Time Will Darken It (52 page)

“The waiting room is right down the hall,” the nurse said smiling. “Try not to take it too hard.”

“I know where it is,” Austin said.

This time he wasn’t to have the waiting room all to himself. The man sitting on the wooden bench was bald, heavy set, and decently dressed. His face was familiar but there were a hundred faces like it in the town of Draperville—middle-aged and rather tired with no trace of the earlier, more eager, perhaps even handsome boy’s face from which it had emerged. Its only distinguishing feature was a mole on the left cheek, and this, anywhere but in the waiting room, and by anyone except a man who had all Time’s delight at his disposal, might easily have passed unnoticed.

Austin sat down and let his head back so that the wall would have the burden of supporting it. There was such an air of uneasiness and of being unwanted about the other man that Austin felt as if he were looking at his own state of mind, and shifted his glance away. The artificial flowers and Sir Galahad reminded him that he had been here the day before, and of what had happened afterward. He tried not to look at them, either. He was conscious of a strange sensation in his mouth, as if his teeth were watering. The rims of his eyelids felt hard and dry.

“You’re Austin King, aren’t you?” the man asked. “I’m George Diehl. I work in the lumber yard.”

“I remember you now,” Austin said, nodding.

“Your first kid?”

“Second.”

“You’ve been through this before, then?”

“Not here,” Austin said. “The other child was born at home.” Because of this man eyeing him as if possibly they ought to become better acquainted, he would have no privacy. His worry and exhaustion would both be exposed to the public gaze.

“Misery loves company. Have a cigar?”

“No, thanks,” Austin said. Having recognized George Diehl, Austin set out to ignore him. There is a misery that loves company and another kind that would rather be alone.

In the confusion of dressing and breakfast and getting a suitcase packed for Ab and delivering her at the Danforths’ front door, Austin had left his gold watch under his pillow. He got up and went out into the hall. What had seemed like half an hour had actually been two and a half minutes. This error in calculation was destined to repeat itself at varying intervals all through the day.

12

With her nose pressed to the window pane and her forlorn back reflected in Mrs. Danforth’s silver gazing globe, Abbey King looked out on the same perspective that she was accustomed to seeing from the window in the front hall and the front living-room window at home. The only difference was that she could see one more house to the left and one less house to the right. No one came in or went out of or walked by the houses. The ground was bare, the trees and shrubbery appeared to have given up forever the idea and intention of producing green leaves. With shreds of brown attached to it, a lateral shoot of the pink rambler trained to grow up the trellis on the east side of the Danforths’ house was bowing and trembling in the wind, a few inches from Ab’s face. If there is no such place as Purgatory, there is at least Elm Street on a grey day in January.

“Would you like to put on your things and go outside and play?” Mrs. Danforth asked.

“I don’t care,” Ab said.

“We’ll bundle up warmly, and if you get cold, tell me and we’ll come in.”

Entrusting her mittened hand to Mrs. Danforth’s gloved one, Ab made a tour of the yard, and Mrs. Danforth lifted her
up so that Ab could look in the window of the playhouse, made of two piano boxes. The key to the playhouse was lost and no one had been in it for many years. Ab saw a school desk, a blackboard, and some dusty paper dolls, and was satisfied that the playhouse, like the flower garden, was finished for a while. Occasionally, her eyes turned to the house next door. She knew that her mother was not there. Whether anyone else was, and what they were doing, the house did not say, and Ab, in exile, did not ask.

A dray went past the Danforths’ house, past the Kings’ and stopped in front of the Beaches’. A man got down from the driver’s seat, and immediately, as if by some prearranged signal, a pack of children appeared around the corner of the house across the street, crossed over, and gathered on the sidewalk.

“You want to join them?” Mrs. Danforth asked.

Ab stood timidly pushing her hands further into her mittens. She was not allowed to go beyond the confines of her own yard, but then she wasn’t at home now and the Danforths’ yard had no fence but was open to the street.

“It’s all right,” Mrs. Danforth said. “I’ll stay here and watch you.”

The sight of the blue kindergarten chairs and the children’s excited comments were enough to break the thread (slight in any case) that bound Ab’s right mitten to Mrs. Danforth’s left glove. She started slowly off down the sidewalk, broke into a run as she passed her own house, and then slowed down again to a walk. The children, boys and girls of all ages, paid no attention to her and there was no Miss Lucy or Miss Alice to coax Ab into the group. She stood on the outskirts, ignored by the others, who left her standing there and went from the sidewalk down into the street, that most dangerous of all places. Ab looked back. Mrs. Danforth nodded. Taking her life in her hands, Ab pressed through the group until she was able to look into the back end of the dray.

