All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [233]
Monday morning I got to the office early. I had slept all day Sunday, getting up only in time for a bite of dinner and then some silly movie, and being back in bed by ten-thirty. I came into the office with that sense you get after a lot of sleep of being spiritually pure.
I went back to the Boss’s office. He hadn’t come in. But while I was there one of the girls came in carrying a big tray piled up with telegrams. “They are all about his boy getting hurt,” she said, “and they keep coming in.”
“They’ll be coming in all day,” I said.
That would be true, all right. Every pinfeather politician, county-courthouse janitor, and ambitious lickspittle in the state who hadn’t seen the story in the Sunday paper would see it in this morning’s paper and get off his telegram. Getting that telegram off would be like praying. You couldn’t tell that praying would do any good, but it certainly never did anybody any harm. Those telegrams were part of the system. Like presents for the wedding of a politician’s daughter or flowers for a cop’s funeral. And it was part of the system, too, for the flowers, now that we are on the subject, to come from Antonio Giusto’s flower store. A girl in the flower store kept a record in a special file of all the orders that came in for a cop’s funeral, and then Tony just ran through the file after the funeral and checked the names by his master list of perennially bereaved friends and if your name was on the master list it had sure-God better be in the file for Murphy’s funeral, and I don’t mean any bunch of sweet peas, either. Tony was a good friend of Tiny Duffy.
It was Tiny Duffy who came into the office just as the girl flounced out with a cute little twitch of her skirt. He mooned in with a face full of professional sympathy and mortician’s gloom, but as soon as he took in the fact that the Boss was not present he relaxed a little, showed his teeth, and said, “How’s tricks?”
I said tricks was O.K.
“You seen the Boss?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Gee,” he said, and the sympathy and gloom appeared magically on his face, “it is sure tough. It is what I always calls tragic. A kid like that. A good clean square-shooting kid like that. It is tragic, and no mistake.”
“You needn’t practice on me,” I said.
“It will be tough on the Boss,” he said, and shook his head.
“Just save your fire till he gets here.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
I tried to get hold of him yesterday,” Tiny said, “but he wasn’t at the Mansion. They said they didn’t know where he was, he hadn’t been home. He was out to the hospital a while, but I missed him there. He wasn’t in a hotel, either.”
“You seem to have been thorough,” I said.
“Yeah,” Tiny said, “I wanted to tell him how us boys all felt.”
Just then Calvin Sperling, who was Commissioner of Agriculture, came in with a couple of other fellows. They were wearing crepe on their faces, too, till they saw the Boss was not in. Then they eased off and began to snap their bubble gum. “Maybe he won’t be coming.” Sperling suggested.
“He’ll come,” Tiny pronounced. “It won’t faze him. The Boss is tough.”
A couple more of the fellows came by, and then Morrisey, who had followed Hugh Miller a long time back as Attorney General, after Miller’s resignation. The cigar smoke began to get thick.
Once Sadie stopped at the door, laid one hand on the jamb, and surveyed the scene.
“Hi, Sadie,” one of the boys said.
She did not respond. She continued her survey for a moment longer, then said, “Jesus Christ,” and moved on. I heard the door of her own office shut.
I drifted over to the window back of the Boss’s desk and looked out over the grounds. It had rained during the night and now in the weak sunlight the grass and the leaves of the live oaks, even the trailing moss, had a faint sheen, and the damp concrete of the curving drives and walks gave off an almost imperceptible, glimmering reflection. The whole world, the bare boles of the other trees, which had lost their leaves now, the roofs of the houses, even the sky itself, had a pale, washed, relieved look, like the look on the face of a person who has been sick a long time and now feels better and thinks maybe he is going to get well.