Time Will Darken It

by William Maxwell

  After the evening concert, the part of the audience that had come out from town for the day crowded the street-cars that were waiting for them outside the entrance gates or got into buggies and drove back to town, choking all the way in a continuous cloud of dust that they themselves helped to create. Because of the dust, the route was marked at intervals by gasoline lamps that spluttered and flared up occasionally, frightening the horses. The campers followed a winding cinder road until they came to their own tents and cottages. By eleven, when the curfew rang, all lights were out and the Chautauqua was as dark and quiet as it was on those nights when the chain hung across the entrance and the north wind and snow had their season.

  Austin King came home from his office at noon, hitched the horse, and as soon as lunch was over, drove his guests out to the Chautauqua grounds. Mr. Potter liked best the military band, Randolph the light opera company that gave a performance of Olivette (with interpolations from Robin Hood, The Bohemian Girl, and The Chimes of Normandy), but to Mrs. Potter it was all one and the wonderful same. She did not wait for the bell to ring, but left the others in the dining-hall or on the porch of the Ellises’ rustic cottage, and went on ahead with her pillow, her fan, and her bottle of citronella. No string trio was ever too long for her, no lecturer ever dull. She was equally delighted with William Jennings Bryan, the explorer who had been in Patagonia, and the man with a potter’s wheel who turned out clay vases and made a larger than life-size head of Marie Antoinette grown old and fretful.

  Sunday cast its shadow over the Chautauqua grounds as it did in town, but the religious services were shorter. After Sunday school and church at the auditorium, the atmosphere brightened, and by evening there might be glee singers or the “Anvil Chorus” performed with real anvils. Martha King, feeling unwell, missed the second Sunday in the 1912 season. The picture on the bulletin board outside the administration building showed a group of twenty handsome young men in white uniforms heavy with gold braid. Travelling from Chautauqua to Chautauqua, the White Huzzars may have lost track of the days of the week. Or perhaps they were the instruments of Change, pointing towards the fast automobiles, the golf courses, and the Sunday-night movies of the future. Anyway, their musical selections and their behaviour (especially when they grabbed up their clarinets and trumpets, shoved their chairs in a double line, and indulged in a mock sleigh-ride) were light-hearted and long remembered. The grey-haired members of the audience, guardians of a gentle Calvinistic era and with fixed ideas of what entertainment was appropriate to a day of worship, sat shocked and disapproving. The rest applauded wildly, reminded of something they had almost forgotten or known only in snatches—of how wonderful it is to be young.

  When the last encore was over, Austin took Ab from Mrs. Potter’s lap and lifted her like a limp sack to his shoulder. Her head collapsed of its own weight and her eyelids remained closed, but she knew they were moving slowly up the aisle of the big auditorium, with people all around them. She was in that delicate state of balance in which the mind grasps one thing at a time. Before they reached the long row of hitching posts, even that limited faculty had left her.

  Austin started to hand the sleeping child up to Mrs. Potter in the back seat of the carriage, but Nora said, “Oh, let me hold her!” and Nora’s voice was so earnest and so desiring that, over Mrs. Potter’s protests, Austin handed the child up to the front seat instead. When the carriage wheels started to turn, Ab stirred and seemed on the point of waking, but then a woman’s hand cushioned her head in the hollow between two breasts and held it there, and whatever strangeness had penetrated into Ab’s sleep went away again or was absorbed into even stranger matters.

  Austin drove back to town the long way round to avoid the dust. The night was cool, and the people in the English cart spoke in murmurs and then not at all. As they passed the cemeteries, Nora said, “I’ve never held a sleeping child before.”

  “She’s not too heavy for you?” Austin asked.

  “Oh no,” Nora said. “But it’s a very strange feeling.”

  With the reins lying loose in his hands, he was free to turn and look at his daughter and at the girl beside him. With wisps of soft hair blowing against her cheek, Nora’s face looked very young and open and vulnerable.

  “Will you promise me something, Nora,” Austin King said suddenly.

  “What is it?”

  “Before you marry, bring the man to see me. I want to look him over.”

  “What if I never find such a person?”

  “You don’t have to find him. He’ll find you. But it has to be the right kind of a man, or you won’t be happy.”

  “Will you be able to tell, just by looking at him?”

  “I think so,” Austin said.

  “All right,” Nora said quietly, “I promise.”

  As they entered the outskirts of town, Ab felt the change from country dirt road to brick pavement, and wakened sufficiently to hear a voice say, “Cousin Austin, do you believe in immortality?” And then shortly afterward, a great many hands lifted her and carried her up a great many steps, brought her through long hallways, and undressed her. When she woke up, it was morning, and she was in her own bed, with no knowledge of how she got there.

  12

  The Potters’ visit lasted four weeks and three days. During the final week Mr. Potter held a series of business meetings in Austin King’s office, and the plan was put down on paper, so that there couldn’t be any trouble later on. After sober consideration, Austin King decided that his other obligations (especially the money that he had to send his mother from time to time) made it inadvisable for him to invest in the Mississippi corporation. Dr. Danforth also stayed out of the venture. But in a town the size of Draperville it was not difficult to find six men who were ready and willing to make a fortune.

