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.
“I’m not going,” Ab announced firmly.
“But we talked about it, and you decided you wanted to go,” Martha said.
“I don’t want to any more,” Ab said, successfully preventing her right arm from being forced into the right sleeve of the coat.
“Abbey, please don’t make a scene. You know you’re going to kindergarten. It’s all decided. Now stand still and let me put your coat on.”
“I don’t want to put my coat on.”
“You must. You can’t go through life changing your mind every five minutes and keeping people waiting.”
“What will all these little girls and boys think of you?” Nora said.
Ab saw Nora coming nearer and threw herself at her mother’s knees, clutching them, clasping her hands around her mother’s skirts.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to carry her, Nora.”
To Ab’s unbelieving horror, arms took hold of her and tore her away from her mother (Madame Montessori was far away in Rome) and after that, nothing was real or made the slightest sense; not her mother’s tears, not the shamed look on the faces of the other children, nor the detached sound of her own screaming.
The kindergarten rooms were three-quarters of a mile from the house on Elm Street, and Ab was carried, kicking and screaming and fighting for breath to scream again, the whole way. People who passed the strange procession turned and looked back and wondered if they ought to interfere. Nobody did. The frightened screaming (“I want my mother! I want my mother!”) sounded like grief—heart-rending, impersonal; grief for the world and all who are obliged to live in it.
8
The porchlight went on, directly overhead, and Dr. Danforth opened the door. “Come in, come in, my boy. How are you? I was just saying to Ella——”
“You aren’t busy?” Austin asked, as he stepped over the threshold.
“I didn’t get that?”
Austin shouted his question.
“Busy?” Dr. Danforth repeated in the low even voice of the de
af. “What would I be busy about at this time of night? Let me take your hat. Always glad to see you.”
The Danforths’ house had been built by Mrs. Danforth’s father at the height of his material prosperity. Mr. Morris had been a banker and also something of a philanthropist. When his bank failed on “Black Friday”, he turned everything he had over to his creditors and eventually got back this house and a fraction of his once considerable means so that his family were not in want. For lack of a better word, people who came to the house for the first time usually said “Oh, what a beautiful house!” by which they meant that it was dark, cavelike, and quiet; that it invited day-dreaming; that it belonged to the past. The rooms were large and opened out of one another, and the varnished cherry woodwork had the gleam of dark red marble. The dark-green walls of the dining-room were stencilled with white peacocks above the dado, and in the music room there were cupids and garlands of pink roses. These long-faded murals had been painted by an itinerant Italian artist whose sick wife, debts, and dirty children had touched old Mrs. Morris’ always susceptible heart.
The parlour fireplace was of molasses-brown tile, with mirrors set into the complicated Victorian mantelpiece. On the mantelshelf there was a brass clock with the works visible through panes of thick bevelled glass, and several family photographs. Over the sofa there was a huge oil painting of a storm at sea and a Byronic shipwreck. Mrs. Danforth’s chair was beside the heavy carved table where the lamp-light would shine on her needlework. The lampshade was of hammered brass, four-sided, with pin-points of light shining through in the design of some long-tailed bird—the phoenix perhaps. Dr. Danforth’s chair was beside the sofa. The light that shone on his newspaper came from a mahogany floor lamp with a red silk shade. In front of the other window was a large silvered gazing globe that belonged in a garden but had found its way, pedestal and all, into the Danforths’ parlour. Though strange in its context and beautiful in itself, the gazing ball was not pleasant to look into, reflecting all people as ugly and deformed.
The room offered no clue to what the Danforths had been doing when the doorbell rang. There was no open book, no workbasket, no cardtable laid out for solitaire. The big lump of cannel coal in the grate was unlit. Though Dr. and Mrs. Danforth were pleased to see Austin King, there was nothing in their manner to indicate that he had rescued them from an empty evening or from each other.
“How is Martha?”
“Tired out. She went upstairs after supper,” Austin said and had to repeat this statement louder for Dr. Danforth’s benefit.
“Nothing serious?” Dr. Danforth asked.
“Fall house-cleaning,” Austin said.
“She mustn’t overdo,” Dr. Danforth said gravely. “I have a horse downtown that I’m anxious to have you see. A sorrel, five-gaited and gentle as they come.”
“That’s all he can talk about,” Mrs. Danforth said. “All through supper he talked about nothing but that horse. I don’t wonder people never come to see us.”
“We’ve been meaning to come over,” Austin said, “but——”
“You might want to get him for Martha. Prince Edward is too big for a woman to handle. This horse would be just right for her.”
“Except that he shies occasionally,” Mrs. Danforth said.
“What’s that?” Dr. Danforth asked.
“I say Martha doesn’t want a horse that shies,” Mrs. Danforth said placidly.
“I think I can cure him of that. He wasn’t ridden properly in the beginning. You can have him for just what I paid for him.”
“I don’t know that I can afford to buy another horse just now,” Austin said. “But I’d like to see him.”
“You come around tomorrow sometime,” Dr. Danforth said, nodding.
Austin moved forward until he was sitting on the edge of the sofa. “I brought these over to show you,” he said, indicating the sheaf of letters in his lap. “Maybe it’s nothing to be worried about, but I’d like your advice.”
