All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [267]
I sat there with my eyes on a flower in the carpet, or I looked up at her and then again at the flower, and her own glance strayed about the room in that abstracted way a good housewife has of looking around to surprise a speck of dust in the act. We were saying things to each other all the while, but they were strained and difficult things, completely empty.
You meet somebody at the seashore on a vacation and have a wonderful time together. Or in a corner at a party, while the glasses clink and somebody beats on a piano, you talk with a stranger whose mind seems to whet and sharpen your own and with whom a wonderful new vista of ideas is spied.. Or you share some intense or painful experience with somebody, and discover a deep communion. Then afterward you are sure that when you meet again, the gay companion will give you the old gaiety, the brilliant stranger will stir your mind from its torpor, the sympathetic friend will solace you with the old communion of spirit. But something happens, or almost always happens, to the gaiety, the brilliance, the communion. You remember the individual words from the old language you spoke together, but you have forgotten the grammar. You remember the steps of the dance, but the music isn’t playing any more. So there you are.
So there we sat for a while, and the minutes sifted and wavered down around us, one by one, like leaves dropping in still autumn air. Then, after a space of silence, she excused herself and I was left alone to watch the leaves drift down.
But she came back, carrying now a tray on which was a pitcher of iced tea, two glasses with sprigs of mint stuck in them, and a large devil’s-food cake. That is what they give you in the country in a little white house like that when you make a visit, iced tea and devil’s-food cake. She had made the cake that morning, no doubt, in preparation for my visit.
Well, eating the cake would be something to do. Nobody expects you to talk with your mouth full of cake.
In the end, however, she said something. Perhaps having the cake on the table beside her, seeing somebody eat her cake, which she knew was a good cake, as people had sat on Sunday afternoons and eaten cake in that room for years, made it possible for her to say something.
She said, “You knew Tom was dead.”
She said it perfectly matter-of-factly, and that was a comfort.
“Yes,” I replied, “I knew it.”
I had seen it in the paper, back in February. I hadn’t gone to the funeral. I figured I had been to enough funerals. And I hadn’t written her a letter. I couldn’t very well write a letter and say I was sorry, and I couldn’t very well write her a letter of congratulations.
“It was pneumonia,” she said.
I remembered Adam’s saying that that was what often got such cases.
“He died very quickly,” she continued. “Just three days.”
“Yes,” I said.
She was silent for a moment, then said, “I am resigned now. I am resigned to it all now, Jack. A time comes when you think you cannot bear another thing, but it happens to you, and you can bear it. I am resigned now, by God’s help.”
I didn’t make any answer.
“Then after I was resigned, God gave me something so I could live.”
I murmured something inarticulate.
She rose abruptly from her chair, and thinking I was being dismissed, I rose, too, clumsily, and started to say something by way of a good-bye. I was ready and anxious to go. I had been a fool to come. But she reached to touch my sleeve, and said, “I want to show you something.” She moved away, toward the door. “Come with me,” she said.
I followed her into the little hall, down it, and into a back room. She went across the room briskly. I didn’t take it in at first, but there by the window was a crib and