All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [163]
“I can take care of myself,” Adam affirmed, and looked down at the hand on his shoulder.
“Sure you can, Doc,” the Boss said. He removed his hand from the shoulder. Then his tone changed, suddenly businesslike and calm. “You will no doubt want to see all the plans which have been drawn up. They are subject to your revision after you consult with the architects. Mr. Todd, of Todd and Waters, will come to see you about it. And you can start picking your staff. It is all your baby.”
He turned away and picked up his hat from the piano top. He swung back toward Adam and gave him a summarizing look, from top to toe and back. “You’re a great boy, Doc,” he said, “and don’t let ’em tell you different.”
Then he wheeled to the door, and went out before Adam could say a word. If there was any word to say.
Sugar-Boy and I followed. We didn’t stop to say good night and thanks for the hospitality. That just didn’t seem to be in the cards. At the door, however, I looked back and said, “So long, boy,” but Adam didn’t answer.
Down in the street, the Boss hesitated on the curb, beside the car. Then he said, “You all go on. I’m walking.” He turned up the street, toward town, past the crummy apartment house and the little grocery and the boarding houses and the shotgun bungalows.
Just as I climbed in beside Sugar-Boy, in the place the Boss always took, I heard the burst of music from the apartment house. The window was open and the music was very loud. Adam was beating the hell out of that expensive piano, and filling the night air with racket like Niagara Falls.
We rolled down the street, and passed the Boss, who, walking along with his head down, didn’t pay us any mind. We pulled on into one of the good streets with the trees arching overhead and the new leaves looking black against the sky, or pale, almost whitish, where the rays of a street lamp struck them. We were beyond the sound of Adam’s music now.
I lay back and closed my eyes ant took the sway and dip of the car, which was soft and easy, and thought of the Boss and Adam Stanton facing each other across that room. I had never expected to see that. But it had happened.
I had found the truth, I had dug the truth up out of the ash pile, the garbage heap, the kitchen midden, the bone yard, and had sent that little piece of truth to Adam Stanton. I couldn’t cut the truth to match his ideas. Well, he’d have to make his ideas match the truth. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. The truth shall make you free.
So I lay back and thought of Adam and the truth. And of the Boss and what he had said the truth was. The good was. The right was. And lying there, lulled in the Cadillac, I wondered if he believed what he had said. He had said that you have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of. Well, we had made some good out of some bad. The hospital, The Willie Stark Hospital, which was going to be there when Willie Stark was dead and gone. As Willie Stark had said. Now if Willie Stark believed that you always had to make the good out of the bad, why did he get so excited when Tiny just wanted to make a logical little deal with the hospital contract? Why did he get so heated up just because Tiny’s brand of Bad might get mixed in the raw materials from which he was going to make some Good? “Can’t you understand?” the Boss demanded of me, grabbing my lapel. “Can’t you understand, either? I’m building that place, the best in the country, the best in the world, and a bugger like Tiny is not going to mess with it, and I’m going to call it the Willie Stark Hospital and it will be there a long time after I’m dead and gone and you are dead and gone and all those sons-of-bitches are dead and gone–” That was scarcely consistent. It was not at all consistent. I would have to ask the Boss about it sometime.
I had asked the Boss about something else once. The night after the impeachment blew up. The night when the great crowd that poured into the town stood on the lawn of the Capitol, trampling the flower beds beneath the great frock-coated