Time Will Darken It (46 page)

But there was more. The arrangements (by whomever made) were generous. The snow kept on falling.

“She isn’t going,” a voice said in the intense stillness. “Her mother thinks it’s snowing too hard for her to go to kindergarten.”

“Thank you, Frieda.”

“You’re welcome, I’m sure, Miss Potter.”

It isn’t snowing too hard, Nora thought as she turned and went back into the excitement of high freedom. It isn’t snowing hard enough.

Of the eleven children that she was supposed to collect, only four were expecting her, and walking with them was as difficult as Lucy Beach had foreseen. They had to walk backwards part of the time so that they didn’t face the wind. There were stretches of sidewalk where no one had walked. There were deep drifts. They were sometimes forced out into the street. The children walked behind Nora, in the path that she schuffed for them, and when they got as far as the high school, the little Lehman boy began to cry. The snow had come over his shoe tops and his feet were cold and wet and he had lost one of his mittens. Nora tried to coax him and succeeded for a little way. Then he sat down in the snow and refused to go any farther, so she picked him up and carried him, as heavy as lead, until they reached the beginning of the business district. Here the sidewalks had been cleaned, and walking was easier.

“When we get to the kindergarten it will be all right,” Nora kept saying to them. “The kindergarten will be warm. We’ll play games. We’ll play that it’s Christmas.”

At nine-thirty, she unlocked the door of the kindergarten rooms and walked in with the children following after her. Though it was immediately apparent, by their visible breath, that there was no fire in the stove, she went over to it and touched it with her hand. The stove was cold. The boy had not come.

There was a closet off the hallway, and in it Nora found some kindling; not much, but if she was careful it would be enough. There was a bucket of coal by the stove, with a folded newspaper lying on top. The fire smoked, but there was no crackling sound, and very soon it went out.

“It probably has something to do with the draught,” Nora explained to the children. She raked the coal and blackened kindling out on the floor. There was no more newspaper, and so she snatched a long coloured-paper chain from the chandelier and stuffed it into the stove. The fire, rebuilt, burned feebly, without giving off any heat. The children stood around, all bundled up and shivering. In the hall closet, while she was rummaging for more paper, Nora found a can of kerosene.

19

Mary Ellis had been asked to the Friendship Club, at Alma Hinkley’s house on Grove Street, as a substitute for Genevieve Wilkinson, who was out of town. There were the usual two tables and the scorecards were decorated irrelevantly with a hatchet and a spray of cherries. At five minutes after five, the four women in the living-room had finished their final rubber and were replaying certain hands in retrospect
while they added up their scores. The table in the parlour had fallen behind because of Bertha Rupp, whose hesitations were sometimes so prolonged and whose playing was so erratic that for years there had been talk of asking her to resign from the club.

Ruth Troxell opened the bidding with a heart and then said, “It must have been a shock to Martha King, in her condition.”

“It was a shock to everybody,” Mary Ellis said.

“I pass,” Irma Seifert said.

Mary Ellis passed and the bidding reached a standstill while Bertha Rupp considered the thirteen cards that chance had dealt her.

“Two clubs,” Bertha Rupp said impulsively and then tried to change her bid to two diamonds, which the other players refused to allow.

“But I meant two diamonds!” she exclaimed.

“It doesn’t matter what you meant. Two clubs is what you bid,” Ruth Troxell said, and then glancing at the score pad beside her, “Two hearts.” She was high at the table.

Irma Seifert and Mary Ellis passed.

“Why did they have a can of kerosene in the kindergarten rooms in the first place?” Irma Seifert said.

“That’s what I can’t figure out,” Mary Ellis said. “Alice says that both she and Lucy knew it was there but they never——Are you waiting for me? I passed.”

“We’re waiting for Bertha,” Ruth Troxell said.

There was a long silence and then Bertha Rupp said, “Two hearts.”

“Ruth has already bid two hearts,” Irma Seifert said.

“Two spades then,” Bertha Rupp said, clenching her cards.

“You’re sure you don’t want to go three hearts?” Ruth Troxell asked.

“No, two spades.”

“Three hearts,” Ruth Troxell said.

“With only the word of four-year-old children to go on,” Irma Seifert said, “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. Three no trump.”

“I pass,” Mary Ellis said. “Mrs. Potter is the one I feel sorry for.”

“They say she has aged overnight,” Ruth Troxell said.

“Austin met them at the train,” Mary Ellis said, “and they drove straight to the hospital. Nora was conscious. She knew them.”

“Who are they staying with?” Irma Seifert asked. “Your bid, Bertha.”

“Oh, they’re staying with the Kings, the way they did before,” Mary Ellis said.

“I wouldn’t have had any of them in my house if I had been Martha,” Ruth Troxell said.

“At a time like that,” Irma Seifert said, “you don’t know what you’d do. Take these nuts away from me, somebody, before I make myself sick.”

Part Six
There Is a Remedy
or There Is None

1

“I wouldn’t care how disfigured her face and hands might be,” Mrs. Potter said, “if she’d only get well; if I could take her home with me and keep her there, forever and ever.”

“From the moment they’re able to walk, they start trying to get away from you,” Mrs. Potter said. She was lying fully dressed on the bed in the yellow guest-room. One arm was thrown across her face, to hide the effort it required for her to remain in possession of her feelings. “They want to escape from your arms, get down out of your lap and leave the house where they were born. I don’t know what it is. Nora never had anything but kindness at home. Her father worships the ground she walks on. So do we all. Love her to pieces. But it isn’t enough, apparently. I don’t know why this had to happen or what we could have done to prevent it.”

“Nothing,” Martha said. “You couldn’t have prevented it or you would have. And you mustn’t blame yourself.”

Mrs. Potter had experienced The Sudden Change. While she was still trying to close the useless umbrella of the Past, the cold wave of the Present had come over her, and, miles and miles from home, she wandered sometimes with the wind, sometimes across it.

“She keeps trying to talk to me through all those bandages and it’s so terrible. Are you sure Dr. Seymour is a good doctor, Martha?”

“We’ve always had him,” Martha said. In open disregard of Dr. Seymour’s orders, she was up and dressed, and sitting in a chair by the front window of the guest-room. But she had her own reasons for what she was doing—reasons that
Dr. Seymour wouldn’t understand or approve of, but this wouldn’t prevent her from putting herself in his hands when the time came to trust someone with absolute trust. “If you don’t feel satisfied and want to call some other doctor in for a consultation, I’m sure it would be all right with him.”

“I keep wishing we’d brought Dr. LeMoyne with us,” Mrs. Potter said. “He’s just a country doctor but he knows a great deal. He brought both my children into the world, and he would have come except that he’s so old now. He’s eighty-three and he would never have stood the train journey.”

There had been a fresh fall of snow during the night. The limbs of the trees were outlined in white against a tropical sky. The tree ferns and palm fronds that went with the blue sky were drawn in white, on the window pane.

“This doctor seems very fond of Nora and anxious to do anything he can to relieve her suffering. The thing I don’t understand is that she doesn’t want to live. She keeps saying there’s no place for her anywhere. I haven’t told Mr. Potter. It would only upset him. But there must be some reason, something that is troubling her.”

Looking out through the patterns of frost, Martha saw that the Wakeman children were trying to make a snowman. The snow would not roll properly; it was too dry, and instead of becoming larger and larger, the snowball crumbled and fell apart.