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But her irony was not the sort of thing Tom Stark would hear or understand, for he stood there in the midst of his own gleaming golden private fog of just being Tom Stark, who had played in a football game.
Until the Boss said, "Now you go on and get to bed, Son. Get your sleep, Son. Get ready to pour it on 'em next Saturday." And he laid his arm across the boy's shoulder, and said, "We're all mighty proud of you, boy."
And I said to myself: _If he gets his eyes starry with tears again I am going to puke.__
"Go on to bed, Son," the Boss said.
And Tom Stark said, "Sure," almost out of the side of his mouth, and went out the door.
And I stood there in what was the present.
But there was the past. There was the question. There was the dead kitty buried in the ash heap.
So I stood, later, in the embrasure of as big bay window and looked out as the last light ceased to gleam from the metallic leaves of magnolias and the creamy wash of the sea beyond dulled in the thickened dusk. Behind me was a room not very different from that other long white room giving on the sea–where now, at this moment perhaps, my mother would be lifting to the taffy-haired Young Executive that face which was still like a damned expensive present and which he had damned well better admire. But in the room behind me, scarcely lighted by the stub of a candle on the mounted shelf, the furniture was shrouded in white cloth, and the grandfather's clock in the corner was as severely mute as grandfather. But I knew that when I turned around there would also be, in the midst of the sepulchral sheetings and the out-of-time silence, a woman kneeling before the cols blackness of the wide fireplace to put pine cones and bits of light-wood beneath the logs there. She had said, "No, let me do it. It's my house, you know, and I ought to light the fire when I come back like this. You know, a ritual. I went to. Adam always lets me do it. When we come back."
For the woman was A
I heard the match rasp, and turned from the sea, which was dark now. The flame had caught the fat of the light-wood and was leaping up and spewing little stars like Christmas sparklers, and the light danced warmly on A
So A
But all at once the laughter was gone. It was as though someone had pulled a shade in front of her face. I felt as you do when you pass down a dark street and look up to see a lighted window and in the bright room people talking and singing and laughing with the firelight splashing and undulating over them and the sound of the music drifts out to the street while you watch; and then a hand, you will never know whose hand, pulls down the shade. And there you are, outside.
And there I was, outside.
Maybe I should have done it anyway, put my arm around her. But I didn't. She had looked up at me and had laughed that way. But not for me. Because she was happy to be there again in the room which held the past time–of which I had been a part, indeed, but was no longer a part–and to be kneeling on the hearth with the new heat of the fire laid on her face like a hand.
It had not been meant for me. So I dropped her hand which I had been holding and stepped back and asked, "Was Judge Irwin ever broke–bad broke?"
I asked quick and sharp, for if you ask something quick and sharp out of a clear sky you may get an answer you never would get otherwise. If the person you ask has forgotten the thing, the quick, sharp question may spear it up from the deep mud, and if the person has not forgotten but does not want to tell you, the quick, sharp question may surprise the answer out of him before he thinks.
But it didn't work. Either she didn't know or she wasn't to be surprised out of herself. I ought to have guessed that a person like her–a person who you could tell had a deep i
But she was surprised a little. "What?" she asked.
So I said it again.
She turned her back to me and went to sit on the couch, to light a cigarette and face me again, looking levelly at me. "Why do you want to know?" she asked.
I looked right back at her and said, "I don't want to know. It is a pal wants to know. He is my best pal. He hands it to me on the first of the month."