“Do you have your key?” Mrs. Beach asked, as Lucy got up from the chair beside the bed.
“In my purse,” Lucy said. “We’ll be home early.”
On her face also there was a look of expectancy, but what Lucy Beach expected from this evening was by no means clear. She could not have been hoping that the Kings, after knowing her for many years, would suddenly accept her as their intimate friend, ask her for dinner again and again, and feel somehow incomplete unless she was with them. Nevertheless, the look was there, and it implied something of this kind of order.
“The cat came back,” Nora said, as Austin opened the door to them. Having waited so long for an invitation to dinner, she now produced this poor joke in self-defence, to show that the waiting was unimportant, was nothing. The gloved hand that was about to reach out and touch his coat-sleeve, she checked in time, but there was nothing she could do about her own rapturous happiness or the voice that cried Oh why can’t he love me?
Nervously, knowing that the happiness could not last because he would not let it last, she looked around to see what changes had taken place in the house during the past three months.
“It’s nice to see you,” Austin said, as he put their coats away in the hall closet.
Though it was so important that Nora look at him, right then, before his expression changed, she could not. Once before he had seemed to want something of her, and then it turned out that he.… That was how it all began, the mistake above all other mistakes she must guard against making. But would he have said that he was glad to see her unless he meant to imply something more besides?
“Martha will be down in just a minute,” he said, and led them into the living-room.
“Mother and Alice were so sorry they couldn’t come,” Lucy said.
“I’m sorry, too,” Austin said, and then, as Lucy chose an uninviting chair, “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable by the fire?”
I know exactly how I feel when I’m with him, Nora said to herself, but I don’t know how to stop feeling it.
They sat stiffly, making conversation, until Martha King came down the stairs. She was wearing a silk shawl, but she showed quite plainly that she was carrying a child. Austin talked to Lucy, and Nora was left with Martha King, whose one effort at making conversation with Nora that evening came to nothing. While Martha was talking to her, Nora’s glance wavered towards the other couple in the room, and then travelled to the sheet music on the piano. She wondered what it would be like sitting here alone with him in the evening, listening to his playing (so much more delicate than her mother’s thumping) and watching his sensitive hands moving over the keyboard. She realized suddenly that Martha had asked her a question and said, “Mama? Oh, she’s fine.”
“And your father?”
“He’s all right. They’re all fine and sent their love to you and Cousin Austin,” Nora said, and felt as if she had awakened abruptly in the midst of a dream. Though the dream remained in her memory, as sharp and clear as a winter day, she couldn’t get back into it. “I notice that Cousin Austin comes home much later than he used to last summer. I’m afraid we interfered with his work.”
“He’s been very busy with the fall term of court,” Martha said.
“Oh,” Nora said, and nodded, and then after a pause she said, “I’d like very much to hear him speak in court. Would it embarrass him, having someone there that he knows?”
Martha picked at the fringe of her shawl and Nora thought for a moment that she had not understood. “If you think it would embarrass him, I won’t say anything to him about it,” she said.
“He won’t let me go and hear him,” Martha said, “but that’s probably just an idea that he’s got fixed in his mind. You’ll have to ask him and see what he says. He might enjoy having you there.”
“You can come if you like,” Austin said, turning away from Lucy. “The case I’m trying now is not very interesting, the way a criminal trial would be.”
“I wouldn’t care about that,” Nora said, her face suffused with pleasure. “All I want is to see a case tried.”
“Dinner is served,” Rachel said.
After they were seated, Nora turned to Austin, prepared to be anything that he wanted her to be, because she loved him so much and because he was so wonderful and she was so happy just being with him. All she needed was some positive indication from him of the role he wanted her to play in his life, and until that came she felt shy with him (it was strange how someone could take up so much of your thoughts and still be as remote as a star) and painfully aware of the fact that she wanted him to love her (knowing that he couldn’t) and that it didn’t matter, so long as she was here and could love him.
Austin’s efforts at commonplace table conversation were not taken up by Nora and he had to fall back on the food. Martha tried to talk to Lucy but there were distractions. Rachel had forgotten to warm the plates, and she passed the mint sauce after they had finished eating their lamb.
Lucy Beach, dining out for the first time in years without her mother and sister, failed to notice the frequent silences. Her hand kept reaching for the cut-glass tumbler. She drank a great deal of water, and smoothed and folded the napkin lying across her lap. When, after an interruption, Martha King took up the conversation at some place other than the place where Lucy had left off, she was neither discouraged nor hurt. Her European table manners returned to her; she ate without transferring her fork from her left hand to her right. She complimented Martha on the lamb, the canned peas, the mashed potatoes. She smiled vivaciously (when there was really nothing to smile at) as if she were a beautiful worldly woman with a black velvet ribbon encircling her throat, her long white gloves drawn back and bunched at her wrists, offering herself first to the distinguished grey-haired man on her right, and then to the gallant and witty young man on her left.
