Or perhaps Sugar-Boy had had something of which he could never be robbed.
I stood there in the hall after Sugar-Boy had gone, breathing the odor of old paper and disinfectant, and turning these thoughts over in my mind. Then I went back into the newspaper room and sat down and bent over a picture magazine.
It was February when I saw Sugar-Boy in the library. I continued with the way of life which I had adopted, still hugging the aimlessness and the anonymity about me like a blanket. But there was a difference now, in my own mind if not in the circumstances of my life. And in the end, months later, in May, in fact, the difference which my meeting with Sugar-Boy had made in my mind sent me to see Lucy Stark. Now, at least, I can see that such was the case.
I telephoned her out at the farm where she was still staying. She sounded all right on the phone. And she asked me to come out.
So I was back in the parlor in the little white house, among the black-walnut furniture upholstered in red plush, looking down at the flowers in the carpet. Nothing had changed in that room for a long time, or would change for a long time. But Lucy had changed a little. She was fleshier now, with a more positive gray in her hair. She was more like the woman the house had reminded me of the first time I had seen it–a respectable, middle-aged woman, in a clean gray gingham dress, with white stockings and black kid shoes, sitting in her rocker on the porch, with her hands folded across her stomach to take a little ease now the day’s work is done and the menfolks are still in the fields and it’s not yet time to think about supper or strain the evening milk. She wasn’t that woman yet, but give her six or seven more years and she would be.
I sat there with my eyes on a flower in the carpet, or I looked up at her and then again at the flower, and her own glance strayed about the room in that abstracted way a good housewife has of looking around to surprise a speck of dust in the act. We were saying things to each other all the while, but they were strained and difficult things, completely empty.
You meet somebody at the seashore on a vacation and have a wonderful time together. Or in a corner at a party, while the glasses clink and somebody beats on a piano, you talk with a stranger whose mind seems to whet and sharpen your own and with whom a wonderful new vista of ideas is spied.. Or you share some intense or painful experience with somebody, and discover a deep communion. Then afterward you are sure that when you meet again, the gay companion will give you the old gaiety, the brilliant stranger will stir your mind from its torpor, the sympathetic friend will solace you with the old communion of spirit. But something happens, or almost always happens, to the gaiety, the brilliance, the communion. You remember the individual words from the old language you spoke together, but you have forgotten the grammar. You remember the steps of the dance, but the music isn’t playing any more. So there you are.
So there we sat for a while, and the minutes sifted and wavered down around us, one by one, like leaves dropping in still autumn air. Then, after a space of silence, she excused herself and I was left alone to watch the leaves drift down.
But she came back, carrying now a tray on which was a pitcher of iced tea, two glasses with sprigs of mint stuck in them, and a large devil’s-food cake. That is what they give you in the country in a little white house like that when you make a visit, iced tea and devil’s-food cake. She had made the cake that morning, no doubt, in preparation for my visit.
Well, eating the cake would be something to do. Nobody expects you to talk with your mouth full of cake.
In the end, however, she said something. Perhaps having the cake on the table beside her, seeing somebody eat her cake, which she knew was a good cake, as people had sat on Sunday afternoons and eaten cake in that room for years, made it possible for her to say something.
She said, “You knew Tom was dead.”
She said it perfectly matter-of-factly, and that was a comfort.
“Yes,” I replied, “I knew it.”
I had seen it in the paper, back in February. I hadn’t gone to the funeral. I figured I had been to enough funerals. And I hadn’t written her a letter. I couldn’t very well write a letter and say I was sorry, and I couldn’t very well write her a letter of congratulations.
“It was pneumonia,” she said.
I remembered Adam’s saying that that was what often got such cases.
“He died very quickly,” she continued. “Just three days.”
“Yes,” I said.
She was silent for a moment, then said, “I am resigned now. I am resigned to it all now, Jack. A time comes when you think you cannot bear another thing, but it happens to you, and you can bear it. I am resigned now, by God’s help.”
I didn’t make any answer.
“Then after I was resigned, God gave me something so I could live.”
I murmured something inarticulate.
She rose abruptly from her chair, and thinking I was being dismissed, I rose, too, clumsily, and started to say something by way of a good-bye. I was ready and anxious to go. I had been a fool to come. But she reached to touch my sleeve, and said, “I want to show you something.” She moved away, toward the door. “Come with me,” she said.
I followed her into the little hall, down it, and into a back room. She went across the room briskly. I didn’t take it in at first, but there by the window was a crib and in the crib was a baby.
She was standing on the far side of the crib looking across at me at the instant when I really saw what was there. I guess my face was a study. Anyway, she said, “It’s Tom’s baby. It’s my little grandbaby. It’s Tom’s baby.”
She leaned over the crib, touching the baby here and there the way women do. Then she picked it up, holding it up with one hand behind its head to prop the head. She joggled it slightly and looked directly in its face. The baby’s mouth opened in a yawn, and its eyes squinched and unsquinched, and then with the joggling and clucking it was getting it gave a moist and pink and toothless smile, like an advertisement. Lucy Stark’s face had exactly the kind of expression on it which you would expect, and that expression said everything there was to say on the subject in hand.
