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.
17
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.
18
In the middle of the night Abbey King was awakened by knocking, by pounding, by a commotion downstairs at the front door. All sounds, all sensations that in the daytime are weakened or explained away by the mind’s comforting interpretation, in the night are magnified. This sound, so loud that her heart almost stopped beating, Ab never doubted for a second was on account of her. They were coming for her. They were going to get her and punish her at last for having been so many times a bad girl. Her only hope—that Mrs. Danforth wouldn’t hear the pounding, or if she did hear it, wouldn’t answer it—lasted only until she heard footsteps in the hall and saw Mrs. Danforth in a long dressing gown, with her hair in two braids down her back, pass the bedroom door.
Just one more chance, Ab begged, to her mother far away and to God farther away still. The steps went on down the stairs and could not be stopped. Ab heard the chain unfastened, the key turn in the door, and a voice that wasn’t a policeman’s or a gypsy’s but her father’s voice said, “It’s a boy.”
Though there was now no reason for terror, it drained away very slowly.
“How’s Martha?” Ab heard Mrs. Danforth say.
“She’s all right. The doctor says she’s fine.”
“Did she have a hard time?”
“Toward the end. But they gave her morphine and she came through the operation without any difficulty. The baby weighs five pounds.” There was an excitement and a happiness in her father’s voice that Ab had never heard there before. She lay perfectly still waiting for him to ask about her, to start up the stairs, to call out when he reached the landing.
“Let me make you some coffee,” Mrs. Danforth said. “It won’t take but a minute.”
“No,” Austin said. “Thank you just the same. It’s been a long ordeal and I’m done in. I’d better go on home.”
The last thing Ab heard was the sound of Mrs. Danforth’s soft slippers on the stairs. Sometime during the remainder of the night, the pink-coated horsemen rode over her on their terrible horses, and she died without dying, and woke with arms around her and heard a voice saying “There, there … There, there … You’ve been having a bad dream.”
19
“But I’ve told her repeatedly,” Mary Caroline said. “She knows it’s my favourite blouse and that I don’t want her to wear it. She has lots more clothes than I do, and I don’t think it was a bit nice of her.”
“You mustn’t be selfish with your things,” Mrs. Link said.
“I’m not,” Mary Caroline said. “But when I showed her the spot that won’t come out, she just said she was sorry and let it go at that.”
“The next time I’m down town,” Mrs. Link said, “I’ll get some material and——”
“I’d rather pick it out myself. If you don’t mind,” Mary Caroline said.
“No, I don’t mind.”
Tolerant and serene, loving both her daughters equally, Mrs. Link viewed the neighbourhood as they walked along. There was a hack waiting in front of the Kings’, and as Mary Caroline and Mrs. Link passed on the opposite side of the street, the Mathein boy came out with two suitcases which he stowed away on the front seat of the hack.
“Did you remember to go and say good-bye to the Potters?” Mrs. Link asked.
“Yes,” Mary Caroline said. “Mrs. Potter asked me to come and visit them.”
“Well, that was nice,” Mrs. Link said.
The lace curtains in the Mercers’ front window were new, and the Webbs’ house looked all shut up as if they might be away. For a week now, Mrs. Link had been meaning to sit down with her needle and thread and change the yoke in her navy blue dress, so she could wear it to church on Sunday, and they really ought to stop and see Mrs. Macomber, who was all alone in that big house.… Dimly conscious of the fact that Mary Caroline had just asked her a question, Mrs. Link said, “What’s that, dear?”
“I said are Mr. and Mrs. Mercer in love?”
“Why? What makes you ask?”
“I just wondered,” Mary Caroline said.
If she’d only thought to bring Mrs. Macomber’s blue cake plate, she could have killed two birds with one stone. On the other hand, it was hardly polite to return the plate with nothing on it. She would take over a loaf of orange bread after she baked on Tuesday. This time of year it always seemed as if there was nothing to look forward to but ice and snow, but it was February and so the winter was really half over. It didn’t get dark till nearly five-thirty, and if Mr. Link was ever going to order the seeds for the vegetable garden, he’d better get ready and do it right away. The Sherman house, too bright a yellow when it was first painted, had faded to a pleasant colour, but it would never look the way it had when it was white. And Doris shouldn’t have taken Mary Caroline’s blouse without asking.
“Are Mr. and Mrs. Sherman in love?” Mary Caroline asked as they turned in at their own front walk.
The hack was still standing in front of the Kings’. How poor Mr. King had managed all this time, with his wife in the hospital and a house full of company.
“Are Mr. and Mrs. King in love?”
“I don’t know, dear,” Mrs. Link said. “I suppose they are. How can you tell?”
