All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [129]
We had a wonderful time. While Anne cooked, and I fixed drinks and set the table, Adam snatched the sheet off the piano (they kept the thing in tune out there and it wasn’t a bad one even yet) and beat hell out of it till the house bulged and rocked. He even took three good highballs before dinner instead of one. Then we ate, and he beat on the piano some more, playing stuff like “Roses Are Blooming in Picardy” and “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” while Anne and I danced and cavorted, or he would mush it up and Anne would hum in my ear and we would sway sweet and slow like young poplars in the slightest breeze. Then he jump up from the piano bench and whistling “Beautiful Lady,” snatched her out of my arms and swung her wide in a barrel-house waltz while she leaned back on his arm with her head back and eyes closed for a swoon, and with right arm outstretched, held delicately the hem of her fluttering skirt.
But Adam was a good dancer, even clowning. It was because he was a natural, for he ever got any practice any more. And never had taken his share. Not of anything except work. And he could have had them crawling to him and asking for it. And once in about five years he would break out in a kind of wild, free, exuberant gaiety like a levee break streaming out to snatch the trees and brush up by the roots, and you would be the trees and brush. You and everybody around him. His eyes would gleam wild and he would gesture wide with an excess of energy bursting from deep inside. You would think of a great turbine or dynamo making a million revs a minute and boiling out the power and about to jump loose from its moorings. When he gestured with those strong, long, supple white hands, it was a mixture of Svengali and an atom-busting machine. You expected to see blue sparks. When he got like that they wouldn’t have had the strength to crawl to him and ask for it. They would just be ready to fall back and roll over where they were. Only it didn’t do them any good.
But that didn’t come often. And didn’t last long. The cold would settle down and the lid would go on right quick.
Adam didn’t have the power on that night. He was just ready to smile and laugh and joke and beat the piano and swing his sister in the barrel-house waltz while the fire leaped on the big hearth and the high face gazed down from the massy gold frame and the wind moved in off the sea and in the dark outside clashed the magnolia leaves.
Not that in that room, with the fire crackling and the music, we heard the tiny clashing of the magnolia leaves the wind made. I heard it later, in bed upstairs in the dark, through the open window, the tiny dry clashing of the leaves, and thought, Were we happy tonight because we were happy or because once, a long time back, we had been happy? Was our happiness tonight like the light of the moon, which does not come from the moon, for the moon is cold and has no light of its own, but is reflected light from far away? I turned that notion around in my head and tried to make a nice tidy little metaphor out of it, but the metaphor wouldn’t work out, for you have to be the cold, dead, wandering moon, and you have to have been the sum, too, way back, and how the hell can you be both the sun and the moon? It was not consistent. It was not tidy. To hell with it, I though, listening to the leaves.
Then thought, Well, anyway, I know now Irwin was broke.
I had dug that much up out of the past, and tomorrow I would leave Burden’s Landing and the past, and go back to the present. So I went back to the present.
Which was:
Tiny Duffy sitting in a great soft leather chair with his great soft hams flowing over the leather, and his great soft belly flowing over his great soft hams, and a long cigarette holder with a burning cigarette stuck jauntily out from one side of his face (the cigarette holder was a recent innovation, imitated from a gentleman who was the most prominent member of the political party to which Tiny Duffy gave his allegiance) and his great soft face flowing down over his collar, an a diamond ring on his finger, big as a walnut