“Why don’t you go in the den where you won’t be disturbed?” Mrs. Danforth said. Her husband was looking at Austin and didn’t know that she had spoken. She waited until he turned to her again and then repeated the suggestion as if for the first time.
“Come along, my boy,” Dr. Danforth said.
“If you don’t mind?” Austin said to Mrs. Danforth.
Mrs. Danforth smiled at him and said “Not at all.”
Though Dr. Danforth had been a part of this household for twenty years, the den was in no way changed from the room it had been when Mrs. Danforth’s father was alive. He found his spectacle case, spread Austin’s letters out in front of him on the big roll-topped desk, and began to read. After a while the swivel chair swung around so that Dr. Danforth’s back was to the litter of papers—deeds, documents, the correspondence between Austin and the bank in Howard’s Landing, between Austin and Mr. Potter. He rubbed his nose thoughtfully with one finger, started to speak, and then changed his mind. At last he said, “I can’t advise you, my boy. You’d better talk to someone who knows something about cotton farming. Fred Meister was down there a few years ago. Why don’t you go talk to him?”
“But does it seem all right to you, just on the face of it?” Austin asked.
“No, I can’t say that it does. The indebtedness is larger than we were given to understand. I only had that one talk with him about it, and I don’t hear all that people say, so maybe——”
“It’s considerably larger,” Austin interrupted.
“Did he say anything about a second mortgage?”
Austin shook his head. “That only came out after I began writing to the bank. Do you think he’s dishonest? He didn’t seem like that kind of a man when he was here. He seemed—you knew that Mr. Potter and my father were raised together? In some ways he reminds me——”
“I never saw the Judge go out of his way to make anybody like him, but I know what you mean,” Dr. Danforth said. “I wouldn’t say that Mr. Potter was dishonest. When I’m trading with a man I’m supposed to get the better of him, and he’s supposed to get the better of me.”
“But this isn’t horse trading.”
“I was just giving that as an example.” Dr. Danforth turned back to the desk and began to read the letters again, moving his lips silently and occasionally shaking his head.
“Has Judge Fairchild seen this letter?” he asked, finally.
Austin got up and came over to the desk. “No,” he said, looking down over Dr. Danforth’s shoulder. “That one just came today.”
“Show it to him. It could be that there is something funny going on between Mr. Potter and the bank. I’d show him everything.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to wait?” Austin asked.
“Bring it all out into the open,” Dr. Danforth said. “It’s going to end up there sooner or later anyway, and you’ll be doing yourself and everybody else a favour by hurrying the thing along.”
Mrs. Danforth opened a drawer of the parlour table and took out her crocheting. In the carved furniture all around her there was a great variety of natural forms—flowers, grasses, ferns, leaves, acorns, occasionally a butterfly or a grasshopper or some small animal like a lizard or a frog. Before he became a banker, Mrs. Danforth’s father had taught woodcarving at Hampton Institute, and after his death, as a kind of legacy, he had left everywhere in the house carved tables, chairs, footstools, firescreens, and chests, his version of the fable of Creation. Mrs. Danforth, being of a more abstract turn of mind, was content with a six-pointed star. Though she had crocheted hundreds of white table mats in the previous eighteen years, and scattered them through a dozen households, she never varied from this one design.
The sound of the men’s voices, low and serious, came to her from the open door of the den. After a few minutes she got up and went through the house, turning on lights in the dining-room, the pantry, and the kitchen. When she had unlocked and opened the back door there was a light pattering of animal footsteps and a stiff-legged, sha
ggy black dog came loping out of the darkness and up onto the porch.
“Well, Hamlet,” she asked, “did you decide it was time to come home?”
The dog stretched in front of her, as if he were making an exaggerated bow, followed her into the house and back through the kitchen, the pantry, and the dining-room, to the parlour, where he turned around three times and subsided on the rug at her feet.
When he sighed deeply she peered down at him over her glasses and said, “Nobody knows what it means to be a very old dog, do they?”
He rolled his eyes up at her, thumped his tail, and sighed again, a shipwrecked creature that had, against all hope and expectation, found his way to shore.
9
Dr. Danforth had begun to lose his hearing when he was a very young man. One by one the minute sounds—the clock ticking, the click of a fingernail, the scrape of a cup in its saucer, all buzzing, droning, hammering, sawing, singing, all echoes and reverberations, the whole auditory perspective vanished from his consciousness without his knowing that this had happened. He had to ask people more and more frequently to repeat what they said to him, and was annoyed with them for mumbling. At the same time his own voice was pitched lower and lower so that people had trouble catching what he himself said, though he was under the impression that he spoke distinctly. His naturally kind, calm face was screwed up in a permanent grimace by the effort to understand what was going on around him, until one day he saw a horse stomp and realized that the hush he lived in hadn’t in any way been impaired. He went out into the street and stood there, listening. The sounds that he knew must be there, as solid and undeniable as the courthouse itself, failed him. He saw movement, people passing on the sidewalks, carriages in the street, clouds in the sky, but they made no sound. And when old man Barnes came up to him and began to shout in his ear, he turned abruptly and went back into the darkness of the stable, a stranger to himself, and from that day on, a friend to no one.