Portrait of a Marriage

by Pearl S. Buck

  To them all she said, “Would you like to see him?”

  She led the way into the parlor. The center table had been taken away and there William lay on his bier. She had the best of her potted plants about him and all the other flowers that had come. Sometimes those who gazed at him did not speak, but more often they did.

  “He looks wonderful, don’t he?”

  “He looks what he was,” she always said.

  She was calmer now because there was so much to do. Sometimes, planning with Mary about sandwiches and cakes for the meal after the funeral, or telling young Henry how to take care of the relatives who filled the house, or reading a telegram Jill brought in, she forgot why all this was. It was almost like any big family gathering—almost, indeed, like the golden wedding party she and William had argued about so often. Though if she’d thought—but she had no time to think. All the relatives were hers today. William had nobody but a sister, and she was not coming. Jill said Louise could not bear to come, because she never went to funerals.

  “It’s funny she can’t come to her own brother’s funeral,” Ruth said coldly.

  “She never does anything she doesn’t want to, I’m afraid,” Jill said. She would never be able to explain Aunt Louise to her mother. There was no possible plane of understanding which either could reach. Old people were so definite, she thought, half sadly. They made such different worlds for themselves out of what was really only one world. Her father alone had belonged to every world. How desperately she would miss him! No one, no one could take his place. What would she have done if he had not seen how lonely she was and sent her Germaine and Angèle to be her children? They were over at Mary’s house, safe, she knew, and yet she kept thinking about them, and seeing their faces, just now beginning to lose the look of anxiety, and their thin little hands. Were Mary’s hearty, plain children being good to them? In a moment she would slip over and see. She had decided against black frocks for them even at the funeral. There had been so much black in their lives already. Instead she had chosen white.

  “Well,” her mother was saying, “let his sister stay away from him now. His folks never meant anything to him when he was alive. Though I can’t understand—” She went away fuming. What would William have done without her, alive or dead? She had relatives enough for them both. They kept up with each other as families ought, and they had always liked William and in later years had respected him, too. They were proud of him. Her brother Tom was buying all the newspapers and making a scrapbook of the clippings about William.

  “There’s even pieces about him in the Philly papers,” he said proudly. He read aloud, “William Barton was at one time regarded as one of the most promising of the younger American artists.”

  There was nothing in the New York papers. They could hardly expect that. But every newspaper in the county carried long columns about him. Ruth found time to read them all, down to the last paragraph. “He is survived by his widow.” That was her. She was William’s widow.

  Upon the strength of this dignity she passed the hours until William was taken from the house on the morning of the third day to return no more. She followed him then, Tom driving her slowly in his bright new car. Behind her came the long line of slow cars moving down the country road to the cemetery that stood around the church to which William had always refused to go. But here he came now, to rest at last in her own family lot where her father and her father’s fathers were buried. And here he would lie, and she would lie beside him, to all eternity …

  The house was very quiet. She had insisted that everybody go home. It had been easy to persuade the girls. After the big funeral feast was over and the relatives gone and everything cleaned, she had said to them, “Now you both run along home. The children will be needing you. Besides, there isn’t a thing you can do here. If I want anybody, I’ll keep Tom.”

  “Sure,” Tom said.

  So Mary and Jill had gone. Uncle Tom, they told each other, could stay perfectly well. There were plenty of people to look after the garage. But it was easy to persuade Tom to go, too. Ruth said plainly, “I want to be by myself, Tom.”

  “You’ll be lonesome,” he objected.

  “No, I won’t,” she told him. “A woman don’t get lonesome when she’s been married as long as I have. The end of her life meets the beginning again.”

  But he was afraid he ought not to go, and she had to make him at last, before he put on his coat and hat. She had to walk with him to his car. Even then, with his hand on the wheel, he hesitated.

  “Sure you’re all right, Ruth?”

  “Sure I am,” she replied. Oh, be gone, be gone, her heart cried at him, longing for freedom to mourn.

  But he lingered, being a kind-hearted old man, seeking for some last word of comfort for his sister. It had been so hard for her, the relatives had all said when she was not in the room, because William had “passed away” in his sleep, without a last word to her. They put great importance upon last words, and they repeated solemnly the last things that others had said. Tom searched his memory and found some words which he remembered because at the time William had spoken them he had not understood what he meant. William was always talking queer. He did not understand them now, but maybe she would.

