</p>
−
<p>
After the operation I did not see anything of Adam for quite a while. He went out of town, up East, on business, on some of the hospital business, I supposed. Then, shortly after he got back, the thing happened which just about left the Boss in the position of having to hunt up a new director.
</p>
−
<p>
What happened was simple and predictable. One night Adam and Anne, who had had dinner together, mounted the stairs of the crummy apartment house to spy, on the landing before the door, a tall, thin, white-clad figure with a white Panama hat on its head, a cigar glowing in the shadow out of one side of the place where the mouth would be and putting out an expensive aroma to compete with the cabbage. The fellow took the white hat off, tucked it lightly under an elbow, and asked if Adam was Dr. Stanton. Adam said he was. So the fellow said his name was Coffee (the name is Hubert Coffee) and asked if he could come in for a minute.
</p>
−
<p>
Adam and Anne went in, and Adam asked the fellow what he wanted. He stood there in his white, well-pressed suit and two-color shoes with, no doubt, intricate stitchings and ventilators in the leather (for I have found Hubert to be quite a dude–two white suits a day, and white silk shorts with red monograms, they say, and red silk socks and trick shoes), and hummed and hawed out of his knobby, long, squash-yellow face, and coughed discreetly, and significantly rolled his brown eyes (which are the color and texture of used motor oil) in the direction of Anne. Anne told me later, for she is my authority for the event, that she thought he was coming about being sick, so she excused herself and went back to the kitchen to put into the electric icebox a little carton of ice cream she had picked up at the corner drugstore. She was planning on a quiet little evening with Adam (Though her quiet little visits with Adam that summer must have been less that restful for her. She must have always had in the back of her mind the question about what would happen when Adam found out how she was spending some of her other evenings. Or was she able to lock off that part of her mind, the way you lock off some of the rooms of a big house, and just sit in the cozy, or perhaps not now so cozy, parlor? And sitting there, did she listen always for the creak on the floor or the ceaseless tread of feet in the locked-off rooms upstairs?)
</p>
−
<p>
After she had put the ice cream away, she noticed that some dirty dishes were piled up in the sink. So to keep out from under foot in the apartment while the men conferred she set about washing the dishes. She had about wound up the dishes, when suddenly the incomprehensible drone of voices stopped. The sudden silence was what she noticed. Then there was a dry thump (that was the way she described it), and her brother's voice saying. "Get out!" Then there was the sound of rapid motion and the slamming of the apartment door.
</p>
−
<p>
She went into the living room to find Adam standing in the middle of the floor, very white in the face, nursing his right hand in his left across the stomach, and staring at the door. When Anne came in, he turned his head slowly to her and said, "I hit him. I didn't mean to hit him. I never hit anybody before."
</p>
−
<p>
He must have hit Hubert pretty hard, too, for his knuckle was split and swelling. Adam had a good weight of shoulder even if he was slender. Anyway he stood there nursing his split knuckle and wearing an expression of blank incredulity on his face. The incredulity, apparently, was at his own behavior.
</p>
−
<p>
Anne, very much agitated, asked him what was the trouble.
</p>
−
<p>
The trouble was, as I have suggested, simple and predictable. Gummy Larson had sent Hubert Coffee, who, on account of his white suit and silk monogrammed drawers, was supposed to have finesse and the gentlemanly approach, to try to persuade Dr. Stanton to use his influence to get the Boss to throw the basic medical-center contract to Larson. Adam didn't know all of this, for we can be quite sure that Hubert had not named the behind-guy in the exploratory stages of the interview. But as soon as I heard the name of Coffee I knew that it was Larson. Hubert never got past the exploratory stages of the interview. But, apparently, he handled those stages rather broadly. At first, Adam didn't get what he was driving at, and Hubert must have decided that any of his high-priced subtlety would be wasted on this dumb cluck and moved pretty directly to the point. He got as far as the idea that there would be some candy in it for Adam, before he finally touched the button which set off the explosion.
</p>
−
<p>
Still caught in the incredulity and nursing the numbed hand, Adam stood there and in a distant voice told Anne what had happened. Then, having finished he leaned down o pick up, with the good left hand, the cigar stub, which was slowly burning a hole in the old green carpet. He walked across the carpet, holding the stinking stub out at some length, and flung it into the fireplace, which still had in it (as I had noticed on my visits) the ashes of the last fire of spring and bits of paper and orange peel from the summer. Then he walked back across the carpet, and ground his foot on the smoldering place, probably with a kind of symbolic savagery. At least, I could imagine that picture.
