All the King's Men (71 page)

She sat very stiff and severe in a chair, not one of the chintz-covered soft ones. She was going to permit no spilling over of emotion, not in a strange room and at that time of the day–the time of day when every day there was breakfast to get and the children to fix and the men to clear out of the house. There would be a proper place and time. After it was over, after she got Lucy home, she would put her to bed in a room with the curtains drawn, and would put a cloth dabbled with vinegar on her forehead, and would sit by the bed and hold her hand, and would say, “Now just you cry if you want to, baby, then you’ll feel better, then you lie still and I’ll sit here, I won’t leave you, baby.” But that would come later. Meanwhile Lucy now and then stole a look across at her sister’s hewn and eroded face. It wasn’t exactly a sympathetic face, but it seemed to have what Lucy was looking for.

I sat over on the couch and looked at the same old picture magazines. I felt definitely that I was out of place. But Lucy had asked me to come. “He would want you to be there,” she had said.

“I’ll wait down in the lobby,” I said.

She shook her head. “Come upstairs,” she said.

“I don’t want to be underfoot. You sister will be there, you said.”

“I want you to,” she had said, and so there I was. And it was better, I decided, even if I was out of place, than being down in the lobby with all the newshawks and politicos and curiosity-seekers.

It didn’t take them awfully long. They said the operation was a success. When the nurse who had brought the news said that, Lucy slumped in her chair and uttered a dry, gasping sob. The sister, who herself had seemed to relax a little at the words, looked sharply at Lucy. “Lucy,” she said, not loud but with some severity, “Lucy!”

Lucy raised her head, met the sister’s reproving gaze, murmured humbly, “I’m sorry, Ellie, I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve–I’ve–”

“We must thank God,” Ellie announced. The she rose briskly, as though she were about to step right out and do that before it slipped her mind. But she turned to the nurse. “When can she see her husband?” she asked.

“It will be some time,” the nurse said. “I can’t tell you exactly, but it will be some time. If you wait here I can let you know.” She moved to the door. There she turned, and asked, “Can I get anything for you? Some lemonade? Some Coffee?”

“That’s right kind and considerate,” the sister said, “but we’ll just say no thanks this time of morning.”

The nurse went out, and I excused myself and followed. I went down to the office of Dr. Simmons, who had performed the operation. I had known him around the place. He was a sort of friend of Adam–about as good a one as Adam had, for he never had chummed up with anybody, that is, anybody except me, and I didn’t count, for I was the Friend of His Youth. I had known Dr. Simmons around the place. Adam had introduced us.

Dr. Simmons, a dry, thin, grayish man, was at his desk, writing something on a big card. I told him to finish what he was doing. He said he was about through, the secretary picked up the card and put it into a filing cabinet, and he turned to me. I asked him how the Governor was doing. The operation had been a success, he said.

“You mean you got the bullets out?” I asked.

He smiled in a sort of chilly way, and said he meant a little more than that. “He’s got a chance,” he said. “He’s a strong man.”

“He’s that,” I agreed.

Dr. Simmons picked up a little envelope from his desk, and emptied the contents into his hand. “No matter how strong they are they can take much of this diet,” he said, and held out his hand, open, to show me the two little pellets resting there. A.25-caliber slug is small, all right, but these looked even smaller and more trivial than I had remembered.

I picked one of them out of his hand and examined it. It was a little misshapen slug of lead. Fingering it, I thought of how a long time back, when we were kids at the Landing, Adam and I used to shoot at a pine board, and how sometimes we had dug the lugs out of the soft wood with a pocketknife. Sometimes the slug dug out of the wood hadn’t been a bit more misshapen than this one, the wood was so soft.

“The son-of-a-bitch,” Dr. Simmons said irrelevantly.

I gave the slug back to him and went down to the lobby. It was pretty well cleared out down there now. The politicos had gone. Two or three newspapermen still hung around, waiting for developments.

There weren’t ant developments that day. Or the next day either. The Boss seemed to be getting on all right. But the third day he turn a turn for the worse. An infection had started up. It moved pretty fast. I knew for the way Dr. Simmons looked, even if he wouldn’t say much, that he was a gone gosling.

