All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [131]
I asked quick and sharp, for if you ask something quick and sharp out of a clear sky you may get an answer you never would get otherwise. If the person you ask has forgotten the thing, the quick, sharp question may spear it up from the deep mud, and if the person has not forgotten but does not want to tell you, the quick, sharp question may surprise the answer out of him before he thinks.
But it didn’t work. Either she didn’t know or she wasn’t to be surprised out of herself. I ought to have guessed that a person like her–a person who you could tell had a deep inner certitude of self which comes from being all of one piece, of not being shreds and patches and old cogwheels held together with pieces of rusty barbed wire and spit and bits of string, like most of us–I ought to have guessed that that kind of a person would not be surprised into answering a question she didn’t want to answer. Even if she did know the answer. But maybe she didn’t.
But she was surprised a little. “What?” she asked.
So I said it again.
She turned her back to me and went to sit on the couch, to light a cigarette and face me again, looking levelly at me. “Why do you want to know?” she asked.
I looked right back at her and said, “I don’t want to know. It is a pal wants to know. He is my best pal. He hands it to me on the first of the month.”
“Oh, Jack–” she cried, and flung her newly lit cigarette across to the hearth, and stood up from the couch. “Oh, why do you have to spoil everything! We had that time back here. But you want to spoil it. We–”
“We?” I said.
“–had something then and you want to spoil it, you want to help him spoil it–that man–he–”
“We?” I said again.
“–want to do something bad–”
“We,” I said, “if we had such a damned fine time why was it you turned me down?”
“That hasn’t anything to do with it. What I mean is–”
“What you mean is that is was fine, beautiful time back then, but I mean that if it was such a God-damned fine, beautiful time, why did it turn into this time which is not so damned fine and beautiful if there wasn’t something in that time which wasn’t fine and beautiful? Answer that one.”
“Hush,” she said, “hush, Jack!”
“Yeah, answer me that one. For you certainly aren’t going to say this time is fine and beautiful. This time came out of that time, and now you’re near thirty-five years old and you creep out here as a special treat to yourself and sit in the middle of a lot of sheet-wrapped, dust-catching furniture in a house with the electricity cut off, and Adam–he’s got a hell of a life, cutting on people all day till he can’s stand up, and him tied up in knots himself inside and–”
“Leave Adam out of it, leave him out–” she said, and thrust her hands, palms out as though to press me off, but I wasn’t in ten feet of her–“he does something anyway–something–”
“–and Irwin down there playing with his toys, and my mother up there with that Theodore, and me–”
“Yes, you,” she said, “you.”
“All right,” I said, “me.”
“Yes, you. With that man.”
“That man, that man,” I mimicked, “that’s what all the people round here call him, what that Patton calls him, all those people who got pushed out of the trough. Well, he does something. He does as much as Adam. More. He’s going to build a medical center will take care of this state. He’s–”
“I know,” she said, wearily, not looking at me now, and sank down on the couch, which was covered by a sheet.
“You know, but you take the same snobbish attitude all the rest take. You’re like the rest.”
“All right,” she said, still not looking at me. “I’m snobbish, I’m so snobbish I had lunch with him last week.”
Well, if grandfather’s clock in the corner hadn’t been stopped already, that would have stopped it. It stopped me. I heard the flame hum on the logs, gnawing in. Then the hum stopped and there wasn’t anything.
Then I said, “For Christ’s sake,” And the absorbent silence sucked up the words like blotting paper.
“All right,” she said, “for