Angry Wife

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Want Lucinda, do you?” he had said when Pierce came to ask for her. “Take her and welcome! Daughters are a drug in a man’s house after they’re sixteen.”

  Lucinda had laughed but Pierce had been intensely indignant.

  “Shall you practice in Richmond?” he now asked his second son one evening after dinner. According to Lucinda’s rite, she and Lucie and Mary Lou left the table after dessert and Pierce sat on with his sons over wine and walnuts. He cracked a nut with the silver nutcrackers.

  “No, Father,” Carey replied. He had a clear tenor voice, pleasant but cold. “I’m going to set out for the new coal mines.”

  Pierce crushed the nut and let it fall on the plate. “The coal mines!” he repeated, stupefied. It was betrayal. He hated the mines that were scarring the face of the State.

  “I’m going to be a big corporation lawyer,” Carey said confidently. “My roommate’s father owns the Woodley holdings, and it’s a future for me. The way I see it”—Carey cracked a filbert with sharpness—“there is going to be increasing friction between capital and labor as unions develop—”

  “Unions aren’t going to develop—”

  “It’s my guess they are,” Carey replied. “That means corporations are going to want their own private lawyers to hold down the unions. There’s a fortune in it.”

  Pierce looked at his son with distaste. Carey was fair, like Lucinda, and he had her cool quiet manners. “You’re going to get rich off the dissensions of men, are you?” he inquired.

  Carey laughed. “There’s no surer way of getting rich,” he said lightly.

  Martin poured his glass full of the port wine that Pierce was now making each year with increasing success. “Here’s to the future!” he cried. “May dissensions flourish and wars multiply on the earth!”

  “I’ll drink no such toast,” Pierce declared. But he lifted his glass and passed it back and forth under his nose. “There’s real bouquet,” he murmured. He forgot the foolishness of his sons and drank the wine down with relish.

  Nevertheless, he was not pleased with Carey, and two months later he still remembered his displeasure and took sides against him and Lucinda in a quarrel between Carey and his third son John.

  Of all his children Pierce had paid the least heed to John. Named for John MacBain, the boy had grown up as little as possible like him. Once or twice John MacBain, in undying longing for his own children, dead and unborn, had tried to befriend the son that Pierce had named for him. But no friendship had developed. John had frankly disliked Molly. “She paws me all the time,” he said bluntly to Pierce, and he was impatient with old John. “He thinks about nothing but steel and locomotives and how to beat the unions,” he told Pierce.

  But if no friendship had grown there had been a result. Pierce’s third son grew up with an intense disdain for business and business men, and a stern determination to hew his own life as he wanted it to be. Pierce knew that he went often to see Tom, and that he had long since ceased to ask permission or even to tell anyone when he went, and Tom’s letters now made no mention of the boy. That, Pierce knew, was because John did not want his mother to know what he did. This being true, Pierce asked himself if he should not inquire into it.

  Uneasily one day he faced the young man, and John admitted it at once. Of all his sons John was still the most like Tom in looks, and Pierce had the strange feeling when he saw him, that he was gazing at Tom’s young self. But he could not or would not acknowledge that the likeness went deeper.

  “Of course I don’t want Mama to know I go there,” John said. “I learned when I was small that I couldn’t tell her anything about myself—she has no sense of honor.”

  Pierce said sternly, “You are speaking of your mother.”

  John smiled, his eyes scornful and held his peace

  Pierce waited, and then took the lead again. “Your mother has been brought up in the old tradition,” he said formally. “I confess that I have, too. We cannot change—”

  “Don’t put yourself in the same category,” John said. “You’re a very different person. She’s a woman.”

  “Then you should honor womanhood,” Pierce said. His words made him uncomfortable as he spoke them. There was an echo in them of old dead grandeur.

  “I feel sorry for women like Mama—that’s all.” John crossed his long legs.

