The Waters of Kronos Page 5

  “I haven’t seen her for a while, Aunty. But I hope she’s all right.”

  “This isn’t Pap-pa, Aunty!” Aunt Jess raised her voice. “Pap-pa is dead. He died Wednesday morning. Don’t you remember? He’s to be buried tomorrow.”

  “Elijah dead!” Aunty cried. “Why didn’t someone tell me?”

  “We did tell you,” Aunt Jess said. “Many times.”

  “I must go to Mary,” Aunt Teresa declared, rising. “My poor sister!”

  Aunt Jess caught her.

  “You can’t go to Mary. She’s in the cemetery long ago. Palmyra is Pap-pa’s widow. You just asked about Palmyra.”

  “Of course I know Palmyra,” Aunt Teresa said stiffly. “How is she?”

  “She’s good as can be expected,” Aunt Jess told her. “You saw her. You were up to the parsonage yesterday. You talked to her.”

  “Certainly I’ve talked to her,” Aunty said. “I knew Palmyra when she was Postmaster Williams’s daughter in Lebanon. She was a worthy enough person but nature hadn’t eminently fitted her to be a minister’s wife like Mary. She doesn’t have the common touch. Mary was like Father. Father, everyone said, could talk to the highest or the lowest. To the lowest like a friend and to the highest like a king. I can still hear him when we had the store before he built the Mansion House. His voice would rattle the tinware on the ceiling.”

  Uncle Dick shook his head. He had heard the story many times before. He went back to his paper and Aunt Jess took Aunt Teresa by the hand.

  “Now I think you should go up to bed, Aunty. You’re tired. You took that long walk over Birds Hill today. Come along. I’ll see you to the stairs.” They disappeared slowly into the hall, where the caller could hear Aunt Teresa protesting she hadn’t brought her book. In a minute she was back in the sitting room looking with surprise at the caller.

  “Why, Elijah! When did you come? I wondered where you were. And how is Palmyra and the children?”

  Aunt Jess hobbled laboriously into the room. Her eyes “looked daggers” (one of her own expressions) at the caller as if he were the cause of this trouble.

  “It isn’t Pap-pa, Aunty,” she repeated. “If you look at him closely you’ll see he looks no more like Pap-pa than the man in the moon.” She gave a triumphant glance at him as if to say, I hope that settles you. Taking Aunt Teresa by the arm, she got her back to the hall again. John Donner heard her rapping on the door to the other side of the house, and he knew she was calling Sally Houck, who would go upstairs and stay with Aunty till she was asleep.

  In her feathered hat and worn black silken coat Aunt Jess appeared again at the door.

  “I’m going, Dick,” she said and paused, her eyes hostile on the caller. “But first I think this man should tell us what trouble he claims Johnny is in.”

  “He isn’t in trouble yet, Mrs. Ryon. Not until the future.”

  She groaned, a trick of hers he had forgotten until now, a horrendous sound of protest and ridicule with which she greeted anything preposterous. As a boy he had thought it amusing. Today he felt its sting.

  “What would you say if I told you that I knew Johnny’s future?” he asked.

  “I’d say you were cracked,” she said tartly.

  “Please, Mrs. Ryon. You can help me!” he begged. “You may even help Johnny although you won’t know it. Just talk to me a little about him. Tell me what faults he has, what mistakes he may have made that would make him want to come back here someday.”

  “Johnny has no more faults than the average boy and far less than most,” she informed him.

  “What about his liking to take walks by himself? Watching birds, he says.”

  “I think he’s lucky to be happy in his own company.” Aunt Jess was withering. “Most boys and men I know don’t go watching birds. They’re birds themselves—blackbirds. They have to flock with other blackbirds. They can’t stand being alone. Now, women are different. They have their housework. They get used to being alone. If something happens to their husbands, they can fall back on themselves and have something to occupy them. But boys have no housework. They have to run out with other boys. Men go to work with other men. When they come home at night, they have their wives for company. If something happens to her or if they retire, they’re lost. They don’t know what to do with themselves. They’ve never learned to go it alone.”

