Sit down, Edward, before I slap you, said the rubber cousin.
My name isn’t Edward, Humphrey said.
“From now on, it is,” Ab said.
Well my advice, said the father, would be to go out in the kitchen and see what there is to eat. Wash your hands, everybody.
The telephone began to ring and Ab made no move to answer it. She didn’t even seem aware of the ringing on the other side of the room, but the doll party on the window seat was suspended when Martha King came into the study and took the receiver off the hook.
“Yes?… Oh yes, Bud … no, we haven’t.…”
Ab always enjoyed listening to her mother on the telephone. Where grown-up conversations were concerned, the half was usually more interesting than the whole.
“Yes …” her mother said several times into the telephone. “Well I’m afraid it’s going to be very warm, but just let me ask them.…” Martha King put the receiver on the telephone stand and left the study. Ab turned back to her dolls.
Hot cocoa, said Humphrey, whose name was now Edward.
And crackers with white icing on them, the father said.
That’s a good idea, the elephant cousin said. Whose idea was it?
That was my idea, said the mother.
Martha King came back and said, “Bud?… We’d like to very much … yes.… All right, I will … good-bye.”
With a brief, absent-minded glance at the dolls lined up in a row on the window-sill, she went through the living-room and out onto the porch. The doll party came to a sudden end.
“… and the terrible part of it was,” Mrs. Potter was saying as Ab opened the screen door, “they seemed so happy!”
She had taken possession, for the rest of the visit, of a wicker armchair that just suited her. The chair commanded a view of the sidewalk and the street, and the right armrest was designed to hold magazines or a knitting bag. Mrs. Potter kept her silk bag with the round raffia base in her lap. The bag contained crocheting and it went everywhere Mrs. Potter went. Mr. Potter kept the swing in motion with his foot. Nora was out in the side yard reading a book, with her head bowed to the white page.
“So Rebecca came home with a six-months-old baby,” Mrs. Potter said, “and she’s been home ever since.… Daughter, you oughtn’t to be out there on the damp ground. Cousin Martha will give you a blanket to sit on.”
“It isn’t damp,” Nora called back, “and I don’t want a blanket to sit on.”
“Nora is a great reader,” Mrs. Potter observed. “She takes after her Great-Aunt Selina, who used to cook with a book in her hand. When Nora was fourteen she started in and read right straight through the historical novels of Harrison Ainsworth. I tried one of them once. It was about the Tower of London and very interesting. I always meant to go on and read the rest of it. Aunt Selina married a man named …” The crochet needle jabbed in and out, emphasizing this point or that in Mrs. Potter’s family history. When Mr. Potter showed increasing signs of restlessness, she glanced up and said, “You haven’t seen the barn.”
“You don’t have to worry about me,” Mr. Potter said. “I can always look after myself.”
But he didn’t. He sat in the swing, with one leg crossed over the other and his arms folded expectantly, and did nothing whatever to amuse himself. He was waiting for the telephone to ring, for people to arrive, for last night’s party to begin all over again.
“Aren’t there any dogs in this town?” he asked suddenly.
“At home Mr. Potter always has at least three hunting dogs trailing after him,” Mrs. Potter said. “Every chair in the house has dog hairs on it, and we have to barricade the beds to keep Blackie off of them. She comes and goes like a princess.…”
“Blackie’s a good dog but she’s getting old,” Mr. Potter said mournfully. “She can’t see any more. Five years ago I wouldn’t have taken a hundred dollars for her.”
He got up from the swing and announced that he was going to have a look around. He meant the barn; enough time had elapsed so that the idea was his now and not his wife’s. As he disappeared around the corner of the house, she said, “Mr. Potter is not himself this morning. You’ll just have to excuse him. He misses the horses. His whole life revolves around horses and dogs. Raising cotton is just a sideline. But it’s good for him to get away some place where he has to fall back on people for companionship.… Now, my dear, I want to hear all about you. Are your mother and father living? I thought maybe we’d have the pleasure of meeting them last night.”
