All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [64]
I said, “You planning on being an old maid?”
She laughed and said, “I’m not planning on anything. I quit making plans a long time back.”
We danced in the handkerchief-big space between the speak-easy tables, in which stood the plates of half-eaten spaghetti or chicken bones and the bottles of Dago red. For about five minutes the dancing had some value in itself, then it became very much like acting out some complicated and portentous business in a dream which seems to have a meaning but whose meaning you can’t figure out. Then the music was over, and stopping dancing was like waking up from the dream, being glad to wake up and escape and yet distressed because now you won’t ever know what it had been all about.
She must have felt the same way about it, for when, later, I asked her to dance again, she said that she didn’t feel like it, she’s rather talk. We talked, quiet a lot, but it was a little bit like the dancing. You can’t keep on taking forever about what a hell of a good time you had when you were kids.
I took her to her apartment building, which was quite a few cuts above Adam’s joint, for Governor Stanton hadn’t died exactly a pauper, and left her in the lobby. She said good night, and, “Be a good boy, Jack.”
“Will you have dinner with me again?” I asked her.
“Any time you want,” she said, “any time in the world. You know that.”
Yes, I knew it.
And she did have dinner with me again, several times. The last time she said: “I’ve seen your father.”
“Yeah,” I said in an unencouraging way.
“Don’t be like that,” she said
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know what I mean,” she said. “Don’t you even want to know how he is?”
“I know how he is,” I said. “He is sitting in that hole he lives in down there or he’s helping round that mission with his bums, or writing those damn-fool little leaflet they pass out to you on the street, all about Mark 4:6, and Job 7:5, and his specs are down on the end of his nose and the dandruff is like a snowstorm in the Dakotas down on his black coat collar.”
She didn’t say anything for a minute, then said: “I saw him on the street and he didn’t look well. He looked sick. I didn’t recognize him at first.”
“Trying to pass you some of that junk?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. He held out a piece of paper to me, and I was in a hurry, so I just automatically put out my hand for it. Then I realized he was staring right in my face. I didn’t recognize him at first.” She paused a little. “That was about two weeks back.”
“I haven’t seen him in nearly one year,” I said.
“Oh, Jack,” she said, “you oughtn’t do that! You ought to see him.”
“Look here, what can I say to him? And God knows, he hasn’t got anything to tell me. Nobody made him live like that. Nobody made him walk out of his law office, either, and not even bother to shut the door behind him.”
“But, Jack,” she said, “you–”
“He’s doing what he wants to do. And besides if he was fool enough to do what he did just because he couldn’t get along with a woman–especially a woman like my mother. If he couldn’t give her what she wanted, whatever the hell it was she wanted and he couldn’t give her, then–”
“Don’t talk like that,” she said sharply.
“Look here,” I said, “just because your old man was Governor once and died in a mahogany tester bed with a couple of high-priced doctors leaning over him and adding up the bill in their heads and because you think he was Jesus Christ in a black string tie, you needn’t try to talk to me like an old woman. I’m not talking about your family. I’m talking about mine, and I can’t help seeing the plain unvarnished truth. And if you–”
“Well, you don’t have to talk to me about it,” she said. “Or anybody.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Oh, the truth,” she exclaimed, and clenched her right hand on the tablecloth. “How do you know it’s the truth? You don’t know anything about it. You don’t know what made them do what they did.”
“I know the truth. I know what my mother is like. And you do, too. And I know my father was a fool to let her get him down.