Time Will Darken It (53 page)

“Maybe some day we’ll have houses of our own,” Alice said, “and then whatever will we do with it all?”

“That’s done for, too,” Lucy said. “I’m forty-seven and you’re forty-three. People may call us the Beach girls but we’re no spring chickens, either of us. We’ve had our chance and missed it, and I’m so tired I don’t care any more. All I want to do is rest. I don’t know why people don’t tell you when you’re young that life is tiring. It probably wouldn’t have done any good, but then again it might have.”

“I don’t feel that way,” Alice said. She took a kindergarten chair and sat down, facing a bookcase crammed with glass and china. On a level with her eyes there was a milk pitcher which she remembered from her childhood. It was blue and white, and two young women (sisters, perhaps) walked in a garden, each with her hand through a young man’s arm. A duenna with a dog at her feet sat watching them, approvingly. And in the background there was a ruined temple, undoubtedly to the shaggy god who, from his place under the handle, kept an eye on both couples. Under the spout there was a motto which Alice Beach knew without having to read it:

She turned her face away from this familiar message and looked out of the attic window at the bare branches of a big maple tree. After a while she said, “Sometimes I have to stop and remember how old I am.”

“You’ve got a few more years to go,” Lucy said. “Then you’ll be tired, too, like me. You won’t care any more what happens to you or what might have happened. Don’t look at me like that.”

“I can’t bear to have you say such things.”

“You don’t have to listen. And besides, I don’t have to say them. I can just think them instead, if that will make it any easier for you.”

“It won’t.”

“Well, then, you’d better go away. I’ll even help you.”

“Where would I go?”

“Anywhere. I can manage here without you, now. You can go anywhere in the world you please. There never was enough money for two but there’s enough for one, and you might as well take it and go abroad. You always liked the Dalmatian Coast. Go back to Ragusa and try there for a while.”

“What about Mama?”

“Well, what about her?”

“It might kill her if I left home now.”

“Nothing will kill her. She’ll outlive both of us. She’ll outlive everybody on Elm Street. She’s not ever going to die. It’s time you realized that. She’s going to live forever. And she can’t stop you from going because I won’t let her. I could have stayed in Europe if I’d really wanted to. I can manage her now and I could have managed her then. Deep down in my heart I didn’t want to. I wanted her to manage me. And she has, I’ll say that for her. She’s never been so sick or so tired and discouraged with Papa and us and herself that she didn’t manage things the way we wanted her to manage them. So pack your bag and put on your hat and go, and it’ll be all right. Go to Mississippi if you don’t want to go abroad. Go stay with the Potters on their plantation. Mrs. Potter asked us to last summer. All you have to do is tell her you’d like to go with them when they go. Maybe you’ll find someone down there. Sometimes a widower with children will——”

Lucy turned her head to listen. Both of them heard, faint and far away, the ting-a-ling of a bedside bell.

“I’d better go see what she wants,” Alice said.

“Let her wait,” Lucy said. “This is more important. And don’t look so frightened. Try and think calmly and clearly. Try to see what it is that you really want to do. And whatever it is—I don’t care if it’s to be a bareback rider in a circus—I’ll help you.”

These offers which come too late or at the wrong time, in words that are somehow unacceptable, are the saddest, the most haunting part of family life.

“Lucy, please stop!” Alice exclaimed as she started for the stairs. “I don’t pick at you. Why can’t you let me alone?”

14

“Mama?”

“She isn’t here,” Mr. Potter said. “You’ve got a new nurse.”

“Where is she?” Nora asked.

“She went back to the house to rest. She didn’t get much sleep last night, so I said I’d take over. Is there anything you’d like me to do for you?”

“What’s that awful shouting?”

“Some poor soul is having a hard time of it, I guess,” Mr. Potter said.

“It seems like it’s been going on for hours and hours. I don’t see why they don’t put her somewhere where nobody can hear her. It’s awful to have to listen to.… When’s Mama coming back?”

“Pretty soon. How do you feel?”

“All right. Only I’m so tired of lying here.”

“It won’t be much longer. The doctor says you’re coming along fine.”

“I want to go home,” Nora said.

“We’ll take you home,” Mr. Potter said, “just as soon as you’re able to be moved.”

“I want to be in my own room. I don’t ever want to see this place again.”

