All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [260]
We stood there quite a while, looking up the track for the first smudge of smoke on the heat-tingling horizon beyond the tide flat and the clumps of pines. Then my mother suddenly said. “Jack, I want to tell you something.”
“Yes?”
“I am letting Theodore have the house.”
That took me so by surprise I couldn’t say anything. I thought of all the years she ahd been cramming the place with furniture and silver and glass till it was a museum and she was God’ gift to the antique dealers of New Orleans, New York, and London. I was surprised anything could pry her loose from it.
“You see,” she said, hurrying on in the tone of explanation, misreading my silence, “it isn’t really Theodore’s fault and you know how crazy he is about the place and about living on the Row and all that. And I didn’t think you’d want it. You see–I thought–I thought you had Monty’s place and if you ever Lived at the Landing you’d prefer that because–because–”
“Because he was my father,” I finished for her, a little grimly.
“Yes,” she said, simply. “Because he was your father. So I decided to–”
“Damn it,” I burst out, “it is your house and you can do whatever you want to with it. I wouldn’t have it. As soon as I get my bag out of there this afternoon I’ll never set foot in it again, and that is a fact. I don’t want it and I don’t care what you do with it or with your money. I don’t want that either. I’ve always told you that.”
“There won’t be any too much money to worry about,” she said. “You know what the last six or seven years have been like.”
“You aren’t broke?” I asked. “Look here, if you’re broke, I’ll–”
“I’m not broke,” she said. “I’ll have enough to get on with. If I go somewhere quiet and am careful. At first I thought I might go to Europe, then I–”
“You better stay out of Europe,” I said. “All hell is going to break loose over there and not long either.”
“Oh, I’m not going. I’m going to some quiet, cheap place. I don’t know where. I’ll have to think.”
“Well,” I said, “don’t worry about me and the house. You can be plenty sure I’ll never set foot in it again.”
She looked up the tracks, east, where there wasn’t any smoke yet beyond the pines and the tidelands. She mused for a couple of minute on the emptiness off there. Then said, as though just picking up my own words. “I ought never set foot in it. I married and I came to it and he was a good man. But I ought to have stayed where I was. I ought never come.”
I couldn’t very well argue that point with her one way or the other, and so I kept quiet.
But as she stood there in the silence, she seemed to be arguing it with herself, for suddenly she lifted up her head and looked straight at me and said, “Well, I did it. And now I know.” And she squared her trim shoulders under her trim blue linen suit and held her face up in the old way like it was a damned expensive present she was making to the world and the world had better appreciate it.
Well, she knew now. As she stood there on the hot cement in the dazzle, she seemed to be musing on what she knew.
But it was on what she didn’t know. For after a while she turned to me and said, “Son, tell me something.”
“What?”
“It’s something I’ve got to know, Son.”
“What is it?”
“When–when it happened–when you went to see Monty–”
That was it. I knew that was it. And in the midst of the dazzle and the heat shimmering off the cement, I was cold as ice and my nerves crawled cold inside me.
“–did he–was there–” she was looking away from me.
“You mean,” I said, “Had he got into a jam and had to shoot himself? Is that it?”
She nodded, then looked straight at me and waited for what was coming.
I looked into her face and studied. The light wasn’t any too kind to it. Light would never be kind to it again. But she held it up and looked straight at me and waited.
“No,” I said, “he wasn’t in any jam. We had a little argument about politics. Nothing serious. But he talked about his health. About feeling bad. That was it. He said good-bye to me. I can see now he meant it as the real thing. That was all.”
She sagged a little. She didn’t have to brace up so stiff any longer.