“My mother died before I was old enough to remember her,” Martha said. “She died of consumption, and my father died shortly afterwards. I was raised by an uncle and aunt.”
Mrs. Potter had reached a crucial turn in her crocheting and didn’t answer for a minute or two. Then she drew a length of thread through her fingers and said, “Was she your mother’s sister?”
“My father’s,” Martha said. “My mother didn’t have any sisters or brothers. She was an actress. I have a picture of her upstairs, in The Taming of the Shrew. I can just barely remember my father. From what I’ve heard of him, I don’t think he was much like the rest of the family. They’re all very religious.”
In her voice there was a note of tension, of fright, as if she were a schoolgirl undergoing an examination for which she was not at all prepared. Mrs. Potter heard it, and without seeming to change the subject, began to talk about the house on Elm Street. Apparently it is not easy for women to make friends. Except for certain critical periods of their lives, they seem almost not to need them. But for Mrs. Potter, too, the visit stretched out interminably. It had not been her idea to come North this summer and she didn’t know, actually, why they were here. She only knew that part of the month of July and part of the month of August had to be crossed somehow, and so she set out to cross them. With her crocheting to support her, as it had in every other crisis of married life, she commented on rooms, rugs, curtains, wallpaper, the arrangement of tables and chairs—all this interspersed with descriptions of the plantation house in Mississippi, and how various pieces of furniture had come down through the family. Under the praise of her house (which was praise of her) Martha King began to feel easier, to feel safe. She explained about the alcove in the living-room and the open bookshelves in the study and, after a time, about the people who had raised her and who were now in China working as Christian missionaries.
“My religion has been a great comfort to me,” Mrs. Potter began. Ab closed the screen door softly so as not to attract attention to herself, and went back to the library. The dolls were worn out from the party. The elephant and Humphrey Edward lay face down on a cushion and for the time being, they all refused to come to life.
Ab went upstairs to her room and got her celluloid animals—a duck, a green frog, and a goldfish—and started down the hall to the bathroom. When she pushed the door open, Randolph Potter was lying in the tub in water up to his chin. Ab stood holding her celluloid toys, and made no move towards the washstand.
“I’ve lost the soap,” Randolph said. He moved his legs gently so that the black hairs stirred with the current.
“Can’t you find it?” Ab asked.
“Not without an extensive search. What have you got there?”
Ab held the toys out to him.
“I have a duck at home,” he said, and sat up slowly. “A live duck.” The water parted, revealing the bald slope of his knee. “I wish I had him here right now.”
“In the bath with you?” Ab cried.
“He swims round and round,” Randolph said, nodding. “And when I lose the soap he dives for it.”
“Why does he do that?”
“Because he knows I need it.”
“Why do you need the soap?”
“For the same reason little girls need to ask questions they already know the answer to.” When he drew his hand out of the water, his fingers were closed around a cake of castile soap.
“What is the duck’s name?”
??
?I call him Sam,” Randolph said, and glanced at the open door.
Now that they had something to talk about, Ab pulled the toilet cover down and set the celluloid animals on it. Randolph began to soap his arms and chest. Where the soap went, Ab’s eyes went also.
“He follows me wherever I go,” Randolph said. “And he likes raisins and crackerjack.”
“What does he do with the prize?” Ab asked.
“He wears it on a string around his neck. When he gets in the bath with me, I take it off so he won’t lose it. And when he swims, he goes like this.” Randolph made a movement with his hands which churned the water around the tub clockwise.
“I take a bath with my mother sometimes,” Ab said, drawing nearer.
“When Sam gets tired of swimming one way, he turns around and goes the other.”
There was a sudden upheaval in the tub and Randolph stood up, dripping, and began to soap his back, his belly, and his thighs. He saw where Ab’s stare was directed. Having got what he wanted, he said, “I don’t think you ought to be in here with me.… You better go now before somebody comes,” and watched the child’s curiosity slowly turn to fear.
