Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Well, how do you like me?”

  They all turned to him, and William saw his son as he had never seen him before, a strange young man, neat, smart, sharply outlined in his new uniform, his hair brushed smooth, his healthy-colored skin ruddy and clean, his broad shoulders square.

  “Oh, Hal!” Ruth cried. She went to him, her blue eyes bright and warm upon her son. She could not keep from touching him here and there, making sure that everything was right, though she knew it was right already. Then she put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes. He was a head taller than she.

  “You be a good boy, Hal,” she said. Her voice trembled. “Remember all the things I’ve told you and be good.”

  “Sure I will, Mom,” he said. He bent and laid his cheek against hers. “You smell so sweet, Mom—just like you always did. I remember it from when I was little and used to smell your dresses hangin’ in the closet.”

  “Oh, Hal, but will you remember to be good?” she moaned.

  “Sure I will, Mom,” he said.

  And suddenly William could bear no longer the spectacle of Ruth’s love for this man so young, so strong, who was nearer to her than any other because he had her own blood in him. That was why men were jealous of their sons, it now occurred to him, because the sons had blood access to their mother’s hearts, and a husband was always an alien in his blood. And blood was woman’s bond.

  He went over to Ruth and drew her gently to himself. “Hal must go now, Ruth,” he said. “It is time for us all to go if we are to see the parade.”

  He had before this made mild fun of the parade and had never meant to go to it himself. But now he made up his mind he would. He wanted to be with Ruth until Hal was gone.

  “You goin’, Dad?” Hal asked.

  “I am, after all,” William said.

  “Good enough,” Hal shouted.

  William did not answer, enduring a sense of dishonesty in silence. “You look very well, Hal,” he said at last.

  “Not too bad, I reckon,” Hal replied.

  So they had gone to the parade and in a mood of intense though unexpressed cynicism he watched the little parade of the fire department, headed by the town band, march through the single street of the village. Ruth wept and he put his arm about her as he stood smoking his pipe, and he was aware of Mary winking back her tears. Jill’s face was calm. He could not tell her thoughts. They saw the three soldiers herded off on the train and then walked home, silent. It was Ruth who broke the silence.

  “Hal was handsomer than the others, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, he was,” William replied. They were entering the lane and the heavy-set, solidly built house was just at its end. He still entered it sometimes, as he did now, with a sense of shock. How strange it was that years ago he should by merest chance have come here, hungry for a single meal, and then stayed to be fed for the rest of his years! He had made an accident his life, and out of the moment’s chance he had shaped Ruth’s life and created the three new lives of the children who would in their turn carry on the widening ripples of that chance. When chance was thus the true beginning of all these lives, who should ever demand reason for their being?

  “What are you thinking about, Father?” Jill’s fresh voice, which was her only beauty, recalled him. He looked at her and looked away again. She was at that moment, young and different as she was, so piercingly like Ruth’s father, old and dead, that it was ghastly. The young ought not to have to wear the looks and ways of the old. They should be born like no one. What was that but chance again? If he had married Elise, there would have been simply the choice between Elise’s father and old Mr. Harnsbarger.

  “William!” Ruth’s voice came from a long way. “Did you hear Jill?”

  William smiled slightly. “I was trying to think whether a Roman nose was better than a potato nose,” he said.

  They looked at each other, mystified.

  “Father, you couldn’t have been thinking so silly!” Jill cried.

  “I was,” William maintained. “And if you think I wasn’t, you don’t know how silly I am.”

  The girls laughed, but Ruth was grave. Her mind slipped off as it always did when William began such talk. She tolerated it, though it was foolishness, because it meant he was feeling happy, and when he was happy she needn’t worry about him. She could put her mind on the hundred and one things that needed doing about the house. She sighed, thinking, as she often did, that she could have done with another son, Hal being what he was. She often wished that she had insisted on another child. But William was so queer about children. He could never understand that a woman had to love her children not best, but some, and she could not always keep herself in two clear parts. Actually she did, but in sheer time and thinking, she had to give more to the children. It was natural. Only when she was scared about William did she forget the children altogether because of him. He could still scare her, though he had never spoken again of going away. She had to thank Hal’s running away for that. She sighed again, thinking of Hal all those years away. What had he seen and what he had done? She had tried to pry the years out of him, but they had seemed to leave no mark on him. He had knocked around some, found work easily enough all the way to the coast and back, staying nowhere very long. He had even gone to Alaska for a year.

