All the King's Men (52 page)

“But you
are
_ Jackie-Bird,” she replied gravely, but with the crinkles still at the corners of the eyes.

“Don’t you love me?” I demanded, ignoring what she had said.

“I love Jackie-Bird,” she said, “poor Jackie-Bird.”

“God damn it,” I said, “don’t you love me?”

She studied me a moment, with the crinkles entirely gone now. “Yes,” she said then, “I do,” and pulled her hand out of mine and walked across the court, with a kind of finality in the stride as though she had made up her mind to go somewhere and it was quite a way and she had better start walking. She only walked across the court, to sit on the bench in the feathery shade of the mimosa, but I watched her as though the court were as wide as the Sahara and she were dwindling into distance.

Then Adam came, and we played tennis.

She had come back that morning, but it was not to be as it had been before. She had come back, all right, but not all of her. She was with me as much as before, but she seemed to be wrapped in her own thoughts, and when I caressed her she seemed to submit out of a sense of duty or at the best out of kindness which wasn’t quite contemptuous. That was the way it was for the last week, while the days stayed hot and breathless, and the clouds piled up in the late afternoon as though promising a squall but the squall didn’t come, and the nights were as heavy and blunt as a big black silver-dusted grape ready to burst.

Two nights before she was supposed to leave we went in to the Landing to a movie. It was raining when we came out of the movie. We had intended to go for a swim after the show, but we didn’t. We had taken lots of swims in the rain, that summer and the summer before when Adam had been with us. We would no doubt have gone that night too, if the rain had been a different kind of rain, if it had been a light sweet rain, falling out of a high sky, the kind that barely whispers with a silky sound on the surface of the water you are swimming in, or if it had been a driven, needle-pointed, cold, cathartic rain to make you want to run along the beach and yell before you took refuge in the sea, or even if it had been a torrent, the kind you get on the Gulf that is like nothing so much as what happens when the bottom finally bursts out of a big paper bag suspended full of water. But it wasn’t like any of those kinds of rain. It was as though the sky had sagged down as low as possible and there were a universal leaking of bilge down through the black, gummy, dispirited air.

So we put to top up on the roadster, getting well wet doing it, got in, and drove toward home. The light was blazing in my mother’s place and on the gallery, and so we decided to go in there and make some coffee and sandwiches. It was still early, about nine-thirty. My mother, I remembered, had gone down the Row to play bridge with the Pattons and some fellow who was visiting them and was stuck on her. We wheeled up the drive and ground to a stop with a great crunching and spraying of shells and rain water. We ran up the right-hand sweep of the twin flights of steps leading to the gallery, then safe under the gallery roof began to stamp and shake the water from us like dogs. The running and stamping and the wet made Anne’s hair come loose. It was hanging down her back, with some odd wet strands plastered across her brow and one over her cheek to make her look like a child coming out of a bath. She laughed as she cocked her head to one side and shook it, the way girls do, to make the hair to fall free. She ran her spread fingers through the hair like a big comb the catch the stray hairpins. A couple of them fell to the gallery floor. “I’m a fright,” she said, “I’m an awful fright,” and kept on cocking her head over and laughing and looking up at me sidewise with bright eyes. She was more like she had been before.

I said yes, she was a fright, and we went on into the house.

I switched the light off in the big hall, but let the gallery lights stay on, then led the way back to the kitchen, through the dining room and pantry, off to the right of the hall. I put the coffee on to make, and got some food out of the icebox (that was back yonder before electric refrigerators or my mother would have had a brace of them big as a long cabin and surrounded at midnight by ladies with bare shoulders and tipsy men in dinner jackets, just like the ads). While I did the scullery work, Anne was braiding her hair. Apparently she was planning a pigtail on each side, for one was well under way by the time I had the grub laid out on the kitchen table. “Why don’ you make the sandwiches and stop primping?” I said.

“All right,” she said, “and you’ll have to fix the hair.”

