Time Will Darken It (2 page)

Part One
An Evening Party
(1912)

1

In order to pay off an old debt that someone else had contracted, Austin King had said yes when he knew that he ought to have said no, and now at five o’clock of a July afternoon he saw the grinning face of trouble everywhere he turned. The house was full of strangers from Mississippi; within an hour the friends and neighbours he had invited to an evening party would begin ringing the doorbell; and his wife (whom he loved) was not speaking to him.

As yet this quarrel was confined to the bedroom and he wanted if possible to keep it from spreading through the house. On his way upstairs he fixed the picture of Maxine Elliott so that it was straight with the world. As he closed the bedroom door from the inside, his eyes turned to the mahogany four-poster bed where his wife lay, face down, in a Japanese kimono. Her brown hair was spread out on the pillow like a sea plant, and one arm, with a heavy gold bracelet hanging from the delicate inert wrist, extended past the edge of the bed into space.

Austin loosened his tie and took off his coat and trousers and hung them on a hanger in the closet. When he had put on his bathrobe he stood waiting for some slight movement, some indication that the hand which had so often searched blindly for his hand was ready to make peace. There was no price that he was not willing to pay, no bargain too hard if only for the rest of this day all differences could be put aside, all wounds (old and new) disregarded and left to heal themselves. After a moment he sat down on the edge of the bed. Receiving no encouragement, he waited and then put out his hand. His fingers closed around his wife’s elbow. The elbow
was jerked away and drawn under her body where he couldn’t get at it. The childishness of this gesture made him smile, but it also meant that one avenue of reconciliation was closed.

“I’m sorry I did what I did,” he said. “I should have talked to you first, before I wrote and told them to come. And if I had it to do over again——” There was no answer and he knew from past experience that there would be none. “I thought you’d understand and they wouldn’t,” he said.

His eyes rested uneasily on the design of the appliquéd quilt, the round lavender morning glories and the heart-shaped green leaves. The quilt was a present from his mother, who would have been shocked to see anyone lying on it.

Annoyed at himself for thinking about the quilt at a time like this, he crossed the room to the dressing-table, picked up his wife’s hairbrush, and closing the bedroom door behind him, went into the room across the hall to look after his little daughter, who was too young to dress without help. Between them they decided which shoes and stockings, which dress she was to wear, and put them on her. Then, sitting in a rocker that was too low for him, Austin held her chin with one hand and managed the hairbrush inexpertly with the other.

The excitement of guests staying in the house made Abbey King talkative. “Is it true,” she asked, “is it true that gypsies steal little children?”

Though more delicate and with a difference in spacing, her features were a reproduction of her father’s—the high forehead particularly, and the eyebrows and grey-blue eyes. Her hair was light brown, like her mother’s, and straight. When it was being brushed, it fluffed out and made crackling sounds but Ab knew, at four years old, that her hair was too fine and too thin to be admired. Both of these drawbacks had been pointed out, not to the little girl but unfortunately in her presence. Mixed in with this sadness about her hair was the pleasure she had from standing between her father’s knees.

“Do they, Daddy?”

“Sometimes,” Austin King said, frowning intently.

“Do they steal tricycles?”

“I don’t think so. They wouldn’t have any use for tricycles.”

“What happens to the children they steal?”

“Their fathers and mothers go to the police and the police find the gypsies and put them in jail,” Austin said.

“What happens if they can’t find the gypsies? What if they go so far away that nobody can find them and put them in jail?”

“Then their mothers grieve over them.”

“Would Mama grieve over me?”

“Certainly. Stand still, Abbey. Stop jerking your head away. I’m not hurting you.”

“You are too,” Ab said, because it did hurt a little and because she liked to argue with people—with her father, with Rachel the cook, and most of all with her mother. She liked to wear her mother’s temper thin. There was a limit that both of them recognized, a danger line past which Ab couldn’t go and safely retreat from a spanking. Occasionally she stepped over it and then, after her mother’s anger and her own tears, peace descended on the household. But with her father there was no such line. She could not drive him to the limit of his patience.

“What happens to the children?” she asked again.

“The children? Oh they grow up and become gypsies.”

“Then what happens?”

“They go from place to place in their wagons.”

