All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [180]
She didn’t answer, but she opened her eyes, and looked at me.
“We oughtn’t,” I began, “we oughtn’t–it wouldn’t–it wouldn’t be–it wouldn’t be right.” So I used the word right, which came to my lips to surprise me, for I hadn’t ever thought of anything I had done with Anne Stanton or with any other woman or girl as being right or wrong very much in connection with anything but had simply done the things people do and not done the things people don’t do. Which are the things people do and don’t do. And I remember now the surprise I felt when I heard that word there in the air, like the echo of a word spoken by somebody else God knows how many years before, and now unfrozen like a word in Baron Munchausen’s tale. I couldn’t any more have touched her then than if she had been my little sister.
She didn’t answer then, but kept on looking at me, with an expression I could not fathom, and as I looked at her I was overwhelmed by a great, warm pity, like a flood in my bosom, and burst out, “Anne–oh, Anne–” and felt the impulse to fling myself to my knees beside the bed and seize my hand.
Now If I had done that, things might have developed differently and more in the normal pattern, for it is probable that when a half-clothed and healthy young man kneels beside a bed and seizes the hand of an entirely unclothed and good-looking young girl, developments will follow the normal pattern sooner or later. And if I had once touched her in the process of undressing her, or even if she had spoken to me to say anything, to call me Jackie-Boy or tell me she loved me, or had giggled or seemed gay, or had even answered me, saying anything whatsoever, when I looked at her lying there on the bed and first cried out her name–if any of those things had happened things might have been different then and forever afterward. But none of these things had happened, and I was not to follow the wild impulse to throw myself on my knees by the bed and take her hand to make the first trifling contact of flesh with flesh, which would probably have been enough. For just as I burst out, “Anne–oh, Anne–” there was the sound of tires on the drive, then the creaking of brakes.
“They’ve come back, they’ve come back!” I exclaimed, and Anne rose abruptly to a sitting position on the bed and looked wildly at me.
“Grab your stuff,” I ordered, Grab your stuff, and get to the bathroom–you could have been in the bathroom!” I was cramming my shirt in and was trying to buckle my belt all at once and was going toward the door. “I’ll be in the kitchen,” I said, “I’ll be fixing something to eat!”
Then I bolted from the room, and ran down the hall, trying to run on tiptoe, and ran down the back stairs to the back passage and then into the kitchen, where I put a match to the gas under the coffeepot with trembling fingers just as the front screen door slammed and people entered the hall. I sat down at the table and began to make sandwiches, waiting for my heart to stop pounding before I confronted my mother and the Pattons and whatever bastards they had with them.
When my mother came on back to the kitchen, right away, followed by her gang, there I was and there was a nice pile of toothsome sandwiches and they weren’t going to La Grange because of the storm and kidded me about being a mind reader and having the sandwiches and coffee all ready for them, and I was charming and gracious to them all. Then Anne came down (she had done a good circumstantial job and flushed the toilet twice to advertise her whereabouts) and they kidded her about her pigtails and her pickaninny hair ribbons, and she didn’t say anything but smile shyly the way a nice well-bred young girl should when the grownups take amiable notice of her, and then she sat quietly and ate a sandwich and I couldn’t read a thing from her face, not a thing.
Well, that was the way the summer ended. True, there was the rest of the night, with me lying on the iron bed and hearing the leaves drip and cursing myself for a fool and cursing my luck and trying to figure out what Anne had thought and trying to plan how I would get her off alone the next day