All the King's Men (38 page)

“Well,” Anne said, looking at me, “you might at least have the grace to tell him why you asked the question.”

“Sure,” I said. And I turned to Adam: “I wanted to find out for Governor Stark.”

“Politics,” he said, and the jaw closed like a trap.

“Yes, politics,” Anne said, smiling a little sourly.

“Well, thank God, I don’t have to mess with ‘em,” Adam said. “Nowadays, anyway.” But he said it almost lightly. Which surprised me. Then added, “What the hell if Stark knows about the Judge being broke. It was more than twenty years ago. And there’s no la against being broke. What the hell.”

“Yeah, what the hell,” Anne said, and looking at me, gave that not unsour smile.

“And what the hell are you doing?” Adam demanded laughing, and grabbed her by the arm and shook her. “Standing there when the grub needs cooking. Get the lead out, Sour-puss, and get going!” He shoved her toward the couch, where the packages were heaped.

She bent to scoop up a lot of packages, and he whacked her across the backsides and said, “Get going!” And laughed. And she laughed, too, with pleasure, and everything was forgotten, for it wasn’t often that Adam opened up and laughed a lot, and then he could be free and gay, and you knew you would have a wonderful time.

We had a wonderful time. While Anne cooked, and I fixed drinks and set the table, Adam snatched the sheet off the piano (they kept the thing in tune out there and it wasn’t a bad one even yet) and beat hell out of it till the house bulged and rocked. He even took three good highballs before dinner instead of one. Then we ate, and he beat on the piano some more, playing stuff like “Roses Are Blooming in Picardy” and “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” while Anne and I danced and cavorted, or he would mush it up and Anne would hum in my ear and we would sway sweet and slow like young poplars in the slightest breeze. Then he jump up from the piano bench and whistling “Beautiful Lady,” snatched her out of my arms and swung her wide in a barrel-house waltz while she leaned back on his arm with her head back and eyes closed for a swoon, and with right arm outstretched, held delicately the hem of her fluttering skirt.

But Adam was a good dancer, even clowning. It was because he was a natural, for he ever got any practice any more. And never had taken his share. Not of anything except work. And he could have had them crawling to him and asking for it. And once in about five years he would break out in a kind of wild, free, exuberant gaiety like a levee break streaming out to snatch the trees and brush up by the roots, and you would be the trees and brush. You and everybody around him. His eyes would gleam wild and he would gesture wide with an excess of energy bursting from deep inside. You would think of a great turbine or dynamo making a million revs a minute and boiling out the power and about to jump loose from its moorings. When he gestured with those strong, long, supple white hands, it was a mixture of Svengali and an atom-busting machine. You expected to see blue sparks. When he got like that they wouldn’t have had the strength to crawl to him and ask for it. They would just be ready to fall back and roll over where they were. Only it didn’t do them any good.

But that didn’t come often. And didn’t last long. The cold would settle down and the lid would go on right quick.

Adam didn’t have the power on that night. He was just ready to smile and laugh and joke and beat the piano and swing his sister in the barrel-house waltz while the fire leaped on the big hearth and the high face gazed down from the massy gold frame and the wind moved in off the sea and in the dark outside clashed the magnolia leaves.

Not that in that room, with the fire crackling and the music, we heard the tiny clashing of the magnolia leaves the wind made. I heard it later, in bed upstairs in the dark, through the open window, the tiny dry clashing of the leaves, and thought,
Were we happy tonight because we were happy or because once, a long time back, we had been happy? Was our happiness tonight like the light of the moon, which does not come from the moon, for the moon is cold and has no light of its own, but is reflected light from far away?
_I turned that notion around in my head and tried to make a nice tidy little metaphor out of it, but the metaphor wouldn’t work out, for you have to be the cold, dead, wandering moon, and you have to have been the sum, too, way back, and how the hell can you be both the sun and the moon? It was not consistent. It was not tidy.
To hell with it
_, I though, listening to the leaves.

Then thought,
Well, anyway, I know now Irwin was broke
_.

I had dug that much up out of the past, and tomorrow I would leave Burden’s Landing and the past, and go back to the present. So I went back to the present.

