Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  “You and me should ha’ married, Ruth.” She was used to his saying this time and again when they were discussing the sowing of a crop or the way to plow against rain wash.

  “Shut up, Henry,” she always said exactly the same.

  “I mean it,” he said yesterday. “Your do-less man and my do-less woman.”

  “Shut up,” she said again.

  She could never have loved that great, rough fellow, not after she had seen William. And no woman could have loved William as she did. Oh, other women must have loved him, women like those she had seen long ago in New York! Was it a woman now who made him want to go away? It must be, for only a woman could make his body cold to hers. She had heard wives talking together. “When he don’t want his reg’lar, then look around and see what’s goin’ on.”

  Her heart beat to pain with jealous love. Oh, they could look around and see, but how could she? He had come down like an angel from heaven to live with her, and if he went away how could she follow him?

  “My dear,” she whispered. He called her lovely names but that was all she could say. When she had said even so much, her heart swelled and she was suffocated with love. She would not let him go.

  The next morning, which was Sunday, they waited at the breakfast table for Hal. The girls were in their fresh muslin dresses ready for Sunday school and Ruth wore her tan linen, with an apron to keep it clean. William would never go to church. He loved his Sunday mornings in the farmhouse when the others were away. This morning he had waked, instantly clear, to the decision awaiting him, and was grateful for the hours of loneliness ahead. This morning he would make up his mind. He faced calmly in himself a probability, growing with the rising of the sun, that he would take his father’s advice and go away.

  “If I am ever to be content any more with what I have,” he thought, “then I must know what I can do elsewhere.”

  Ruth had got up early as she always did and gone downstairs to the kitchen, leaving him asleep. He was alone in their room but the house was alive about him. He was fond of it now, he realized. It was safe, comfortable, beautiful in its simplicity. The smell of bacon and coffee was its fragrance at this moment, and he heard the girls’ voices, muted until he should appear.

  He lay in the wide old bed, feeling light and aloof and free. A bond had broken. He knew it last night. For the first time in their life together he had not turned importunate to Ruth, but she to him. There was a difference so deep in this that he could not at once fully comprehend it. It made him free to consider to the utmost possibility what his father had said to him. Had his father said it was time for him to return to the world in which he was born, he would have angrily denied it. But his father had said it was time for him to return to himself—before it was too late. What he must consider was not one world or another, but his true self. Yesterday that self had risen at his father’s words, like a ghost from the dead.

  He got up at last, bathed and dressed and went downstairs to the breakfast table. Ruth and the girls were waiting for him. However late he was, Ruth always made them wait for him. It was one of her little determinations that they must all sit down together at meals. “Families mustn’t eat just anyhow,” she always said. But Hal was still not there.

  “Where is that boy?” Ruth said impatiently. “Mary, run upstairs and call him.”

  “He’s tired after last night,” William said pointedly. He sat down and Jill sat down and then Ruth. She did not answer him or meet his eyes. “Why don’t we let him sleep for once?” he continued.

  “He didn’t do anything yesterday to make him tired,” Ruth retorted.

  In a moment they heard Mary’s shriek. “Mother!” she cried.

  Ruth leaped to her feet and ran into the hall and up the stairs.

  “What is it now!” William muttered. He rose and followed her, Jill at his heels. He could hear voices upstairs.

  “He’s not here!” Mary gasped.

  “He’s got to be!” Ruth said loudly.

  They were in Hal’s room when he reached them. The bed was untouched. Ruth threw open the door of the closet where Hal kept his clothes. It was empty.

  “He can’t be so foolish!” she cried. But her face went the color of cream, and her lips were grey.

  “I’ll see if his bicycle’s here,” Jill cried, and raced downstairs. She was back almost at once while they waited. “It’s gone,” she said.

  “Oh, the silly boy,” Ruth groaned. Her eyes flew about the room, looking for a message from him. But there was none. They went downstairs and William tried to think what they should do.

  “We ought to notify the police at once,” he told Ruth.

  But she had the farming folk’s fear of police and of public attention. Besides, she was growing angry at Hal as she comprehended what he had done.

  “He’ll be back by night,” she said. “Mark my words—when he’s hungry, he’ll come back.”

  But none of them could go to church. She went upstairs and put on her old blue working dress, and when the girls begged to stay at home she let them.

  They stayed together all day, working at desultory tasks. William could not paint, but that he might be busy he cleaned his palette and box. He moved a small table to the window, saying that he must have light, but actually because from that window he could see the road.

  “Boys often run away from home,” he told Ruth cheerfully.

  But as a boy he himself had never thought of running away. He had gone dutifully from one day to the next, obeying the regime that his mother had set for his training. Then it occurred to him that he really had run away that day when he first saw Ruth. All his long subdued instinct for escape had accumulated into one great leap that had lasted until now. That was the way his parents regarded it, he knew. Some day, they doubtless still told one another, William would come home.