20
Half an hour before the hack arrived to drive them to the station, the Potters were all downstairs, ready and anxious to leave. Mr. Potter took his watch out and compared it with the clock in the hall. As he put the watch back in his vest pocket, he said, “Cousin Abbey, I think we’re making a big mistake not to take you with us. You could have a pony to ride and lots of little piccaninnies to play with.”
“Mr. Potter, stop teasing that child,” Mrs. Potter said. With her hat and coat on, and her veil pinned over her face, she sat down at the piano. She had just remembered a hymn that she hadn’t thought of in years. With several false starts she made her way through the first half, and then time after time produced
a wrong chord and had to go back and start over again.
“Do you feel all right?” Randolph asked, bending over the sofa.
“Yes,” Nora said, “but I wish Mama would remember the rest of that hymn. It’s driving me crazy.”
“If you want Mama, you’ll have to take her hymns with her,” Randolph said, and wandered out into the front hall, where a suitcase was waiting for somebody, some conscientious helpful person, to carry it out to the kerbing.
“Cousin Austin said he’d be here by ten,” Mr. Potter said, “and it’s five after.” And then, in response to the ringing of the front doorbell, “Now I wonder who that could be?”
“He’ll be here. Don’t go borrowing trouble,” Randolph said.
“There’s someone at the door,” Mrs. Potter called from the piano.
“Do you think we ought to answer it?” Mr. Potter said. “We’ve said good-bye to everybody I can think of.”
“Maybe Cousin Austin forgot his key,” Randolph said. He opened the door and a long conversation followed, while the cold swept in along the floor.
“For heaven’s sake, shut the door!” Nora exclaimed.
“Is that right?” Randolph said. “Well, I’m sure they didn’t mean to. How much is it? … I’ll tell him. I certainly will … yes … Well, I don’t think that’s at all fair to you.… I’ll tell you what you do. You come back next Saturday, and there’ll surely be somebody here then.”
He closed the door and, turning to Mr. Potter, said, “The paper boy. He hasn’t been paid in weeks.”
“How much was it?” Mr. Potter asked.
“Forty cents. They take it out of his earnings instead of waiting till he gets paid. He showed me a book with a lot of little coupons in it, so it must be right. Funny that Cousin Austin hasn’t paid him. The boy’s name is Dick Sisson, and he’s saving his money to buy a new bicycle.”
“It’s twelve minutes after,” Mr. Potter said, eyeing his watch.
Mrs. Potter, having remembered the rest of the hymn, got up from the piano triumphantly and said, “Randolph, come help me with your sister.”
Together, they got Nora up off the sofa, put her hat and coat on her, and sat her, like a doll done up in bandages, on the chair in the front hall.
“The hack is here,” Randolph said, “and no Cousin Austin. Now what do we do?”
“We can’t leave without saying good-bye,” Mrs. Potter said. “Cousin Austin would be hurt.”
“Well, why isn’t he here then?” Randolph asked.
“Oh, I don’t know!” Mrs. Potter exclaimed. “I wish you wouldn’t ask questions that nobody knows the answer to.… It’s all right, Nora. If we miss this train, we’ll take the next one.”
The Potters, accustomed to keeping other people waiting, now sat and waited themselves—waited and waited. At last Mrs. Potter said, “Cousin Abbey, will you tell your father that——”
“It’s no use,” Mr. Potter said. “The train leaves in seven and a half minutes. We’d just have a wild ride for nothing.”
They sat looking at each other. A minute went by, and another, and then the front door burst open. “I’m terribly sorry,” Austin said. “I was detained.”
“It’s all right,” Mr. Potter said. “We’ll take the evening train. Or the one tomorrow morning.”
Nora’s eyes filled with tears that were not, Austin saw, for him. She wanted to go home. The tears were merely from childish disappointment. A long time ago, he thought, I used to feel like that sometimes.
“If I can’t take that train, I’ll die,” Nora said.
Mr. Potter shook his head. “It’s no use,” he repeated.
Without bothering to search through that part of his mind where old unhappy memories were stored (whatever the disappointment was that had been more than he could bear, he had lived through it) Austin picked up the remaining suitcase and opened the front door. “We can try,” he said. “The train may be late.”
21
When Martha King came back to the house on Elm Street it was as a traveller returning after a long adventurous life to the place where that life had begun, fifty years before. The lights in the windows, the known dimensions of the yard, the half-seen shapes of trees and shrubbery all appeared to her from a perspective of distance too great for her to feel any direct happiness but only wonder at the place for being, after all this while, so intact and so much itself.
The nurse went ahead with the baby, while Martha with Austin supporting her made the trip slowly, pausing at the porch steps. She still hadn’t got her strength back and there was a question in her mind whether she ever would. The lamps were lighted, the floors and the furniture shone. A hand that might have been hers had been at work, and nothing varied by a hair’s breadth from its right place.