  Yes, John Donner thought, in the end every man and woman has to go it alone.

  “But there must have been something,” he insisted. “Something when he was young. A disappointment perhaps that left a scar. Or something he passionately wanted and never got.”

  Aunt Jess groaned again, not so deeply and dreadfully as before, but enough to carry her disgust.

  “Every boy that ever lived has disappointments. Johnny less than most. He has as good a mother and father as there are in Unionville. He’s the first boy in town to get a bicycle of his own. His father went to Philadelphia to buy it wholesale.”

  John Donner didn’t hear her. Something in his own words remained in his mind. Could it possibly have been something not in him but in his mother’s experience, something she had passionately wanted and never got, a wound which before birth or in their close sympathetic relationship afterward had been transmitted from mother to son? The old feeling about his father came back to him, and he remembered now certain clues in his mother. Scores of times he had looked up and found her staring into space, her sewing quiet on her lap. “What is it, Mamma?” he would ask and she would come back to the present. “Oh, nothing, Johnny,” she would say, give him the tender smile he knew so well and go back to her sewing. What troubled her she had never revealed, but he recalled now that the poem that affected her most was “Maud Muller,” the last words of which were, “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” Suddenly for the first time these things and his own doubts about his father came together, and they fitted perfectly. Ask! Ask! something inside of him kept urging. You’ll never have the chance again.

  “I wonder, would you tell me something, Mrs. Ryon?” he began. “Do you know or could you tell me if there was someone else Johnny’s mother cared for before she married Harry Donner?”

  Aunt Jess’s eyes opened.

  “That, sir, is none of your business.”

  “But it is my business,” he insisted slowly. “Although I can’t explain. Someday Johnny might want to know who he is.”

  “He is Johnny Donner,” she said.

  “I know that’s his name. But is he really a Donner?”

  He saw incredulity, then indignation, on his aunt’s face.

  “I don’t know what you mean, but if you mean what you are saying, then you have the gall of an ox to come in this house and ask insulting questions. I’ll have to ask you never to show your face here again.”

  “Aunt Jess!” he begged her.

  “I am not your Aunt Jess,” she told him witheringly. “And thank God I never will be.” She stood there for a moment, a picture of magnificent wrath and contempt. She glanced at her husband. “You can be tolerant to him as you like, Dick Ryon. I just hope to heaven I won’t have him to contend with when I get back. Now I’m going.” With great dignity she limped majestically out of the room.

  There was no other sound except the slow ticking of the clock until the front door closed behind her. The caller was aware of his Uncle Dick’s eyes on him, dark, distant, a little annoyed and with something else around the mouth he couldn’t quite name.

  “You took her at a bad time with the funeral tomorrow,” he said coldly.

  “I’m sorry,” John Donner said.

  His Uncle Dick leaned forward and the something the other couldn’t quite name turned into a kind of amused weakness under the mustache.

  “You said, or at least you gave the impression,” he began, “that you believed Johnny’s father wasn’t Harry Donner. Do you have any basis for that statement?”

  “Nothing anybody but I would understand,” th
e caller admitted.

  Richard Ryon whistled.

  “Well,” he said sarcastically, “you certainly jump in with both feet where angels fear to tread.”

  John Donner wished he hadn’t spoken. Why had he? All he knew was that in this house he felt very close to the secret and mysterious source, as in the old game when they called out, “You’re warm.” This was where he felt “warm,” where he had been brought into the world, the house he had been coming back to all his life. His father’s and mother’s house had constantly changed, a few years in a parsonage here, a few years there. Aunt Jess’s house had stayed the same.

  He returned to his Uncle Dick. On the shelves above the Rayo lamp were the first books of Florida he had ever known. He could still feel the sensation they had given him, of a primal land, of the strange Seminoles and stranger Everglades. There was one red book in particular that had left its flavor with him. He could still almost taste it, binding, paper, type and all. His Uncle Dick had sent it North when a conductor on Flagler’s railroad that was then just reaching south of Jacksonville. His Uncle Dick had been there when most of the state was a jungle. He hadn’t stayed long, but long enough to send up the first grapefruit ever seen in Unionville. Nobody had liked it.

