Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  But it was not only teasing. Oh, they knew that, she and Mary! But Mary always took her mother’s side. They would discuss it afterwards.

  “Dad oughtn’t to talk so. She doesn’t like it,” Mary said.

  “I think it’s lovely! Other men are so stupid. Look at that fat Henry Fasthauser! I’ll bet he never talks about anything except cows and corn.”

  “Ellie said he was in love with Mom, too,” Mary said slyly. Ellie was Tom’s wife.

  Jill’s little gray eyes stared at her sister. “You mean—he might have been—Father?” Mary nodded. “Oh, it would have been horrible!” Jill cried.

  “We wouldn’t have known it.”

  “Oh, I would! Not to have our real father!”

  But secretly she was never quite sure of William as her father. She examined herself sadly in the mirror to discover if she could see any likeness to him. But there was none.

  “Don’t any of us look like Father?” she asked Ruth one day over dishwashing.

  “Only Hal,” her mother said shortly. “But he wasn’t like him, really—only in looks.”

  But none of them were prepared for Hal’s shocking likeness to William when suddenly one day he stood at the half-open Dutch door of the room William had made into a dining room. It was a Saturday and they were at their noon meal. They happened at the moment to be silent. Ruth was cutting a cherry pie. A lazy voice spoke.

  “Got a meal for a tramp?”

  They looked up. A young man stood there. William felt faint. He was looking at himself. That face—it was more familiar to him than the one he now saw in the mirror every morning! Ruth screamed for the first time in her life.

  “Hal!”

  Hal put one long leg over the door and then the other.

  “Oh, Hal!” Ruth half-rose, and then sank down again, her brown face ash-colored. She began suddenly to cry. William leaped up.

  “Look to your mother, girls,” he cried. He lifted his glass of wine and held it to her lips. “Shame on you,” he said angrily to his son, “coming on her like this after all these years!”

  He was suddenly raging at Hal for everything, for the grief he had caused in the house, for coming back to make Ruth look like this, above all, he knew sharply, for looking so exactly as he himself had looked thirty years ago. Oh, he was very angry at Hal for that!

  But Ruth cried out against him. “For shame yourself, William! What does anything matter now! Oh, Hal, Hal, you’ve come home.” The tears were still streaming down her face and she moved away from William’s arm and put her hand to Hal’s cheek. He patted it.

  “Sure I have, Mom. You knew I’d come home sometime. Why, Mom, I wouldn’t go away forever.”

  “You might have sent a letter to tell her so,” William said dryly. The boy was taller than he was and too handsome. Had he been so handsome when he was young? He remembered out of some forgotten year Elise saying to him in her bold direct fashion, “You’re too handsome to be so good, William. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Oh, well, I’m no great hand at writin’,” Hal laughed. “I was always goin’ to write and somehow I just didn’t get around to it.”

  “Hal, where have you been?” Ruth cried.

  “Everywhere,” he said. “Don’t get me started on that till I’m fed.”

  The thought of his hunger brought her back to herself. “Sit down,” she commanded him. “Mary—Jill—get a clean plate and cut some meat—and get whatever we have. I’m glad I made the pie. It’s your favorite, too, son. When I made it this morning I kept thinking of you. But oh, Hal, not to let me know!” Her red lips were quivering again.

  His mouth was full of bread but he stopped chewing. “I know, Mom,” he muttered, and swallowed. “I see now ’twas awful of me. But gee, the time went so fast—so much was happenin’.” He pulled another piece of bread from the loaf.

  “What has brought you home now?” William asked. He sat down again at the head of the table and his voice was stern. He could not make it otherwise. But Hal looked up at him with frank, unclouded eyes.

  “The war, sir,” he said; “we’re goin’ into the war.”

