Time Will Darken It (56 page)

When Martha King came back to the house on Elm Street it was as a traveller returning after a long adventurous life to the place where that life had begun, fifty years before. The lights in the windows, the known dimensions of the yard, the half-seen shapes of trees and shrubbery all appeared to her from a perspective of distance too great for her to feel any direct happiness but only wonder at the place for being, after all this while, so intact and so much itself.

The nurse went ahead with the baby, while Martha with Austin supporting her made the trip slowly, pausing at the porch steps. She still hadn’t got her strength back and there was a question in her mind whether she ever would. The lamps were lighted, the floors and the furniture shone. A hand that might have been hers had been at work, and nothing varied by a hair’s breadth from its right place.

“It looks as if we were about to give a party,” she said as Austin was hanging her coat in the hall closet.

“Hadn’t you better go straight up to bed?”

“After dinner,” Martha said.

When she was settled on the sofa in the living-room with a wool afghan over her knees and pillows at her back, she said, “Austin, would you go upstairs and see if there’s anything she needs?… And find Ab,” she called as Austin started for the stairs.

She lay back on the sofa with her eyes closed. The whole feel of the house was wrong, in spite of the order and polish and preparation for her. The living-room curtains, that she had decided to leave until next summer, would have to go. And the picture of Apollo would have to come down. She had looked at it long enough. She would get a divided mirror for over the mantelpiece. The chair in the hall would have to go to the upholsterer’s to be glued and re-covered. There would have to be other changes, not all at once, but gradually one thing after another until the house was …

A sudden thunder of feet on the stairs made her sit up and turn towards the hall. Austin came into the living-room with Ab riding on his back. They were both flushed and laughing, which annoyed Martha. Ab was a child, of course, and couldn’t be expected to know what her mother had been through. But Austin was another matter.

Ab slid into her arms limply and Martha said, “You oughtn’t to come down the stairs like that with her.”

“I wouldn’t drop her,” Austin said.

“You might stumble and fall,” Martha said. As she rocked Ab and smoothed her hair, she felt as if something she had been deprived of without realizing it had now been restored to her.

“Rachel’s out in the kitchen,” Ab said.

“No!” Martha exclaimed. And then, “That’s what you were so pleased with yourself about?”

“I wanted to surprise you,” Austin said. “I found out where she was and wrote to her.”

“Did you fire Frieda?”

“She gave notice the day the Potters went. She said she couldn’t stay in the house alone with me. It wasn’t proper.”

“And you’ve had nobody to cook for you all this time?”

“I managed,” Austin said.

At the sound of someone in the dining-room, Martha called, “Rachel, is that you?”

Rachel appeared in the dining-room door and smiled—a broad, bright, gleaming smile that made Martha feel taken up and held, as she herself was holding Ab.

“If you only knew what it was like without you,” she said, “and how I missed you.”

“Is that right?” Rachel said. “I give the whole house a good going over.”

“I see you did. It’s beautiful. Have you been up to see the baby? He’s not much to look at. He only weighs five and a half pounds.”

“I reckon he’ll improve, now that you’ve got him home,” Rachel said. “Dinner is served.”

“I can’t tell you what it feels like,” Martha said as she started to get up from the sofa.

Hours later, lying in bed and watching Austin undress, she said the same thing. What it was like was music, like wave upon wave of rising, ringing happy voices singing
Let us praise the Creator and all that He has made
.

With the light off and Austin in bed beside her, she found herself suddenly wide awake, restless, and wanting to talk. “There’s something the matter with Ab.”

“I didn’t notice it,” Austin said.

“She acts as if she had some kind of a grievance against us.”

“She’ll be all right. Don’t worry about it.”

After a short while, he withdrew his arm from under her head and turned over on his side. She was still not ready to go to sleep. “There’s something else that worries me. When Ab was born I loved her right away, but I don’t feel the same about this baby.”

“You will.”

“When I hold him he cries as if he doesn’t want to come to me.”

“Show me the baby that doesn’t cry.”

“Austin, does Nora write to you?”

“No.”

“You’re telling me the truth? You wouldn’t lie to me about it?”

“Why should I lie to you? She hasn’t written to me and she won’t, and if she did write I wouldn’t open the letter.”

“There’s no reason for you to say that. I wouldn’t mind if you did. If you want to write to her, it’s all right with me.”

“But I don’t want to write to her. And I don’t want her to write to me. It’s all past and done with.”

“For you, maybe.”

“Oh, darling, forget about it. Go to sleep.”

