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."