All the King's Men (47 page)

Anne Stanton was tugging at my arm. She asked me, “Does he mean that, Jack?”

“Hell,” I said, and heard the savage tone in my own voice, “hell, how the hell do I know?”

Adam Stanton’s lips curled and he said, “Justice! He used that word.”

And suddenly, for the flicker of an instant, I hated Adam Stanton.

I told them I had to go, which was true, and worked my way around through the edge of the crowd, to the police cordon. Then I went around to the back of the Capitol, where I joined the Boss.

Late that night, back at the Mansion, after he had thrown Tiny and his rabble out of the study, I asked him the question. I asked, “Did you mean what you said?”

Propped back on the big leather couch, he stared at me, and demanded, “What?”

“What you said,” I replied, “tonight. You said your strength was their will. You said your justice was their need. All of that.”

He kept on staring ay me, his eyes bulging, his stare grappling and probing into me.

“You said that,” I said.

“God damn it,” he exclaimed, violently, still staring at me, “God damn it–” he clenched his right fist and struck himself twice on the chest–”God damn it, there’s something inside you–there’s something inside–”

He left the words hanging there. He turned his eyes from me and stared moodily into the fire. I didn’t press my question Well, that was how it had been when I asked him a question, a long time back. Now I had a new question to ask him: If he believed that you had to make the good out of the bad because there wasn’t anything else to make it out of, why did he stir up such a fuss about keeping Tiny’s hands off the Willie Stark Hospital?

There was another little question. One I would have to ask Anne Stanton. It had come to me that night down on the pier at the mist-streaked river when Anne said that she had gone up to Adam Stanton’s apartment “to talk to him about it”–about the offer of the directorship of the Willie Stark Hospital. She had said that to me, and at the moment, it had disturbed like an itch that comes when your hands are full and you can’t scratch. I hadn’t, in the press of the moment, defined what was disturbing, what was the question. I had simply pushed the whole pot to the back of the stove and left it to simmer. And there it simmered for weeks. But one day, all at once, it boiled over and I knew what the question was: How had Anne Stanton Known about the hospital offer?

One thing was a cinch. I hadn’t told her.

Perhaps Adam had told her, and then she had gone up there “to talk to him about it.” So I went to see Adam, who was furiously deep in work, his usual practice and teaching, and in addition, the work on the hospital plans, who hadn’t been able, he said, to touch the piano in almost a month, whose eyes fixed on me glacially out of a face now thin from sleepless ness, and who treated me with a courtesy too chromium-plated to be given to the friend of your youth. It took some doing, on my part, in the face of that courtesy, to get my nerve up to ask him the question. But I finally asked it. I said, “Adam, that first time Anne came up to talk to you about–about the job–you know, the hospital–had you told–”

And he said, with a voice like a scalpel, “I don’t want to discuss it.”

But I had to know. So I said, “Had you told her about the proposition?”

“No,” he said, “and I said I didn’t want to discuss it.”

“O. K.,” I heard myself saying, in a flat voice which wasn’t quite my own. “O. K.”

He looked sharply at me, then rose from his chair and took a step toward me. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry, Jack. I’m on the edge.” He shook his head slightly like a man trying to shake the fog of sleep out. “Not been getting enough shut-eye,” he said. He took another step to me–I was leaning against the mantel–and looked into my face again and laid his hand on my arm, saying, “I’m really sorry, Jack–talking that way–but I didn’t tell Anne anything–and I’m sorry.”

“Forget it,” I said.

“I’ll forget it,” he agreed, smiling wintrily, tapping my arm, “if you will.”

“Sure,” I said, “sure, I’ll forget it. Yeah, I’ll forget it. It didn’t amount to anything anyway. Who told her. I guess I told her myself. It just slipped my mind that–”

“I mean forget about the way I acted,” he corrected me, “blowing off the way I did.”

“Oh,” I said, “oh, that. Sure. I’ll forget it.”

Then he was peering into my face, with a question darkening his eyes. He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “What did you want to know for?”

