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"Yeah," I said, "you don't care, but you forget one thing. You forget that Adam will be sitting right there looking at little sister."
Her face was white as a sheet.
The she lowered her head a little and was looking at her hands, which were clenched together now around the empty Coca Cola glass. Her head was low enough so that I could not see her eyes, only the lids coming down over them.
"My dear, my dear," I murmured. Then as I seized her hands pressed around the glass, the words wrenched out of me, "Oh, A
It was the one question I had never meant to ask.
For a moment she did not answer. Then, without raising her eyes, she said in a low voice, "He wasn't like anybody else. Not anybody else I'd ever known. And I love him. I love him, I guess. I guess that is the reason."
I sat there and reckoned I had asked for that one.
She said, "Then you told me–you told me about my father. There wasn't any reason why not then. After you told me."
I reckoned I had asked for that one, too.
She said, "He wants to marry me."
"Are you going to?"
"Not now. It would hurt him. A divorce would hurt him. Not now."
"Are you going to?"
"Perhaps. Later. After he goes to the Senate. Next year."
One part of my mind was busy ticketing that away: _The Senate next year. That means he won't let old Scoggan go back. Fu
"You don't know him," she said, her voice even lower than before. "You've known him all these years and you don't know him at all." Then she had lifted her head and was looking straight into my eyes. "I'm not sorry," she said, quite distinctly. "Not for anything that's happened."
I walked down the street in the hot darkness toward my hotel under a magnificent throbbing sky, breathing the old gasoline fumes the day had left and the sweet, marshy smell of the river at low water which the night brought up into the streets, and thinking, yes, I knew why she had done it.
The answer was in all the years before, and the things in them and not in them.
The answer was in me, for I had told her.
_I only told her the truth__, I said savagely to myself, _and she can't blame me for the truth!__
But was there some fatal appropriateness inherent in the very nature of the world and of me that I should be the one to tell her the truth? I had to ask myself that question, too. And I couldn't be sure of the answer. So I walked on down the street, turning that question over and over in my mind without any answer until the question lost meaning and dropped from my mind as something heavy drops from numb fingers. I would have faced the responsibility and the guilt, I was ready to do that, if I could know. But who is going to tell you?
So I walked on, and after a while I remembered how she had said I had never known him. And the _him__ was Willie Stark, whom I had known for the many years since Cousin Willie from the country, the Boy with the Christmas Tie, had walked into the back room of Slade's old place. Sure, I knew him. Like a book. I had known him a long time.
_Too long__, I thought then, _too long to know him__. For maybe the time had blinded me, or rather I had not been aware of the passing of time and always the round face of Cousin Willie had come between me and the other face so that I had never really seen the other face. Except perhaps in those moments when it had leaned forward to the crowds and the forelock had fallen and the eyes had bulged, and the crowd had roared and I had felt the surge in me and had felt that I was on the verge of the truth. But always the face of Cousin Willie above the Christmas tie had come again.
But it did not come now. I saw the face. Enormous. Bigger than a billboard. The forelock shagged down like a mane. The big jaw. The heavy lips laid together like masonry. The eyes burning and bulging powerfully.
Fu
That night I telephoned the Boss, told him what had happened and how A
I worked it. It was a hard little job I had cut out for me. First, I had to enlist Adam on the side of righteousness by getting him to agree to swear out a warrant for Coffee. My method was to assume, of course, that he was aching for the opportunity to nail Coffee, and to indicate that the Boss was cheering on the glorious exploit. Then I had to lead him to the discovery, which had to be all his own, that this would involve A
Just as we were ready to walk out of the apartment, he stepped to the mantelpiece and picked up the stamped letters waiting there to be mailed. I had spotted the top envelope already, the one address to the Boss. So as he turned around with the letters in his hand, I simply lifted that one out of his grasp, said with my best smile, "Hell, you haven't got any use for this in the daylight," and tore it across and put the pieces into my pocket.
Then we went out back and got into his car. I rode with him all the way to his office. I would have sat with him all day to keep an eye on him if it had been possible. Anyway, I chatted briskly all the way down-town to keep his mind clear. My chatter was as gay and sprightly as bird song.
So the summer moved on, swelling slowly like a great fruit, and everything was as it had been before. I went to my office. I went back to my hotel and sometimes ate a meal and sometimes did not and lay under the fan and read till late. I saw the same faces, Duffy, the Boss, Sadie Burke, all the faces I had known for a long time and saw so often I didn't notice the changes in them. But I did not see Adam and A
Yes, those pictures were an asset to the Boss. Half the people in the state knew that the Boss had been tom-catting around for years, but he pictures of the family and the white leghorns gave the voters a nice warm glow, it made them feel solid, substantial, and virtuous, it made them think of gingerbread and nice cold buttermilk, and if somewhere not too far in the wings there was a flicker of a black-lace negligee and a whiff of musky perfume, then, "Well, you can't blame him a-taken hit, they put hit up to him." It only meant that the Boss was having it both ways, and that seemed a mark of the chosen and superior. It was what the voter did when he shook loose and came up to town to the furniture dealers' convention and gave the bellhop a couple of bucks to get him a girl up to the room. Or if he wasn't doing it classy, he rode into town with his truckload of hogs and for two bucks got the whole works down at a crib. But either way, classy or crib, the voter knew what it meant, and he wanted both Mom's gingerbread and the black-lace negligee and didn't hold it against the Boss for having both. What he would have held against the Boss was a divorce. A