So while she sat at the table and fixed the sandwiches, I finished the first pigtail. “There ought to be a ribbon on it to hold it together,” I said, “or something.” I was pressing the end between my fingers to keep it from coming unplaited. Then my eyes fell on a clean dish towel on the rack. I dropped the braid and went over to the towel and tore with the aid of a pocket knife two strips off the end. The dish towel was white with a red border. I came back, repaired the damage to the braid, and tied up the end with the piece of towel in a bowknot. “You’ll look like a pickaninny,” I said. She giggled and kept on spreading peanut butter.

I saw that the coffee was made, and turned off the gas. Then I began to work on the second pigtail. I leaned over and ran the silky stuff through my fingers, which were all tingling thumbs as rough as sandpaper, separated it into three skeins, and while I folded them over into place, one after another, breathed in the fresh meadowy smell the hair had because it was damp. I was thus occupied when the telephone rang. “Take this,” I ordered Anne, “or it’ll unravel,” and thrust the end of the pigtail at her. Then I went out to the hall.

It was my mother. She and the Pattons and the fellow who was stuck on her, and God knew who else, were going to pile into the car and drive forty miles to La Grange, a joint in the next county, on the road to the city, where there were a few dice tables and a couple of roulette wheels and where the best people rubbed shoulders with the worst and inhaled a communal blue fog of throat-lacerating tobacco smoke and illicit alcohol fumes. She said she didn’t know when she’d be in, but to leave the door open, for she forgotten her key. She didn’t have to tell me to leave the door open, for nobody ever locked up in the Landing, anyway. She said not to worry, for she felt lucky, and laughed and hung up. Well, she needn’t have told me not to worry, either. Not about her luck. She was lucky, all right. She got everything she wanted.

I hung up the receiver and looked up to see, in the light that came to the hall from the door to the back passage, Anne standing a few feet from me, just tying the bow to the end of the second pigtail. “It was my mother,” I explained. She and the Pattons are going to La Grange.” Then added, “She won’t be back till late.”

As I said that last, I was suddenly aware of the emptiness of the house, the dark rooms around us, the weight of darkness stored above us, stuffing the rooms and the attic, spilling thickly but weightlessly down the stairs, and aware of the darkness outside. As I looked into Anne’s face there wasn’t a sound in the house. Outside there was the drip on leaved and on the roof, now subsiding. Then my heart took a big knock, and I felt the new blood coursing through me as though somebody had opened a sluice gate.

I was looking right into Anne’s face, and doing so, I knew, and knew that she knew, that this was the moment the great current of the summer had been steadily moving toward all the time. I turned around and moved slowly up the hall toward the foot of the stairs. I could tell at first whether she was following or not. Then I knew she was. I climbed the stairs, and knew she was following about four steps behind me.

At the end of the stairs, in the upstairs hall, I didn’t even pause or look around. I moved up the hall, which was pitch dark, toward the door of my room. My hand touched the knob in the dark, and I pushed the door open and entered. There was a little light in the room, for the night had, apparently, cleared for the moment, and too, the glare of the gallery light below was reflected up from the wet leaves. I stood to one side, with my hand still on the knob of the door, while she walked into the room. She didn’t even glance at me as she came in. She took about three steps into the room and stopped. I closed the door and moved toward the white-clothed narrow figure; but she did not turn around. I stood behind her, drawing her shoulders back against me and folding my forearms over her bosom and putting my dry lips down against her hair. Meanwhile her arms hung loosely at her sides. We stood that way for a couple of minutes, like lovers in an advertisement watching a dramatic sunset or the ocean or Niagara Falls. But we weren’t watching anything. We were standing in the middle of a bare, shadowy room (iron bed, old dresser, pine table, trunks and books, and male gear–for I hadn’t let my mother turn that room into a museum and staring across the room out into the dark tops of the trees which all at once began to stir with a wind off the Gulf and rattle in an increase of rain.

Then Anne lifted her arms and folded them before her so that one of her hands was on each of mine. “Jackie,” she said in a low voice, which wasn’t, however, a whisper, “Jackie-Bird, I came up here.”

She had come, all right.