  Mrs. Potter wanted very much to stay on till the end of the Chautauqua season, but Mr. Potter had received a letter from the bank in Howard’s Landing and business came before pleasure. The banging sound that Ab heard when she was supposed to be taking her nap turned out to be Mr. Potter and Randolph hauling the two trunks up from the basement.

  They went one last time to the Chautauqua grounds and when the afternoon lecture was over, wandered into the museum, a log cabin not unlike the one old Mr. Ellis was born in, except that in the old days log cabins didn’t have a water cooler just inside the door and visitors were not handed small printed cards urging them, in the name of the First National Bank, to save for a rainy day.

  There were barely enough relics in the museum to go around—a gourd that had been used as a powder flask during the battle of Fort Meigs, a pair of antlers, a baby’s dress, a tomahawk, a bed with rope springs, a few letters and deeds. By all rights, the first hoe that shaved the prairie grass and so brought an end to one of the wonders of the world, should have been here; but historically important objects that are useful in their own right are seldom found in museums.

  It is hard to say why Nora Potter chose this place to announce to her father and mother that she was not going back to Mississippi with them. Perhaps the regimental flags and the rifle that had originally come from Virginia encouraged her to take a defiant stand. Or possibly it was her mother’s annoying interest in a stuffed alligator that was swung on wires from the ceiling. At all events, with no warning or preparation, she turned and said, “I’m not going home.” Mr. Potter bent down and signed the register in the full expectation that it would guarantee his immortality. Mrs. Potter gazed up at the alligator. “So lifelike,” she murmured, and then “What do you mean you’re not going home, Nora?”

  “The Beach girls are starting a kindergarten and they want me to work with them. I told them I would.”

  Mrs. Potter’s face took on a sudden angry flush. “It’s preposterous!” she exclaimed. “I never heard of such a thing.”

  The present with its unsolved personal relationships and complex problems seldom intrudes upon the past, but when it does, the objects under glass, the framed handw
riting of dead men, the rotting silk and corroded metal all are quickened, for a tiny fraction of time and to an almost imperceptible degree, by life.

  “We’d better wait outside,” Martha King said to Austin, and pushing Ab ahead of her, she went past the water-cooler out into the sunlight. While the Potters converged (God and Liberty, Voltaire said) upon Nora, Austin and Martha and Ab waited uneasily in the cinder drive. Occasionally, the sound of voices, rising higher and higher, came through the open door of the museum. Ab was prevented from hearing what was said inside by her mother and father’s resolute and uninteresting conversation about Prince Edward, who was showing signs of lameness from being driven so much. After a time the Potters appeared, with blank faces. Mr. Potter drew Austin aside and said, “Mrs. Potter thinks we’d better not stay for the evening performance.” A moment later the whole party started walking in the general direction of the cement entrance gates.

  Late that night, after the others had retired to their rooms, Mrs. Potter in her brocade dressing-gown knocked on Nora’s door, opened it, and went in. Nora was sitting up in bed reading. Mrs. Potter sat down on the edge of the bed, and picked up Nora’s book.

  “What’s this, if I may ask?”

  “Certainly you can ask,” Nora said. “It’s a book the Beach girls loaned me.”

  Mrs. Potter read the title of the book aloud, dubiously, “The Montessori Method … I don’t understand. I really don’t. How you can talk about leaving your family and your home and everyone dear to you! Why do you want to stay up North among strangers?”

  “They’re not strangers. They’re my friends.”

  “You have friends at home, if that’s all there is to it. Plenty of them. What is it you want, Nora?”

  “I want to make my own life,” Nora said, raising her knees under the cover and resting her chin on them. “I want to be among people who do things instead of merely existing. I want to see snow. I don’t know what I want.”

  “No, you don’t know what you want. Ever since you were a little girl you’ve been that way. Do you know the first word you ever said? Most babies begin with ‘Mama’ but the first word you ever uttered was ‘No’ and you’ve been saying it—not to other people, just to me—ever since. I’ve tried to be a good mother to you. As good as I knew how, anyway. I nursed you through scarlet fever and whooping cough, I’ve fed and clothed you, I’ve protected you against your father when he was impatient or wanted to make you do things you didn’t feel like doing, and all the same you’re against me, and have been, since the beginning. Do I get on your nerves—the way I talk, the things I do? What is it?”

