Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  The day was set for early September, before the New York season began. Louise and Monty and Elise and Jill would motor down. It would be easy for him to go. Tom’s thriving service station was managed by his two sons, and they came and went to Philadelphia as in the old days they had gone to the next village. If he wanted to go, one of Tom’s boys would drive him over and bring him back. He put the whole matter off in the way he found increasingly easy to do these days.

  “I mustn’t,” he thought, “I’m not old yet.” But living in the house alone with Ruth, it was easy to avoid any crisis of decision for himself. She made life so rich when she was content, and his universe was darkened when she was not. He did not like to leave her alone in the house any more. When he used to go to his parents, there were the three children to stay behind with her. Now she would only sit waiting and alone while he was gone, and when he came back, what would he tell her, how to explain now all that he had never explained? For Jill he had made a cause and won it, but himself seemed scarcely worth it. He was not afraid of Ruth, he told himself, as he had been of his mother. He loved Ruth, and wanted her to be happy, that was all. And if he left her alone, even for a day, she would be unhappy. So when the fourth of September dawned in a soft, misty rain it seemed too great an effort to tell Ruth that today he wanted to go and see his old home. After all these years!

  He lay in the early morning, watching the rain, hearing it gentle upon the slate roof, and it did not seem worth while to him to get up. All that he cared for was here in the house. Ruth was still sleeping. He rose carefully on one elbow and looked at her. She was a sound sleeper, and he slept so lightly and restlessly that she was used to his tossing about in the bed. She did not waken, and as he looked at her all that she was came welling into his being from all the little channels of their days and years together. Her youth had been his, and her middle age. He had not changed her, nor did he want her changed. She was complete, a creature who had fulfilled that for which she was designed. He put aside the question of himself.

  “I have been happy,” he thought. Happiness was a primitive, simple state of being, a state of body first and of mind only freedom. Well, Ruth had left him free to think, and to imagine and to dream. He had had a good life with Ruth. How few men of his age, their children grown and gone, could look forward with quiet ecstasy to the years ahead, with wives grown old beside them!

  Was Ruth old? He saw no sign of age upon her except the two white wings of her hair. Her sweet sleeping face was smooth—not young, but never old. Her skin was fine, her lips were still red, her teeth white and sound. He bent closer to that sleeping face and caught the fragrance of her body, as fresh as it had been his wedding night.

  He lay back again and felt her warm and strong beside him. He closed his eyes and heard the steady rain pouring upon the roof above his head. His house, his home—he had made it his. He knew now he would never leave it until he died.

  PART III

  “WILLIAM, I HAVEN’T HARDLY asked anything for myself all these years,” Ruth said.

  “But our golden wedding, my dear, belongs to us both—or does it?”

  William added the last three words when he saw her rosy, stubborn face. They were sitting together in the living room, in the middle of a summer’s morning. Ruth as an old lady was going to be still beautiful. Her soft, curly white hair framed her fresh face. She had put on enough weight so that she had none of the wrinkles of age. He looked at his own thin, dark face in the mirror every morning and saw a mapwork of wrinkles. He looked twenty years older than she. One of his brown wool socks was spread over her hand and she was weaving in a new heel. Her blue eyes were as clear as ever and she wore no spectacles.

  He went on when she did not speak. “But weddings always belong to women, from the first one to the last one.”

  She answered out of her own thoughts, without heed to him. “I’ll have everything yellow—tablecloth and all. We’ll have yellow roses by then.”

  “Do by all means have everything yellow,” he said with impatience, “but can’t we have yellow things without inviting the countryside in?”

  “Folk in the neighborhood expect to come to a golden wedding,” she replied. “A golden wedding isn’t common.”

  She went on darning, but he saw sudden tears hang on her lashes and he leaned from where he sat beside her on the old sofa and took her hands, sock and all. “My dear, do you really want this—this party?”

  “’Tisn’t I want a party, William—it’s our golden wedding.”

  “But Ruth, why should we share our wedding with all the neighbors?”

  “It’s a thing to be proud of, William—a golden wedding.”

  He laughed, dropped her hands, and got up. “Oh, all right, my dear. I yield! I’ll try to go through with it for you, Ruth.”

  “William, I don’t think you ought to laugh at the folks. They all look up to you so.”

  “I, laugh? I assure you I hadn’t thought of laughter.”

  He stood before her, restless and vaguely irritable as he often was these days. Perhaps this was old age, this restlessness to get on to whatever came next, impatience with what had continued for so long.

  “I think I’ll go now, Ruth.”

  “You still goin’ to climb the hill? In all this sun?”

  “The sun is good for me. It’ll warm me.”

  She looked up instantly anxious. “You feel chilly, William?”

  “No, no—don’t fuss over me!”

  “I don’t see what you want to climb that hill for, yet,” she said sharply. “You ain’t fit for it.”

  “I’ll never be more fit for it,” he replied.

  “Well, don’t say I didn’t tell you,” she called after him as he left her. That was like William, she thought. When he didn’t like something he just went away.

  “William!” she raised her voice.

  Out in the entry he stopped. “Well?” he called back.

  “You ain’t takin’ your paintbox!”

