Роберт Уоррен - All the king's men

One thing was a cinch. I hadn't told her.

Perhaps Adam had told her, and then she had gone up there "to talk to him about it." So I went to see Adam, who was furiously deep in work, his usual practice and teaching, and in addition, the work on the hospital plans, who hadn't been able, he said, to touch the piano in almost a month, whose eyes fixed on me glacially out of a face now thin from sleepless ness, and who treated me with a courtesy too chromium-plated to be given to the friend of your youth. It took some doing, on my part, in the face of that courtesy, to get my nerve up to ask him the question. But I finally asked it. I said, "Adam, that first time Anne came up to talk to you about–about the job–you know, the hospital–had you told–"

And he said, with a voice like a scalpel, "I don't want to discuss it."

But I had to know. So I said, "Had you told her about the proposition?"

"No," he said, "and I said I didn't want to discuss it."

"O. K.," I heard myself saying, in a flat voice which wasn't quite my own. "O. K."

He looked sharply at me, then rose from his chair and took a step toward me. "I'm sorry," he said, "I'm sorry, Jack. I'm on the edge." He shook his head slightly like a man trying to shake the fog of sleep out. "Not been getting enough shut-eye," he said. He took another step to me–I was leaning against the mantel–and looked into my face again and laid his hand on my arm, saying, "I'm really sorry, Jack–talking that way–but I didn't tell Anne anything–and I'm sorry."

"Forget it," I said.

"I'll forget it," he agreed, smiling wintrily, tapping my arm, "if you will."

"Sure," I said, "sure, I'll forget it. Yeah, I'll forget it. It didn't amount to anything anyway. Who told her. I guess I told her myself. It just slipped my mind that–"

"I mean forget about the way I acted," he corrected me, "blowing off the way I did."

"Oh," I said, "oh, that. Sure. I'll forget it."

Then he was peering into my face, with a question darkening his eyes. He didn't say anything for a moment. Then, "What did you want to know for?"

"Nothing," I replied, "nothing. Just idle curiosity. But I recollect now. I told her myself. Yeah, and I guess maybe I shouldn't. I didn't mean to get her into it. Just let it slip. I didn't mean to cause any ruckus. I didn't think–" And all the while that cold, unloving part of the mind–that maiden aunt, that washroom mirror the drunk stares into, that still small voice, that maggot in the cheese of your selfesteem, that commentator on the ether nightmare, that death's head of lipless rationality at your every feast–all that while that part of the mind was saying: _You're making it worse, your lying is just making it worse, can't you shut up, you blabbermouth!__

And Adam, with whitening face, was saying, "There wasn't any ruckus. As you call it."

But I couldn't stop, as when your car come to the glare ice over the brow of the hill and hits it before you can get on the brake, and you feel the beautiful free glide and spin of the skid and almost burst out laughing, it is so fine and free, like boyhood. I was saying, "–not any ruckus exactly–just I'm sorry I sicked her on you–I didn't want to cause any trouble–it was just that–"

"I don't want to discuss it," he said, and the jaw snapped shut, and he swung from me and went to stand on the other side of the room, very stiff and military.

So I took my leave, and the chromium-plated courtesy was so bright and cold that my, "Be seeing you, boy," stuck in y throat, like old corn bread.

But he hadn't told Anne Stanton. And I hadn't told her. Who had told her? And at that point I could see no answer except that there had been some loose talk, some leak, and the news had got around. I guess I took that answer–if I really took it–because it was the easiest answer for me to take. But I knew, deep down, that the Boss wasn't given to loose talk except when he wanted to talk loose, and he would have known that one sure way to ruin the chance of ever getting Adam Stanton would be to let the gossip mill start grinding on the topic. I knew that all right, but my mind just closed up like a clam when that shadow came floating over. A clam has to live, hasn't it?

But I did find out who had told Anne Stanton.

