All the King's Men (59 page)

“Yeah, Sugar’s my pal, ain’t you, Sugar-Boy?” he said, and slapped Sugar-Boy on the shoulder, and then swung again toward the Congressman while Sugar-Boy finally was managing to say, “I’m–y-y-y-your pal–and_–__I–ain’t ta-ta-ta-talking–none.”

Yes, Sugar-Boy probably knew, but he was dependable.

And Sadie was dependable, too. She had told me, but that was in the flush of her first fine rage and I (I thought of this with a certain grim humor) was, you might say, in the family. She wouldn’t tell anybody else. Sadie Burke didn’t have any confidant, for she didn’t trust anybody. She didn’t ask any sympathy, for the world she had grown up in didn’t have any. So she would keep her mouth shut. And she had plenty of patience. She knew he’d come back. Meanwhile, she could hack him into a rage, or could try to for it was hard to do, and she herself would get into one, and you would think that they would be ready to fly at each other in the frenzy they could build up. By that time, too, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was a frenzy of love or hate that coiled and tangled them together. And after all the years it had been going on, it probably didn’t matter which it was. Her eyes would blaze black out of her chalk-white, pocked face and her wild black hair would seem to lift electrically off her scalp and her hands would fly out in a gesture of rending and tearing. While the flood of her language poured over him, his head would rock massively but almost imperceptibly from side to side and his eyes would follow her every motion, at first drowsily, then raptly, until he would heave himself up, the big veins in his temples pumping and his right fist raised. Then the raised fist would crash into the palm of the other hand, and he would burst out, “God damn, God damn it, Sadie!”

Or for weeks there wouldn’t be any shenanigans. Sadie would treat the Boss with an icy decorum, meeting him only and strictly in the course of business, standing quietly before him while he talked. She would stand there before him and study him out of the black eyes, in which the blaze was banked now. Well, despite all the shenanigans, Sadie knew how to wait for everything she had ever got out of the world.

So the summer went on, and we all lived in it. It was a way to live, and when you have lived one way for a while you forget that there was ever any other way and that there may be another way again. Even when the change came, it didn’t at first seem like a change but like more of the same, an extension and repetition.

It came through Tom Stark.

Given the elements, it was perfectly predictable. On one hand there was the Boss, and on the other hand there was MacMurfee. MacMurfee didn’t have any choice. He had to keep fighting the Boss, for the Boss wouldn’t deal with him, and if (and it looked more likely
when
_ than
if
_) the Boss ever broke MacMurfee in the Fourth District, Mac was a goner. So he had no choice, and he would use anything he could lay his hands on.

What he laid his hands on was a fellow named Marvin Frey, previously unknown to fame. Frey had a daughter named Sibyl, also unknown to fame, but not, Mr. Frey said, unknown to Tom Stark. It was simple, not a new turn to the plot, not a new line in the script. An old home remedy. Simple. Simple and sordid.

The outraged father, accompanied by a friend, for witness and protector no doubt, called on the Boss and stated his case. He got out, white in the face and obviously shaken, but he had the strength to walk. He walked across the long stretch of carpet from the Boss’s door to the door to the corridor, getting inadequate support from the friend, whose own legs seemed to have lost some of their stiffening, and went out.

Then the buzzer on my desk went wild, the little red light which meant headquarters flashed, and when I switched on the voice box, the Boss’s voice said, “Jack, get the hell in here.” When I got the hell in there, he succinctly outlined the case to me, and gave me two assignments: first, get hold of Tom Stark, and second, find all there was about Marvin Frey.

It took all day and the efforts of half of the Highway Patrol to locate Tom Stark, who was, it developed, at a fishing lodge on Bigger’s Bay with several cronies and some girls and a lot of wet glasses and dry fishing tackle. It was near six o’clock before they fetched him in. I was out in the reception room when he came in. “Hi, Jack,” he said, “what’s eating on him now?” And he cocked his head toward the Boss’s door.

“He’ll tell you,” I said, and watched him head toward the door, a wonderfully set-up in dirty white duck trousers, sandals, and a pale-blue short-sleeved silky sport shirt that stuck to the damp pectoral muscles and almost popped over the brown biceps. His head, with a white gob cap stuck on it, was thrust forward just a little bit, and had the slightest roll when he walked, and his arms hung slightly crooked with the elbows a little out. Watching the arms hanging that way, you got the impression that they were like weapons just loosened and riding easy and ready in the scabbards. He didn’t knock, but walked straight into the Boss’s office. I retreated to my own office and waited for the dust to settle. Whatever it was, Tom was not going to stand and take it, not even from the Boss.