</p>
−
<p>
He went to his desk, sat down, took out pen and paper, and began to write. When he had finished, he swung round to Anne, and announced that he had just written his resignation. She didn't say anything. Not a word. She knew, she told me, that there wasn't any use trying to argue with him, to point out to him that it wasn't the fault of Governor Stark or the fault of the job that some crook had come and tried to bribe him. She knew from looking at his face that there wasn't any use in talking. In other words, he must have been in the grip of an instinctive withdrawal, which took the form of moral indignation and moral revulsion, but which, no doubt, was different from either, and more deep-seated than either, and finally irrational. He got up from the chair, and took a few strides about the room, apparently in great excitement. He seemed almost gay, Anne said, as though he were about to burst out laughing. He seemed happy that the whole thing had happened. Then he picked up the letter and stamped it.
</p>
−
<p>
Anne was afraid that he would go out immediately to mail it, for he stood there in the middle of the floor, fingering it as though debating the issue. But he did not go out. Instead, he propped it on the mantelpiece, took a few more turns about the apartment, then flung himself down on the piano bench and started to beat out the music. He sat there and beat it for more than two hours in a breathless June night, and the sweat ran down his face. Anne sat there, afraid, she told me, and not knowing what she was afraid of.
</p>
−
<p>
When he got through, he turned his sweat-streaked white face toward her, she fetched the ice cream and they had a jolly little family party. Then she went out and got into her car and drove home.
</p>
−
<p>
She telephoned me. I met her at an all-night drugstore, and across the imitation-marble top of the table in the booth. I saw her for the first time since the morning in May when she stood at the door of her apartment and had read the question in my face and had slowly and wordlessly nodded the answer. When I heard her voice on the telephone that night, my heart took the little leap and _kerplunk__, like the frog into the lily pond, just as it had before, and for the moment what had happened might as well not have happened. But it had happened, and what I had now as my cab wheeled me down-town to the all-night-drugstore, was the wry and bilious satisfaction that I was being called on for some special reason the other fellow couldn't be expected to answer. But the satisfaction forgot even to be wry and bilious and was, for the moment, just simple satisfaction when I stepped out of the cab and saw her standing inside the glass doors of the drugstore, a trim erect figure in a light-green polka-dot dress with some kind of a white jacket hung across one of her bare arms. I tried to make out the expression on her face, but before I could discover what it was, she spied me and smiled.
</p>
−
<p>
It was a tentative, apologetic sort of smile, which said _please__ and _thank you__ and at the same time expressed an innocent and absolute confidence that your better nature would triumph. I walked across the hot pavement toward that smile and the green polka-dot figure which stood there behind the glass like something put in a showcase for you to admire but not touch. Then I laid my hand on the glass of the door, and pushed, and left the street, where the air was hot and sticky like a Turkish bath and where the smell of gasoline fumes mixed with the brackish, dead-sweet smell of the rivers which crept city on still nights in summer, and entered the bright, crisp, antiseptic, cool world behind the glass where the smile was, for there is nothing brighter, crisper, more antiseptic, and cooler than a really first-rate corner drugstore on a hot summer night. If Anne Stanton is inside the door and the air conditioning is working.
</p>
−
<p>
The smile was on me and the eyes looked straight at me and she put out her hand. I took it, thought how cool and small and firm it was, as though I were just discovering the fact, and heard her say, "It looks like I'm always calling you up, Jack."
</p>
<p>"Oh, that's O. K.," I said, and released the hand.</p>
−
<p>
It couldn't have been More than an instant we stood there then without saying anything, but it seemed a long and painfully embarrassed time, as if neither of us knew what to say, before she said, "Let's sit down."
</p>
−
<p>
I started to move back toward the booths. Out of the tail of my eye, I notice that she made a motion, quickly suppressed, to hang on to my arm. As I noticed that fact, the satisfaction which had been for the moment simple satisfaction, was again merely the wry and bilious satisfaction with which I had started out. And it stayed that kind, as I sat in the booth and looked at her face which was not smiling now and was showing the tensions and the tightness of the skin over the fine bone and showing, I suppose, the years that had gone since the summer when we sat in the roadster and she sang to Jackie-Bird, and promised never to let anybody hurt poor Jackie-Bird. Well, she had kept her promise, all right, for Jackie-Bird had flown away that summer, before the fall came, to some place with a better climate where nobody would ever hurt him, and he had never come back. At least, I had never seen him since.
</p>
−
<p>
Now she sat in the booth and told me, over our glasses of Coca Cola, what had happened in Adam's apartment.
</p>
−
<p>
"What do you want me to do?" I asked, when she got through.
