4
As a result of his having drawn up the necessary papers (so that Mr. Potter’s plan would all be down on paper, legal and proper, and there couldn’t be any trouble later on) Austin found himself involved in an active correspondence with the bank in Howard’s Landing, and from this correspondence he learned a number of facts that Mr. Potter had apparently not found time or thought it necessary to go into. The indebtedness on the plantation was larger than Bud Ellis and the other shareholders had been given to understand, and the mortgage (which would have to be satisfied before the Mississippi corporation began to coin money) covered not only the plantation house but the land and the farm implements as well. Mr. Potter’s reassurances, by return mail, were convincing enough, if you took each explanation by itself, but they didn’t quite dovetail. Austin began to wonder about the elk’s tooth charm, the courtly manners, and the stories in which Mr. Potter invariably outsmarted the other fellow.
Mrs. Potter’s bread-and-butter letter—full of misspelling and arbitrary punctuation, words written in and crossed out, the margins crammed with messages and affectionate afterthoughts, and bits of information about people that Austin and Martha had never heard of—quieted for a short while his uneasiness about the business transaction that had taken place in his office. They would never forget the wonderful time they had had, she wrote, or their dear friends up North. The pity of it was that they couldn’t get on the train and come back whenever they felt like it, which was often. Since her return home, she had been as busy as a cat in a fish store. Cousin Alice Light, who lived in Glen Falls, had come with the children, twins. Little Alice very bright for her age, and the boy into everything the minute his mother’s back was turned. And then old Mrs. Maltby died before Mrs. Potter had a chance to ask her for the recipe for making hedge-apple jam, and Mrs. Potter, though no kin to the Maltbys, had taken charge, made all the arrangements for the funeral, buried the dead and entertained the living. After the funeral the relatives came back to the house and fought over the furniture, and the little drop-leaf table that was supposed to go to Mrs. Potter went to one of the daughters-in-law instead.
Mrs. Potter missed the yellow bedroom of the house on Elm Street—as girls she and her sister always had that colour. And Mr. Potter had bought an automobile, a Rambler, and was learning to drive. Randolph had been offered a job in the bank but couldn’t decide whether to take it or not. His father wanted him to, but Randolph wasn’t sure that he’d like working behind a cage and taking money from all kinds of people. Besides, he would have to live away from home, and naturally he’d rather be with his family. The weather was still warm, like the middle of summer. They had started picking cotton that week.…
The letter contained no mention of Nora, not even in the postscript. Reading the letter, one would almost have thought that Mrs. Potter had no daughter, or else that she was afraid. In places where witchcraft is still practised, people are extremely careful about disposing of hairs that they find in combs, and of finger-nail parings. Possibly some such instinctive or superstitious caution kept Mrs. Potter from writing Nora’s name.
The postman also left in the mailbox of the house on Elm Street a souvenir of the Mardi Gras, addressed to Miss Abbey King. Across the bottom of the long narrow strip of coloured pictures—horse-drawn floats. boats and thrones, gigantic spider-webs, witches’ caverns, cloud-capped palaces, and caves under the sea—Randolph had scrawled Do you remember me? which was foolish and unnecessary, since Ab in her nightly prayers remembered everybody.
With these samples of their highly characteristic handwriting, the Potters proved that they had gone home, that they were now safely disposed of in the shadowy untroublesome country of absent friends and relations, but Austin King found himself wondering why Mr. Potter, with his affairs in such an unsettled state, had bought an expensive automobile; why Randolph hadn’t jumped at the chance of a job in the bank; why Nora never came to see them. Occasionally he saw her, in the side yard or on the porch of the house next door, and waved to her and Nora waved back. Instead of stopping to talk to her, he went on into the house, carrying with him the image of a startled face, the eyes wide open, the expression doubtful, as if Nora were not certain that he was waving at her.
5
After a long summer of green, the prairie towns have their brief season of colour. The leaves on the trees begin to turn—first a branch, then a tree, then a whole street of trees, like middle-aged people falling in love. The maples turn bright orange or scarlet, the elms a pale poetic yellow, and before the colour has reached its height, the leaves begin to detach themselves, to drift down. Lawns have to be raked, and then raked again. Children play in leaf houses, and leaf fires smouldering in gutters change the odour of the air. The sun finds a way through bare branches to make new patterns of light and shade. The daytime, between nine o’clock in the morning and two in the afternoon, is like summer; but after the evening meal, women sitting in porch rockers send this or that child into the house for a shawl and are themselves driven indoors by the dark a few minutes later. The lawn mowers stand idle, frost stills the katydids and puts an end to the asters, and sadly, a little at a time, people get used to the idea of winter.
