All the King's Men (42 page)

“You are hearing voices,” I said.

“You get him,” he repeated dourly.

“Boss,” I said, “Adam is an old pal of mine. I know him like a brother. And I know he hates your guts.”

“I’m not asking anybody to love me. Not even you.”

“We all love you,” I mimicked Tiny, “you know how all us boys feel.”

“Get him,” he said.

I stood up, stretched, yawned, moved toward the door. “I am leaving,” I declared. “Tomorrow, when you are in possession of your faculties, I’ll hear what you’ve got to say.”

And I shut the door behind me

Tomorrow, when he was in full possession of his faculties, I heard what he had to say, and it was: “Get Stanton.”

So I went to the shabby little monastic apartment where the grand piano glittered like a sneer in the midst of near-squalor and the books and paper piled on chairs and the old coffee cup with dried dregs inside which the colored girl had forgotten to pick up, and where the friend of my youth received me as though he were not a Success and I were not a Failure (both spelled with capital letters), laid his hand on my shoulder, pronounced my name, looked at me from the ice-water-blue, abstract eyes which were a reproach to all uncertain, twisted, and clouded things and were as unwavering as conscience. But the smile on his face, unsealing almost tentatively the firm suture of the mouth, put a warmth in you, a shy warmth like that you discover with surprise in the winter sunshine in late February. That smile was his apology for being what he was, for looking at you the way he did, for seeing what he saw. It did not so much forgive you, and the world, as ask forgiveness for himself for the crime of looking straight at whatever was before him, which might be you. But he didn’t smile often. He smiled at me not because I was what I was but because I was the Friend of His Youth.

The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does not exist any more, speaks a name–Spike, Bud, Snip, Red, Rusty, Jack, Dave–which belongs to that now nonexistent face but which by some inane and doddering confusion of the universe is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger. But he humors the drooling, doddering confusion of the universe and continues to address politely that dull stranger by the name which properly belongs to the boy face and to the time when the boy voice called thinly across the late afternoon water or murmured by a campfire at night or in the middle of a crowded street said, “Gee, listen to this–’On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble; His forest fleece the Wrekin heaved–’ ” the Friend of Your Youth is your friend because he does not see you any more.

And perhaps he never saw you. What he saw was simply part of the furniture of the wonderful opening world. Friendship was something he suddenly discovered and had to give away as a recognition of and payment for the breathlessly opening world which momently divulged itself like a moonflower. It didn’t matter a damn to whom he gave it, for the fact of giving was what mattered, and if you happened to be handy you were automatically endowed with all the appropriate attributes of a friend and forever after your reality is irrelevant. The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he hasn’t the slightest concern with calculating his interest or your virtue. He doesn’t give a damn, for the moment, about Getting Ahead or Needs Must Admiring the Best, the two official criteria in adult friendships, and when the boring stranger appears, he puts out his hand and smiles (not really seeing your face) and speaks your name (which doesn’t really belong to your face), saying, “Well, Jack, damned glad you came, come on in, boy!”

So I sat in one of his broken-down easy chairs, after he had cleared the books out, and drank his whisky, and waited for the moment when I was going to say, “Now, listen here, I’m going to tell you something and don’t you start yelling till I finish.”

He didn’t yell till I had finished. Not that I took long to finish. I said, “Governor Stark wants you to be director of the new hospital and medical center.”

He didn’t, to be precise, yell then. He didn’t make a sound. He looked at me for nearly a minute, with an unsmiling clinical eye as though my symptoms merit special attention; then he slowly shook his head. “Better think it over,” I said, “maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds, there may be some angles–” But I let my voice trail off, watching him shake his head again and smile now with the smile which did not forgive me but humbly asked me to forgive him for not being like me, for not being like everybody else, for not being like the world.

If he had not smiled. If he had smiled but had smiled a confident, to-hell-with-you, satirical smile. Or even a smile forgiving me. If he had not smiled the smile which humbly, but with dignity, begged me to forgive him, then things might have been different. But he smiled that way out of the fullness of whatever it was he had, out of the depth of the idea he lived by–whatever the hell it was or whyever the hell he lived that way–and things were the way they turned out to be. Giving that smile, he was like a man who stops to give a beggar a buck and in opening his wallet lets the beggar catch sight of the big roll. If the beggar hadn’t seen the big roll he would never have followed the man down the street, waiting for the block without the street lamp. Not so much because he wants the roll as because he now cannot endure the man who has it and gave him a buck.