Which was: Tiny Duffy sitting in a great soft leather chair with his great soft hams flowing over the leather, and his great soft belly flowing over his great soft hams, and a long cigarette holder with a burning cigarette stuck jauntily out from one side of his face (the cigarette holder was a recent innovation, imitated from a gentleman who was the most prominent member of the political party to which Tiny Duffy gave his allegiance) and his great soft face flowing down over his collar, an a diamond ring on his finger, big as a walnut–for all of that was Tiny Duffy, who was not credible but true and who had obviously consulted the cartoons by
Harper’s Weekly
_ in the files of the ‘nineties to discover exactly what the successful politician should be, do, and wear.

Which was: Tiny Duffy saying, “Jesus, and the Boss gonna put six million bucks in a hospital–six million bucks.” And lying back in the chair, eyes dreamily on the coffered ceiling, head wreathed in the baby-blue smoke from the cigarette, murmuring dreamily, “Six million bucks.”

And Sadie Burke saying, “Yeah, six million bucks, and he ain’t planning for you to get your fingers on a penny of it.”

“I could fix it up for him in the Fourth District. MacMurfee still got it sewed up down there. Him and Gummy Larson. But throw that hospital contract to Gummy and–”

“And Gummy would sell out MacMurfee. Is that it?”

“Well, now–I wouldn’t put it that way. Gummy’d sort of talk reason into MacMurfee, you might say.”

“And would sort of slip you a slice. Is that it, Tiny?”

“I ain’t talking about me. I’m talking about Gummy. He’d handle MacMurfee for the Boss.”

“The Boss don’t need anybody to handle MacMurfee. He’ll handle MacMurfee when the time comes and it will be permanent. For God’s sake, Tiny, you known the Boss as long as you have and you still don’t know him. Don’t you know he’d rather bust a man than buy him? Wouldn’t he, Jack?”

“How do I know?” I said. But I did know.

At least, I knew that the Boss was out to bust a man named Judge Irwin. And I was elected to do the digging.

So I went back to the digging.

But the next day, before I got back at the digging, a call came from Anne Stanton, “Smarty,” she said, smarty, you thought you were so smart!”

I heard he laughing, way off somewhere at the end of the line, but the tingling came over the wire, and I thought of her face laughing.

“Yes, smarty! you found from Adam how Judge Irwin was broke a long time ago, but I’ve found out something too!”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah, smarty! I went to see old Cousin Mathilde, who knows everything about everybody for a hundred years back. I just got to talking about Judge Irwin and she began to talk. You just mention something and it is like putting a nickel in a music box. Yes, Judge Irwin was broke, or near it, then, but–and the joke’s on you, Jackie-boy, it’s on you, smarty-boy! And on your Boss!” And there was the laughter again, coming from far away, coming out of the little black tube in my hand.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Then he got married!” she said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Who are we talking about, smarty? Judge Irwin got married.”

“Sure, he was married. Everybody knew he was married, but what the hell has that–”

“He married money. Cousin Mathilde says so, and she knows everything. He was broke but he married money. Now, smarty, put that on your pipe and smoke it!”

“Thanks,” I said. But before it was out of my mouth, I heard a clicking sound and she had hung up.

I lighted a cigarette and leaned back in the swivel chair, and swung my feet up to the desk. Sure, everybody knew, or had known, that Judge Irwin was married. Judge Irwin, in fact, had been married twice. The first woman, the woman he was married to when I was a little boy, had been thrown from a horse and couldn’t do more than lie up in bed and stare at the ceiling or, on her good days, out the window. But she had died when I was just a kid, and I scarcely remembered her. But you almost forgot the other wife, too. She was from far away–I tried to remember how she looked. I had seen her several times, all right. But a kid of fifteen or so doesn’t pay much attention to a grown woman. I called up an image of a dark, thin woman, with big dark eyes, wearing a long white dress and carrying a white parasol. Maybe it wasn’t the right image, at all. Maybe it was somebody else who had been married to Judge Irwin, and had come to Burden’s Landing, and had received all the curious, smiling ladies in Judge Irwin’s long white house, and had been aware of the eyes and the sudden silence for attention and then the new sibilance as she walked down the aisle in St. Matthew’s just before the services began, and had fallen sick and had lived with a Negro nurse in an upstairs room for so long that people forgot about her very existence and were surprised when the funeral came to remind them of the fact that she had existed. But after the funeral there was nothing to remind them, for the body had gone back to whatever place it was she came from, and not even a chiseled name was left in the Irwin plot in St. Matthew’s graveyard, under the oaks and the sad poetic festoons of Spanish moss, which were garlanded on the boughs as though to prepare for the festivities of ghosts.

