All the King's Men (72 page)

So when I got there, the nurse was upstairs working on her, and Katy Maynard was calling the doctor and taking charge. There wasn’t any reason for me to stay. I got in my car and headed back to the city.

But now the Boss was dead, too, and I was back at the Landing. My mother and her Theodore were off on a trip and I had the house to myself. It was as empty and still as a morgue. But even so, it was a bit more cheerful than the hospitals and cemeteries I had been hanging around. What was dead in this house had been dead a long time, and I was accustomed to the fact. I was even becoming accustomed to the fact of the other deaths. They had shoveled it over Judge Irwin, and Adam Stanton, and the Boss.

But there were some of us left. And Anne Stanton was among those left. And I was.

So back at the Landing again, we sat on the gallery side by side, when there was sun–the lemon-pale sun of late autumn–and the afternoon made its shortened arc over the onyx-mottled waters of the bay, which stretched south to the autumn-hazy horizon. Or when there wasn’t any sun, and the wind piled the sea up over the beach, even to the road, and the sky seemed to be nothing but gusty rain, we sat side by side in the living room. Either place, we never talked much those days, not because there was nothing to say but because there might be too much and if you once started you would upset the beautiful and perilous equilibrium which we had achieved. It was as though we each sat on the end of a seesaw, beautifully balanced, but not in any tidy little play yard but over God knows what blackness on a seesaw which God had rigged up for kiddies. And if either of us should lean toward the other, even a fraction of an inch, the balance would be upset and we would both go sliding off into blackness. But we fooled God, and didn’t say a word.

We didn’t say a word, but some afternoons I read to Anne. I read the first book I had laid hand to the first afternoon when I found I couldn’t sit there any longer in that silence which bulged and creaked with all the unsaid words. It was the first volume of the works of Anthony Trollope. That was a safe bet. Anthony never upset any equilibriums.

In a peculiar way those late-autumn days began to remind me of the summer almost twenty years before when I had fallen in love with Anne. That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is. And now we were absolutely alone, but it was a different kind of floating island or magic carpet. That summer we had seemed to be caught in a massive and bemusing tide which knew its own pace and time and would not be hurried even to the happiness which is surely promised. And now again we seemed to be caught in such a tide and couldn’t lift a finger in its enormous drift, for it knew its own pace and time. But what it promised we didn’t know. I did not even wonder.

Now and then, however, I wondered about something else. Sometimes when I was sitting beside her, reading or not talking, and sometimes when I was away, eating breakfast or walking down the Row or lying awake. There was a question without an answer. When Anne had told me about Adam’s last, wild visit to her apartment–how he rushed in and said he wouldn’t be pimp for her and all that–she had said that some man had telephoned Adam to tell him about her and Governor Stark.

Who?
_

In the first days after the event I had really forgotten the fact, but then the question came. At first, even then, the question didn’t seem important to me. For nothing seemed very important to me then, in the pervasive soreness and numbness. Or at least what seemed important to me then had nothing to do with the question. What had happened was important, but not the cause of what had happened in so far as such a cause was not in me myself.

But the question kept coming back. Even when I wasn’t thinking of it, I would suddenly be aware of its gnawing like a mouse’s tooth stitching away inside the wainscoting of my mind.

For a while I didn’t see how I could ask Anne. I couldn’t ever say anything to her about what had happened. We would sit forever in our conspiracy of silence, forever bound together in that conspiracy by our awareness of our earlier, unwitting conspiracy to commit Adam Stanton and Willie Stark to each other and to their death. (If we should ever break the conspiracy of silence we might have to face the fact of that other conspiracy and have to look down and see the blood on our hands.) So I said nothing.

Until the day when I had to say it.

I said, “Anne, I’m going to ask you a question. About–about–it. Then I’ll never say another word about it to you unless you speak up first.”

She looked at me without answering. But I could see in her eyes the recoil of fear and pain, and then the stubborn mustering of what forces she had.

