Time Will Darken It

by William Maxwell

  His deafness had the effect of making the world seem a larger place, the streets wider, the buildings farther apart, the sky vast again, the way it had seemed to be when he was a country boy. It also showed him that every man was a liar, and he himself—the eternal horse trader—was of course the greatest, the most complete liar of them all.

  The truth is necessarily partial. Every vision of completeness is a distortion in one way or another, whether it springs from sickness or sanctity. But in the visions of saints there are voices that speak reassuringly of the cloud of Unknowing. Dr. Danforth did not even hear the occasional good that people spoke of him. When they came to the livery stable to hire a carriage, he directed them to Snowball McHenry, the Negro stableboy, and betrayed himself only in the way that his hands petted and stroked and captured the heart of every dumb animal that came near them. In time he learned to use his infirmity to advantage, reading lips when he wanted to understand, and when it served his purpose not to understand, making people repeat, until in the exasperation of continual shouting, they gave the game away.

  That’s Dr. Danforth, deaf as a post but nobody ever got the better of him in a horse trade.… Lives all alone, never goes anywhere or sees anybody.… Doc’s a fine man. The trouble is, he won’t let anybody do anything for him. His father was like that towards the end of his life.…

  So, charitably, Dr. Danforth was assigned a place; he became a town character, like the Orthwein boy, who was born without a soft palate, and Mrs. Jouette, so given to litigation with the members of her own family.

  Dr. Danforth knew everything that went on in Draperville but from a distance, from the greatest distance of all, which is the outside. Ten years passed without its ever occurring to him that he needed a new suit of clothes. He was often seen with a stubble on his chin. He didn’t know or care how he looked. On his way home to the boarding-house on Hudson Street, he stepped over little girls who were too engrossed in their sidewalk games to realize that they were in anybody’s way; saw them leave their coloured chalk, their jacks and skipropes and rubber balls, and lose themselves in the mirror of some upstairs bedroom, just as he himself was lost in a private hush; saw the inevitable change from adolescents to men and women who told lies about each other, about themselves, and about the true nature of the world they lived in, never for a moment admitting what he and everybody else knew to be a fact—that the apple had gone bad a long time ago, and slugs had eaten the rose, that the hay had mildewed in the barn, and the last hope of fair dealing was lost in third-grade arithmetic.

  An incomplete vision may last for generations, but anything complete, like any act of will, is bound to crack in a much shorter time. With Dr. Danforth the change came when he began to understand people, unconsciously, by observation and instinct, as he understood animals. The light in the human eye, the sudden change of colouring under surprise and emotion, the stiffness around the mouth, the movement of the hands were all, he discovered, essentially truthful; as if, in those moments when people were most anxious to deceive, they were also desperately eager to convey to him, to anybody, that they were lying. Lying very plausibly—the eye, the skin, the mouth, the hands said—but lying nevertheless, and with no real desire to be believed. The motive is money, said the eye. Ambition, confessed the nervous hands. Fear, said the mottled skin. Envy, said the hungry mouth.

  As for his own lies, which had once filled him with horror and pride, he saw that he was not even in a class with Snowball, who lied like an artist, in several dimensions, for pleasure sometimes, sometimes out of boredom, now maliciously, now sincerely out of a confused sense of fact. Since Dr. Danforth loved Snowball, he had to believe everything that the Negro said—tentatively, provisionally, never trying to pin him down, because one lie exposed always gave rise to another, and Snowball himself was apparently incapable of grasping the idea, let alone the ideal, of truth.

  Into this crack, bit by bit, enough of the apocalyptic vision disappeared so that when Ella Morris came into the stable one Decoration Day, to hire a rig, he was ready for her. She was then past thirty; a very homely, very intelligent woman with a queer habit of twisting her head to one side when she talked to people and considering them with detachment, with an unsentimental curiosity. Dr. Danforth, as a young man, had known her father and used to call on Mr. Morris sometimes when he needed advice. Ella wanted a carriage to drive her mother out to the cemetery. She didn’t shout at him as people so often did. She didn’t even talk slowly, but in a perfectly normal voice asked, “Why don’t you ever come and see us?”

