That was the way it was for a while after I didn't have any job. It wasn't new. It had been like that before, twice before. I had even given a name to it–The Great Sleep. The time before I quit the University, just a few months before I was supposed to finish my dissertation for the Ph. D. in American History. It was almost finished, and they said it was O. K. The sheets of typed-on paper were stacked up on the table by the typewriter. The boxes f cards were there. I would get up late in the morning and see them there, the top sheet of paper beginning to curl up around the paperweight. And I'd see them there when I came in after supper to go to bed. Finally, one morning I got up late and went out the door and didn't come back and left them there. And the other time the Great Sleep had come was the time before I walked out the apartment and Lois started to get the divorce.
But this time there wasn't any American History and there wasn't any Lois. But there was the Great Sleep.
When I did get up I just piddled around. I went to movies and hung around speak-easies and went swimming or went out to the country club and lay on the grass and watched a couple of hot bastards swing rackets at a little white ball that flashed in the sun. Or perhaps one of the players would be a girl and the short white skirt would swirl and whip about her brown thighs, and flash in the sun, too.
A few times I went to see Adam Stanton at his apartment, the fellow I had grown up with at Burden's Landing. He was a hot-shot surgeon now, with more folks screaming for him to cut on them than he had time to cut on, and a professor at the University Medical School, and busy grinding out the papers he published in the scientific journals or took off to read at meetings in New York and Baltimore and London. He wasn't married. He didn't have time, he said. He didn't have time for anything. But he'd take a little time to let me sit in a shabby overstuffed chair in his shabby apartment, where papers were stacked around and the colored girl had streaked the dust on the furniture. I used to wonder why he lived the way he did when he must have been having quite a handsome take, but I finally got it through my head that he didn't ask anything from a lot of the folks he cut on. He had the name of a softy in the trade. And after he got money, people took him for it if they had a story that would halfway wash. The only thing in his apartment that was worth a plugged nickel was the piano, and it was the best money could buy.
Most of the time when I was at Adam's apartment he would be at the piano. I have heard it said that he was pretty good, but I wouldn't know. But I didn't mind listening, not if the chair was good and comfortable. Adam must have heard me say one time or another that music didn't mean much to me, but I suppose that he'd forgotten it or couldn't believe that it was true for anybody. Anyway, he would turn his head at me and say, "This–now listen to this–my God, this now is sure a–" But his voice would trail off and the words which were going to tell what the thing sure and eternally was in its blessed truth would not ever get said. He would just leave the sentence hanging and twisting slowly in the air like a piece of frayed rope, and would look at me out of his clear, deep-set, ice-water-blue, abstract eyes–the kind of eyes and the kind of look your conscience has about three o'clock in the morning–and then, unlike your conscience, he would begin to smile, not much, just a sort of tentative, almost apologetic smile that took the curse off that straight mouth and square jaw, and seemed to say, "Hell, I can't help it if I look at you that way, buddy, it's just the way I look at things." Then the smile would be gone, and he would turn his face to the piano and set his hands to the keys.
Sooner or later he would get enough of the music and would drop into one of the other shabby chairs. Or he might remember to get me a drink, or might even take one himself, paler than winter sunlight and about as strong. We'd sit there, not taking, sipping slow, his eyes burning cold and blue in his head, bluer because of the swarthiness of the skin, which was drawn back taut over the bones of the face. It was like when we used to go fishing, when we were kids, back at Burden's Landing. We used to sit in the boat, under the hot sun, hour after hour, and never a word. Or lie on the beach. Or go camping together and after supper lie by a little smudge fire for the mosquitoes, and never say a word.
Perhaps Adam didn't mind taking a little time out for me because I made him think back to Burden's Landing and the other days. Not that he talked about it. But once he did. He was sitting in the chair, looking down at the eyewash in the glass which his long, hard-looking, nervous fingers were slowly revolving. The he looked up at me, and said, "We used to have a pretty good time, didn't we? When we were kids."
"Yeah," I said.
"You and me and Anne," he said.
"Yeah," I said, and thought of Anne. Then I said, "Don't you have a good time now?"
He seemed to take the question under advisement for a half minute, as though I had asked him a real question, which maybe it was. Then he said, "Well, I don't suppose I ever thought about it." Then, "No, I don't suppose I ever thought about it."
