Time Will Darken It (26 page)

During their stay, the Potters had managed to invest the rooms they slept in with much of their personality. They had moved things, chipped things, left rings in mahogany, left medicine stains, left the impression of their bodies in horsehair mattresses. Living partly out of suitcases and partly out of untidy dresser-drawers, with disorder lying on the floor of their closets, with toilet articles spilling over their rooms, they had achieved a surface of confusion that Martha King had long since given up trying to do anything about. And even after all or nearly all of their possessions had been stuffed into trunks and suitcases and the Potters were on the train, the work of restoration had to be carried on, inch by inch.

With their heads tied up in dustcloths, Martha King and Rachel went to work and, like archæologists chipping plaster
from a ninth-century Byzantine mosaic, restored the house on Elm Street. Turn a mattress and who can say what manner of person has been sleeping on it? A bed remade with clean sheets and a fresh counterpane will look as if it had never been slept in. By nightfall, the guest-rooms had regained their idealized, expectant air, and there was a large square package (containing a black velvet bow, a sandalwood fan, a toothbrush, a necktie …), all wrapped and ready to mail, on the downstairs hall table.

Without the two extra leaves, the dining-room table was round instead of oval, and brought Austin and Martha and Ab much closer together under the red-and-green glass lampshade.

“Is the steak the way you like it?” Martha inquired from her end of the table.

“Yes,” Austin said, from his.

“Not too done?”

“No, it’s fine. Just the way I like it.”

“I asked Mr. Connor for veal chops and he said he had veal but he wouldn’t recommend it, so I got steak instead.”

“Mr. Holby is going to Chicago next week,” Austin said, after a considerable silence.

“Again?”

“He’s going to be gone four or five days. There’s a meeting of the State Bar Association.”

There was another long silence and then he said, “Old Mrs. Jouette was in the office today. She asked after you.”

“That was nice of her,” Martha said.

Part Four
The Cruel Chances of Life
Baffle Both the Sexes

1

If I live to be a thousand years old, Nora said to herself as she rearranged her ivory toilet articles on the dresser scarf, I’ll never get used to these curtains.

Neither will we ever get used to you
, the faded black and red and green curtains said.
We may learn to tolerate each other but no more. That bed you slept so badly in, last night, is Mr. Beach’s bed. He died in it. This was his room. And even though your comb and brush are on the bureau and your dresses are hanging in the clothes-press, it all belongs to him
.

The black walnut bed was enormous, a bed that was meant for husband and wife, for marriage and childbirth. No single person could possibly feel comfortable in it, or anything but lost to the world. Lying between the high, crenellated headboard and footboard, she had dreamed about Randolph; she was in trouble and he saved her. In real life, of course, he never did save her. He was only harsh and impatient with her for getting into trouble when he, for some reason or other, never did. She could be drowning and as she came up for the last time he would look down at her from the bank and say
I told you it wasn’t safe to swim into a waterfall.…

When Nora had made the bed Mr. Beach died in, she looked around timidly for something else to do, some household chore that would justify her being there, and discovered that neither Alice nor Lucy had straightened their rooms that morning. Though there were no cotillion programmes tucked in the dressing-table mirror, no invitations to parties or football games, no letters beginning:

My dear Miss Beach
,

So delightfully urged I succeeded in getting an invitation to the Draperville Academy dance next Friday. I write to ask permission to take you and to have the supper dance with you. I will call tomorrow evening and then learn whether or not I may have the pleasure of …
both rooms seemed to say that it is not kind to pry into the secrets of young people. Lucy’s room was larger, with a window seat and a view of the mulberry tree in the back yard. The prevailing colour was a pink so inappropriate to Lucy’s age that Nora decided Mrs. Beach must have chosen it for her. Alice’s room, directly across the hall, was in blue and white. The two brass beds were undoubtedly the same ones Alice and Lucy had slept in when they were thirteen or fourteen years old. A stranger to the family, passing down the hall and glancing in at these two doors, would have thought to herself
the girls’ rooms
, never suspecting that two mature women came here each night, undressed, took the combs and pins out of their greying hair, and lay down to sleep in the midst of so many frills and ruffles.

