Time Will Darken It (29 page)

In the upstairs hall of the Beaches’ house, under a combination gas and electric light fixture, there was a large steel engraving of an old woman selling apples. In a gilt frame that
was ornately carved and cracked, it had outlived by many years the sentimental age that inspired such pictures. The old woman had snow-white hair, square steel-rimmed spectacles, and an expression that was a nice blending of natural kindness and the determination to be kind. There were three children in the picture. The well-dressed boy and girl on the old woman’s left had a marked family resemblance. A china doll hung dangling from the little girl’s right hand and she had already taken a bite out of her apple. The little boy was apparently saving his until a burning question had been decided. Facing the brother and sister a barefoot boy with ragged clothing searched deep in his trousers pocket for a penny. The barefoot boy was the centre and whole point of the picture—his rapt eyes, his expression conveying a mixture of hope and fear. It was evident that he could expect no financial assistance from the well-dressed children. Either there was a penny in that or some other pocket, or else he would get no apple from the old woman with the square spectacles. When Mrs. Beach was a little girl, she had often had trouble getting past this picture, and a voice (now long dead) had to remind her that she had been sent in quest of a gold thimble or a spool of thread.

Nora was gazing at the picture one rainy afternoon when a voice called from the foot of the stairs. From her room at the end of the hall, Mrs. Beach called back, “Is that you, Martha? Come on up.”

Unable to move, Nora heard the footsteps mounting and at the last moment, panic set her free and she vanished into her own room. Martha King, having seen the flash of skirts and the door closing, said to herself, Then she
is
trying to avoid me.

“In my room,” Mrs. Beach called, and Martha went on down the hall.

Mrs. Beach was seated at her sewing table fitting together the complicated pieces of a pink and white and green quilt.
The big double bed, which dominated the room, was made up and the pillows tucked into a round hollow bolster. The rest of the room was in such disorder as one might expect if the occupant were packing for a long sea voyage, but Mrs. Beach had merely been straightening her bureau drawers. The chairs were piled with odds and ends whose place in the grand scheme of things she had not yet decided upon.

“Just move that pile of shirtwaists,” she said, with a wave of her stork-handled scissors. “I’d rather you didn’t sit on the bed.”

“I can’t stay,” Martha said.

“You always say that, and it’s not polite. If you come intending to leave right away, you might as well not come at all. Have you heard from Mrs. Potter?”

Martha nodded.

“I think it’s so strange that she doesn’t write to me,” Mrs. Beach said, “with Nora staying in our house. If Alice or Lucy were staying with the Potters I’d certainly feel that it was my duty to write and show my appreciation, but I gather that Nora and her mother are not very close. That may be why she doesn’t bother to put herself out, where Nora is concerned. Now that I think of it, it seems to me that you might have done more for Nora than you have, these past weeks. Or would you have preferred that she went home with her family?”

In order to carry on an amicable conversation with Mrs. Beach, most people found it necessary to let a great many of her remarks pass unchallenged. Far from being grateful because they had come to see her, she usually found pleasure in pointing out to them how long it had been since their last visit. She also asked questions that were inoffensive in themselves but that steered the conversation inexorably around to matters that were sometimes delicate and sometimes none of Mrs. Beach’s business.

“I’ve had only one letter from her,” Martha said. “She
asked to be remembered to you. Austin hears from Mr. Potter.”

“I must say she seemed very fond of us all when she was here, but out of sight, out of mind, apparently. This is the wild rose pattern.” Mrs. Beach held the quilt out for Martha to admire. “I’ve made one for Lucy and now I’m making one for Alice. I want them to have something to remember me by when I’m gone.”

“It’s lovely,” Martha said. “But I wish you wouldn’t talk of dying on a gloomy day like this.”

“After you reach sixty,” Mrs. Beach said, “you don’t expect to be around forever. I don’t know that I even want to be. The world was a much nicer place when I was a girl. Good breeding and good manners counted for something. My mother began her married life with her own carriage and a large staff of servants. In the summer we went to …”

Mrs. Beach kept Martha for three-quarters of an hour, talking about the vanished world of her girlhood and about the kindergarten, and then she said, “Please don’t think I’m driving you away, my dear, but if I don’t have my afternoon rest——”

“If you wanted to lie down,” Martha said, rising, “why have you been keeping me here? I tried to leave three times in the last fifteen minutes, and each time you——”

“Don’t be so touchy,” Mrs. Beach said, and smiled. Her smiles were rare, in any case, and seldom as amused or as genuinely friendly as this one was. “All old people have their failings,” she said. “Stop and see the girls on your way out. They’ll be hurt if you don’t.”

The Beach girls were on the glassed-in back porch, painting little wooden chairs. They had spread newspapers over the floor but there was no way they could avoid getting paint on themselves. Lucy had a streak of robin’s-egg blue running through her hair where she had touched her head in a gesture of weariness. Their hands and aprons were covered with paint.

“Be careful and don’t brush against anything!” she said when Martha appeared in the kitchen doorway.

“They’re for the kindergarten? How beautiful!” Martha said. “And what a lot of work!”

“There’s no end to it,” Lucy said. “If I’d known what we were letting ourselves in for——”

“Mother’s upstairs,” Alice said.

“I’ve just been up to see her,” Martha said, “but I really came over to talk to you. About Ab, I mean. I haven’t decided definitely whether to send her to kindergarten or not. She’s so young.”

“You mustn’t let our friendship influence you,” Lucy said.

