Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  “I’ll never go, Ruth.” But he did not at this moment want to touch her.

  “You don’t know what you’ll do,” she said. She did not want to go near him. She felt suddenly that she was not fit. This morning a handsome, proud-looking woman had come to see William, from where, why, she did not know, she did not want to know. But she would not let that woman take anything from this house.

  “If you refuse this to Jill, you are denying her very much,” he said indistinctly. He saw Jill in a new and solemn shape. What right had Ruth to forbid her a world for which perhaps she was born?

  “I can’t help that,” Ruth said.

  How unchanging she was, he thought, how stubborn in all her strength! He felt suddenly desperate for Jill’s sake.

  “Jill was born in this house and in this house she’ll stay until she marries some good man,” Ruth said.

  “And if she does not marry?” His voice was cold.

  “Then she can help me. We’re gettin’ older, William.” The words held a hint of pleading but there was no plea in her voice. It was firm with refusal. “There’s no use talking, William,” she said.

  He resolved himself. “Yes, there is he said. “Yes, we will talk, Ruth. We’ll talk again and again until you see it as I do. You’ve got to understand me this time.”

  In the night, when the house was still, he tried to bring back his old world for Ruth’s understanding. He felt Jill lying awake in her own room, depending upon him. She had never longed for anything as she longed now to go away with Elise. She had taken William aside that afternoon, and clasping his hand with hers that were sticky with jam-making, she had tried to show him how desperately she wanted to go away.

  “I’ve wanted to go somewhere for a long time. I guess all my life I’ve wanted to live somewhere else than here. I’m not like Mary. I can’t just keep house and milk cows and feed chickens. There are other things—there must be other things, aren’t there, Father?”

  “Many other things,” he said.

  “Mother thinks she always knows best,” the girl cried passionately, “but how can she know best for me?”

  “She can’t,” he said.

  “If I don’t go away I’ll die,” she said.

  “You won’t die,” he said, “but maybe you’ll live more if you go.” He thought of that strange chance whereby she had found the picture of Elise’s son. In this quiet house the life he had avoided reached in long arms to entangle him. He sighed. Jill, frowning and thinking only of herself, did not hear the sigh. She cried out, “It seems as if a man I never knew—that now I’ll never know, though I might have—I never saw anyone who drew me so. He’s opened a door to me, and I won’t have it closed.”

  “I don’t believe in closing doors,” he said. “I’ll do the best I can, Jill, without hurting your mother.”

  “You always think of her first.”

  “I always have,” he said.

  She threw at him one of her dark, sidelong looks and so they parted.

  Side by side now he and Ruth lay in the wide old bed where they had slept two-thirds of a life together, and he tried to make new again for Jill’s sake a world he thought he had forgotten. She listened, tearing the world down as fast he built it.

  “I can only see things when they’re put plain, William. Would you have married that—woman—if you hadn’t met me?”

  “I did meet you, dearest.”

  “Would you?”

  “I suppose I would, just as you would have married Henry Fasthauser if you hadn’t met me.”

  She thought this over. “Well, I can see that,” she said. She pondered a while again. Elise was different from any woman she had ever seen. Was she like William inside? What did they talk about?

  “All those letters you get,” she said, “are some of them from her?”

  “Yes, some are,” he replied.

  Then when she did not speak he asked her, “Would you like to see them?”

  She took this in and turned it over and over in her mind. “No, I don’t know as it would do any good for me to see them.” She did not say, but she thought, what if she could not make more out of them than she had that letter of William’s long ago? She felt wounded somewhere deep in her and baffled because she could not discover where the wound was or who had caused it. She could not be angry with William, for he was gentle and patient with her and she knew it, and yet she was angry somewhere, somehow, because he thought he needed to be gentle and patient with her. She would have been glad to be openly angry at him so that she could focus this large hurt in her.

  “If Jill goes away with that woman she’ll never be satisfied to come home again,” she said.

  “Is that what you’re thinking?” he replied. “But it might work just the other way. She might be glad to come back. Remember that I chose to live here.”

  “It was different with you—you’d had nothing but that other kind of life and it seemed good to you to get out of it. But she’s only had this and the other’ll seem good to her.”

  “But have we the right to refuse it to her?”

  “If it’s for her good!” Ruth cried.

  “Can we say what is her good?” he asked.

  “Yes, we can,” she replied. “She’s ours.”

  “No,” he said slowly, “no human being belongs to another.”

  There was long silence. Then her voice came out of the darkness. “If you believe that, why do you stay with me?”

  He hurried to her with all his being. “Because I want to stay with you, Ruth!” He took her in his arms, though she rebelled against him a while, refusing to be easily comforted. She so seldom needed comfort, but when she was hurt the wound went deep and she could not be quickly healed. He lit the lamp so that he might see her face and study its change from its present sadness to its usual calm. And he set himself to bring her back to him, to believe in him, to know that he would never leave her.

