All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [176]
We were in September then. In a few days Anne was to leave to go back up East to Miss Pound’s School. Her father was going to take her a few days early and stop with her in Washington and then in New York before sending her on to Boston, where Miss Pound would get her hooks in. Anne hadn’t seemed particularly excited about the trip, or about getting back to Miss Pound. She liked the school fine, she had told me, but I hadn’t been overwhelmed by tales of midnight snacks and memory books and that darling teacher of French, and her vocabulary wasn’t slimed up with offensive bits of esoteric finishing-school slang. Back in August she had mentioned the plan, the date of departure, but without pleasure or displeasure, as though it were something completely irrelevant to us, the way a young person mentions death. When she mentioned it, I had felt a sudden twinge, but I had managed to put the thought aside, for even though the calendar said it was August I had not been able to believe that the summer, and the world, would ever end. But that morning when Anne reappeared at the tennis court, my first thought was that she would be going soon. It really came over me then. I went up to her, not even saying hello, and took her hand, feeling a kind of unformulated desperation and urgency.
She looked at me with an expression of mild surprise.
“Don’t you love me?” I demanded, angrily.
She burst out laughing, and fixed her eyes on me, with the laughter making innocent, mocking crinkles at the outer corners of the absolutely clear eyes. “Sure,” she said, laughing, the idle racket swinging in her free hand, “sure, I love you, Jackie-Boy, Jackie-Bird, who said I didn’t love poor old Jackie-Bird?”
“Don’t be silly,” I said, for the language of all our nights in the roadster and in the porch swing suddenly seemed, in the glare of the morning and with the desperation in me, fatuous and loathsome. “Don’t be silly,” I repeated, “and don’t call me Jackie-Bird.”
“But you are Jackie-Bird,” she replied gravely, but with the crinkles still at the corners of the eyes.
“Don’t you love me?” I demanded, ignoring what she had said.
“I love Jackie-Bird,” she said, “poor Jackie-Bird.”
“God damn it,” I said, “don’t you love me?”
She studied me a moment, with the crinkles entirely gone now. “Yes,” she said then, “I do,” and pulled her hand out of mine and walked across the court, with a kind of finality in the stride as though she had made up her mind to go somewhere and it was quite a way and she had better start walking. She only walked across the court, to sit on the bench in the feathery shade of the mimosa, but I watched her as though the court were as wide as the Sahara and she were dwindling into distance.
Then Adam came, and we played tennis.
She had come back that morning, but it was not to be as it had been before. She had come back, all right, but not all of her. She was with me as much as before, but she seemed to be wrapped in her own thoughts, and when I caressed her she seemed to submit out of a sense of duty or at the best out of kindness which wasn’t quite contemptuous. That was the way it was for the last week, while the days stayed hot and breathless, and the clouds piled up in the late afternoon as though promising a squall but the squall didn’t come, and the nights were as heavy and blunt as a big black silver-dusted grape ready to burst.
Two nights before she was supposed to leave we went in to the Landing to a movie. It was raining when we came out of the movie. We had intended to go for a swim after the show, but we didn’t. We had taken lots of swims in the rain, that summer and the summer before when Adam had been with us. We would no doubt have gone that night too, if the rain had been a different kind of rain, if it had been a light sweet rain, falling out of a high sky, the kind that barely whispers with a silky sound on the surface of the water you are swimming in, or if it had been a driven, needle-pointed, cold, cathartic rain to make you want to run along the beach and yell before you took refuge in the sea, or even if it had been a torrent, the kind you get on the Gulf that is like nothing so much as what happens when the bottom finally bursts out of a big paper bag suspended full of water. But it wasn