The Judge had had bad luck with his wives, and people felt sorry for him. Both of them sickly for a long time and then had died on his hands. He got a lot of sympathy for that.

But this second wife, I was told, was rich. That explained why the face I called up was not pretty–not the kind of face you would expect to find on Judge Irwin’s wife–but a sallowish, thin face, not even young, with only the big dark eyes to recommend it.

So she had been rich, and that disposed of my notion that back in 1913 or 1914 the Judge had been broke and had stepped over the line. And that made Anne Stanton Happy. Happy because now Adam hadn’t played, even unwittingly, stool pigeon to the Boss. Well, if it made her happy, it made me happy too, I reckoned. And maybe she was happy to think, too, that Judge Irwin was innocent. Well, that would have made me happy too. All I was doing was trying to prove Judge Irwin innocent. I would be able, sooner or later, to go to the Boss and say, “No sale, Boss. He is washed in the Blood.”

“The son-of-a-bitch is washed in whitewash,” the Boss would say. But he’d have to take my word. For he knew I was thorough. I was a very thorough and well-trained research student. And truth was what I sought, without fear or favor. And let the chips fly.

Anyway, I could cross 1913 off the ticket. Anne Stanton had settled that.

Or has she?

When you are looking for the lost will in the old mansion, you tap, inch by inch, along the beautiful mahogany wainscoting, or along the massive stonework of the cellarage, and listen for the hollow sound. Then upon hearing it, you seek the secret button or insert the crowbar. I had tapped and had heard something hollow. Judge Irwin had been broke. “But, oh, no,” Anne Stanton had said, “there is no secret hiding place there, that’s just where the dumb-waiter goes.”

But I tapped again. Just to listen to that hollow sound, even if it was just the place where the dumb-waiter went.

I asked myself: If a man needs money, where does he get it? And the answer is easy: He borrows it. And if he borrows it, he has to give security. What would Judge Irwin have given as security? Most likely his house in Burden’s Landing or his plantation up the river.

If it was big dough he needed, it would be the plantation. So I got in my car and headed up the river for Mortonville, which is the county seat of La Salle County, a big chunk of which is the old Irwin plantation where the cotton grows white as whipped cream and the happy darkies sing all day, like Al Jolson.

In the courthouse at Mortonville, I got hold of the abstract on the Irwin place. There it was, from the eighteenth-century Spanish grant to the present moment. And in 1907, there was the entry:
Mortgage, Montague Irwin to Mortonville Mercantile Bank, $42,000, due January 1, 1910
_. Late in January, 1910, a chunk had been paid, about $12,000 and the mortgage redrawn. By the middle of 1912, interest payments were being passed. In March, 1914, foreclosure proceedings had been instituted. But the Judge had been saved by the bell. In early May there was an entry for the satisfaction of the mortgage in full. No further entries were on the abstract.

I had tapped again, and there was the hollow sound. When a man is broke there is always a hollow sound, like the tomb.

But he had married a rich wife.

But was she rich?

I had only the word of old Cousin Mathilde for that. And the evidence of Mrs. Irwin’s sallow face. I decided to put in the crowbar.

I would check the date of marriage with the dates on the abstract. That might tell something. But whatever that said, I would put in the crowbar.

I knew nothing about Mrs. Irwin, not the date of her marriage, not even her name or where she came from. But that was easy. An hour in the newspaper files of the public library back in the city, looking at the society pages, which after more than twenty years were yellow and crumbling and somewhat less than gay or grand and I came out again into the light of day with my collar wilted and my hands begrimed but with the words scribbled on the back of an envelope in my inside coat pocket:
Mabel Carruthers, only child of Le Moyne Carruthers, Savannah, Georgia. Married, January 12, 1914.
_