That took me so by surprise I couldn’t say anything. I thought of all the years she ahd been cramming the place with furniture and silver and glass till it was a museum and she was God’ gift to the antique dealers of New Orleans, New York, and London. I was surprised anything could pry her loose from it.
“You see,” she said, hurrying on in the tone of explanation, misreading my silence, “it isn’t really Theodore’s fault and you know how crazy he is about the place and about living on the Row and all that. And I didn’t think you’d want it. You see–I thought–I thought you had Monty’s place and if you ever Lived at the Landing you’d prefer that because–because–”
“Because he was my father,” I finished for her, a little grimly.
“Yes,” she said, simply. “Because he was your father. So I decided to–”
“Damn it,” I burst out, “it is your house and you can do whatever you want to with it. I wouldn’t have it. As soon as I get my bag out of there this afternoon I’ll never set foot in it again, and that is a fact. I don’t want it and I don’t care what you do with it or with your money. I don’t want that either. I’ve always told you that.”
“There won’t be any too much money to worry about,” she said. “You know what the last six or seven years have been like.”
“You aren’t broke?” I asked. “Look here, if you’re broke, I’ll–”
“I’m not broke,” she said. “I’ll have enough to get on with. If I go somewhere quiet and am careful. At first I thought I might go to Europe, then I–”
“You better stay out of Europe,” I said. “All hell is going to break loose over there and not long either.”
“Oh, I’m not going. I’m going to some quiet, cheap place. I don’t know where. I’ll have to think.”
“Well,” I said, “don’t worry about me and the house. You can be plenty sure I’ll never set foot in it again.”
She looked up the tracks, east, where there wasn’t any smoke yet beyond the pines and the tidelands. She mused for a couple of minute on the emptiness off there. Then said, as though just picking up my own words. “I ought never set foot in it. I married and I came to it and he was a good man. But I ought to have stayed where I was. I ought never come.”
I couldn’t very well argue that point with her one way or the other, and so I kept quiet.
But as she stood there in the silence, she seemed to be arguing it with herself, for suddenly she lifted up her head and looked straight at me and said, “Well, I did it. And now I know.” And she squared her trim shoulders under her trim blue linen suit and held her face up in the old way like it was a damned expensive present she was making to the world and the world had better appreciate it.
Well, she knew now. As she stood there on the hot cement in the dazzle, she seemed to be musing on what she knew.
But it was on what she didn’t know. For after a while she turned to me and said, “Son, tell me something.”
“What?”
“It’s something I’ve got to know, Son.”
“What is it?”
“When–when it happened–when you went to see Monty–”
That was it. I knew that was it. And in the midst of the dazzle and the heat shimmering off the cement, I was cold as ice and my nerves crawled cold inside me.
“–did he–was there–” she was looking away from me.
“You mean,” I said, “Had he got into a jam and had to shoot himself? Is that it?”
She nodded, then looked straight at me and waited for what was coming.
I looked into her face and studied. The light wasn’t any too kind to it. Light would never be kind to it again. But she held it up and looked straight at me and waited.
“No,” I said, “he wasn’t in any jam. We had a little argument about politics. Nothing serious. But he talked about his health. About feeling bad. That was it. He said good-bye to me. I can see now he meant it as the real thing. That was all.”
She sagged a little. She didn’t have to brace up so stiff any longer.
“Is that the truth?” she demanded.
“Yes,” I said. “I swear to God it is.”
“Oh,” she said softly and let her breath escape in an almost soundless sigh.
So we waited again. There wasn’t anything else to say. She had finally, at the last minute, asked what she had been waiting to ask and had been afraid to ask all the time.
Then, after a while, there was the smoke on the horizon. Then we could see, far off, the black smoke moving toward us along the edge of the bright water. Then with the great grinding and tramping and hissing and the wreaths of steam, the engine had pulled past us to a stop. A white-coated porter began to gather up the nice matched bags and boxes.
My mother turned to me and took me by the arm. “Good-bye, Son,” she said.
“Good-bye,” I said.
She stepped toward me and I put my arm around her.
“Write to me, Son,” she said. “Write to me. You are all I’ve got.”
I nodded. “Let me know how you make out,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “yes.”
Then I kissed her good-bye, and as I did so I saw the conductor who was beyond her look at his watch and flick it into his pocket with that contemptuous motion a conductor on a crack train has when he is getting ready to wind up the ninety-second stop at a hick town. I knew he was that very instant going to call, “All aboard!” But it seemed a long time coming. It was like looking at a man across a wide valley and seeing the puff of smoke from his gun and then waiting God knows how long for the tiny report, or like seeing the lightning way off and waiting for the thunder. I stood there with my arm around my mother’s shoulder and her cheek against mine (her cheek was wet, I discovered) and waited for the conductor to call, “All aboard!”
Then it came, and she stepped back from me and mounted the steps and turned to wave as the train drew away and the porter slammed the vestibule door.