  Three years, Monty had said. It had been less than that. Nearly three years ago war had begun in a small European town and had spread like cancer over the nations. But that war had never been real to William, because all that was real to him was here in Ruth’s house. He glanced at headlines two or three times a week in the county newspaper and sometimes he bought on Sundays the Philadelphia paper. With no special feeling he read one familiar name after the other capitulating to Germany. He had enjoyed Germany. A month’s journey on foot through the Black Forest had been one of his greatest pleasures. What if Germany did extend her borders? The war remained a shadow play on the other side of the world and the years slipped over him like a stream of clear water, flesh warm, so he had neither seen nor felt them.

  Now he looked about the table, startled, and saw their mark upon his children. Hal was a man, and Mary a woman, and Jill a tall girl of fourteen. He turned to Ruth, and instantly the comfort of her surged over him again. She had not grown older. The years had left her alone. Her hair was as brown as ever, her eyes as blue.

  Just now those blue eyes were full of bright alarm. “It ain’t our war, Hal?” she asked.

  “Might be,” he said. His plate was heaped before him and his fork filled. He used his thumb to push back a fragment of meat that fell from it.

  “I don’t believe it,” Ruth said. She put down her fork.

  “Might be, though,” Hal said again. “That’s why I come home. I’ve volunteered.”

  “Hal!” Ruth’s cry was sharp.

  He looked up and saw her face and put down his own fork.

  “Mom, they’d have got me anyway. There’s goin’ to be conscription.”

  “That’s no reason to go before you have to.”

  “Yes it is, Mom—besides, I want to go, I’ve always liked goin’ places.”

  “Not to your death!”

  Hal laughed. “I ain’t agoin’ to die, Mom! You don’t die unless a bullet’s got your number on it!”

  William broke in. “But what have you got against the Germans, Hal?”

  “Not a thing,” Hal said cheerfully. “Not a thing in the world. I’m goin’ for fun.” He laughed and Mary and Jill, swept with irresponsibility, laughed with him. But Ruth and William looked at each other, grave.

  “Why do you laugh?” William asked them sharply.

  They stopped, chidden, and looked from one face to the other. Why were their parents so solemn?

  “It’s no laughin’ matter,” Ruth said.

  He told himself that Ruth would be herself again as soon as Hal had gone. He tried to be patient with her. This was a woman preparing to tell her only son good-by, for months, for years, and there was the shadow of forever beyond. He was ashamed of his own contrasting impatience to have Hal gone and the house and his own life just as it had always been, and he hid his selfishness from Ruth with guilt as he acknowledged it. He knew that he resented in a foolish fashion Ruth’s division from him. He was jealous of her attention fixed upon this tall, too-handsome fellow who was his own son. He wanted to send him out of the house, to separate him from their life, and take Ruth back for his own, entire. He wished, his impatience quickened by disgust, that she would not laugh so much at his silly jokes and pranks. Hal was a practical joker, a tease, a heckler, and only Jill resented him. William drew near to the sensible Jill.

  “Let’s take a little walk this evening,” he said to her one evening after their supper. He felt restless with restraint before Hal. What did a man do, he wondered, when he discovered that he particularly disliked the sort of man his son was proving to be?

  Jill’s plain face lit. “I’d love that,” she said.

  They walked across the lawn and down the lane and he was touched by her anxious effort to be companionable to him. She walked carefully, holding her steps to time with his leisurely stroll, though her usua
l gait was a sort of dog trot.

  “Am I too slow?” William asked.

  “Oh, no,” she said fervently. “I love to walk slow—you see everything. Sometimes when I walk by myself now I go slow, just so that I can see everything.”

  He found it hard to talk and was sure that she found it harder, though she tried bravely one subject after another. He let her try because she was revealing herself to him. He had never felt curiosity about any of his children, and yet he knew by an instinct that this was the only one of the three whom it would be worth his while to discover. She fell silent at last, depressed, he could see, by her lack of success in amusing him. He decided to startle her.

  “I suppose you know I’m rather fond of you—as a person, quite apart from my being your father,” he remarked.

  She looked up at him, her face bright with unbelieving joy. So she would look, some day, he thought, when the young man she loved said to her words not too different from these.