  “Maybe!”

  “You’d better not lug that heavy thing up to the top of the hill—your heart won’t stand it!”

  He did not answer this. She heard him fumbling in the entry for his stick and resisted the impulse to go and help him. He did so little for himself nowadays—let him do what he could! He never so much as offered to wipe the dishes and she always had to ask him. She did now ask him to help her as she never used to do when the girls were home. It wasn’t as if he had anything else to do, and besides she was old herself. She went on brooding over the lone grievance of his painting—the idle pastime, she thought, which had kept him from ever getting a real job and doing a man’s work. What was the use of painting more pictures when there were nearly a hundred still stacked in the barn, not sold? It was little enough to show for a lifetime spent.

  But then life was a disappointing thing, look at it how you could. She had had one disappointment after the other. There was Hal who had never come home from France, and now would never come home. She had almost forgotten how he looked. He had two children, both girls, both dark and thin. She kept their photographs on the mantelpiece in the parlor.

  “Though I don’t feel a mite of kin to them,” she always thought when she dusted them once a week. She sighed, pursed her lips together firmly, and quickened the speed of the bright needle, weaving in and out. “For a man who doesn’t work,” she was thinking, “William wears out his socks wonderfully.”

  … William was not sure whether he could get to the top of the hill, but he wanted to try. He had an intense longing to see above the level of the green trees which now shadowed the farmhouse so heavily. In the years that he and Ruth had lived here together, the trees, already large when he first saw them, had grown enormous. They spread over the sky, and under them he felt smothered.

  “Let’s cut them down,” he had said to Ruth again and again.

  “What—the trees my grandpop’s father put in?” she always cried horrified. “Why, my own pop would rise
from his grave!”

  “Then leave them, by all means,” he retorted with a willful humor that he knew would be quite safe because it would escape her.

  … There was only one person in this family of his whose perception of humor could not be safely trusted as obtuse, and that was Mary’s youngest child, Richard. He saw sometimes in that child’s dark eyes, only recently at a height, it seemed to him, to be well above the Sunday dinner table, something which was at all times so understanding, so quickly mirthful, even over the small, dry jokes of an old man, that he wondered if some germ of his own soul, swept along in the strong stream of Ruth’s blood, had lodged in the boy. But he did not know. Richard was, when he spoke to him, aloof and mature. Actually the child was ten years old and Mary was almost past bearing any more children, he hoped. Six was enough. That was the way life went headlong on, these days. Already Mary was fat and at her menopause, and Joel was gray, and old Fasthauser was dead—dropped dead in a fit of anger six years ago, and young Henry had finished college and gone into law. It was he who had insisted on their sending Henry to college. Joel had done well with the two farms and there was no use in his holding the boy back. All of William’s battles were now for his grandchildren, that they should not be held back.

  He began to climb the hill. … Jill of course belonged entirely to Elise, an old bediamonded woman, until a year ago, when she had been killed in a motor accident in London. After she had got Jill, she had never gone back to Ronnie. There had been no divorce and scarcely a separation. Ronnie still came over now and then. He said continually these days that there would be another world war, but nobody would believe him.

  “Nothing is being done about peace,” Ronnie kept insisting, but still nobody listened to him. Most people thought the last war had left him a little mad.

  And Hal was still in France. He drove a taxicab in Paris, it seemed. It was an odd thing to have one’s son do. But none of his children now were very clear to William. Far closer and dearer were his grandchildren, particularly the little ones, and most particularly Richard.

  “How do you do, Grandfather,” Richard said invariably.

  “How do you do, Richard,” William as invariably replied. They shook hands, and that was all. But he was pleased that out of the six children Mary and Joel had, Richard at least remembered how he liked to be addressed. “I will not be called Grandpop,” he had often said indignantly to his grandchildren. But only Richard always remembered.

  He was climbing now and he paused a moment on the hillside, not to sit down yet, but merely to catch his breath. He still could not see beyond the giant trees. But the question of their remaining where they were was settled, for there was no one able to cut them down now. Joel’s shoulder had grown worse as he grew older, and none of his sons could wield an axe or saw as he had. Ruth had not had a hired man since Gus Sigafoos was killed in the World War—poor old Gus, who had scarcely been able to read and write and who had no notion of what the war was about, had been among those who had fulfilled the letter of the law and, compelled to go on fighting after the armistice was signed, had died for nothing, at the last minute.

  William could not himself now so much as contemplate the cutting down of trees. Even to hold his paintbrush tired him these days. He scarcely painted a picture a year, though this was not only because he was tired. He knew what he painted. They were an old man’s pictures. They did not deceive him. He knew long ago that he had lost the tricks of depth and luminosity which had been exciting to those who had once perceived them. How he had lost them he would never know, or even when. But his pictures now were commonplace. The country school children were still brought to see them, and the county took pride in him. His canvases hung in country parlors. Sometimes he got as much as a hundred dollars for one, but usually he could ask only twenty-five or thirty dollars, and he sold most of them at ten dollars. Still, the people around were proud of him. “Our county artist,” they called him. He had painted the seasons faithfully as they passed over the landscape in which he had lived. But he knew now that he was getting old.