  He thought at first that he must have misunderstood her, but she seemed to be waiting for an answer, so he said, “I don’t go anywhere. People don’t like to talk to a deaf person.”

  “You can understand me, can’t you?” she asked, twisting her head and looking at him.

  He nodded.

  “Mother would be very pleased if you came to see her,” Ella Morris said. “She often speaks of you.”

  For two days he tried to make up his mind what to do. Then he went out and bought a new suit, a new white shirt, and a new tie and hat, and that evening he went to call on the Morrises. The old lady talked to him about her dead husband. When Dr. Danforth said what a fine man he was, she said, “Isn’t it strange, nobody misses him. All the people that knew him, and all the people he helped. It’s just as if he had never lived. I don’t know how people can forget so quickly.”

  “They don’t forget,” he said. “It’s just that they have so much else on their minds.”

  Ella sat quietly, listening, following the conversation. But the questioning look, the look of reservation, or perhaps of unkind curiosity was not there. She seemed, in some way, to have made up her mind about him.

  They talked about the old days for a while and when he got up to go, the old lady said, “I hope you’ll come again,” and took his hand and looked deeply into his eyes, trying to see, apparently, whether he really did remember her husband.

  When Ella went to the door with him, he was afraid that she was going to comment sarcastically about his new suit, but all she said was, “I hope Mother didn’t tire you. She lives a great deal in the past.”

  He went to see the Morrises again, and then again, and one night they asked him to go to a church supper with them. He was afraid to go, but he went, nevertheless, and because he was with the Morrises, people seemed to treat him differently. They went out of their way to draw him into conversation, and he wasn’t shy. He talked to people, with his eyes turning occasionally towards Ella Morris, and on the way home that night a great wave came over him of happiness and hope. Sitting on the front porch, after the old lady had excused herself and gone indoors to escape the night air, Ella asked him to marry her. It was so strange, not being able to hear the words and yet knowing, by his own wildly beating heart, that they had been said. He was frightened at what she had done and he thought, for a second, that the only thing left for him to do was to pick up his new hat and run, but he couldn’t even do that, because Ella was still talking, in that inaudible voice, her eyes focused on the porch railing, and her face so beautiful with trouble that he realized he couldn’t go; that unless he took her in his arms, something terrible would happen.

  “If you’re sure,” he said; but that was a long time later, and it was all he ever said.

  From that night everything was different for him. He wasn’t on the outside any more, looking at lighted windows. He was sitting down at the table in the dining-room or beside the parlour lamp. He didn’t walk down the street and nod to people on their front porches, on summer evenings. He had a porch to sit on, a place where he was expected.

  10

  “I saw you coming out of the bank,” Nora said, “but you didn’t see me.”

  “Why didn’t you stop me?” Austin asked. He had just come through the revolving door of the post office, and the sun was shining directly in his eyes.

  “You were lost in thought,” Nora said.

  “Was I?” Austin
said. Her manner with him was friendly and natural—or almost natural—but since her visit with Martha, Nora hadn’t come either to the house or to the office. During the past week he had seen her only once, in the side yard of the house next door. Though he was glad to see her now, if he had had a chance to choose where they met, it would not have been in so public a place as the steps of the post office. He shaded his eyes from the glare and said, “What do you hear from your family?”

  “They’re fine,” Nora said. “Pa had an accident with the new automobile, but it wasn’t so very serious. He ran over a culvert and bent the front axle, I think it was, and had to be towed into Howard’s Landing. But it’s all right now. And Brother has a new hunting dog, and they’ve had lots of company.” She moved up one step in order to be on a level with him. “Mrs. Beach is complaining because you and Cousin Martha never come to see us.”