</p>
<p>"You know," she said.</p>
<p>"You want me to make him stick to it?"</p>
<p>"Yes," she said.</p>
<p>"It'll be hard."</p>
<empty-line/>
<empty-line/>
<empty-line/>
<p>She nodded</p>
<empty-line/>
−
<p>
"It'll be hard," I said, "because he is acting perfectly crazy. The only thing I can prove to him is that if this Coffee bastard try to bribe him it only indicates that the job is on the level as long as Adam wants to keep it that way. It only indicates, furthermore, that somebody farther up the line had declined to take a bribe, too. It even indicates that Tiny Duffy is an honest man. Or," I added, "hasn't been able to deliver the goods."
</p>
<p>"You will try?" she asked.</p>
−
<p>
"I'll try," I said, "but don't get your hopes up. I can only prove to Adam what he would already know if he hadn't gone crazy. He just has the high cantankerous moral shrinks. He does not like to play with the rough boys. He is afraid they might dirty his Lord Fauntleroy suit."
</p>
<p>"That's no fair," she burst out.</p>
<p>I shrugged, then said, "Well, I'll try, anyway."</p>
<p>"What will you do?"</p>
−
<p>
"There is only one thing to do. I'll go to Governor Stark, get him to agree to arrest Coffee on the grounds of attempted bribery of an official–Adam is an official, you know–and call on Adam to swear to the charges. If he'll swear to them. That ought to make him see how things line up. That ought to show him the Boss will protect him. And–" to that point I had only been thinking of the Adam end but now my mind got to work on the possibilities of the situation–"it wouldn't do the Boss any harm to hang a rap on Coffee. Particularly if he will squeal on the behind-guy. He might bust up Larson. And with Larson out, MacMurfee wouldn't mean much. He might hang it on Coffee, too, if you–" And I stopped dead.
</p>
<p>"If I what?" she demanded.</p>
−
<p>
"Nothing," I said, and felt the way you do when you are driving merrily across the drawbridge, and all at once the span starts up.
</p>
<p>"What," she demanded.</p>
−
<p>
I looked into her level eyes and saw the way her jaw was set, and knew that I might as well say it. She would work on me till she had it. So I said it. "If you will testify," I said.
</p>
<p>"I'll do it," she said without hesitation.</p>
<p>I shook my head. "No," I said.</p>
<p>"I'll do it."</p>
<p>"No, it won't wash."</p>
<p>"Why?"</p>
−
<p>
"It just won't. After all, you didn't see anything."
</p>
<p>"I was there."</p>
−
<p>
"It would just be hearsay testimony. Absolutely that. It would never stand up."
</p>
−
<p>
"I don't know," she said. "I don't know about those things. But I know this. I know that isn't the reason you changed your mind. What made you change your mind?"
</p>
−
<p>
"You never have been on a witness stand. You don't know what it is to have a mean, smart lawyer saw at you while you sweat."
</p>
<p>"I'll do it," she said.</p>
<p>"No."</p>
<p>"I don't mind."</p>
−
<p>
"Listen here," I said, and shut my eyes and took the plunge off the end of the open drawbridge, "if you think Coffee's lawyer wouldn't have plenty on the ball you are crazy as Adam. He would be mean and he would be smart and he would not have one damned bit of fine old Southern chivalry."
</p>
−
<p>
"You mean–" she began, and I knew from her face that she had caught the point.
</p>
−
<p>
"Exactly," I said. "Nobody may know anything now, but when the fun started they would know everything."
</p>
−
<p>
"I don't care," she affirmed, and lifted her chin up a couple of notches. I saw the little creases in the flesh of her neck, just the tiniest little creases, the little mark left day after day by the absolutely infinitesimal gossamer cord of thuggee which time throws around the prettiest neck every day to garrote it. The cord is so gossamer that it breaks every day, but the marks get there finally, and finally one day the gossamer cord doesn't break and is enough. I looked at the marks when Anne lifted her chin, and realized that I had never noticed them before and would always notice then again. I suddenly felt awful–literally sick, as though I had been socked in the stomach, or as though I had met a hideous betrayal. Then before I knew, the way I felt changed into anger, and I lashed out.
</p>
−
<p>
"Yeah," I said, "you don't care, but you forget one thing. You forget that Adam will be sitting right there looking at little sister."
</p>
<p>Her face was white as a sheet.</p>
−
<p>
The she lowered her head a little and was looking at her hands, which were clenched together now around the empty Coca Cola glass. Her head was low enough so that I could not see her eyes, only the lids coming down over them.
</p>
−
<p>
"My dear, my dear," I murmured. Then as I seized her hands pressed around the glass, the words wrenched out of me, "Oh, Anne, why did you do it?"
