All the King's Men (37 page)

For the woman was Anne Stanton, and this was the house of Governor Stanton, whose face, marmoreal and unperturbed and high, above black square beard and black frock coat, gazed down in the candlelight from the massy gold frame above the fireplace, where his daughter crouched, as though at his feet, rasping a match to light a fire there. Well, I had been in this room when the Governor had not been the marmoreal brow in the massy gold frame but a tall man sitting with his feet on the hearthrug with a little girl, a child, on a hassock at his feet, leaning her head against his knee and gazing into the fire while his large man hand toyed deliciously with the loose, silken hair. But I was here now because Anne Stanton, no longer a little girl, had said, “Come on out to the Landing, we’re just going back for Saturday night and Sunday, just to build a fire and eat something out of a can and sleep under the roof again. It’s all the time Adam can spare. And he can’t spare that much often now.” So I had come, carrying my question.

I heard the match rasp, and turned from the sea, which was dark now. The flame had caught the fat of the light-wood and was leaping up and spewing little stars like Christmas sparklers, and the light danced warmly on Anne Stanton’s leaning face and then on her throat and cheek as, still crouching, she looked up at me when I approached the hearth. Her eyes were glittering like the eyes of a child when you give a nice surprise, and she laughed in a sudden throaty, tingling way. It is a way a woman laughs for happiness. They never laugh that way just when they are being polite or at a joke. A woman only laughs that way a few times in her life. A woman only laughs that way when something has touched her way down in the very quick of her being and the happiness just wells out as natural as breath and the first jonquils and mountain brooks. When a woman laughs that way it always does something to you. It does not matter what kind of a face she has got either. You hear that laugh and feel that you have grasped a clean and beautiful truth. You feel that way because that laugh is a revelation. It is a great impersonal sincerity. It is a spray of dewy blossom from the great central stalk of All Being, and the woman’s name and address hasn’t got a damn thing to do with it. Therefore, that laugh cannot be faked. If a woman could learn to fake it she would make Nell Gwyn and Pompadour look like a couple of Campfire Girls wearing bifocals and ground-gripper shoes and with hands on their teeth. She could set all society by the ears. For all any man really wants is to hear a woman laugh like that.

So Anne looked up at me with the glittering eyes and laughed that way while the firelight glowed on her cheek. Then I laughed, too, looking down at her. She reached up her hand to me, and I took it and helped her as she rose easy and supple–God, how I hate a woman who scrambles up off things–and I still held her hand as she swayed at the instant of reaching her full height. She was very close to me, with the laughter still on her face–and echoing somehow deep inside me–and I was holding her hand, as I had held her up to stand swaying for an instant in front of me before I could put my arm around her and feel her waist surrender supplely to the cup of my hand. It had been that way. So now I must have leaned toward her and for an instant the trace of the laughter was still on her face, and her head dropped a little back the way a girl’s head does when she expects you to put your arm around her and doesn’t care if you do.

But all at once the laughter was gone. It was as though someone had pulled a shade in front of her face. I felt as you do when you pass down a dark street and look up to see a lighted window and in the bright room people talking and singing and laughing with the firelight splashing and undulating over them and the sound of the music drifts out to the street while you watch; and then a hand, you will never know whose hand, pulls down the shade. And there you are, outside.

And there I was, outside.

Maybe I should have done it anyway, put my arm around her. But I didn’t. She had looked up at me and had laughed that way. But not for me. Because she was happy to be there again in the room which held the past time–of which I had been a part, indeed, but was no longer a part–and to be kneeling on the hearth with the new heat of the fire laid on her face like a hand.

It had not been meant for me. So I dropped her hand which I had been holding and stepped back and asked, “Was Judge Irwin ever broke–bad broke?”

I asked quick and sharp, for if you ask something quick and sharp out of a clear sky you may get an answer you never would get otherwise. If the person you ask has forgotten the thing, the quick, sharp question may spear it up from the deep mud, and if the person has not forgotten but does not want to tell you, the quick, sharp question may surprise the answer out of him before he thinks.