  Pierce thought, “This boy has the most honest eyes I have ever seen—far more honest than mine ever were.”

  “Sorry?” he repeated aloud.

  “They’re living in a world that’s gone,” John said. “They don’t know it—but they’re afraid. They might know.”

  “That sounds like nonsense,” Pierce replied.

  “It isn’t,” John said pleasantly. “It’s sad truth. Poor Mama, she’s hanging on by her fingernails to the old romance—pretty white ladies living in lovely houses, protected by white men! But we’ve betrayed them—we’ve sneaked out of the back doors, after making sure they were quite comfortable, their little slippered feet on satin footstools.” He got up and walked to the window. “God, how I honor my uncle Tom!” he cried to the mountains beyond.

  The room was very silent. Pierce could not speak. John sat down again and looked at his father. “I propose to go North,” he said. “I want to get away from the South. It’s rotten. I don’t want to rot with it.”

  Here in his beautiful library, the great windows facing the mountains, Pierce heard his son destroy his home. He made feeble defense. “But this isn’t the South,” he objected, “we separated ourselves in the war.”

  “We’ve never dared to cut the placenta,” John said harshly. “I want to go where my children never hear that a man’s color dooms him and that because a woman is black, she is not a woman but a female.”

  Pierce winced and then smiled. “Where will you go?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” John answered, “but I’ll go until I find the place.”

  “What will you do?” Pierce asked.

  “I’m going to be a brain surgeon,” John said. “I’m going to find out for myself that men’s brains vary from the imbecile to the brilliant, but not from white to black.”

  Carey’s voice interrupted them from the door. It was the first week of the summer vacation and the two young men were home together. “Is the dreamer dreaming again?”

  “It’s no dream,” John retorted.

  “Then it’s madness and the same thing,” Carey said gaily.

  The two brothers did not love one another, and John lost his temper vehemently. “Leave my life alone, damn you!” he roared. “I don’t say anything to your little pettifogging lawyer’s plans! I’d rather cut my throat than make my living the way you’re going to do!”

  Lucinda, hearing the loud voice, came in from the terrace where she had been sitting in the shade of a sycamore tree.

  “Pray tell!” she said sharply. “What’s the fuss now?”

  John put his lips together until they were white, but Carey smiled his bitter smile. “John is having heroics, as usual,” he said. “He wants to go North where he won’t see the horrid ways we have.”

  Lucinda turned to her third son. “Tell me instantly what you mean,” she demanded.

  Pierce interposed, “My dear, young men always quarrel. I advise you to go back to your seat.”

  But Lucinda did not heed him. “John, you are not going North!”

  “Yes, I am, Mama,” he replied. He stood, towering above her fragile whiteness. “I hate it here—”

  “Indeed? You hate your home?” Lucinda’s voice was tinkling ice.

  “Not Malvern—exactly,” John muttered.

  “Oh—not Malvern—exactly,” Lucinda repeated.

  The mockery in her voice lit the wrath in her son again.

  “I take it back,” he cried. “I do hate Malvern—and everything in it—”

  “Oh!” Lucinda’s hands flew to their place under her breasts. “Pierce—you hear him?”

  Pierce bent his h
ead sadly. “My dear—he must be free,” he murmured. “We cannot make Malvern a cage—”

  Lucinda turned from him and suddenly her hand flashed like the blade of a sword. She slapped John’s cheek as once she had slapped Georgia’s, Pierce thought in horror. “There!” she cried. “That’s what you deserve—you silly boy!”

  John gazed at her, shocked to the soul, and then turned and strode away. They heard him rush up the stairs to his own room.

  “Lucinda, you have done something that can never be undone,” Pierce said.

  She burst into tears. “I don’t care!” she cried.

  “Don’t cry, Mama,” Carey said.

  But Pierce answered, “Go away, my son. You ought not to be here.”

