Time Will Darken It (47 page)

“You mustn’t think too much about what she says in her delirium.”

“I can’t help thinking about it,” Mrs. Potter said. “And besides, she wasn’t delirious when she said that. She was in her right mind. ‘I don’t have to go on living if I don’t want to,’ she said.… Part of the time she knows me, and then other times when I say something to her, she doesn’t hear.”

A chunk of snow dislodged by the wind left a branch of the big elm tree and was scattered on the brilliant sunshine.

“If I only knew what it is that’s troubling her, I might be able to do something about it. But I’ve asked her and she won’t tell me. Did she ever talk to you and Cousin Austin?”

“She talked to Austin,” Martha said.

“It surely wasn’t the kindergarten,” Mrs. Potter said.

“No,” Martha said. “She was very good with the children. They all loved her.”

“It must be something else,” Mrs. Potter said. “Sometimes I think it was those law books. I told you, didn’t I, that she never wrote us that she was reading law in Cousin Austin’s office?”

“Yes.”

“Was it Cousin Austin’s idea?”

“No, it was Nora’s,” Martha said.

“Well, it was very thoughtful of him to allow her to do it. I should have thanked him before this. He’s always so ready to help. Some day he’ll get his reward.… I’ve been low in my mind, but I have always wanted to live, and I can’t seem to find the right thing to say to comfort her. There’s something else she said last night: ‘It looks different without the leaves.’ Whatever could she have meant by that?”

“I don’t know,” Martha said. “You’re sure she said ‘leaves’?”

“Yes. And then she said, ‘I ought never to have allowed myself to hope.’ I asked her what it was that she hoped, but she didn’t hear me. And right after that, the nurse said something about her condition and she flared up and we had difficulty quieting her. I oughtn’t to tell you these things, Martha. It isn’t good for you when you’re expecting a child. Everything ought to be happy around you. I don’t know why you didn’t tell us last summer—why you let us come and impose on you that way when there was no need.”

“Last summer was a long time ago,” Martha said. “Your being here now doesn’t change anything so far as Austin and I are concerned. I’m just sorry that there’s so little we can do.”

“Don’t say that,” Mrs. Potter said, withdrawing her arm. “You and Cousin Austin have meant more to us in these last few days than I can ever begin to tell you.”

“I’m going to leave you alone for a little while,” Martha said. “You must get some rest before you go back to the hospital. If you want anything, call me.”

The comforter who says
I know, I know
(and doesn’t know) or
You must be brave
(when all people are brave and it doesn’t help them when the blow comes) is nevertheless serving a purpose. Martha King made it possible for Mrs. Potter to talk about her grief, and when the words were out of the way and the bedroom door had closed and the comforter had gone off down the hall, then the dammed-up feeling was free to flow over the whole winter landscape, covering roads, setting houses and barns afloat, and determining at last the level past which the flood waters would not rise.

2

On the door of room 211 in the hospital was a sign that read
NO VISITORS
. This did not apply to Dr. Seymour and the nurses or to Mrs. Potter, who slept on a cot in Nora’s room and went home some time during the day to change her clothes, to be with her husband, and to rest. The sign did apply to Austin King.

While he was at his office, he was safe; he could turn his mind to other things and forget for a while about Nora, though even here the trouble intruded. He would find himself staring at a legal paper he had read over and over, without knowing a single word he had read. When he was at home, his eyes kept turning toward his desk where, in the left-hand cubby-hole, there was a letter from Nora. Though Austin needed
to talk to someone about this letter and all that had led up to the writing of it, there was no one willing to listen night after night with eyelids grown heavy and no one came down the stairs and put an end to his investigation of blind alleys and his consideration of what might have happened in the light of what actually had. He was quite clear in his mind about what he had meant to do for Nora, but he had been patient, he had listened to Nora instead of turning his back on her the day she came to see him at his office, and if he hadn’t treated her gently, would Nora have stayed up North? So much depended on the answer to this question and there was only one person who could tell him (through bandages) what he needed to know.

The Mississippi people returning brought three small suitcases with them and left behind all desire to please, to charm, to acquire new friends. Though there was a question of how long they would stay, their reason for coming was clear to everyone. Time did not pass the way it had before in a whirl of carriage rides, picnics, and trips to the Chautauqua grounds. Time had slowed down and was threatening to stop entirely.