“It looks as if we were about to give a party,” she said as Austin was hanging her coat in the hall closet.
“Hadn’t you better go straight up to bed?”
“After dinner,” Martha said.
When she was settled on the sofa in the living-room with a wool afghan over her knees and pillows at her back, she said, “Austin, would you go upstairs and see if there’s anything she needs?… And find Ab,” she called as Austin started for the stairs.
She lay back on the sofa with her eyes closed. The whole feel of the house was wrong, in spite of the order and polish and preparation for her. The living-room curtains, that she had decided to leave until next summer, would have to go. And the picture of Apollo would have to come down. She had looked at it long enough. She would get a divided mirror for over the mantelpiece. The chair in the hall would have to go to the upholsterer’s to be glued and re-covered. There would have to be other changes, not all at once, but gradually one thing after another until the house was …
A sudden thunder of feet on the stairs made her sit up and turn towards the hall. Austin came into the living-room with Ab riding on his back. They were both flushed and laughing, which annoyed Martha. Ab was a child, of course, and couldn’t be expected to know what her mother had been through. But Austin was another matter.
Ab slid into her arms limply and Martha said, “You oughtn’t to come down the stairs like that with her.”
“I wouldn’t drop her,” Austin said.
“You might stumble and fall,” Martha said. As she rocked Ab and smoothed her hair, she felt as if something she had been deprived of without realizing it had now been restored to her.
“Rachel’s out in the kitchen,” Ab said.
“No!” Martha exclaimed. And then, “That’s what you were so pleased with yourself about?”
“I wanted to surprise you,” Austin said. “I found out where she was and wrote to her.”
“Did you fire Frieda?”
“She gave notice the day the Potters went. She said she couldn’t stay in the house alone with me. It wasn’t proper.”
“And you’ve had nobody to cook for you all this time?”
“I managed,” Austin said.
At the sound of someone in the dining-room, Martha called, “Rachel, is that you?”
Rachel appeared in the dining-room door and smiled—a broad, bright, gleaming smile that made Martha feel taken up and held, as she herself was holding Ab.
“If you only knew what it was like without you,” she said, “and how I missed you.”
“Is that right?” Rachel said. “I give the whole house a good going over.”
“I see you did. It’s beautiful. Have you been up to see the baby? He’s not much to look at. He only weighs five and a half pounds.”
“I reckon he’ll improve, now that you’ve got him home,” Rachel said. “Dinner is served.”
“I can’t tell you what it feels like,” Martha said as she started to get up from the sofa.
Hours later, lying in bed and watching Austin undress, she said the same thing. What it was like was music, like wave upon wave of rising, ringing happy voices singing Let us praise the Creator and all that He has made.
“I didn’t notice it,” Austin said.
“She acts as if she had some kind of a grievance against us.”
“She’ll be all right. Don’t worry about it.”
After a short while, he withdrew his arm from under her head and turned over on his side. She was still not ready to go to sleep. “There’s something else that worries me. When Ab was born I loved her right away, but I don’t feel the same about this baby.”
“You will.”
“When I hold him he cries as if he doesn’t want to come to me.”
“Show me the baby that doesn’t cry.”
“Austin, does Nora write to you?”
“No.”
“You’re telling me the truth? You wouldn’t lie to me about it?”
“Why should I lie to you? She hasn’t written to me and she won’t, and if she did write I wouldn’t open the letter.”
“There’s no reason for you to say that. I wouldn’t mind if you did. If you want to write to her, it’s all right with me.”
“But I don’t want to write to her. And I don’t want her to write to me. It’s all past and done with.”
“For you, maybe.”
“Oh, darling, forget about it. Go to sleep.”
“All the time I was in the hospital I kept thinking about what it would be like to be home, and the very first night——”
Austin heaved himself over and sat up in bed, staring down at her in the dark. “This is something you started your own self. I didn’t mention Nora.”
“What difference does it make who mentioned her? She’s still here,” Martha said, and felt the bed give as he lay back once more. “I can’t reach you the way I used to be able to,” Martha said, after a while. “I guess it’s just that I don’t know you any more. You’ve changed, but I’ve changed, too. You know Nora better than you know me. You’ve talked more to her. I don’t mean this unkindly, Austin, but I think we ought to see things as they are, instead of trying to make a false life together, for the sake of the children. It’s something I realized in the hospital—that you have only one life and if you spend all your time and energy trying to force something that, in the very nature of things, is impossible and hopeless, you might as well not have lived at all. People ought to follow their deeper instincts and be what they are meant to be, even if it causes unhappiness. They can’t be themselves and still go on pretending that everything is all right when it isn’t. By being honest with each other, we can at least——” She stopped, informed by his breathing that he was asleep.
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