“Nothing,” I replied, “nothing. Just idle curiosity. But I recollect now. I told her myself. Yeah, and I guess maybe I shouldn’t. I didn’t mean to get her into it. Just let it slip. I didn’t mean to cause any ruckus. I didn’t think–” And all the while that cold, unloving part of the mind–that maiden aunt, that washroom mirror the drunk stares into, that still small voice, that maggot in the cheese of your selfesteem, that commentator on the ether nightmare, that death’s head of lipless rationality at your every feast–all that while that part of the mind was saying:
You’re making it worse, your lying is just making it worse, can’t you shut up, you blabbermouth!
_

And Adam, with whitening face, was saying, “There wasn’t any ruckus. As you call it.”

But I couldn’t stop, as when your car come to the glare ice over the brow of the hill and hits it before you can get on the brake, and you feel the beautiful free glide and spin of the skid and almost burst out laughing, it is so fine and free, like boyhood. I was saying, “–not any ruckus exactly–just I’m sorry I sicked her on you–I didn’t want to cause any trouble–it was just that–”

“I don’t want to discuss it,” he said, and the jaw snapped shut, and he swung from me and went to stand on the other side of the room, very stiff and military.

So I took my leave, and the chromium-plated courtesy was so bright and cold that my, “Be seeing you, boy,” stuck in y throat, like old corn bread.

But he hadn’t told Anne Stanton. And I hadn’t told her. Who had told her? And at that point I could see no answer except that there had been some loose talk, some leak, and the news had got around. I guess I took that answer–if I really took it–because it was the easiest answer for me to take. But I knew, deep down, that the Boss wasn’t given to loose talk except when he wanted to talk loose, and he would have known that one sure way to ruin the chance of ever getting Adam Stanton would be to let the gossip mill start grinding on the topic. I knew that all right, but my mind just closed up like a clam when that shadow came floating over. A clam has to live, hasn’t it?

But I did find out who had told Anne Stanton.

It was a beautiful morning in middle May, and just that morning, at that hour, about nine-thirty, there was still some last touch of spring–by that time you had almost forgotten there had been a spring–a kind of milkiness in the air, and way off yonder, from my window, I could see a little white haze on the river, milky too. The season was like the fine big-breasted daughter of some poor spavined share-cropper, a girl popping her calico but still having a waist, with pink cheeks and bright eyes and just a little perspiration at the edge of her tow hair (which would be platinum blond in some circles), but you see her and know that before long she will be a bag of bone and gristle with a hag face like a rusted brush hook. But she looks enough to scare you now, if you really look at her, and that morning the season still had that look and feel even if you did know that by the end of June everything would be bone and gristle and hag face and a sweat-sticky sheet to wake up on and a taste in your mouth like old brass. But now the leaves on the trees hung down thick and fleshy and had not begun to curl yet. I could look down from my office window on the great bolls and tufts and swollen globes of green which were the trees of the Capitol grounds seen from the height of my window, and think of the deep inner maze of green in one of the big trees and of the hollow shadowy chambers near the trunk, where maybe a big cantankerous jay would be perched for a moment like a barbarous potentate staring with black, glittering, beady eyes into the green tangle. Then he would dive soundlessly off the bough and break through the green screen and be gone into the bright sunshine where suddenly he would be screaming his damned head off. I could look down and think of myself inside that hollow inner chamber, in the aqueous green light, inside the great globe of the tree, and not even a jaybird in there with me now, for he had gone, and no chance of seeing anything beyond the green leaves, they were so thick, and no sound except, way off, the faint mumble of traffic, like the ocean chewing its gums.

It was fine, peaceful, beautiful thought and I took my eyes off the green below and lay back in my swivel chair, with my heels on the desk, and shut my eyes and thought of swooping down and bursting through the green to the sudden green quietness inside. I lay back with my eyes closed and listen to the electric fan, which was humming like a dream, and could almost feel the wonderful swoop and then the poise inside. It was a fine idea. If you had wings.

Then I heard the racket outside in the reception room, and opened my eyes. Somebody had slammed a door. Then I caught the whir of a passage and Sadie Burke swung into my ken, making a great curve through my open door, and, all in one motion, slamming it behind her and charging on my direction. She stood in front of my desk and fought for air enough to say what she had to say.

