Time Will Darken It

by William Maxwell

  Austin’s present turned out to be a grey woollen scarf that Nora had knitted herself.

  “That’s very thoughtful of you, Nora.”

  “If you don’t like the colour,” she said, “I can make you another. All I have to do is get some wool and——”

  “No,” Austin said. “This is just right. Thank you very much.”

  “There’s a present here for you,” Ab said to Nora.

  “Go and get it,” Austin said. “It’s on the hall table.”

  As Ab started out of the room, Nora said, “I didn’t know what to get for Frieda.”

  “You didn’t have to get her anything,” Austin said.

  “Well, I wanted to,” Nora said happily. “I didn’t know what she’d like so I got her a handkerchief.… Is this for me?”

  “Yes,” Ab said.

  Austin turned his face away while Nora carefully and painstakingly untied the ribbon. Her exclamations of pleasure, her praise of Martha’s taste, he only partly heard.

  “Abbey, take these up to your mother,” he said, handing her the three packages. “And be careful you don’t slip on the stairs.”

  There was no use waiting until tomorrow to tell Nora what he had to tell her. He might as well get it over with, along with all the other unpleasantness.

  With her head framed by the Christmas wreath in the window, Nora sat and listened quietly while he explained to her how grateful he and Mr. Holby were for all the help she had given them after Miss Ewing’s breakdown, but how with the added burden and confusion of breaking in a new girl, they couldn’t—they neither of them had the time to——

  Without any noticeable or sickening jar, the world slid back into its accustomed orbit, the one it had been following for hundreds of thousands of years. Nora looked at her hands, at the holly on the mantelpiece, at the wooden animals that had fallen out of the ark. She said, “I know.…” She said, “I understand, Cousin Austin, I know exactly.…” And by the time he had finished, she was apparently quite reconciled. She tried to pretend that it wasn’t a great disappointment to her, but only something natural and to be expected on Christmas Day. She smiled, she went on talking about other things for a short while, and as she was leaving, she said, “Tell Cousin Martha I love the handkerchief. I always lose mine wherever I go and never have enough.”

  15

  “What I’d really like is to behave naturally toward you,” Nora said. “And the knowledge you have that I do love you—and knowing I know that nothing can be done about that, but that you are willing to act as though this did not affect your attitude toward me as a person and so forth—I don’t know whether I am expressing myself so badly that you may not be able to follow what I am trying to say. I hope you do understand, because it is terribly important to me—all these things help me to act toward you as I know I should. I may appear to be giving a very poor performance of trying to help myself, but I am trying.”

  For a while she sat silent, with her arms embracing her knees, lost in thought. The loudness of the clock testified to the lateness of the hour. Nora stared at the design of the carpet without realizing how the silence prolonged itself. At nine-thirty, when she came for the fourth night running, she had said that she was only going to stay for five minutes. She had been discussing, analysing, explaining herself for over three hours now.

  “I can’t accept the nice things you say to me,” she said. “Accept them gracefully, I mean. And yet the very least little thing that you say to me pleases me so. It makes wonderful things happen inside of me. Do you know how good it makes me feel, how glad, sitting across from you in this room? I know that, being you, you know exactly what I am going through, and you are trying to help me. It seems like something without beginning or end, you and I in this room. Everything is so simple now, I say to myself. He knows how you feel. He knows you love him. He knows, in fact, everything. Go ahead and talk, if you must talk, only don’t look at him.… Isn’t it strange the trouble I have looking at you, Austin? I can’t look at you.”

  If she had looked at him, she would have seen that his eyelids were drooping. The lines that gave his face character and distinction had melted. He was very tired. He had tried, like a man walking a tightrope blindfolded over Niagara Falls, to keep himself and the wheel-barrow in balance, but whereas Nora went away each night looking relieved, easier in her mind, and more hopeful, he himself was so exhausted by her that he could hardly get up the stairs.

  “Sometimes I’ve thought about you and wondered. If you had known me first, would things have been any different? I don’t mean necessarily that you would have wanted to marry me, but you’d have liked me, wouldn’t you? Because I’m not like other girls, am I? Not just another girl who loves you and is afraid of becoming a nuisance?”

  “No,” Austin said.

  “In spite of my general muddle-headedness,” Nora said, “certain aspects of this thing are clear, irrevocably clear. I know that nothing can ever again be as empty as the life I lived before I knew you. When I have moments of despair and think it would be so much easier for me just to give up, I can’t. Everything in me fights it at every turn. What do you do? What happens when you are caught between two things? When you can’t get where you are headed, but it is impossible to turn back? I know that you have been kind and gentle when you might have been angry and lost all patience with me, and I would not have done anything but accept it from you, because that’s how it is. Besides, in letting me come and read in your office, you have opened an entirely new world to me. I’m sorry, naturally, that it had to stop, but that doesn’t alter the fact that you have been good and wonderful. How can you help but love a person who has been the sort of person you have been? I have nothing but the most profound admiration for you.… Oh, don’t you see, if I keep this up, this wild talking, it’s because I’m saying over and over ‘I love you and you don’t love me and how can I go on? What am I going to do?’ Sooner or later you will become discouraged with me. You will feel I am not making any real effort to overcome an emotion which can only spoil everything for us. I mean make it impossible for us ever to talk to each other again the way we are doing now.… But if, in permitting me to say anything and everything to you, we have only succeeded in having me fall more in love with you, we must be on the wrong track.… Oh, it wasn’t entirely wrong because if, up to a point, I hadn’t been able to talk to you as I did that day in your office and as I have been, these last few nights, I think——”

  There was the sound of a step on the stair, which Austin didn’t pay any attention to, until it was followed by a second and a third.

  “And I am thinking of this very carefully,” Nora said. “I think I should have——”

  The third step was followed by a fourth and a fifth. Austin’s eyelids lifted. His face came back into focus. He turned toward the doorway into the hall. Nora went on talking and broke off only when Martha King came into the room, wearing a long lace negligee over her nightgown, and with her light brown hair down her back. She walked between them, over to the window seat, sat down, and drew the lace skirt together over her knees. For a moment nobody said anything. Nora coloured with embarrassment. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “It’s quite all right,” Martha said. “Your voice carries.” Then turning to Austin, “What do you want of her? Why do you go on making her suffer?”

  Nora felt a flicker of elation which gave way to sorrow, to a sorrow that was very deep, as if the woman sitting in the window were her first friend and final enemy, someone whose coming had been long expected and planned for. “He hasn’t made me suffer,” she said. “He hasn’t done anything. It’s all my fault. I’m so sorry. I’m so very sorry this happened. Please forgive me!”

  “Nora, I think you’d better go now,” Austin said. “It’s late. It’s after midnight.”

  From the hall doorway, Nora turned and looked back and saw that they were waiting in a silence from which she was excluded.

  �
�I really didn’t mean to do this,” she said, fumbling with the latch on the front door. “I couldn’t have meant to do this.”

  16

  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. “May
be 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.