"Don't you have a good time?" I asked. "And you a big-shot. Don't you have a good time being a big-shot?" I didn't let go. I knew it was a question you haven't got any right to ask anybody, not with the tone of voice I heard coming out of my mouth, but I couldn't let go. You grow up with somebody, and he is a success, a big-shot, and you're a failure, but he treats you just the way he always did and hasn't changed a bit. But that is what drives you to it, no matter what names you call yourself while you try to stick the knife in. There is a kind of snobbery of failure. It's a club, it's the old school, it's Skull and Bones, and there is no nasty supercilious twist to a mouth like the twist the drunk gets when he hangs over the bar beside the old pal who has turned out to be a big-shot and who hasn't changed a bit, or when the old pal takes him home to dinner and introduces him to the pretty little clear-eye woman and the healthy kids. There wasn't any pretty little woman in Adam's shabby apartment, but he was a big-shot, and I let him have it.
But it didn't register on him. He simply turned on me the candid, blue gaze, slightly shaded by thought now, and said, "It just isn't something I ever thought about." Then the smile did the trick to the mouth which under ordinary circumstances looked like a nice, clean, decisive surgical wound, well healed and no pucker.
So I tried to make what amends I could for being what I was, and pulled out the soft-and sweet stop, and said, "Yeah, we did have a good time when we were kids, you and Anne and me."
Yes, Adam Stanton, Anne Stanton, and Jack Burden, back in Burden's Landing, had a good time when they were children by the sea. A squall might, and did, pile in off the Gulf, and the sky blacked out with the rain and the palm trees heaved in distraction and then leaned steady with the vanes gleaming like wet tin in the last turgid, bilious, tattered light, but it didn't chill us or kill us in the kingdom by the sea, for we were safe inside a white house, their house or my house, and stood by the window to watch the surf pile up beyond the sea wall like whipped cream. And back in the room behind us would be Governor Stanton or Mr. Ellis Burden, or both, for they were friends, or Judge Irwin, for he was a friend, too, and there wasn't a wind that would ever have the nerve to bother Governor Stanton or Mr. Ellis Burden or Judge Irwin.
"You and Anne and me," Adam Stanton had said to me, and I had said it to him. So one morning, after I had managed to get out of bed, I called Anne up, and said, "I hadn't thought about you in a long time, but the other night I saw Adam and he said you and he and I used to have a good time when we were kids. So how about having dinner with me? Even if we are on crutches now." She said she would. She certainly wasn't on crutches, but we didn't have any fun.
She asked me what I was doing, and I told her, "Not a blessed thing. Just waiting for my cash to run out." She didn't tell me I ought to do something, and didn't look it. Which was something. So I asked her what she was doing, and she laughed and said, "Not a blessed thing." Which_ __I knew was a lie, for she was_ __always fooling around with orphans and half-wits and blind niggers, and not even getting paid for it. And looking at her you could know it was all a waste of something and the something wasn't money. So I said, "Well, I hope you're doing it in pleasant company."
"Not particularly," she said.
I looked at her close and saw what I knew I would see and what I had seen a good many times when she wasn't sitting across from me. I saw Anne Stanton, who was not exactly a beauty maybe but who was Anne Stanton. Anne Stanton: the brown-toned, golden-lighted face, not as dark as Adam's, with a hint of the positive structure beneath the skin, which was drawn over the bone with something, a suggestion, of the tension which was in Adam's face, as though the fabricator of the job hadn't wanted to waste any material in softness and slacknesses and had stylized the product pretty cleanly. The dark hair drawn smoothly, almost tautly, away from the accurate part. The blue eyes which looked at you like Adam's eyes, with the same directness, but in which the clear, abstract, ice-blue was replaced by a deeper, coiling, troubled blue. Sometimes, anyway. They looked alike, Adam and Anne. They might have been twins. They even had the same smile. But the mouth it came on was, in Anne's case, different. It didn't carry any suggestion of the nice, clean, decisive, well-healed surgical wound. The fabricator had, on this item, allowed himself the luxury of a little extra material. Not too much. But enough.
That was Anne Stanton, and I saw what I knew I would see.
She sat there before me, very erect, with her head held high and straight on the fine, round stalk of her neck above the small, squarish shoulders, and with her rather small but roundly modeled bare arms laid close to her sides in mathematical accuracy. And looking at her, I though how, below the level of the table, her small legs would be laid accurately together, thigh to thigh, knee to knee, ankle to ankle. There was, in fact, always something a little stylized about her–something of the effect one observes in certain Egyptian bas-reliefs and statuettes of princesses of a late period, forms in which grace and softness, without being the less grace or softness, are caught in mathematical formality. Anne Stanton always looked level at you, and you had the feeling that she was looking at something far away. She always held her head high, and you had the feeling that she was waiting for a voice which you wouldn't be able to hear. She always stood so trim and erect, and you had feeling that all her grace and softness was caught in the rigor of an idea which you could not define.
I said, "You planning on being an old maid?"