</p>
<p>It was the one question I had never meant to ask.</p>
−
<p>
For a moment she did not answer. Then, without raising her eyes, she said in a low voice, "He wasn't like anybody else. Not anybody else I'd ever known. And I love him. I love him, I guess. I guess that is the reason."
</p>
<p>I sat there and reckoned I had asked for that one.</p>
−
<p>
She said, "Then you told me–you told me about my father. There wasn't any reason why not then. After you told me."
</p>
<p>I reckoned I had asked for that one, too.</p>
<p>She said, "He wants to marry me."</p>
<p>"Are you going to?"</p>
−
<p>
"Not now. It would hurt him. A divorce would hurt him. Not now."
</p>
<p>"Are you going to?"</p>
−
<p>
"Perhaps. Later. After he goes to the Senate. Next year."
</p>
−
<p>
One part of my mind was busy ticketing that away: _The Senate next year. That means he won't let old Scoggan go back. Funny he hadn't told me__. But the other part of my mind which was not the nice, cool, steel filing cabinet with alphabetical cards was boiling like a kettle of pitch. A big bubble heaved up and exploded out of the pitch, and it was my voice saying, "Well, I suppose you know what you are up to."
</p>
−
<p>
"You don't know him," she said, her voice even lower than before. "You've known him all these years and you don't know him at all." Then she had lifted her head and was looking straight into my eyes. "I'm not sorry," she said, quite distinctly. "Not for anything that's happened."
</p>
−
<p>
I walked down the street in the hot darkness toward my hotel under a magnificent throbbing sky, breathing the old gasoline fumes the day had left and the sweet, marshy smell of the river at low water which the night brought up into the streets, and thinking, yes, I knew why she had done it.
</p>
−
<p>
The answer was in all the years before, and the things in them and not in them.
</p>
<p>The answer was in me, for I had told her.</p>
−
<p>
_I only told her the truth__, I said savagely to myself, _and she can't blame me for the truth!__
</p>
−
<p>
But was there some fatal appropriateness inherent in the very nature of the world and of me that I should be the one to tell her the truth? I had to ask myself that question, too. And I couldn't be sure of the answer. So I walked on down the street, turning that question over and over in my mind without any answer until the question lost meaning and dropped from my mind as something heavy drops from numb fingers. I would have faced the responsibility and the guilt, I was ready to do that, if I could know. But who is going to tell you?
</p>
−
<p>
So I walked on, and after a while I remembered how she had said I had never known him. And the _him__ was Willie Stark, whom I had known for the many years since Cousin Willie from the country, the Boy with the Christmas Tie, had walked into the back room of Slade's old place. Sure, I knew him. Like a book. I had known him a long time.
</p>
−
<p>
_Too long__, I thought then, _too long to know him__. For maybe the time had blinded me, or rather I had not been aware of the passing of time and always the round face of Cousin Willie had come between me and the other face so that I had never really seen the other face. Except perhaps in those moments when it had leaned forward to the crowds and the forelock had fallen and the eyes had bulged, and the crowd had roared and I had felt the surge in me and had felt that I was on the verge of the truth. But always the face of Cousin Willie above the Christmas tie had come again.
</p>
−
<p>
But it did not come now. I saw the face. Enormous. Bigger than a billboard. The forelock shagged down like a mane. The big jaw. The heavy lips laid together like masonry. The eyes burning and bulging powerfully.
</p>
<p>Funny, I had never seen it before. Not really.</p>
−
<p>
That night I telephoned the Boss, told him what had happened and how Anne had told me, and made my suggestion about getting Adam to swear out a warrant for Coffee. He said to do it. To do anything that would nail Adam. So I went to the hotel, where I lat on my bed under the electric fan until the desk called me to get up at about six o'clock. Then by seven I was on Adam's doorstep, with a single cup of java sloshing about in my insides and a fresh razor cut on my chin and sleep like sand under my eyelids.
</p>
−
<p>
I worked it. It was a hard little job I had cut out for me. First, I had to enlist Adam on the side of righteousness by getting him to agree to swear out a warrant for Coffee. My method was to assume, of course, that he was aching for the opportunity to nail Coffee, and to indicate that the Boss was cheering on the glorious exploit. Then I had to lead him to the discovery, which had to be all his own, that this would involve Anne as a witness. Then I had played the half-wit and imply that this had never occurred to me before. The danger was, with a fellow like Adam, that he would get so set on seeing justice done that he would let Anne testify, hell and high water. He almost did that, but I painted a gory picture of the courtroom scene (but not as gory by half as it would have been in truth), refused to be party to the business, hinted that he was an unnatural brother, and wound up with a vague notion of another way to get Coffee for a similar attempt in another quarter–a vague notion of laying myself open for Coffee to approach me. I could put out a feeler for him, and all that. So Adam dropped the idea of the charge, but retained the implied idea that he and the Boss had teamed up to keep things clean for the hospital.
