All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [69]
The furniture changed, but the people in it changed too. Way back, there had been the thick-set, strong man, not tall, with a shock of tangled black hair on his head and steel-rimmed glasses on his nose and a habit of buttoning his vest up wrong, and a big gold watch-chain, which I liked to pull at. Then he wasn’t there, and my mother pressed my head against her breast and said, “Your Daddy isn’t coming back any more, Son.”
“Why did he go away?”
“Because he didn’t love Mother. That’s why he went away.”
“I love you, Mother,” I said, “I’ll love you always.”
“Yes, Son, yes, you love your mother,” she said, and held me tight against her breast.
So the Scholarly Attorney was gone. I was about six years old then.
Then there was the Tycoon, who was gaunt and bald and wheezed on the stair. “Why does Daddy Ross puff going upstairs?” I said.
“Hush,” my mother said, “hush, Son.”
“Why, Mother?”
“Because Daddy Ross isn’t well, Son.”
Then The Tycoon was dead. He had not lasted long.
So my mother put me in a school in Connecticut and left me to go across the ocean. When she came back there was another man, who was tall and slender and wore white suits and smoked long thin cigars, and had a thin black mustache. He was the Count, and my mother was a Countess. The Count sat in the room with people and smiled a great deal and didn’t say much. People looked sideways at him, but he looked straight at them and smiled to show the whitest teeth in the world under the thin, accurate black mustache. When nobody was there he played the piano all day, and then went out wearing black boots and tight white trousers and rode a horse and made it jump over gates and gallop along the beach till its sides were flecked with lather and were pumping fit to die. The Count came into the house and drank wis-kee and held a Persian cat on his knee and stroked it with a hand which was not big but which was so strong that he could make men frown when he shook hands with them. And once I saw four blue-black parallel marks on my mother’s upper right arm. “Mother,” I said, “look! What happened?”
“Nothing,” she said, “I just hurt myself.” And she pulled the scarf down over her arm.
The Count’s name was Covelli. People said, “That Count fellow is a son-of-a-bitch, but he can evermore ride a horse.”
Then he was gone. I was sorry, for I had liked the Count. I had liked to watch him ride a horse.
Then there was quite a while when there was nobody.
Then there was the Young Executive, who had been a Young Executive from the day his mother gave the last push and would be a Young Executive until the day they drained out the blood and pumped in the embalming fluid. But that would be a long time off, because he was just forty-four, and sitting at the desk at the oil company where he earned the pin money to supplement his allowance wasn’t breaking him down fast.
Well, I’d sat in that room with all of them, the Scholarly Attorney and the Tycoon and the Count and the Young Executive, and had watched the furniture changed. So now I sat and looked at Theodore and at the new Sheraton break-front desk, and wondered how permanent they were.
I had come home. I was the thing that always came back
It kept on raining that night. I lay in a big fine old family bed, which had come from somebody else’s family (a long time ago there had been a white iron bed in my room standing on the floor matting, and the big fine old mahogany Burden family bed, which hadn