All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [125]
And I stood there in what was the present.
But there was the past. There was the question. There was the dead kitty buried in the ash heap.
So I stood, later, in the embrasure of as big bay window and looked out as the last light ceased to gleam from the metallic leaves of magnolias and the creamy wash of the sea beyond dulled in the thickened dusk. Behind me was a room not very different from that other long white room giving on the sea–where now, at this moment perhaps, my mother would be lifting to the taffy-haired Young Executive that face which was still like a damned expensive present and which he had damned well better admire. But in the room behind me, scarcely lighted by the stub of a candle on the mounted shelf, the furniture was shrouded in white cloth, and the grandfather’s clock in the corner was as severely mute as grandfather. But I knew that when I turned around there would also be, in the midst of the sepulchral sheetings and the out-of-time silence, a woman kneeling before the cols blackness of the wide fireplace to put pine cones and bits of light-wood beneath the logs there. She had said, “No, let me do it. It’s my house, you know, and I ought to light the fire when I come back like this. You know, a ritual. I went to. Adam always lets me do it. When we come back.”
For the woman was Anne Stanton, and this was the house of Governor Stanton, whose face, marmoreal and unperturbed and high, above black square beard and black frock coat, gazed down in the candlelight from the massy gold frame above the fireplace, where his daughter crouched, as though at his feet, rasping a match to light a fire there. Well, I had been in this room when the Governor had not been the marmoreal brow in the massy gold frame but a tall man sitting with his feet on the hearthrug with a little girl, a child, on a hassock at his feet, leaning her head against his knee and gazing into the fire while his large man hand toyed deliciously with the loose, silken hair. But I was here now because Anne Stanton, no longer a little girl, had said, “Come on out to the Landing, we’re just going back for Saturday night and Sunday, just to build a fire and eat something out of a can and sleep under the roof again. It’s all the time Adam can spare. And he can’t spare that much often now.” So I had come, carrying my question.
I heard the match rasp, and turned from the sea, which was dark now. The flame had caught the fat of the light-wood and was leaping up and spewing little stars like Christmas sparklers, and the light danced warmly on Anne Stanton’s leaning face and then on her throat and cheek as, still crouching, she looked up at me when I approached the hearth. Her eyes were glittering like the eyes of a child when you give a nice surprise, and she laughed in a sudden throaty, tingling way. It is a way a woman laughs for happiness. They never laugh that way just when they are being polite or at a joke. A woman only laughs that way a few times in her life. A woman only laughs that way when something has touched her way down in the very quick of her being and the happiness just wells out as natural as breath and the first jonquils and mountain brooks. When a woman laughs that way it always does something to you. It does not matter what kind of a face she has got either. You hear that laugh and feel that you have grasped a clean and beautiful truth. You feel that way because that laugh is a revelation. It is a great impersonal sincerity. It is a spray of dewy blossom from the great central stalk of All Being, and the woman’s name and address hasn’t got a damn thing to do with it. Therefore, that laugh cannot be faked. If a woman could learn to fake it she would make Nell Gwyn and Pompadour look like a couple of Campfire Girls wearing bifocals and ground-gripper shoes and with hands on their teeth. She could set all society by the ears. For all any man really wants is to hear a woman laugh like that.
So Anne looked up at me with the glittering eyes and laughed that way while the firelight glowed on her cheek. Then I laughed, too, looking down at her. She reached up her hand to me, and I took it and helped her as she rose easy and supple