Chapter Eight 11 страница

"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."

Yes, Lucy, you have to believe that. You have to believe that to live. I know that you must believe that. And I would not have you believe otherwise. It must be that way, and I understand the fact. For you see, Lucy. I must believe that, too. I must believe that Willie Stark was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn't anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must believe that.

Because I came to believe that, I came back to Burden's Landing. I did not come to believe it at the moment when I watched Sugar‑Boy mount the stairs from the basement hall of the public library or when Lucy Stark stood before me in the hall of the little paint‑peeling white house in the country. But because of those things–and of all the other things which had happened–I came, in the end, to believe that. And believing that Willie Stark was a great man, I could think better of all other people, and of myself. At the same time that I could more surely condemn myself.

I came back to Burden's Landing in early summer, at the request of my mother. She telephoned me one night and said, "Son, I want you to come here. As soon as you can. Can you come tomorrow?"

When I asked her what she wanted, for I still did not want to go back, she refused to answer me directly. She said she would tell me when I came.

So I went.

She was waiting for me on the gallery when I drove up late the next afternoon. We went around to the screened side gallery and had a drink. She wasn't talking much, and I didn't rush her.

When by near seven o'clock the Young Executive hadn't turned up, I asked her was he coming to dinner.

She shook her head. "Where is he?" I asked.

She turned her empty glass in her hand, lightly clinking the ice left there. Then she said, "I don't know."

"On a trip?" I asked.

"Yes," she answered, clinking the ice. Then she turned to me. "He has been gone five days," she said. "He won't come back until I have gone. You see–" she set the glass down on the table beside her with an air of finality–"I am leaving him."

"Well," I breathed, "I'm damned."

She continued to look at me, as though expecting something. What, I didn't know.

"Well, I'm damned," I said, still fumbling with the fact which she had presented to me.

"Are you surprised?" she asked me, leaning a little toward me in her chair.

"Sure, I'm surprised."

She examined me intently, and I could detect a curious shifting and shading of feelings on her face, too evanescent and ambiguous for definition.

"Sure, I'm surprised," I repeated.

"Oh," she said, and sank back in her chair, sinking back like somebody who has fallen into deep water and clutches for a rope and seizes it and hangs on a moment and lose the grip and tries again and doesn't make it and knows it's no use to try again. There wasn't anything ambiguous now about her face. It was like what I said. She had missed her grip.

She turned her face away from me, out toward the bay, as though she didn't want me to see what was on it. Then she said, "I thought–I thought maybe you wouldn't be surprised."

I couldn't tell her why I or anybody else would be surprised. I couldn't tell her that when a woman as old as she was getting to be had her hooks in a man not much more than forty years old and not wind‑broke it was surprising if she didn't hang on. Even if the woman had money and the man was as big a horse's‑ass as the Young Executive. I couldn't tell her that, and so I didn't say anything.

She kept on looking out to the bay. "I thought," she said, hesitated, and resumed, "I thought maybe you'd understand why, Jack."

"Well, I don't," I replied.

She held off awhile, then began again. "It happened last year. I knew when it happened.–Oh, I knew it would be like this."

"When what happened?"

"When you–when you–" Then she stopped, and corrected what she had been about to say. "When Monty–died."

And she sung back toward me and on her face was a kind of wild appeal. She was making another grab for that rope. "Oh, Jack," she said, "Jack, it was Monty–don't you see?–it was Monty."

I reckoned that I saw, and I said so. I remembered the silvery, pure scream which had jerked me out into the hall that afternoon of Judge Irwin's death, and the face of my mother as she lay on the bed later with the knowledge sinking into her.

"It was Monty," she was saying. "It was always Monty. I didn't really know it. There hadn't been–been anything between us for a long time. But it was always Monty. I knew it when he was dead. I didn't want to know it but I knew it. And I couldn't go on. There came a time I couldn't go on. I couldn't."

She rose abruptly from her chair, like something jerked up by a string.