She came around the crib, holding the baby up for my inspection.
“It’s a pretty baby,” I said, and put out a forefinger for the baby to clutch, the way you are supposed to do.
“It looks like Tom,” she said. “Don’t you think so?”
Then before I could get an answer ready that wouldn’t be too horrendous a lie, she went on. “But that’s silly to ask you. You wouldn’t know. I mean he looks like Tom when he was a baby.” She paused to inspect the baby again. “It looks like Tom,” she said, more to herself than to me. Then she looked directly at me. “I know it’s Tom’s,” she declared fiercely to me, “it’s got to be Tom’s, it looks like him.”
I looked critically at the baby, and nodded. “It favors him, all right,” I agreed.
“To think,” she said, “there was a time I prayed to God it wasn’t Tom’s baby. So an injustice wouldn’t be Tom’s.” The baby bounced a little in her arms. It was a husky, good-looking baby, all right. She gave the baby an encouraging jiggle, and then looked back at me. “And now,” she continued, “I have prayed to God that it is Tom’s. And I know now.”
I nodded.
“I knew in my heart,” she said. “And then, do you think that poor girl–the mother–would have given it to me if she hadn’t known it was Tom’s. No matter what that girl did–even what they said–don’t you think a mother would know? She would just know.”
“Yes,” I said.
“But I knew, too. In my heart. So I wrote her a letter. I went to see her, I saw the baby and held him. I persuaded her to let me adopt him.”
“You’ve got it fixed for a legal adoption?” I asked. “So she won’t–” I stopped before I could say, “be bleeding you for years.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, apparently not reading my mind. “I got a lawyer to see her and fix everything. I gave her some money, too. The poor girl wanted
to go to California and get away. Willie didn’t have much money–he spent almost everything he made–but I gave her what I could. I gave her six thousand dollars.”
So Sibyl had made a good thing out of it after all, I reflected.
“Don’t you want to hold him?” Lucy asked me in an excess of generosity, thrusting out the expensive baby in my direction.
“Sure,” I said, and took him. I hefted him, while I carefully tried to keep him from falling apart. “How much does he weigh?” I asked, and suddenly realized that I had the tone of a man about to buy something.
“Fifteen pounds and three ounces,” she answered promptly; and added, “that is very good for three months.”
“Sure,” I said, “that’s a lot.”
She relieved me of the baby, gave him a sort of quick snuggle to her bosom, bending her head down so her face was against the baby’s head, and then replaced him in the crib.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
She straightened up and came around to my side of the crib. “At first,” she said, “I thought I’d name him for Tom. I thought that for quite a while. Then it came to me. I would name him for Willie. His name is Willie–Willie Stark.”
She led the way out into the little hall again. We walked up toward the table where my hat lay. Then she turned around and scrutinized my face as though the light weren’t very good in the hall.
“You know,” she said, “I named him for Willie because–”
She was still scrutinizing my face.
“–because,” she continued, “because Willie was a great man.”
I nodded, I suppose.
“Oh, I know he made mistakes,” she said, and lifted up her chin as though facing something, “bad mistakes. Maybe he did bad things, like they say. But inside–in here, deep down–” and she laid her hand to her bosom–”he was a great man.”
She wasn’t bothering with my face any more, with trying to read it. For the moment, she wasn’t bothering with me. I might as well not have been there.
“He was a great man,” she affirmed again, in a voice nearly a whisper. Then she looked again at me, calmly. “You see, Jack,” she said, “I have to believe that.”
Yes, Lucy, you have to believe that. You have to believe that to live. I know that you must believe that. And I would not have you believe otherwise. It must be that way, and I understand the fact. For you see, Lucy. I must believe that, too. I must believe that Willie Stark was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn’t anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must believe that.
Because I came to believe that, I came back to Burden’s Landing. I did not come to believe it at the moment when I watched Sugar-Boy mount the stairs from the basement hall of the public library or when Lucy Stark stood before me in the hall of the little paint-peeling white house in the country. But because of those things–and of all the other things which had happened–I came, in the end, to believe that. And believing that Willie Stark was a great man, I could think better of all other people, and of myself. At the same time that I could more surely condemn myself.
I came back to Burden’s Landing in early summer, at the request of my mother. She telephoned me one night and said, “Son, I want you to come here. As soon as you can. Can you come tomorrow?”
When I asked her what she wanted, for I still did not want to go back, she refused to answer me directly. She said she would tell me when I came.
So I went.
She was waiting for me on the gallery when I drove up late the next afternoon. We went around to the screened side gallery and had a drink. She wasn’t talking much, and I didn’t rush her.
When by near seven o’clock the Young Executive hadn’t turned up, I asked her was he coming to dinner.
