Time Will Darken It (8 page)

1

After three unbroken blocks, Elm Street dipped downhill in a way that was dangerous to children trying out new bicycles, and at the intersection with Dewey Avenue the pavement ended. From here on, Elm Street made no pretence of living up to the dignified architectural standards of the period. Instead, it was lined on both sides with one-story houses that under the steady pressure of a first and second mortgage were beginning to settle, to soften, to crack open.

If there had ever been any graceful trees below the intersection, they were gone by 1912. The cottonwoods and box elders had been planted by the wind—the same wind that later broke off limbs and lopped the tops out of them. There were no flower beds, no fern baskets, no potted palms, no brick driveways. The grass fought a losing battle with dandelions, ragweed, thistles. Chimney fires and evictions were not uncommon.

In this down-at-the-heel neighbourhood a few white families and most of the Negroes of Draperville lived on terms of social intimacy to which there were limits; but no taboo prevented the women from calling to each other (
How’s your husband’s back, Mrs. Woolman? Is it still giving him trouble?… I saw your Rudolf heading for the gravel pits with some older boys and told him to come home, but I don’t think he heard me
.…) or the children from playing together in swarms.

In winter the residents of lower Elm Street kept themselves warm with stoves or took to their beds when the woodpile gave out. Their windows were nailed shut the year around, and the stale air they breathed they were accustomed and resigned to, just as they were accustomed and resigned to
roofs that leaked, ceilings that cracked and fell, floors that were uneven, and the scratching of rats at night inside the walls. In their lifetime few of them had known anything better, though as a matter of fact there was one—there was a coloured boy who finished high school and went off to St. Louis to study medicine, much to the amusement of the white families who brought their washing to his mother once a week in big wicker baskets.

Something like a great pane of glass, opaque from one side, transparent from the other, divided the two halves of Elm Street. Beulah Osborn, the Ellises’ hired girl, Snowball McHenry, who worked in Dr. Danforth’s livery stable, and the Reverend Mr. Porterfield, who looked after Mrs. Beach’s furnace from October until April and her flower garden from April until October, knew a great deal about what went on in the comfortable houses on the hill. But when they or any of their friends and neighbours passed under the arc light at the intersection, the comfortable part of Elm Street lost all contact with them.

In one of these shabby houses, in what was actually a railroad caboose covered with black roofing paper and divided into two rooms by a flimsy partition, Rachel, the Kings’ cook, lived sometimes with one man and sometimes with another, and raised her five children. The two small windows on either side of the front door had once looked out on a moving landscape, on Iowa and Texas and Louisiana and West Virginia. Because every house in Draperville had to have a porch, Rachel’s also had one—a platform four by four, with an ornamental balustrade that unknown hands had deposited in a tree nearby, one Halloween. In the front yard under the shade of a box elder was a rain-rotted carriage seat with the horsehair stuffing coming out of it, and a funeral basket set on two round stones. There were a number of other things in Rachel’s yard that were not easily explained—a bassinet, a rusty coach lantern, a coffeepot, a slab of marble that might
have been a table-top or a tombstone. The effect of all this was strangely formal, a fancy-dress nightmare made out of odds and ends, suggesting (if you didn’t look too closely) an eighteenth-century garden house.

The morning after Martha King’s party, Rachel opened her eyes and saw the commode with a pitcher and bowl, and a full slopjar standing on the floor beside it. A magazine cover was tacked on the wall above the washstand. The child in this picture had rolled off the printing press a little white girl, but someone had since painted the hands and face a chocolate brown, and now it was a little coloured girl who hugged the grey kitten to her breast.

Rachel hung for a moment between sleep and waking, and then, realizing that the other half of the bed was empty, said “You, Thelma—what you doing?”

Thelma appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. She was in her underwear and in her left hand was the piece of wrapping-paper Rachel had used to bring home some leftovers from the party—a little chicken and ham that would never be missed. As a piece of sculpture, Thelma was astonishingly beautiful. The receding slope of her forehead, the relation of the cheekbones to the slanting, dreamy eyes, the carving of the thin arms and legs, the rounded shoulders, the hollow chest were the work of a tormented artist who had said, in this one fully accomplished effort, all that there is to say about childhood; said (unfortunately, from the point of view of a work of art) a little more, spoiling the generality of his design by something personal.

“You want to see what I been drawing?” Thelma asked.

Rachel brushed the picture aside. “What time that clock say?”

“Twenty minutes to seven.”