  Carey, hesitating, saw the look in his eyes, and went away and Lucinda wept on and Pierce sat silent and let her weep for he could not comfort her. At last her anger dried her tears and she went away without a word to him, and shut herself in her rooms.

  All day she did not come downstairs and John did not appear until he had found that his mother had shut herself in with a headache. Then he came downstairs and to his father.

  “I want to go away,” he said.

  “Of course,” Pierce said. “How much money do you need?”

  “A hundred dollars or so,” John replied. His eyes were too bright, as though he had shed tears, and his cheeks were flushed. But Pierce asked no questions. He went to the safe behind the panels of his office and took out cash and gave it to his son.

  “Tell me where you are and write to me every week,” he said.

  “I will,” John promised him. And then in sudden gratitude, he cried out, “Papa, thank you—for—everything! And I’m going first to Uncle Tom’s house.”

  “I thought so,” Pierce said, and let him go.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE YEARS SLIPPED PAST, and he marked them by the growth of trees he had planted in new orchards. The apple trees he had put in on the south hillside began to bear and the chestnuts he had put on the west knoll were burred. He had to order the sycamore over the east terrace cut back because it shaded the house and the rhododendrons were rich on the banks below the gardens.

  There were more than trees to mark the years. Mathews’ children grew up and started livery stables and grocery stores in the nearby towns, and inside his own house he had two grandchildren and Carey, two years after he left home, married the daughter of a millionaire mine owner.

  Pierce did not like his new daughter-in-law. She was effusive over the charm of Malvern but he heard her praise with grim calm.

  “It’s delightful, isn’t it, Carey? Such a wonderful background—” she exclaimed. Listening to her, watching her, Pierce decided not to give Carey the MacBain house. It would allow this young woman to stay too near. He’d keep it. Maybe by some strange chance, Tom would come back to Malvern. He dreamed of such strange things these days, gazing at the mountains.

  Pierce looked to the mountains increasingly now when he was bored or lonely. He was often both. His Sally was planted deep in South America, with children of her own. Those people apparently did not believe in birth control—it was their religion, he supposed. But he could not reach out to Sally any more. And Lucie was Lucinda’s own shadow. He had never found a way to communicate with the child, though she was child no more, and engaged now to a young fellow from Baltimore—but he had no interest in it.

  He met John MacBain sometimes, but John was tired and he was worried now by the talk of automobiles. If people bought cars of their own what would railroads do? There was even talk of freight being hauled by motor vehicles.

  “It seems like railroads will never rightly come into their full glory,” John MacBain mourned. “People are always inventing something new before they get the good out of the old. We’ve only just begun to think about street cars and automatic stokers and here they’re plotting automobiles—”

  Somewhere in the years John MacBain and Molly had reached the river which must part them or which they must cross together. Pierce knew of it, for John had sent for him abruptly one day from New York. Pierce had gone at once, with great distaste for that northern city, but with invincible loyalty to his friend. He found John and Molly together at the Waldorf in a state of mind that was iron on John’s part and fire on Molly’s.

  Pierce was surprised to find them together in the same suite, for he had imagined that only Molly’s broken promise and final desertion could have moved John to go to New York after her. He sat in the room with them both.

  “Pierce, you decide,” John announced.

  “Decide?” Pierce murmured.

  “Whether I’m being fair or not,” John went on. “I’ve let her have her rein now for years. Pierce, you know the whole story. But the time has come to stop. If I’d been—a whole man—it would have been time to stop—even with me. She can just as well stop with another man—and I mean Henry Mallows, by Gawd!”

  Molly burst into loud tears, but John refused to be moved. He turned to Pierce pathetically. “Pierce, either she can stay with me and grow old with me decently or she can leave me. My patience has given out.” He pounded the table and overturned his glass of whiskey and water and the liquid spread over the floor.

  Molly flew to mend the damage. “Oh, look what you’ve done, you big lout!” she cried in a trembling voice. She ran for a towel and wiped up the wet. “The table’s spotting, too!”