  “I had a real good time of it,” he said.

  “And missed all your schoolin’!” she had cried to reproach him.

  He had looked at her out of mischievous red-brown eyes. “Learned a lot, though,” he said, and would not tell her what.

  Well, anyway, he was never in jail, he had told her that much. And now he was in the army. The army was as safe a place as you could get for a boy like Hal. They kept them busy, and told them how not to get diseased from bad women. No use to expect William to speak to the boy, though she had asked him. William had only said, “He’s never learned anything from me—why that?” So she had let the boy go, only saying to him he must be good. They would tell him in the army, anyway.

  It reminded her suddenly that the next thing she had to do on the farm was to get three of her Ayrshire cows bred. Henry Fasthauser had told her he was getting a new Ayrshire bull any day now and if she liked she could bring the cows over and he would help her. It would save her the cost of hiring a bull. If she had had a man to help her on the farm, she would have kept her own bull. But she managed with seasonal help and what the girls could do. They did well, especially Jill, though they had to go to school. She wondered sometimes if William had any idea how much work there was to do, even when she share-rented most of the land. She glanced at him. He was whistling softly a tune she had heard him whistle before but never could remember. He grew handsomer, she thought, as he grew older. Hal got all his looks from William.

  “What’s that tune?” Jill asked and put her arm through his.

  “My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice,” he said.

  “But what’s that?” she persisted.

  “Samson and Delilah,” he said.

  “In the Bible?”

  “The same pair, but outside the Bible—I must take you to opera one of these days.”

  “Will you, honest?” Jill squeezed his arm.

  “Maybe.”

  What would it be like to drop back into New York? Like Rip Van Winkle, doubtless, that old Rip who had soon died when he discovered how the world had gone on without him. Probably he was sorry he had ever waked up. A cow bellowed suddenly in the night.

  “What’s that damned cow roaring about?” he asked. He hated cows.

  “I’ll see to her tomorrow,” Ruth replied. Both the girls would know what the cow wanted, but not for anything could she have told William before them. Nor, indeed, could she have told him anywhere. He did not like to see animals in heat. It was queer, she thought, seeing how it was only nature. But so it was. Once he and she, walking in the orchard, had come upon the dogs and he had hurried away in disgust. A moment before he had been loving her and then suddenly he seemed disgusted
with that, too.

  “A little lower than the angels,” he had said, whatever that meant. But he had to have everything exactly as he wanted it.

  She pondered that, as she went about getting supper. He had to have everything delicate-like. Sometimes at night she wanted to be hearty and straight and then go to sleep. But she had learned that this was impossible for him. The light had to be so, not too dim, not too bright, and she must give him plenty of time and not think about being sleepy.

  The cow bellowed again through the silent twilight, and Ruth turned to Jill.

  “You take that cow and tie her to a tree way across the orchard. She’ll turn your father’s stomach with her bellerin’.”

  And Jill ran to obey.

  … William had begun work again with unusual eagerness. The house, now that Hal had gone from it, seemed easy and free. After breakfast one day William kissed Ruth and left her, intent that day upon painting a canvas full of blue sky and white clouds, the landscape a strip of brilliant green, miniature fine in detail of houses and spires as tiny as doll houses beneath it. So he had seen the world as he looked out of the window that morning.

  “Here’s the universe,” he had thought, “all sky above a strip of green and dolls’ houses.”

  Painting this universe upon the hill behind the house, he looked down at midmorning and saw Henry Fasthauser’s lumbering figure halfway up. He put down his brush. He heard a roar. Then he saw that Henry was motioning him to come down.

