All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [227]
But she took it. It hit her where she lived, but she took it. “Oh, God,” she said, not loud, “oh, God,” but the remark was not addressed to me. I presumed that she was praying, for she had gone to the little Baptist college way back in the red clay where they had been long on praying, and maybe the habit had stuck.
And it wasn’t fun, either, when I led her into the waiting room where the Boss was. He turned his face heavily to her from the midst of the floral design on the chintz-covered, overstuffed, high-backed chair in which he sat, and looked at her as a stranger. She stood in the middle of the floor, not going toward him, and asked, “How is he?”
At her question the light flared up in the Boss’s eyes, and he rose violently from the chair. “Look here,” he said, “he’s all right–he’s going to be all right. You understand that!”
“How is he? She repeated.
“I told you–I told you he’s going to be all right,” he said with a grating voice.
“You say it,” she said, “but what do the doctors say?”
The blood apoplectically flushed his face and I heard the snatch of his breathing before he said, “You wanted it this way. You said you did. You said you had rather see him dead at your feet. You wanted it this way. But–” and he stepped toward her–“he’ll fool you. He’s all right. Do you hear? He will be all right.”
“God grant it,” she said quietly.
“Grant it, grant it!” he burst out. “He’s all right, right now. That boy is tough, he can take it.”
She made no answer to that, but stood and looked at him while the blood subsided in his face and his frame seemed to sag with the weight of the flesh on it. The she asked, “Can I see him?”
Before answering, the Boss stepped back to the chair and sank into it. Then he looked at me. “Take her down to Room 305,” he directed. He spoke dully, and apparently without interest now, as though in a railway waiting room answering foolish questions about the schedule for some traveler.
So I took her down to Room 305, where the body lay like a log under the white sheet and the breath labored through the gaping mouth. At first, she did not approach the bed. She stood just inside the door, looking across at it. I thought she was going to keel over, and put my arm out to prop her, but she stayed on her legs. Then she moved to the bed and reached down with a timid motion to touch the body there. She laid her hand on the right leg, just above the ankle, and let it test there as though she could draw, or communicate, some force by the contact. Meanwhile, the nurse, who stood on the other side of the bed, leaned down to wipe from the brow of the patient the drops of moisture which gathered there. Lucy Stark took a step or two up the bed, and, looking at the nurse, reached out her hand. The nurse put the cloth into it, and Lucy finished the job of wiping the brow and temples. Then she handed the cloth back to the nurse. “Thank you,” she whispered. The nurse gave a sort smile of professional understanding out of her plain, good, anonymous, middle-aged face, like a light flicked on momentarily in a comfortable, shabby living room.
But Lucy wasn’t looking at that face, but at the sag-jawed face below her where the breath labored in and out. There wasn’t any light on there. So after a while–the nurse said D. Stanton wouldn’t be back for some little time and she would notify us when he did come–we went back to the room where the Boss sat with his heavy head in the middle of th floral design.
Lucy sat in another chintz-covered chair (the waiting room was very cozy and cheerful with potted plants on the window ledge and chintz on the chairs and water colors on the walls in natural-wood frames and a fireplace with artificial logs in it) and looked at her lap or, now and then, across at the Boss, and I sat on the couch over by the wall and thumbed through the picture magazines, from which I gathered that the world outside our cozy little nook was still the world.
About eleven-thirty Adam came in to say that the doctor from Baltimore who was coming for the consultation had been forced down by fog and would fly in as soon as the ceiling lifted.