  “We haven’t gone anywhere,” Austin said. “Martha hasn’t felt up to it. You know we’re——”

  “Yes, I know,” Nora said. “I’m very happy for you. I——” She hesitated as a man came up the steps towards them.

  “I just sold my corn, Austin,” the man said.

  “Good time to sell,” Austin said, nodding, and waited until Ray Murphy had disappeared into the post office. Then he said, “Are you getting along all right, Nora?”

  “Yes,” Nora said. “You don’t have to worry about me any more. I don’t know where I got the courage to speak to you as I did that day, but it must have been from you. Because even now as I look back on it and realize what an unthinkable thing I have done, somehow I’m not ashamed or humiliated. So it must be because of you.”

  “There’s no reason for you to feel ashamed.”

  “I hope you’ve forgotten all I said to you, because I have. I’ve put it out of my mind forever. It was just something that at the time seemed very real but wasn’t actually, and I’m very grateful to you for talking to me the way you did, because some men—but you aren’t like that, and so there’s no use in my going into it. I wasn’t in love with you—or if I was, I’m not any more. It’s just like you said. I’ll always know that I can come to you if I’m ever in trouble, and you’ll do everything in your power to help me, and for that reason I’m not entirely sorry. But you mustn’t worry any more about me because there’s nothing to worry about.”

  The post-office door opened and Nora went right on talking. “The chief thing I want to say to you is how truly grateful to you I am, and how sorry I am that you should ever have become involved enough to feel that you …”

  If Ray Murphy was surprised to see them still standing there, his face did not show it. He nodded at Austin and went on down the steps and crossed the street.

  “… Sometimes I feel like writing to Cousin Martha,” Nora said, “and telling her how kind you were to me, and how you put me on the right track.”

  “I don’t believe I’d do that, if I were you.”

  “Oh I wouldn’t dream of writing to her!” Nora exclaimed. “She might not understand and I wouldn’t want to cause you or her a moment’s unhappiness. It’s just that she has so much—she has you and little Abbey and that beautiful house and all—and I feel like telling her how much she has to be thankful for. But she knows, of course. There’s no need to tell her things that she already knows.”

  “No,” Austin agreed. He saw Al Sterns coming across the courthouse lawn and, turning to Nora, said, “Would you like to come up to the office and talk to me there?”

  “Don’t you see I can’t come up to your office and talk to you?” Nora said. “Of course I want to, but what is the good? I’d just rattle on and on. If I could only be still or talk sensibly, but I can’t do either. I know I’m an emotional person. I’m aware of all these things. But if you only knew how badly I want you to like me and approve of me!”

  “I do like and approve of you,” Austin said. Al Sterns waited for a wagon to pass and then started across the street towards the post-office.

  “I want desperately to be friends with you, but I don’t know how. It’s not your fault. You are doing everything possible to make things easy for me, but even thinking about going to your office with you makes me want to run miles away, because I know I’d only make a fool of myself. Sometimes when I haven’t seen you for several days I think ‘Maybe he isn’t like that. Now think. How could you remember exactly what he looks like? Part of it is in your head.’ But then I see you coming up the walk and you are just as I remember you, of course. This is my compensation for being all mixed up in general—that I have certain things—faces, mannerisms, and so forth, so impressed on my mind that I can never forget them.”

  “Austin, how’s the world treating you?”

  “Can’t complain, Al.… This is my cousin, Miss Potter.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Miss Potter,” Al Sterns said and put out his hand. “Austin, they tell me you——”

  “Or even colour them in imagination,” Nora said. “They are just as they are.”

  “I’ll drop in and see you later,” Al Sterns said, and went on up the steps.

