Time Will Darken It (20 page)

All that Mary Caroline would have asked for, if asking would have done any good, was to belong to a large family where babies recur frequently, and not be forced to roam the neighbourhood in search of them. The year between her eleventh and twelfth birthdays moved so slowly that at times it seemed to her she would never get through it. But once it became a physical possibility for her to have a baby of her own, her whole concern was disparagingly for her mirror. She cut out dresses from tissue paper patterns and pieced them together on the floor of her bedroom—an undertaking that often ended in tears. She tried twenty ways of pinning up her hair and in the mirror she was twenty different women—young, old, animated, bored, modest as a nun, evil beyond shame or boldness. She bathed constantly and took great care of her nails.

All this went on in her bedroom, at the end of the upstairs hall. She presented to the world—to her mother and father and sister, her schoolmates, her teachers—the image of a fourteen-year-old girl with sturdy legs, a thick waist, thick eyebrows, a receding chin, an awkward manner, and a tendency to blush. Where there should have been mysterious shadows in her face, to correspond with the mysteries that absorbed all her waking mind, there was only a painful shyness.

In the town of Draperville, the fourteen-year-old girls were the natural prey of older boys. At their moment of budding, the girls left the boys of their own age (still in knee-britches, in love with bicycles) behind. The older boys were waiting in Giovanni’s ice-cream parlour, with the dark and the whole outdoors (and sometimes the girl, as well) on their side.

The five boys, all of decent respectable families, who lured a Polish miner’s daughter out to the cemetery one May night, would not have dared to do what they did if it had been, say,
one of the Atchison girls instead. But they managed, now and then, singly, to seduce some girl whose father was cashier of the bank, or county superintendent of highways, or a hardware merchant or a lawyer or a doctor. The Lathrop boy, so well brought up, so polite always with older people, persuaded Jessie McCormack to go with him out into a cornfield at the edge of town. And afterward, when he urinated on the moonlit weeds, he felt a sensation of burning pain that frightened him and robbed him of all pride in his wonderful new accomplishment. Since there seemed to be no other way to renew this pride except by telling on the girl, he did that—only to one boy, but that was enough. That boy told the others. And in the end, the word
cornfield
was a signal for Jessie McCormack to turn away and find other company.

What was done to the Polish miner’s daughter was an act of horror, but at least her body was old for her age. The McCormack girl was prematurely pretty, with blue eyes and straight blonde hair and bangs, and her mother dressed her like the doll in
Tales of Hoffmann
and she had not meant to do anything that the other girls didn’t do. A single word can age people, wash away any youth, any attractiveness they were intended to have. At seventeen, no longer a doll and disappointing as a woman, she sat alone in the porch swing on Saturday evenings and watched the couples go by.

The high school boys compared experiences in the locker rooms and washrooms at school (
I don’t ever want to have anything to do with her again. I hate a girl that
…), but in all their tattling, their wondering and recounting and imagining, they left Mary Caroline untouched. The boy who asked Mary Caroline to the senior play, her last year in high school, wore glasses and went out for the track team (unsuccessfully) and in his social inexperience let her walk on the outside until somebody shouted “Girl for sale!”

And all the while her eyes saw, on every side, the strong arms and straight backs and widening shoulders. Her ears
caught the husky music in voices that had only recently deepened. There was, she discovered, a hollow centre in her body which drained all the strength out of her legs whenever she met James Morrissey in the corridor—James Morrissey who had curly blond hair and a cracked laugh and white teeth and cheeks like apple blossoms, and who wrote notes to Frances Longworth and to Virginia Burris but never to Mary Caroline. And then suddenly it was no longer James Morrissey but now Boyd Mangus who affected that highly sensitive nervous centre. Then it was Frankie Cooper. Then Joe Diehl. Like a cloud shadow, love passed over the field, having nothing to do with actual boys but only with something which for a brief time was given to them.

Mary Caroline had always been studious, but when the Potters arrived and she suddenly started acting like her older sister, gossip lumped both girls together permanently. The gossip of Draperville was often irresponsible and unjust. Mary Caroline was not boy crazy; she had received a sign. She who had looked in the mirror so many times with sickness and dislike for herself had seen mirrored in a human eye her need for love. She had seen it only once, at the Kings’ evening party for the people from Mississippi, but it had been unmistakable.