In her desperate hurry to get away from the bathroom, Ab slipped and fell thump-thump-thump, all the way down the treacherous back stairs. Her screaming brought Rachel, who picked her up and moaned over her and rocked her in her arms.
The world (including Draperville) is not a nice place, and the innocent and the young have to take their chances. They cannot be watched over, twenty-four hours a day. At what moment, from what hiding-place, the idea of evil will strike, there is no telling. And when it does, the result is not always disastrous. Children have their own incalculable strength and weakness, and this, for all their seeming helplessness, will determine the pattern of their lives. Even when you suspect why they fall downstairs, you cannot be sure. You have no way of knowing whether their fright is permanent or can be healed by putting butter on the large lump that comes out on their forehead after a fall.
5
The July sun mounting higher and higher in the sky brought both heat and glare with it. By the middle of the morning, animals moved with a noticeable slowness, and the leaves of the trees hung limp and dusty. Women with errands to do downtown kept as much as possible in the shade of awnings. Men meeting on the steps of the courthouse or in front of the bank, stopped to compare thermometer readings, to observe how the new asphalt paving blocks buckled with the heat, and to prophesy a thunderstorm out of the brassy sky before night. Farmers driving into Draperville for their Saturday marketing left their teams on shady side streets or in Dr. Danforth’s livery stable. The farmers alone bore the heat patiently and without complaining; no heat, no corn. In stores the overhead fans whirred to little if any purpose. The windows in the two upper floors of office buildings were flung wide open, as if the masonry were gasping with the heat. At eleven o’clock, the big round sprinkling wagon drove twice around the square. The spraying cooled the streets and the air temporarily but by noon, when Austin King left his office, the pavement was dry and dusty again.
He waited under the awning of Giovanni’s ice-cream parlour and moviedrome until a street-car came along. It was the open car that went out past the cemeteries to the Chautauqua grounds, and would let him off two blocks further from Elm Street than the other car, but it was cooler and so he took it. As he turned in at his own front walk, Mr. Potter got up from the porch swing. “It’s a scorcher, isn’t it?” Austin said.
“We’re all waiting for you,” Mr. Potter said.
“Am I late?”
“The women folks decided to have an early lunch,” Mr. Potter said. “Bud Ellis called and invited us to drive out to their farm this afternoon.”
“In this heat?”
“Well, he seemed to think today would be a good time. And we’re used to heat. Down home——” Mr. Potter hesitated, searching for justification for the ride and apparently expecting Austin to provide it.
For a minute Austin said nothing. Then pleasantly, in his usual tone of voice, “If that’s what you all want to do, fine.” He held the screen door open for Mr. Potter, and followed him into the house. Randolph was in the study. He had Austin’s fishing box open on his knees and was examining the trout flies. Mrs. Potter was in the living-room, playing the piano loudly and firmly. Ab was sitting on the living-room floor, with her collection of Singer sewing machine birds spread out around her.
“Where’s Martha?” Austin asked.
“In the kitchen,” Mrs. Potter said, still playing.
The whole atmosphere of the house had changed since breakfast. The Potters seemed to have taken hold (after all, he might have been consulted about the drive this afternoon), to have asserted their rights and privileges as guests, and he could feel his rights and privileges withdrawing timidly into the cellar, into closets, and beyond the trap door to the attic.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I’d better wash up before lunch.”
He came down by way of the back stairs, and found Martha in the pantry putting sprigs of mint in a row of tall iced-tea glasses. “You look as pale as a ghost,” she said. “Was it hot downtown?”
“No worse than it was here, probably.”
“We’re just having sandwiches and leftover salad.”
“Did everything go all right this morning?” he asked.
“Randolph came down to breakfast at ten-thirty. Ab fell on the stairs. And they want to go driving.”
“So I hear.”
“I tried to put it off, but Mr. Potter gets restless just sitting around the house. And Nora has been reading.”
“That shouldn’t upset anybody,” Austin said.
“Maybe it shouldn’t but it did. You know that set of books from your father’s library—tall green books?”
“The ‘Works of Robert Ingersoll’?”