  “It’s better to get the impulse out of one’s system young,” he told Ruth, without telling her what he had been thinking.

  “Hal had no call to run away from his good home,” she said curtly.

  She polished the furniture and cleaned the stairs and she went upstairs to clean the attic, because from the high windows she could see a long way. William went with her to look over the piles of old magazines. He did not reproach her, knowing, as though she could tell him in words, how she was reproaching herself.

  Her reproach began to crush her as the day drew on to twilight. He did not need to make it heavier. Her anger faded under it, and by night she was trembling with terror. He had never seen her as she was when at last the darkness had covered the road and the boy had not come home. She turned to him in the attic she had made spotless and crept to his breast.

  “I’m a wicked willful woman,” she whispered. “I didn’t whip him for his own good yesterday. I whipped him because I was so mad at him and God has taken him away to punish me.”

  He stripped his heart of everything except the great rush of new protecting love he felt for the cowering, clinging woman he now held in his arms.

  “Nonsense, my darling,” he said. He comforted her, smoothing her hair and laying his cheek against her forehead. “We haven’t begun to try to find him yet.” No use to argue with her against God, he knew. All his easy rationalism had never disturbed Ruth’s belief in a God relentlessly just. “We’ll call the police,” he said. “They have all sorts of ways of finding lost persons.”

  He led her downstairs and left her in the rocking chair in the sitting room. “Rest a little,” he told her. “You’ve worked hard all day and eaten almost nothing and been so anxious.” Then he went to telephone the police.

  He was a good deal shaken when he had to tell them how Hal looked. He had never seen his son so clearly, “—tall for his age, reddish brown hair and brown eyes, freckled across his nose, red cheeks, and his mouth full”—“like his mother’s,” he all but added until he checked himself. He went back to Ruth with his own lips quivering. She had the family Bible on her knees and was staring at it.
/>   “William!” she cried, “he’s written in the Bible.”

  He strode to her and looked over her shoulder. And there in Hal’s childish handwriting, under the date of his birth, were these words: “Left Home July 13, 1913.”

  “I took up the book to find some help in it,” Ruth sobbed, “and it turned to this!”

  The heavy book slid to the floor and she wept aloud. And he knelt beside her and held her while she wept.

  For a month the police searched the county and state for a brown-haired, brown-eyed boy. For six months and then a year they searched the country, but he was not found.

  William never left Ruth for an hour. If he painted he went up on the hill and if she did not come out of the kitchen and wave her apron, he came down and hunted for her through the house until he found her.

  “Are you all right, dearest?” he would ask her.

  “Why, yes, William,” she always said quietly.

  He knew of course that she meant she was as right as she could be until they found Hal. Secretly William feared and sometimes believed that Hal was dead, but he never said this to Ruth, and she spoke of him always as living. Never, even in the depths of her secret heart, did she consider the possibility of his death. She kept his room waiting and ready for him, airing the bedclothes, washing the sheets from time to time as though the boy had slept in his bed. Some day he would come walking in, smiling his mischievous smile. She would smile, thinking of it.

  “What are you smiling at, Mother?” Jill asked. She had grown quickly since Hal had run away, her emotions forced by her awareness of the suffering in the house. She had changed even her manners, even her speech, imitating her father in her new awareness.

  “Nothing,” her mother replied, absently.

  Ruth seemed outwardly much the same, but inwardly she changed. She grew gentler to William than she had ever been, and more dependent on him, but she was sharper with the girls. She was sometimes so sharp that William could not bear it but he did not reproach her again as he had reproached her for whipping Hal. For she had never forgotten his reproach. Sometimes in the night he woke, feeling her awake at his side.

  “Can you not sleep?” he asked.

  “I’ve got to thinkin’,” she said. This meant always that she was thinking of her son. “If I’d ha’ listened to you,” she said heavily. “If I’d only ha’ done what you told me that night and held back my hand from him—”

  “Ruth, you mustn’t keep going over and over that night, he told her. Besides, the boy wasn’t angry with you. I remember being impressed because he was so—so understanding of why you felt you had to punish him.”

  “That’s why he left me,” she groaned. “If he’d been mad, he’d got over it and been all right. But he went to bed and figured it all out that he was one way and I was another and that we couldn’t ever get along.”

  He was astonished at her perspicacity. Had Hal been as shrewd as this? He could scarcely believe it of that heedless boy. But perhaps she was right.

  “If he understands you as well as that, then he knows how much you love him and he’ll come home again. Dear Ruth, dear wife, don’t grieve. I need you.” He held her to him. “Darling, this is the best part of our lives. If we are not happy now, when will we ever be happy?”

  “You never loved Hal like I do,” she said.

  He released her. “I think that is true,” he said. “I don’t believe that I have loved any of the children as much as you have. But perhaps I have loved you more than you have loved me. All my capacity for love has been used in loving you.”

  She listened to this and grew frightened as she always did when he talked beyond her understanding.