I looked after the dwindling train was carrying my mother away until it was nothing but the smudge of smoke to the west, and thought how I had lied to her. Well, I had given that lie to her as a going-away present. Or a kind of wedding present, I thought.
Then I thought how maybe I had lied just to cover up myself.
“Damn it,” I said out loud, savagely, “it wasn’t for me, it wasn’t.”
And that was true. It was really true.
I had given my mother a present, which was a lie. But in return she had given me a present, too, which was truth. She gave me a new picture of herself, and that meant, in the end, a new picture of the world. Or rather, the new picture of herself filled in the blank space which was perhaps the center of the new picture of the world which had been given to me by many people, by Sadie Burke, Lucy Stark, Willie Stark, Sugar-Boy, Adam Stanton. And that meant that my mother gave me back the past. I could now accept the past which I had before felt was tainted and horrible. I could accept the past now because I could accept her and be at peace with her and with myself.
For years I had condemned her as a woman without heart, who loved merely power over men and the momentary satisfaction to vanity or flesh which they could give her, who lived in a strange loveless oscillation between calculation and instinct. And my mother, realizing a condemnation of her, but without, perhaps, realizing its nature, had done everything she could to hold me and to throttle the condemnation. What she could do to me was to use the force which she was able to use on other men. I resisted and resented this but I wanted to be loved by her and at the same time I was drawn by the force, for she was a vital and beautiful woman by whom I was drawn and by whom I was repelled, whom I condemned and of whom I was proud. But the change came.
The first hint was in the wild, silvery scream which filled the house when the word of Judge Irwin’s death was received. That scream rang in my ears for many months, but it had faded away, lost in the past and the corruption of the past, by the time she called me back to Burden’s Landing to te
ll me that she was going to go away. Then I knew that she was telling the truth. And I felt at peace with her and with myself.
I did not say why to myself at the moment when she told me or even the next day when we stood on the cement platform and waited for the train, or even when I stood there alone and watched the last smudge of smoke fade to the west. Not did I say why to myself when I sat alone that night in the house which had been Judge Irwin’s house but which was now mine. I had closed up my mother’s house that afternoon, had put the key under the mat on the gallery, and had left it for good.
Judge Irwin’s house had the odor of dust and disuse and close air. In the afternoon I opened all the windows and left them open while I went down to the Landing for some supper. When I got back and turned the lights on, it seemed more like the house which I remembered from all the years. But sitting there in the study, with the damp, sweet-heavy night air coming in through the windows, I did not say to myself why I now felt so fully at peace with myself. I thought of my mother and I felt the peace and the relief and the new sense of the world.
After a while I got up and walked out of the house and down the Row. It was a very calm, clear night with scarcely a sibilance from the water on the shingle of the beach, and the bay was bright under the stars. I walked down the Row until I came to the Stanton house. There was a light on in the little back sitting room, a dim light as though from a reading lamp. I looked at the house for a couple of minutes and then entered the gate and walked up the path.
The screen door of the gallery was latched. But the main door of the hall inside the gallery was open, and looking across the gallery I could see down the hall to the place where a rectangle of light was laid on the floor from the open door of the back sitting room. I knocked on the frame of the screen door and waited.
In a moment Anne Stanton appeared in the patch of light down the hall.
“Who is it?” she called “It’s me,” I called back.
She came down the hall and across the gallery toward me. Then she was at the door, a thin, white-clad figure in the dimness beyond the screen. I started to say hello, but didn’t. And she did not speak, either, as she fumbled with the latch. Then the door was open and I stepped inside.
As I stood there, I caught the trace of the scent she used, and a cold hand compressed my heart.
“I didn’t know you’d let me in,” I said, trying to make it sound like a joke and trying to see her face in the shadow. I could only see the paleness in shadow and the gleam of her eyes.
“Of course I’d let you in,” she said.
“Well, I didn’t know,” I said, and gave a kind of laugh.
“Why?”
“Oh, the way I’ve behaved.”
We moved over to the swing on the gallery and sat down. The chains creaked, but we sat so still that the thing did not sway a hair’s breadth.
“What have you done?” she asked I fished for a cigarette, found one, and lighted it. I flicked the match out without looking at her face. “What have I done?” I repeated. “Well, it’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t answer your letter.”
“That’s all right,” she said. Then added reflectively, as though to herself, “That was a long time ago.”
“It was a long time back, six months, seven months. But I did worse than not answering it,” I said. “I didn’t even read it. I just set it up on my bureau and never even opened it.”
She didn’t say anything to that. I took a few drags on the cigarette and waited but there wasn’t a word.
“It came at the wrong time,” I said finally. “It came at a time when everything and everybody–even Anne Stanton–looked just alike to me and didn’t give a damn. You know what I mean?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Like hell you do,” I said.
“Maybe I do,” she said quietly.