During the long September evenings, Austin King found time to collect the family snapshots and paste them in a big black scrapbook. This scrapbook was part of a set, of the great American encyclopædia of sentimental occasions, family gatherings, and stages in the growth of children. The volumes are not arranged alphabetically and it doesn’t matter very much which one you open, since each of the million or so volumes is likely to contain, among other things,
a picture of a statue in a park
of children playing in the sand at the seashore
of the horses waiting at the paddock gate
of the float that won first prize
of the new house before the roof was finished
of a winding mountain road
of Sunset Hill, of Mirror Lake
of a nurse wheeling a baby carriage
of a tree leaning far out over the bank of a creek
of the tennis court when there was no one on it.
of two families seated along the steps of a band pavilion
of the dead rattlesnake
of a sign reading Babylon 2 miles
of a row of rocking chairs on a hotel veranda
of the view from the ridge
of girls with young men they did not marry
of a picnic by the side of the road
of a camping wagon
of the cat that did not stay to have its picture taken
of a boy holding his bicycle
of summer cottages on a small inland lake
of the dog that was run over
of the little boy in a pony cart, with a formal flower bed and the stone gates of the asylum in the background
of a man with a string of fish
of the graduation class
of the oak tree in the garden
of the children wading with their clothes pulled up to their thighs
of a parade
of a path shovelled through deep snow
of a man aiming a rifle
of a boy walking on his hands
of a Christmas tree taken when the needles were beginning to fall off
of Starved Bock
of two children in a swing
of the party stepping into a gasoline launch
of the bride and groom with their arms around each other
of the son in uniform, standing beside the back steps, on a day when the light was not right for taking kodak pictures
of the pergola
of a fancy-dress party
of the river bank at flood level
Here and there, among so much that is familiar and obvious, you suddenly come upon a scene that cries out for explanation—four women seated around a picnic cloth and gazing calmly at a young man who is also seated and holding what appears to be a revolver in his right hand;
or a picture with the centre torn out of it, leaving an oval-shaped hole surrounded by porch railing, lawn, trees, a fragment of a woman’s skirt, and the sky. If there are clues in the form of writing: Just after smash upon mountain or The Hermitage 1910, they are usually unsatisfactory. You never learn what smash-up on what mountain or where the hermitage is. There is seldom any pretence that the subjects were doing anything but having their pictures taken. The scenes are necessarily static, and in the faces there is that strange absence of tension that exists in all casual photographs taken before the first World War. One’s immediate impression, looking through old photograph albums, is likely to be Why there has been no change, no change since childhood. And then But how they give themselves away! And Who held the camera? is a question that recurs again and again; what person voluntarily absented himself from the record in order to preserve for posterity the image he saw through the small glass square on the side of the camera?
Austin King worked over the scrapbook at his desk in the study, with his back to the fireplace. His careful hand moved from the pastepot to the cloth, from the cloth to the box of curling, unmounted snapshots. The logs that had been drying out all summer on the woodpile snapped and shuddered and were consumed quickly by the yellow flames and fell apart. When he looked up, he saw the lighted room and himself reflected in the window-panes against the darkness outside. If Martha had been there, she would have drawn the curtains, but she had taken to going upstairs soon after dinner.
If you are of a certain temperament, patient and methodical, pasting snapshots into an album or any work that is simple and done mostly with the hands is pleasant, but it has one important drawback; it leaves the mind free and open to its own dubious devices. Sometimes, to escape from or clarify his own thoughts, Austin King screwed the lid on the pastepot, got up from his desk, and began to walk back and forth in front of the fireplace. He walked from the door that led to the hall (where he turned) to the door that led to the dining-room (where he turned again). Occasionally, while the minute hand and the hour hand of the Dresden china clock on the mantelpiece moved slowly towards bedtime, the classic drama in the fireplace was interrupted by some irrelevant stage business—a door creaking somewhere in the back part of the house, a ghost on the stairs.
Before Austin King could go up to bed there were a number of things that, night after night, had to be done. He stood the logs on end in the study fireplace so they wouldn’t burn away before morning. He tried the lock on the kitchen door. He opened the door in the pantry, went down the unsafe cellar stairs, and banked the furnace fire. Some of these precautions were necessary (Rachel sometimes forgot to lock herself out, and the kitchen door had once or twice blown open in the night); some had a strange ritualistic quality. No one had been in the living-room all day but he looked to make sure that the damper in the living-room fireplace was closed. He glanced out of the dining-room window at the thermometer, which had not changed perceptibly since he looked at it two hours before. He went around turning off certain radiators and turning others on, night after night. These acts were somehow precautions against something—the presence on the stairs, possibly; or the enemy who, when Austin opened the front door before locking it, was never there.
6
In the upstairs hall of the Beaches’ house, under a combination gas and electric light fixture, there was a large steel engraving of an old woman selling apples. In a gilt frame that was ornately carved and cracked, it had outlived by many years the sentimental age that inspired such pictures. The old woman had snow-white hair, square steel-rimmed spectacles, and an expression that was a nice blending of natural kindness and the determination to be kind. There were three children in the picture. The well-dressed boy and girl on the old woman’s left had a marked family resemblance. A china doll hung dangling from the little girl’s right hand and she had already taken a bite out of her apple. The little boy was apparently saving his until a burning question had been decided. Facing the brother and sister a barefoot boy with ragged clothing searched deep in his trousers pocket for a penny. The barefoot boy was the centre and whole point of the picture—his rapt eyes, his expression conveying a mixture of hope and fear. It was evident that he could expect no financial assistance from the well-dressed children. Either there was a penny in that or some other pocket, or else he would get no apple from the old woman with the square spectacles. When Mrs. Beach was a little girl, she had often had trouble getting past this picture, and a voice (now long dead) had to remind her that she had been sent in quest of a gold thimble or a spool of thread.