  And in all the tender words, the soft, gay love-making words that he spoke, while he pledged himself to her as long as he lived, he had a sense that part of him was escaping her through Jill. Jill was to be set free, and with Jill, a little of himself went out of this house.

  There was no mention of Jill again between him and Ruth, but in the morning at the breakfast table he said quietly, as though it were a matter of no great concern to him, “By the way, Jill your mother and I decided last night that you were to go.” He looked up and met the impetuous blue of Ruth’s eyes, and challenged them with his insistent affirming gaze. “We both believe you have the right to choose for yourself,” he said to Jill, and went on, his eyes still on Ruth, “It’s no more than we did in our time.”

  Thus he gave his daughter to Elise.

  He was aware, after Jill had left, that he and Ruth were more than middle-aged. They were getting old. Nothing in the world about them mattered much to him. Elise’s letters continued, but now they were not importunate for herself. They centered in Jill. Jill must have new clothes and Jill must be given lessons in singing. Had William never discovered what a fine contralto voice she had? They were in New York, and Louise was helping to outfit Jill and to find the best teachers for her. Monty was enormously rich from the war. The longer the war went on, the richer Monty would be. He was being very generous with Jill. And Louise said what a shame that William had kept himself away from all his family. His parents were very old and frail now. When Jill was all finished they were going to take her to Philadelphia. Would William meet them there?

  He read these letters carefully, comparing them with Jill’s letters. Hers, he perceived, were written for her mother’s eyes. He could make out little from them except that she was working very hard at her voice lessons.

  “Did you know she could sing?” he asked Ruth.

  “I used to think she sang the hymns in church real nice,” she said, surprised, “but I never thought nothing of that.”

  “Ah, now I see I should have gone to church,” he said laughing. But an instant later he
was grave. “What a fearful thing it would have been,” he said, “if we had not let her go!”

  But Ruth would not grant him this. “It’s not such a good life for a woman, singin’ on a stage before everybody.”

  “Good for Jill, though, doubtless,” he maintained. He did not mention the matter of Jill at his father’s house. There was time enough for that when he knew whether he himself would go to meet her there.

  Then the war ended and Ruth forgot Jill because Hal was coming home. Would he be home by Christmas? She cleaned the house from attic to cellar and put fresh paper in his room. The house was full of a new peace that had nothing to do with the war. That war had for her been contained in the person of Hal. He had come through it without a wound and boasted that he had grown an inch and gained fifteen pounds.

  “He must look wonderful,” Ruth said. “What’ll he want to do, I wonder?” She spent a great deal of time wondering this. “Of course if he should want to settle on the farm, ’twould be too good to be true.”

  “I am afraid it would be,” William said. “Don’t set your heart on children, darling. It’s no use.”

  “I don’t know why my children should be so different,” she said sadly. “Other folks’ children seem to just settle down as nice as can be. But only Mary is like anybody else.”

  He laughed. “Your children have a queer sort of father, my Ruth.”

  She threw him one of her rarely mischievous looks. “Pity I didn’t think of that when you first came to this house!”

  “Is it a pity?” Perhaps it was this deep uncertainty, he thought sometimes, which made them eternally lovers.

  “Pity or not, I could’ve done no different,” she replied.

  They had in those few days before Christmas a span as sweet as a honeymoon. Alone in the house, they were not lonely, and Hal’s coming, which signified the end of a world war, added a joyfulness beyond themselves.

  He did not come before Christmas, but the gaiety held. New Year, perhaps, and then New Year did not bring him. Then spring, perhaps, and still the gaiety did not break. Jill was very happy, Mary’s baby was born, a second boy, to be called Thomas, and Hal was due any day.

  The gaiety snapped one day in April when a letter came in Hal’s eternally childish script. He was not coming. He had married a French girl who had lived in Paris all her life and would not leave it. As for him, he liked Paris fine. Maybe one of these days they’d come over and see him and Mimi. If they didn’t, he’d get over for a while somehow.

  William had found the letter in the mailbox and had taken it straight to Ruth, unopened. She was in the vegetable garden, raking the ground for seeds, and with her earth-stained fingers she tore open the envelope and read the few lines in which Hal had put the end of all her hopes. She held it out to William and he read it. Then he saw she could not speak and he took her by the hand and led her in the house, and made her sit down. He fetched some cherry brandy for her and made her drink it. And all the time he tried to soothe her.

  “Dearest, I told you we must not set our hearts on children. They will do what they want. We have each other.”

  She found words. “William! A French woman!”

  He saw that it was not Hal’s marriage that dealt her death, but his marriage to a stranger, a woman to whom she could never, even if she saw her, speak a single word.

  “The French are just like everybody else, dear. I used to spend all my summers in France when I was a little boy and I spoke French as well as English. I liked the people. Don’t mind that.”

  But she did mind. It was nothing to her what he had done in that other life of his. With a French woman she had no means of communication.

  “What’ll his children be?” she mourned. “They won’t be ours.”

  “You’ll see them sometime, perhaps, and you’ll be fond of them.”

