All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [87]
Then she lifted her hands a little, and touched the white riddled plaster-of-Paris mask, touching t on each side, just barely prodding the surface as though it were swollen and painful. “Look,” she commanded.
She held it here for me to look at. “Look!” she commanded vindictively, and jabbed her fingers into the flesh, hard. For it was flesh, it wasn’t plaster of Paris at all.
“Yes, look,” she said, “and we lay up there in that God-forsaken shack–both of us, my brother and me–we were kids–and it was the smallpox–and my father was a drunk no-good–he was off drunk, crying and drinking in a saloon if he could beg a dime–crying and telling how the kiddies, the sweet little angel kiddies, was sick–oh, he was a drunk lousy warm-hearted kid-beating crying Irishman–and my brother died–and he ought to have lived–it wouldn’t have mattered to him–not to a man–but me, I didn’t die–I didn’t die, and I got well–and my father, he would look at me and grab me and start kissing me all over the face, all over the holes, slobbering, and crying and stinking of whisky–or he’d look at me and say, ‘Jeez,’ and slap me in the face–and it was all the same–it was all the same, for I wasn’t the one that died–I didn’t die–I–”
It was all a breathless monotony, suddenly cut off. She had groped out for me and had seized the cloth of my coat in her hands and had stuck her bowed head up against my chest. So I stood there with my right arm around her shoulder, patting her, patting and making a kind of smoothing-out motion with my hand on her back that shook soundlessly with what I took to be sobs.
Then, not lifting her head, she was saying, “It’s going to be like that–it’s always been that way, and it’ll keep on–being like that–”
It, I thought, and thought she was talking about the face.
But she wasn’t, for she was saying, “–it’ll keep on–they’ll kiss it and slobber–then they’ll slap you in the face–no matter what you do, do anything for them, make them what they are–take them out of the gutter and make something out of them–and they’ll slap you in the face–the first chance–because you had smallpox–they’ll some naked slut on skates and they’ll slap you in the face–they’ll kick up dirt in your face–”
I kept on patting and making the smoothing-out motion, for there wasn’t anything else to do.
“–that’s the way it’ll be–always some slut on skates–some–”
“Look here,” I said, still patting, “you make out. What do you care what he does?”
She jerked her head up. “What do you know, what the hell do you know?” she demanded, and dug her fingers in my coat and shook me.
“If it’s all this grief,” I said, “let him go.”
“Let him go! Let him go! I’ll kill him first, I swear it,” she said, glaring at me out of the now red eyes. “Let him go? Listen here–” and she shook me again–“if he does run after some slut, he’ll come back. He’s got to come back, do you hear? He’s got to. Because he can’t do without me. And he knows it. He can do without any of those sluts, but he can’t do without me. Not without Sadie Burke, and he knows it.”
And she lifted her face up, high, almost thrusting it at me, as though she were showing me something I ought damned well to be proud to look at.
“He’ll always come back,” she asserted grimly.
And she was right. He always came back. The world was full of sluts on skates, even if some of them weren’t on skates. Some of them wore grass skirts and some of them pounded typewriters and some of them checked hats and some of them were married to legislators, but he always came back. Not necessarily to be greeted with open arms and a tender smile, however. Sometimes it was a cold silence like the artic night. Sometimes it was delirium for every seismograph on the continent. Sometimes it was a single well-chosen epithet. For instance, the time the Boss and I had to do a little trip up to the north of the state. The afternoon we got back we walked into the Capitol and there, in the stately lobby, under the great bronze dome, was Sadie. We approached her. She waited until we had arrived, then said, without preliminary, quite simply, “You bastard.