Time Will Darken It (45 page)

There are only two kinds of faces—those that show everything openly and tragically, and those that (no matter what happens) remain closed. From the one every old loss cries out each time you meet it. Every fresh doubt calls attention to itself. The beginning of cancer or of complacency are immediately apparent, and so is the approach of death. From the other kind you get nothing, no intimation of strain, of the inner war of the soul—unless, of course, you love the person who looks out at you from behind the blank face. In that case, some day, instead of saying
How well you are looking
, as the last acquaintance before you has done, you may be shocked and ask abruptly
What on earth has happened
?

The same thing is true of houses, for anyone who is interested enough to look at them, at what is there. Rachel’s shack cried out that she was gone, taking her children with her. The funeral basket lying on its side ten feet away from the two stones said
Keep away unless you are looking for trouble
. The wicker bassinet, half full of leaves, said
Man is his own architect
. The coach lantern and the coffee-pot had disappeared, the front door stood open.

On the unmade bed, on sheets that were twisted and sooty, Andy lay abandoned, flat on his back, barefoot, with trousers on and a woollen shirt unbuttoned over his chest. The breath that came from his open mouth, with each snore, was frosty. He turned onto his side, and huddled there like a fœtus, his hands locked in agony and in sleep.

A dry leaf had drifted in and was now resting on the edge of the rag carpet before it went even further. On the table were dirty dishes, dried food, cigarette butts, and a small pool of vomit. The patchwork covers were in a heap at the foot of the bed, but the hand that reached slowly out went in a different direction, over the side, down, fumbling until the fingers closed over the neck of a bottle and stayed there. The drawers of the old varnished dresser had at some time or other been pulled open and ransacked, and then left with garments dripping over onto the floor. In the kitchen Thelma’s picture of the evening party at the Kings’ had come loose and hung from one tack, flapping. All the food and cooking utensils had been knocked down from the shelves. There was a broken cup under a chair, and on top of the stove a mixture of coffee grounds and cornflakes.

The man on the bed sat up slowly, with the bottle in his hands. His eyes opened. Bloodshot and frightened, they looked around the room with no recognition in them, not even when they were focused on the open door. The man raised the bottle to his lips, and drank until the bottle, upended, proved conclusively that it was empty. He flung it across the room and the bottle bounced without breaking. The figure on the bed sank back solemnly, the hands opened and closed twice, as if in surprise (
Pharaoh’s army got drowned
) and then the only movement was the frosted breath rising thinner and thinner from the purple mouth.

The Kings’ house showed nothing, that day. To Mary Caroline Link, on her way to high school, and to old Mr. Porterfield, riding by on his ancient bicycle, the house looked exactly the same as it always had. The iron fence was enough, in itself, to keep out every threat the world has to offer, all danger of change, but Mrs. Danforth was uneasy. From her parlour window she had seen the setting sun reflected from the windows across the way several thousand times. She could predict almost to the minute when the lights would
go on—first in the kitchen, then in the front part of the house. She knew also how the Kings’ house looked when it was completely dark. She had looked out on the flower garden in summer when it was a mass of bright colour, in clumps and borders, and when the mounded beds, with snow on them, looked like a small family graveyard in a corner of a country field. The Kings’ house—the east side of it—and her own house were like her left and right hand. And when there is something wrong with your hand you know it, whether other people are aware of it or not.

Mrs. Danforth opened the pantry door and listened, convinced that she had heard the telephone, that they were trying to communicate with her from the house next door. Then she went about her housework, made the big double bed in the front room, and with the dust-mop in her hands, worked her way down, frowning at the lint that had collected on the stairs.

17

“Now where are you going?”

“Upstairs,” Ab said.

Frieda moved between her and the doorway into the dining-room.

“No, you don’t, young lady,” she said. “I have my orders and I’m to keep you with me, so just sit down on that stool over there and don’t make any trouble, if you know what’s good for you.”

“I want my mother,” Ab said.

“Well, you can’t have her.”

“I can too have her,” Ab said. “And I don’t have to mind you.”

“Your mother doesn’t want you up there. She’s sick. You
try anything funny and you’ll get what Paddy gave the drum.”

“I’ll tell my father on you when he comes home,” Ab said.

“Go ahead and tell him. See how much good it does you.”

“I will tell him.”

“You’re not to bother your Daddy either. He has other things to worry about. You stay here in the kitchen with me and be a good girl and maybe I’ll let you lick the dish.”