It was a beautiful morning in middle May, and just that morning, at that hour, about nine-thirty, there was still some last touch of spring–by that time you had almost forgotten there had been a spring–a kind of milkiness in the air, and way off yonder, from my window, I could see a little white haze on the river, milky too. The season was like the fine big-breasted daughter of some poor spavined share-cropper, a girl popping her calico but still having a waist, with pink cheeks and bright eyes and just a little perspiration at the edge of her tow hair (which would be platinum blond in some circles), but you see her and know that before long she will be a bag of bone and gristle with a hag face like a rusted brush hook. But she looks enough to scare you now, if you really look at her, and that morning the season still had that look and feel even if you did know that by the end of June everything would be bone and gristle and hag face and a sweat-sticky sheet to wake up on and a taste in your mouth like old brass. But now the leaves on the trees hung down thick and fleshy and had not begun to curl yet. I could look down from my office window on the great bolls and tufts and swollen globes of green which were the trees of the Capitol grounds seen from the height of my window, and think of the deep inner maze of green in one of the big trees and of the hollow shadowy chambers near the trunk, where maybe a big cantankerous jay would be perched for a moment like a barbarous potentate staring with black, glittering, beady eyes into the green tangle. Then he would dive soundlessly off the bough and break through the green screen and be gone into the bright sunshine where suddenly he would be screaming his damned head off. I could look down and think of myself inside that hollow inner chamber, in the aqueous green light, inside the great globe of the tree, and not even a jaybird in there with me now, for he had gone, and no chance of seeing anything beyond the green leaves, they were so thick, and no sound except, way off, the faint mumble of traffic, like the ocean chewing its gums.

It was fine, peaceful, beautiful thought and I took my eyes off the green below and lay back in my swivel chair, with my heels on the desk, and shut my eyes and thought of swooping down and bursting through the green to the sudden green quietness inside. I lay back with my eyes closed and listen to the electric fan, which was humming like a dream, and could almost feel the wonderful swoop and then the poise inside. It was a fine idea. If you had wings.

Then I heard the racket outside in the reception room, and opened my eyes. Somebody had slammed a door. Then I caught the whir of a passage and Sadie Burke swung into my ken, making a great curve through my open door, and, all in one motion, slamming it behind her and charging on my direction. She stood in front of my desk and fought for air enough to say what she had to say.

It was just like old times. I hadn't seen her worked up that much since the morning when she had found out about the Nordic Nymph who had skated her way into the Boss's bed up in Chicago a long time back. That morning she had exploded out of the Boss's door, and had described a parabola into my office, with her black chopped-off hair wild and her face like a riddled plaster-of-Paris mask of Medusa except for the hot bituminous eyes, which were in full blaze with a bellows pumping the flame.

Well, since that morning there had, no doubt, been plenty of occasions when Sadie and the Boss had not exactly eye to eye. The Boss had had everything from the Nordic Nymph to the household-hints columnist on the _Chronicle__ in his life, and Sadie hadn't been exactly condoning–for Sadie did not have a condoning nature–but a peculiar accommodation had finally been reached. "Damn him," Sadie had said to me, "let him have his sluts, let him have them. But he'll always come back to me. He knows he can't get along without me. He knows he can't." And she had added grimly, "And he better not try." So, with her fury and her _God-damns __and her satire and her tongue-lashing–and she had a tongue like a cat-o'-nine-tails–and even with her rare bursts of dry-eyed grief, she seemed to take a kind of pleasure, wry and twisted enough God knows, in watching the development of the pattern in each new-old case, in watching the slut get bounced and the Boss come back to stand before her, grinning and heavy and sure and patient, to take his tongue-lashing. A long time back she herself had probably ceased to believe in the tongue-lashing or even to think what she was saying. The juicy epithets had long since lost their fine savor and a strident mechanical quality had crept into the rendering of the scene. Like a stuck phonograph record or a chicken-hungry preacher getting over the doxology. The word came but her mind wasn't on them.