• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2419 0

had been watching him all along, searching for some sign in his big bland face that some sense of urgency had touched him, some sense that now he had to take hold, that now he had to do something, anything—she would have been glad to see him make a mistake, even make a mess of things if it meant that he was doing something—but she saw that nothing had happened. His eyes were on her, glittering just slightly behind his glasses. He had taken in every detail of Tilman’s face; he had registered Roosevelt’s tears, Mary Maud’s confusion, and now he was studying her to see how she was taking it. She yanked her hat straight, seeing by his eyes that it had slipped toward the back of her head.

“You ought to wear it that way,” he said. “It makes you look sort of relaxed—by-mistake.”

She made her face hard, as hard as she could make it. “The responsibility is yours now,” she said in a harsh, final voice.

He stood there with his half smile and said nothing. Like an absorbent lump, she thought, taking everything in, giving nothing out. She might have been looking at a stranger using the family face. He had the same noncommittal lawyer’s smile as her father and grandfather, set in the same heavy jaw, under the same Roman nose; he had the same eyes that were neither blue nor green nor gray; his skull would soon be bald like theirs. Her face became even harder. “You’ll have to take over and manage this place,” she said and folded her arms, “if you want to stay here.”

The smile left him. He looked at her once hard, his expression empty, and then beyond her out across the meadow, beyond the four oaks and the black distant tree line, into the vacant afternoon sky. “I thought it was home,” he said, “but it don’t do to presume.”

Her heart constricted. She had an instant’s revelation that he was homeless. Homeless here and homeless anywhere. “Of course it’s home,” she said, “but somebody has to take over. Somebody has to make these Negroes work.”

“I can’t make Negroes work,” he muttered. “That’s about the last thing I’m capable of.”

‘I’ll tell you everything to do,” she said.

“Ha!” he said. “That you would.” He looked at her and his half smile returned. “Lady,” he said, “you’re coming into your own. You were born to take over. If the old man had had his stroke ten years ago, we’d all be better off. You could have run a wagon train through the Bad Lands. You could stop a mob. You’re the last of the nineteenth century, you’re…”

“Walter,” she said, “you’re a man. I’m only a woman.”

“A woman of your generation,” Walter said, “is better than a man of mine.”

Her mouth drew into a tight line of outrage and her head trembled almost imperceptibly. “I would be ashamed to say it!” she whispered.

Walter dropped into the chair he had been sitting in and opened his book. A sluggish-looking flush settled on his face. “The only virtue of my generation,” he said, “is that it ain’t ashamed to tell the truth about itself.” He was already reading. Her interview was at an end.

She remained standing there, rigid, her eyes on him in stunned disgust. Her son. Her only son. His eyes and his skull and his smile belonged to the family face but underneath them was a different kind of man from any she had ever known. There was no innocence in him, no rectitude, no conviction either of sin or election. The man she saw courted good and evil impartially and saw so many sides of every question that he could not move, he could not work, he could not even make niggers work. Any evil could enter that vacuum. God knows, she thought and caught her breath, God knows what he might do!

He had not done anything. He was twenty-eight now and, so far as she could see, nothing occupied him but trivia. He had the air of a person who is waiting for some big event and can’t start any work because it would only be interrupted. Since he was always idle, she had thought that perhaps he wanted to be an artist or a philosopher or something, but this was not the case. He did not want to write anything with a name. He amused himself writing letters to people he did not know and to the