The Waters of Kronos (7 page)

“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 head 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.

John Donner stood on the sandy sidewalk after the door had shut out the light. Aunt Jess’s house still hung in a cloud around him, rich and warm with those intimate details once taken for granted, or of doubtful beneficence, but now enhanced, made sweet to the point of pain by the long past and the present still denied him. Actually, there’s no house here, he said under his breath to comfort himself. All this is really gone, departed, old stuff, no more than some unaccountable figment of the brain. But even as he said it the house continued to stand there with its rectangular yellow eyes regarding as an alien him on whom it had once smiled as a friend, and in the end he felt that he was the old stuff, the departed, the figment of the past.

He reached out a hand to the third maple, the one over the gate that used to turn such a faithful vivid scarlet in
the fall while others on the street reached no more than orange or pale cerise. He would prove it an illusion and hence all this unreal, fanciful. But the tree was a rock, the bark rough, knotted and insoluble.

If this were real, then he must be the unreal, he told himself, the insubstantial and imaginary. More than once in the past he had had this curious feeling about life and its illusions, coming on bits of evidence such as, for instance, his name. How often and incredulously as a boy and even as a man he had repeated it to himself, “John, John, Johnny, Johnny!” It had sounded strange and hollow to his ears all his life. He couldn’t believe the name quite his. It never looked right, spelled with a “j” and with an “h” where no “h” should be. There was something wrong about it. He had gone over other boys’ names, trying them, speaking them aloud, fitting them to himself. There were nearly a dozen that sounded more real, one in particular that he felt was really his, but in the midst of it someone would brutally call “Johnny!” and drag him back to the dream that others called reality.

He had once told his mother how he felt. She had confessed to him that she had never liked her own name, neither Valeria nor Vallie. He had felt better at once. He could tell anything
to his mother. She was never surprised, or if she was, she didn’t show it. Whatever his doubts about justice and right, about doctrine and orthodoxy, whatever shocking words or still more shocking conceptions he had heard, whatever his protests or questions, she had had them before him or had at least known about them. Her calm could lay so easily the specters in his mind. She was incapable of being outraged when he was concerned. She would not be outraged by him today. She had always understood him even when most irrational and incoherent. She would understand him now. He could not imagine her otherwise. She would listen no matter how grotesque and improbable his tale or how his father stood back. If ever she should not—but he dare not think of such an eventuality.

Deep in his mind he knew that this, hidden and concealed by a multitude of complex acts and thoughts, was what he feared the most, was why he had not gone to her already. Her heart was the one sure and priceless possession he could count on here in the abyss and dare not be risked or gambled. And yet eventually he knew he must do just that. He had best go to her now while the chasm still held and the water held back.

He went down the dark path his father’s feet had taken under the great ash trees which grew so rank in Unionville.
Not until he was in his sixties had he learned that they were sacred among the ancients. He thought he could feel them like leafy idols over his head tonight, listening to his step, watching him without eyes, aware of his whole past. This was where he had played soldier with a wooden gun. And here under the biggest tree on Kronos Street, that some said had grown gross from human phosphates washed underground in the old hollow from the cemetery, was where as a child he had first noticed the changed track of the sun, that in October it was already dark at six. Beyond this tree he was setting foot in the home square, another very long square, the middle so far from lampposts that the gloom of foliage overhead confused him. He was uncertain whose house was whose. Only his feet knew, taking him unerringly to the steps they had run up so often and blindly as a boy.

Old and stiff, they wanted to run up now. The red hall lamp (all the best houses had them) was lighting him home. Another moment and he could burst in that old friend of a door, be young Johnny Donner and be safe.

“Careful! Careful!” he warned. He must go slowly, feel his way, knock on his own door like a stranger, but not on the front door lest his father come with a face that asked, “What are you doing here?” Around back there was a chance
his mother might answer. There in that moment at the door together, recognition would come. Now what was the cowardice that still smote him as he made his way back through the familiar alleyway, and why should he have to struggle like a worn-out swimmer through heavy seas? There was light in the kitchen as always, a light soft and mild, and somewhere young people’s voices.

His hand shook as he rapped on the door.

“Who’s there?” a voice called, not his mother’s. She never called like that. It was Annie, his mother’s old Dunkard maid.

“I’d like to see Mrs. Donner.” His voice was shaky.

“What do you want with her?” Annie demanded. The old stranger in the door gave the ghost of a smile. That was like Annie, only a midget of a woman (they used to call her Half Pint) yet always speaking her mind. What business did a man, and especially a strange man, have at this time of night with a married woman like Mrs. Donner?

“I just want to see her,” John Donner told her. And when there was no reply: “I’m related to her.”

“Oh!” Annie said, which meant several things—so that’s how it is and why didn’t you tell me before? “Well, she’s not here. She’s up at the preacher’s.” Then she added, “If you
came for the funeral, you don’t need to count on sleeping here tonight. She already has more than she can handle. I got to sleep with young Timmy.”

So his mother was at the parsonage. He might have known. It was the family get-together the night before the funeral, with Uncle Peter and Aunt Hetty and all the great-uncles and -aunts from Philadelphia. He could never face his mother among so many. He had always had her to himself when they talked.

“Annie!” he begged.

“What!” she answered in the explosive Dutch intended to admonish or cow.

“Annie. May I talk to you a little?”

“Well, talk then!” she told him shortly, making no move to open the door.

“I can’t talk through the cracks,” he protested, turning the brown knob. His mother almost never locked the door, but Annie—a little fighting cock of a woman afraid of neither man nor spook, she claimed—would turn the key, he remembered, whenever she was alone.

“Why can’t you?” she came back unmoved.

“Annie!” He shook the knob. “Let me in.”

He could see her through the window standing small and
belligerent in the middle of the floor, her small white Dunkard cap on the back of her head.

“What do you want in for?”

“I want to see you and talk to you. I want to see the house again.”

“You’re not coming in here,” Annie informed him. “Not till I know who you are.”

“You know me,” he promised. “You know me well. Don’t you remember Johnny?” Why, as a small boy Annie had taken him everywhere.

“Johnny who?” she wanted to know. He saw her take the light and come to the window. She put up the shade to the top with one hand and with the other held the lamp close against the pane. A long-forgotten childhood feeling went over him at sight of the old green print of her dress, of the cocky nose and the small mouth turned down.

“I never seen you before, old man,” she informed him.

“But you did!” he pleaded. “We were thick as thieves. You were very fond of me. You’d do anything for me.”

“Well, you should of made hay while the sun shone,” she retorted. “I don’t know you no more.” She put the lamp back on the table.

“Annie! You can’t do this to me!” he cried.

She turned on him.

“Why don’t you come in the daylight?” she scolded. “What do you come at night for like a thief trying to sneak and slobber your way in where you have no right?”

The old man stood silent. That had shaken him. What could he say? It was the great riddle. He could only answer that this was the way it was. There was no use trying to explain to Annie. After a little he turned and went defeated to the street. As he stood there looking back at the house such yearning came up in him that he could scarcely stand it, a yearning for many things vanished, but most of all for what as a boy he had valued so little and almost despised.

He found himself presently moving up the street. Once upon a time he had thought that man had invented nothing better than town life on a warm evening with the feel of neighbor friends around you, with the south wind stirring the town leaves and the lazy twang of frogs from the canal. The silent shadows of toads hopped in the garden. Occasional townspeople would pass on the street, the girls in light summer dresses, and all the time the drift of voices from front porches where families sat with occasional words between
them or to those passing and pausing to chat and tell some news, so that by the time one went from Mill to Maple Street a social evening could be passed.