All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [64]
A few times I went to see Adam Stanton at his apartment, the fellow I had grown up with at Burden’s Landing. He was a hot-shot surgeon now, with more folks screaming for him to cut on them than he had time to cut on, and a professor at the University Medical School, and busy grinding out the papers he published in the scientific journals or took off to read at meetings in New York and Baltimore and London. He wasn’t married. He didn’t have time, he said. He didn’t have time for anything. But he’d take a little time to let me sit in a shabby overstuffed chair in his shabby apartment, where papers were stacked around and the colored girl had streaked the dust on the furniture. I used to wonder why he lived the way he did when he must have been having quite a handsome take, but I finally got it through my head that he didn’t ask anything from a lot of the folks he cut on. He had the name of a softy in the trade. And after he got money, people took him for it if they had a story that would halfway wash. The only thing in his apartment that was worth a plugged nickel was the piano, and it was the best money could buy.
Most of the time when I was at Adam’s apartment he would be at the piano. I have heard it said that he was pretty good, but I wouldn’t know. But I didn’t mind listening, not if the chair was good and comfortable. Adam must have heard me say one time or another that music didn’t mean much to me, but I suppose that he’d forgotten it or couldn’t believe that it was true for anybody. Anyway, he would turn his head at me and say, “This–now listen to this–my God, this now is sure a–” But his voice would trail off and the words which were going to tell what the thing sure and eternally was in its blessed truth would not ever get said. He would just leave the sentence hanging and twisting slowly in the air like a piece of frayed rope, and would look at me out of his clear, deep-set, ice-water-blue, abstract eyes–the kind of eyes and the kind of look your conscience has about three o’clock in the morning–and then, unlike your conscience, he would begin to smile, not much, just a sort of tentative, almost apologetic smile that took the curse off that straight mouth and square jaw, and seemed to say, “Hell, I can’t help it if I look at you that way, buddy, it’s just the way I look at things.” Then the smile would be gone, and he would turn his face to the piano and set his hands to the keys.
Sooner or later he would get enough of the music and would drop into one of the other shabby chairs. Or he might remember to get me a drink, or might even take one himself, paler than winter sunlight and about as strong. We’d sit there, not taking, sipping slow, his eyes burning cold and blue in his head, bluer because of the swarthiness of the skin, which was drawn back taut over the bones of the face. It was like when we used to go fishing, when we were kids, back at Burden’s Landing. We used to sit in the boat, under the hot sun, hour after hour, and never a word. Or lie on the beach. Or go camping together and after supper lie by a little smudge fire for the mosquitoes, and never say a word.
Perhaps Adam didn’t mind taking a little time out for me because I made him think back to Burden’s Landing and the other days. Not that he talked about it. But once he did. He was sitting in the chair, looking down at the eyewash in the glass which his long, hard-looking, nervous fingers were slowly revolving. The he looked up at me, and said, “We used to have a pretty good time, didn’t we? When we were kids.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You and me and Anne,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, and thought of Anne. Then I said, “Don’t you have a good time now?”
He seemed to take the question under advisement for a half minute, as though I had asked him a real question, which maybe it was. Then he said, “Well, I don’t suppose