It was just like old times. I hadn’t seen her worked up that much since the morning when she had found out about the Nordic Nymph who had skated her way into the Boss’s bed up in Chicago a long time back. That morning she had exploded out of the Boss’s door, and had described a parabola into my office, with her black chopped-off hair wild and her face like a riddled plaster-of-Paris mask of Medusa except for the hot bituminous eyes, which were in full blaze with a bellows pumping the flame.

Well, since that morning there had, no doubt, been plenty of occasions when Sadie and the Boss had not exactly eye to eye. The Boss had had everything from the Nordic Nymph to the household-hints columnist on the
Chronicle
_ in his life, and Sadie hadn’t been exactly condoning–for Sadie did not have a condoning nature–but a peculiar accommodation had finally been reached. “Damn him,” Sadie had said to me, “let him have his sluts, let him have them. But he’ll always come back to me. He knows he can’t get along without me. He knows he can’t.” And she had added grimly, “And he better not try.” So, with her fury and her
God-damns
_and her satire and her tongue-lashing–and she had a tongue like a cat-o’-nine-tails–and even with her rare bursts of dry-eyed grief, she seemed to take a kind of pleasure, wry and twisted enough God knows, in watching the development of the pattern in each new-old case, in watching the slut get bounced and the Boss come back to stand before her, grinning and heavy and sure and patient, to take his tongue-lashing. A long time back she herself had probably ceased to believe in the tongue-lashing or even to think what she was saying. The juicy epithets had long since lost their fine savor and a strident mechanical quality had crept into the rendering of the scene. Like a stuck phonograph record or a chicken-hungry preacher getting over the doxology. The word came but her mind wasn’t on them.

But it was different that fine May morning. It was like old times, all right, with her bosom heaving and the needle of the steam gauge pricking deep into the red on the dial. Then she blew the plug.

“He’s done it,” she blew, “he’s done it again–and I swear–”

“Done what?” I demanded, though I knew perfectly well what he had done. He had another slut.

“He’s two-timing me,” she said.

I lay back in my swivel chair and looked at her. The bright morning light was hitting her face square and without pity, but her eyes were magnificent.

“The bastard,” she said, “he’s two-timing me!”

“Now, Sadie,” I said, lying back in my chair and sighting at her over the toes of my shoes crossed on the desk, “we went into that arithmetic a long time back. He’s not two-timing you. He’s two-timing Lucy. He may be one-timing you, or four-timing you. But it can’t be two-timing.” I was watching her eyes, and just saying that to see if it was possible to put a little more snap into them. It was.

For she said, “You–you–” Then words failed her.

“Me what?” I defended myself.

“You–you and your high-toned friends–what do they know–what do they know about anything–and you’ve got to mix them in.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I may not be high-toned and maybe I live in a shack but it hadn’t been for me he wouldn’t be Governor this minute and he knows it and she better not get gay, for high-toned or not, I’ll show her. By God, I’ll show her!”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about,” she affirmed, and leaned over the desk top toward me, shaking her finger at me, “and you sit there and smile that way and think you are so high-toned. If you were a man you’d get up and go in there and knock hell out of him. I thought she was yours. Or maybe he’s fixed you up, too. Maybe he’s fixed you up like he fixed up that doctor.” She leaned farther toward me. “Maybe he’s making you director of a hospital. Yeah, what’s he making you director of?”

Under the flood of words and the savage finger and the snapping eyes, I jerked myself forward, dropped my feet to the floor with a crash, and lunged up to stand before her, while the blood pounded in my head to make me dizzy, as it does when you rise suddenly, and little red flecks danced before me and the words kept on. Then the words stopped on her question.

“Are you saying,” I began firmly, “that–that–” I had been about to pronounce the name of Anne Stanton, for the name itself had been quite clearly in my mind, as though spelled out on a billboard, but all at once the name stuck in my throat and with surprise I discovered that I could not say it. So I continued, “–that she–she–”

But Sadie Burke was looking straight into my mind–at least, I had that feeling–and quick as a boxer she jabbed that name at me, “Yeah, she, she, that Stanton girl, Anne Stanton!”