Love falling on her face, love falling on her hair, love smooth and untracked, filling up every previous impression, space closing in, distance diminished, the shape and outline of every house, every tree, every hitching post transformed, made beautiful, made into the great lace curtain.
With the heavy coat weighing her down, Nora floundered through the snow until she got as far as the Kings’ front walk. Someone had shovelled a path from the porch steps to the sidewalk, and the path was already filling in, more than half obliterated. She saw large footprints which must be Austin’s, and as she walked where he had walked, put her foot down in the print of his, all sense of cold left her. She rang the doorbell and then, turning around, saw the world as he had seen it, a few minutes before, from his own front steps. If I can have this and no more, Nora said to herself, it’s enough. I’ll be happy forever. I’ve had more than I ever expected to have on this earth.
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.
“You mustn’t think too much about what she says in her delirium.”
“I can’t help thinking about it,” Mrs. Potter said. “And besides, she wasn’t delirious when she said that. She was in her right mind. ‘I don’t have to go on living if I don’t want to,’ she said.… Part of the time she knows me, and then other times when I say something to her, she doesn’t hear.”
A chunk of snow dislodged by the wind left a branch of the big elm tree and was scattered on the brilliant sunshine.
“If I only knew what it is that’s troubling her, I might be able to do something about it. But I’ve asked her and she won’t tell me. Did she ever talk to you and Cousin Austin?”
“She talked to Austin,” Martha said.
“It surely wasn’t the kindergarten,” Mrs. Potter said.
“No,” Martha said. “She was very good with the children. They all loved her.”
“It must be something else,” Mrs. Potter said. “Sometimes I think it was those law books. I told you, didn’t I, that she never wrote us that she was reading law in Cousin Austin’s office?”
“Yes.”
“Was it Cousin Austin’s idea?”
“No, it was Nora’s,” Martha said.
“Well, it was very thoughtful of him to allow her to do it. I should have thanked him before this. He’s always so ready to help. Some day he’ll get his reward.… I’ve been low in my mind, but I have always wanted to live, and I can’t seem to find the right thing to say to comfort her. There’s something else she said last night: ‘It looks different without the leaves.’ Whatever could she have meant by that?”
“I don’t know,” Martha said. “You’re sure she said ‘leaves’?”
“Yes. And then she said, ‘I ought never to have allowed myself to hope.’ I asked her what it was that she hoped, but she didn’t hear me. And right after that, the nurse said something about her condition and she flared up and we had difficulty quieting her. I oughtn’t to tell you these things, Martha. It isn’t good for you when you’re expecting a child. Everything ought to be happy around you. I don’t know why you didn’t tell us last summer—why you let us come and impose on you that way when there was no need.”
“Last summer was a long time ago,” Martha said. “Your being here now doesn’t change anything so far as Austin and I are concerned. I’m just sorry that there’s so little we can do.”
“Don’t say that,” Mrs. Potter said, withdrawing her arm. “You and Cousin Austin have meant more to us in these last few days than I can ever begin to tell you.”
“I’m going to leave you alone for a little while,” Martha said. “You must get some rest before you go back to the hospital. If you want anything, call me.”
The comforter who says I know, I know (and doesn’t know) or You must be brave (when all people are brave and it doesn’t help them when the blow comes) is nevertheless serving a purpose. Martha King made it possible for Mrs. Potter to talk about her grief, and when the words were out of the way and the bedroom door had closed and the comforter had gone off down the hall, then the dammed-up feeling was free to flow over the whole winter landscape, covering roads, setting houses and barns afloat, and determining at last the level past which the flood waters would not rise.
2
On the door of room 211 in the hospital was a sign that read NO VISITORS. This did not apply to Dr. Seymour and the nurses or to Mrs. Potter, who slept on a cot in Nora’s room and went home some time during the day to change her clothes, to be with her husband, and to rest. The sign did apply to Austin King.
