All the King's Men (21 page)

The furniture changed, but the people in it changed too. Way back, there had been the thick-set, strong man, not tall, with a shock of tangled black hair on his head and steel-rimmed glasses on his nose and a habit of buttoning his vest up wrong, and a big gold watch-chain, which I liked to pull at. Then he wasn’t there, and my mother pressed my head against her breast and said, “Your Daddy isn’t coming back any more, Son.”

“Why did he go away?”

“Because he didn’t love Mother. That’s why he went away.”

“I love you, Mother,” I said, “I’ll love you always.”

“Yes, Son, yes, you love your mother,” she said, and held me tight against her breast.

So the Scholarly Attorney was gone. I was about six years old then.

Then there was the Tycoon, who was gaunt and bald and wheezed on the stair. “Why does Daddy Ross puff going upstairs?” I said.

“Hush,” my mother said, “hush, Son.”

“Why, Mother?”

“Because Daddy Ross isn’t well, Son.”

Then The Tycoon was dead. He had not lasted long.

So my mother put me in a school in Connecticut and left me to go across the ocean. When she came back there was another man, who was tall and slender and wore white suits and smoked long thin cigars, and had a thin black mustache. He was the Count, and my mother was a Countess. The Count sat in the room with people and smiled a great deal and didn’t say much. People looked sideways at him, but he looked straight at them and smiled to show the whitest teeth in the world under the thin, accurate black mustache. When nobody was there he played the piano all day, and then went out wearing black boots and tight white trousers and rode a horse and made it jump over gates and gallop along the beach till its sides were flecked with lather and were pumping fit to die. The Count came into the house and drank
wis-kee
_ and held a Persian cat on his knee and stroked it with a hand which was not big but which was so strong that he could make men frown when he shook hands with them. And once I saw four blue-black parallel marks on my mother’s upper right arm. “Mother,” I said, “look! What happened?”

“Nothing,” she said, “I just hurt myself.” And she pulled the scarf down over her arm.

The Count’s name was Covelli. People said, “That Count fellow is a son-of-a-bitch, but he can evermore ride a horse.”

Then he was gone. I was sorry, for I had liked the Count. I had liked to watch him ride a horse.

Then there was quite a while when there was nobody.

Then there was the Young Executive, who had been a Young Executive from the day his mother gave the last push and would be a Young Executive until the day they drained out the blood and pumped in the embalming fluid. But that would be a long time off, because he was just forty-four, and sitting at the desk at the oil company where he earned the pin money to supplement his allowance wasn’t breaking him down fast.

Well, I’d sat in that room with all of them, the Scholarly Attorney and the Tycoon and the Count and the Young Executive, and had watched the furniture changed. So now I sat and looked at Theodore and at the new Sheraton break-front desk, and wondered how permanent they were.

I had come home. I was the thing that always came back It kept on raining that night. I lay in a big fine old family bed, which had come from somebody else’s family (a long time ago there had been a white iron bed in my room standing on the floor matting, and the big fine old mahogany Burden family bed, which hadn’t been fine enough and which was now in the attic, had been in my mother’s room) and listened to the rain hiss on the live-oak and magnolia leaves. In the morning it had stopped raining, and there was sun. I went out and saw the thin pools of water standing on the background, like sheets of isinglass. Around the japonicas, the white and red and coral petals, which had been shattered from the blossoms, floated on the blackly gleaming pools. Some of them floated with the curled edges upward, like boats, and around them other petals floated upside down or had shipped water, making a gay carnage as though a battleship had fired a couple of salvos into a fleet of carnival barges and gondolas in some giddy, happy, far-off land.

There was a massive japonica tree by the steps. I leaned over to scoop up some petals in my hand, and walked down the curving drive to the gate. I stood there, pressing the petals in the palm and looking out at the bay, which was very bright beyond the strip of whitish sand streaked with drift.

But before noon it began to rain again, a long drizzle and drip from the spongy sky that lasted two days. That afternoon, and the next morning, and the next afternoon, I put on a raincoat belonging to the Young Executive and walked in the drizzle. Not that I was a walker who just has to have his lungs flushed out with ozone. But walking seemed the thing to do. The first afternoon I walked down the beach, past the Stanton place, which was cold and hollow-looking beyond the dripping leaves, and on out to the Irwin place, where Judge Irwin put me in a chair with my heels to the fire and opened a bottle of his choice old Maryland rye to give a drink, and invited me to dinner the next night. But I took a drink and left, and walked on where there weren’t any more houses, just brush and oak tangles with here and there a pine rising, and occasionally an open patch of ground with a gray shack.

And the next day I walked up the bay, through the streets of the town, and on beyond till I came to the little half-moon-shaped cove off the bay, where the pine grove came down close to the white sand. I walked just under the shelter of the pines, my heels deep in the needles, then I came out on the sand. There was a place where a half-charred log lay, very black with the wetness and around it the sudden ashes and black butts of driftwood, blacker for the white sand. People still came here for picnics. Well, I had come here for picnics, too. I knew what picnics were like.

I knew what a picnic was like, all right.

Anne and Adam and I had come here years before when we were kids, but it was not raining that day. Not till the end. It was very hot and very still. You could look down the bay, beyond the cove, toward the Gulf, and see the water lifting up into the light as though the horizon had ceased to exist. We swam, and ate our lunch, lying on the sand, then fished some more. But we didn’t have any luck. By that time clouds had begun to pile, working in over the whole sky, except toward the west, beyond the pines, where the light struck through the break. The water was very still, and suddenly dark with the darkness of the sky, and away across the bay the line of woods looked black now, not green, above the whiteness of the line which was the beach way over there. A boat, a catboat, was becalmed over in that direction, nearly a mile away, and under the sky and over the dark water and against the black line of the woods, you never saw anything so heartbreakingly white as the sharp sail.

