All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [129]
“Yes,” I said, and it was true.
He was fast and he was a son-of-a-bitch. At least, if he wasn’t a son-of-a-bitch yet, he had shown some very convincing talent in that line. You couldn’t much blame Lucy for wanting to stop the football–his name always on the sporting page–the pictures–the Freshman Whiz–the Sophomore Thunderbolt–the cheers–the big fat hands always slapping his shoulder–Tiny Duffy’s hand on his shoulder–yeah, Boss, he’s a chip off of the old block–the roadhouses–the thin-legged, tight-breasted little girls squealing, Oh Tom, oh, Tom–the bottles and the tourist cabins–the sea-roar of the crowd and always the single woman-scream spangling the sudden silence like damnation.
But Lucy did not have a chance. For he was going to be All American. All American quarterback on anybody’s team. If bottle and bed didn’t manage to slow down too soon something inside that one hundred and eighty pounds of split-second, hair-trigger, Swiss-watch beautiful mechanism which was Tom Stark, the Boss’s boy, the Sophomore Thunderbolt, Daddy’s Darling, who stood that night in the middle of a hotel room, with apiece of court plaster across his nose and a cocky grin on his fine, clean, boyish face–for it was fine and clean and boyish–while all the hands of Papa’s pals pawed at him and beat his shoulders, while Tiny Duffy slapped him on the shoulder, and Sadie Burke, who sat a little outside the general excitement on her own private fog of cigarette smoke and whisky fumes, a not entirely unambiguous expression on her riddled, handsome face, said, “Yeah, Tom, somebody was telling me you played a football game tonight.”
But her irony was not the sort of thing Tom Stark would hear or understand, for he stood there in the midst of his own gleaming golden private fog of just being Tom Stark, who had played in a football game.
Until the Boss said, “Now you go on and get to bed, Son. Get your sleep, Son. Get ready to pour it on ’em next Saturday.” And he laid his arm across the boy’s shoulder, and said, “We’re all mighty proud of you, boy.”
And I said to myself: If he gets his eyes starry with tears again I am going to puke.
“Go on to bed, Son,” the Boss said.
And Tom Stark said, “Sure,” almost out of the side of his mouth, and went out the door.
And I stood there in what was the present.
But there was the past. There was the question. There was the dead kitty buried in the ash heap.
So I stood, later, in the embrasure of as big bay window and looked out as the last light ceased to gleam from the metallic leaves of magnolias and the creamy wash of the sea beyond dulled in the thickened dusk. Behind me was a room not very different from that other long white room giving on the sea–where now, at this moment perhaps, my mother would be lifting to the taffy-haired Young Executive that face which was still like a damned expensive present and which he had damned well better admire. But in the room behind me, scarcely lighted by the stub of a candle on the mounted shelf, the furniture was shrouded in white cloth, and the grandfather’s clock in the corner was as severely mute as grandfather. But I knew that when I turned around there would also be, in the midst of the sepulchral sheetings and the out-of-time silence, a woman kneeling before the cols blackness of the wide fireplace to put pine cones and bits of light-wood beneath the logs there. She had said, “No, let me do it. It’s my house, you know, and I ought to light the fire when I come back like this. You know, a ritual. I went to. Adam always lets me do it. When we come back.”
For the woman was Anne Stanton, and this was the house of Governor Stanton, whose face, marmoreal and unperturbed and high, above black square beard and black frock coat, gazed down in the candlelight from the massy gold frame above the fireplace, where his daughter crouched, as though at his feet, rasping a match to light a fire there. Well, I had been in this room