The friends the Potters had made on their previous visit did not desert them. The callers filled the living-room and overflowed into the study. What had happened was too tragic to be mentioned, and so the callers depended on their mere physical presence to convey how sorry they were, and talked about other things, about the weather, about the new oiled road from Draperville to Gleason, about the new fashions in women’s dress, about their own sciatica or rheumatism or the great number of people who were down with the grippe, in an effort to divert the Potters from their only purpose in coming to Draperville. Lucy Beach threw herself into Mrs. Potter’s arms and wept, but then the Beach girls had always been queer, and if they hadn’t taken it into their heads to start a kindergarten, the whole thing might have been
avoided. When Lucy had been led from the room, the conversation was resumed where it had left off, the full social strength was mustered to cover this lapse from decorum.

Mr. Potter acted like a man who had been stunned. He was neither restless nor interested in anything that went on around him. He sat most of the time in the big chair in the study, unable to take part in any conversation or to check the involuntary tears that at certain moments filled his eyes and slid down his leathery cheeks. Rather than disturb him, Austin and Martha King found themselves turning to Randolph when there were messages of sympathy that had to be acknowledged, decisions to be made.

Of the many things that would not fall into any proper place during this second visit, one of the strangest was the change in Randolph Potter. He was able to pass the mirror in the hall, the ebony pier glass in the living-room, without so much as a glance at his reflection. His handsomeness forgotten, he had become overnight the prop of the family. Mrs. Potter leaned on him as if from years of habit. When Ab offered herself to him, Randolph lifted her onto his lap but instead of playing games or teasing her, he went on talking quietly to the callers or to Austin and Martha, and after a few minutes she got down and went off to play. Mary Caroline Link called and Randolph talked to her in a way that was pleasant and friendly, but that aroused no expectations. It was almost as if he were her older brother, home from college arid trying to fit once more, or at least appear to fit, into the family circle he had now outgrown. He asked about Rachel the first night, when a strange white woman moved around the dining-room table with platters of food. When Martha King explained that Rachel had disappeared shortly before Christmas, taking her children with her, Randolph nodded absently as if he had known all along that was what Rachel would eventually do.

He was not grotesquely cheerful the way his mother sometimes was, nor openly grief-stricken, like Mr. Potter. It was almost as if Randolph, who always walked by himself and never made common cause with his family, were now justifying the wisdom of his past selfishness by assuming full responsibility for his family and for the confusion and distress which they brought with them, sooner or later, wherever they went. Randolph was kind, he was thoughtful, anxious not to make trouble for Martha King and solicitous about her health, and sensible about the problems which Austin and Martha brought to him. More wonderful than anything else, he carried for eight whole days, all alone, the burden of conversation in a house where nobody felt like talking. His mild jokes and stories said or seemed to say:
You understand that it is not lack of feeling that makes me able to tell about the time Pa paid a call on the new minister. I know my sister is lying in the hospital badly burned and that there is nothing any of its can do about it. But if you listen carefully, you will perceive that the jokes I make, the stories I tell, are not the ones I would use if we were all lighthearted and Mama were not waiting for us to leave the dining-room table so she can go back to the hospital. But somebody has to carry the load, otherwise you would sit and stare at your food, and Pa would begin to cry again, and it only makes things worse
.

One day when he and Austin were alone in the study, Austin brought up the subject that no one was willing to talk to him about. “For a while,” he began, “we didn’t see as much of Nora as we ought to have. living right next door.”

“You and Cousin Martha weren’t in any way responsible for what happened,” Randolph said.

“I know, but I blame myself for——”

“You mustn’t. Sister shouldn’t have stayed up here on her own. Mama tried to prevent her. We all did. But she had this idea about being a kindergarten teacher, and wouldn’t listen to reason. I know you both love her and that’s enough, as I
keep telling Mama. She thinks if she’d only allowed herself to realize that Nora was a grown woman, and not kept harping at her—but you know Mama is just as set in her ways as Nora is. After a little, when things are straightened out, I hope you’ll come and stay with us. You’d like it very much down South, Cousin Austin. I’ll take you around and show you the country. Take you coonhunting, if you like.”

3

“I just don’t know,” Mrs. Potter said.

Austin’s question had taken her by surprise. The hack was waiting in front of the house and Mrs. Potter, with her hat and coat on, was waiting at the foot of the stairs for Mr. Potter to come down and drive off to the hospital with her. She glanced around for a place to sit down. The only chair near her was an antique of carved walnut that had been put in the front hall purposely because in the hall there was less likelihood of anyone’s being tempted to sit on it. The chair creaked ominously but it sustained Mrs. Potter’s weight, which was not much, in any case.