  “Why doesn’t the damn blockhead come up?” he muttered. He was loath to leave his picture at this point. The new flexible paint would dry and he would have to work it all up again. But there was nothing else to do. Henry stood there, hooking the air violently with his arms. Only when he saw William moving downward did he begin to climb again to meet him. Within the carrying distance of voice to ear he shouted, and William heard Ruth’s name—Ruth? He began to run.

  “What’s wrong?” he shouted.

  “She’s hurt—hurt bad!” Henry roared.

  Then he did run and in a moment they were running together toward the house. William, slender and agile, easily ahead. Behind him the thick-set farmer was panting.

  “She brought her cow over this morning. If I’d ha’ knowed it, I’d ha’ brought my bull over. I don’t know a woman anywheres around does what she had to do—” He was so angry with William that for once he had made up his mind to tell him what he thought of him, letting a woman bring a cow over to be serviced by a bull! Ruth had been ashamed of it herself.

  “If ’twas anybody but you, Henry, I couldn’t do it,” she had said. “I hadn’t counted on the cow gettin’ ready quite so quick. Hal could have helped, if I’d only thought yesterday. But she didn’t start bellerin’ until night, and William can’t stand—”

  “She said you couldn’t stand the noise,” he shouted at William’s back, “so she brung it over herself, the pore thing. Didn’t want her girls to—and she knows she can count on me.”

  “Damn you, what’s happened?” William turned on him, blazing at him.

  “She’s gored, that’s what!” Henry roared back. “I told her to get out of the bull pen quick, but she didn’t get out quick enough. The bull caught her in the back and tossed her clear up and she fell hard. Then I picked her up.”

  “Oh, God,” William groaned. He sprinted as he had in track days in college, down the hill and through the orchard and garden, through the kitchen. There was not a sound in the house. “Oh, damn,” he groaned again. “Ruth—Ruth!”

  Jill came clattering down the stairs, her brown face pale. “Mother’s hurt bad,” she said. “The doctor’s here. He says if it had been a half-inch to the right, her kidney would have been tore.”

  He paid no heed, dashing up the stairs to the bedroom. There she lay upon the bed, his Ruth, face down, and the doctor was probing the horrible wound. Mary stood holding a basin, her face pallid and her hands trembling. The doctor did not glance up when William came in.

  “Is she—in danger?” he cried.

  “I can’t tell yet.” The doctor, a fat, middle-aged fellow, was probing with two stubby fingers. Ruth groaned and William bent over her.

  “Oh, my darling,” he whispered. “Don’t speak,” the doctor ordered. So he stood there gazing at Ruth’s eyelashes and her drained white face. Suddenly she was unconscious. He was glad for that, but what did it mean? He could ask nothing until the doctor had cleaned and sewed the wound. Then he followed him downstairs. Henry Fasthauser was still there, waiting in the hall, but William faced the doctor.

  “Exactly how serious is my wife’s condition?”

  “Not as serious as it would have been if the horn had gone right or left. By luck it’s muscle and not spine or kidney that was gored. But it will take watching. She’d better go to the hospital or have a nurse.”

  “She’ll want to stay in her own house, so send a nurse—two, if necessary. Is she in danger of her life?”

  “Not if everything goes right.”

  “I’ll see to that.”

  Henry Fasthauser growled, “Kind of late, I’m thinkin’.”

  William felt his anxiety for Ruth explode in him. “Will you get the hell out of here?” he cried.

  Henry’s yellowish grey eyes glittered in his round face. “Me? Not till I’ve said my say, mister! If you’d done the man’s work around here this wouldn’t have happened in the first place! A woman oughtn’t to have to do the things Ruth’s done. If she’d been my wife—as she’d ought to of been and would of been long a’ready if you hadn’t come walkin’ in all dressed up with your picture-paintin’ and your fine city ways of livin’, to live on her the rest of your life—Why didn’t you take her to your father’s big house and look after her and give her some pleasure?”

