All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [67]
That was the way it had always been–when I had come home from school, when I had come back from camps, when I had come back from college, when I had come back from jobs–and that was the way it was that late rainy afternoon, on the borderline between winter ands spring, back in 1933, when I came back home again, after not coming home for a long time. It had been six or eight months since my last visit. That time we had had a row about my working for Governor Stark. We always sooner or later got into a row about something, and in the two and a half years that I had been working for Willie it usually in the end came round to Willie. And if his name wasn’t even mentioned, he stood there like a shadow behind us. Not that it mattered much what we rowed about. There was a shadow taller and darker than the shadow of Willie standing behind us. But I always came back, and I had come back this time. I would find myself drawn back. It was that way, and, as always, it seemed to be a fresh start, a wiping out of all the things which I knew could not be wiped out.
“Leave the bags in your car,” she said, “the boy will get them.” And she drew me toward the open door of the living room, where the firelight was, and down the length of the room to the long couch. I saw the bowl of ice, the siphon of soda, the Scotch on the glass-topped table, all the item sparkling in the firelight.
“Sit down,” she said, “sit down, Son,” and put the fingers of her right hand against my chest to give a little shove. It wasn’t much of a shove, it didn’t put me off my balance, but I sat down, and sank back into the couch. I watched her mix me a drink, and then a sort of excuse of a drink for herself, for she never took much. She held the glass out to me, and laughed that quick, throaty laugh again. “Take it,” she said, and her face seemed to proclaim that she was offering me something which was absolutely special, something which was so precious that it couldn’t be tied on God’s green globe.
There’s a lot of likker in the world, even Scotch, but I took it and gave a pull, feeling too that it was something special.
She sank down on the couch with an easy motion, vaguely suggestive of a flutter and preening as when a bird touches a bough, and took a sip, and lifted her head as if to let the liquor trickle into her throat. She had drawn one leg up beneath her and the other hung over with the sharp tip of the gray suède pump stretched forward to just touch the floor, with the precision of a dancer. She turned cleanly from the erect waist to look straight at me, twisting the gray cloth of the dress. The firelight defined her small, poised features, one side bright, one side in shadow, and emphasized the slight, famished, haunting hollow beneath the cheekbones (I always figured, after I got old enough to do any kind of figuring, that it was that–the hollow beneath the cheekbone–that got them) and the careful swooping lift of her piled-up hair. Her hair was yellowish, like metal, with gray in it now, but the gray was metallic, too, like spun metal woven and coiled into the yellow. It looked as though that was the way it had been intended from the very first to be, and a damned expensive job. Every detail.
I looked at her and thought: Well, she’s pushing fifty-five but I’ll hand it to her. And suddenly seemed to stretch back forever. But I had to hand it to her.
She kept on looking at me, not saying anything, with that look which always said, “You’ve got something I want, something I need, something I’ve got to have,” and said, too, “I’ve got something for you, I won’t tell you what, not yet, but I’ve got something for you, too,” The hollow in the cheeks: the hungry business. The glittering eyes: the promising business. And both at the same time. It was quite a trick.
I took the last of the drink, and held the glass in my hand. She reached out and took it, still watching me, and reached out to set it on the little table. Then she said, “Oh, Son, you look tired.”
“I’m not,” I said, and felt the stubbornness in me.
“You are,” she said, and took me by the sleeve of the forearm and drew me toward her. I didn