All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [257]
Cemeteries and hospitals: I was back in the swing of things, I thought.
But the Millett place wasn’t like the hospital. It didn’t look at all like a hospital, I discovered when I turned off the highway twenty-five miles out of the city and tooled gently up the drive under the magnificent groining of the century-old live oaks whose bough met above the avenue and dripped stalactites of moss to make a green, aqueous gloom like a cavern. Between the regularly spaced oaks stood pedestals on which classic marbles–draped and undraped, male and female, stained by weathers and leaf acid and encroaching lichen, looking as though they had, in fact, sprouted dully out of the clinging black-green humus below them–stared out at the passer-by with the faintly pained, heavy, incurious unamazement of cattle. The gaze of those marble eyes must have been the first stage in the treatment the neurotic got when he came out to the sanatorium. It must have been like smearing a cool unguent of time on the hot pustule and dry itch of the soul.
Then at the end of the avenue the neurotic reached the sanatorium, which graciously promised peace beyond the white columns. For the Millett Sanatorium was what is called a rest home. But it had been built more than a century back for vanity and love by a cotton snob to whom money n no object, who had bought near a shipload of shining marble statues in Rome for his avenue, and who had probably had a face like brutally hewed cedar and not a nerve in his body, and now people who were descended from such people, or who had enough money (made in the administration of Grant or Coolidge) to assume that they were descended from such people, brought their twitches, tics, kinks, and running sores out here and rested in the high-ceiling rooms and ate crawfish bisque and were soothed by the voice of a psychiatrist in whose wide, unwavering, brown, liquid, depthless eyes one slowly drowned.
I almost drowned in those eyes during the one-minute interview I had in order to get permission to see Sadie. “She is very difficult,” he said.
Sadie was lying on a chaise longue by a window which gave over a stretch of lawn sloping down to a bayou. Her chopped-off black hair was wild and her face was chalk-white and the afternoon light striking across it made it look more than ever like the plaster-of-Paris mask of Medusa riddled with BB shot. But it was a mask flung down on a pillow and the eyes that looked out of it belonged to the mask. They did not belong to Sadie Burke. There wasn’t anything burning there.
“Hello, Sadie,” I said, “I hope you don’t mind me coming to see you.”
She studied me a moment out of the unburning eyes. “It’s O.K. with me,” she said.
So I sat down and hitched my chair up closer and lighted a cigarette.
“How you getting on?” I asked.
She turned her head in my direction and gave me another long look. For an instant, there was a flicker in the eyes as when a breath of air touches an ember. “Look here,” she said, “I’m getting on all right. Why the hell shouldn’t I be getting on all right?”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“I didn’t come out here because there was anything wrong with me. I came because I was tired. I wanted a rest. That’s what I said to that God-damned doctor. I said, ‘I’m here to get a rest because I’m tired and I don’t want you messing around and trying to swap secrets with me and find out if I ever had any dreams about red fire engines.’ I said, ‘If I ever started swapping secrets with you I’d burn your ears off, but I’m here to rest and I don’t want you in my hair.’ I said, ‘I’m tired of a lot of things and I’m God-damned tired of a lot of people and that goes for you, too, Doc.’ ”
She pushed herself up on one arm and looked at me. Then said, “And that goes for you, too, Jack Burden.”
I didn’t say anything to that and I didn’t move. So she sank back down, and into herself.
I let my cigarette burn up my fingers and lighted another one before I said, “Sadie, I reckon I know how you feel and I don’t want to be bringing everything up again, but–”
“You don’t know a thing about how I feel,