  “Oh,” she gasped, “do you?” She caught his arm. “I’ve often wondered. Because we—Mary and me, I mean—we’ve thought you didn’t, maybe. Not that you aren’t grand to us, but then, you’re grand to everybody.”

  He was amused by this. “I’m not committing myself beyond you,” he said. “It’s a principle of mine that you oughtn’t to have to like somebody merely because he’s a relative. I shouldn’t like you to think you had to like me just because I’m your father. It’s pure chance that I am.”

  They had reached the fence and beyond it they saw Henry Fasthauser turning his cows into pasture for the night.

  “That fellow, for instance, he’s as much right to be your father as I—only chance didn’t happen that way,” he went on.

  She pressed against him. “If old Fasthauser were my father, I’d die,” she murmured.

  “He’s no older than I am,” he said.

  “You’ll never be old!” she cried with passion. “You’ll always be just what you are now, the handsomest, best man I ever knew!”

  He laughed. “Don’t commit yourself, my dear. Save that for the young man around the corner of tomorrow. He may not be a bit like me.”

  “Then I won’t have him,” she declared. “He’s got to be just like you.”

  He laughed again, warmed, amused, touched, and now curious, a very little, about this young girl who was his daughter. Her small grey eyes worshiped him in the twilight and her mouth was tender.

  “I wish I could tell you how I feel about you. You’re different from everybody. You make me feel different. I don’t want just to be like everybody else—because you’re my father. I’m terribly proud of that.”

  He pressed the hot young hand in his arm. “Sometimes I think I’m not much,” he said.

  She would not have this. “Oh, but you are! Everybody looks up to you and—and thinks about you the way I do. They all know you’re—different.”

  He sighed. The difference! It separated him. He felt suddenly a little lonely.

  “The twilight is chill,” he said; “let’s go in and find your mother.” Then because he felt her taken back, he patted her hand again quickly. “You’re a nice girl,” he said, “a very nice girl.”

  But he knew that no child of his could ever be part of him. He entered the house, shouting, “Ruth, where are you? Ruth—Ruth!”

  “Here!” her voice cried very faint from the attic.

  He tramped up the stairs, swearing a little, and came upon her kneeling by a trunk. A candle set in a saucer flared beside her.

  “What on earth are you doing up here at night?” he demanded. “You’ll set the house afire with that candle.”

  “I’m emptying this trunk for Hal,” she said.

  “Trunk! He can’t take a trunk to camp!”

  She sat back on her heels. “Can’t he?”

  She looked so beautiful kneeling there before him, the candlelight from beneath, that he leaned and seized her and lifted her up and held her hard.

  “I’m about tired of all this,” he muttered, “it’s time you gave me a little attention.” He felt her hand on his cheek, his neck. “What do you think I married you for?” he demanded, and kissed her once, twice, fiercely, delicately.

  “I don’t know,” she said, half-laughing.

  “Not for brats,” he said, “only for myself—” He let his lips rest on hers long and hard for a moment. Then he lifted his head and gave her a slight shake. “I want a woman who’s my wife,” he said.

  “What would the children do?” she asked.

  He laughed down at her. “What’s that got to do with you and me?” he said, and went downstairs again.

  But that, she thought, kneeling there alone in the attic, was the difference between men and women. A woman felt responsible. Suppose she only thought about William, then who would look after the children, or the farm for that matter? But the farm was only because of William. If she had married Henry she wouldn’t have had to bother about the farm, only about Henry. But Henry would have wanted her to tend him first, too, and she could not have done it.

  “I’m glad I married a man as I want to put first,” she thought. “’Twould be terrible to have to do it not wantin’ to.”

  When she went downstairs to the kitchen again, for no reason at all she was sharp with Hal, idling by the stove. She saw William pacing the grass outside as he smoked his evening pipe. His figure was clear against the evening sky, just now bright with afterglow of the sun.

  “Go and turn on the light in the sittin’ room for your father,” she said. “It’s gettin’ damp out there and he’ll come in when he sees the light.”