A half hour later Tom came out, slamming the door so that the heavy gold-framed paintings of the former governors hung around the paneled walls of the big reception room shivered like autumn leaves in a blast. He stalked across the room, not even giving a look in the direction of my open door, and went out. At first, he had, the Boss told me later, denied everything. Then he had admitted everything, looking the Boss in the eye, with a what-the-hell’s-it-to-you expression. The Boss was fit to be tied when I saw him a few minutes after Tom’s departure. He had only a small comfort–that from the legal point of view, Tom had been just one of a platoon of Sibyl’s friends, according to Tom himself. But, aside from the legal point of view, that fact just made the Boss madder, Tom’s being one of a platoon. It would be convenient in any discussion of the paternity of Sibyl’s alleged child, but it seemed to hurt the Boss’s pride.

I had found Tom and brought him in as one of my assignments. The second one took a little longer. Finding out about Marvin Frey. There wasn’t much to find out, it appeared. He was a barber in the only hotel in a fair-sized town, Duboisville, over in the Fourth District. He was a sporting barber, with knifeedged creases in his striped pants, ointment on his thinning hair, hands like inflated white rubber gloves, a
Racing Form
_ in his hip pocket, the shapeless soft nose with the broken veins like tiny purple vines, and breath sweetly flavored with Sen-Sen and red-eye. He was a widower, living with his two daughters. You don’t have to find out much about a fellow like that. You know it all already. Sure, he has an immortal soul which is individual and precious in God’s eye, and he is that unique agglomeration of atomic energy known as Marvin Frey, bur you know all about him. You know his jokes, you know the insinuative
hee-hee
_ through his nose with which he prefaces them, you know how the gray tongue licks luxuriously over his lips at the conclusion, you know how he fawns and drools over the inert mass with the face covered with steaming towels which happens to be the local banker or the local gambling-house proprietor or the local congressman, you know how he kids the hotel chippies and tries to talk them out of something, you know how he gets in debt because of his bad hunches on the horses and bad luck with the dice, you know how he wakes up in the morning and sits on the edge of the bed with his bare feet on the cold floor and a taste like brass on the back of his tongue and experiences his nameless despair. You know that, with the combination of poverty, fear, and vanity, he is perfectly designed to be robbed of his last pride and last shame and be used by MacMurfee. Or by somebody else.

But it happened to be MacMurfee. This angle had not appeared in Marvin’s first interview. It appeared a few days later. One of the MacMurfee’s boys called on the Boss, said MacMurfee had heard how a fellow named Frey had a daughter named Sibyl who had something on Tom Stark, but MacMurfee had always liked football and sure liked the way Tom carried the ball, and didn’t want to see the boy get mixed up in anything unpleasant. Frey, the fellow said, was not in any frame of mind to be reasonable. He was going to make Tom marry the daughter. (The Boss’s face must have been something to see at that point.) But Frey lived over in MacMurfee’s district, and MacMurfee knew him a little, and maybe MacMurfee could put some reasonableness into Frey’s head. It would cost something, of course, to do it that way, but there wouldn’t be any publicity, and Tom would still be a bachelor.

What would it cost? Well, some money for Sibyl. Folding money.

But this meant that MacMurfee was simply acting out of deep heart and generous nature.

What would it cost? Well, MacMurfee was thinking he might run for Senator.

So that was it.

But the Boss, as Anne Stanton had told me, was figuring on going to the Senate himself. He had it in the sack. He had the state in a sack. Except for MacMurfee. MacMurfee and Marvin Frey. But still, he wasn’t in any mood to dicker with MacMurfee. He didn’t dicker, but he stalled.

There was one reason he could take the chance and stall. If Marvin and MacMurfee had had it sewed up absolutely tight, and could have ruined the Boss, they would have done it without further ado. They wouldn’t have bothered to dicker. They had some cards, all right, but it wasn’t necessarily a straight flush, and they had to take their gamble, too. They had to wait, while the Boss did his thinking, and hope that he wouldn’t think up anything unpleasant in his turn.

