Роберт Уоррен: All the king's men

"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.