But it didn’t work. Either she didn’t know or she wasn’t to be surprised out of herself. I ought to have guessed that a person like her–a person who you could tell had a deep inner certitude of self which comes from being all of one piece, of not being shreds and patches and old cogwheels held together with pieces of rusty barbed wire and spit and bits of string, like most of us–I ought to have guessed that that kind of a person would not be surprised into answering a question she didn’t want to answer. Even if she did know the answer. But maybe she didn’t.

But she was surprised a little. “What?” she asked.

So I said it again.

She turned her back to me and went to sit on the couch, to light a cigarette and face me again, looking levelly at me. “Why do you want to know?” she asked.

I looked right back at her and said, “I don’t want to know. It is a pal wants to know. He is my best pal. He hands it to me on the first of the month.”

“Oh, Jack–” she cried, and flung her newly lit cigarette across to the hearth, and stood up from the couch. “Oh, why do you have to spoil everything! We had that time back here. But you want to spoil it. We–”

“We?” I said.

“–had something then and you want to spoil it, you want to help him spoil it–that man–he–”

“We?” I said again.

“–want to do something bad–”

“We,” I said, “if we had such a damned fine time why was it you turned me down?”

“That hasn’t anything to do with it. What I mean is–”

“What you mean is that is was fine, beautiful time back then, but I mean that if it was such a God-damned fine, beautiful time, why did it turn into this time which is not so damned fine and beautiful if there wasn’t something in that time which wasn’t fine and beautiful? Answer that one.”

“Hush,” she said, “hush, Jack!”

“Yeah, answer me that one. For you certainly aren’t going to say this time is fine and beautiful. This time came out of that time, and now you’re near thirty-five years old and you creep out here as a special treat to yourself and sit in the middle of a lot of sheet-wrapped, dust-catching furniture in a house with the electricity cut off, and Adam–he’s got a hell of a life, cutting on people all day till he can’s stand up, and him tied up in knots himself inside and–”

“Leave Adam out of it, leave him out–” she said, and thrust her hands, palms out as though to press me off, but I wasn’t in ten feet of her–”he does something anyway–something–”

“–and Irwin down there playing with his toys, and my mother up there with that Theodore, and me–”

“Yes, you,” she said, “you.”

“All right,” I said, “me.”

“Yes, you. With that man.”

“That man, that man,” I mimicked, “that’s what all the people round here call him, what that Patton calls him, all those people who got pushed out of the trough. Well, he does something. He does as much as Adam. More. He’s going to build a medical center will take care of this state. He’s–”

“I know,” she said, wearily, not looking at me now, and sank down on the couch, which was covered by a sheet.

“You know, but you take the same snobbish attitude all the rest take. You’re like the rest.”

“All right,” she said, still not looking at me. “I’m snobbish, I’m so snobbish I had lunch with him last week.”

Well, if grandfather’s clock in the corner hadn’t been stopped already, that would have stopped it. It stopped me. I heard the flame hum on the logs, gnawing in. Then the hum stopped and there wasn’t anything.

Then I said, “For Christ’s sake,” And the absorbent silence sucked up the words like blotting paper.

“All right,” she said, “for Christ’s sake.”

“My, my,” I said, “but the picture of the daughter of Governor Stanton at lunch with Governor Stark would certainly throw the society editor of the
Chronicle
_ into a tizzy. Your frock, my dear–what frock did you wear? And flowers? Did you drink champagne cocktails? Did–”

“I drank a Coca Cola, and I ate a cheese sandwich. In the cafeteria in the basement of the Capitol.”

“Pardon my curiosity, but–”

“–but you want to know how I got there. I’ll tell you. I went to see Governor Stark about getting state money for the Children’s Home. And I–”

“Does Adam know?” I asked.

“–and I’m going to get it, too. I’m to prepare a detailed report and–”

“Does Adam know?”

“It doesn’t matter whether Adam knows or not–and I’m to take the report back to–”

“I can imagine what Adam would say,” I remarked grimly.

“I guess I can manage my own affairs,” she said with some heat.

“Gee,” I said, and noticed that the blood had mounted a little in her cheeks, “I thought you and Adam were always just like that.” And I held my right hand up with forefinger and the next one side by side.

