All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [142]
“And will vote for you,” I said.
“I’ll be dead,” he said, “and you’ll be dead, and I don’t care whether he votes for me or not, he can go there and–”
“And bless your name,” I said.
“Damn it!” he shook me hard, crumpling my lapel in his big hand, “you stand there grinning like that–get that grin off your face–get it off or I’ll–”
“Listen,” I said, “I’m not any of your scum, and I’m still grinning when I please.”
“Jack–hell, Jack–you know I don’t mean that–it’s just you stand there and grin. Damn it, can’t you understand? Can’t you?” He held the lapel and thrust the big face at me, his eyes gouging into mine, saying, “Can’t you? Can’t you see I’m not going to let those bastars muck with it? The Willie Stark Hospital? Can’t you see? And I’m going to get me the damned best man there is to run it. Yes, sir! The best there is. Yes, sir, up in New York they told me to get him, he was the man. And, Jack, you–”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“You’re going to get him.”
I disengaged myself from the grasp on my lapel, straightened it, and dropped into a chair. “Get who?” I asked.
“Dr, Stanton,” he said “Dr. Adam Stanton.”
I almost bounced right out of the chair. The ash off my cigarette fell down my shirt front. “How long have you been having these symptoms?” I asked. “You been seeing any pink elephants?”
“You get Stanton,” he said.
“You are hearing voices,” I said.
“You get him,” he repeated dourly.
“Boss,” I said, “Adam is an old pal of mine. I know him like a brother. And I know he hates your guts.”
“I’m not asking anybody to love me. Not even you.”
“We all love you,” I mimicked Tiny, “you know how all us boys feel.”
“Get him,” he said.
I stood up, stretched, yawned, moved toward the door. “I am leaving,” I declared. “Tomorrow, when you are in possession of your faculties, I’ll hear what you’ve got to say.”
And I shut the door behind me
Tomorrow, when he was in full possession of his faculties, I heard what he had to say, and it was: “Get Stanton.”
So I went to the shabby little monastic apartment where the grand piano glittered like a sneer in the midst of near-squalor and the books and paper piled on chairs and the old coffee cup with dried dregs inside which the colored girl had forgotten to pick up, and where the friend of my youth received me as though he were not a Success and I were not a Failure (both spelled with capital letters), laid his hand on my shoulder, pronounced my name, looked at me from the ice-water-blue, abstract eyes which were a reproach to all uncertain, twisted, and clouded things and were as unwavering as conscience. But the smile on his face, unsealing almost tentatively the firm suture of the mouth, put a warmth in you, a shy warmth like that you discover with surprise in the winter sunshine in late February. That smile was his apology for being what he was, for looking at you the way he did, for seeing what he saw. It did not so much forgive you, and the world, as ask forgiveness for himself for the crime of looking straight at whatever was before him, which might be you. But he didn’t smile often. He smiled at me not because I was what I was but because I was the Friend of His Youth.
The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does not exist any more, speaks a name–Spike, Bud, Snip, Red, Rusty, Jack, Dave–which belongs to that now nonexistent face but which by some inane and doddering confusion of the universe is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger. But he humors the drooling, doddering confusion of the universe and continues to address politely that dull stranger by the name which properly belongs to the boy face and to the time when the boy voice called thinly across the late afternoon water or murmured by a campfire at night or in the middle of a crowded street said,