Time Will Darken It (9 page)

“Very,” Martha said.

“Did I waken you?”

Martha shook her head. “We thought you were still asleep,” she said, reaching for the china serving bell.

“I tried to slip out of the house as quietly as I could. What a nice sound that bell makes. Our bell at home makes such a racket. It came down through the Detrava side of the family so Mama insists on using it.”

“This one came down through Mr. Gossett’s gift shop,” Martha said. “Did you enjoy your walk?”

“There was dew on the grass and after the heat yesterday everything seemed so fresh and clear cut. Maybe because I’m in a strange place, seeing everything for the first time. Or maybe it’s because I’m happy. All my life I’ve wanted to come North.” She put down her spoon and with her raised eyebrows conveyed the seriousness and the intensity of this desire. “Ever since I was a little girl.”

The horrible odour of frying eggs penetrated through two swinging doors and filled the dining-room.

“Well now that you’re here, you must make the most of it,” Martha said.

“I mean to,” Nora said earnestly. “At home it doesn’t cool off at night and you wake up exhausted. Here everybody and his dog were out sweeping and watering their window-boxes and I don’t know what all. You’d think they were getting ready for a celebration.”

Martha leaned over and wiped a dribble of egg from Ab’s chin. “You make me wish I’d been out with you,” she said. “There was nothing so interesting going on here.”

“And red geraniums. Everybody has red geraniums and I’m so tired of magnolias. What would they have done if I’d walked right past them into their houses and had a look around?”

“It all depends on whose house you walked into. The Murphys would have let you go upstairs and downstairs and anywhere you wanted to. Old Mrs. Tannehill would probably have called the police.”

“Would she really?”

“Yes, I think she would,” Martha said. “But Austin would have come and bailed you out.”

“It’s a game I’m always playing with myself,” Nora said. “That I’m invisible and can go wherever I want to go and watch people when they don’t know anybody is watching
them.” She finished her cantaloupe and pushed it aside. “There was so much going on this morning I almost came back here to get Brother. You know how—not always but sometimes—you feel If I only had someone with me?”

“I know,” Martha said.

“And then,” Nora said, “sometimes when you do have someone with you and you think they’re going to enjoy things the way you do, it turns out not to be the right person.” Her eyes came to rest on the silver napkin ring. “You and Cousin Austin seem so suited to each other. I woke up thinking about you.”

“And I woke up thinking about you,” Martha said.

“Did you really?” Nora’s eyes opened wide with amazement. “Wasn’t that a coincidence! And yet if we were to try and tell somebody, they probably wouldn’t believe that such a thing could happen. I’m always having strange things happen to me. I don’t know what it is.”

The pantry door swung open and Rachel appeared with a platter of bacon and eggs. “Morning, Miss Nora,” she said glumly.

“Good morning, Rachel. How are you this morning—at least
I
think they’re strange. But what I was about to say is I’m so glad you and Cousin Austin found each other.”

“Do you take cream and sugar in your coffee?” Martha asked.

“Neither,” Nora said. “I just take it black.” Her expression changed and became uncertain. In Mississippi a genuine liking conveyed with candour usually brought a similar protestation in return. Also, there was something about Martha King’s manner—so encouraging one minute and the next so blank, as if she had no idea what Nora was talking about—that made some of Nora’s pleasure in the summer morning dwindle away. At the risk of seeming foolish she added, “And so glad I’ve found you both,” and was partly reassured by the wan smile from across the breakfast table. “I often wonder why
people marry the people they do marry, and what they find to say to each other, day in and day out. There’s so much that must be difficult——”

“You’re excused, pet,” Martha said to Ab.

“I haven’t finished my milk,” Ab said.

“Never mind. You don’t have to finish your milk this morning. Go in the study and play with your dolls.”

“Do you mind my talking in such a steady stream?” Nora asked, as Ab left the room. “We all talk more than we should, except Randolph. It’s a family failing. The thing is, you don’t have to listen. Not if you don’t feel like it.”

“Oh but I
am
listening,” Martha said. “And with great interest.”

“If people don’t talk,” Nora said, “it’s so hard to know what’s on their minds. Tell me, Cousin Martha, do you ever hear voices?”

The telephone began ringing, and Martha went into the study to answer it.

“Yes,” Nora heard her say. “Well, I’m glad. I hoped everybody was having a good time.… Yes, I’ll tell them. They aren’t up yet. Only Nora …”

At the sound of her own name, Nora felt the cold damp wind of dislike blowing through the dining-room, and wondered what she had said or done to deserve it.

“Oh no!” Martha exclaimed, over the telephone. “What a pity! Perhaps it was the fried chicken … yes … yes, of course.… Well, you tell her I’m terribly sorry.… I can look it up, but I think I remember it … a teaspoonful of baking powder and then you beat it throughly until it’s stiff.… That’s right … yes … yes, Alice … yes, I will. And thank you for calling.”

“I’m so sorry about all these interruptions,” she said, when she came back into the dining-room. “That was Alice Beach calling to say what a nice time they had last night and how much they liked you all.”

“I hope you told her how much we liked them,” Nora said.

“What was it you were saying?” Martha asked. “Here, let me fill your cup.”

Oh, it’s no use, Nora thought. I ought never have tried to make friends with her. She doesn’t want to be friends with anybody.

