All the King's Men (76 page)

Yes, Lucy, you have to believe that. You have to believe that to live. I know that you must believe that. And I would not have you believe otherwise. It must be that way, and I understand the fact. For you see, Lucy. I must believe that, too. I must believe that Willie Stark was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn’t anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must believe that.

Because I came to believe that, I came back to Burden’s Landing. I did not come to believe it at the moment when I watched Sugar-Boy mount the stairs from the basement hall of the public library or when Lucy Stark stood before me in the hall of the little paint-peeling white house in the country. But because of those things–and of all the other things which had happened–I came, in the end, to believe that. And believing that Willie Stark was a great man, I could think better of all other people, and of myself. At the same time that I could more surely condemn myself.

I came back to Burden’s Landing in early summer, at the request of my mother. She telephoned me one night and said, “Son, I want you to come here. As soon as you can. Can you come tomorrow?”

When I asked her what she wanted, for I still did not want to go back, she refused to answer me directly. She said she would tell me when I came.

So I went.

She was waiting for me on the gallery when I drove up late the next afternoon. We went around to the screened side gallery and had a drink. She wasn’t talking much, and I didn’t rush her.

When by near seven o’clock the Young Executive hadn’t turned up, I asked her was he coming to dinner.

She shook her head. “Where is he?” I asked.

She turned her empty glass in her hand, lightly clinking the ice left there. Then she said, “I don’t know.”

“On a trip?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered, clinking the ice. Then she turned to me. “He has been gone five days,” she said. “He won’t come back until I have gone. You see–” she set the glass down on the table beside her with an air of finality–”I am leaving him.”

“Well,” I breathed, “I’m damned.”

She continued to look at me, as though expecting something. What, I didn’t know.

“Well, I’m damned,” I said, still fumbling with the fact which she had presented to me.

“Are you surprised?” she asked me, leaning a little toward me in her chair.

“Sure, I’m surprised.”

She examined me intently, and I could detect a curious shifting and shading of feelings on her face, too evanescent and ambiguous for definition.

“Sure, I’m surprised,” I repeated.

“Oh,” she said, and sank back in her chair, sinking back like somebody who has fallen into deep water and clutches for a rope and seizes it and hangs on a moment and lose the grip and tries again and doesn’t make it and knows it’s no use to try again. There wasn’t anything ambiguous now about her face. It was like what I said. She had missed her grip.

She turned her face away from me, out toward the bay, as though she didn’t want me to see what was on it. Then she said, “I thought–I thought maybe you wouldn’t be surprised.”

I couldn’t tell her why I or anybody else would be surprised. I couldn’t tell her that when a woman as old as she was getting to be had her hooks in a man not much more than forty years old and not wind-broke it was surprising if she didn’t hang on. Even if the woman had money and the man was as big a horse’s-ass as the Young Executive. I couldn’t tell her that, and so I didn’t say anything.

She kept on looking out to the bay. “I thought,” she said, hesitated, and resumed, “I thought maybe you’d understand why, Jack.”

“Well, I don’t,” I replied.

She held off awhile, then began again. “It happened last year. I knew when it happened.–Oh, I knew it would be like this.”

“When what happened?”

“When you–when you–” Then she stopped, and corrected what she had been about to say. “When Monty–died.”

And she sung back toward me and on her face was a kind of wild appeal. She was making another grab for that rope. “Oh, Jack,” she said, “Jack, it was Monty–don’t you see?–it was Monty.”

I reckoned that I saw, and I said so. I remembered the silvery, pure scream which had jerked me out into the hall that afternoon of Judge Irwin’s death, and the face of my mother as she lay on the bed later with the knowledge sinking into her.

“It was Monty,” she was saying. “It was always Monty. I didn’t really know it. There hadn’t been–been anything between us for a long time. But it was always Monty. I knew it when he was dead. I didn’t want to know it but I knew it. And I couldn’t go on. There came a time I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t.”

She rose abruptly from her chair, like something jerked up by a string.