Feeling like an intruder, Nora put the two rooms in order and escaped to the downstairs part of the house, where she sat in the parlour and looked at a large souvenir book of photographs of the Columbian Exposition, and waited for Martha King to call.

If the Kings had asked Nora to stay on with them, she would have refused, even though their house was so much more cheerful and comfortable than the Beaches’. But they hadn’t asked her. And furthermore, Martha had let two whole days go by without coming across the yard to see whether she was settled and happy in her new surroundings.

The telephone rang several times during the morning, and each time Nora hurried into the dining-room, ready to be pleasant and natural, to keep her hurt feelings from betraying themselves, to make water run uphill. While one part of her said into the mouthpiece of the telephone, “This is Nora
Potter, Miss Purinton.… Yes … for a while, anyway.… Just a moment, I’ll see if she can come to the phone.…” another part of her cried out:
How can she not call when she knows I’m waiting to hear from her?

Answers to this question came and crowded around Nora. Cousin Martha had meant to call and then someone had dropped in and was gossiping and keeping her from the telephone; or perhaps she had tried to call and the line was busy. It might be that, out of nervousness (they had never been altogether easy with one another), she had put off calling as long as she could, without being rude; or that the telephone was out of order and she was waiting for a man from the telephone company to come out and fix it. In which case, she could have come over unless she was sick. And if she was sick, wouldn’t Austin have called and told them?

It was possible—just barely possible—that Cousin Martha (though she didn’t seem that kind of a person) had taken this way of showing Nora that she didn’t like her and didn’t want her here. Down home, people would never act that way. Whether they liked you or not, they called and pretended that.… Or it might be that she was annoyed because …

Like the early systems of astronomy, the answers were all based on the assumption that the sun goes around the earth. By lunchtime Nora had considered and exhausted every explanation except the right one—that she was not as important to Martha King as Martha King was to her.

It would be difficult, she decided, living right next door to them and never seeing or speaking to Cousin Martha, but if she didn’t call, that must be what she intended Nora to do. She would walk past the Kings’ house without looking at it, and if they were on the porch and didn’t speak.… This image, involving a third person, was too painful and had to be put aside in favour of another.… If Nora were, say, with Lucy and Alice and they called
Good evening, Martha
, then Nora would have to pretend that she didn’t hear or wasn’t
aware that anyone was being spoken to. She would have to be ready, when Cousin Martha came over to see Mrs. Beach, to step aside into some room, to be always busy in some remote part of the house. She couldn’t take the children to kindergarten, as Lucy wanted her to do, because that meant turning up the Kings’ front walk, ringing the doorbell, and standing there in front of the door until Cousin Martha opened it. But everything else she could manage, and maybe even that. If she sent some child and she herself remained on the sidewalk, turned slightly away, looking after the other children.… Whatever lay in her power to do, for Austin’s sake, she would do. If she couldn’t be friends with Cousin Martha, she would do the next best thing. She would keep out of her way. Though it would be difficult and not at all the way it was when her family was here, no one would ever know. People would think it was an accident that she and Cousin Martha were never seen together. And her mother, who was very fond of Cousin Martha, need never find out how badly Nora had been treated.

Having prepared herself again and again all morning for the call that didn’t come, Nora had no strength left to fight the idea that recurred to her at quarter to two—that perhaps Martha King was waiting for
her
to call; that it was, in fact, her duty to call, after having been a guest in the Kings’ house for over a month. Pride counselled her to wait in the parlour, but Fear said
What if Cousin Martha never calls?
By that time, Nora was too nervous to trust her own voice over the telephone.

“I’m going over to the Kings,” she called out to the silent house. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” and ran across the yard to get at the little white-throated, whisking animal of uncertainty.

2