while Tiny Duffy slapped him on the shoulder, and Sadie Burke, who sat a little outside the general excitement on her own private fog of cigarette smoke and whisky fumes, a not entirely unambiguous expression on her riddled, handsome face, said, “Yeah, Tom, somebody was telling me you played a football game tonight.”

But her irony was not the sort of thing Tom Stark would hear or understand, for he stood there in the midst of his own gleaming golden private fog of just being Tom Stark, who had played in a football game.

Until the Boss said, “Now you go on and get to bed, Son. Get your sleep, Son. Get ready to pour it on ‘em next Saturday.” And he laid his arm across the boy’s shoulder, and said, “We’re all mighty proud of you, boy.”

And I said to myself:
If he gets his eyes starry with tears again I am going to puke.
_

“Go on to bed, Son,” the Boss said.

And Tom Stark said, “Sure,” almost out of the side of his mouth, and went out the door.

And I stood there in what was the present.

But there was the past. There was the question. There was the dead kitty buried in the ash heap.

So I stood, later, in the embrasure of as big bay window and looked out as the last light ceased to gleam from the metallic leaves of magnolias and the creamy wash of the sea beyond dulled in the thickened dusk. Behind me was a room not very different from that other long white room giving on the sea–where now, at this moment perhaps, my mother would be lifting to the taffy-haired Young Executive that face which was still like a damned expensive present and which he had damned well better admire. But in the room behind me, scarcely lighted by the stub of a candle on the mounted shelf, the furniture was shrouded in white cloth, and the grandfather’s clock in the corner was as severely mute as grandfather. But I knew that when I turned around there would also be, in the midst of the sepulchral sheetings and the out-of-time silence, a woman kneeling before the cols blackness of the wide fireplace to put pine cones and bits of light-wood beneath the logs there. She had said, “No, let me do it. It’s my house, you know, and I ought to light the fire when I come back like this. You know, a ritual. I went to. Adam always lets me do it. When we come back.”