“Look out,” a boy in a plaid mackinaw said to her. “You’ll get conked on the head if you aren’t careful.”

This offhand admonition, neither friendly nor unfriendly, was very important. First of all, it recognized her existence, a fact that would otherwise have remained in doubt. Second, it conferred citizenship papers on her. From now on she was free to come and go in a commonwealth where the games were sometimes rough and where the older inhabitants sometimes picked on the younger ones, but nobody ever had to deal with or try to understand emotions and ideas that were thirty years too old for them. Abbey King attached herself to the hero in the plaid mackinaw, followed him from the street to the sidewalk and back again, and with her eyes on his dirty, tough, young face, waited to see what remarkable words, what brave acts, he would spontaneously produce.

Satisfied that Ab no longer needed watching, Mrs. Danforth turned and went back into the house that invited day-dreaming, that was dark, cavelike, and full of objects which had demonstrated conclusively how often things survive and people do not.

13

When the dray loaded with kindergarten furniture drew up before the Beaches’ house, Alice propped the storm door open wide, with a brick covered with carpet from the house in St. Paul, and then went back inside. As she peered out through the front window, the expression on her face was of relief, almost of happiness. The chairs were scattered over the frozen lawn, and the children sat down on them as if they had been invited to a party. The two movingmen started up the walk, carrying a table between them. Except that they held it by the ends instead of by silver handles at the side,
the effect was that of pallbearers carrying a coffin. The box of coloured yarn which they had set on top of the table might so easily have been flowers sent by some close friend of the family. When they reached the steps, Alice opened the door again. The man in front put his end down for a moment, tipped his hat, and said, “Where do you want it, lady?”

He was short and stocky, his face so capable and kind that she was tempted to tell him everything, but the other man was still holding his end of the table, so she said timidly, “In the attic, please.” She was prepared, if the two men exchanged a glance, not to notice it, but no such unpleasantness occurred. Tracking soot in after them, they headed for the stairs. “Easy,” the man in front said. “Watch the newel post.” The man at the back was enormous, loose-limbed, open-mouthed, and entirely at the mercy of the mind that directed his strength. At the turn of the stairs, he managed to leave a cruel scratch that no amount of furniture polish would ever remove from the banister.

Halfway down the upstairs hall, the attic door stood open. On the wall beside it, a glass knob the size of a dollar shone red, an indication that the light was on in the attic. The hall was narrow and the table had to be turned gradually and carefully on end before it would go through the door and up the steep attic stairs. Lucy stood waiting for them by the chimney, with a man’s heavy sweater on over her cotton dress. She had cleared a space for the kindergarten equipment from the accumulation and welter of years—suitboxes, trunks, old furniture, lampshades, riding boots, books and magazines stacked in piles, boxes that were not always marked as to their contents and might contain Christmas tree ornaments or Mr. Beach’s clothes. The men made five trips in all, and Alice went with them each time in an effort to prevent further damage to the stairs.

Lucy remained in the attic, where the kindergarten equipment looked strangely bright and fresh; too bright and too
fresh to be what it really was, the death of all her hopes. Why is it we never give anything away? she wondered. Other people discard and dispose of things and start afresh with only what they need and can use, but everything we ever had is here, ready to speak out against us on the Day of Judgment.… She pushed the chairs closer together so that the kindergarten equipment took up less room, and rearranged the coloured paper, the yarns, and the boxes of scissors in a neat pile.

“Are you still up there?” Alice called from below, and, receiving an answer, came up the attic stairs.

“It doesn’t look like very much, does it?” she said, staring at the tables and chairs.

“Well, it’s paid for,” Lucy said. “That’s the main thing. Maybe we can sell it some time.”

“Or maybe we can use it ourselves,” Alice said, “after people have forgotten.”

“No,” Lucy said. “It’s done for. I don’t know why we keep it. We’ll never have any use for it, and we’ll never sell it. It’s just going to stay up here, with the trunks and the Baedekers.” Her eyes wandered to the suitcases in the corner, with faded cracked labels—Lake Como, Grand Hotel, Nice,
Roma, Firenze
, and
Compagnie Générale Transatlantique
.

“Any time we want to start living our lives all over again, everything we need is here—except courage.”