For as he smiled and said, “But I’m not interested in the angles,” I did not feel that shy warmth as of the winter sunshine which I had always felt before when he smiled, but suddenly felt something else, which I didn’t have a name for but which was like the winter itself and not the winter sunshine, like the stab of an icicle through the heart. And I thought:
All right, you smile like that–you smile like that–
_

So, even as the thought vanished–if a thought can ever be said to vanish, for it rises out of you and sinks back into you–so I said, “But you don’t know what the angles are. For instance, the Boss expects you to write your ticket.”

“The Boss,” he repeated, and on the words his upper lip curled more than customary to expose the teeth, and the sibilance seemed exaggerated, “need to expect to buy me. I have–” he looked about the room at the clutter and near-squalor–”everything I want.”

“The Boss isn’t any fool. You don’t think he was trying to buy you?”

“He couldn’t,” he said.

“What do you think he was trying to do?”

“Threaten me. That would be next.”

“No,” I nodded, “no that. He couldn’t scare you.”

“That is what he seems to depend on. The bribe or the threat.”

“Guess again,” I said.

He rose from his chair, took a couple of restless paces across the frayed green carpet, then swung to face me. “He needn’t think he can flatter me,” he said, fiercely.

“Nobody can flatter you,” I said, softly, “nobody in the world. And do you know why?”

“Why?”

“Listen, pal, there was a man name Dante, who said that the truly proud man knew his own worth could never commit the sin of envy, for he could believe that there was no one for him to envy. He might just as well have said that the proud man who knew his own worth would not be susceptible to flattery, for he would believe that there was nothing anybody else could tell him about his own worth he didn’t know already. No, you couldn’t be flattered.”

“Not by him, anyway,” Adam said grimly.

“Not by anybody,” I said. “And he knows it.”

“What does he try for, then? Does he think I–”

“Guess again,” I said.

He stood there in the middle of the frayed green carpet and stared at me, head slightly lowered, with the slightest shade–not of doubt or perturbation–over the fine abstract blue of the eyes. It was just the shade of question, of puzzlement.

But that is something. Not much, but something. It is not the left to the jaw and it does not rock them on their heels. It does no make the breath come sharp. It is just the tap on the nose, the scrape across with the rough heel of the glove. Nothing lethal, just a moment’s pause. But it is an advantage. Push it.

So I repeated, “Guess again.”

He did not answer, looking at me, with the shade deeper like a cloud passing suddenly over blue water.

“All right,” I said, “I’ll tell you. He knows you are the best around, but you don’t cash in on it. So obviously, you don’t want money, or you would charge folks something like the others in the trade or would hang on to what you do take. You don’t want fun, or you would get some, for you are famous, relatively young, and not crippled. You don’t want comfort, or you would quit working yourself like a navvy and wouldn’t live in this slum. But he knows what you want.”

“I don’t want anything he can give me,” Adam affirmed.

“Are you sure, Adam?” I said. “Are you sure?”

“Damn it–” he began, and the blood was up in his cheeks.

“He knows what you want,” I cut in. “I can put it in a word, Adam.”

“What?”

“You want to do good,” I said.

That stopped him. His mouth was open like a fish’s gaping for air.

“Sure,” I said, “that’s it. He knows your secret.”

“I don’t see what–” he began, fiercely again.

But I cut in, saying, “Easy now, it’s no disgrace. It’s just eccentric. That you can’t see somebody sick without having to put your hands on him. That you can’t see something rotten inside him without wanting to take a knife in your strong, white, and damned welleducated fingers, pal, and cut it out. It is merely eccentric, pal. Or maybe it is a kind of supersickness you’ve got yourself.”

“There’s a hell of a lot of sick people,” he said glumly, “but I don’t see–”

“Pain is evil,” I said, cheerfully.