  Nora shook her head. For a minute neither of them spoke, and then she said slowly, “Mother, listen to me. Now’s your chance, do you hear? I know that when I start to talk about what I really think and want and believe, something comes over you, some terrible fit of impatience, so that your knees twitch and you can’t even sit still long enough to hear what I have to say. You listen to other people. Anybody but your own daughter you have all the patience in the world with. I’ve watched you. You know just what to say and what not to say. With everybody but me you’re wonderful. I wish I had a mirror. I wish I could show you what you look like right now, your face flushed and set, and that expression of grim endurance. Why do you have to endure your own daughter? I get furious at you but I don’t endure you. What is it you want me to be? Do you want me to be domestic, like Cousin Martha, and worry about meals and whether the cook is in a bad temper and whether my husband is looking at some other woman? I haven’t any husband to be jealous of, and I haven’t any house, either. So I can’t very well be domestic, can I? Or worry about the temper of the cook who doesn’t exist? Do you want me to be afraid of you the way the Beach girls are afraid of their mother, so that when you’re around all the life and hope goes out of me, and everybody thinks what a pity it is that such a charming delightful woman should have a dull daughter? Well, I won’t be dull for anybody, not even you. I’m not dull, so why should I pretend to be? Or easy going, or self-controlled or anything else.… What you are thinking now I know. I can read it in your face. We’ve been over this a thousand times, you’re saying, so why do we have to go over it again? But we haven’t been over it a thousand times. I’ve never really talked to you the way I’m talking now, never in my whole life. Always before I’ve spared you, spared your feelings, and this time I’m not going to. I don’t see any reason to spare your feelings. You’re a grown woman and you had enough courage to leave my father and to come back to him, which I wouldn’t have been able to do. I’d have died first. Don’t look so horrified. You know what he’s up to with Bud Ellis and those other men. You know why he brought us all up North when we were perfectly comfortable at home. You don’t live with someone for thirty years without knowing what they’re like. Somewhere inside of you, you have accepted him, for better or worse. And you’ve accepted Randolph. You know why that dog bit him. You know how he gets people and animals to love him and then turns on them suddenly when they’re least expecting it. If I were a collie, I’d have bit him a hundred times. I did try to kill him once when we were little. Do you remember? I chased him round and round the summer house with a butcher knife and everybody but Black Hattie was afraid to come near me. You were afraid too, Mother. I saw it in your eyes, but I wouldn’t have stabbed you. If you’d only walked right up to me when I was wild with anger and trusted me enough to put your arms around me and hold me—that’s all I ever wanted—somebody to hold me until I could get over being angry with Brother—then we wouldn’t be sitting here like this, like two strangers who don’t know each other very well, or like each other.… Why haven’t you ever accepted me, Mother? Didn’t you want to have a daughter? Or was it that you suddenly started to dislike me, after I——Oh, it’s no use. I don’t know why I go on trying. It’s like talking to a tree or an iron doorstep.… Look, I want to stay up North because I feel, deep down in my heart, that there’s something here for me. There’s nothing at home and I’m young, Mother. I can’t bear to wake up in the morning and know what’s going to happen all day long, what we’re going to have for lunch, what you and Father and Randolph are going to say before the words are out of your mouth. If a wagon goes by with two niggers in it and a yellow dog, that’s enough for you. You run to the window at the first sound of the wheels, and say ‘There’s Old Jeb and Sally and their yellow dog,’ and you’re as pleased as if you’d seen a circus parade. But I don’t care if it is Old Jeb, or if my new dress doesn’t fit right across the shoulders, or if Miss Failing’s sciatica is worse, or the minister is going to leave. There’ll be another minister to take his place. There always has been, and the new one will go right on trying to raise the money to fix the church roof, so what difference does it make? I don’t care about the big blue willow salad bowl and platter that should have come to you after Great-Aunt Adeline died, only Cousin Laura Drummond snitched it while the rest of the china was being packed. Let Cousin Laura have her salad bowl and platter. I want excitement. I want to live in the real world, not in Mississippi with my head in a brown paper bag just because you married Father instead of Jim Ferris, who would have given you a big house in Baltimore and a fine carriage and plenty of servants to wait on you. I’m your daughter and you ought to help me. You ought to want to help me get away and lead the kind of life you would have had if things had turned out differently. Who knows? You help me now and maybe I can help you later. Maybe I can make a lot of money teaching kindergarten, and you won’t have to be worrying always for fear the whole plantation will collapse on your head some day, and the Detrava sofas be sold at auction. Maybe I’ll marry a millionaire. Maybe I’ll——”

  Like an alarm clock that had finally run down, Nora stopped talking. Her eyes filled with tears. If her mother had argued with her, she could have found new arguments to answer the old ones, but her mother was sitting so quietly on the edge of the bed that it frightened Nora. With her hands in her lap, her mother looked suddenly so like a chi
ld, a very good child who is waiting for some grown person’s permission to get up and go outdoors and play. The angry flush was gone, and instead of the resisting, restless gestures, only a quiet so intense that the room rang with it, like a hollow sea shell.

  “Nora, I need you,” she said slowly. “If you leave me now, I don’t know how I’ll manage. You’re more help to me than you know. I can’t live in a house where nobody is honest or brave or in any way dependable. I did before you were old enough to understand things, but I can’t any more.”

  13

  “I know old man Seligsberg isn’t your client,” Miss Ewing said, “but since Mr. Holby is out of town and it’s rather important, I thought maybe you might want to handle it for him.”