“I couldn’t,” she said. “Because everything was a mess. Everything has always been a mess.” Her hands twisted and tore the handkerchief she held before her at the level of her waist. “Oh, Jack,” she cried out, “it had always been a mess.”

She flung down the shredded handkerchief and ran off the gallery. I heard the sound of her heels on the floor inside, but it wasn’t the old bright, spirited tattoo. It was a kind of desperate, slovenly clatter, suddenly muted on the rug.

I waited on the gallery for a while. Then I went back to the kitchen. “My mother isn’t feeling very well,” I told the cook. “You or Jo-Belle might go up a little later and see if she will take some broth and egg or something like that.”

Then I went back into the dining room and sat down in the candlelight and they brought me the food and I ate some of it.

After dinner Jo-Belle came to tell me that she had carried a tray up to my mother’s room but she wouldn’t take it. She hadn’t even opened the door at the knock. She had just called to say she didn’t want anything.

I sat on the gallery a long time while the sounds died out back in the kitchen. Then the light went out back there. The rectangle of green in the middle of blackness where the light of the window fell on the grass was suddenly black, too.

After a while I went upstairs and stood outside the door of my mother’s room. Once or twice I almost knock to go in. But I decided that even if I went in, there wouldn’t be anything to say. There isn’t ever anything to say to somebody who has found out the truth about himself, whether it is good or bad.

So I went back down and stood in the garden among the black magnolia trees and the myrtles, and thought how by killing my father I had saved my mother’s soul. Then I thought how all knowledge that is worth anything is maybe paid for by blood. Maybe that is the only way you can tell that a certain piece of knowledge is worth anything: it has cost some blood.

My mother left the next day. She was going to Reno. I drove her down to the station, and arranged all her nice, slick matched bags and valises and cases and hatboxes in a nice row on the cement of the platform to wait for the train. The day was hot and bright, and the cement was hot and gritty under our feet as we stood there in that vacuity which belongs to the period just before parting at a railway station.

We stood there quite a while, looking up the track for the first smudge of smoke on the heat-tingling horizon beyond the tide flat and the clumps of pines. Then my mother suddenly said. “Jack, I want to tell you something.”

“Yes?”

“I am letting Theodore have the house.”

That took me so by surprise I couldn’t say anything. I thought of all the years she ahd been cramming the place with furniture and silver and glass till it was a museum and she was God’ gift to the antique dealers of New Orleans, New York, and London. I was surprised anything could pry her loose from it.

“You see,” she said, hurrying on in the tone of explanation, misreading my silence, “it isn’t really Theodore’s fault and you know how crazy he is about the place and about living on the Row and all that. And I didn’t think you’d want it. You see–I thought–I thought you had Monty’s place and if you ever Lived at the Landing you’d prefer that because–because–”

“Because he was my father,” I finished for her, a little grimly.

“Yes,” she said, simply. “Because he was your father. So I decided to–”

“Damn it,” I burst out, “it is your house and you can do whatever you want to with it. I wouldn’t have it. As soon as I get my bag out of there this afternoon I’ll never set foot in it again, and that is a fact. I don’t want it and I don’t care what you do with it or with your money. I don’t want that either. I’ve always told you that.”

“There won’t be any too much money to worry about,” she said. “You know what the last six or seven years have been like.”

“You aren’t broke?” I asked. “Look here, if you’re broke, I’ll–”

“I’m not broke,” she said. “I’ll have enough to get on with. If I go somewhere quiet and am careful. At first I thought I might go to Europe, then I–”

“You better stay out of Europe,” I said. “All hell is going to break loose over there and not long either.”

“Oh, I’m not going. I’m going to some quiet, cheap place. I don’t know where. I’ll have to think.”

“Well,” I said, “don’t worry about me and the house. You can be plenty sure I’ll never set foot in it again.”

She looked up the tracks, east, where there wasn’t any smoke yet beyond the pines and the tidelands. She mused for a couple of minute on the emptiness off there. Then said, as though just picking up my own words. “I ought never set foot in it. I married and I came to it and he was a good man. But I ought to have stayed where I was. I ought never come.”