“He better get in,” Adam said. “It’s going to blow.”

“Not quick,” Anne said, “let’s swim again.”

“Better not.” Adam hesitated and looked off at the sky.

“Let’s,” she insisted and pulled at his arm. He didn’t respond, still scanning the sky. All at once she dropped his arm and laughed and began to run toward the water. She didn’t run directly to the water, but up the beach, toward a little spit, with her bobbed hair back loose on the air. I watched her run. She ran with her arms not quite outspread, crooked at the elbows, and with a motion of her legs which was graceful and free, and somehow awkward at the same time, as though she hadn’t quite forgotten one kind of running, the child’s running, and hadn’t quite learned another kind of running, the woman’s running. The legs seemed to be hung too loose, somewhat uncertainly, from the little hips, which weren’t quite rounded yet. I watched her and noticed that her legs were long. Which I had never noticed before.

It wasn’t a noise, but instead, a stillness that made me turn suddenly to Adam. He was staring at me. When I met his eyes, his face flushed, and he jerked his eyes off me, as though embarrassed. Then he said, “I’ll race you,” huskily, and ran after her. I ran too, and his feet threw the sand back at me.

Anne was out in the water swimming now. Adam plunged in after her and swam hard and straight, outdistancing me. He was a wonderful swimmer. He hadn’t wanted to swim but now he would swim straight out, hard and fast.

I came up to Anne, and slowed down, and said, “Hello.” She lifted her head high for an instant, with the gracile motion a seal has, and smiled, and curled over forward in a clean surface dive. Her sharp small heels, side by side, flickered for a second above the water, then drew under. I caught up with her, and she did it again. Every time I caught up with her she would lift her head, and smile, and dive again. The fifth time I caught up, she didn’t dive. She rolled over with a light, lounging twist of her body, and floated on her back, looking up at the sky, her arms spread wide. So I turned over, too, and floated, about five or six feet from her, and looked at the sky.

The sky was darker now, with a purplish, greenish cast. The color of a turning grape. But it still looked high, with worlds of air under it. A gull crossed, very high, directly above me. Against the sky it was whiter even than the sail had been. It passed clear across all the sky I could see. I wondered if Anne had seen the gull. When I looked at her, her eyes were closed. Her arms were still spread out wide, and her hair wavered out free on the water from around her head. Her head was far back, her chin lifted. Her face looked very smooth as though she were asleep. As I lay in the water, I could see her profile sharp against the far-off black trees.

All at once, she turned, in the direction away from me, as though I hadn’t been there, and began to swim in. She swam with a slow stroke now that seemed retarded and yet effortless. Her thin arms rose and sank with a languid and bemused and fastidious punctuality, like your own effortless motion in a dream.

Before we got to the beach, the rain had begun, big, spaced, heavy, independent drops that prickled the yet glossy surface of the water. Then it was a driving gust of rain, and the surface of the water was gone.

We rose out of the water and stood on the sand, with the rain whipping our skin, and looked out at Adam, who was coming in. He still had a long way to come. Down the bay beyond him, to the south, the lightening kept forking out of the dark sky, with steady thunder. Now and then Adam seemed, for a moment, to be lost in a driving sheet of rain which would rake over the water. Watching him, Anne stood there with her head bowed forward a little, almost pensively, and her shoulders hunched and her arms crossed over her insignificant breasts, hugging herself as though she were just about to shiver, and her knees tight together and slightly bent.

Adam came in, we gathered up our stuff, put on our sopping sandals, and passed through the pine grove, where the black masses heaved above us and the boughs made a stridor which you caught now and then coming out of the roar. We reached our car and went home. That summer I was seventeen, Adam was about my age, and Anne was four years younger, or about that. That was back before the World War, or rather, we before we got into it.

That was a picnic I never forgot.

I suppose that that day I first saw Anne and Adam as separate individual people, whose ways of acting were special, mysterious, and important. And perhaps, too, that day I first saw myself as a person. But that is not what I am talking about. What happened was this: I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true imagines in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind that become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters.

The image I got in my head that day was the image of her face lying in the water, very smooth, with the eyes closed, under the dark greenish-purple sky, with the white gull passing over.

This is not to say that I fell in love with Anne that day. She was a kid then. That came later. But the image would have been there if I had never fallen in love with her, or had never seen her again, or had grown to detest her. There were times afterwards when I was not in love with Anne. Anne told me she wouldn’t marry me, and after a while I married Lois who was a better-looking girl than Anne, the kind they turn around on the street to see, and I was in love with Lois. But the image was there all the time, growing brighter as the veils were withdrawn and making the promise of a greater brightness.

So when I stepped out of the pine grove, that drizzly early spring afternoon a long time afterward, and saw the charred log on the white sand where a picnic had been, I remembered the picnic back in the summer of 1915, the last picnic we had before I left home to go to college.

I wasn’t going such a hell of a long way to college. Just up to the State University.

“Oh, Son,” my mother said, “why don’t you be sensible and go to Harvard or Princeton.” For a woman out of the scrub country of Arkansas, my mother had certainly learned a lot that time about our better educational institutions. “Or even Williams,” she said. “They say it’s a nice refined place.”

“I went to school where you wanted,” I said, “and it was sure refined.”

“Or even Virginia,” she went on, looking brightly at my face and not hearing a word I said. “Your father went to the University of Virginia.”

“That shouldn’t be such a bib recommendation to you,” I said, and I thought how smart I was to get that one off. I had got in the habit in arguments with her of making some reference to his leaving.

But she didn’t hear that, either. She just went on, “If you were East, then it would be easier for you to come over for the summer and see me.”