All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [208]
Yes, those pictures were an asset to the Boss. Half the people in the state knew that the Boss had been tom-catting around for years, but he pictures of the family and the white leghorns gave the voters a nice warm glow, it made them feel solid, substantial, and virtuous, it made them think of gingerbread and nice cold buttermilk, and if somewhere not too far in the wings there was a flicker of a black-lace negligee and a whiff of musky perfume, then, “Well, you can’t blame him a-taken hit, they put hit up to him.” It only meant that the Boss was having it both ways, and that seemed a mark of the chosen and superior. It was what the voter did when he shook loose and came up to town to the furniture dealers’ convention and gave the bellhop a couple of bucks to get him a girl up to the room. Or if he wasn’t doing it classy, he rode into town with his truckload of hogs and for two bucks got the whole works down at a crib. But either way, classy or crib, the voter knew what it meant, and he wanted both Mom’s gingerbread and the black-lace negligee and didn’t hold it against the Boss for having both. What he would have held against the Boss was a divorce. Anne was right about that. It would have hurt even the Boss. That would have been very different, and would have robbed the voter of something he valued, the nice warm glow of complacency, the picture that flattered him and his own fat or thin wife standing in front of the henhouse.
Meanwhile, if the voter knew that the Boss had been tom-catting for years, and could name the names of half of the ladies involved, he didn’t know about Anne Stanton. Sadie had found out, but that was no miracle. But as far as I could detect, nobody else knew, not even Duffy with his wheezing, elephantine with and leer. Maybe Sugar-Boy knew, but he could be depended upon. He knew everything. The Boss didn’t mind telling anything in front of Sugar-Boy, or close to it–anything, that is, that he would tell. Which probably left a lot untold, at that. Once Congressman Randall was in the Boss’s library with him, Sugar-Boy, and me, pacing up and down the floor, and the Boss was giving him play-by-play instructions on how to conduct himself when the Milton-Broderick Bill was presented to Congress. Te instructions were pretty frank, and the Congressman kept looking nervously at Sugar-Boy. The Boss noticed him. “God damn it,” the Boss said, “you afraid Sugar-Boy’s finding out something? Well, you’re right, he’s finding out something. Well, Sugar-Boy has found out plenty. He knows more about this state than you do. And I trust him a hell of a lot farther than I’d trust you. You’re my pal, ain’t you, Sugar-Boy?”
Sugar-Boy’s face darkened with the rush of pleasurable, embarrassed blood and his lips began to work and the spit to fly as he prepared to speak.
“Yeah, Sugar’s my pal, ain’t you, Sugar-Boy?” he said, and slapped Sugar-Boy on the shoulder, and then swung again toward the Congressman while Sugar-Boy finally was managing to say, “I’m–y-y-y-your pal–and–I–ain’t ta-ta-ta-talking–none.”
Yes, Sugar-Boy probably knew, but he was dependable.
And Sadie was dependable, too. She had told me, but that was in the flush of her first fine rage and I (I thought of this with a certain grim humor) was, you might say, in the family. She wouldn’t tell anybody else. Sadie Burke didn’t have any confidant, for she didn’t trust anybody. She didn’t ask any sympathy, for the world she had grown up in didn’t have any. So she would keep her mouth shut. And she had plenty of patience. She knew he’d come back. Meanwhile, she could hack him into a rage, or could try to for it was hard to do, and she herself would get into one, and you would think that they would be ready to fly at each other in the frenzy they could build up. By that time, too, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was a frenzy of love or hate that coiled and tangled them together. And after all the years it had been going on,