Read Online Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell - Free Book Online

call was from Mrs. Danforth, to say the same thing. “Well I’ll tell Martha,” she heard him say. “Oh no, she’s fine.”
    At eight-thirty he folded his napkin and slipped it through a silver ring that had his first name engraved on it and was a relic of his childhood. “I’ll be home a little after twelve,” he said as he pushed his chair back from the table. Although he said nothing about the Potters, it was clear from the look in his eyes and from his doubtful expression as he bent down to kiss his wife that he wanted to ask her to be gracious, to be friendly whether she felt like it or not, to do nothing that would make the Potters feel unwanted.
    As he was starting out the front door, Martha heard him say, “Hello, where have
you
been?”
    A moment later, Nora Potter came through the study and into the dining-room. She was wearing a green dress with black velvet bows and two black velvet ribbons braided into her cinnamon-coloured hair. The dress was becoming, but strange for this time of the day. It made Nora look like a tintype in a family album—some fourth or fifth cousin who is shown, a few pages later, with her rather vain-looking husband, and then again as an old lady, formidable and all in black, with her elbow resting on an Ionic pillar.
    “I woke up around six o’clock,” Nora said as she began to eat her cantaloupe, “and couldn’t get back to sleep so I got up and put on my clothes and went out walking. Wasn’t that enterprising of me?”
    “Very,” Martha said.
    “Did I waken you?”
    Martha shook her head. “We thought you were still asleep,” she said, reaching for the china serving bell.
    “I tried to slip out of the house as quietly as I could. What a nice sound that bell makes. Our bell at home makes such a racket. It came down through the Detrava side of the family so Mama insists on using it.”
    “This one came down through Mr. Gossett’s gift shop,” Martha said. “Did you enjoy your walk?”
    “There was dew on the grass and after the heat yesterday everything seemed so fresh and clear cut. Maybe because I’m in a strange place, seeing everything for the first time. Or maybe it’s because I’m happy. All my life I’ve wanted to come North.” She put down her spoon and with her raised eyebrows conveyed the seriousness and the intensity of this desire. “Ever since I was a little girl.”
    The horrible odour of frying eggs penetrated through two swinging doors and filled the dining-room.
    “Well now that you’re here, you must make the most of it,” Martha said.
    “I mean to,” Nora said earnestly. “At home it doesn’t cool off at night and you wake up exhausted. Here everybody and his dog were out sweeping and watering their window-boxes and I don’t know what all. You’d think they were getting ready for a celebration.”
    Martha leaned over and wiped a dribble of egg from Ab’s chin. “You make me wish I’d been out with you,” she said. “There was nothing so interesting going on here.”
    “And red geraniums. Everybody has red geraniums and I’m so tired of magnolias. What would they have done if I’d walked right past them into their houses and had a look around?”
    “It all depends on whose house you walked into. The Murphys would have let you go upstairs and downstairs and anywhere you wanted to. Old Mrs. Tannehill would probably have called the police.”
    “Would she really?”
    “Yes, I think she would,” Martha said. “But Austin would have come and bailed you out.”
    “It’s a game I’m always playing with myself,” Nora said. “That I’m invisible and can go wherever I want to go and watch people when they don’t know anybody is watchingthem.” She finished her cantaloupe and pushed it aside. “There was so much going on this morning I almost came back here to get Brother. You know how—not always but sometimes—you feel If I only had someone with me?”
    “I know,” Martha said.
    “And then,” Nora said,