Time Will Darken It (24 page)

“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 child, 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.”

“All right,” Austin said, without glancing up. “Just put it on my desk and I’ll look at it later.”

Mr. Holby’s procrastination was a problem that had to be handled delicately. If he had been as successful and as universally respected as Judge King, he might have found it easier to make decisions. Office work bored him. What he needed to marshal his energies was the smell of the courtroom, the sound of the judge’s gavel, whispered consultations at a moment of crisis, a shaky witness to cross-examine, and an audience that he could sway by reason or emotion, depending on the cards he had up his sleeve.

The mantle of the older lawyers should have fallen on his shoulders, but when the time came for him to receive it, the mantle was threadbare and he found himself cheated out of the honour that they had had. His little overnight trips to Springfield and Chicago and St. Louis extended themselves to three days or sometimes to a week and longer. When he was in the office he spent more time talking to old cronies than he gave to legal work. “Just put it there in that pile I have to
look over,” he would say, indicating a wire basket full of dusty manilla folders. “I’ll take care of it first thing tomorrow morning.” Or “Let’s wait another month or six weeks and then see where we stand. If we hurry it through——”

Austin King was not entirely free from procrastination himself, and for that reason found it twice as irritating in his partner. Forty minutes passed before he got around to looking at the large document that Miss Ewing had placed on his desk. During that time a fashionably dressed young woman entered the outer office and asked to see Mr. King. “If you’ll just take a chair,” Miss Ewing said, “Mr. King will see you as soon as he is free.” There was nothing she liked better than to keep people waiting, and it often annoyed her that Austin did not use this simple means of building up his prestige. When he called to her, finally, she got up from her desk, smiling, and went into his office.

“Where did you find this deed? It should have been recorded months ago.”

“It was in the files,” Miss Ewing said.

“Did you know it was there?”

Miss Ewing nodded. “I’ve spoken to Mr. Holby several times about it, but——”

She and Austin exchanged a brief, understanding look, and then he said, “I’d better get right over to the county clerk’s office with it.”

“Miss Potter is waiting to see you.”

With difficulty Austin turned his mind away from the things he would have to say not only to the county clerk but also to Mr. Seligsberg, and to Mr. Holby when he returned from his trip to Chicago.

“Miss Potter?” he repeated. “Tell her to come in.”

When Miss Ewing ushered Nora in, Austin got up from his chair. “Well, this is very nice!”

“The county clerk’s office closes at noon today,” Miss Ewing said, and withdrew, shutting the door after her.

“I won’t stay but a minute,” Nora said. “I know you’re terribly busy.”

Unable to deny it in the face of Miss Ewing’s instructions about the county clerk’s office, Austin with a wave of his hand offered Nora the chair beside his desk. She remained standing.

“I came to ask you something.”

“Something of a legal nature, perhaps?” Austin smiled at her.

“No,” Nora said, pulling at her gloves.

The errand that had brought her downtown must be a serious one, Austin decided; otherwise she wouldn’t be so uneasy with him. Again his hand made the same gesture without his being altogether aware of it, and Nora shook her head. “There’s no need for me to sit down,” she said, “and I don’t want to take up any more of your time than I have to. It’s simply this—I came here to ask why you—why you look at me the way you do.”

“Look at you?” Austin repeated.

“Yes. Whenever we’re in the same room or anywhere together I see you watching me, and before I go home I want to know why. I want to know what it is that you are trying to convey to me.”

Austin flushed. “If I have been making you uncomfortable, Nora,” he said, “I’m very sorry. I wasn’t aware of what I was doing. Now that you’ve told me, I——”

“Is that all?” Nora’s lips trembled.

“What do you mean ‘all’?”

“I mean—oh, why are you so cautious? You can say anything in the world to me,
anything
, do you understand?”

“But I really don’t have anything to say to you, Nora.”

The clacking of the typewriter in the outer office added to his sense of helplessness.
This is a place of business
, the typewriter said.
Personal matters should be taken care of after office hours, not here
.

Nora turned towards the door, and he said, “Wait!”

“Please let me go,” she said with her back to him.

“Not just yet. I want to talk to you. If I had had any idea that you——”

“You must have known that I was in love with you. Everything else about me you understood so perfectly without my having to tell you. I thought you wanted me to be in love with you.”