All the King's Men (75 page)

“I’m sorry.”

“Y-y-you know h-h-how I feel, and y-y-you oughtn’t d-d-done me like that.”

“I know how you feel,” I said. “And I’m sorry. I really am.”

“F-f-ferget it,” he said. He stood there, seeming smaller than before, slumped and forlorn as though he were a doll that had lost some of his sawdust.

I studied him. Then I said, as much to myself as him, I suppose, “You really would have done it.”

“It w-w-was the B-B-Boss,” he said.

“Even if they’d hang you.”

“They w-w-wasn’t n-n-nobody like the B-B-Boss. And they k-k-killed him. They h-h-had to go and k-k-kill him.”

He shuffled his feet on the cement floor and looked down at them. “He could t-t-talk so good,” he half-mumbled with his stuttering. “The B-B-Boss could. Couldn’t nobody t-t-talk like him. When he m-m-made a speech and ev-ev-everybody y-y-yelled, it looked l-l-like something was gonna b-b-bust inside y-y-you.” He touched his chest with his hand to indicate where something looked like it might bust inside you. Then he looked questioningly at me.

“Sure,” I agreed, “he was a great talker.”

We stood there for half minute more without anything to say to each other. He looked at me and then down at his feet. Then back at me, and said, “W-w-well, I reckon I’ll b-b-be getting on.”

He put out one of his hands to me and I took it and gave it a shake.

“Well, good luck,” I said.

And he went up the stairs, bending his knees excessively for the stairs, for his legs were stumpy. When he used to drive the big black Cadillac he always had a couple of flat cushions–the kind you take with you on picnics or in a canoe–to prop behind him so he could properly work the clutch and break pedals.

So that was the last I saw of Sugar-Boy. He had been born over in Irish Town. He had been the runt the big boys shoved around in the vacant lot. They had played baseball, but he hadn’t been good enough to play. “Hey, Sawed-Off,” they’d say, “go git me that bat.” Or, “Hey, Sawed-Off, go git me a coke.” And he had gone to get the bat or the coke. Or they’d say, “Aw, dry up, Mush-Mouth, write me a letter.” And he had dried up. But somehow, sometimes, he had learned what he could do. Those stubby arms could flip the steering wheel of a car as clean as a bee martin whips around the corner of a barn. Those pale-blue eyes, which didn’t have any depth, could look down the barrel of a.38 and see, really see for one frozen and apocalyptic instant, what was over yonder. So he had found himself one day in the big black Cadillac with a couple of tons of expensive machinery pulsing under his fingers and the blue-steel.38 riding in the dark under his left armpit like a tumor. And the Boss was by his side, who could talk so good.

“Well, good look,” I had said to him, but I knew what his luck would be. Some morning I would pick up the paper and see that a certain Robert (or it was Roger?) O’Sheean had been killed in an automobile crash. Or had been shot to death by unidentified assailants while he sat in the shadow outside the Love-Me-and-Leave-Me roadhouse and gambling hell operated by his employer. Or had that morning walked unassisted to the scaffold as a result of having been quicker on the draw than a policeman named, no doubt, Murphy. Or perhaps that was romantic. Perhaps he would live forever and outlive everything and his nerve would go (likker, dope, or just plain time) and he would sit, morning after morning while the gray winter rain sluiced down the high windows, in the newspaper room of the public library, a scrawny bald little old man in greasy, tattered clothes bent over a picture magazine.

So perhaps I hadn’t done Sugar-Boy any favor after all in not telling him about Duffy and the Boss and allowing him to whang straight to his mark and be finished like a bullet when it strikes in.. Perhaps I had robbed Sugar-Boy of the one thing which he had earned out of the years he had lived and which was truly himself, and everything else to come after, no matter what it was, would be waste and accident and the sour and stinking curdle of truth like what you find in the half-full bottle of milk you had left in the ice-box when you went away for your six-week vacation.

Or perhaps Sugar-Boy had had something of which he could never be robbed.

I stood there in the hall after Sugar-Boy had gone, breathing the odor of old paper and disinfectant, and turning these thoughts over in my mind. Then I went back into the newspaper room and sat down and bent over a picture magazine.