“All the time I was in the hospital I kept thinking about what it would be like to be home, and the very first night——”

Austin heaved himself over and sat up in bed, staring down at her in the dark. “This is something you started your own self. I didn’t mention Nora.”

“What difference does it make who mentioned her? She’s still here,” Martha said, and felt the bed give as he lay back once more. “I can’t reach you the way I used to be able to,” Martha said, after a while. “I guess it’s just that I don’t know you any more. You’ve changed, but I’ve changed, too. You know Nora better than you know me. You’ve talked more to her. I don’t mean this unkindly, Austin, but I think we ought to see things as they are, instead of trying to make a false life together, for the sake of the children. It’s something I realized in the hospital—that you have only one life and if you spend all your time and energy trying to force something that, in the very nature of things, is impossible and hopeless, you might as well not have lived at all. People ought to follow their deeper instincts and be what they are meant to be, even if it causes unhappiness. They can’t be themselves and still go on pretending that everything is all right when it isn’t. By being honest with each other, we can at least——” She stopped, informed by his breathing that he was asleep.

How could he do that to her? How could he not care, when she was speaking to him for the first time, opening her heart in a way that she had not done all the years of their married life? She had been through the most terrible experience, and the minute it was over, he had no more interest in it or in what she had been through. All that mattered to him was his own peace and comfort.

In a cold rigid fury she lay beside him, trying not to hear the deep regular breathing of the man who had beaten her down with his persistence and his unbending will, and now no longer cared enough about her even to stay awake five minutes. She was weak and exhausted and caught by the children she had borne him, but he was fine. He was still young and didn’t care whether she lived or died, so long as he got his sleep.

She moved slowly and carefully, out from under the cover, being careful even in her anger not to waken him.… Not that she was afraid of him any longer, but she had to be alone, to think, to decide what she would do when she got her strength back. Because she wouldn’t stay in the house with him a day longer than she had to. She would take the children and Rachel and find some place where they could live. It probably wouldn’t be comfortable and beautiful like this house. They’d probably have to live in some little flat downtown, over a store, but in the summer-time she could rent a cottage at the Chautauqua grounds so that the children would have a place to play outdoors, and they would manage somehow. They would be independent, and free at last to make of their lives something decent and brave, and when the children got old enough to look after themselves, she could go to Chicago and find a job there. Rachel had managed, and what Rachel could do, she could.

How long Martha King sat in the rocking chair by the front window in the guest-room, with her robe drawn around her, planning, she had no idea. She looked out at the
street and saw the street lamp as the life she had been meant to lead and the circle of light cast by it as the place she must get to. Drunk with certainty, with finality, with decision, when the grandfather’s clock in the downstairs hall struck one, she went into the room where the baby’s crib was. The nurse was lying on her back snoring and did not waken when Martha King picked up the baby and carried it into the guest-room where she sat holding it, the burden that had so little weight, that was no burden at all.

The baby did not waken, though it stirred occasionally and she felt the hands pushing for a second against her side. She examined the baby’s face by the light of the street lamp: so small and helpless, so much in need of protection against the cruelty of the world. She would bring him up not to be nice, not to be polite, not to make the best of things, but in full knowledge of what life is, to make his own way, fight for what he wanted, and above all else to feel. To be angry when he was angry, and when he was happy, to bring the house down with his joy. All the things that Austin had failed to be. This child would have a chance. She would make it possible. It would be so.

She put the child back in the crib, and because it was cold, and she was not well and there was, after all, no place else to go, she got back into bed and lay there, with her eyes wide open, looking at the reflection of the street light on the ceiling.

Austin stirred, and put his arm across her, and she took hold of it, by the wrist, and removed it, but when she moved away from him, towards the outer edge of the bed, he followed again in his sleep, and curled around her in a way that made her want to shout at him, and beat his face with her fists. She pushed the arm away, roughly this time, but he still did not waken. The arm had a life of its own. All the rest of him, his body and his soul, were asleep. But the arm was awake, and came across her, and the hand settled on her
heart, and she let it stay there for a moment, thinking how hard and heavy it was compared to the child she had been holding, how importunate, how demanding; how it was no part of her and never would be, insisting on a satisfaction, even in sleep, that she could not give. She started to push it away once more but her own arms were bound to the bed. Only her mind was awake, able to act, to hate. And then suddenly the delicate gold chain of awareness, no stronger than its weakest link, gave way. Circled by the body next to her, enclosed in warmth, held by the arm that knew (even though the man it belonged to did not), Martha King was asleep.