All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [68]
I let myself go, and keeled over toward her. I lay on my back, with my head on her lap, the way I had known I would do. She let her left hand lie on my chest, the thumb and forefinger holding, and revolving back and forth, a button on y shirt, and her right hand on my forehead. Her hands were always cool. It was one of the first things I remembered ever knowing.
For a long time she didn’t talk any. She just moved the hand over my eyes and forehead. I had known how it would be, and knew how it had been before and how it would be after. But she had the trick of making a little island right in the middle of time, and of you knowing, which is what time does to you.
Then she said, “You’re tired, Son.”
Well, I wasn’t tired, but I wasn’t not tired, either, and tiredness didn’t have anything to do with the way things were.
Then, after a while, “Are you working hard, Son?”
I said, “So-so, I reckon.”
Then, after another while, “Tan–the man you work for–”
“What about it?” I said. The hand stopped on my forehead, and I knew it was my voice that stopped it.
“Nothing,” she said. “Only you don’t have to work for that man. Theodore could get you a–”
“I don’t want any job Theodore would get for me,” I said, and tried to heave myself up, but have you ever tried to heave yourself up when you’re flat on your back on a deep couched and somebody has a hand on your forehead?
She held her hand firm on my forehead and leaned over and said, “Don’t now, don’t. Theodore is my husband, he’s your stepfather, don’t talk that way, he’d like–”
“Look here,” I said, “I told you I–”
But she said, “Hush, Son, hush,” and put her hand over my eyes, and began to move it again upward over my forehead.
She didn’t say anything else. But she had already said what she had said, and she had to start the island trick all over again. Perhaps she had said it just so she could start over again, just to prove she could do it. Anyway, she did it, all over again, and it worked.
Until the front door banged, and there were steps in the hall. I knew that it was Theodore Murrell, and started to heave up again. But even now, just for the last instant, she pressed her palm down on my forehead, and didn’t let go until the sound of Theodore’s steps had entered the room.
I got to my feet, feeling my coat crawling up around my neck and my tie under one ear, and looked across at Theodore, who had a beautiful blond mustache and apple cheeks and pale hair laid like taffy on a round skull and a hint of dignity at the belly (bend over, you bastard, bend over one hundred times every morning and touch the floor, you bastard, or Mrs. Murrell won’t like you, and then where would you be?) and a slightly adenoidal lisp, like too much hot porridge, when he opened the aperture under the beautiful blond mustache.
My mother approached him with that bright stride and her shoulders well back, and stopped right before the Young Executive. The Young Executive put his right arm about her shoulder, and kissed her with the aperture under the beautiful blond mustache, and she seized him by the sleeve and drew him over toward me, and he said, “Well, well, old boy, it’s fine to see you. How’s trick, how’s the old politician?”
“Fine,” I said, “but I’m not a politician, I’m a hired hand.”
“Oho,” he said, “don’t try to kid me. They say you and the Governor are just like this.” And he held up two not thin, very clean, perfectly manicured fingers for me to admire.
“You don’t know the Governor,” I replied, “for the only thing the Governor is just like this with–” and I held up two not very clean and quite imperfectly manicured fingers–“is the Governor, and now and then God-Almighty when he needs somebody to hold the hog while he cuts its throat.”
“Well, the way he’s going–” Theodore began.
“Sit down, you all,” my mother told us, and we sat down, and took the glasses she handed us. She turned on a light.
I leaned back in my chair, and said “Yes” and said “No,” and looked down the long room, which I knew better than any room in the world and which I always came back to, no matter what I said. I noticed that there was a new piece in it. A tall Sheraton break-front desk, in the place where the kidney desk had been. Well, the kidney desk would be in the attic now, in the second-string museum, while we sat in the first-string museum and while Bowman and Heatherford, Ltd., London, wrote a large figure in the black column of the ledger. There was always a change in the room. When I came home I