That evening, shortly after I had arrived at the hospital and had gone up to the waiting room to see how Lucy was making out, I got the message that the Boss wanted to see me. He had rallied, they said.

He was a sick-looking customer when I saw him. The flesh had fallen away on his face till the skin sacked off the bone the way it does on an old man’s face. He looked like Old Man Stark, up at Mason City. He was white as chalk.

When I first saw the eyes in the white face, they seemed to be filmed and unrecognizing. Then, as I moved toward the bed, they fixed on me and a thin light flickered up in them. His mouth twisted a little in a way which I took to be the feeble shorthand for a grin.

I came over close to the bed. “Hello, Boss,” I said, and hung something on my features which I meant to be taken for a grin.

He lifted the forefinger and the next finger of his right hand, which lay prone on the sheet, in an incipient salute, then left them drop. The strength of the muscles which held his mouth twisted gave out, too, and the grin slid off his face and the weight of flesh sagged back.

I stood up close to the bed and looked down at him, and tried to think of something to say. But my brain felt as juiceless as an old sponge left out in the sun a long time.

Then he said, in something a little better than a whisper, “I wanted to see you, Jack.”

“I wanted to see you, too, Boss.”

For a minute he didn’t speak, but his eyes looked up at me, with the light still flickering in them. Then he spoke: “Why did he do it to me?”

“Oh, God damn it,” I burst out, very loud, “I don’t know.”

The nurse looked warningly at me.

“I never did anything to him,” he said.

“No, you never did.”

He was silent again, and the flicker went down in his eyes. Then, “He was all right. The Doc.”

I nodded

I waited, but it began to seem that he wasn’t going to say any more. His eyes were on the ceiling and I could scarcely tell that he was breathing. Finally, the eyes turned toward me again, very slowly, and I almost thought that I could hear the tiny painful creak of the balls in their sockets. But the light flickered up again. He said, “It might have been all different, Jack.”

I nodded again

He roused himself more. He even seemed to be straining to lift his head from the pillow. “You got to believe that,” he said hoarsely.

The nurse stepped forward and looked significantly at me.

“Yes,” I said to the man on the bed.

“You got to,” he said again. “You got to believe that.”

“All right.”

He looked at me, and for a moment it was the old strong, probing, demanding glance. But when the words this time, they were very weak. “And it might even been different yet he whispered. “If it hadn’t happened, it might–have been different–even yet.”

He barely got the last words out, he was so weak.

The nurse was making signals to me.

I reached down and took the hand on the sheet. It felt like a piece of jelly.

“So long, Boss,” I said. “I’ll be seeing you.”

He didn’t answer, and I wasn’t even sure that there was recognition in the eyes now. I turned away and went out.

He died the next morning, just about day. There was a hell of a big funeral. The city was jam-packed with people, all kinds of people, county-courthouse slickers and red-necks and wool-hat boys and people who had never been on pavement before. And they had their women with them. They filled all the space around the Capitol and spilled and eddied back into the streets beyond, while the drizzle came down and the loud-speakers placed on the trees and poles blared out the words which made you want to puke.

Then after the coffin had been brought down the great steps of the Capitol and loaded into the hearse and after the state patrolmen and the mounted cops had fought out a passage, the procession rolled slowly away to the cemetery. The crowd seethed after it. At the cemetery they surged and swayed over the grass, trampling the graves, breaking down shrubbery. A couple of gravestones were overturned and broken. It was two hours after the burial before the police managed to clear the place.

That was my second funeral within a week. The first one had been very different. It had been the funeral of Adam Stanton, down at Burden’s Landing.

Chapter Ten

After the Boss was safe underground, and the pussel-gutted city cops sweating in their blue and the lean, natty boys of the State Patrol and the mounted police on glossy, dancing horses whose hoofs sank fetlock deep in the flower beds had driven the crowd sullenly out of the cemetery–but long before the tramped grass began to lift itself or the caretakers came to repair the knocked-over tombstones–I left town and took out for the Landing. There were two reasons. First, I couldn’t stand to stay in town. Second, Anne Stanton was at the Landing.

