All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [158]
I didn’t say anything.
“–you’re so damned wonderful–and clean and strong–oh, you’re a hero–”
“I’m sorry I acted like a son-of-a-bitch,” I said.
“I can imagine to what particular thing you are referring,” she whispered in mock sweetness, underscoring the particular, setting it meticulously in my hide like a banderilla. Then she swung her face from me, and wouldn’t look at me, and the arm I clutched might as well have belonged to a dummy in a show window, and the cold stone in my stomach was a stone in a deep well covered with slime, and the pig’s eyes in the swollen, black-jowled face came back and hated me in the dull, mist-streaked night, and a horn moaned down the river, and in the cab Anne Stanton sat back in one corner, very straight and as far from me as possible, and the light from the street lamps we passed would flicker across her white face. She would not speak to me. Until we came to a street with a car track on it. Then she said, “Get out. You can catch some car here. I don’t want you to take me home.”
So I got out.
Five nights later I heard Anne Stanton’s voice on the telephone.
It said, “Those things–those papers you said you had–send them to me.”
I said, I’ll bring them.”
It said, “No. Send them.”
I said, “All right. I’ve got extra photostat of one thing. Tomorrow I’ll get photostat of the other paper and send them together.”
It said, “A photostat. So you don’t trust me.”
I said, “I’ll send them tomorrow.”
Then there was the click, in the little black tube. Then the tiny, windy, humming sound which is the sound of space falling away from you, and of infinity, and of absolute nothingness.
Every night when I came into my room, I would look at the telephone. I would say to myself: It is going to ring. Once, even, I was sure that it had rung, for the tingle and stab of its ringing was in all my nerves. But it hadn’t rung. I had merely fallen asleep. Once I picked up the thing and held it to my ear, listening to the tiny, humming sound which is the sound of the various things I have already mentioned.
Every night, at the desk in the lobby, I asked if there have been any numbers left for me. Yes, sometimes there were numbers. But never the right number.
Then I would go up to my room, where the telephone was and the brief case with the photostat and the affidavit from Memphis. I hadn’t given that to the Boss yet. I hadn’t even told him about it yet. Not that I was thinking about not giving it to him. I would give it to him. That was in the cards. But not yet. Not quiet yet. After the telephone had rung.
But it didn’t ring.
Instead, after about a week, one night as I turned the corner of the corridor, I saw a woman sitting on the bench down beyond my door. I fumbled for my key, inserted it in the lock, and was about to enter when I was aware that the woman stood beside me. I swung toward her. It was Anne Stanton.
She had made no sound on the deep carpet. Not with her light foot.
“You gave me heart failure,” I said, and swung the door wide, and added, “Come in.”
“I thought you were so careful about my reputation,” she said. “At least you claimed to be. Once.”
“I remember,” I said, “but come in anyway.”
She walked into the room and stood in the middle of the floor with her back to me while I shut the door. I noticed that she had a brown manila envelope in her hand, with her bag.
No turning to me, she stepped to the desk by the wall and flung down the envelope. “There it is,” she said. “The photostats. I brought them back. But I would have brought back the originals if you had trusted me with them.”
“I know it,” I said.
“It was awful,” she said, still not turning to me.
I went across to her and touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“It was awful. You don’t know.”
I didn’t know how awful. So I stood there just behind her and didn’t dare to touch her again, even with the weight of my finger.
“You don’t know,” she said.
“No,” I said, “I don’t.”
“It was awful.” The she turned to put her wide eyes on me, and I had the impression of stumbling