  “You are just as you are,” Nora said. “I think of you all the time, because I can’t help doing that. But I don’t think of you in any woe-begone way. Just sometimes when I can’t find anything to do to keep me busy or at night when I’m falling asleep, I suddenly wonder where you are and what you’re doing. And if we do find ourselves face to face, by some accident, the way we are now, I know I’ll always have something to say to you, because I think in terms of you. Whenever I see anything that moves me, makes me smile or feel sad, I always think of you. But no one need ever know. I never talk about you, about how wonderful you are, or drag compliments out of people so I can repeat them to you, or make over Ab, or do any of the things girls do when they’re hopelessly in love. I won’t run in and out of the house on some flimsy pretext, and on the other hand, if I don’t come to see you very often, you mustn’t think it’s because I don’t have any interest in you, because I do.”

  “I understand,” Austin said. He had been expecting Al Sterns to come out again, but he saw now that Al had come out of the side entrance and crossed the street in front of the fire station.

  “Last night I dreamed about you, and today I can’t remember the dream. All I know is that we were at home and that you were going into town with us, and somehow in the dream we went off and left you.…”

  It was a long involved dream that Nora recaptured, piece by piece, standing on the post-office steps. Though Austin kept his eyes rigidly on her face, he heard very little of it. In his mind he said Nora, I have work to do.… There’s somebody waiting in my office.… over and over, hoping that Nora would grasp what he was thinking, by mental telepathy. I don’t want to listen to your dream.…

  “… we were driving through this section of the country,” Nora went on. “I can’t remember whether this was part of the same dream or another one. Anyway, there were two other people with us. Actually a couple who are not really friends of our family but the man is one of Pa’s business associates, with their twelve-year-old son. I can remember distinctly being at your house, Cousin Austin. I don’t remember arriving there, having you greet us and so forth, but suddenly in the dream I was leaning against the window-sill with my chin in my hands——”

  The Jouettes’ shiny black surrey drove up before the post-office. The coloured boy jumped down from the front seat and took old Mrs. Jouette’s letter from her.

  “—staring at you,” Nora said. “The window was closed, which was queer because it was in summer, and you were outdoors watering the lawn, paying absolutely no attention to us at all.”

  Old Mrs. Jouette, all in shiny black, like the carriage, turned to the sad-faced young girl beside her and said, “Who is that standing on the steps?”

  “Austin King.”

  “It can’t be,” Mrs. Jouette exclaimed.

  “It is all the same,” the girl said listlessly. “I don’t know who she is, but they were
standing there when we drove by before.”

  “I had the feeling in my dream,” Nora said earnestly, “I had the distinct feeling that you had been cordial and polite to everyone but me. I kept staring at you, trying to make you look at me.…”

  Seeing the old lady’s lorgnette trained upon him, Austin lifted his hat and bowed. The bow was returned, but without any accompanying smile of pleasure, and old Mrs. Jouette turned her attention to the courthouse lawn. Lord Nelson, Austin thought, at Trafalgar, in his admiral’s frock coat, with all his medals showing.…

  “… And you would not,” Nora said. “You absolutely refused to look at me. Yet you knew, of course, that I was staring at you for that express reason.…”

  11

  The voices in the study grew louder and Martha King, sitting in the living-room with young Mrs. Ellis, heard Bud Ellis say, “Of course it’s not your fault, Austin. All you did was draw up the papers. But naturally, since he was a relative of yours, we assumed——”

  “Let’s keep to the facts,” Judge Fairchild said. Martha got up and dragged her chair nearer the sofa.

  “I’m just stupid, I guess,” Mary Ellis said. “But it seems harder than anything I’ve ever tried to do. I sit down with three cook-books in front of me, and they all tell you to do something different, and never the thing you really want to know. If Bud weren’t particular about his food, it wouldn’t matter, but his mother was a very fine cook and he tells me things she used to make for him, like peach cobbler and upside-down-cake and salt-rising bread. And when I try the same thing, it never turns out right, for some reason. And I have to worry about things that Father Ellis can chew, and sometimes if he doesn’t like what we have, he gets up from the table. Bud says he does it just to make a scene, but naturally it makes me feel bad after I’ve tried to please him. Bud’s mother never used a recipe, he says. I don’t see how anybody can cook without a recipe. I don’t see how you begin, even.”