I couldn’t very well argue that point with her one way or the other, and so I kept quiet.

But as she stood there in the silence, she seemed to be arguing it with herself, for suddenly she lifted up her head and looked straight at me and said, “Well, I did it. And now I know.” And she squared her trim shoulders under her trim blue linen suit and held her face up in the old way like it was a damned expensive present she was making to the world and the world had better appreciate it.

Well, she knew now. As she stood there on the hot cement in the dazzle, she seemed to be musing on what she knew.

But it was on what she didn’t know. For after a while she turned to me and said, “Son, tell me something.”

“What?”

“It’s something I’ve got to know, Son.”

“What is it?”

“When–when it happened–when you went to see Monty–”

That was it. I knew that was it. And in the midst of the dazzle and the heat shimmering off the cement, I was cold as ice and my nerves crawled cold inside me.

“–did he–was there–” she was looking away from me.

“You mean,” I said, “Had he got into a jam and had to shoot himself? Is that it?”

She nodded, then looked straight at me and waited for what was coming.

I looked into her face and studied. The light wasn’t any too kind to it. Light would never be kind to it again. But she held it up and looked straight at me and waited.

“No,” I said, “he wasn’t in any jam. We had a little argument about politics. Nothing serious. But he talked about his health. About feeling bad. That was it. He said good-bye to me. I can see now he meant it as the real thing. That was all.”

She sagged a little. She didn’t have to brace up so stiff any longer.

“Is that the truth?” she demanded.

“Yes,” I said. “I swear to God it is.”

“Oh,” she said softly and let her breath escape in an almost soundless sigh.

So we waited again. There wasn’t anything else to say. She had finally, at the last minute, asked what she had been waiting to ask and had been afraid to ask all the time.

Then, after a while, there was the smoke on the horizon. Then we could see, far off, the black smoke moving toward us along the edge of the bright water. Then with the great grinding and tramping and hissing and the wreaths of steam, the engine had pulled past us to a stop. A white-coated porter began to gather up the nice matched bags and boxes.

My mother turned to me and took me by the arm. “Good-bye, Son,” she said.

“Good-bye,” I said.

She stepped toward me and I put my arm around her.

“Write to me, Son,” she said. “Write to me. You are all I’ve got.”

I nodded. “Let me know how you make out,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “yes.”

Then I kissed her good-bye, and as I did so I saw the conductor who was beyond her look at his watch and flick it into his pocket with that contemptuous motion a conductor on a crack train has when he is getting ready to wind up the ninety-second stop at a hick town. I knew he was that very instant going to call, “All aboard!” But it seemed a long time coming. It was like looking at a man across a wide valley and seeing the puff of smoke from his gun and then waiting God knows how long for the tiny report, or like seeing the lightning way off and waiting for the thunder. I stood there with my arm around my mother’s shoulder and her cheek against mine (her cheek was wet, I discovered) and waited for the conductor to call, “All aboard!”

Then it came, and she stepped back from me and mounted the steps and turned to wave as the train drew away and the porter slammed the vestibule door.

I looked after the dwindling train was carrying my mother away until it was nothing but the smudge of smoke to the west, and thought how I had lied to her. Well, I had given that lie to her as a going-away present. Or a kind of wedding present, I thought.

Then I thought how maybe I had lied just to cover up myself.

“Damn it,” I said out loud, savagely, “it wasn’t for me, it wasn’t.”

And that was true. It was really true.

I had given my mother a present, which was a lie. But in return she had given me a present, too, which was truth. She gave me a new picture of herself, and that meant, in the end, a new picture of the world. Or rather, the new picture of herself filled in the blank space which was perhaps the center of the new picture of the world which had been given to me by many people, by Sadie Burke, Lucy Stark, Willie Stark, Sugar-Boy, Adam Stanton. And that meant that my mother gave me back the past. I could now accept the past which I had before felt was tainted and horrible. I could accept the past now because I could accept her and be at peace with her and with myself.