All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [204]
“Yes,” I nodded, “like most things.”
She went to one of the windows, where she stood with her back to me and the parlor and peered through a crack between the curtains out into the hot, sun-dazzled world outside, where everything happened.
After a minute she said, “Go on, tell me what you were going to tell.”
So not looking at her as she peered out the crack into the world but looking at the empty chair where she had been sitting, I told her about the MacMurfee proposition and how things were.
My voice stopped. Then there was another minute of silence. Then, I heard her voice back over by the window, “It had to be this way, I guess. I have tried to do right but it had to be this way, I guess. Oh, Jack–” I heard the rustle as she turned from the window, and swung my head toward her, as she said–“Oh, Jack, I tried to do right. I loved my boy and tried to raise him right. I loved my husband and tried to do my duty. And they love me. I think they love me. After everything I have to think that, Jack. I have to.”
I sat there and sweated on the red plush, while the large, deep-brown eyes fixed on me in a mixture of appeal and affirmation.
Then she said, very quietly now, “I have to think that. And think that it will be all right in the end.”
“Listen,” I said, “the Boss stalled them off, he’ll think of something, it’ll be all right.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that, I meant–” but she stopped.
But I knew what she had meant, even as her voice, lower and steadier now, and at the same time more resigned, resumed to say, “Yes, he’ll think of something. It will be all right.”
There wasn’t any use to hang round longer. I got up, rescued my old Panama off the carved walnut table, where the Bible and stereoscope were, walked across to Lucy, put out my hand to her, and said, “It’ll be all right.”
She looked at my hand as though she didn’t know why it was there. Then she looked at me. “It’s just a baby,” she almost whispered. “It’s just a little baby. It’s a little baby in the dark. It’s not even born yet, and it doesn’t know about what’s happened. About money and politics and somebody wanting to be a senator. It doesn’t know about anything–about how it came to be–about what that girl did–or why–or why the father–why he–” She stopped, and the large brown eyes kept looking at me with appeal and what might have been accusation. Then she said, “Oh, Jack, it’s a little baby, and nothing’s its fault.”
I almost burst out that it wasn’t my fault, either, but I didn’t.
Then she added, “It may be my grandbaby. It may be my boy’s baby.”
Then, after a moment, “I would love it.”
Her hands, which had been clenched into fists and pressed together at the level of her breast, opened slowly at the words, and reached out, supine and slightly cupped, but with the wrists still against her own body as though expectation were humble or hopeless.
She noticed me looking down at the hands, then quickly let them drop.
“Good-bye,” I said, and moved toward the door.
“Thank you, Jack,” she said, but didn’t follow me. Which suited me down to the ground, for I was really on my way out.
I walked out into the dazzling world and down the prideful patch of concrete and got into my car and headed back to town, where, no doubt, I belonged.
The Boss did think up something.
First, he thought that it might be a good idea to get in touch with Marvin Frey, directly and not through MacMurfee, to feel out the situation there. But MacMurfee was too smart for that. He didn’t trust Frey or the Boss, either, and Marvin had been whisked off, nobody knew where exactly. But, as it developed later, Marvin and Sibyl had been carried off into Arkansas, which was probably the last place they wanted to be, on a farm up in Arkansas, where the only horses were mules and the brightest light came from a patented gasoline pressure lamp on the parlor table and there weren