“I don’t want to lick the dish, and I don’t like it here. You’re a bad woman.”

“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,” Frieda said.

“If you don’t let me see my Mama, I’ll call the police. They’ll come and take you away and put you in jail.”

The thin mouth stretched to a grim slit, and a dark red flush told Ab that she had once more stepped over the line.

“Very well, young lady, call the police. I’ve taken all I’m going to off you. March right into the library with me and call the police. You’ll see soon enough who they’ll take off to jail.”

She took hold of Ab’s arm roughly, pulled her from the high stool, and forced her, stumbling, through the swinging doors, through the dining-room, and into the study.

“Sit right down there,” Frieda said, giving Ab a final push toward the desk. “I’ll wait here while you do it.”

Ab looked at the black instrument on its hook. In spite of many imaginary conversations into a glass telephone filled with red candy, she had never thought of using the real instrument and she did not know what would happen, what voice would answer if she took the receiver off the hook. It might be Mrs. Ellis or Alice Beach or the man at the grocery store, or it might be the voice of her Sunday school teacher or of the man who came to the back door with froglegs.

“Go ahead,” Frieda said. “I’m waiting.”

Ab looked at the telephone and then wildly around for help.

18

“If only Alice hadn’t come down with the grippe,” Lucy said.

“Oh, it’s so beautiful!” Nora said, standing at the parlour window with her fur hat on, and peering through the lace curtain at a world that was even more lacelike. The evening before, along about dusk, it had started snowing, and the snow had been coming down all night long. The walk and the front yard were buried several inches deep. Beyond that, Nora could not see because of the snowflakes that filled the air with a massed downward movement. “I want to get out in it,” she said. “Twice in the night I got up out of bed and went to the window and stood shivering in my nightgown, trying to see the snow. Now I want to be out in it. I want to feel it on my face.”

“I don’t think you ought to try it,” Lucy said. “Let me call the mothers. It probably would be better to, anyway. If the children get their feet wet, they’ll all come down with colds.”

On a newspaper beside the front door there were three pairs of overshoes. Nora found hers and sat down to put them on.

“By tomorrow,” Lucy said, “it will have stopped snowing and the walks will be cleaned and you won’t have such a time getting there.”

“Who knows what it will be like tomorrow,” Nora said gaily. “Maybe the snow will be six feet deep. Maybe we won’t be able to get out of the house. Do the drifts ever come up as high as the second-story window?”

“I think I’d better come with you,” Lucy said. “I really think I’d better. It’ll be hard enough for you, but you don’t
know what it’s like for children. You’ll have to carry them, and you can’t all that distance.”

“They can walk behind me,” Nora said. “I’ll make a path for them.”

She put her arms into the man’s winter coat that Lucy held for her. The coat had belonged to Mr. Beach. It was very heavy, it was much too large for Nora, and it was lined with rabbit-skin.

“Now for the mittens. This is just like ‘East Lynne,’ ” Nora said, and pushed the storm door open. The snow was banked against it, blown there during the night, and the storm door cut a deep quarter-circle into the new level of the porch. “Don’t worry about me.”

The front steps were rounded over so there was scarcely an inch drop from one to the next. Nora put her foot down cautiously where the walk ought to be, and discovered that the snow was six or seven inches deep. She took a big step and then another and another. At the place where the lawn curved down to meet the sidewalk there were three more steps, which she found under the snow. And then she stopped and looked around. The houses across the street had rounded white roofs with black chimneys sticking out of them. The trees, thickened, whitened, lightened with snow, gave a curious perspective to the street that Nora had seen only in the double post cards that went with the stereoscope in the dentist’s office in Howard’s Landing, Mississippi. “Oh, no wonder!” she exclaimed.

Love falling on her face, love falling on her hair, love smooth and untracked, filling up every previous impression, space closing in, distance diminished, the shape and outline of every house, every tree, every hitching post transformed, made beautiful, made into the great lace curtain
.

With the heavy coat weighing her down, Nora floundered through the snow until she got as far as the Kings’ front walk. Someone had shovelled a path from the porch steps
to the sidewalk, and the path was already filling in, more than half obliterated. She saw large footprints which must be Austin’s, and as she walked where he had walked, put her foot down in the print of his, all sense of cold left her. She rang the doorbell and then, turning around, saw the world as he had seen it, a few minutes before, from his own front steps. If I can have this and no more, Nora said to herself, it’s enough. I’ll be happy forever. I’ve had more than I ever expected to have on this earth.