I rode with him back to the Mansion. He hadn't said a word when I joined him at the car. Sugar-Boy worked through the back streets, while behind us we could still hear the roaring and shouting and the protracted blatting of automobile horns. Then Sugar-Boy shook himself free into a quiet little street where the houses sat back from the pavement, lights on inside them now and people in the lighted rooms, and where the budding boughs interlaced above us. At the corners where the street lamps were you could catch the hint of actual green on the boughs. Sugar-Boy drove up to the rear entrance of the Mansion. The Boss got out and went into the door. I followed him. He walked down the back hall, where we met nobody, and then into the big hall. He paced right across the hall, under the chandeliers and mirrors, past the sweep of the stairway, looked into the drawing room, crossed the hall again to look into the back sitting room, then again to look into the library. I caught on, and quit following him. I just stood in the middle of the big hall and waited. He hadn't said he wanted me, but he hadn't said he didn't. In fact he hadn't said anything. Not a word.
When he turned from the library into the hall again, a white-coated Negro boy came out of the dining room. "Boy," the Boss asked, "you seen Mrs. Stark?"
"Yassuh."
"Where, dammit?" the Boss snapped. "You think I'm asking for my health?"
"Naw, suh, I didn't think nuthin, I–"
"Where?" the Boss demanded in a tone to set the chandelier tingling.
After the first paralysis, the lips began to work in the black face. In the beginning without effect. Then a sound was detectable. "Upstairs–she done gone upstairs–I reckin she done gone to bed–she–"
The Boss had headed up the stairs.
He came back almost immediately, walked past me without a word, and back to the library. I trailed along. He flung himself down on the big leather couch, heaved his feet off the floor to the leather, and said, "Shut the God-damned door."
I shut the door, he leaned back on the cushions, at about a thirty-degree angle from horizontal, and glumly studied his knuckles. "You would have thought she might wait up for me tonight," he said finally, still studying the knuckles. Then, looking at me, "She's gone to bed. Gone to bed and locked her door. Said she had a headache. I go upstairs and there id Tom sitting in the room across from her room doing his schoolwork. Before I lay hand to the knob of her door, he comes out and says, 'She don't want to be bothered.' Like I was a delivery boy. 'I'm not going to bother her,' I said to him, 'I'm just going to tell her what happened.' He looked at me and said, 'She's got a headache, and she don't want to be bothered.' " He hesitated, looked at the knuckles again, then back to me, and said with a hint of defensiveness in his tone, "All I was going to do was tell her how it came out tonight."
"She wanted you to throw Byram to the wolves," I said. "Did she want you to throw yourself to the wolves?"
"I don't know what the hell she wants," he said. "I don't know what the hell any of 'em want. A man can't tell. But you can tell this, if any man tried to run things the way they want him to half the time, he'd end up sleeping on the bare ground. And how would she like that?"
"I imagine Lucy could take it," I said.
"Lucy–" he said, and looked sort of surprised, as though I had introduced a new topic in the conversation. Then I recollected that Lucy's name hadn't been mentioned. Sure, he had been talking about Lucy Stark, he knew that and I knew that. But as soon as the name _Lucy__ was mentioned, to take the place of that _she__, somehow it was different. It was as though she had walked into the room, and looked at us.
"Lucy–" he repeated. Then, "All right–Lucy. She could take it. Lucy could sleep on the bare ground, and eat red beans, but it wouldn't change the world a damned bit. But can Lucy understand that? No, Lucy cannot." He was, apparently,, taking a relish in using the name now, in saying _Lucy__ instead of _She__, as though he proved something about something, or about her, or about himself, by saying it, by being able to say it. "Lucy," he was saying, "she could sleep on the bare ground. And that's exactly what she's going to raise Tom to do, too, if she has her way. She'd have him so the six-year kids will be plugging him with nigger-shooters, and then no bothering to run. He's a good stout boy–plays a good game of football, bet he makes the team when he gets to college–but she's going to ruin him. Make him a sissy. Looks like I say a word to the boy and you can just see her face freeze. I called up here tonight to get Tom to come down and see the crowd. Was going to send Sugar-Boy to get him because I wasn't going to have time to get home. But would she let him go? No, sir. Said he had to stay home and study. Study," he said. Then, "Didn't want him down there, that was it. Me and the crowd."
"Take it easy," I said. "That's the way all women treat their kids. Besides, you got to be a big-shot by hitting your books."
"He's smart, smart enough without being a sissy," he said. "He makes good grades in school, and, by God, he better. Sure, I want him to study. And he better, but what I don't get is–"
There was a racket out in the hall, voice, then a knock at the door.
"See who it is," the Boss said.
I opened the door and in stormed the familiar faces, somewhat flushed, Tiny Duffy's in the lead. They ringed round the Boss and wheezed and shoved and chortled. "We fixed 'em!–We damned well fixed 'em!–You're telling it, we stopped that clock!–It'll be a long time till next time!" While the Boss lay back on the cushions at his thirty-degree angle, with his feet propped on the leather, and his eyes flickering around from face to face, under the half-lowered lids, you got the notion he was spying through a peephole. He hadn't said a word.
"Champagne," one of the boys was saying, "real champagne! A case and it is honest-to-God stuff. French, from France. Out in the kitchen, and Sambo is icing up. Boss, it's a celebration!"
The Boss didn't say anything.
"Celebrate, it's a celebration, ain't you gonna celebrate, Boss?"
"Duffy," the Boss said, not loud, "if you aren't too drunk you can see I don't want this assing around here. Take your rabble over to the other side of the house and stay out from under foot." Then in the silence of his pause his eyes flickered over the faces again, to come back to Duffy. To whom he said, "You think you grasp the idea?"
Tiny Duffy did grasp the idea. But the others grasped it, too, and I thought that I detected a slight competition among the brothers of the lodge to be among the first out.
The Boss regarded the fine paneling of the closed door for a couple of minutes. Then he said, "You know what Lincoln said?"
"What," I asked.
"He said a house divided against itself cannot stand. Well, he was wrong."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah," the Boss said, "for this government is sure half slave and half son-of-a-bitch, and it is standing."
"Which is which?" I asked.
"Slaves down at the Legislature, and the sons-of-bitches up here," he said. And added, "Only sometimes they overlap."
But Lucy Stark did not leave the Boss after the settlement of the impeachment trouble. Not even after the next election, when the Boss came in for a second term in 1934. (A Governor can succeed himself in our state, and the Boss succeeded himself with a vengeance. There never had been a vote like it.) I suppose Tom was the reason she hung on. When she did leave him, there wasn't any noise. Health. She went to Florida for a long pull. When she got back, she stayed out of town at a little place her sister had, a poultry farm and hatchery just out of town. Tom used to spend a lot of his time out with her, but I imagined that by that time she figured he wasn't Mamma's Boy any more. By that time he was a strapping fellow, cocky and fast on his feet, a natural-born quarterback, and he had discovered that something besides pasteurized milk came in bottles and that approximately half the human race belonged to a sex interestingly different from his own. Lucy probably figured that she could do something to hold Tom down, and so there wasn't any absolute break with Willie. Now and then, but not often, she would appear in public with him. For instance, on that trip up to Mason City–the time the Boss and I made the midnight visit on Judge Irwin–Lucy came along. That was in 1936, and by that time Lucy had been staying out at her sister's poultry farm for going on a year.