  In their room the two girls prepared for bed. Whether they were silent or not depended on Jill. If she talked, there was talk. If she did not, Mary undressed in drowsy silence, yawning softly now and again. Tonight Jill was silent. She undressed quickly, washed her face and brushed her teeth and took down her long, looped braids and folded the red ribbons with which they were tied. Then she got into bed and pulled up the covers. Mary was twice as slow. Jill glanced at her sister’s plump, pretty figure, clad only in a chemise. Mary was in love with Joel Fasthauser, old Henry’s second son. She knew, because Mary had told her so. Mary was only waiting for him to propose to her. They had discussed that proposal and wondered when it would come and how.

  “Mary, you must tell me when he does!” she had cried. “You wouldn’t be so mean not to tell me when we’ve talked it over so much!”

  But Mary, peony red, had refused to promise.

  “Maybe I wouldn’t feel to tell even you just what he’d say,” she said.

  “That’s downright mean,” Jill retorted. Mean she felt it would be until tonight. Somehow tonight she understood. For she could not have told Mary about that walk with her own father and how she felt, not about her father exactly, but about somebody, someone she had never seen, who would be like her father but much younger, though otherwise exactly like him. All through her being she felt a delicate, deep longing and aspiration to be better, finer, more clever, more beautiful than she now was.

  “I ought to do everything to make myself ready for him,” she thought—not her father, but that other one like him, only young and eagerly looking for her. “I could never, never marry anybody like that Joel,” Jill thought. But how could she tell Mary that?

  Between William and Ruth the war became personified in Hal. William was aware of it, but Ruth was not. The transformation took place the last day that he was at home. They had never seen him in his uniform. At home he wore an old blue shirt always open at the neck and a pair of trousers whose original color had long been lost. His red-brown hair was as rough as it had been when he was ten, and he went barefoot in the house. Thus he sat at the dinner table the last day. None of them could imagine him different from this lounging, smiling, careless young man, whose humor was in pinching and teasing his sisters and even his mother. William controlled in himself an impulse of real rage when Hal leaned across to his mother and pulled her small, clos
e-set ear.

  “Leave your mother alone,” William said suddenly.

  They all looked at him in surprise.

  “That’s no way to treat your mother,” William said with unusual sternness. He was aware of the same astonishment in Ruth’s eyes as in the children’s. “I wouldn’t have dreamed of such familiarity with my mother,” he said.

  “I don’t mind it,” Ruth said, amazed. “I know what Hal means—he don’t mean nothin’.”

  “That’s right, Mom,” Hal said, laughing, “except I think you’re all right.” He spoke in his lazy way, his big voice amiable. That voice came with a shock upon William’s ear. When Hal had left home his voice had been the half-quivering, uneven voice of a boy. There had been a quality almost pathetic in that uncertainty. There was no uncertainty in this big, coarse-timbred voice. It was the voice of a man, and, William knew, of a man forever strange to him.

  After dinner Hal went into his room to put on his uniform. He was to leave in less than an hour, and there was to be a parade in Hesser’s Corners. Two other boys were leaving for the war, one of them a chum of Hal’s, and the third a chum of the second. Each had been led by the others to volunteer.

  “The Three Musketeers, eh?” William had said affably, hearing of it.

  “Sure,” Hal had replied, his eyes blank.

  William had refused his instinctive irritation. Hal who never read a book, who never even inquired of a book, who had not so much as glanced at the shelves William had put about the house, did not know The Three Musketeers. Why did he not say so? He had all the rustic’s determination not to give himself away. William had turned away from him.

  “That’s a book, Hal, so I suppose you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “Thought maybe it was,” Hal had said, acknowledging nothing.

  None of them were prepared for the Hal who emerged now from his room. Ruth was in the kitchen putting it to rights after the dishwashing. Jill had gone upstairs, and Mary was sweeping the crumbs from the dining-room floor. William was at the half-open door judging the quality of the afternoon light over the lawn that he was painting. The door opened and Hal’s voice said,