Time Will Darken It

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Book: Read Time Will Darken It for Free Online
Authors: William Maxwell
received it, a chain of subdued excitement and planning that would take months to exhaust itself. She stopped fanning and called across the room to her son. “Randolph, what is the name of the man Clara Huber’s eldest daughter married? Danforth? Danverse?”
    “Tweed,” Randolph said, barely turning his head. “Charlie Tweed.” Mary Caroline was telling him about the high school debating contest that had as its subject:
Resolved that Napoleon was defeated, not by the Russians or the English or the Austrians, but by Destiny
. Her side had been given the affirmative.
    “Charlie Tweed,” Mrs. Potter said to Dr. Danforth. “So he’s probably no relation to you. He’s a cotton broker and lives outside of Columbus, Georgia.”
    The conversation of the Southerners was sprinkled with place names that in an Illinois living-room, in 1912, were still romantic—Memphis and Nashville and Natchez and Gulfport and New Orleans—and that conveyed to the people of Draperville a sense of strange vegetation and of an easier, more picturesque life than they themselves were accustomed to. Mr. and Mrs. Potter depended, for the most part, on half a dozen topics: the Delta Country, the plantation, cotton, kinship, their own emphatic likes and dislikes, and the behaviour of various eccentric persons back home. These topics formed a complicated series of tracks and switches, like a railroad yard. Sometimes their separate conversations merged, so that Mr. and Mrs. Potter would be telling the same story simultaneously in different parts of the room. But the next moment they would go steaming off in opposite directions, calling on their son or daughter for confirmation of details, for names and dates momentarily forgotten. They thought out loud, recklessly, and sometimes heard their own remarks withsurprise and wonder. They were in the North and among strangers, a situation that was unnatural to them, and that could only be corrected by making lifetime friends of every person they talked to. It didn’t occur to them that they might bore anyone, and no one was bored by them or less than delighted with their soft Mississippi accent.
    Mr. and Mrs. Potter talked about themselves and the people they knew because they had as yet nothing else to talk about, but as they began to feel better acquainted, the direction of their concern sometimes veered, sometimes reversed itself, and the full heat of their charm and interest was applied flatteringly to the listener, while they extracted his likes and dislikes, his hopes, plans, and history. The person taken hold of in this way had the feeling that they would never let go, that he and everything about him would always engage the attention and sympathy of these Southerners. The fact that the Southerners did let go a moment later, and let go completely, was not important. The contact, though brief, had been satisfying.
    Randolph Potter left Mary Caroline and went out to the kitchen on some errand which he did not explain, and Mrs. Danforth came and sat down beside her. It was all Mary Caroline could do not to put out her hand and prevent Randolph’s place from being taken. Mrs. Danforth was a very homely woman with a disconcerting habit of twisting her head and looking at the person she was talking to with a parrot-like expression that seemed half-inquiring and half-mocking. Mary Caroline answered Mrs. Danforth’s questions about her mother, who had not been well lately, but her eyes kept straying. Mrs. Danforth saw the direction they took, and then, in her survey of the room, that her husband had said something to Mrs. Potter which made her tap his arm coquettishly with her fan. Pleased that he was enjoying himself, Mrs. Danforth turned back to Mary Caroline and said, “What a pretty dress, my dear. Did you make it yourself?”
    In a kind of dream, Abbey King had been passed from one lap to another. Worn out by the excitement, the perfume and cigar smoke, and the effort of trying to follow so many

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