When they had finished the main course and were ready for dessert, Martha rang the little china serving bell beside her place, and nothing happened. As if it were customary for people to ring and have no one answer, they sat and waited. Eventually, Rachel put her head in at the pantry door and said, “The frogleg man.”
“At this time of night!” Austin exclaimed. He felt in his change pocket and drew out fifty cents for Rachel. Then turning to Nora, he explained, “Mr. Barrett. We never know when he’s coming, and if we don’t take them, he won’t come back any more. They’re bullfrogs, and I suspect that he catches them with a flashlight, which is against the law, but …” The frogleg man carried them safely through the rest of the meal, on his eccentric back. When they left the table and returned to the living-room, they discovered the fireplace had been smoking in their absence. Austin opened the windows and while they shivered with the cold and broke into coughing, Nora started telling about a strange odour that had developed in the plantation house at Howard’s Landing. “It wasn’t like any smell I’ve ever smelled before. It was dry and dusty, and a little like the smell of vinegar, and nobody could make out where it was coming from, until one day——” Austin left the room and Nora waited until he had come back with a big log in his hands before she went on and finished her story.
The log made the fire burn properly. The smoke went up the chimney instead of out into the room, and in time they were able to close the windows. The Kings and their two guests sat in a circle around the fire, and Austin, finding an appreciative audience, talked shop. Martha sat quietly braiding the fringes of her shawl. Austin’s stories about the involved litigations, lawsuit after lawsuit, of the picturesque Jouette family, she had heard before. From time to time she pressed a yawn back into her throat and, exerting all the will-power at her command, kept from glancing at the clock in the castle of St. Angelo. Lucy Beach contributed nothing to the conversation but her animated interest. Looking at her, one would have thought that a great many things were now being made clear to her that had not been clear before. Actually, she was planning in her mind what she would say to Alice when she got home. Austin got started talkin
g about the law, she would say, and he talked very well. I wish you could have heard him.…
Lucy sat and listened as long as Austin included her in the conversation. When he forgot to do this, she turned to Martha King and began to talk about a problem that had arisen in connection with the kindergarten.
“We have an arrangement with Rachel’s son, Eugene, to come and start the fire in the stove so the rooms will be warm when the children get there. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the chairs had been rearranged and the alphabet plates were on a different shelf of the cupboard from where I’d put them the day before. I didn’t know whether to speak to Eugene or not. He’s a very nice boy, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But soon after that, a piece of green paper was missing, and some of the crayons were broken. Something had to be done, so I went downtown an hour earlier one morning, and guess who the culprit was?”
“I can’t guess,” Martha said. “Who was it?”
“Thelma.”
“What did you say to her?”
“What could I say to her,” Lucy said, “except that if she came any more, I’d be forced to tell her mother about it.”
This version was heavily censored. What actually happened was that Lucy walked in, the fire was crackling in the stove, and Thelma was sitting at one of the long kindergarten tables with crayons and paper spread around her, at work on a detail of the grand fresco that would some day, like the Boro-Budur, depict every human emotion, a design made up entirely of gestures. Suddenly she looked over her shoulder, her eyes large with fright.
“Have you been coming here every morning, Thelma?”
“Yes, Miss Lucy.” Thelma looked down at the small black hands that had at last got her into serious trouble.
“You know that you shouldn’t have used the crayons and paper without asking?”
“Yes’m.”
“And that I’ll have to tell your mother on you?”
“Yes’m.”
With a long pole Lucy opened one of the windows at the top and let out some of the hot dry air in the room. When she had put the pole in the corner, she turned and said, “What will your mother do when I tell her?”
“Whip me.”
“And do you want her to do that?”
“No, Miss Lucy.”
Her eyes downcast, her hands shaking, Thelma put on her coat and started to leave. So contagious is remorse that Lucy said, “You can take this with you if you like,” and presented Thelma with her own half-finished drawing of a woman in a garden, with shears and a basket full of flowers—poppies or anemones or possibly some flower that existed only in Thelma’s mind. Shortly afterward, the children arrived, as noisy and active as birds, and took possession of the kingdom that was reserved for them.
Some dissatisfaction with her part in this scene or with the circumstances which had obliged her to act as she did kept Lucy from going into the particular details, which could have no interest, she felt, for Martha King. She turned her head so as not to miss what Austin was saying.
“… so Father called old Mr. Seacord into his office and said, ‘George, I want you to go down to the bank in Kaiserville and tell Fred Bremmer to look around and see if he can find that will anywhere. If an offer of two hundred acres of land will help him find it, you can make the offer in my name, and I don’t care how you split the land between you.’ The will was in Father’s office by nine o’clock the next morning.”
“How amazing,” Nora said, and felt the world moving off on an entirely new orbit from which it would very likely never return to pursue its usual path. She had had a vision during the past half-hour, and the way was now open to her. She would read, she would study, she would pass the bar examination with flying colours. She saw herself defending the innocent (who would otherwise be convicted of crimes they had no knowledge of), astounding old and learned judges with her irrefutable logic, the foremost woman lawyer in the State of Illinois, a partner in the firm of King and Potter.