Although the world firmly and relentlessly pushes young people together, it does so with an object in view and has very little patience with them once it becomes apparent that the object is not going to be served.
If this one won’t love you, then for heaven’s sake go find another who will:
so says the world, and the young, unless they are unusually obstinate, obey. Mary Caroline came back, day after day, in the hope of seeing again what she had seen the night of the Kings’ party, and always with an excuse in her hands—a dish of home-made fudge, a book of poems for Mrs. Potter (who never read poetry), one of her mother’s coffee cakes, or a bouquet of the same flowers that bloomed so abundantly in Martha King’s garden. When these offerings had been received and disposed
of, Mary Caroline sat in a shy silence, never taking her eyes off Randolph, and sometimes it was necessary for Martha King to ask her to meals.

6

“You’ll stay for lunch?” Alice Beach asked at the foot of the stairs.

“I’d love to,” Nora said, “but Cousin Martha is expecting me. I told her I’d be right back.”

“It’s all right,” Lucy Beach called from the dining-room. “I just telephoned Martha. It was perfectly all right. She’s having a light lunch the same as we are. And this way we can have you all to ourselves for once. Everything is ready. Come and sit down.”

From their strange manner, which conveyed a subdued excitement, it was clear that the Beach girls had something on their minds and were debating whether to tell Nora. The secret, like all secrets, came out eventually. Lucy and Alice were thinking of starting a kindergarten. There was a place downtown, it seemed—two rooms over Bailey’s Drug Store that were for rent very reasonably.

“I’ve spoken to Mr. Bailey about them,” Lucy said, “and he’s waiting to hear from us before he lets anyone else have them. There has to be some equipment—the more the better, naturally, but it all takes money and we haven’t got very much. We’re going to have some long low tables, and some chairs that are the right size for children, and coloured yarns for them to weave, and scissors and blocks and coloured paper for them to cut out——”

“Tell her about the book,” Alice said. “We sent off for——”

“We have a book written by an Italian woman,” Lucy said. “Sometime while you’re here——”

“It’s very difficult reading,” Alice said. “There’s a lot I can’t make head or tail of.”

“You haven’t tried,” Lucy said. “I don’t suppose, Nora, with all you have to do, that you’d have time or even be interested——”

“Oh, but I would,” Nora said. “I’d be very interested. I am already.”

The rest of the lunch party was given over to the kindergarten plans. When Lucy came back from the kitchen with a large dish of sliced peaches and the teapot, she said, “What we want to ask you, Nora, is this: Would you, as a kindness to us, speak to Mother about it? Maybe if you said it was a good idea, she might let us go ahead with it.”

“I don’t know that I have that much influence over her,” Nora said, “or any, as a matter of fact. But of course I’ll try. Just tell me what it is that you want me to say to her and I’ll——”

Before she could finish, the telephone began to ring, and Lucy jumped up from the table to answer it.

“Yes,” they heard her say. “All right, I will.”

“Who was it?” Alice asked when Lucy put the receiver back on the hook.

“That was your mother,” Lucy said. “She said to tell you that they’re waiting for you to go driving with them.”

“Oh it’s so stupid,” Nora said, rising from her place. “I don’t in the least want to go driving. Couldn’t I stay and talk with you?”

From the upstairs part of the house came the tinkle of a little bedside bell, bought in the open market in Fiesole long ago.

“Couldn’t we——” Nora began.

“That’s Mama,” Lucy said. “I’d better go see what she wants. It was so nice of you to stay and have lunch with us, Nora, and Alice will give you the book.”

7

All her stubbornness aroused, Nora sat under the mulberry tree in the Beaches’ yard, with the dark blue book that had been ordered from Chicago open on her lap, and in a short while her family (quite as if she didn’t exist) came out of the Kings’ house with Bud Ellis and got into the Ellises’ surrey. When Martha and Ab joined them, the surrey started up briskly and without even a backward glance they drove away. That’s what they’re like, she thought. And if anything happened to me, they’d just go on being themselves, so why do I worry so about them?

She waited a little longer, until Rachel came out of the kitchen door with a bundle under her arm, and called, “They was looking for you, Miss Nora. They wanted you to go driving with them.”

“I know,” Nora called back. “I didn’t want to go driving.”

“Well, you’re safe now. You outsmarted them. You got the whole house to yourself,” Rachel said and went off down the driveway.

The book failed to hold Nora’s attention, under the mulberry tree or in the window seat of Austin King’s study. She rejected for a while the temptation to explore the house, entirely empty and for the first time at her disposal, but in the end she put the book aside and wandered from room to room. There was very little that she hadn’t seen before, but observing the house the way it was now, unsoftened and unclaimed by the people who lived in it, she saw more clearly. Rejecting, approving, she tried to imagine what it was like to be Martha King.