All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [66]
That was Anne Stanton, and I saw what I knew I would see.
She sat there before me, very erect, with her head held high and straight on the fine, round stalk of her neck above the small, squarish shoulders, and with her rather small but roundly modeled bare arms laid close to her sides in mathematical accuracy. And looking at her, I though how, below the level of the table, her small legs would be laid accurately together, thigh to thigh, knee to knee, ankle to ankle. There was, in fact, always something a little stylized about her–something of the effect one observes in certain Egyptian bas-reliefs and statuettes of princesses of a late period, forms in which grace and softness, without being the less grace or softness, are caught in mathematical formality. Anne Stanton always looked level at you, and you had the feeling that she was looking at something far away. She always held her head high, and you had the feeling that she was waiting for a voice which you wouldn’t be able to hear. She always stood so trim and erect, and you had feeling that all her grace and softness was caught in the rigor of an idea which you could not define.
I said, “You planning on being an old maid?”
She laughed and said, “I’m not planning on anything. I quit making plans a long time back.”
We danced in the handkerchief-big space between the speak-easy tables, in which stood the plates of half-eaten spaghetti or chicken bones and the bottles of Dago red. For about five minutes the dancing had some value in itself, then it became very much like acting out some complicated and portentous business in a dream which seems to have a meaning but whose meaning you can’t figure out. Then the music was over, and stopping dancing was like waking up from the dream, being glad to wake up and escape and yet distressed because now you won’t ever know what it had been all about.
She must have felt the same way about it, for when, later, I asked her to dance again, she said that she didn’t feel like it, she’s rather talk. We talked, quiet a lot, but it was a little bit like the dancing. You can’t keep on taking forever about what a hell of a good time you had when you were kids.
I took her to her apartment building, which was quite a few cuts above Adam’s joint, for Governor Stanton hadn’t died exactly a pauper, and left her in the lobby. She said good night, and, “Be a good boy, Jack.”
“Will you have dinner with me again?” I asked her.
“Any time you want,” she said, “any time in the world. You know that.”
Yes, I knew it.
And she did have dinner with me again, several times. The last time she said: “I’ve seen your father.”
“Yeah,” I said in an unencouraging way.
“Don’t be like that,” she said
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know what I mean,” she said. “Don’t you even want to know how he is?”
“I know how he is,” I said. “He is sitting in that hole he lives in down there or he’s helping round that mission with his bums, or writing those damn-fool little leaflet they pass out to you on the street, all about Mark 4:6, and Job 7:5, and his specs are down on the end of his nose and the dandruff is like a snowstorm in the Dakotas down on his black coat collar.”
She didn’t say anything for a minute, then said: “I saw him on the street and he didn’t look well. He looked sick. I didn’t recognize him at first.”
“Trying to pass you some of that junk?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. He held out a piece of paper to me,