She laughed and said, "I'm not planning on anything. I quit making plans a long time back."
We danced in the handkerchief-big space between the speak-easy tables, in which stood the plates of half-eaten spaghetti or chicken bones and the bottles of Dago red. For about five minutes the dancing had some value in itself, then it became very much like acting out some complicated and portentous business in a dream which seems to have a meaning but whose meaning you can't figure out. Then the music was over, and stopping dancing was like waking up from the dream, being glad to wake up and escape and yet distressed because now you won't ever know what it had been all about.
She must have felt the same way about it, for when, later, I asked her to dance again, she said that she didn't feel like it, she's rather talk. We talked, quiet a lot, but it was a little bit like the dancing. You can't keep on taking forever about what a hell of a good time you had when you were kids.
I took her to her apartment building, which was quite a few cuts above Adam's joint, for Governor Stanton hadn't died exactly a pauper, and left her in the lobby. She said good night, and, "Be a good boy, Jack."
"Will you have dinner with me again?" I asked her.
"Any time you want," she said, "any time in the world. You know that."
Yes, I knew it.
And she did have dinner with me again, several times. The last time she said: "I've seen your father."
"Yeah," I said in an unencouraging way.
"Don't be like that," she said "Like what?"
"Oh, you know what I mean," she said. "Don't you even want to know how he is?"
"I know how he is," I said. "He is sitting in that hole he lives in down there or he's helping round that mission with his bums, or writing those damn-fool little leaflet they pass out to you on the street, all about Mark 4:6, and Job 7:5, and his specs are down on the end of his nose and the dandruff is like a snowstorm in the Dakotas down on his black coat collar."
She didn't say anything for a minute, then said: "I saw him on the street and he didn't look well. He looked sick. I didn't recognize him at first."
"Trying to pass you some of that junk?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. He held out a piece of paper to me, and I was in a hurry, so I just automatically put out my hand for it. Then I realized he was staring right in my face. I didn't recognize him at first." She paused a little. "That was about two weeks back."
"I haven't seen him in nearly one year," I said.
"Oh, Jack," she said, "you oughtn't do that! You ought to see him."
"Look here, what can I say to him? And God knows, he hasn't got anything to tell me. Nobody made him live like that. Nobody made him walk out of his law office, either, and not even bother to shut the door behind him."
"But, Jack," she said, "you–"
"He's doing what he wants to do. And besides if he was fool enough to do what he did just because he couldn't get along with a woman–especially a woman like my mother. If he couldn't give her what she wanted, whatever the hell it was she wanted and he couldn't give her, then–"
"Don't talk like that," she said sharply.
"Look here," I said, "just because your old man was Governor once and died in a mahogany tester bed with a couple of high-priced doctors leaning over him and adding up the bill in their heads and because you think he was Jesus Christ in a black string tie, you needn't try to talk to me like an old woman. I'm not talking about your family. I'm talking about mine, and I can't help seeing the plain unvarnished truth. And if you–"
"Well, you don't have to talk to me about it," she said. "Or anybody."
"It's the truth."
"Oh, the truth," she exclaimed, and clenched her right hand on the tablecloth. "How do you know it's the truth? You don't know anything about it. You don't know what made them do what they did."
"I know the truth. I know what my mother is like. And you do, too. And I know my father was a fool to let her get him down."
"Don't be so bitter!" she said, and reached out to seize my forearm and set her sharp fingers in it, through the coat, and shake it a little.
"I'm no bitter. I don't give a damn what they did. Or do. Or why."
"Oh, Jack," she said, still clutching my forearm, but not hard now, "can't you love them a little, or forgive them, or just not think about them, or something? Something different from the way you are?"
"I could go for the rest of my life and not think about them," I said. Then I noticed that she was shaking her head ever so little from side to side, and that her eyes were as dark a blue as they ever got and too bright, and that she had drawn in the edge of her lower lip and had set her teeth to it. I reached my right hand over and took her hand off my left forearm and laid it down flat, palm down, on the tablecloth, and covered it with my hand. "I'm sorry," I said.
"You're not, Jack," she said, "you're not sorry. Not really. You aren't ever sorry about anything. Or glad, either. You're just–oh, I don't know what."
"I am sorry," I said.
"Oh, you just thing you are sorry. Or glad. You aren't really."
"If you think you are sorry, who in the hell can tell you that you aren't?" I demanded, for I was a brass-bound Idealist then, as I have started, and was not going to call for a plebiscite on whether I was sorry or not.
"That sounds all right," she said, "but it isn't. I don't know why–oh, yes, I do–if you've never been sorry or glad then you haven't got any way to know the next time whether you are or not."
