All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [256]
I telephoned her out at the farm where she was still staying. She sounded all right on the phone. And she asked me to come out.
So I was back in the parlor in the little white house, among the black-walnut furniture upholstered in red plush, looking down at the flowers in the carpet. Nothing had changed in that room for a long time, or would change for a long time. But Lucy had changed a little. She was fleshier now, with a more positive gray in her hair. She was more like the woman the house had reminded me of the first time I had seen it–a respectable, middle-aged woman, in a clean gray gingham dress, with white stockings and black kid shoes, sitting in her rocker on the porch, with her hands folded across her stomach to take a little ease now the day’s work is done and the menfolks are still in the fields and it’s not yet time to think about supper or strain the evening milk. She wasn’t that woman yet, but give her six or seven more years and she would be.
I sat there with my eyes on a flower in the carpet, or I looked up at her and then again at the flower, and her own glance strayed about the room in that abstracted way a good housewife has of looking around to surprise a speck of dust in the act. We were saying things to each other all the while, but they were strained and difficult things, completely empty.
You meet somebody at the seashore on a vacation and have a wonderful time together. Or in a corner at a party, while the glasses clink and somebody beats on a piano, you talk with a stranger whose mind seems to whet and sharpen your own and with whom a wonderful new vista of ideas is spied.. Or you share some intense or painful experience with somebody, and discover a deep communion. Then afterward you are sure that when you meet again, the gay companion will give you the old gaiety, the brilliant stranger will stir your mind from its torpor, the sympathetic friend will solace you with the old communion of spirit. But something happens, or almost always happens, to the gaiety, the brilliance, the communion. You remember the individual words from the old language you spoke together, but you have forgotten the grammar. You remember the steps of the dance, but the music isn’t playing any more. So there you are.
So there we sat for a while, and the minutes sifted and wavered down around us, one by one, like leaves dropping in still autumn air. Then, after a space of silence, she excused herself and I was left alone to watch the leaves drift down.
But she came back, carrying now a tray on which was a pitcher of iced tea, two glasses with sprigs of mint stuck in them, and a large devil’s-food cake. That is what they give you in the country in a little white house like that when you make a visit, iced tea and devil’s-food cake. She had made the cake that morning, no doubt, in preparation for my visit.
Well, eating the cake would be something to do. Nobody expects you to talk with your mouth full of cake.
In the end, however, she said something. Perhaps having the cake on the table beside her, seeing somebody eat her cake, which she knew was a good cake, as people had sat on Sunday afternoons and eaten cake in that room for years, made it possible for her to say something.
She said, “You knew Tom was dead.”
She said it perfectly matter-of-factly, and that was a comfort.
“Yes,” I replied, “I knew it.”
I had seen it in the paper, back in February. I hadn’t gone to the funeral. I figured I had been to enough funerals. And I hadn’t written her a letter. I couldn’t very well write a letter and say I was sorry, and I couldn’t very well write her a letter of congratulations.
“It was pneumonia,” she said.
I remembered Adam’s saying that that was what often got such cases.
“He died very quickly,” she continued. “Just three days.”
“Yes,” I said.
She was silent for a moment, then said, “I am resigned now. I am resigned to it all now, Jack. A time comes when you think you cannot bear another thing, but it happens to you, and you can bear it. I am resigned now, by God’s help.”
I didn’t make any answer.
“Then after I was resigned, God gave me something so I could live.