“Just be patient a little while longer,” Mr. Potter said. “It doesn’t do to try and rush things.”

“But I’ve been here so long and this bed’s so uncomfortable.”

“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

The screaming was resumed.

“What time is it?” Nora asked.

“Half after two.”

“Did Mama say what time she was coming back?”

“She’ll be along directly. Now that you’re getting better, you mustn’t expect her to be at your beck and call all the time. You’ve put her through considerable strain, and she’s worn out. From now on, it’s up to us to spare her anything we can.… It’s a bad thing to grow old, Nora, and know that you’ve been a fool.”

After this abrupt revelation, the first that he had ever made to his daughter, Mr. Potter sat quietly and watched her eyes close and saw her breathing change gradually to the breathing of sleep.

Most maxims are lies, or at any rate misleading. A rolling stone gathers moss. A stitch in time doesn’t save nine. The knowledge that you have been a fool hurts just as much, is just as hard to admit to yourself if you are young as when you are old. Every error that people make is repeated over and over again, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, if they know what they are doing and cannot help themselves. The curtain goes up night after night on the same play, and if the audience weeps, it is because the hero always arrives at the abandoned sawmill in the nick of time, the heroine never gives in to the dictates of her heart and marries the man with the black moustache. There is not only a second chance, there are a thousand second chances to speak up, to act bravely for once, to face the fact that must sooner or later be faced. If there is really no more time, it can be faced hurriedly. Otherwise, it can be examined at leisure. The result is in either case the same. Windows that have been nailed shut for years are suddenly pried open, letting air in, letting love in, and hope.
Cause is revealed to be, after all, nothing but effect. And the long, slow, dreadful working out of the consequences of any given mistake is arrested the very moment you accept the idea that for you (and for your most beautiful bride, who with garlands is crowned, whose lightness and brightness doth shine in such splendour) there is an end.

15

Part of the time Martha King was convinced that there was some dreadful mistake, that they were trying to bury her alive. At other times she was quite rational, knew why she was there, answered correctly when Dr. Seymour leaned over the bed and asked, “How many fingers have I?” and was able to distinguish between her own screaming and the chant that came from the next room:
Oh doctor, doctor … oh my doctor
 … sometimes pleading, sometimes a shriek, sometimes a singsong, but in the next room. Not the same as
Oh this is strong! The pain comes in waves! It’s all in my back!
(she said that); or,
It’s gone, isn’t it?
(the nurse); or
Are my eyes swollen? It feels as if I were peeking through them … Oh now it’s starting, it’s starting!

At three-thirty the nurse stopped referring to her watch, and time was measured by the slow progress of a patch of sunlight on the hospital floor.

“By rights,” George Diehl said, “she shouldn’t be having this child. She’s too old. She’s nearly fifty and worn out with bringing up kids, but she wanted one more, and I couldn’t refuse her. It’s not good, though—a woman of her age. She’s been in labour for fifteen hours and the doctor is worried about her heart. They let me in to see her for a couple of minutes, just before you came. We’ve been married for
nearly thirty years, and yet whenever I try to tell her I love her, it sticks in my throat. I know she knows, but I thought she might like to hear me say it, so I did, and she said, ‘Who’s been getting you all upset?’ ‘Nobody,’ I said. ‘It’s just the sight of you lying there, looking like a young girl.’ Which was not the truth, you understand; she looked all worn out, but it pleased her, even though she didn’t want to let on. ‘You’ve been a good wife to me,’ I said, and afterwards I felt better, as if I’d got a weight off my chest.”

(The sunlight reached the foot of the hospital bed and began to climb.)

“But this waiting is hard on a man,” George Diehl said. “I’ve seen a whole year go by faster than these last two hours.”

To experience the emotion of waiting, in its purest form, you must pass through that stage when pacing the floor, or drumming with your fingers, or counting, or any of the mechanical aids gives release, and enter into the stage when the arrival of the minute hand of the clock at twelve is separated from the sound of striking by so long an interval that the whole nervous system cries out in vain for an end of waiting. Pain is movement, the waves of the sea rising, receding; waiting is the shore they break upon, the shore that changes, in-time, but never noticeably. The will that waits and endures is not the same will that makes it possible for people to get out of bed in the morning or to choose between this necktie, this silk scarf, and that. It is something you never asked for and that never asked for you. You have it and live. You lose it and give up the ghost.