  “I wonder,” the old stranger begged, “if you would let me go through the house.”

  His uncle’s expression did not change, as if the request was beneath considering.

  “We’d bring the old harridan out on us,” he refused briefly.

  “I once lived here and should like very much to see it again!” John Donner begged.

  “Nobody ever lived here except the old lady and us,” Uncle Dick informed him.

  “It was on the other side. When I was a boy.”

  “Well, I couldn’t show you the other side,” Uncle Dick said flatly. “The Houcks live there.” He considered him with a skeptical eye. “You say you lived over there when you were a boy. I judge the old harridan isn’t more than fifteen or twenty years older than you. She claims she built this house when she was forty. So when you were a boy there was no house here at all.”

  “It was in another life and world,” John Donner explained.

  At the look his uncle gave him, he knew it was the wrong tack. He better not get himself in deeper. He sat very still, tasting while he could the invisible emanation pouring from the old honeycomb of a house. That door with the heavy wrought-iron lock, they said, had originally opened to steps in the yard. Now it led to the bare schoolroom where Aunt Teresa had taught her kindergarten, usually with an apple on the Baltimore heater to “purify” the air, and a pair of stools up in front of her desk so she could question two pupils at a time. Under the schoolroom was the dim outer basement, with Uncle Dick’s blue bicycle in a corner, with crocks on the shelves and bare hard earth underfoot except for the brick walk to the door. Under where he sat now was the basement kitchen with its two red cupboards, the stairs coming down, the low bridge of a whitewashed rafter, and the windows lifted back in summer on long wire catches. Here you looked out level with the ground outside, an experience that as a boy turned him into a creature no higher than a cricket, intimate with grass and grasshoppers. The other door led to the cellar, musty with the smell of spoiling potatoes, earth and coal, of a hanging safe and of a red bread tray on saw-horses.

  Emotions were fast crowding now. What had happened in this cellar, he never knew. There was talk that his Great-Grandfather Scarlett had once murdered a peddler in his Mansion House cellar uptown. John Donner’s mother and Aunt Jess had ridiculed the story, but as a boy sent for coal at Aunt Jess’s he knew terror till he was back with the throated bucket from the Nameless Dark to the warm secure kitchen, with the octagonal steel kettle simmering on the stove, and his mother and Aunt Jess telling stories over the red cloth.

  He heard a movement and looked up. Uncle Dick had got formally to his feet and stood there waiting with Northern Irish dourness. It came to him with a little shock that the man had had enough of him and wanted him to go. He wanted to get him out before Aunt Jess returned. He wanted to get back to his paper, Uncle Dick who had once been his friend, had looked up to the young writer, tramped the hills with him while he talked of the West and the stubbornness of these Pennsylvania Dutch farmers sticking to their stony hills when they could homestead the rich level soil of the West.

  The stranger got up reluctantly. He felt abandoned and confused.

  “If the young could only know,” he apologized for his uncertainty. “But then they wouldn’t be young any more.”

  There was no reply. He feasted his eyes for the last time on the Scarlett sofa, on the cubbyhole doors, on the yellow buffet that Aunt Jess used for papers and such, on the rug whose pattern was like the face of an old friend. In the hall he kept peering up over the banister. How well he knew what lay beyond. How many times had he raced those stairs, his hand never touching the rail!

  “Could I go up for a minute? Just in the hall?” he pleaded.