She had been there since Adam’s funeral. She had gone down with the body, trailing the sun-glittering, expensive hearse in an undertaker’s limousine with a nurse, who proved to be superfluous, and Katy Maynard, an old friend who proved, no doubt to be superfluous, too. I didn’t see her as she sat in the rented limousine which moved at its decorous torturer’s pace the near-hundred miles, lifting the miles slowly off the concrete slab, slowly and fastidiously as though you were peeling and endless strip of skin off the live flesh. I didn’t see her, but I know how she had been: erect, white in the face, the beautiful bones of her face showing under the taut flesh, her hands clenched in her lap. For that was the way she was when I saw her standing under the moss-garlanded oaks, looking absolutely alone despite the nurse and Katy Maynard and all the people–friend of the family, curiosity-seekers come to gloat and nudge, newspapermen, big-shot doctors from town and from Baltimore and Philadelphia–who stood there while the shovels did their work.

And she was that way when she walked out of the place, not leaning on anybody, with the nurse and Katy Maynard trailing along with that look of embarrassed and false piety which people get on their faces when they are caught in the open with the principal mourner at a funeral.

Even when–just as she was coming out the gate of the cemetery–a newspaperman jammed a camera at her and took her picture, she didn’t change the expression on her face.

He was still there when I came up, a squirt with his hat over one eye and the camera hung round his neck and a grin on his squirt face. I thought maybe I had seen him around town, but maybe not, the squirts look so much alike when they grind them out of journalism school. “Hello,” I said.

He said hello.

“I saw you get that picture,” I said.

He said yeah.

“Well, son,” I said, “if you live long enough, you’ll find out there are son kinds of a son-of-a-bitch you don’t have to be even to be a newspaperman.”

He said yeah, out of his squirt face, and looked at am. Then he asked. “You’re Burden?”

I nodded

“Jesus Christ,” he exclaimed, “you work for Stark and you call somebody a son-of-a-bitch.”

I just looked at him. I’d been over all that ground before. I had been over it a thousand times with a thousand people. Hotel lobbies and dinner tables and club cars and street corners and bedrooms and filling stations. Sometimes they didn’t say it just exactly that way and sometimes they didn’t say it at all, but it was there. Oh, I’d fixed them, all right. I knew how to roll with that punch and give it right back in the gut. I ought to have known, I’d had plenty of practice.

But you get tired. In a way it is too easy, and so it isn’t fun any more. And then you get so you don’t get mad any more, it has happened so often. But those aren’t the reasons. It is just that those people who say that to you–or don’t say it–aren’t right and they are wrong. If it were absolutely either way, you wouldn’t have to think about it, you could just shut your eyes and let them have it in the gut. But the trouble is, they are half right and half wrong, and in the end that is what paralyzes you. Trying to sort out the one from the other. You can’t explain it to them, for there isn’t ever time and there is always that look on their faces. So you get to a point in the end where you don’t even let them have it in the gut. You just look at them, and it is like a dream or something remembered from a long time back or like they weren’t there at all.

So I just looked at the squirt face.

There were other people there. They were looking at me. They expected me to say something. Or do something. But somehow I didn’t even mind their eyes on me. I didn’t even hate them. I didn’t feel anything except a kind of numbness and soreness inside, more numbness than soreness. I stood there and looked at him and waited the way you wait for the pain to start after you have been hit. Then, if the pain started, I would give it to him. But it didn’t start, and there was just the numbness. So I turned around and walked away. I didn’t even mind the eyes that were following me or the snatch of a laugh somebody gave and cut off short because it was a funeral.

I walked on down the street with the numbness and soreness in me. But what had happened at the gate hadn’t given it to me. I had had it before I came.

I went on down the Row toward the Stanton house. I didn’t imagine she’d want to see me right then, but I intended to leave word that I would be at the hotel down at the Landing till late afternoon. This, of course, if something didn’t break about the Boss’s condition But when I got to the Stanton house I learned that Anne wasn’t seeing anybody. Katy Maynard and the nurse weren’t superfluous any more. For when Anne entered the house she went into the living room and stood there just inside the door and looked slowly all over the place, at the piano, the furniture piece by piece, the picture above the fireplace, the way a woman looks over a room just before she sails in to redecorate that place and rearrange the furniture (that was Katy Maynard’s way of putting it), and then she just gave down. She didn’t even reach for the doorjamb, or stagger, or make a sound, they said. She just gave down, now it was over, and was out cold on the floor.