"Oh, yes," she said, apparently not reading my mind. "I got a lawyer to see her and fix everything. I gave her some money, too. The poor girl wanted to go to California and get away. Willie didn't have much money–he spent almost everything he made–but I gave her what I could. I gave her six thousand dollars."
So Sibyl had made a good thing out of it after all, I reflected.
"Don't you want to hold him?" Lucy asked me in an excess of generosity, thrusting out the expensive baby in my direction.
"Sure," I said, and took him. I hefted him, while I carefully tried to keep him from falling apart. "How much does he weigh?" I asked, and suddenly realized that I had the tone of a man about to buy something.
"Fifteen pounds and three ounces," she answered promptly; and added, "that is very good for three months."
"Sure," I said, "that's a lot."
She relieved me of the baby, gave him a sort of quick snuggle to her bosom, bending her head down so her face was against the baby's head, and then replaced him in the crib.
"What's his name?" I asked.
She straightened up and came around to my side of the crib. "At first," she said, "I thought I'd name him for Tom. I thought that for quite a while. Then it came to me. I would name him for Willie. His name is Willie–Willie Stark."
She led the way out into the little hall again. We walked up toward the table where my hat lay. Then she turned around and scrutinized my face as though the light weren't very good in the hall.
"You know," she said, "I named him for Willie because–"
She was still scrutinizing my face.
"–because," she continued, "because Willie was a great man."
I nodded, I suppose.
"Oh, I know he made mistakes," she said, and lifted up her chin as though facing something, "bad mistakes. Maybe he did bad things, like they say. But inside–in here, deep down–" and she laid her hand to her bosom–"he was a great man."
She wasn't bothering with my face any more, with trying to read it. For the moment, she wasn't bothering with me. I might as well not have been there.
"He was a great man," she affirmed again, in a voice nearly a whisper. Then she looked again at me, calmly. "You see, Jack," she said, "I have to believe that."
Yes, Lucy, you have to believe that. You have to believe that to live. I know that you must believe that. And I would not have you believe otherwise. It must be that way, and I understand the fact. For you see, Lucy. I must believe that, too. I must believe that Willie Stark was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn't anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must believe that.
Because I came to believe that, I came back to Burden's Landing. I did not come to believe it at the moment when I watched Sugar-Boy mount the stairs from the basement hall of the public library or when Lucy Stark stood before me in the hall of the little paint-peeling white house in the country. But because of those things–and of all the other things which had happened–I came, in the end, to believe that. And believing that Willie Stark was a great man, I could think better of all other people, and of myself. At the same time that I could more surely condemn myself.
I came back to Burden's Landing in early summer, at the request of my mother. She telephoned me one night and said, "Son, I want you to come here. As soon as you can. Can you come tomorrow?"
When I asked her what she wanted, for I still did not want to go back, she refused to answer me directly. She said she would tell me when I came.
So I went.
She was waiting for me on the gallery when I drove up late the next afternoon. We went around to the screened side gallery and had a drink. She wasn't talking much, and I didn't rush her.
When by near seven o'clock the Young Executive hadn't turned up, I asked her was he coming to dinner.
She shook her head. "Where is he?" I asked.
She turned her empty glass in her hand, lightly clinking the ice left there. Then she said, "I don't know."
"On a trip?" I asked.
"Yes," she answered, clinking the ice. Then she turned to me. "He has been gone five days," she said. "He won't come back until I have gone. You see–" she set the glass down on the table beside her with an air of finality–"I am leaving him."
"Well," I breathed, "I'm damned."
She continued to look at me, as though expecting something. What, I didn't know.
"Well, I'm damned," I said, still fumbling with the fact which she had presented to me.
"Are you surprised?" she asked me, leaning a little toward me in her chair.
"Sure, I'm surprised."
She examined me intently, and I could detect a curious shifting and shading of feelings on her face, too evanescent and ambiguous for definition.
"Sure, I'm surprised," I repeated.
"Oh," she said, and sank back in her chair, sinking back like somebody who has fallen into deep water and clutches for a rope and seizes it and hangs on a moment and lose the grip and tries again and doesn't make it and knows it's no use to try again. There wasn't anything ambiguous now about her face. It was like what I said. She had missed her grip.
She turned her face away from me, out toward the bay, as though she didn't want me to see what was on it. Then she said, "I thought–I thought maybe you wouldn't be surprised."
I couldn't tell her why I or anybody else would be surprised. I couldn't tell her that when a woman as old as she was getting to be had her hooks in a man not much more than forty years old and not wind-broke it was surprising if she didn't hang on. Even if the woman had money and the man was as big a horse's-ass as the Young Executive. I couldn't tell her that, and so I didn't say anything.
She kept on looking out to the bay. "I thought," she said, hesitated, and resumed, "I thought maybe you'd understand why, Jack."
"Well, I don't," I replied.
She held off awhile, then began again. "It happened last year. I knew when it happened.–Oh, I knew it would be like this."
"When what happened?"
"When you–when you–" Then she stopped, and corrected what she had been about to say. "When Monty–died."
And she sung back toward me and on her face was a kind of wild appeal. She was making another grab for that rope. "Oh, Jack," she said, "Jack, it was Monty–don't you see?–it was Monty."
I reckoned that I saw, and I said so. I remembered the silvery, pure scream which had jerked me out into the hall that afternoon of Judge Irwin's death, and the face of my mother as she lay on the bed later with the knowledge sinking into her.
"It was Monty," she was saying. "It was always Monty. I didn't really know it. There hadn't been–been anything between us for a long time. But it was always Monty. I knew it when he was dead. I didn't want to know it but I knew it. And I couldn't go on. There came a time I couldn't go on. I couldn't."
She rose abruptly from her chair, like something jerked up by a string.
"I couldn't," she said. "Because everything was a mess. Everything has always been a mess." Her hands twisted and tore the handkerchief she held before her at the level of her waist. "Oh, Jack," she cried out, "it had always been a mess."
She flung down the shredded handkerchief and ran off the gallery. I heard the sound of her heels on the floor inside, but it wasn't the old bright, spirited tattoo. It was a kind of desperate, slovenly clatter, suddenly muted on the rug.
I waited on the gallery for a while. Then I went back to the kitchen. "My mother isn't feeling very well," I told the cook. "You or Jo-Belle might go up a little later and see if she will take some broth and egg or something like that."