Time Will Darken It (54 page)

During the course of that interminable day, Austin’s relation to the man with a mole on his left cheek kept changing. When the wall would no longer support the weight of his head, he got up and walked, his nerves on edge, his mind coming up against a high blank fear every six or seven paces. He felt his ribs encased in a delicate pressure that
might, if he took too deep a breath, be shattered, and with it the last chance that things would turn out all right. A single nervous gesture, a word addressed to himself out loud and his life, like a round glass paperweight turned upside down, would be filled with revolving white particles of terror. At those moments when his natural patience seemed to have gained the upper hand and he was able to sit down and wait, the man with the mole would get up and walk, and it was impossible for Austin not to share in that walking, not to feel his own forehead contracting in the same furrows as that other forehead, and his eyes clouding over with the same suspicion that everything that could be done upstairs was not being done.

The first time that George Diehl, with his hands clasped behind his back, stopped in front of Austin as if there was something that he felt the need of saying, Austin turned his eyes away. He was sorry immediately. The mouth already open, about to speak, closed and the pacing was resumed. When George Diehl sat down and it was Austin’s turn to walk the floor, he hesitated and then said abruptly, “I guess we’re in this together. If you want to talk—if it will make it any easier for you to talk, go ahead.”

“No, thanks,” the man said, refusing this offer of sympathy as Austin had refused his cigar. Though neither offer was repeated, George Diehl did begin to talk eventually, about the lumber business, which was not too good, and then about how there wasn’t as much game as there used to be and how the creeks were beginning to be fished out or else ruined because the miners had been using dynamite in them; and Austin found himself with a lighted cigar in his right hand and a gradually unfolding history to contemplate that was quite different from his own, until this moment when the two had merged. The story of George Diehl (including the mistakes he had made—there were several that were serious—and the lucky breaks that had alternated with events not so
lucky; the jobs he had lost through no fault of his own, the neglected opportunities, how George Diehl’s oldest girl wanted to be a teacher, how his son didn’t care about anything so long as he had a little spending money in his pocket and they didn’t ask him, when he went out in the evening, where he was going and what time he would be home) was a story full of interest and suspense, of strangeness and incident and even poetry.

Austin tried to limit himself to listening, but certain scenes and situations kept rising to the surface of his mind; words got as far as his lips and had to be pushed back. Finally, the fabric of reserve gave way under the weight of George Diehl’s confidences and Austin began to talk.

Martha King’s pains recurred at the same unchanging interval. A scrubwoman, in slavery to a bucket of soapy water and grey mop, reached the doorway and looked in.

“What’s the matter? Won’t the baby come out?”

It was not a question but merely comfort, freely given and gratefully received.

“Have you any children?” Martha King asked, turning her face to the door.

“Nine alive and one dead.”

“Was your second as hard as the first?”

“That’s right. And with the second one I suffered the same pain.”

The scrubwoman went on mopping the corridor. She did not know or ask who the patient in 204 was. There was no lace on the hospital gown, and pain had first disfigured and was now busy disposing of the beautiful woman. Pain did its work so well that old Mr. Porterfield would not have recognized Mrs. King. Neither would the Beach girls nor Mrs. Danforth nor anyone who ever saw her gathering flowers in her garden of a late summer afternoon. First the beauty went, then the smile, then the light in the brown eyes, then the perfume, then the softness, then the fiery temper and finally
the deeper patience of love. All that was left was a creature writhing on a bed, trying to come to acceptable terms with agony.

George Diehl listened attentively, and now and then made some observation that indicated he had been turning over in his mind the events that Austin was describing. He had long ago come to the conclusion that there was so little difference in people or in how they met their problems that to criticize or take a high moral stand was more or less a waste of time. When Austin realized that no matter what he told George Diehl (he had already told him everything and nothing), George Diehl would not be surprised or shocked or blame him, a kind of exhilaration set in, which the older man understood but did not share—a state of excitement it was perfectly all right for Austin to feel, because he was younger than George Diehl and had more of his life before him.

The fading outside light was replaced by the glare of electric bulbs, and a black velvet cloth was hung outside the hospital windows.

