I ate a sandwich and had a cup of coffee. I was pouring myself a second cup, when the Boss reached to set his cup down, sloshingly, on the little table beside him.
"Lucy," he said, "Lucy!"
"Yes," she answered.
"You know–you know what I'm going to do?" He leaned forward, not waiting for an answer. "I'm going to name the new hospital for him. For Tom. I'm going to call it the Tom Stark Hospital and Medical Center. It'll be named for Tom, it'll–"
She was slowly shaking her head, and his words stopped "Thos things don't matter," she said. "Oh, Willie, don't you see? Those things don't matter. Having somebody's name cut on a piece of stone. Getting it in the paper. All those things. Oh, Willie, he was my baby boy, he was our baby boy, and those things don't matter, they don't ever matter, don't you see?"
He sank back into his chair, and the silence picked up where it had left off. The silence was still going full blast when I got back from taking the dishes and uneaten food down to the desk. It gave me an excuse for getting out. It was twenty minutes to six when I got back At six o'clock Adam came in. He was pretty gray and stony in the face. The Boss got to his feet and stood there looking at Adam, but neither he not Lucy uttered a sound.
Then Adam said, "He will live."
"Thank God," Lucy breathed, but the Boss still stared into Adam's face.
Adam stared back. Then he said, "The cord was crushed."
I heard a gasp from Lucy, and looked over to see her with her head bowed on her breast.
The Boss didn't show a sign for a moment. Then he lifted his hands, chest-high, with the fingers spread as though to seize on something. "No!" he declared. "No!"
"It was crushed," Adam said. And added, "I am sorry, Governor."
Then he left the room.
The Boss stared at the closed door, then slowly sank back into the chair. He kept on staring at the door, his eyes bulging and the moisture gathering in drops on his forehead. The he jerked upright and the sound wrenched out of him. It was a formless, agonized sound torn raw right out of the black animal depths inside of the bulk there in the chair. "Oh!" he said. Then, "Oh!"
Lucy Stark was looking across at him. He was still staring at the door.
Then the sound came again: "Oh!"
She rose from her chair and went across to him. She didn't say anything. She simply stood by his chair and laid a hand on his shoulder.
The sound came again, but it was the last time. He sank back, still staring at the door, and breathed heavily. It must have been like that for three or four minutes. Then Lucy said, "Willie."
He looked up at her for the first time.
"Willie," she said, "it's time to go."
He stood up from the chair, and I got their coats off the couch by the wall. I helped Lucy on with hers, and then she picked up the other and helped him. I didn't interfere.
They started for the door. He had drawn himself erect now and looked straight ahead, but her hand was still on his arm, and if you had seen them you would have got the impression that she was expertly and tactfully guiding a blind man. I opened the door for them, and then went on ahead to tell Sugar-Boy to get the car ready.
I was there when the Boss got into the car and she got in after him. That surprised me a little, but it didn't hurt my feelings if Sugar-Boy drove her home. Despite the coffee, I was ready to drop.
I went back inside and up to Adam's office. He was just about ready to pull out. "What is the story?" I asked.
"What I said," he said. "The cord is crushed. That means paralysis. The prognosis is that for a time the limbs will be absolutely limp. Then the muscle tone will come back. But he will never use arms or legs. The bodily function will continue but without control. He'll be like a baby. And the skin will be inclined to break down. He will get infections easily. The respiratory control will be impaired, too. Pneumonia will be likely. That's what usually knock off cases like this sooner or later."
"It sounds to me the sooner the better," I said, and thought of Lucy Stark.
"Maybe so," he said, tiredly. He was sagging now, all right. He slipped on his coat and picked up his bag. "Can I drop you somewhere?" he asked.
"Thanks, I'm in my car," I said. Then my eyes fell on the telephone on his desk. "But I'll make a call, if I may," I said. "I'll pull the door to."
"All right," he said, and went to the door. "Good night," he added, and went out.
I dialed outside, and got Anne's number, and told her the news. She said it was horrible. She kept saying that into the telephone–"It is horrible"–in a low bemused voice, three or four times. Then she thanked me and hung up.
I left the office. I had one more errand to do. I went down to the lobby. Sadie was still there. So I told her. She said it was pretty tough. I agreed.
"It will be tough on the Boss," she said.
"It will be tough as hell on Lucy," I said, "for she is the one who will have to fix the baby. Don't forget that while you're giving out the free samples of sympathy."
She must have been pretty tired or something for that didn't make her mad. So I asked her if I could take her into town. She had her car, too, she said.
"Well, I am going home and sleep forever," I said, and left her in the lobby.
By the time I got out to my car, the sky was curdling blue with dawn.
The accident occurred on Saturday afternoon. The operation was performed just before dawn on Sunday. The big pay-off was on Monday. It was the Monday before Thanksgiving.
That day, there was a gradual piling up of events, then the rush to the conclusion, as when a great weight that has been grinding and slipping suddenly breaks the last mooring and takes the plunge. As I experienced that day, there was at first an impression of the logic of the events, caught flickeringly at moments, but as they massed to the conclusion I was able to grasp, at the time, only the slightest hints as to the pattern that was taking shape. This lack of logic, the sense of people and events driven by impulses which I was no able to define, gave the whole occasion the sense of a dreamlike unreality. It was only after the conclusion, after everything was over, that the sense of reality returned, long after, in fact, when I had been able to gather the pieces of the puzzle up and put them together to see the pattern. This is not remarkable, for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from other events which, likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our own identity is dependent upon this principle.
Monday morning I got to the office early. I had slept all day Sunday, getting up only in time for a bite of dinner and then some silly movie, and being back in bed by ten-thirty. I came into the office with that sense you get after a lot of sleep of being spiritually pure.
I went back to the Boss's office. He hadn't come in. But while I was there one of the girls came in carrying a big tray piled up with telegrams. "They are all about his boy getting hurt," she said, "and they keep coming in."
"They'll be coming in all day," I said.
That would be true, all right. Every pinfeather politician, county-courthouse janitor, and ambitious lickspittle in the state who hadn't seen the story in the Sunday paper would see it in this morning's paper and get off his telegram. Getting that telegram off would be like praying. You couldn't tell that praying would do any good, but it certainly never did anybody any harm. Those telegrams were part of the system. Like presents for the wedding of a politician's daughter or flowers for a cop's funeral. And it was part of the system, too, for the flowers, now that we are on the subject, to come from Antonio Giusto's flower store. A girl in the flower store kept a record in a special file of all the orders that came in for a cop's funeral, and then Tony just ran through the file after the funeral and checked the names by his master list of perennially bereaved friends and if your name was on the master list it had sure-God better be in the file for Murphy's funeral, and I don't mean any bunch of sweet peas, either. Tony was a good friend of Tiny Duffy.