While the Boss did his thinking, I saw Lucy Stark. She wrote me a note and asked me to come to see her. I knew what she wanted. She wanted to talk about Tom. Obviously, she wasn’t finding out anything from Tom himself, or at least, what she considered to be the truth and the whole truth, and she wasn’t talking it over with the Boss for on the matter of Tom she and the Boss had never agreed. So she was going to ask me questions, and I was going to sit and sweat on the red plush upholstery in the parlor of the farmhouse where she was living. But that had to be. Long back, I had made up my mind that when Lucy Stark asked me to do something I was going to do it. It was not exactly that I felt I owed Lucy Stark a debt, or had to make restitution, or do penance. At least, if there was a debt, it was not to Lucy Stark, and if there was restitution to be made it was not to be made to her. If there was a debt, it was, perhaps, due to me, from me. And if restitution was to be made, it was to be made to me, by me. And as for penance, there had been no crime for which I should do it. My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don’t have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical.

If you have ever been down toward the Gulf, you know the kind of house. White frame, but with the glitter long gone. One story, a wide gallery across the front with spindly posts supporting the shed over it. A tin roof, with faint streaks of rust showing red in the channel joints. The whole thing set high on brick pillars, to make a cool cobweb-draped cloister underneath, screened on the front side by rank ligustrums and canna beds, for hens to congregate and fluff in the dust and an old shepherd dog to lie and pant in the hot days. It sits pretty well back from the road, in a lawn gone sparse and rusty in the late season. On each side of an anachronistic patch of concrete walk, which dies blankly at the gate where the earth of the highway shoulder shows raw, there are two round flower beds made by lying an old automobile tire on the ground and filling it with wood earth. There are few zinnias in each, hairy like an animal, brilliant in the dazzling sun. At each end of the house is a live oak, not grand ones. Beyond the house, flanking it on each side are the chicken houses and barns, unpainted. But the faded-white decent house itself, sitting there in the middle of the late-summer afternoon, in the absolute quiet of that time of day and year, with the sparse lawn and tidy flower beds and the prideful patch of concrete walk in front, the oaks at each side, is like nothing so much as a respectable, middle-aged woman, in a clean gray gingham dress, with white stockings and black kid shoes, the pepper-and-salt hair coiled on her head, sitting in her rocker with her hands folded across her stomach to take a little ease, now the day’s work is done and the menfolks are in the field and it’s not yet time to think about supper and strain the evening milk.

I stepped gingerly up that patch of concrete walk, as though I were treading on dozens of eggs laid by all those white leghorns back in the chicken run.

Lucy led me into the parlor, which was just the place I had known it would be, the carved black-walnut furniture upholstered in red plush, with a few tassels still left hanging here and there, the Bible and the stereoscope and the neat pile of cards for the stereoscope on the carved black-walnut table, a flowered carpet, with little rag rugs laid over the places most worn, the big walnut and gilt frames on the wall enclosing the stern, malarial, Calvinistic faces whose eyes fixed you with little sympathy. The windows of the room were closed, and the curtains drawn to give a shadowy, aqueous light in which we sat silently for a minute as though at a funeral. The palm of my hand laid down on the plush prickled drily.

She sat there as though I hadn’t come, not looking at me but down at the floral figure in the carpet. The abundant dark-brown hair which, when I first met Lucy out at the Stark place, had been massacred off at the neck and marcelled by the beauty operator of Mason City, had long since grown back to its proper length. The auburn luster was still in it, maybe, but I couldn’t see it in the dim light of the parlor. I had, however, noticed the few touches of gray, when I met her at the door. She sat across from me on the red plush seat of a stiff, carved, walnut chair, with her still good ankles crossed in front of her, and her waist, not so little now, still straight, and her bosom full but not shapeless under the blue summer cloth. The soft soothing contours of her face weren’t girlish any more, as they had been on that first evening back in Old Man Stark’s house, for now there was a hint of weight, of the infinitesimal downward drag, in the flesh, the early curse and certain end of those soft, soothing faces which, especially when very young, appeal to all our natural goodness and make us think of the sanctity of motherhood. Yes, that is the kind of face you would put on the United States Madonna if you were going to paint her. But you aren’t, and meanwhile it is the kind of face they try to put on advertisements of ready-mix cake flour and patented diapers and whole-wheat bread–good, honest, wholesome, trusting, courageous, tender, and with the glow of youth. The glow of youth wasn’t on the particular face any more, but when Lucy Stark lifted her head to speak, I saw that the large, deep-brown eyes hadn’t changed much. Time and trouble had shaded and deepened them some, but that was all.