  “Never mind,” Pierce said. He waited until she came back and then he went on, musingly. “Tables and chairs and things last so much longer than we do—I often think of that at Malvern. All the things I’ve gathered there—they’ll be there, but I won’t. There isn’t much time left for nonsense—after fifty—”

  His quiet words brought a still cold air into the heated room. John sighed and, Molly wiped her eyes.

  “You two,” Pierce said affectionately, “I can’t spare either of you and so you must stay together somehow. I don’t want any more changes in my lifetime—whatever comes after.”

  He went home again after they had dined together and there had been no more talk. John and Molly went to Europe unexpectedly, and when they came back Molly had given herself up to fat and comfort and from then on John and she jogged along. Pierce looking at them wondered why it was that he and Lucinda could not do the same. But he could not, as John had, demand nothing but simplicities of marriage.

  “I’ve given everything to my marriage,” Pierce said to himself. John and Molly had come for a brief visit before going home to Wheeling. Then they were gone and the house was somnolent. Martin’s family lived in the west wing, and when Pierce wanted quiet he drew a bar across the door between and it was understood that it remained so until he drew it back again. Mary Lou was compliant, never emerging, indeed, from the sweetness which she kept wrapped about her like a veil and through it Pierce saw her only dimly. But Martin seemed happy—as, happy as he needed to be. Pierce knew his eldest son well enough now to know that he demanded little from life beyond comfort and security and these he took for granted from Malvern.

  Then why, Pierce asked himself on one somnolent autumn afternoon, was he himself not content? He found himself increasingly and unbearably lonely as he viewed old age just over the horizon of the mountains. There it was, like the setting sun, and he must watch night come on. He dreaded it and he longed for closeness and nearness to someone, and to whom could it be, if not to Lucinda? They must be wed again to one another for age as they had been for youth.

  So he set himself to win her once more, to court her with new love. He could study her, he told himself, and learn afresh her little likes and dislikes, her taste in colors and flowers and perfumes, things he had forgotten for years. And jewels—he had given her jewels for the children. Now he would give her jewels for herself.

  It was not easy. Hardest of all to bear was Lucinda’s surprise, cynical, half amused.

  “What’s the matter with you, Pierce?” she inquired. “What do you want?”

&nb
sp; “Only to tell you that I love you, my dear,” he said gently. But she seemed unable to believe him. She imagined with disgust that he wanted her body with some sort of recrudescent, elderly lust. He was too embarrassed to speak when he discovered her suspicions and for some time he refrained from so much as kissing her lips.

  Then his loneliness overcame him and one November afternoon, when they had walked together through the woods, he sat down on a fallen log. When she sat down beside him he took her hand.

  “I feel myself growing old, Luce,” he said.

  “It’s about time,” she said with the faint smile she used so often now.

  “No, don’t, my dear—” he begged her. “Don’t be cynical, Luce. It’s a desperate thing to grow old, and feel one’s wife doesn’t forgive him for something—he doesn’t know what. Darling, come close to me—I don’t mean—what you think—I mean—your heart, Luce—that’s far away from me. I must have your heart—because I can’t grow old alone—”

  She sat as still in the soft autumn sunshine as though she were made of marble. He felt something struggle in her. Her fingers still fluttered but he held them fast.

  “Tell me what it is you have against me,” he begged her. “Whatever it is, I will change it—do away with it—give it up—I promise you! But first you must tell me what it is or how will I know?”

  She could not speak, or would not. But he held her fluttering, unwilling fingers and he told himself that if he were patient, loving but not passionate, if he could persuade her and make her believe him—

  “I have no one but you now, to be near to me,” he said tenderly. “See, dear, I want to be near to you, too, in the way we should be, each trusting the other. I want to devote myself to you—I thought I had all my life—but if there is something you think keeps me from you—”

  And then bit by bit she began to speak, and he let her speak.

  “But you do know what it is,” she said.