  Had he said it or hadn’t he? Uncle Dick did not reply. It was dim up there but he could see the open door to Aunt Jess’s bedroom, could feel the very shape of her bright red bureau with its bits of veneer missing, the still brighter red blanket usually folded at the foot of the bed, the polished window board that raised level with the sill. You could sit on the bed and play solitaire looking out at the Machamers next door. You had to go through Aunt Jess’s bedroom to get to the back bedroom which had been added to the house when the schoolroom was built. The floor slanted like a ship’s deck in a storm so that as a boy sleeping in this room with Matt he had the pleasant feeling of being adrift at sea. The front bedroom at the other end of the hall was Aunt Teresa’s, a severe, anciently furnished cell with grim ancestors looking down from the walls. He had stayed away from that but by day and night he knew the attic. He had been sent there to sleep when the house was full, once as a small boy with Polly. He remembered waking in the middle of the night and reaching out to touch his sleeping cousin, curious to find out how a girl’s flesh felt, since he had only brothers. She must have been nine or so, and he five or six.

  He felt his face grow cruel with ties and memories.

  “I wish I could see Matt and Polly,” he said.

  “Supper over and they’re gone,” Uncle Dick told him. “The devil knows where.”

  John Donner listened. They weren’t here. The house was silent.

  He scarcely moved, consuming every minute, hoping the absent might come. At the door to the parlor he halted. There was no light except from the hall but even in the gloom he knew every object intimately, the black marble fireplace that carried through to the sitting room, Aunt Jess’s tall frosted-glass parlor lamp painted with blue flowers, the brass sconces on the wall that she had promised many a time should go to him when she died but never had, and the dark hulk of the piano. It was the piano that next to Aunt Jess he had felt closest to in this house, the carved Chinese monster, half idol, half alive, the pedals its feet, the gnarled and broken jacks, as Aunt Jess called them, its fingers, the golden rods and the hammers that struck the strings its arms. Most alive of all was its voice. The hard tight treble sang very clear. The deep bass reassured that the foundations of the earth were still standing. He had hoped when he came down the street that there might be a child taking lessons, the pleasant background of faltering humility and industry. He could still pick up books that he had first read in Aunt Jess’s house and hear along with the taste of words and smell of the paper the sound of Aunt Jess’s piano.

  He wished now he had asked her to play for him before she went. No one else had her “touch.” He would know it anywhere. Once when he asked she would have smiled with her particular kind of half-make-believe pleasure. In later years she grumbled that her fingers were stiff as pokers; she couldn’t play a note. Sooner or later she would go to the piano all the same, seat her bulk dangerously on the tipping, creaking horsehair stool, run her hands up and down the keyboard to warm and limber them up, shake her h
ead with disgust from time to time, although those double and triple runs were like the wind blowing first one way and then another. He had once asked her how she did it, and she said, “I don’t. They just go.” Sometimes she sat for a while as at a bowl washing her hands, tasting the water, throwing up tinkling and rippling drops until satisfied. “Now what do you want?” she would say and if he’d brought her a new Schirmer book, she would page through it on the rack, swiftly picking out the meat, sampling snatches of this and that, making pungent comments like “That’s clever, Johnny, very clever,” or “The dumb jack. What did a grown man waste his time putting that down for?” When accompanying a singer she could and often did transpose to a more vocally comfortable key as she went without a moment’s hesitation.

  She had a weakness for Liszt.

  “Poor man,” she would say. “Rose told me he could play like an angel. But he’s no composer. He just improvises like I do, perhaps better, perhaps worse if I haven’t anything on my mind. Listen, how he keeps trying this and that. It doesn’t please him any more than it does me, so he cuts some capers to cover it up. I never know where he’s going and neither does he.”

  And yet her nephew noticed that she played Liszt almost more than anyone else. She even looked like him, the same powerful artistic face, the arched nose, the spirited way she held her head. Then suddenly she would turn and smile at you as she played, and your heart would melt for her and for those small hands that could somehow span more than an octave. Who could have foretold, John Donner thought, that those fingers which galloped so gaily and effortlessly over the piano should be found at the age of seventy-two, gnarled and worn like the keys of her piano, locked on the counterpane while she knelt on the floor by her bed in death?

  “Oh, Aunt Jess!” the old man cried to himself.

  But Aunt Jess was no longer here. She had gone to the house of the dead. Now he followed her out of the beloved place into the night.