I began to undo the hooks and eyes down the back of the white dress. She stood absolutely still, as good and obedient, with a pigtail hanging back over each shoulder. The fact the light cloth was damp and clingy didn’t make things easier. I kept fumbling the God-damned hooks and eyes. Then I came to the sash. It was tied in a bow on the left side, I remember. I got that free, and it fell to the floor, and I began again on the dress. She was as patient, standing there with her arms at her side, a though I were a dressmaker and she were having a fitting. She didn’t say anything except when I, in my clumsiness and confusion, tried to pull the dress down over her hips. “No,” she said then, in the same low voice as before, “no, this way,” and lifted her bare arm above her head. I noticed, even then, that she didn’t let the fingers fall loose in the natural way, but held them together on each hand, and almost straight, as though she were lifting her arms for a dive and had stopped just before completing the preliminary posture. I drew the dress over her head and stood there with it clutched foolishly in my hands before I got the wit to lay it across a chair.

She was standing with her arms still up, and I took that as a sign the slip was to come off the same was the dress had. It came off the same way, and with my clumsy, nervous meticulousness I laid it across a chair, as though it might break. She lowered her arms to her sides and stood with the same passivity while I finished the task. While I unhooked the brassière, and lifted it forward so that it would fall down her motionless arms, and release the drawers and drew them down her legs, kneeling on the floor beside her, I was somehow so careful that my fingers never even brushed her skin. My breath was quick and the constriction in my throat and chest was like a knot, but my mind kept flying off to peculiar things–to a book I had started and never finished, to wondering whether I would go back to the dormitory that fall or take a room out, to an algebraic formula I remembered which kept running through my head, to a scene, just the corner of a field with a broken stile, which I tried desperately to locate out of my past. My mind would just take those crazy wild leaps and centrifugal plunges like an animal with one foot in a trap or a June bug on a string.

As I crouched there beside her, just as I had let the batiste drop about her feet, she slipped one foot from its pump–you know how girls do, pressing the heels together a little so that the feet can be drawn out–then the other. I rose to stand beside her, and experienced a kind of shock to find how small she was, standing flat n the floor without her heels. I had seen her that way a thousand times, n a bathing suit, standing barefooted n the sand or float. But it stuck me now.

She stood there, as I rose, with her arms hanging loose as before, then she folded them across her breast and hunched her shoulders a little and gave a slight shiver, and I saw how with the drawing forward of the shoulders the shoulder blades suddenly seemed sharp and frail, with a pigtail hanging down across each one.

It was raining hard outside now, with violent gusts. I noticed that.

Her head was slightly inclined forward, and she apparently saw, or remembered, that she still had on her stockings. Turning from me a little, she leaned forward, and balancing herself on one foot and then the other, drew them off and let tem fall with the sash and the little wispy pile of stuff there before her. Then she stood as before, hunched slightly forward, perhaps shivering, her knees slightly bent and pressed together.

While I stood there fumbling with the buttons on my shirt, tearing one loose because I couldn’t seem to get it through the buttonhole (in a momentary lull of the wind and rain, it made a single
tick
_ when it struck the uncarpeted floor), and while my mind made the crazy June-bugs leaps and plunges, she walked across to the iron bed and sat down, tentatively, close to the edge, her feet and knees pressed close, her arms still folded and her shoulders slightly hunched as before. She was looking up at me across the space, with a question, or appeal, in her eyes–I couldn’t read them in the dimness.

Then, letting one hand drop to the bed for support, she leaned a little sideways, lifted her feet from the floor, still together, and with a gentle, curling motion, lay back on the white counterpane, then punctiliously straightened out and again folded her hands across her bosom, and closed her eyes.

And at the instant when she closed her eyes, as I stare at her, my mind took one of the crazy leaps and I saw her floating in the water, that day of the picnic three years before, with her eyes closed and the violent sky above and the white gull flashing high over, and that face and this face and that scene and this scene seemed to fuse, like superimposed photographs, each keeping its identity but without denying the other. And at that instant, as I stood there with the constriction in my throat that made me swallow hard and with my body tumescent, I looked at her there on the iron bed, then looked suddenly around the big, bare, shadowy room and heard the gusty rain and knew that everything was wrong, completely wrong, how I didn’t know, didn’t try to know, and that this was somehow not what the summer had been driving toward. That I wasn’t going to do it. “Anne,” I said, hoarsely, Anne–”