Lucy looked down at her gold watch and exclaimed, “Why, we must go home! We’ve stayed much later than we should have.… Nora, I hate to talk about going, when everybody is having such a good time, but we really must.”
In the front hall, while Austin was helping Nora on with her coat, she said, “It’s all so fascinating. I won’t be able to sleep for thinking of the things you’ve told me.” And Lucy said to Martha King, “It’s so nice of you to ask us. As soon as Mother is over her little upset, you must come and have dinner with us. Then Alice can be in on it, too.”
She carried her expectant look with her out into the November night.
16
The night of Martha King’s dinner party, a traveller returned—a Negro with no last name. He came on a slow freight from Indianapolis. Riding in the same boxcar with him, since noon, were an old man and a fifteen-year-old boy and neither of them ever wanted to see him again. His eyes were bloodshot, his face and hands were gritty, his hair was matted with cinders. His huge, pink-palmed hands hung down out of the sleeves of a corduroy mackinaw that was too small for him and filthy and torn. He had thrown away his only pair of socks two days before. There was a hole in the sole of his right shoe, his belly was empty, and the police were on the lookout for him in St. Louis and Cincinnati.
The shadow that the Negro met under the arc light at every cross street did not surprise him. He had seen it in too many back alleys where it is better to have no shadow at all, and he was a man who lived by surprising other people. When he came to Rachel’s shack he stopped and looked up and down the street. Then he moved quietly up to the window and looked in. He stood there motionless for some time before he turned towards the door.
“Where’s your Ma?”
The five frightened faces might just as well have been one. There was no variation in the degree or quality of terror.
“I asked you a question.”
“She ain’t home, Andy,” Everitt said.
“That’s mighty strange. I thought she’d be here tonight,” he said, and closed the door. “She ain’t expecting me?”
There was no answer.
“I don’t call that much of a welcome,” he said. “Your Pappy come three hundred miles to see you, and they ain’t none of you get up off their ass to welcome me home.”
“We didn’t know you was coming,” Eugene said in a whisper. “You didn’t send no word.”
“So I got to send a notice to my own family before they condescends to receive me. I got to write them a letter say I be home on such and such a day, after I been away three whole years. Well, next time maybe I do that. And maybe I don’t. Who’s your Ma working for, these days? That same old white woman?”
“No,” Eugene said.
“Where she work?”
“She work for the Kings,” Everitt said.
“Huh? You don’t say. She getting up in the world. Fast. Mighty fine clothes you all got, for niggers. Looks to me like you’re well fed too. Mighty sleek. Looks to me like I come to the right place.”
“I’ll go tell her you’re here,” Thelma said, glancing towards the door.
“Another country heard from.… Eugene, git up off of that couch and let your Pappy lie down. He’s come a long way and he’s tired. Your Ma fix me a little supper and then I’m going to sleep. I’m going to get in the bed arid sleep for a week. Get up, you hear? Before I make you. You think you’re grown, maybe, but you ain’t grown enough. I show you. I show you right now.”
What happened inside the shack was of no concern to the funeral basket, the two round stones, the coach lantern, and the coffeepot. They were merely the setting for a fancy-dress nightmare, not the actors. Evil moves about on two legs and has lines to speak, gestures that frighten because they are never completed. He can be blond, well bred, to all appearances gentle and kind. Or the eyes can be almond-shaped, the eyebrows plucked, the lids drooping. The hair can be kinky or curly or straight. Features and colouring are a matter of make-up to be left to the individual actor, who can,
if he likes, with grease paint and eyebrow pencil create the face of a friend. If the actor wears a turban or a loincloth, the dramatic effect will be heightened, providing of course that the audience is not also wearing turbans or loincloths. What is important is that Evil be understood, otherwise the scene will not act. The audience will not be able to decide which character is evil and which is the innocent victim. It is quite simple, actually. The one comes to grief through no fault of his own, knows what is being done to him, and does not lift a hand to defend himself from the blow. If he defends himself, he is not innocent. The other has been offered a choice, and has chosen Evil. If the audience and the actors both remember this, they will have no trouble following or acting out the play, which should begin, in any case, quietly, in a low key, suggesting an atmosphere of peace and security and love. The funeral basket, the two round stones, the rain-rotted carriage seat, the coach lantern, and the coffeepot are very good. And for a backdrop let there be a quiet street on a November night in a small midwestern town. A woman comes down the street towards an arc light at the foot of a hill. Under her arm she has a brown paper parcel containing scraps of leftover food. A coloured woman, with her head down, her shoulders hunched, indicating that it is cold. If there is a wind-machine in the wings, the effect will be more realistic. There should be lights in the houses. The trees have shed their leaves. The woman stops suddenly and conveys to the audience by a look, by the absence of all expression, that a chill has passed over her which has nothing to do with the wind from the wings. She looks back at the arc light. And then she begins to run.
Time Will Darken It Page 22