"I couldn't," she said. "Because everything was a mess. Everything has always been a mess." Her hands twisted and tore the handkerchief she held before her at the level of her waist. "Oh, Jack," she cried out, "it had always been a mess."

She flung down the shredded handkerchief and ran off the gallery. I heard the sound of her heels on the floor inside, but it wasn't the old bright, spirited tattoo. It was a kind of desperate, slovenly clatter, suddenly muted on the rug.

I waited on the gallery for a while. Then I went back to the kitchen. "My mother isn't feeling very well," I told the cook. "You or Jo‑Belle might go up a little later and see if she will take some broth and egg or something like that."

Then I went back into the dining room and sat down in the candlelight and they brought me the food and I ate some of it.

After dinner Jo‑Belle came to tell me that she had carried a tray up to my mother's room but she wouldn't take it. She hadn't even opened the door at the knock. She had just called to say she didn't want anything.

I sat on the gallery a long time while the sounds died out back in the kitchen. Then the light went out back there. The rectangle of green in the middle of blackness where the light of the window fell on the grass was suddenly black, too.

After a while I went upstairs and stood outside the door of my mother's room. Once or twice I almost knock to go in. But I decided that even if I went in, there wouldn't be anything to say. There isn't ever anything to say to somebody who has found out the truth about himself, whether it is good or bad.

So I went back down and stood in the garden among the black magnolia trees and the myrtles, and thought how by killing my father I had saved my mother's soul. Then I thought how all knowledge that is worth anything is maybe paid for by blood. Maybe that is the only way you can tell that a certain piece of knowledge is worth anything: it has cost some blood.

My mother left the next day. She was going to Reno. I drove her down to the station, and arranged all her nice, slick matched bags and valises and cases and hatboxes in a nice row on the cement of the platform to wait for the train. The day was hot and bright, and the cement was hot and gritty under our feet as we stood there in that vacuity which belongs to the period just before parting at a railway station.

We stood there quite a while, looking up the track for the first smudge of smoke on the heat‑tingling horizon beyond the tide flat and the clumps of pines. Then my mother suddenly said. "Jack, I want to tell you something."

"Yes?"

"I am letting Theodore have the house."

That took me so by surprise I couldn't say anything. I thought of all the years she ahd been cramming the place with furniture and silver and glass till it was a museum and she was God' gift to the antique dealers of New Orleans, New York, and London. I was surprised anything could pry her loose from it.

"You see," she said, hurrying on in the tone of explanation, misreading my silence, "it isn't really Theodore's fault and you know how crazy he is about the place and about living on the Row and all that. And I didn't think you'd want it. You see–I thought–I thought you had Monty's place and if you ever Lived at the Landing you'd prefer that because–because–"

"Because he was my father," I finished for her, a little grimly.

"Yes," she said, simply. "Because he was your father. So I decided to–"

"Damn it," I burst out, "it is your house and you can do whatever you want to with it. I wouldn't have it. As soon as I get my bag out of there this afternoon I'll never set foot in it again, and that is a fact. I don't want it and I don't care what you do with it or with your money. I don't want that either. I've always told you that."

"There won't be any too much money to worry about," she said. "You know what the last six or seven years have been like."

"You aren't broke?" I asked. "Look here, if you're broke, I'll–"

"I'm not broke," she said. "I'll have enough to get on with. If I go somewhere quiet and am careful. At first I thought I might go to Europe, then I–"

"You better stay out of Europe," I said. "All hell is going to break loose over there and not long either."

"Oh, I'm not going. I'm going to some quiet, cheap place. I don't know where. I'll have to think."

"Well," I said, "don't worry about me and the house. You can be plenty sure I'll never set foot in it again."

She looked up the tracks, east, where there wasn't any smoke yet beyond the pines and the tidelands. She mused for a couple of minute on the emptiness off there. Then said, as though just picking up my own words. "I ought never set foot in it. I married and I came to it and he was a good man. But I ought to have stayed where I was. I ought never come."