So I plunged on, “You told me–that day when I came to your apartment–that somebody had telephoned Adam–had told him–had told him about–”

“About me,” she said, finishing the sentence on which I had, for the moment, wvered. She hadn’t waited for the impact. With whatever force she had she was meeting it head-on.

I nodded.

“Well?” she queried.

“Did he say who had telephoned him?”

She thought a minute. You could see her, even as she sat there, lifting the sheet off that moment when Adam had burst in on her, like somebody lifting the sheet off the face of a corpse on a marble slab in a morgue and peering into the face.

Then she shook her head. “No,” she said, “he didn’t say–” she hesitated–”except that it was a man. I’m sure he said man.”

So we resumed our conspiracy of silence, while the seesaw wavered and swayed beneath us and the black clawed up at us and we clung on.

I left the Landing next day.

I got to town in the late afternoon, and put in a call to Sadie Burke’s apartment. There was no answer. So I tried the Capitol, on the off chance that she would be there, but there was no answer on her extension. Off and on during the evening I tried her apartment number, but with no luck. I didn’t go around the Capitol to see her in the morning. I didn’t want to see the gang who would be there. I didn’t ever want to see them again.

So I telephoned again. Her extension didn’t answer. So I asked the switchboard to find out if possible where she was. After two or three minutes the voice said, “She is not here. She is ill. Will that be all, please?” Then before I could put my thought in order, I heard the click of being cut off.

I rang again

I rang again.

“This is Jack Burden,” I said, “and I’d like to–”

“Oh–Mr. Burden–” the switchboard said noncommittally, or perhaps in question.

There had been a time and it hadn’t been very long back when the name
Jack Burden
_ got something done around that joint. But that voice, the tone of that voice, told me that the name
Jack Burden
_ didn’t mean a damned thing but a waste of breath around there any more.

For a second I was sore as hell. Then I remembered that things had changed.

Things had changed out there. When things change in a place like that, things change fast and all the way down, and the voice at the switchboard gets another tone when it speaks your name. I remembered how much things had changed. Then I wasn’t sore any more, for I didn’t give a damn.

But I said sweetly, “I wonder if you can tell me how to get in touch with Miss Burke. I’d sure appreciate it.”

Then I waited a couple of minutes for her to try to find out.

“Miss Burke is at the Millett Sanatorium,” the voice then said.

Cemeteries and hospitals: I was back in the swing of things, I thought.

But the Millett place wasn’t like the hospital. It didn’t look at all like a hospital, I discovered when I turned off the highway twenty-five miles out of the city and tooled gently up the drive under the magnificent groining of the century-old live oaks whose bough met above the avenue and dripped stalactites of moss to make a green, aqueous gloom like a cavern. Between the regularly spaced oaks stood pedestals on which classic marbles–draped and undraped, male and female, stained by weathers and leaf acid and encroaching lichen, looking as though they had, in fact, sprouted dully out of the clinging black-green humus below them–stared out at the passer-by with the faintly pained, heavy, incurious unamazement of cattle. The gaze of those marble eyes must have been the first stage in the treatment the neurotic got when he came out to the sanatorium. It must have been like smearing a cool unguent of time on the hot pustule and dry itch of the soul.

Then at the end of the avenue the neurotic reached the sanatorium, which graciously promised peace beyond the white columns. For the Millett Sanatorium was what is called a rest home. But it had been built more than a century back for vanity and love by a cotton snob to whom money n no object, who had bought near a shipload of shining marble statues in Rome for his avenue, and who had probably had a face like brutally hewed cedar and not a nerve in his body, and now people who were descended from such people, or who had enough money (made in the administration of Grant or Coolidge) to assume that they were descended from such people, brought their twitches, tics, kinks, and running sores out here and rested in the high-ceiling rooms and ate crawfish bisque and were soothed by the voice of a psychiatrist in whose wide, unwavering, brown, liquid, depthless eyes one slowly drowned.

I almost drowned in those eyes during the one-minute interview I had in order to get permission to see Sadie. “She is very difficult,” he said.

