All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [90]
She was looking straight to me all the time as though if she looked hard enough she might see the answer to something.
Then she went past me to the wall, where a mirror hung, and stared into the mirror, putting her face up close to the mirror and turning it a little from side to side, slowly. I couldn’t see what was in the mirror, just the back of her head.
“What was she like?” she asked, distantly and dispassionately
“Who?” I asked, and it was an honest question.
“In Chicago,” she said.
“She was just a little tart,” I said, “with fake Swedish hair on her head and skates on her feet and practically nothing on in between.”
“Was she pretty?” the distant and dispassionate voice asked.
“Hell,” I said, “if I met her on the street tomorrow I wouldn’t recognize her.”
“Was she pretty?” the voice said.
“How do I know?” I demanded, peevish again. “The condition she earned her living in you didn’t get around to noticing her face.”
“Was she pretty?”
“For Christ’s sake, forget it,” I said.
She turned around, and came toward me, holding her hands up at about the level of the chin, one on each side, the fingers together and slightly bent, not touching her face. She came up close to me and stopped. “Forget it?” she repeated, as though she had just heard my words.
Then she lifted her hands a little, and touched the white riddled plaster-of-Paris mask, touching t on each side, just barely prodding the surface as though it were swollen and painful. “Look,” she commanded.
She held it here for me to look at. “Look!” she commanded vindictively, and jabbed her fingers into the flesh, hard. For it was flesh, it wasn’t plaster of Paris at all.
“Yes, look,” she said, “and we lay up there in that God-forsaken shack–both of us, my brother and me–we were kids–and it was the smallpox–and my father was a drunk no-good–he was off drunk, crying and drinking in a saloon if he could beg a dime–crying and telling how the kiddies, the sweet little angel kiddies, was sick–oh, he was a drunk lousy warm-hearted kid-beating crying Irishman–and my brother died–and he ought to have lived–it wouldn’t have mattered to him–not to a man–but me, I didn’t die–I didn’t die, and I got well–and my father, he would look at me and grab me and start kissing me all over the face, all over the holes, slobbering, and crying and stinking of whisky–or he’d look at me and say, ‘Jeez,’ and slap me in the face–and it was all the same–it was all the same, for I wasn’t the one that died–I didn’t die–I–”
It was all a breathless monotony, suddenly cut off. She had groped out for me and had seized the cloth of my coat in her hands and had stuck her bowed head up against my chest. So I stood there with my right arm around her shoulder, patting her, patting and making a kind of smoothing-out motion with my hand on her back that shook soundlessly with what I took to be sobs.
Then, not lifting her head, she was saying, “It’s going to be like that–it’s always been that way, and it’ll keep on–being like that–”
It, I thought, and thought she was talking about the face.
But she wasn’t, for she was saying, “–it’ll keep on–they’ll kiss it and slobber–then they’ll slap you in the face–no matter what you do, do anything for them, make them what they are–take them out of the gutter and make something out of them–and they’ll slap you in the face–the first chance–because you had smallpox–they’ll some naked slut on skates and they’ll slap you in the face–they’ll kick up dirt in your face–”
I kept on patting and making the smoothing-out motion, for there wasn’t anything else to do.
“–that’s the way it’ll be–always some slut on skates–some–”
“Look here,” I said, still patting, “you make out. What do you care what he does?”
She jerked her head up. “What do you know, what the hell do you know?” she demanded, and dug her fingers in my coat and shook me.
“If it’s all this grief,” I said, “let him go.”
“Let him go! Let him go! I’ll kill him first, I swear it,” she said, glaring at me out of the now red eyes. “Let him go? Listen here–” and she shook