“Well, Nora found them and Aunt Ione discovered what she was reading and made her stop. He’s an atheist, isn’t he? Aunt Ione has been playing hymns to purify the atmosphere. Nora got mad and went over to the Beaches’ house and the girls asked her to stay and eat with them. I wanted to get out of the house for a while myself, to give the Potters more room, but it was time to start lunch.”
“I don’t think Nora had a very good time at the party last night,” Austin said.
“Did she say anything to you?”
“No,” Austin said, “it’s just a feeling I had. We ought to have invited somebody for her—somebody her own age.” He touched a damp curl on the nape of her neck. Martha moved away from him.
“You don’t seem too happy yourself at this moment,” he said.
“Does everybody have to be happy? Go on in and tell them to sit down. We’re all ready.”
He looked at her in astonishment. Though he knew he had already said too much, he said one thing more: “I’m sorry you had such a difficult morning.” But it was no use. She was already far, far out of his reach. He waited a moment with his hand on the swinging door and then went on into the dining-room.
During lunch Martha King behaved towards her guests exactly as she had before, but she looked past her husband instead of at him—a thing that all three of the Mississippi people were instantly aware of. Out of politeness and not because they had any fear of scenes, they talked—talked constantly, often including Rachel in their conversation as she moved around the table. The gleam and roll of her very white eyeballs conveyed extreme acuteness of perception and sometimes open mockery, both of which the Potters were used to in their own servants.
As soon as Austin had finished his dessert, he put down his napkin and escaped to the barn. The horse, a handsome sorrel, had been harnessed and fed. Austin backed Prince Edward into the shafts of the high English cart that was his special pride, and drove around to the front of the house, where the Ellises’ surrey was waiting. He tied the reins to the other hitching-post and then went back inside. Bud Ellis was standing in the front hall with his straw hat in his plump ha
nd. Mrs. Potter had put on a long linen dustcoat and was adjusting her veils in front of the ebony mirror in the living-room. Mr. Potter and Randolph, also in dustcoats, were waiting impatiently.
“Where is Miss Nora?” Bud Ellis asked, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Isn’t she coming?”
“Nobody knows,” Randolph said gloomily.
There was a step on the front porch and Mrs. Potter, turning away from the pier glass, said, “There she is now.”
“I’m not going,” Nora announced as she walked in. “I’m going to stay home with Cousin Martha.”
“There’s no need for you to do that,” Mrs. Potter said.
“But I don’t want to go!” Nora exclaimed.
“You don’t want to miss the ride,” Mrs. Potter said firmly. “And Cousin Martha probably has things that she wants to do this afternoon.”
Seeing Nora’s face fall, Mrs. Potter thought how selfish her children were, how seldom they did anything for anyone else if it required the least effort or sacrifice. She herself would have liked very much to stay home out of the heat, but here she was, ready to do what everybody else did, and to give every appearance of enjoying it. “We’re all waiting for you,” she said.
Reduced to the status of a child, Nora put on the linen dustcoat her mother held out to her, and then a series of green veils. The whole company trooped out of the cool house into the blinding hot glare. The English cart, though it was very handsome and painted red, did not have a top to protect them from the sun. Mrs. Potter gathered her long skirts with one hand, put her right foot on the little iron step, and with Mr. Potter’s help mounted to the back seat of the cart. After a brief pause, to give Austin a chance to offer him the reins, Mr. Potter got up after her. Screened by the purple clematis on the Links’ front porch, Mary Caroline saw Bud Ellis help Nora into the front seat of the surrey, saw Randolph leap into the front seat of the cart beside Austin King.
Actuality, no matter how beautiful or how charming, can never even approximate the heartbreaking vision of the beggar looking in at the feast. To Mary Caroline, Mrs. Potter was not a middle-aged woman from Mississippi but a queen—some legendary queen of France or Denmark; and Randolph was not a person at all, but everything that is kind or fair. For this glimpse of him, as the carriages drove off, she had been waiting since breakfast and would have gone on waiting, patiently, for years.