“Pain is
an
_ evil,” he said, “but it is not evil–it is not evil in itself,” and took a step toward me, looking at me like an enemy.

“That’s the kind of question I don’t debate when I’ve got the toothache,” I retorted, “but the fact remains that you are the way you are. And the Boss–” I delicately emphasized the word
Boss
_–”knows it. He knows what you want. He knows your weakness, pal. You want to do good, and he is going to let you do good in wholesale lots.”

“Good,” he said, wolfishly, and twisted his long, thin upper lip, “good–that’s a hell of a word to use around where he is.”

“Is it?” I asked casually.

“A thing does not grow except in its proper climate, and you know what kind of a climate that man creates. Or ought to know.”

I shrugged. “A thing is good in itself–if it is good. A guy gets ants in his pants and writes a sonnet. Is the sonnet less of a good–if it good, which I doubt–because the dame he got the ants over happened to be married to somebody else, so that his passion, as they say, was illicit? Is the rose less of a rose because–”

“You are completely irrelevant,” he said.

“So I am irrelevant,” I said, and got out of the chair. “That’s what you always used to say when I got in a corner in an argument a thousand years ago when we were boys and argued all night. Could a first-class boxer whip a first-class wrestler? Could a lion whip a tiger? Is Keats better than Shelley? The good, the true, and the beautiful. Is there A God? We argued all night and I always won, but you–you bastard–” and I slapped him on the shoulder–”you always said I was irrelevant. But little Jackie is never irrelevant. Nor is he immaterial, and–” I looked around, scooped up my hat and coat–”I am going to leave you with that thought and–”

“A hell of a thought it is,” he said, but he was grinning now, he was my pal now, he was the Friend of My Youth.

But I ignored him anyway, saying–”You can’t say I don’t put the cards on the table, me and the Boss, but I’m hauling out, for I catch the midnight to Memphis, where I am going to interview a medium.”

“A medium?” he echoed.

“An accomplished medium maned Miss Littlepaugh, and she is going to give me word from the Other Shore that the Boss’s hospital is going to have a dark, handsome, famous, son-of-a-bitch of a director named Stanton.” And with that I slammed his door and was running and stumbling down the dark stairs, for it was the kind of apartment house where the bulb burns out and nobody ever puts a new one in and there is always a kiddie car left on a landing and the carpet is worn to ribbons and the air smells dankly of dogs, diapers, cabbage, old women, burnt grease, and the eternal fate of man.

I stood in the dark street and looked back at the building. The shade of a window was up and I looked in where a heavy, bald man in shirt sleeves sat at a table in what is called a “dinette” and slumped above a plate like a sack propped in a chair, while a child stood at his elbow, plucking at him, and a woman in a slack colorless dress and hair stringing down brought a steaming saucepan from the stove, for Poppa had come home late as usual with his bunion hurting, and the rent was past due and Johnnie needed shoes and Susie’s report card wasn’t any good and Susie stood at his elbow, plucking at him feebly, and staring at him with her imbecilic eyes and breathing through her adenoids, and the Maxfield Parrish picture was askew on the wall with its blues all having the savage tint of copper sulphate in the glaring light from the unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling. And somewhere else in the building a dog barked, somewhere else a baby was crying in automatic gasps. And that was Life and Adam Stanton lived in the middle of it, as close as he could get to it; he snuggled up to Life, breathing the cabbage smell, stumbling on the kiddie car, bowing to the young just-married, gum-chewing, hand-holding couple in the hall, hearing through the thin partition the sounds made by the old woman who would be dead (it was cancer he had told me) before summer, pacing the frayed green carpet among the books and broken-down chairs. He snuggled up to Life, to keep warm perhaps, for he didn’t have any life of his own–just the office, the knife, the monastic room. Or perhaps he didn’t snuggle to keep warm. Perhaps he leaned over Life with his hand on the pulse, watching from the deep-set, abstract, blue clinical eyes, slightly shadowed, leaning ready to pop in the pill, pour the potion, apply the knife. Perhaps he had to be close in order to keep a reason for the things he did. To make the things he did be themselves Life. And not merely a delightful exercise of technical skill which man had been able to achieve because he, of all the animals, had a fine thumb.