While he was at his office, he was safe; he could turn his mind to other things and forget for a while about Nora, though even here the trouble intruded. He would find himself staring at a legal paper he had read over and over, without knowing a single word he had read. When he was at home, his eyes kept turning toward his desk where, in the left-hand cubby-hole, there was a letter from Nora. Though Austin needed to talk to someone about this letter and all that had led up to the writing of it, there was no one willing to listen night after night with eyelids grown heavy and no one came down the stairs and put an end to his investigation of blind alleys and his consideration of what might have happened in the light of what actually had. He was quite clear in his mind about what he had meant to do for Nora, but he had been patient, he had listened to Nora instead of turning his back on her the day she came to see him at his office, and if he hadn’t treated her gently, would Nora have stayed up North? So much depended on the answer to this question and there was only one person who could tell him (through bandages) what he needed to know.
The Mississippi people returning brought three small suitcases with them and left behind all desire to please, to charm, to acquire new friends. Though there was a question of how long they would stay, their reason for coming was clear to everyone. Time did not pass the way it had before in a whirl of carriage rides, picnics, and trips to the Chautauqua grounds. Time had slowed down and was threatening to stop entirely.
The friends the Potters had made on their previous visit did not desert them. The callers filled the living-room and overflowed into the study. What had happened was too tragic to be mentioned, and so the callers depended on their mere physical presence to convey how sorry they were, and talked about other things, about the weather, about the new oiled road from Draperville to Gleason, about the new fashions in women’s dress, about their own sciatica or rheumatism or the great number of people who were down with the grippe, in an effort to divert the Potters from their only purpose in coming to Draperville. Lucy Beach threw herself into Mrs. Potter’s arms and wept, but then the Beach girls had always been queer, and if they hadn’t taken it into their heads to start a kindergarten, the whole thing might have been avoided. When Lucy had been led from the room, the conversation was resumed where it had left off, the full social strength was mustered to cover this lapse from decorum.
Mr. Potter acted like a man who had been stunned. He was neither restless nor interested in anything that went on around him. He sat most of the time in the big chair in the study, unable to take part in any conversation or to check the involuntary tears that at certain moments filled his eyes and slid down his leathery cheeks. Rather than disturb him, Austin and Martha King found themselves turning to Randolph when there were messages of sympathy that had to be acknowledged, decisions to be made.
Of the many things that would not fall into any proper place during this second visit, one of the strangest was the change in Randolph Potter. He was able to pass the mirror in the hall, the ebony pier glass in the liv
ing-room, without so much as a glance at his reflection. His handsomeness forgotten, he had become overnight the prop of the family. Mrs. Potter leaned on him as if from years of habit. When Ab offered herself to him, Randolph lifted her onto his lap but instead of playing games or teasing her, he went on talking quietly to the callers or to Austin and Martha, and after a few minutes she got down and went off to play. Mary Caroline Link called and Randolph talked to her in a way that was pleasant and friendly, but that aroused no expectations. It was almost as if he were her older brother, home from college arid trying to fit once more, or at least appear to fit, into the family circle he had now outgrown. He asked about Rachel the first night, when a strange white woman moved around the dining-room table with platters of food. When Martha King explained that Rachel had disappeared shortly before Christmas, taking her children with her, Randolph nodded absently as if he had known all along that was what Rachel would eventually do.
He was not grotesquely cheerful the way his mother sometimes was, nor openly grief-stricken, like Mr. Potter. It was almost as if Randolph, who always walked by himself and never made common cause with his family, were now justifying the wisdom of his past selfishness by assuming full responsibility for his family and for the confusion and distress which they brought with them, sooner or later, wherever they went. Randolph was kind, he was thoughtful, anxious not to make trouble for Martha King and solicitous about her health, and sensible about the problems which Austin and Martha brought to him. More wonderful than anything else, he carried for eight whole days, all alone, the burden of conversation in a house where nobody felt like talking. His mild jokes and stories said or seemed to say: You understand that it is not lack of feeling that makes me able to tell about the time Pa paid a call on the new minister. I know my sister is lying in the hospital badly burned and that there is nothing any of its can do about it. But if you listen carefully, you will perceive that the jokes I make, the stories I tell, are not the ones I would use if we were all lighthearted and Mama were not waiting for us to leave the dining-room table so she can go back to the hospital. But somebody has to carry the load, otherwise you would sit and stare at your food, and Pa would begin to cry again, and it only makes things worse.