“Whoo-ee, I got to get up out of this bed right now. Go wake up your brothers.”

As Rachel bent over the china washbowl, she heard the
couch in the kitchen being shaken, and then groans and protests.

“Time to get up, Alfred,” Thelma said.

“Time to knock your head off if you don’t leave me alone,” Alfred said.

“Hush up, all of you!” Rachel commanded.

Thelma came back in the front room and sat on the bed. Rachel glanced at her daughter suspiciously and, as she was drying her face and hands, said, “There seems to be something weighing on your mind.”

Thelma pulled a feather through the ticking of the pillow and said, “I don’t want to go to Mrs. King’s no more.”

“So that what’s bothering you.”

“I don’t so much like it there. The Southern people they—”

“I guess I’m mistaken,” Rachel said. “It don’t look as if you was my child after all. Mrs. King give you them nice crayons and when she needs a helping hand, you aren’t a bit willing.”

“Yes I am,” Thelma said quickly. “I’m your child.”

“Get away from me,” Rachel said, and found herself, at ten minutes of seven when the coffee ought to be in the pot and on the stove, with a broken heart to mend. She took Thelma on her lap and said, “I don’t know what to do with you. I just don’t. Let me see that picture you drawed.” She felt around in the bedclothes and uncovered the piece of brown wrapping-paper. “Alfred … Eugene.… Get up out of that bed before I come pull you out. Your Pappy come home one of these days and I tell him a few things.”

The two little boys asleep on the narrow cot at the foot of Rachel’s bed stirred and untwined their bare legs without waking.

Rachel held the picture out at arm’s length and considered it critically. The artist had taken certain liberties with perspective and altered a few facts, but there nevertheless, for all time, was the Kings’ living-room, the ebony pier glass, the
upright piano, and the bouquets of white phlox, just as they had appeared to the innocent eye, the eye that sees things as they are and not the use they are put to. The café-au-lait ladies distributed about the room on sofas and chairs wore long lace dresses, diamond necklaces, too many rings on their fingers, too many jewelled pendants and rhinestone ornaments in their hair. The men were more aristocratic. They might have been dark-skinned dukes and earls. No one was fat or ugly, no one was old.

“Yes,” Rachel said nodding. “You’re too tender for this world. I got to harden you up some way or you won’t survive.”

2

The breakfast table was set for seven, and four of the places had not been disturbed. No sound came from the upper regions of the house. When Austin and Martha spoke to each other or to Ab, their voices sounded subdued, as if they were either listening or afraid of being overheard. Except for this, and the empty places, there was no indication of company in the house. One might almost have thought that the Mississippi people had packed their bags and stolen away in the night.

Austin passed his cup down the table to be refilled. With the fumes from the coffeepot, Martha felt a wave of returning nausea, and bent her face away. “Be careful and don’t spill it,” she said, handing the cup to Ab.

“That’s very good coffee,” Austin said.

The telephone rang a minute or two later. He looked at his wife questioningly. She nodded, and he got up and went into the study to answer it. Young Mrs. Ellis wanted to say what a nice time they had had and how much they had enjoyed the Potters. Austin barely had time to return and sit down before
the telephone rang again. The second call was from Mrs. Danforth, to say the same thing. “Well I’ll tell Martha,” she heard him say. “Oh no, she’s fine.”

At eight-thirty he folded his napkin and slipped it through a silver ring that had his first name engraved on it and was a relic of his childhood. “I’ll be home a little after twelve,” he said as he pushed his chair back from the table. Although he said nothing about the Potters, it was clear from the look in his eyes and from his doubtful expression as he bent down to kiss his wife that he wanted to ask her to be gracious, to be friendly whether she felt like it or not, to do nothing that would make the Potters feel unwanted.

As he was starting out the front door, Martha heard him say, “Hello, where have
you
been?”

A moment later, Nora Potter came through the study and into the dining-room. She was wearing a green dress with black velvet bows and two black velvet ribbons braided into her cinnamon-coloured hair. The dress was becoming, but strange for this time of the day. It made Nora look like a tintype in a family album—some fourth or fifth cousin who is shown, a few pages later, with her rather vain-looking husband, and then again as an old lady, formidable and all in black, with her elbow resting on an Ionic pillar.

“I woke up around six o’clock,” Nora said as she began to eat her cantaloupe, “and couldn’t get back to sleep so I got up and put on my clothes and went out walking. Wasn’t that enterprising of me?”