Nora was gazing at the picture one rainy afternoon when a voice called from the foot of the stairs. From her room at the end of the hall, Mrs. Beach called back, “Is that you, Martha? Come on up.”
Unable to move, Nora heard the footsteps mounting and at the last moment, panic set her free and she vanished into her own room. Martha King, having seen the flash of skirts and the door closing, said to herself, Then she is trying to avoid me.
“In my room,” Mrs. Beach called, and Martha went on down the hall.
Mrs. Beach was seated at her sewing table fitting together the complicated pieces of a pink and white and green quilt. The big double bed, which dominated the room, was made up and the pillows tucked into a round hollow bolster. The rest of the room was in such disorder as one might expect if the occupant were packing for a long sea voyage, but Mrs. Beach had merely been straightening her bureau drawers. The chairs were piled with odds and ends whose place in the grand scheme of things she had not yet decided upon.
“Just move that pile of shirtwaists,” she said, with a wave of her stork-handled scissors. “I’d rather you didn’t sit on the bed.”
“I can’t stay,” Martha said.
“You always say that, and it’s not polite. If you come intending to leave right away, you might as well not come at all. Have you heard from Mrs. Potter?”
Martha nodded.
“I think it’s so strange that she doesn’t write to me,” Mrs. Beach said, “with Nora staying in our house. If Alice or Lucy were staying with the Potters I’d certainly feel that it was my duty to write and show my appreciation, but I gather that Nora and her mother are not very close. That may be why she doesn’t bother to put herself out, where Nora is concerned. Now that I think of it, it seems to me that you might have done more for Nora than you have, these past weeks. Or would you have preferred that she went home with her family?”
In order to carry on an amicable conversation with Mrs. Beach, most people found it necessary to let a great many of her remarks pass unchallenged. Far from being grateful because they had come to see her, she usually found pleasure in pointing out to them how long it had been since their last visit. She also asked questions that were inoffensive in themselves but that steered the conversation inexorably around to matters that were sometimes delicate and sometimes none of Mrs. Beach’s business.
“I’ve had only one letter from her,” Martha said. “She asked to be remembered to you. Austin hears from Mr. Potter.”
“I must say she seemed very fond of us all when she was here, but out of sight, out of mind, apparently. This is the wild rose pattern.” Mrs. Beach held the quilt out for Martha to admire. “I’ve made one for Lucy and now I’m making one for Alice. I want them to have something to remember me by when I’m gone.”
“It’s lovely,” Martha said. “But I wish you wouldn’t talk of dying on a gloomy day like this.”
“After you reach sixty,” Mrs. Beach said, “you don’t expect to be around forever. I don’t know that I even want to be. The world was a much nicer place when I was a girl. Good breeding and good manners counted for something. My mother began her married life with her own carriage and a large staff of servants. In the summer we went to …”
Mrs. Beach kept Martha for three-quarters of an hour, talking about the vanished world of her girlhood and about the kindergarten, and then she said, “Please don’t think I’m driving you away, my dear, but if I d
on’t have my afternoon rest——”
“If you wanted to lie down,” Martha said, rising, “why have you been keeping me here? I tried to leave three times in the last fifteen minutes, and each time you——”
“Don’t be so touchy,” Mrs. Beach said, and smiled. Her smiles were rare, in any case, and seldom as amused or as genuinely friendly as this one was. “All old people have their failings,” she said. “Stop and see the girls on your way out. They’ll be hurt if you don’t.”
The Beach girls were on the glassed-in back porch, painting little wooden chairs. They had spread newspapers over the floor but there was no way they could avoid getting paint on themselves. Lucy had a streak of robin’s-egg blue running through her hair where she had touched her head in a gesture of weariness. Their hands and aprons were covered with paint.
“Be careful and don’t brush against anything!” she said when Martha appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“They’re for the kindergarten? How beautiful!” Martha said. “And what a lot of work!”
“There’s no end to it,” Lucy said. “If I’d known what we were letting ourselves in for——”
“Mother’s upstairs,” Alice said.
“I’ve just been up to see her,” Martha said, “but I really came over to talk to you. About Ab, I mean. I haven’t decided definitely whether to send her to kindergarten or not. She’s so young.”
“You mustn’t let our friendship influence you,” Lucy said.
“Oh I wouldn’t,” Martha said. “If I don’t send her, I know you’ll understand. When are you going to start?”
“The first week in October, if everything is ready by that time,” Lucy said. “We’re having trouble with the tables. Mr. Moseby keeps promising them by a certain date, and then they’re never ready. It’s so discouraging.”
Time Will Darken It Page 18