She shook her head. “Where is he?” I asked.
She turned her empty glass in her hand, lightly clinking the ice left there. Then she said, “I don’t know.”
“On a trip?” I asked.
“Yes,” she answered, clinking the ice. Then she turned to me. “He has been gone five days,” she said. “He won’t come back until I have gone. You see–” she set the glass down on the table beside her with an air of finality–”I am leaving him.”
“Well,” I breathed, “I’m damned.”
She continued to look at me, as though expecting something. What, I didn’t know.
“Well, I’m damned,” I said, still fumbling with the fact which she had presented to me.
“Are you surprised?” she asked me, leaning a little toward me in her chair.
“Sure, I’m surprised.”
She examined me intently, and I could detect a curious shifting and shading of feelings on her face, too evanescent and ambiguous for definition.
“Sure, I’m surprised,” I repeated.
“Oh,” she said, and sank back in her chair, sinking back like somebody who has fallen into deep water and clutches for a rope and seizes it and hangs on a moment and lose the grip and tries again and doesn’t make it and knows it’s no use to try again. There wasn’t anything ambiguous now about her face. It was like what I said. She had missed her grip.
She turned her face away from me, out toward the bay, as though she didn’t want me to see what was on it. Then she said, “I thought–I thought maybe you wouldn’t be surprised.”
I couldn’t tell her why I or anybody else would be surprised. I couldn’t tell her that when a woman as old as she was getting to be had her hooks in a man not much more than forty years old and not wind-broke it was surprising if she didn’t hang on. Even if the woman had money and the man was as big a horse’s-ass as the Young Executive. I couldn’t tell her that, and so I didn’t say anything.
She kept on looking out to the bay. “I thought,” she said, hesitated, and resumed, “I thought maybe you’d understand why, Jack.”
“Well, I don’t,” I replied.
She held off awhile, then began again. “It happened last year. I knew when it happened.–Oh, I knew it would be like this.”
“When what happened?”
“When you–when you–” Then she stopped, and corrected what she had been about to say. “When Monty–died.”
And she sung back toward me and on her face was a kind of wild appeal. She was making another grab for that rope. “Oh, Jack,” she said, “Jack, it was Monty–don’t you see?–it was Monty.”
I reckoned that I saw, and I said so. I remembered the silvery, pure scream which had jerked me out into the hall that afternoon of Judge Irwin’s death, and the face of my mother as she lay on the bed later with the knowledge sinking into her.
“It was Monty,” she was saying. “It was always Monty. I didn’t really know it. There hadn’t been–been anything between us for a long time. But it was always Monty. I knew it when he was dead. I didn’t want to know it but I knew it. And I couldn’t go on. There came a time I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t.”
She rose abruptly from her chair, like something jerked up by a string.
“I couldn’t,” she said. “Because everything was a mess. Everything has always been a mess.” Her hands twisted and tore the handkerchief she held before her at the level of her waist. “Oh, Jack,” she cried out, “it had always been a mess.”
She flung down the shredded handkerchief and ran off the gallery. I heard the sound of her heels on the floor inside, but it wasn’t the old bright, spirited tattoo. It was a kind of desperate, slovenly clatter, suddenly muted on the rug.
I waited on the gallery for a while. Then I went back to the kitchen. “My mother isn’t feeling very well,” I told the cook. “You or Jo-Belle might go up a little later and see if she will take some broth a
nd egg or something like that.”
Then I went back into the dining room and sat down in the candlelight and they brought me the food and I ate some of it.
After dinner Jo-Belle came to tell me that she had carried a tray up to my mother’s room but she wouldn’t take it. She hadn’t even opened the door at the knock. She had just called to say she didn’t want anything.
I sat on the gallery a long time while the sounds died out back in the kitchen. Then the light went out back there. The rectangle of green in the middle of blackness where the light of the window fell on the grass was suddenly black, too.
After a while I went upstairs and stood outside the door of my mother’s room. Once or twice I almost knock to go in. But I decided that even if I went in, there wouldn’t be anything to say. There isn’t ever anything to say to somebody who has found out the truth about himself, whether it is good or bad.
So I went back down and stood in the garden among the black magnolia trees and the myrtles, and thought how by killing my father I had saved my mother’s soul. Then I thought how all knowledge that is worth anything is maybe paid for by blood. Maybe that is the only way you can tell that a certain piece of knowledge is worth anything: it has cost some blood.
My mother left the next day. She was going to Reno. I drove her down to the station, and arranged all her nice, slick matched bags and valises and cases and hatboxes in a nice row on the cement of the platform to wait for the train. The day was hot and bright, and the cement was hot and gritty under our feet as we stood there in that vacuity which belongs to the period just before parting at a railway station.
We stood there quite a while, looking up the track for the first smudge of smoke on the heat-tingling horizon beyond the tide flat and the clumps of pines. Then my mother suddenly said. “Jack, I want to tell you something.”
“Yes?”
“I am letting Theodore have the house.”