"All right," I said, "but can I tell you this: something is happening inside me which I choose to call sorry?"
"You can say it, but you don't know." Then, snatching her hand from under my hand, "Oh, you start to feel sorry or glad or something but it just doesn't come to anything."
"You mean like a little green apple that's got a worm in it and falls off the tree before it ever gets ripe?"
She laughed, and answered, "Yes, like little green apples with worms in them."
"Well," I said, "Here's a little green apple with a worm in it: I'm sorry."
I was sorry, or what went for sorry in my lexicon. I was sorry that I had ruined the evening. But candor compelled me to admit that there hadn't been much of an evening to ruin.
I didn't ask her to go to dinner with me again, at least not that time while I was out of a job and doing the sleeping. I had hunted up Adam and heard him play the piano. And I had sat across the spaghetti and the Dado red and looked at Anne Stanton. And as a result of what Anne said to me, I had gone down to the slums and seen the old man, not the very tall man who had once been stocky but whose face now dropped in puffy gray folds beneath the gray hair, with the steel-rimmed spectacles hanging on the end of the nose, and whose shoulders, thin now and snowed with dandruff, sagged down as with the pull of the apparently disjunctive, careful belly which made the vest of his black suit pop up above the belt and the slack-hanging pants. And in every case I had found what I had known I was going to find, because they had happened and nothing was going to change what had happened. I had been sinking down in the sleep like a drowning man in water, and they had flashed across my eyes again the way people say the past flashes across the eyes of the drowning man.
Well, I could go back to sleep now. Till my cash ran out, anyway. I could be Rip Van Winkle. Only I thought that the Rip Van Winkle story was all wrong. You went to sleep for a long time, and when you woke up nothing whatsoever had changed. No matter how long you slept, it was the same.
But I didn't get to do much sleeping. I got a job. Or rather, the job got me. The telephone got me out of bed one morning. It was Sadie Burke, who said, "Get down here to the Capitol at ten o'clock. The Boss wants to see you."
"The who?" I said.
"The Boss," she said, "Willie Stark, Governor Stark, or don't you read the papers?"
"No, but somebody told me in the barbershop."
"It's true," she said, "and the Boss said for you to get down here at ten." And she hung up the phone.
Well, I said to myself, maybe things do change while you sleep. But I didn't believe it then, and didn't really believe it when I went into the big room with the black oak paneling and padded across the long red carpet under the eyes of all genuine oil paintings of all the bewhiskered old men toward the man who wasn't very old and wasn't bewhiskered and who sat behind a desk in front of the high windows and who got up as I approached. _Hell__, I thought, _it's just Willie__.
It was just Willie, even though he was wearing something different from the country blue serge he had had on back at Upton. But he just had the thing flung on him anyhow, with his tie loose and to one side and the collar unbuttoned. And his hair hung down over his forehead, the way it used to. I thought for a second that maybe the meaty lips were laid together firmer than they used to be, but before I could be sure, he was grinning and had come around to the front of the desk. So I thought again it was just Willie.
He put out his hand, and said, "Hello, Jack."
"Congratulations," I said.
"I hear they fired you."
"You heard wrong," I said. "I quit."
"You were smart," he said, "because when I get through with that outfit they wouldn't be able to pay you. They won't be able to pay the nigger washes the spittoons."
"That will suit me," I allowed.
"Want a job?" he asked.
"I'd consider a proposition."
"Three hundred a month," he said, "and traveling expenses. When you travel."
"Who do I work for? The state?
"Hell, no. Me."
"It looks like you'd be working for me," I said. "This Governorship doesn't pay but five thousand."
"All right," he said, and laughed, "I'll be working for you then."
Then I recollected how he'd done right well in his law practice.
"I'll give it a try," I said.
"Fine," he said. Then, "Lucy's wanting to see you. Come to dinner tomorrow night at the house."
"You mean the Mansion?"
"What the hell you think I mean? A tourist home? A boarding house? Sure, the Mansion."
Yes, the Mansion. He was going to treat me just like old times and take me home to dinner and introduce me to the pretty woman and the healthy kid.
"Boy," he was saying, "we sure do rattle around in that place, Lucy and Tom and me."
"What am I supposed to do?" I asked him.
"Eat," he said. "Come at six-thirty and eat hearty. Call up Lucy and tell her what you want to eat."
"I mean, what do I do for the job?"
"Hell, I don't know," he said. "Something will turn up."
He was right about that.