</p>
−
<p>
Just as we were ready to walk out of the apartment, he stepped to the mantelpiece and picked up the stamped letters waiting there to be mailed. I had spotted the top envelope already, the one address to the Boss. So as he turned around with the letters in his hand, I simply lifted that one out of his grasp, said with my best smile, "Hell, you haven't got any use for this in the daylight," and tore it across and put the pieces into my pocket.
</p>
−
<p>
Then we went out back and got into his car. I rode with him all the way to his office. I would have sat with him all day to keep an eye on him if it had been possible. Anyway, I chatted briskly all the way down-town to keep his mind clear. My chatter was as gay and sprightly as bird song.
</p>
−
<p>
So the summer moved on, swelling slowly like a great fruit, and everything was as it had been before. I went to my office. I went back to my hotel and sometimes ate a meal and sometimes did not and lay under the fan and read till late. I saw the same faces, Duffy, the Boss, Sadie Burke, all the faces I had known for a long time and saw so often I didn't notice the changes in them. But I did not see Adam and Anne for a while. And I had not seen Lucy Stark for a long time. She was living out in the country now. The Boss would still go out to see her now and then, to keep up appearances, and have his picture taken among the white leghorns. Sometimes Tom Stark would stand there with him and, perhaps, Lucy, with the white leghorns in the foreground and a wire fence behind. _Governor Willie Stark and Family__, the caption would read.
</p>
−
<p>
Yes, those pictures were an asset to the Boss. Half the people in the state knew that the Boss had been tom-catting around for years, but he pictures of the family and the white leghorns gave the voters a nice warm glow, it made them feel solid, substantial, and virtuous, it made them think of gingerbread and nice cold buttermilk, and if somewhere not too far in the wings there was a flicker of a black-lace negligee and a whiff of musky perfume, then, "Well, you can't blame him a-taken hit, they put hit up to him." It only meant that the Boss was having it both ways, and that seemed a mark of the chosen and superior. It was what the voter did when he shook loose and came up to town to the furniture dealers' convention and gave the bellhop a couple of bucks to get him a girl up to the room. Or if he wasn't doing it classy, he rode into town with his truckload of hogs and for two bucks got the whole works down at a crib. But either way, classy or crib, the voter knew what it meant, and he wanted both Mom's gingerbread and the black-lace negligee and didn't hold it against the Boss for having both. What he would have held against the Boss was a divorce. Anne was right about that. It would have hurt even the Boss. That would have been very different, and would have robbed the voter of something he valued, the nice warm glow of complacency, the picture that flattered him and his own fat or thin wife standing in front of the henhouse.
</p>
−
<p>
Meanwhile, if the voter knew that the Boss had been tom-catting for years, and could name the names of half of the ladies involved, he didn't know about Anne Stanton. Sadie had found out, but that was no miracle. But as far as I could detect, nobody else knew, not even Duffy with his wheezing, elephantine with and leer. Maybe Sugar-Boy knew, but he could be depended upon. He knew everything. The Boss didn't mind telling anything in front of Sugar-Boy, or close to it–anything, that is, that he would tell. Which probably left a lot untold, at that. Once Congressman Randall was in the Boss's library with him, Sugar-Boy, and me, pacing up and down the floor, and the Boss was giving him play-by-play instructions on how to conduct himself when the Milton-Broderick Bill was presented to Congress. Te instructions were pretty frank, and the Congressman kept looking nervously at Sugar-Boy. The Boss noticed him. "God damn it," the Boss said, "you afraid Sugar-Boy's finding out something? Well, you're right, he's finding out something. Well, Sugar-Boy has found out plenty. He knows more about this state than you do. And I trust him a hell of a lot farther than I'd trust you. You're my pal, ain't you, Sugar-Boy?"
</p>
−
<p>
Sugar-Boy's face darkened with the rush of pleasurable, embarrassed blood and his lips began to work and the spit to fly as he prepared to speak.
</p>
−
<p>
"Yeah, Sugar's my pal, ain't you, Sugar-Boy?" he said, and slapped Sugar-Boy on the shoulder, and then swung again toward the Congressman while Sugar-Boy finally was managing to say, "I'm–y-y-y-your pal–and_–__I–ain't ta-ta-ta-talking–none."
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