  He worried a little sometimes because he knew he would always be poor—not for himself, of course, but for Ruth. He had forbidden the children to think of his inheriting money, and yet he had expected something. But his father, by an old will dated soon after William’s marriage and never revised, had left almost his entire fortune to the founding and maintenance of a museum of art, the center of which was his own collection. There had not been enough to put up the great marble building for which he had left careful plans by a famous French architect. “The estate is much less than we expected,” Louise had written. “Ever since the railroad was taken over by the government during the war, it’s been worthless. No wonder they wanted to hand it back to private capitalists!” She and Monty thought of little else these days except how to circumvent a government of which they wholly disapproved.

  To William, after his mother’s death, his father’s will had left only enough barely to feed and clothe one person—nothing for a family. Ruth’s brother Tom had wanted him to fight the will, but he would not, though he could not tell them why.

  “I did enough to disappoint my father,” he had thought with sad, secret tenderness. “I won’t rob him of his pictures, too.”

  He was still climbing and now, halfway up the hill, he knew Ruth had been right. He should not have come. He plodded upward again for five minutes. It was all he could do to get himself from step to step. He sat down to rest, gasping for breath. His heart was beating so hard it shook his body. If it had strength enough to beat like that, why could it not serve him better? This hill he had once scarcely thought of as a hill. He had gone leaping up, laden with easel and canvas and paints, eager for the day’s work. But now he had come back to the perspectives of childhood. The hill towered above him. He waited a little longer.

  Even as he now sat, he was barely above the treetops. But it had been so long since he had climbed to this height from which to gaze that he felt very high. He could see the long, soft roll of the green countryside—“flat,” a tourist from New England had called it last summer, and he had been angry to hear his landscape misunderstood.

  “It’s not chopped up in little round-headed hills as your country is,” he had said coldly. “It has far more majesty. It has the sweep of the ocean in it.”

  Now he felt its long, undulating richness, which the farms divided solidly into centers of human living. He could see the farm next door where Mary lived. All the farms looked alike, big barns and compact stone houses, like Ruth’s and his. Seen from another hill this place at his feet where he had spent his life with Ruth would look like the others. There was no difference to tell that his life was not like any other. Nor was it, except as he was always, unalterably, different in himself.

  That difference he felt, as he grew old, when he appeared in the little town which was also the county seat. The slightly jeering voices which he used to hear about him when he was young were dead. The men and women living now in the village had been born after he came here to live in Ruth’s house. He was to them a part of the countryside. Still, having learned of their parents, when he went to the fair, when he sauntered in at the firemen’s carnival, or at a meeting of the school board, they gave him greetings which were not quite the same as those they gave each other. Sometimes he liked this difference; sometimes it made him feel lonely.

  Today, on this hillside, he felt lonely. In a way he had missed the world. He was aware of that world. Jill wrote of it because now it was hers. Her letters came to him from all over the country and half of Europe. Now she was going to South America. People were talking about South America, she wrote him, because in case of another world war, the United States ought to have allies toward the south. Jill had never married, even after Elise had died. Everybody was riding in automobiles nowadays, though he and Ruth had never bought one. Ruth went to church every Sunday in Joel’s car and he was miserable until she was home again.

  “A sill
y way to die,” he thought. He thought a great deal about death now when he was old, yet not so much death as whatever was to come next for him. He believed in death as a part of life, the end of one thing and the birth of another. Anyway, Elise now knew more than he did about it, although she had drawn such comfort from something he had written to her once when her younger son was killed in the war. He could not now remember the name of that boy. The older one he remembered because Jill talked of him exactly as though she had married him. He was sure she told people that she had at least been engaged to Don, now that she was middleaged and, so far as he knew, had never had a lover. She had been a very successful woman and was still, if he could trust the newfangled machine his grandchildren had given him for Christmas. Only last Sunday afternoon he had turned a button and heard an announcer introduce his own daughter as the greatest American contralto, and then Jill’s deep voice had poured into the room—overtrained, he sometimes thought. She called herself Judith, because there was no dignity in Jill, she said. Judith suited her better, he had to grant. She was slender, but tall, and full of poise and grace, and if one trusted things one saw in papers, her temper was not too good.

  She came home once in a few years, and the last time she had worn a solitaire and a gold wedding ring.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Elise’s,” she said. Her cheeks turned a dark red. “She asked me to wear them, when she knew her back was broken and she couldn’t get well.”

  It had helped her to make more real that tenuous imaginary marriage to Elise’s dead son. And then he had discovered that Jill spent a fortune on spiritualists. She believed, she said, that she had established communication with Don. Perhaps she had. He would be the last to say it was impossible, now that the persistence of his own being had become a matter of interest to him.

  He sighed and rose to climb higher. Somewhere near the top he heard behind him a rustle in the grass and he stopped, glad of the excuse. A pheasant, he thought, and then he heard it again. It was too heavy for a pheasant. It might be a fawn. He looked in the direction of the wind that carried the sound upward and saw beneath him not a fawn but the black head of a boy, and then the face and shoulders of Mary’s son, Richard.