All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [66]
Well, I said to myself, maybe things do change while you sleep. But I didn’t believe it then, and didn’t really believe it when I went into the big room with the black oak paneling and padded across the long red carpet under the eyes of all genuine oil paintings of all the bewhiskered old men toward the man who wasn’t very old and wasn’t bewhiskered and who sat behind a desk in front of the high windows and who got up as I approached. Hell, I thought, it’s just Willie.
It was just Willie, even though he was wearing something different from the country blue serge he had had on back at Upton. But he just had the thing flung on him anyhow, with his tie loose and to one side and the collar unbuttoned. And his hair hung down over his forehead, the way it used to. I thought for a second that maybe the meaty lips were laid together firmer than they used to be, but before I could be sure, he was grinning and had come around to the front of the desk. So I thought again it was just Willie.
He put out his hand, and said, “Hello, Jack.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“I hear they fired you.”
“You heard wrong,” I said. “I quit.”
“You were smart,” he said, “because when I get through with that outfit they wouldn’t be able to pay you. They won’t be able to pay the nigger washes the spittoons.”
“That will suit me,” I allowed.
“Want a job?” he asked.
“I’d consider a proposition.”
“Three hundred a month,” he said, “and traveling expenses. When you travel.”
“Who do I work for? The state?
“Hell, no. Me.”
“It looks like you’d be working for me,” I said. “This Governorship doesn’t pay but five thousand.”
“All right,” he said, and laughed, “I’ll be working for you then.”
Then I recollected how he’d done right well in his law practice.
“I’ll give it a try,” I said.
“Fine,” he said. Then, “Lucy’s wanting to see you. Come to dinner tomorrow night at the house.”
“You mean the Mansion?”
“What the hell you think I mean? A tourist home? A boarding house? Sure, the Mansion.”
Yes, the Mansion. He was going to treat me just like old times and take me home to dinner and introduce me to the pretty woman and the healthy kid.
“Boy,” he was saying, “we sure do rattle around in that place, Lucy and Tom and me.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked him.
“Eat,” he said. “Come at six-thirty and eat hearty. Call up Lucy and tell her what you want to eat.”
“I mean, what do I do for the job?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “Something will turn up.”
He was right about that.
Chapter Three
It was always the same way when I came home and saw my mother. I would be surprised that it was the way it was but I knew at the same time that I had know it would be this way. I would come home with the firm conviction that she didn’t really care a thing about me, that I was just another man whom she wanted to have around because she was the kind of woman who had to have men around and had to make them dance to her tune. But as soon as I saw her I would forget all that. Sometimes I forgot it even before I saw her. Anyway, when I forgot it, I would wander why we couldn’t get along. I would wonder even though I knew what would happen, even though I would always know that the scene into which I was about to step and in which I was about to say the words I would say, had happened before, or had never stopped happening, and that I would always just be entering the wide, white, high-ceiling hall to see across the distance of the floor, with gleamed like dark ice, my mother, who stood in a doorway, beyond her the flicker of firelight in the shadowy room, and smiled at me with a sudden and innocent happiness, like a girl. The she would come toward me, with a brittle, excited clatter of heels and a quick, throaty laugh, and stop before me and seize a little bunch of my coat between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, in a way that was childlike and both weak and demanding, and lift her face up to me, turning it somewhat to one side so that I could put the expected kiss upon her cheek. The texture of her cheek would be firm and smooth, quite cool, and I would breathe the scent which she always used, and as I kissed her I would see the plucked accuracy of the eyebrow, the delicate lines at the corner of the eye toward me, and note the crinkled, silky, shadowed texture of the eyelid, which would flicker sharply over the blue eye. The eye, very slightly protruding, would be fixed on some point beyond me.