All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [126]
“Does he still wet the bed?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” the Scholarly Attorney replied gravely.
I looked at George. He was weeping silently, the tears running down his smooth, flat cheeks, but his jawbone was not missing a beat on the bread. “Look at him,” I said.
The Scholarly Attorney looked at him. “Stupid, stupid,” he muttered fretfully, shaking his head, so that an additional flake or two of dandruff floated down to the black serge collar, “stupid of me to be talking that way with him listening. Stupid–I’m an old man and I forget–” and clucking and muttering and shaking his head in that same fretful fashion he poured some soup into a bowl, took a spoon, and went to George. “Look, look,” he said, leaning, with a spoon of soup thrust toward George’s face, “good, it’s good soup–soup–take some soup.”
But the tears continued to flow out of George’s eyes, and he didn’t open his mouth. But the jaws weren’t working on the bread now. They were just shut tight.
The old man set the bowl on the floor, and with one hand still holding the spoon to George’s mouth, with the other he patted George on the back soothingly, all the while clucking with that distraught, henlike, maternal little noise. All of a sudden he looked up at me, the spectacles hanging over, and said, peevishly like a mother, “I just don’t know what to do–he just won’t take soup–he won’t eat much of anything but candy–chocolate candy–I just don’t know–” His voice trailed off.
“Maybe you spoil him,” I said.
He put the spoon back into the bowl, which was on the floor beside him, then began to fumble in his pockets. He fished out, finally, a bar of chocolate, somewhat wilted form the heat, and began to peel back the sticky tinfoil. The last tears were running down George’s cheeks, while he watched the process, with his mouth open in damp and happy expectation. But he did not grab with his chubby little mitts.
Then the old man broke off a piece of chocolate and placed it between the expectant lips, and peered into George’s face while taste buds, no doubt, glowed incandescent in the inner dark and gland with a tired, sweet, happy sigh released their juices, and George’s face took on an expression of slow, deep, inward, germinal bliss, like that of a saint.
Well, I almost said to the old man, you said the physical was never cause, but a chocolate bar is physical and look what it’s causing, for to look at that face you might think it was a bite of Jesus and not a slug of Hershey’s had done. And how you going to tell the difference, huh?
But I didn’t say it, for I was looking there at the old man, who was leaning over with his spectacles hanging and his coat hanging and his belly hanging from the leaning, and who was holding out another morsel of chocolate and who was clucking soft, and whose own face was happy, for that was the word for what his face was, and as I looked at him I suddenly saw the man in the long white room by the sea, the same man but a different man, and the rain of the squall driving in off the sea in the early dark lashed the windowpanes but it was a happy sound and safe because the fire danced on the hearth and on the windowpanes where the rain ran down to thread the night-black glass with silver, to mix the silver with the flames caught there, too, and the man leaned and held out something and said, “Here’s what Daddy brought tonight, but just one bite now–” and the man broke off a piece and held it out–“just one bite, for your supper’s near ready now–but after supper–”
I looked at the old man over there and my guts went warm and a big lump seemed to dissolve in my chest–as though I had carried a big lump around in there for so long I had got used to it and didn’t realized it had been there until suddenly it was