Sadie was lying on a chaise longue by a window which gave over a stretch of lawn sloping down to a bayou. Her chopped-off black hair was wild and her face was chalk-white and the afternoon light striking across it made it look more than ever like the plaster-of-Paris mask of Medusa riddled with BB shot. But it was a mask flung down on a pillow and the eyes that looked out of it belonged to the mask. They did not belong to Sadie Burke. There wasn’t anything burning there.

“Hello, Sadie,” I said, “I hope you don’t mind me coming to see you.”

She studied me a moment out of the unburning eyes. “It’s O. K. with me,” she said.

So I sat down and hitched my chair up closer and lighted a cigarette.

“How you getting on?” I asked.

She turned her head in my direction and gave me another long look. For an instant, there was a flicker in the eyes as when a breath of air touches an ember. “Look here,” she said, “I’m getting on all right. Why the hell shouldn’t I be getting on all right?”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“I didn’t come out here because there was anything wrong with me. I came because I was tired. I wanted a rest. That’s what I said to that God-damned doctor. I said, ‘I’m here to get a rest because I’m tired and I don’t want you messing around and trying to swap secrets with me and find out if I ever had any dreams about red fire engines.’ I said, ‘If I ever started swapping secrets with you I’d burn your ears off, but I’m here to rest and I don’t want you in my hair.’ I said, ‘I’m tired of a lot of things and I’m God-damned tired of a lot of people and that goes for you, too, Doc.’ “

She pushed herself up on one arm and looked at me. Then said, “And that goes for you, too, Jack Burden.”

I didn’t say anything to that and I didn’t move. So she sank back down, and into herself.

I let my cigarette burn up my fingers and lighted another one before I said, “Sadie, I reckon I know how you feel and I don’t want to be bringing everything up again, but–”

“You don’t know a thing about how I feel,” she said.

“Some idea–maybe,” I said. “But what I came for was to ask you a question.”

“I thought you came because you were so damned fond of me.”

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I am. We’ve been around a long time together and we always got along. But that’s not–”

“Yeah,” she interrupted, and again thrust herself up on one arm, “everything and everybody just got alone fine. Oh, Jesus, just fine.”

I waited while she sank back and turned her eyes from me across the lawn below toward the bayou. A crow was making its way across the clear air above the tattered cypress tops beyond the bayou. Then the crow was gone, and I said, “Adam Stanton killed the Boss, but he never got that idea by himself. Somebody primed him to do it. Somebody who knew the kind of man Adam was and knew the inside of how he took the job at the medical center and knew–”

She didn’t seem to be listening to me. She was watching the clear air above the tattered cypresses where the crow had gone. I hesitated, and then, watching her face, went on. “–and knew about the Boss and Anne Stanton.”

I waited again and watched her face as I handed those names to her, but it didn’t show a thing. It simply looked tired, tired and not giving a damn.

“I found out one thing,” I continued. “A man called Adam that afternoon and told him about the Boss and his sister. And some more stuff. You can guess what stuff. So he went wild. He went to see his sister and jumped her and she didn’t deny it. She isn’t the kind of person who could deny it. I guess she was sick of having a secret and she was almost glad not to have it any longer and–”

“Yeah,” Sadie said, not turning to me, “tell me how noble and high-tone Anne Stanton is.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and felt the blood flushing my face. “I guess I did get off the point.”

“I guess you did, all right.”

I waited. Then, “That man who called up Adam, do you have any notion who it was?”

She seemed to be turning that question over in her mind. If she had heard it, for I couldn’t be sure.

“Do you?” I asked.

“I don’t have any notion,” she said.

“No?”

“No,” she said, still not looking at me, “and I don’t have to have any. Because, you see, I know.”

“Who?” I demanded. “Who?” And came up out of my chair.

“Duffy,” she said.

“I knew it!” I exclaimed, “I ought to have known it! It had to be.”

“If you knew it,” she said, “what the hell you come messing around me for?”

“I had to be sure. I had to know. Really know. I–” I stopped and stood there at the foot of the chaise longue and looked down at her averted face, which the sunlight lay across. “You say you know it was Duffy. How do you know?”