All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [261]
“Is that the truth?” she demanded.
“Yes,” I said. “I swear to God it is.”
“Oh,” she said softly and let her breath escape in an almost soundless sigh.
So we waited again. There wasn’t anything else to say. She had finally, at the last minute, asked what she had been waiting to ask and had been afraid to ask all the time.
Then, after a while, there was the smoke on the horizon. Then we could see, far off, the black smoke moving toward us along the edge of the bright water. Then with the great grinding and tramping and hissing and the wreaths of steam, the engine had pulled past us to a stop. A white-coated porter began to gather up the nice matched bags and boxes.
My mother turned to me and took me by the arm. “Good-bye, Son,” she said.
“Good-bye,” I said.
She stepped toward me and I put my arm around her.
“Write to me, Son,” she said. “Write to me. You are all I’ve got.”
I nodded. “Let me know how you make out,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “yes.”
Then I kissed her good-bye, and as I did so I saw the conductor who was beyond her look at his watch and flick it into his pocket with that contemptuous motion a conductor on a crack train has when he is getting ready to wind up the ninety-second stop at a hick town. I knew he was that very instant going to call, “All aboard!” But it seemed a long time coming. It was like looking at a man across a wide valley and seeing the puff of smoke from his gun and then waiting God knows how long for the tiny report, or like seeing the lightning way off and waiting for the thunder. I stood there with my arm around my mother’s shoulder and her cheek against mine (her cheek was wet, I discovered) and waited for the conductor to call, “All aboard!”
Then it came, and she stepped back from me and mounted the steps and turned to wave as the train drew away and the porter slammed the vestibule door.
I looked after the dwindling train was carrying my mother away until it was nothing but the smudge of smoke to the west, and thought how I had lied to her. Well, I had given that lie to her as a going-away present. Or a kind of wedding present, I thought.
Then I thought how maybe I had lied just to cover up myself.
“Damn it,” I said out loud, savagely, “it wasn’t for me, it wasn’t.”
And that was true. It was really true.
I had given my mother a present, which was a lie. But in return she had given me a present, too, which was truth. She gave me a new picture of herself, and that meant, in the end, a new picture of the world. Or rather, the new picture of herself filled in the blank space which was perhaps the center of the new picture of the world which had been given to me by many people, by Sadie Burke, Lucy Stark, Willie Stark, Sugar-Boy, Adam Stanton. And that meant that my mother gave me back the past. I could now accept the past which I had before felt was tainted and horrible. I could accept the past now because I could accept her and be at peace with her and with myself.
For years I had condemned her as a woman without heart, who loved merely power over men and the momentary satisfaction to vanity or flesh which they could give her, who lived in a strange loveless oscillation between calculation and instinct. And my mother, realizing a condemnation of her, but without, perhaps, realizing its nature, had done everything she could to hold me and to throttle the condemnation. What she could do to me was to use the force which she was able to use on other men. I resisted and resented this but I wanted to be loved by her and at the same time I was drawn by the force, for she was a vital and beautiful woman by whom I was drawn and by whom I was repelled, whom I condemned and of whom I was proud. But the change came.
The first hint was in the wild, silvery scream which filled the house when the word of Judge Irwin’s death was received. That scream rang in my ears for many months, but it had faded away, lost in the past and the corruption of the past, by the time she called me back to Burden’s Landing to tell me that she was going to go away. Then I knew that she was telling the truth. And I felt at peace with her and with myself.