  William’s voice cut coldly across this fire. “I should have been delighted, but she has always wanted to live here. Now will you mind your own business?”

  The doctor was busy looking over the bottles in his medicine case. He had lived in the valley for thirty years and there was nothing he did not know about everyone. He had been in and out of this house on children’s ailments and one thing and another—all small, for it was a healthy family. He had wondered sometimes if William was happy. The woman was, of course. Women didn’t look like Ruth if they weren’t happy. He had known her when she was a little girl, healthy and pretty, but determined to have her own way. He could imagine her saying she was going to live right here and doing it.

  “Well, I’ll be going,” he said placidly. “I’ll send a nurse—one’ll be enough. Our nurses are used to work. Give your wife three of these pills every hour. It’ll ease her if she has any pain. Don’t believe she’ll have much. A thing can go deep into a body’s vitals and the mind hardly seems to know it—queer thing! Mind and body aren’t as close as some think.”

  He went away, with a nod exactly alike to the two angry men. “Hope I don’t have to come back to sew one of them up,” he thought. He speculated a little on them as the speedometer of his old car trembled around seventy. “Always did know Henry was in love with that woman,” he thought. “Well, God’ll have to go easy on him for coveting his neighbor’s wife. He thought Ruth belonged to him. ’Twould have been more suitable, certainly.”

  He stopped at a village to telephone for a nurse and then rushed on to a small, unpainted farmhouse and went in to deliver a round-faced baby boy. He had long ago lost count of how many times he had done this. Nowadays he said, “Reckon we’ll need ’em all if this war goes on.”

  In the house that in so short a time the doctor had left far behind him, William regained his control. He hated this thick farmer, and it disgusted him that probably the man in his dull fashion was still in love with Ruth. But he was not jealous. He knew Ruth was his. Who could prefer Henry Fasthauser to him? The man’s hands were horrible, lumps deformed out of all human shape, not fit to touch a woman’s flesh. He put his own very beautiful hands into his pockets and lifted his head proudly. />
  “Mr. Fasthauser, I doubt it will profit either of us to talk to each other any longer.”

  “I’m not doin’ it for profit—I’m doin’ it for her. What’re you goin’ to do about the chores?”

  “We usually hire a man in the spring anyway. We’ll manage.”

  “If you mean that drifter, Gus Sigafoos, he’s not due here ’till next week.”

  “We’ll manage, thank you. I am capable of a little, perhaps, in spite of your opinions of me.”

  “I’m not botherin’ about you. I’m thinkin’ about her,” Henry said heavily. “And what I’m goin’ to do for her is to send my boy Joel over here every day till Gus Sigafoos gets here.”

  William longed to say, “It is not necessary.” But he was too honest to deny the necessity. He smiled suddenly, capitulating to reality.

  “I’d like to say I won’t have Joel around, but I’d be a fool if I did,” he said. “I wish my university education had included the milking of cows and the feeding of pigs, but it didn’t.”

  And Henry, who had resisted so instantly William’s anger, found himself unable to say a word when William smiled and stood at ease, his hands in his pockets and his tall, slim body relaxed. He stared at William and slowly the perception of their difference came over him. Women wanted men to look like this man, and Ruth was a woman. She’d use men like himself and come to him for help with seeds and crops. But this other one was the man she wanted in her house. Anger went out of him as though it were his strength. He felt tired and weak.

  “Well, I’ll be goin’,” he muttered. “Got a lot of work waitin’.”

  “Thank you for all you have done,” William said gracefully.

  “It don’t matter,” Henry said. “I’ll send Joel over.”

  “Thank you,” William said again.

  Henry wanted to say, “Let me know how she does,” but he could not. Of her own will Ruth had chosen this man. She chose him still. “Well, g’by,” he said.

  “Good-by,” William replied. He watched this rough good man lumber out of the house with pity in his heart and triumph. When he was gone he leaped up the stairs and knelt at Ruth’s side. Her lashes fluttered and she opened her eyes and saw him.