Chapter Three
It was always the same way when I came home and saw my mother. I would be surprised that it was the way it was but I knew at the same time that I had know it would be this way. I would come home with the firm conviction that she didn't really care a thing about me, that I was just another man whom she wanted to have around because she was the kind of woman who had to have men around and had to make them dance to her tune. But as soon as I saw her I would forget all that. Sometimes I forgot it even before I saw her. Anyway, when I forgot it, I would wander why we couldn't get along. I would wonder even though I knew what would happen, even though I would always know that the scene into which I was about to step and in which I was about to say the words I would say, had happened before, or had never stopped happening, and that I would always just be entering the wide, white, high-ceiling hall to see across the distance of the floor, with gleamed like dark ice, my mother, who stood in a doorway, beyond her the flicker of firelight in the shadowy room, and smiled at me with a sudden and innocent happiness, like a girl. The she would come toward me, with a brittle, excited clatter of heels and a quick, throaty laugh, and stop before me and seize a little bunch of my coat between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, in a way that was childlike and both weak and demanding, and lift her face up to me, turning it somewhat to one side so that I could put the expected kiss upon her cheek. The texture of her cheek would be firm and smooth, quite cool, and I would breathe the scent which she always used, and as I kissed her I would see the plucked accuracy of the eyebrow, the delicate lines at the corner of the eye toward me, and note the crinkled, silky, shadowed texture of the eyelid, which would flicker sharply over the blue eye. The eye, very slightly protruding, would be fixed on some point beyond me.
That was the way it had always been–when I had come home from school, when I had come back from camps, when I had come back from college, when I had come back from jobs–and that was the way it was that late rainy afternoon, on the borderline between winter ands spring, back in 1933, when I came back home again, after not coming home for a long time. It had been six or eight months since my last visit. That time we had had a row about my working for Governor Stark. We always sooner or later got into a row about something, and in the two and a half years that I had been working for Willie it usually in the end came round to Willie. And if his name wasn't even mentioned, he stood there like a shadow behind us. Not that it mattered much what we rowed about. There was a shadow taller and darker than the shadow of Willie standing behind us. But I always came back, and I had come back this time. I would find myself drawn back. It was that way, and, as always, it seemed to be a fresh start, a wiping out of all the things which I knew could not be wiped out.
"Leave the bags in your car," she said, "the boy will get them." And she drew me toward the open door of the living room, where the firelight was, and down the length of the room to the long couch. I saw the bowl of ice, the siphon of soda, the Scotch on the glass-topped table, all the item sparkling in the firelight.
"Sit down," she said, "sit down, Son," and put the fingers of her right hand against my chest to give a little shove. It wasn't much of a shove, it didn't put me off my balance, but I sat down, and sank back into the couch. I watched her mix me a drink, and then a sort of excuse of a drink for herself, for she never took much. She held the glass out to me, and laughed that quick, throaty laugh again. "Take it," she said, and her face seemed to proclaim that she was offering me something which was absolutely special, something which was so precious that it couldn't be tied on God's green globe.
There's a lot of likker in the world, even Scotch, but I took it and gave a pull, feeling too that it was something special.
She sank down on the couch with an easy motion, vaguely suggestive of a flutter and preening as when a bird touches a bough, and took a sip, and lifted her head as if to let the liquor trickle into her throat. She had drawn one leg up beneath her and the other hung over with the sharp tip of the gray suède pump stretched forward to just touch the floor, with the precision of a dancer. She turned cleanly from the erect waist to look straight at me, twisting the gray cloth of the dress. The firelight defined her small, poised features, one side bright, one side in shadow, and emphasized the slight, famished, haunting hollow beneath the cheekbones (I always figured, after I got old enough to do any kind of figuring, that it was that–the hollow beneath the cheekbone–that got them) and the careful swooping lift of her piled-up hair. Her hair was yellowish, like metal, with gray in it now, but the gray was metallic, too, like spun metal woven and coiled into the yellow. It looked as though that was the way it had been intended from the very first to be, and a damned expensive job. Every detail.
I looked at her and thought: _Well, she's pushing fifty-five but I'll hand it to her__. And suddenly seemed to stretch back forever. But I had to hand it to her.
She kept on looking at me, not saying anything, with that look which always said, "You've got something I want, something I need, something I've got to have," and said, too, "I've got something for you, I won't tell you what, not yet, but I've got something for you, too," The hollow in the cheeks: the hungry business. The glittering eyes: the promising business. And both at the same time. It was quite a trick.
I took the last of the drink, and held the glass in my hand. She reached out and took it, still watching me, and reached out to set it on the little table. Then she said, "Oh, Son, you look tired."
"I'm not," I said, and felt the stubbornness in me.
"You are," she said, and took me by the sleeve of the forearm and drew me toward her. I didn't come at first. I just let her pull the arm. She didn't pull hard, but she kept on looking straight at me.
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