All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [206]
“I don’t care,” she affirmed, and lifted her chin up a couple of notches. I saw the little creases in the flesh of her neck, just the tiniest little creases, the little mark left day after day by the absolutely infinitesimal gossamer cord of thuggee which time throws around the prettiest neck every day to garrote it. The cord is so gossamer that it breaks every day, but the marks get there finally, and finally one day the gossamer cord doesn’t break and is enough. I looked at the marks when Anne lifted her chin, and realized that I had never noticed them before and would always notice then again. I suddenly felt awful–literally sick, as though I had been socked in the stomach, or as though I had met a hideous betrayal. Then before I knew, the way I felt changed into anger, and I lashed out.
“Yeah,” I said, “you don’t care, but you forget one thing. You forget that Adam will be sitting right there looking at little sister.”
Her face was white as a sheet.
The she lowered her head a little and was looking at her hands, which were clenched together now around the empty Coca Cola glass. Her head was low enough so that I could not see her eyes, only the lids coming down over them.
“My dear, my dear,” I murmured. Then as I seized her hands pressed around the glass, the words wrenched out of me, “Oh, Anne, why did you do it?”
It was the one question I had never meant to ask.
For a moment she did not answer. Then, without raising her eyes, she said in a low voice, “He wasn’t like anybody else. Not anybody else I’d ever known. And I love him. I love him, I guess. I guess that is the reason.”
I sat there and reckoned I had asked for that one.
She said, “Then you told me–you told me about my father. There wasn’t any reason why not then. After you told me.”
I reckoned I had asked for that one, too.
She said, “He wants to marry me.”
“Are you going to?”
“Not now. It would hurt him. A divorce would hurt him. Not now.”
“Are you going to?”
“Perhaps. Later. After he goes to the Senate. Next year.”
One part of my mind was busy ticketing that away: The Senate next year. That means he won’t let old Scoggan go back. Funny he hadn’t told me. But the other part of my mind which was not the nice, cool, steel filing cabinet with alphabetical cards was boiling like a kettle of pitch. A big bubble heaved up and exploded out of the pitch, and it was my voice saying, “Well, I suppose you know what you are up to.”
“You don’t know him,” she said, her voice even lower than before. “You’ve known him all these years and you don’t know him at all.” Then she had lifted her head and was looking straight into my eyes. “I’m not sorry,” she said, quite distinctly. “Not for anything that’s happened.”
I walked down the street in the hot darkness toward my hotel under a magnificent throbbing sky, breathing the old gasoline fumes the day had left and the sweet, marshy smell of the river at low water which the night brought up into the streets, and thinking, yes, I knew why she had done it.
The answer was in all the years before, and the things in them and not in them.
The answer was in me, for I had told her.
I only told her the truth, I said savagely to myself, and she can’t blame me for the truth!
But was there some fatal appropriateness inherent in the very nature of the world and of me that I should be the one to tell her the truth? I had to ask myself that question, too. And I couldn’t be sure of the answer. So I walked on down the street, turning that question over and over in my mind without any answer until the question lost meaning and dropped from my mind as something heavy drops from numb fingers. I would have faced the responsibility and the guilt, I was ready to do that, if I could know. But who is going to tell you?
So I walked on, and after a while I remembered how she had said I had never known him. And the him was Willie Stark, whom I had known for the many years since Cousin Willie from the country, the Boy with the Christmas Tie, had walked into the back room of Slade’s old place. Sure,