I couldn't very well argue that point with her one way or the other, and so I kept quiet.

But as she stood there in the silence, she seemed to be arguing it with herself, for suddenly she lifted up her head and looked straight at me and said, "Well, I did it. And now I know." And she squared her trim shoulders under her trim blue linen suit and held her face up in the old way like it was a damned expensive present she was making to the world and the world had better appreciate it.

Well, she knew now. As she stood there on the hot cement in the dazzle, she seemed to be musing on what she knew.

But it was on what she didn't know. For after a while she turned to me and said, "Son, tell me something."

"What?"

"It's something I've got to know, Son."

"What is it?"

"When–when it happened–when you went to see Monty–"

That was it. I knew that was it. And in the midst of the dazzle and the heat shimmering off the cement, I was cold as ice and my nerves crawled cold inside me.

"–did he–was there–" she was looking away from me.

"You mean," I said, "Had he got into a jam and had to shoot himself? Is that it?"

She nodded, then looked straight at me and waited for what was coming.

I looked into her face and studied. The light wasn't any too kind to it. Light would never be kind to it again. But she held it up and looked straight at me and waited.

"No," I said, "he wasn't in any jam. We had a little argument about politics. Nothing serious. But he talked about his health. About feeling bad. That was it. He said good‑bye to me. I can see now he meant it as the real thing. That was all."

She sagged a little. She didn't have to brace up so stiff any longer.

"Is that the truth?" she demanded.

"Yes," I said. "I swear to God it is."

"Oh," she said softly and let her breath escape in an almost soundless sigh.

So we waited again. There wasn't anything else to say. She had finally, at the last minute, asked what she had been waiting to ask and had been afraid to ask all the time.

Then, after a while, there was the smoke on the horizon. Then we could see, far off, the black smoke moving toward us along the edge of the bright water. Then with the great grinding and tramping and hissing and the wreaths of steam, the engine had pulled past us to a stop. A white‑coated porter began to gather up the nice matched bags and boxes.

My mother turned to me and took me by the arm. "Good‑bye, Son," she said.

"Good‑bye," I said.

She stepped toward me and I put my arm around her.

"Write to me, Son," she said. "Write to me. You are all I've got."

I nodded. "Let me know how you make out," I said.

"Yes," she said, "yes."

Then I kissed her good‑bye, and as I did so I saw the conductor who was beyond her look at his watch and flick it into his pocket with that contemptuous motion a conductor on a crack train has when he is getting ready to wind up the ninety‑second stop at a hick town. I knew he was that very instant going to call, "All aboard!" But it seemed a long time coming. It was like looking at a man across a wide valley and seeing the puff of smoke from his gun and then waiting God knows how long for the tiny report, or like seeing the lightning way off and waiting for the thunder. I stood there with my arm around my mother's shoulder and her cheek against mine (her cheek was wet, I discovered) and waited for the conductor to call, "All aboard!"

Then it came, and she stepped back from me and mounted the steps and turned to wave as the train drew away and the porter slammed the vestibule door.

I looked after the dwindling train was carrying my mother away until it was nothing but the smudge of smoke to the west, and thought how I had lied to her. Well, I had given that lie to her as a going‑away present. Or a kind of wedding present, I thought.

Then I thought how maybe I had lied just to cover up myself.

"Damn it," I said out loud, savagely, "it wasn't for me, it wasn't."

And that was true. It was really true.

I had given my mother a present, which was a lie. But in return she had given me a present, too, which was truth. She gave me a new picture of herself, and that meant, in the end, a new picture of the world. Or rather, the new picture of herself filled in the blank space which was perhaps the center of the new picture of the world which had been given to me by many people, by Sadie Burke, Lucy Stark, Willie Stark, Sugar‑Boy, Adam Stanton. And that meant that my mother gave me back the past. I could now accept the past which I had before felt was tainted and horrible. I could accept the past now because I could accept her and be at peace with her and with myself.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28