All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [67]
“I haven’t seen him in nearly one year,” I said.
“Oh, Jack,” she said, “you oughtn’t do that! You ought to see him.”
“Look here, what can I say to him? And God knows, he hasn’t got anything to tell me. Nobody made him live like that. Nobody made him walk out of his law office, either, and not even bother to shut the door behind him.”
“But, Jack,” she said, “you–”
“He’s doing what he wants to do. And besides if he was fool enough to do what he did just because he couldn’t get along with a woman–especially a woman like my mother. If he couldn’t give her what she wanted, whatever the hell it was she wanted and he couldn’t give her, then–”
“Don’t talk like that,” she said sharply.
“Look here,” I said, “just because your old man was Governor once and died in a mahogany tester bed with a couple of high-priced doctors leaning over him and adding up the bill in their heads and because you think he was Jesus Christ in a black string tie, you needn’t try to talk to me like an old woman. I’m not talking about your family. I’m talking about mine, and I can’t help seeing the plain unvarnished truth. And if you–”
“Well, you don’t have to talk to me about it,” she said. “Or anybody.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Oh, the truth,” she exclaimed, and clenched her right hand on the tablecloth. “How do you know it’s the truth? You don’t know anything about it. You don’t know what made them do what they did.”
“I know the truth. I know what my mother is like. And you do, too. And I know my father was a fool to let her get him down.”
“Don’t be so bitter!” she said, and reached out to seize my forearm and set her sharp fingers in it, through the coat, and shake it a little.
“I’m no bitter. I don’t give a damn what they did. Or do. Or why.”
“Oh, Jack,” she said, still clutching my forearm, but not hard now, “can’t you love them a little, or forgive them, or just not think about them, or something? Something different from the way you are?”
“I could go for the rest of my life and not think about them,” I said. Then I noticed that she was shaking her head ever so little from side to side, and that her eyes were as dark a blue as they ever got and too bright, and that she had drawn in the edge of her lower lip and had set her teeth to it. I reached my right hand over and took her hand off my left forearm and laid it down flat, palm down, on the tablecloth, and covered it with my hand. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re not, Jack,” she said, “you’re not sorry. Not really. You aren’t ever sorry about anything. Or glad, either. You’re just–oh, I don’t know what.”
“I am sorry,” I said.
“Oh, you just thing you are sorry. Or glad. You aren’t really.”
“If you think you are sorry, who in the hell can tell you that you aren’t?” I demanded, for I was a brass-bound Idealist then, as I have started, and was not going to call for a plebiscite on whether I was sorry or not.
“That sounds all right,” she said, “but it isn’t. I don’t know why–oh, yes, I do–if you’ve never been sorry or glad then you haven’t got any way to know the next time whether you are or not.”
“All right,” I said, “but can I tell you this: something is happening inside me which I choose to call sorry?”
“You can say it, but you don’t know.” Then, snatching her hand from under my hand, “Oh, you start to feel sorry or glad or something but it just doesn’t come to anything.”
“You mean like a little green apple that’s got a worm in it and falls off the tree before it ever gets ripe?”
She laughed, and answered, “Yes, like little green apples with worms in them.”
“Well,” I said, “Here’s a little green apple with a worm in it: I’m sorry.”
I was sorry, or what went for sorry in my lexicon. I was sorry that I had ruined the evening. But candor compelled me to admit that there hadn’t been much of an evening to ruin.
I didn’t ask her to go to dinner with me again, at least not that time while