“We are,” she said, “but I don’t care what–”

“–and you don’t care what
he–
_” and I jerked a thumb toward the high, unperturbed, marmoreal face which gazed from the massy gold frame in the shadow–”would say about it either, huh?

“Oh, Jack–” and she rose from the couch, almost fretful in her motion, which wasn’t like her–”what makes you talk like that? Can’t you see? I’m just getting the money for the Home. It’s a piece of business. Just business.” She jerked her chin up with a look that was supposed to settle the matter, but succeeded in unsettling me.

“Listen,” I said, and felt myself getting hot under the collar, “business or not, it’s worth your reputation to be caught running round with–”

“Running round, running round!” she exclaimed. “Don’t be a fool. I had lunch with him. On business.”

“Business or not, it’s worth your reputation, and–”

“Reputation,” she said. “I’m old enough to take care of my reputation. You just told me I was nearly senile.”

“I said you were nearly thirty-five,” I said, factually.

“Oh, Jack,” she said, “I am, and I haven’t done anything. I don’t do anything. Not anything worth anything.” She wavered there and with a hint of distraction lifted her hands to touch her hair. “Not anything. I don’t want to play bridge all the time. And what little I do–that Home, the playground thing–”

“There’s always the Junior League,” I said. But she ignored it.

“–that’s not enough. Why didn’t I do something–study something? Be a doctor, a nurse. I could have been Adam’s assistant. I could have studied landscape gardening. I could have–”

“You could make lampshades,” I said.

“I could have done something–something–”

“You could have got married,” I said. “You could have married me.”

“Oh, I don’t mean just getting married, I mean–”

“You don’t know what you mean,” I said.

“Oh, Jack,” she said, and reached out and took my hand and hung on to it, “maybe I don’t. I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight. When I come out here sometimes–I’m happy when I come, I truly am, but them–”

She didn’t say any more about it. By this time she had sunk her head to my chest, and I had given her a few comforting pats on the shoulder, and she had said in a muffled sort of way that I had to be her friend, and I had said, “Sure,” and had caught some good whiffs of the way her hair smelled. It smelled just the way it always had, a good, clean, well-washed, little-girl-ready-for-a-party smell. But she wasn’t a little girl and this wasn’t a party. It definitely was not a party. With pink ice cream and devil’s-food cake and horns to blow and we all played clap-in and clap-out and the game in which you sang about King William being King James’s son and down on this carpet you must kneel sure as the grass grows in the field and choose the one you love best.

She stood there for a minute or two with her head on my chest, and you could have seen daylight between her and her friend, if there had been any daylight, while her friend gave her the impersonal and therapeutic pats on the shoulder. Then she walked away from him and stood by the hearth, looking down at the fire, which was doing fine now and making the room look what is called real homey.

Then the front door swung open and the wind off the cold sea whipped into the room like a great dog shaking itself and the fire leaped. It was Adam Stanton coming into that homey atmosphere. He had an armful of packages, for he had been down into the Landing to get our provisions.

“Hello,” he said over the packages, and smiled out of that wide, thin, firm mouth which in repose looked like a clean, well-healed surgical wound but which when he smiled–if he smiled–surprised you and made you feel warm.

“Look here,” I said quick, “way back yonder, any time, was Judge Irwin ever broke? Bad broke?”

“Why, no–I don’t know–” he began, his face shading.

Anne swung around to look at him, and then sharply at me. I thought for an instant she was about to say something. But she didn’t.

“Why, yes!” Adam said, standing there, still hugging the parcels. I had speared it up from the deep mud.

“Why, yes,” he repeated, with the pleased bright look on his face which people get when they dredge up any lost thing from the past, “yes, let me see–I was just a kid–about 1913 or 1914–I remember father saying something about it to Uncle John or somebody, before he remembered I was in the room–then the Judge was here and he and father–I thought they were having a row, their voices got so high–they were talking about money.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Welcome,” he said, with a slightly puzzled smile on his face, and moved to the couch to let the parcels cascade to the soft softness.