“Not the way I mean. You couldn’t.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, anyway that was the way it was. Everything and everybody looked alike. I didn’t even feel sorry for anybody. I didn’t even feel sorry for myself.”
“I never asked you to feel sorry for me,” she said fiercely. “In the letter or anywhere else.”
“No,” I said slowly, “I don’t reckon you did.”
“I never asked you that.”
“I know,” I said, and fell silent for a moment. Then said: “I came up here to tell you I don’t feel that way any more. I had to tell somebody–I had to say it out loud–to be sure it’s true. But it is true.”
I waited in the silence, which remained unbroken until I began again.
“It’s my mother,” I said. “You know,” I said, “how it always was with us. How we didn’t get along. How I thought that she–”
“Don’t!” Anne burst out. “Don’t! I don’t want to hear you talk that way. What makes you so bitter? What do you talk that way for? Your mother, Jack, and that poor old man your father!”
“He’s not my father,” I said.
“Not your father!”
“No,” I said, and sitting there in the motionless swing on the dark gallery, I told her what there was to tell about the pale-haired and famish-checked girl who had come down from Arkansas, and tried to tell her what my mother had finally given back to me. I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.
I tried to tell her that.
Then, after a long silence, she said, “I believe that, for if I had not come to believe it I could not have lived.”
We did not talk any more. I smoked another half a pack of cigarettes, sitting there in the swing in the dark with the summer air heavy and damp and almost sick-sweet around us, and trying to catch the sound of her breath in the silence. Then after a long time I said good night, and went down the Row to my father’s house.
This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story, too. For I have a story. It is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way. The change did not happen all at once. Many things happened, and that man did not know when he had any responsibility for them and when he did not. There was, in fact, a time when he came to believe that nobody had any responsibility for anything and there was no god but the Great Twitch.
At first that thought was horrible to him when it was forced on him by what seemed the accident of circumstance, for it seemed to rob him of a memory by which, unconsciously, he had lived; but then a little later it gave him a sort of satisfaction, because it meant that he could not be called guilty of anything, not even of having squandered happiness or of having killed his father, or of having delivered his two friends into each other’s hands and death.
But later, much later, he woke up one morning to discover that he did not believe in the Great Twitch any more. He did not believe in it because he had seen too many people live and die. He had seen Lucy Stark and Sugar-Boy and the Scholarly Attorney and Sadie Burke and Anne Stanton live and the ways of their living had nothing to do with the Great Twitch. He had seen his father die. He had seen his friend Adam Stanton die. He had seen his friend Willie Stark die, and he had heard him say his last breath, “It might have been all different, Jack. You got to believe that.”
He had seen his two friends, Willie Stark and Adam Stanton, live and die. Each had killed the other. Each had been the doom of the other. As a student of history, Jack Burden could see that Adam Stanton, whom he came to call the man of idea, and Willie Stark, whom he came to call the man of fact, were doomed to destroy each other, just as each was doomed to try to use the other and to yearn toward and try to become the other, because each was incomplete with the terrible division of their age. But at the same time Jack Burden came to see that his friend had been doomed, he saw that though doomed they had nothing to do with any doom under
the godhead of the Great Twitch. They were doomed, but they lived in the agony of will. As Hugh Miller (once Attorney General under Willie Stark and much later Jack Burden’s friend) said to him when they were discussing the theory of the moral neutrality of history: “History is blind, but man is not.” (It looks as though Hugh will get back into politics, and when he does I’ll be along to hold his coat. I’ve had some valuable experience in that line.)
So now I, Jack Burden, live in my father’s house. In one sense it is strange that I should be here, for the discovery of truth had one time robbed me of the past and had killed my father. But in the end the truth gave the past back to me. So I live in the house which my father left me. With me is my wife, Anne Stanton, and the old man who was once married to my mother. When a few months ago I found him sick in the room above the Mexican restaurant, what could I do but to bring him here? (Does he think that I am his son? I cannot be sure. Nor can I feel that it matters, for each of us is the son of a million fathers.)
He is very feeble. Now and then he has the strength to play a game of chess, as he used to play with his friend Montague Irwin long ago in the long room in the white house by the sea. He used to be a very good chess player, but now his attention wanders. Or on good days now he sits in the sunshine. He can read his Bible a little. He is not strong enough to write any more, but occasionally he dictated something to me or Anne for a tract which is he is writing.
Yesterday he dictated this to me: The creation of man whom God in His foreknowledge knew doomed to sin was the awful index of God’s omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create mere perfection. To do so would, to speak truth, be not creation but extension. Separateness is identity and the only way for God to create, truly create, man was to make him separate from God Himself, and to be separate from God is to be sinful. The creation of evil is therefore the index of God’s glory and His power. That had to be so that the creation of good might be the index of man’s glory and power. But by God’s help. By His help and His wisdom.
He turned to me when he had spoken the last word, stared at me, and then said, “Did you put that down?”