  But she shook her head. “I can’t be,” she said. “They won’t belong to me.” The tears filled her eyes. “I wish we hadn’t papered Hal’s room. He won’t never use it now.”

  “Of course he will,” William insisted.

  But he could not prevail. From that day on she felt that her son was dead. She did not answer his letter. It was William who wrote to Hal finally, and sent him a small check for a wedding present, gained from a picture he had sold to a tourist passing by who had seen him at work upon it.

  “Your mother minds your not coming home,” he wrote Hal, “so I shall write until she feels better.”

  Thus began the letters between William and his son, and out of them began his letters to his French daughter-in law. For one day he ended his letter to Hal with a message to her, and Mimi, reading this in her little Paris apartment, was charmed with its correctness. “Here is a miracle,” she exclaimed to her American, “that out of all your regiment I should choose you who have an intelligent papa.”

  “I didn’t know the old man knew French,” Hal said, amazed.

  “You do not appreciate him.” Mimi exclaimed. And she set herself to appreciate William, especially when she had drawn from Hal the facts of William’s wealthy family. She began to urge William to visit them. She would welcome her dear husband’s father as her own. Paris was so improved over what it must have been in his youth. She longed to exhibit all to him.

  These letters William did not translate to Ruth. He read them with amusement. They were gay, selfish, and not always correctly spelled. He had a very clear vision of Hal’s little French wife, and when a picture came of Hal in mufti and with him a small, dark, determined creature in a ruffled dress, he was not surprised. He must, he thought, prepare Ruth not to see her son again, perhaps, ever. He would not put it in so many words, but he would try to make her happy in every way he could because in Hal her happiness was now destroyed.

  … So how could he leave her, to return to that old house in Philadelphia, even to meet Jill? Had his father been able to know him, he might have thought thrice, though to the same end. But Louise, writing to him now because of Jill, warned him not to expect that the aged man would know him. He knew no one at all now, not even his wife. Instead his companions were those with whom he had always actually lived, the great painters of the past. He carried on long muttered monologues to Corot and Titian, and argued with Velasquez the quality of certain of his paintings.

  “Father won’t know whether you come or not,” Louise warned him.

  Then, he thought sadly, his father would not know now or care whether a painting of his would ever hang in his gallery or that he had never followed his advice and gone away to find out what he ought to paint. In a mood of bitter self-appraisal he looked at all his canvases. He sold a number of them each year after his exhibition in the small Masonic hall of the village, and year after year he believed that more people came to see what he had done. But he had become known for Pennsylvania landscapes, and nothing more, though into every canvas he had ever done he had tried to put far more. However he reviled Americans in his mind for loving to ticket for their own cultural convenience the work of any creator, the fact remained that they were too much for him. What he had tried to teach, that a landscape was valuable not geographically but spiritually, remained unlearned. It was no satisfaction to him to hear himself praised as the best painter of Pennsylvania countryside. Scorning his own work, therefore, he concluded against his hope that of all the canvases he had, the one he had never put up for sale, his first picture of Ruth, was the best.

  “Still the best,” he thought sadly, because he had finished it thirty-five years ago. It was a grim thing to face, that his best work had been his first. Why should he go to see his father?

  When he heard that his mother, very old, touched with palsy, but in complete mental health, still refused to see Ruth, after she had seen Jill, he made up his mind that he would not go to see her, however old she was.

  “You ain’t sick, are you?” Ruth asked. “You’re so yaller.”

  “No, I’m not ill,” he said. He had told her nothing of all his struggle and indecision
under Louise’s letters. He was not even sure he wanted to see a very wealthy and successful Louise and Monty. They were “doing everything” for Jill, but he could see they were enjoying it. And she was taking it all gracefully, he knew. Her sincere, happy letters told him that. She wrote kindly of Louise, humorously of Monty who now wore a monocle and a Vandyke and was getting very deaf, generously of her grandfather, and always with clinging affection of Elise.

  “I have the strangest feeling sometimes that she is my mother,” Jill wrote.

  “This dear child of yours,” Elise wrote, “is now my own. I have a strange conviction that if Don had lived, somehow he and Jill would have come together. She feels it, too. I doubt she ever marries.”

  He grew anxious when he read this and wrote a long exhorting letter to Jill, begging her not to allow Elise to influence her against marriage.

  “Marriage is so profound an experience,” he wrote her, “I should be sorry if you missed it. It takes place. Sometimes between two who are unsuited but still it is profound. I had rather you married unhappily than not at all.”

  She replied, “If I want to marry, I will. But I think I shall never want to—I am going to try for the Metropolitan. Do you remember “My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice”? I am learning it now. If I sing it on the stage some day, you must come and hear me. You promised me we would go together to opera!”

  But all the time he was not quite sure whether he would go to see his mother once more. If he did go, it would be for the last time, he knew, and only because Jill would be there again.

  Willfully his mother had decided to like Jill. Elise wrote him, “Your mother clamors for Jill. Of course she can’t live in Philadelphia.”