It was February when I saw Sugar-Boy in the library. I continued with the way of life which I had adopted, still hugging the aimlessness and the anonymity about me like a blanket. But there was a difference now, in my own mind if not in the circumstances of my life. And in the end, months later, in May, in fact, the difference which my meeting with Sugar-Boy had made in my mind sent me to see Lucy Stark. Now, at least, I can see that such was the case.

I telephoned her out at the farm where she was still staying. She sounded all right on the phone. And she asked me to come out.

So I was back in the parlor in the little white house, among the black-walnut furniture upholstered in red plush, looking down at the flowers in the carpet. Nothing had changed in that room for a long time, or would change for a long time. But Lucy had changed a little. She was fleshier now, with a more positive gray in her hair. She was more like the woman the house had reminded me of the first time I had seen it–a respectable, middle-aged woman, in a clean gray gingham dress, with white stockings and black kid shoes, sitting in her rocker on the porch, with her hands folded across her stomach to take a little ease now the day’s work is done and the menfolks are still in the fields and it’s not yet time to think about supper or strain the evening milk. She wasn’t that woman yet, but give her six or seven more years and she would be.

I sat there with my eyes on a flower in the carpet, or I looked up at her and then again at the flower, and her own glance strayed about the room in that abstracted way a good housewife has of looking around to surprise a speck of dust in the act. We were saying things to each other all the while, but they were strained and difficult things, completely empty.

You meet somebody at the seashore on a vacation and have a wonderful time together. Or in a corner at a party, while the glasses clink and somebody beats on a piano, you talk with a stranger whose mind seems to whet and sharpen your own and with whom a wonderful new vista of ideas is spied.. Or you share some intense or painful experience with somebody, and discover a deep communion. Then afterward you are sure that when you meet again, the gay companion will give you the old gaiety, the brilliant stranger will stir your mind from its torpor, the sympathetic friend will solace you with the old communion of spirit. But something happens, or almost always happens, to the gaiety, the brilliance, the communion. You remember the individual words from the old language you spoke together, but you have forgotten the grammar. You remember the steps of the dance, but the music isn’t playing any more. So there you are.

So there we sat for a while, and the minutes sifted and wavered down around us, one by one, like leaves dropping in still autumn air. Then, after a space of silence, she excused herself and I was left alone to watch the leaves drift down.

But she came back, carrying now a tray on which was a pitcher of iced tea, two glasses with sprigs of mint stuck in them, and a large devil’s-food cake. That is what they give you in the country in a little white house like that when you make a visit, iced tea and devil’s-food cake. She had made the cake that morning, no doubt, in preparation for my visit.

Well, eating the cake would be something to do. Nobody expects you to talk with your mouth full of cake.

In the end, however, she said something. Perhaps having the cake on the table beside her, seeing somebody eat her cake, which she knew was a good cake, as people had sat on Sunday afternoons and eaten cake in that room for years, made it possible for her to say something.

She said, “You knew Tom was dead.”

She said it perfectly matter-of-factly, and that was a comfort.

“Yes,” I replied, “I knew it.”

I had seen it in the paper, back in February. I hadn’t gone to the funeral. I figured I had been to enough funerals. And I hadn’t written her a letter. I couldn’t very well write a letter and say I was sorry, and I couldn’t very well write her a letter of congratulations.

“It was pneumonia,” she said.

I remembered Adam’s saying that that was what often got such cases.

“He died very quickly,” she continued. “Just three days.”

“Yes,” I said.

She was silent for a moment, then said, “I am resigned now. I am resigned to it all now, Jack. A time comes when you think you cannot bear another thing, but it happens to you, and you can bear it. I am resigned now, by God’s help.”

I didn’t make any answer.

“Then after I was resigned, God gave me something so I could live.”

I murmured something inarticulate.

She rose abruptly from her chair, and thinking I was being dismissed, I rose, too, clumsily, and started to say something by way of a good-bye. I was ready and anxious to go. I had been a fool to come. But she reached to touch my sleeve, and said, “I want to show you something.” She moved away, toward the door. “Come with me,” she said.

I followed her into the little hall, down it, and into a back room. She went across the room briskly. I didn’t take it in at first, but there by the window was a crib and in the crib was a baby.