  “I don’t hardly see how a body could’ve loved a man more,” she said. She found it so hard to say directly that she loved him that he was suddenly impatient with her. He sat up in the darkness and bent over her.

  “Say that you do love me!”

  “William, don’t be so—”

  “Do you love me or not, Ruth?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Why don’t you say it then? I tell you a dozen times a day.”

  “I wasn’t raised to talk.”

  “Do you think it’s only talk with me, Ruth?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then say, ‘I love you, William.’”

  “If I didn’t, would I slave for you like I do?” Her voice trembled as though she were angry. “There isn’t a woman anywhere as has so much to do as I have! Home and farm and children, they’re all on me. Would I do it if I didn’t—want to?”

  “You mean, I’m no use to you!”

  “No, but you’re not like the menfolks around here.”

  “You mean I’m not like Henry Fasthauser.” He wondered at himself. He was not in the least jealous of Henry. For years he had known that Ruth turned to Henry for advice about the farm. But the man was such a clod, he was bald and thickened and coarse, and from very fastidiousness William would not have stooped to jealousy. He never saw Henry Fasthauser without being pleasantly conscious of his own slender and alert figure and his own thick, handsomely greying hair.

  Ruth answered with dignity. Her voice was steady enough now. “William, I’m ashamed of you. You know I’m not a woman as would think of any man except her own husband.”

  He was instantly humbled. He put his cheek upon her bosom. “I know it, Ruth.”

  But he felt her heart beating quickly, and she did not put her arms about him.

  “If you think that of me,” she went on, “then nothing I’ve done for you is any good, though everything I do is done for you. I make the house the way I think you want it. I never stir up cake or put the bread to rise without I think, ‘It’s for William.’ Night or day, that’s my thought.”

  In all their years she had never said so much as this.

  “I know it,” he whispered. “Dearest, don’t say any more. I understand you. I’m so unreasonable. You give me everything.”

  “I mind to,” she said, “but if it’s words you want, too—”

  “Don’t, darling—don’t say any more!”

  “If it’s words you want,” she repeated resolutely, “why then—” she went on with such difficulty that he suffered with her, shy and ashamed, “I do—love you.”

  It was as though she had wounded herself for him. He put his hand under her breast and felt her sweat. But he was exhilarated and excited, too. He had made her say it. He had forced her out of herself, out of her silence. He had made her come to him. He laughed aloud.

  “Oh, you sweet!” he cried. This middle-aged, reserved woman, busy about her house and her children, was a shy and lonely girl, and he alone knew what she was. He lit the lamp by the bed and stripped off her high-necked gown. And she lay so beautiful in her prime, so much more beautiful than she had been as a girl.

  “Your thighs are beautiful,” he said, “and your breasts.”

  She did not answer, but he saw her body begin to arch and quiver towards him.

  “I had rather it were so,” he thought. And with all the symbolism to which he was so sensitive, he proceeded to his triumph.

  If she was strong, so was he. If she was in her prime, so was he. He thought of the passion of their youth as small, weak flutterings of this mighty thing that now was theirs. Together they plumbed the abyss and found its depth. Together they sprang up again.

  “Good?” he demanded.

  “Good,” she said.

  In peace, at midnight, he laughed in his heart to think that he had ever thought of leaving this house of hers to wander upon the earth in search of—what? Himself, he had said, himself, he had thought. But had he gone, he would have left himself behind. He had not left her the day that Hal ran away because he could not. Now he knew that he would never leave her because he would not. This, this was he.

  Another two years and more passed without a word of rumor or a letter or a card from Hal. William took it for granted now that the boy was dead, but he said nothi
ng to Ruth. Mary and Jill had almost forgotten how their brother looked. They knew only their father thought him dead and their mother did not.

  “What do you think?” Jill asked Mary.

  “I think like Mom,” she said.

  “But I think like Father,” Jill said. She wanted to think like her father in everything. She worshiped him and was afraid always that she was not nice enough to please him. She wished she were pretty. Neither she nor Mary was really pretty, but Mary was prettier than she was. She wanted to be pretty for her father, because she knew how much he saw her mother’s beauty. Sometimes in the middle of a meal, or when they were sitting around the fire at night, he would say suddenly, “Ruth, you’re beautiful.” They all looked at her then and saw how beautiful she was, her brown hair curling around her forehead and her little ears, and her cheeks red and her eyes blue. Then she would feel them staring at her and her neck would turn pink.

  “Stop it, all of you,” she would say. “William, you ought to know better.”

  “What?” he would say laughing.

  “Before the girls!” she cried.

  “But they know you’re pretty!”

  “I don’t mean that,” she said, blushing more than ever.

  “Then what?”

  “Oh—William!” She was always tongue-tied when he forced her to say what she meant. And then he went on, to tease her.

  “Do you mean they mustn’t know I’m in love with you? But they ought to know it—it’s good for them to know it. They must begin to know what being in love means.”

  “William!” Only when Ruth’s voice reached a certain agony would he stop his teasing.