“The only thing that frightens me is hearing that woman scream,” Martha King said.

It was her own screaming that she heard, this time. The next room was as quiet as doom.

Disfigure and dispose of Martha King as, say, Mrs. Beach or old Mr. Ellis knew her and you have a nameless animal creature, but the creature is not the end and certainly not the answer. There is finally the self, biting its hands and shouting
It’s awful
 … 
Oh please … It’s so awful
 … 
Oh God I don’t like it.…

Out in the corridor there was the sound of dishes rattling, of talking and occasionally laughter. People who work in hospitals have their own sanity to think about and preserve.

At quarter to seven, Austin and George Diehl left the waiting room and walked downtown to a restaurant that Austin had never been in before, and ordered steak sandwiches.
Austin couldn’t eat his when it came. He pushed the plate away from him, on the verge of being sick. He watched George Diehl’s face while he ate, and thought how little of all that had happened to him showed in the very ordinary features, the eyes that were tired but friendly and had no comment to make beyond the fact that, if Austin wasn’t going to eat his sandwich, it oughtn’t to go begging. Austin passed the plate across the table and George Diehl transferred it to his own plate and went on talking and eating.

In silence, talked out at last, they walked back to the hospital, where, as soon as they opened the door, a nurse came toward them with a message for George Diehl, who seemed quite dazed by news that was good. He did not hear Austin’s congratulations or even seem to know who Austin was.

“Well, that’s that,” he said.

Austin found himself in full possession of the waiting room and, after nearly thirteen hours of George Diehl’s company and conversation, little or no interest in being alone. He began to walk the floor and the sixth or seventh step brought him face to face with the barrier that he couldn’t get past. He sat down and waited for the paperweight to be turned upside down, the miniature snow to begin falling.

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When Ab had said her prayers, Mrs. Danforth lifted her into the big bed in the guest-room and drew the covers around her. “I’ll leave the light on in the hall,” she said, “and if you want anything in the night, call me and I’ll hear you.”

Ab looked up at her without answering, her eyelids weighted with sleep. Nobody but her mother had ever tucked her in bed before, and though Mrs. Danforth was kind and
gentle with her, it wasn’t the same. She wanted her mother. The sound of Mrs. Danforth’s heels descending the stairs was not the sound her mother made.

The gaslight in the hall threw moving shadows and filled the bedroom with an uneasy light. From where Ab lay she could see a picture on the wall: A man in a white nightshirt, his legs sprawled across the sheets, was dreaming of a steeplechase. Above the man in bed there was a brook, and horsemen in pink coats were jumping their horses over this hazardous obstacle. Ab did not understand the dream picture as such. What she saw, by the flickering gaslight, was that the horses would land on the man in the bed and trample him. With her heart beating faster, she tried to turn over in her own bed so as not to be an unwilling witness to the death of the man in the white nightshirt, but her legs were chained and she couldn’t move. Even after her eyelids shut out the ugly sight, she still saw it in her mind, and would have cried out except that no sound came.

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The mop, swishing in wet wide circles, brought the scrubwoman face to face with a glass window which acted as a frame to a picture that never hangs on the walls of the waiting room of doctors’ offices. The operating table was tipped, so that the patient’s feet were higher than her head, and the upper half of the body was covered by a sheet. The hands strapped to the side of the operating table looked bluish. The sheet moved up, down, up, down, with hard breathing. Dr. Seymour was cutting into the abdominal area, blotting up blood with a towel as the incision grew larger and larger. The scrubwoman made several wide swipes with the mop and then looked again. This time the incision was completed and
the skin, held back by clamps, revealed a lake of blood which the nurses were struggling to dispose of. Dr. Seymour, looking like a butcher, fitted the forceps into the abdomen and pulled. The forceps slipped and he put them in again and pulled with all his strength. Then, dispensing with the forceps, he reached in with his hand, wrist deep in blood and water, and pulled out a baby, dripping, waxlike, and limp.

The scrubwoman who had ten children (of which nine were still living) stayed long enough at the window to make sure that this child was alive, and then moved slowly down the corridor, swirling the mop in wider and wider circles that left cloud patterns and wave patterns on the hexagonal tiled floor.

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