Then I thought how maybe I had lied just to cover up myself.
"Damn it," I said out loud, savagely, "it wasn't for me, it wasn't."
And that was true. It was really true.
I had given my mother a present, which was a lie. But in return she had given me a present, too, which was truth. She gave me a new picture of herself, and that meant, in the end, a new picture of the world. Or rather, the new picture of herself filled in the blank space which was perhaps the center of the new picture of the world which had been given to me by many people, by Sadie Burke, Lucy Stark, Willie Stark, Sugar-Boy, Adam Stanton. And that meant that my mother gave me back the past. I could now accept the past which I had before felt was tainted and horrible. I could accept the past now because I could accept her and be at peace with her and with myself.
For years I had condemned her as a woman without heart, who loved merely power over men and the momentary satisfaction to vanity or flesh which they could give her, who lived in a strange loveless oscillation between calculation and instinct. And my mother, realizing a condemnation of her, but without, perhaps, realizing its nature, had done everything she could to hold me and to throttle the condemnation. What she could do to me was to use the force which she was able to use on other men. I resisted and resented this but I wanted to be loved by her and at the same time I was drawn by the force, for she was a vital and beautiful woman by whom I was drawn and by whom I was repelled, whom I condemned and of whom I was proud. But the change came.
The first hint was in the wild, silvery scream which filled the house when the word of Judge Irwin's death was received. That scream rang in my ears for many months, but it had faded away, lost in the past and the corruption of the past, by the time she called me back to Burden's Landing to tell me that she was going to go away. Then I knew that she was telling the truth. And I felt at peace with her and with myself.
I did not say why to myself at the moment when she told me or even the next day when we stood on the cement platform and waited for the train, or even when I stood there alone and watched the last smudge of smoke fade to the west. Not did I say why to myself when I sat alone that night in the house which had been Judge Irwin's house but which was now mine. I had closed up my mother's house that afternoon, had put the key under the mat on the gallery, and had left it for good.
Judge Irwin's house had the odor of dust and disuse and close air. In the afternoon I opened all the windows and left them open while I went down to the Landing for some supper. When I got back and turned the lights on, it seemed more like the house which I remembered from all the years. But sitting there in the study, with the damp, sweet-heavy night air coming in through the windows, I did not say to myself why I now felt so fully at peace with myself. I thought of my mother and I felt the peace and the relief and the new sense of the world.
After a while I got up and walked out of the house and down the Row. It was a very calm, clear night with scarcely a sibilance from the water on the shingle of the beach, and the bay was bright under the stars. I walked down the Row until I came to the Stanton house. There was a light on in the little back sitting room, a dim light as though from a reading lamp. I looked at the house for a couple of minutes and then entered the gate and walked up the path.
The screen door of the gallery was latched. But the main door of the hall inside the gallery was open, and looking across the gallery I could see down the hall to the place where a rectangle of light was laid on the floor from the open door of the back sitting room. I knocked on the frame of the screen door and waited.
In a moment Anne Stanton appeared in the patch of light down the hall.
"Who is it?" she called "It's me," I called back.
She came down the hall and across the gallery toward me. Then she was at the door, a thin, white-clad figure in the dimness beyond the screen. I started to say hello, but didn't. And she did not speak, either, as she fumbled with the latch. Then the door was open and I stepped inside.
As I stood there, I caught the trace of the scent she used, and a cold hand compressed my heart.
"I didn't know you'd let me in," I said, trying to make it sound like a joke and trying to see her face in the shadow. I could only see the paleness in shadow and the gleam of her eyes.
"Of course I'd let you in," she said.
"Well, I didn't know," I said, and gave a kind of laugh.
"Why?"
"Oh, the way I've behaved."
We moved over to the swing on the gallery and sat down. The chains creaked, but we sat so still that the thing did not sway a hair's breadth.
"What have you done?" she asked I fished for a cigarette, found one, and lighted it. I flicked the match out without looking at her face. "What have I done?" I repeated. "Well, it's what I didn't do. I didn't answer your letter."
"That's all right," she said. Then added reflectively, as though to herself, "That was a long time ago."
"It was a long time back, six months, seven months. But I did worse than not answering it," I said. "I didn't even read it. I just set it up on my bureau and never even opened it."
She didn't say anything to that. I took a few drags on the cigarette and waited but there wasn't a word.
"It came at the wrong time," I said finally. "It came at a time when everything and everybody–even Anne Stanton–looked just alike to me and didn't give a damn. You know what I mean?"
"Yes," she said.
"Like hell you do," I said.
"Maybe I do," she said quietly.
"Not the way I mean. You couldn't."
"Maybe."
"Well, anyway that was the way it was. Everything and everybody looked alike. I didn't even feel sorry for anybody. I didn't even feel sorry for myself."
"I never asked you to feel sorry for me," she said fiercely. "In the letter or anywhere else."
"No," I said slowly, "I don't reckon you did."
"I never asked you that."
"I know," I said, and fell silent for a moment. Then said: "I came up here to tell you I don't feel that way any more. I had to tell somebody–I had to say it out loud–to be sure it's true. But it is true."
I waited in the silence, which remained unbroken until I began again.
"It's my mother," I said. "You know," I said, "how it always was with us. How we didn't get along. How I thought that she–"
"Don't!" Anne burst out. "Don't! I don't want to hear you talk that way. What makes you so bitter? What do you talk that way for? Your mother, Jack, and that poor old man your father!"
"He's not my father," I said.
"Not your father!"
"No," I said, and sitting there in the motionless swing on the dark gallery, I told her what there was to tell about the pale-haired and famish-checked girl who had come down from Arkansas, and tried to tell her what my mother had finally given back to me. I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.
I tried to tell her that.
Then, after a long silence, she said, "I believe that, for if I had not come to believe it I could not have lived."
We did not talk any more. I smoked another half a pack of cigarettes, sitting there in the swing in the dark with the summer air heavy and damp and almost sick-sweet around us, and trying to catch the sound of her breath in the silence. Then after a long time I said good night, and went down the Row to my father's house.
This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story, too. For I have a story. It is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way. The change did not happen all at once. Many things happened, and that man did not know when he had any responsibility for them and when he did not. There was, in fact, a time when he came to believe that nobody had any responsibility for anything and there was no god but the Great Twitch.