She was standing on the far side of the crib looking across at me at the instant when I really saw what was there. I guess my face was a study. Anyway, she said, “It’s Tom’s baby. It’s my little grandbaby. It’s Tom’s baby.”

She leaned over the crib, touching the baby here and there the way women do. Then she picked it up, holding it up with one hand behind its head to prop the head. She joggled it slightly and looked directly in its face. The baby’s mouth opened in a yawn, and its eyes squinched and unsquinched, and then with the joggling and clucking it was getting it gave a moist and pink and toothless smile, like an advertisement. Lucy Stark’s face had exactly the kind of expression on it which you would expect, and that expression said everything there was to say on the subject in hand.

She came around the crib, holding the baby up for my inspection.

“It’s a pretty baby,” I said, and put out a forefinger for the baby to clutch, the way you are supposed to do.

“It looks like Tom,” she said. “Don’t you think so?”

Then before I could get an answer ready that wouldn’t be too horrendous a lie, she went on. “But that’s silly to ask you. You wouldn’t know. I mean he looks like Tom when he was a baby.” She paused to inspect the baby again. “It looks like Tom,” she said, more to herself than to me. Then she looked directly at me. “I know it’s Tom’s,” she declared fiercely to me, “it’s got to be Tom’s, it looks like him.”

I looked critically at the baby, and nodded. “It favors him, all right,” I agreed.

“To think,” she said, “there was a time I prayed to God it wasn’t Tom’s baby. So an injustice wouldn’t be Tom’s.” The baby bounced a little in her arms. It was a husky, good-looking baby, all right. She gave the baby an encouraging jiggle, and then looked back at me. “And now,” she continued, “I have prayed to God that it is Tom’s. And I know now.”

I nodded.

“I knew in my heart,” she said. “And then, do you think that poor girl–the mother–would have given it to me if she hadn’t known it was Tom’s. No matter what that girl did–even what they said–don’t you think a mother would know? She would just know.”

“Yes,” I said.

“But I knew, too. In my heart. So I wrote her a letter. I went to see her, I saw the baby and held him. I persuaded her to let me adopt him.”

“You’ve got it fixed for a legal adoption?” I asked. “So she won’t–” I stopped before I could say, “be bleeding you for years.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, apparently not reading my mind. “I got a lawyer to see her and fix everything. I gave her some money, too. The poor girl wanted to go to California and get away. Willie didn’t have much money–he spent almost everything he made–but I gave her what I could. I gave her six thousand dollars.”

So Sibyl had made a good thing out of it after all, I reflected.

“Don’t you want to hold him?” Lucy asked me in an excess of generosity, thrusting out the expensive baby in my direction.

“Sure,” I said, and took him. I hefted him, while I carefully tried to keep him from falling apart. “How much does he weigh?” I asked, and suddenly realized that I had the tone of a man about to buy something.

“Fifteen pounds and three ounces,” she answered promptly; and added, “that is very good for three months.”

“Sure,” I said, “that’s a lot.”

She relieved me of the baby, gave him a sort of quick snuggle to her bosom, bending her head down so her face was against the baby’s head, and then replaced him in the crib.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

She straightened up and came around to my side of the crib. “At first,” she said, “I thought I’d name him for Tom. I thought that for quite a while. Then it came to me. I would name him for Willie. His name is Willie–Willie Stark.”

She led the way out into the little hall again. We walked up toward the table where my hat lay. Then she turned around and scrutinized my face as though the light weren’t very good in the hall.

“You know,” she said, “I named him for Willie because–”

She was still scrutinizing my face.

“–because,” she continued, “because Willie was a great man.”

I nodded, I suppose.

“Oh, I know he made mistakes,” she said, and lifted up her chin as though facing something, “bad mistakes. Maybe he did bad things, like they say. But inside–in here, deep down–” and she laid her hand to her bosom–”he was a great man.”

She wasn’t bothering with my face any more, with trying to read it. For the moment, she wasn’t bothering with me. I might as well not have been there.

“He was a great man,” she affirmed again, in a voice nearly a whisper. Then she looked again at me, calmly. “You see, Jack,” she said, “I have to believe that.”