“Oh I wouldn’t,” Martha said. “If I don’t send her, I know you’ll understand. When are you going to start?”

“The first week in October, if everything is ready by that time,” Lucy said. “We’re having trouble with the tables. Mr. Moseby keeps promising them by a certain date, and then they’re never ready. It’s so discouraging.”

They discussed at some length whether Ab would be happy in kindergarten.

“She doesn’t want to be anywhere unless I’m there too,” Martha said. “Also, I don’t want to be separated from her. I really feel very queer about it, but I suppose it will pass. I can’t go on like this, feeling anxious about everything. But if she cries——”

“She won’t cry,” Lucy said. “At the Montessori School in Rome——”

“Look out for your dress!” Alice cried, too late, as Martha backed against one of the freshly painted chairs.

The blue smudge came out with a little turpentine, and Alice went as far as the front door with Martha King, and then turned towards the stairs. Mrs. Beach was lying on her bed with her eyes closed, but as Alice started to tiptoe from the room, she said, “Well,
is
she or isn’t she going to send Ab
to kindergarten? I never saw Martha so undecided about anything before.”

“She’s going to think it over,” Alice said.

“This shilly-shallying isn’t like her,” Mrs. Beach said, opening her eyes. “I think she’s going to have another baby.”

Mrs. Beach had a talent for divination. With the aid of a soiled pack of fortune-telling cards she sometimes correctly foretold the future, and she could often guess at a glance what was inside a wrapped package or in the back of someone’s mind. If this was perhaps nothing but acute observation arriving at the truth by way of shortcuts and back alleys, it never ceased to confound and confuse her daughters, and Mrs. Beach had absolute faith in her own intuitive powers.

“If she were going to have a baby, wouldn’t it show?” Alice asked, aware that, while they were talking, Nora had come into the room.

“Not necessarily,” Mrs. Beach said, “For Austin’s sake, I hope it’s a boy. He’s so kind and considerate of other people. I wish there were only more like him.”

This was not her usual opinion of Austin King, and Alice recognized that her mother was in a special mood—the one where she didn’t like to hear anybody criticized.

Out of contrariness, as she knelt down and began picking up scraps of material from the rug, Alice said, “Sometimes I wonder about him. I mean, if he is as nice as he seems. Because if he is that way, why does Martha get so furious with him?”

“I’ve never seen the slightest trace of irritability in Martha,” Mrs. Beach said. “Vague, yes, and unable to make up her mind. But not irritable.”

“I’ve seen her ready to pick up an axe and hit him over the head with it,” Alice said.

“You’re imagining things,” Mrs. Beach said. “May, June, July, August, September——”

“No,” Alice said, and realized how still Nora was. Throughout the conversation, she hadn’t said a word. And yet Nora had lived in the Kings’ house for a month and must have some opinion on the subject of Austin King. He was her foster-cousin, of course, and with some people that would be enough to prevent them from discussing him. But Nora talked about her own mother and father and brother without the least reticence, and if she didn’t join in the conversation about Austin, it couldn’t be because of any family scruples, but only because she didn’t want to say what she thought.

As Alice Beach reached toward a pin, an idea came into her mind that startled and then frightened her. She glanced hurriedly around to see whether her mother or Nora had read her thoughts.

“—October, November, December, January,” Mrs. Beach said. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the baby came in January.”

7

It wasn’t that Ab didn’t want to go to kindergarten. She woke that morning in a warm nest of bedclothes, and when her mother came into the room and said, “Today is the day,” Ab felt both proud and singled out. But there was something she didn’t understand, that might have been explained to her and wasn’t, and disaster is often merely an event that you don’t have a chance to get used to before it happens.

“Did you go to kindergarten?” she asked as she stepped into the underwear that her mother held out for her.

“No,” Martha said. “There wasn’t any kindergarten when I was a little girl.”

“Did Daddy go to kindergarten?”

“No.”

“Did Rachel?”

“No, Rachel didn’t go to kindergarten either. Just you.”

Ab submitted to the washrag and soap with less than the usual amount of complaints, and she didn’t dally over her breakfast. As soon as she had finished her milk, she asked to be excused and slid down from her high chair. The house was full of clocks, but they were of no earthly use to her. She could go to her mother and say, “What time is it?” and her mother would glance at the china clock on the mantelpiece in the study and say, “Twenty minutes to two,” or her father would put down his newspaper and extract his gold watch from his vest pocket, open the case, and announce that it was a quarter after seven; but such statements are never really enlightening. There was no way of telling beforehand when anything was going to happen. So far as Ab could discover, it happened when the grown people decided that the time had come for it to happen.

She played, that morning, within sight and hearing of her mother, who lingered at the breakfast table, her hair piled in a loose knot on top of her head, and the sleeves of her negligee pinned above the elbows. At quarter to nine the doorbell rang. When her mother opened the door, Ab saw Nora Potter with a little boy and two little girls.

“Oh, hello,” Martha King said. “I didn’t expect you quite so early.”

Ab withdrew behind her mother’s skirts. Since they had come too early, they would have to sit down in the living-room and wait until her mother was dressed.

Martha went to the long closet under the stairs and a moment later emerged with Ab’s blue coat and bonnet in her hand, and even then Ab was unprepared for the shock that followed—the shock of hearing her mother say, “Now be a good girl, won’t you?” Her mother must know that she wouldn’t think of going to kindergarten without her. It was out of the question.