“I hear these voices,” she began, as she passed her cup across the table, “saying ‘Nora, where are you?’ and I say, sometimes right out loud: ‘On the side porch’ or ‘Upstairs’—depending on where I am at the time. They aren’t real voices——”

Martha tilted the coffeepot and it gave out a last thin trickle.

“
Now
where are you going?” Nora asked anxiously.

“To make a fresh pot of coffee.”

“Can’t I do it?”

“I’d better go do it myself,” Martha said. “Rachel’s in a bad mood this morning. She might bite your head off.… They’re not real?” she asked, with her hand on the swinging door.

“Cousin Martha, that bed!” a voice said. Mrs. Potter swept into the dining-room, wearing a lace cap to hide her curl papers and an old brocade dressing-gown that Nora had begged her to leave at home. “Good morning, daughter.”

“Nora and I have been having such an interesting conversation,” Martha King said.

“I hope she hasn’t been talking about Life, at the breakfast table.”

“Oh no,” Martha said. “Nora and I have been talking about voices.”

“I can’t always follow her, before my eyes are open. Nothing but toast and coffee for me,” Mrs. Potter added as she sat down. “Mr. Potter likes his two eggs and a little fried ham, if you have any, but I just have toast and coffee. My dear, it was like sleeping on a cloud.”

3

The law office of Holby and King, on the north side of the courthouse square, was reached by a flight of rickety stairs in which deep grooves had been worn by the feet of people coming to inquire into their rights under the Law, or to be treated by Dr. Hieronymous, the osteopath whose office was across the hall.

In the outer room of the law firm, surrounded by tier upon tier of fat calf-bound books on jurisprudence and equity, Miss Ewing guarded the gate through which people were usually but not always allowed to pass. She was a thin, energetic, nervous woman with a raw complexion, pale blue eyes, and pince-nez that reflected no mercy upon mankind. Around her cuffs she wore sheets of legal foolscap held in place by paper clips, and her hair was a grey bird’s nest full of little combs, bone hairpins, puffs, and rats. The age of anyone born and raised in Draperville was either common knowledge or easily arrived at by mental calculation—Miss Ewing was fifty-one. But how she did her hair up the same way every morning of her life was a secret known to no other living person.

Miss Ewing was friendly with clients, rude to insurance salesmen and peddlers, and self-important generally; but she did the work of two secretaries and an errand boy, was never ill, and gave up all claim to a life of her own in the sincere and fairly accurate belief that without her the firm of Holby and King would not have been able to function. She alone understood the filing and book-keeping systems, and she had dozens of telephone numbers and addresses in her head, including some that belonged to people who were now retired from business and in certain cases dead.

This morning she was sitting at her L. C. Smith double-keyboard typewriter thrashing out five copies of an abstract that Austin King had left on her desk, and waiting for a farmer named John Scroggins to come out of Mr. Holby’s office so she could go in and take his dictation. There were a number of matters that Mr. Holby ought to have been attending to, but instead he was addressing the farmer as if they were both in a crowded courtroom. “We had more enjoyment in the days of bare rough floors and mud chimneys than the people of today, who tread upon velvet and recline upon cushioned seats, clothed in purple and fine linen …”

The farmer was clothed in an old dark blue suit, and he had come to consult Mr. Holby about the mortgage on his farm. It was coming due shortly and the bank was threatening to foreclose.

“Life then,” Mr. Holby said, “was more real. Humankind possessed more goodness. Virtue had a higher level, and manhood was set at a higher key …”

Miss Ewing went on typing.

Austin King’s door was closed. Although he was the junior partner in the firm, his office was the larger of the two, and looked out over the square and the stately courthouse elms. It had been Judge King’s office. Partly out of respect for his father’s memory and partly so that his father’s friends could come here and smoke a cigar and perhaps feel his loss less keenly, Austin had kept the office the way it was during Judge King’s lifetime. But the big slant-topped desk, the green and red carpet, the stuffed prairie dog and the framed photograph of the old Buttercup Hunting and Fishing Club were not enough. Something was gone from the room and these memorials only made the old men sad. When they came at all, it was generally on business.

Judge King was the nearest the town of Draperville had come to producing a great man. During the last years of his life, honours had been heaped upon him. He was twice judge
of the circuit court and several times a director of the country fair association. In 1880 he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention at Chicago, and four years later he was one of the presidential electors for the State of Illinois. In 1896 he was asked to run for governor and declined (the offer had strings attached to it). And shortly after the conclusion of his most celebrated case,
The Citizens of Dunthorpe County v. James Long
, he was publicly presented with the gold watch which Austin now carried.

Judge King’s largeness of mind, his legal talent, and his wisdom in political affairs were balanced and made human by his fund of stories, his love of good living, and the pleasure he took in people of all kinds, especially women. He preferred them to be young and pretty, but whatever they were like, he rose to meet them as if they were, entirely in themselves, an object of pleasure and an occasion for ceremony. He made them little complimentary speeches and with his own eyes dancing, looked deeply into theirs, to see what was there. They were always charming to him. Refusing to recognize what everyone knew to be a melancholy fact, he went on notes for friends and made a number of loans of which his executors could find no written record. But in a place where gossip and scandal flourished, Judge King left a good name.

It was never his intention that Austin should become a lawyer. He died in 1901 before Austin knew what profession he wanted to follow. His father’s memory, tenaciously preserved in the minds of the people who loved him, the sense of personal loss, and perhaps most of all the realization that he had never really known his father made Austin choose law as a career.