Ab’s next remark, a question really, though it took the form of a statement, was prepared for by an extended silence, during which Austin turned her around so he could tie her blue sash.

“Rachel says sometimes—
she
says if children are bad and if nobody can do anything with them or make them mind, then their mothers and fathers sell them to the gypsies.”

“Surely not,” Austin said.

“That’s what Rachel says.”

“Well nobody’s going to sell you to the gypsies so stop worrying about it,” Austin said, and got up from the rocker. His hands, as they gave a final twist to Ab’s hair-ribbon, seemed meant for some work of exactness like mending watches or making trout flies. Actually, Austin King was a lawyer.

“Now then,” he said approvingly, “you’re all ready for company even if your father and mother are not. See if you can stay that way for the next half-hour till people begin to arrive.”

He stood still and listened. Overhead, footsteps crossed and recrossed the ceiling. In the big, bare, third-floor bedroom (where the heat must be stifling, Austin thought) young Randolph Potter was also making himself presentable for the party. He had come North with his father and mother and sister, hoping to escape the heat, and like a faithful hound running after a carriage with its tongue hanging out the heat had followed them.

Until today Austin King had never set eyes on these foster relatives. When the name Potter crossed his mind at all, it was associated with two faded tintypes in the family album, on the page facing the stiff wedding-day portrait of his Grandfather and Grandmother King. Judge King, Austin’s father, often used to speak of the man who took him in after his own father died, gave him a home as long as he needed one, and treated him exactly as he treated his own five sons. Both parties to this act of kindness—the homeless, frightened, boy and the gaunt Mennonite preacher—were now six feet underground, and the obligation could just as well have ended there, except that on the tenth of June the postman had delivered to the law office of Holby and King a letter addressed to Judge King, and therefore all the more binding on the person who broke open the sealed envelope. The letter was signed
Yrs. affy. Reuben S. Potter
, and it was full of allusions to boyhood matters that Austin didn’t understand or know about, but he knew what his father would have written in
reply to the final paragraph in which Mr. Potter, anxious to pick up the threads that had broken under the weights of time and distance, suggested bringing his family to Illinois for a visit.

Austin’s whole long boyhood had been full of visiting aunts and uncles and cousins who came and stayed sometimes for a month or more. Lawyers, judges, politicians, railroad men, business acquaintances, anybody that Judge King liked or was interested in or felt sorry for, he brought home from his office for a meal, for overnight, and never thought of letting his wife know beforehand. The dining-room table could be stretched out until it accommodated any number, and there was always plenty of food. Austin’s mother was active and capable, and while Judge King was alive, able to manage any burden that he placed upon her. Having company meant putting clean sheets on the bed in this or that spare room and making up the couch in the billiard room so that some young cousin, or sometimes Austin, could sleep on it, and then settling down to a nice long visit.

Such continuous open hospitality was dying out; it was a thing of the past. Martha King didn’t entertain easily and casually the way Austin’s mother had, and also, two days before the letter came, Dr. Seymour had told her that she was pregnant again. Faced with a choice between an inherited obligation and the consideration he owed his wife, Austin had sat down at his desk and tried to frame a letter that would explain, politely and regretfully and without giving offence, why it was not convenient to have the Potters at this time. He began and crumpled up one draft after another, until finally, trusting that Martha out of love for him would understand and approve, he dipped his pen in the ink bottle and with a heavy sigh committed them both.

Martha King not only didn’t understand, she put an altogether different colouring upon his intentions; but instead of telling him how she felt, she waited, and when the Potters
had arrived and it was too late for him to do anything about it, she made a scene behind the closed bedroom door, showered him with accusations (some just, some unjust), said that he didn’t love her or he couldn’t possibly have done such a thing when she was in no condition to have a house full of company, and then withdrew her support, leaving him to manage as best he could. To add to Austin’s difficulties, she was ill in a way that she hadn’t been before Ab was born; she was subject to morning sickness, making him feel that he had been unfair not only towards her but also towards the Potters, who should have been told, he now realized. They should at least have been given a chance not to come.

The footsteps stopped.

“Will there be any children for me to play with?” Ab asked.

Austin said, “No, this is a grown-up party and you mustn’t interrupt people when they are talking, do you hear? Just be quiet and watch, and afterwards everybody will say, ‘What a nice little girl.’ ”