  “Ruth,” he said, “that last time I talked with William he said something about you I was going to tell you.”

  “Did he?” she cried. “Oh, Tom, what was it?”

  “He said he wouldn’t know what to do without you. ’Member that day last autumn when I ran the car up with a box of books for him from the express office?”

  She nodded. William was always buying books with his picture money. She used to be angry about it, because books were so useless, but now she was glad he had done what he wanted—though what she would do now with all those books!

  “You brung a shawl out for his legs—’member?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, after you was gone in, he said, you was his daily bread or somethin’ like that.”

  “Did he, Tom?”

  He watched her face to see if she were comforted. And he saw she was. She understood then what the old man had meant.

  “I thought maybe you’d like that,” he said, pleased with himself.

  “It was a wonderful sweet thing for William to say,” she replied.

  When he was gone she went back to the kitchen to eat her supper. Bread! William had been so fond of good bread. And he always said hers was the best in the world. He had talked like poetry about her sometimes when she stood kneading bread at this very table. Bread meant something special to William. That first picture he had painted of her had been with a loaf of bread in her hand. She sat remembering all she could of what he used to say about bread.

  “If I have good bread to eat, I don’t care what else is lacking,” he used to say. “Bread is my real food,” he used to say.

  “He couldn’t have said a more meaningful thing about me,” she thought gratefully. Somehow it eased her for everything. She had always been proud to be his wife, and still always there was the inner discouragement of knowing she was not good enough for him. But if she was like bread to him, then it meant he could never have done without her.

  “I guess he didn’t mind my being a mite cross once in a while,” she thought. “I guess he knows there just wasn’t anybody but him nor ever will be. And I did everything for him.”

  Her eyes filled, but she kept on eating. This was the first of many meals she must eat alone and she might as well get used to it first as last. The house was so still she could have been frightened if she had been a woman like that. But she wasn’t. She could always do what had to be done. So she sat, finishing her meal.

  About her there was not a sound, inside the house or out. It was the time of evening when even the birds were still. Then suddenly she was overcome with longing for him. This was how it was going to be, still, like this, day and night, all the rest of her life. She could eat no more and she put down her spoon and sat st
aring out into the bright evening. The house was empty. She had a queer feeling that it was altogether empty, that even she was not here.

  “Oh, William,” she said heavily. Her voice was loud in the emptiness about her.

  He was really gone.

  Then suddenly in the stillness she heard a noise. She heard a clatter in the barn. Something had fallen. She jumped up.

  “My goodness, what’s that?” she cried. She hurried out of the kitchen and across the grass to the barn bridge and up to the open door. “Who’s there?” she called sharply. A tramp, likely, she thought, but she wasn’t going to be afraid.

  “It’s me,” someone said. The voice came from the room under the hayloft where William kept his paintings.

  “For pity’s sake,” she said, and went quickly across the rough old floor and looked in.

  There among William’s tumbled paintings stood Mary’s youngest boy, Richard.

  “Rickie, for pity’s sake!” she repeated. “What you doin’ here?”

  “I wanted to see his—his pictures,” the boy faltered. He had been crying and his cheeks were streaked with dust from the canvases he had been turning over as he wept.

  “Well, why didn’t you ask me to show ’em to you?” Ruth said. She sat down on William’s old chair. He had sat at his easel in later years when standing tired him. Then she pulled the boy toward her.

  “Mercy me, look at that face! Here, I’ll wipe it with my apron.” She wiped his face and he was comforted by her scolding tenderness, since there was no one else to see her babying him. She gave him a hearty kiss. “Now then, want I should show you your granddad’s pictures?”

  “If you don’t think he’d care.”

  “He’d love it,” she said briskly. She put a picture on the easel. “Now this here one he painted one day—I can remember like anything—when they was making hay. A thunderstorm come up—see, there it is, you can see it just as like—”

  One by one she lifted the paintings, remembering. “Now this one he always said just wouldn’t come right.”

  “I think it’s good, though, Grandmom,” Richard said eagerly.

  “So do I,” she said. “Wonderful! He was a grand wonderful man, Richard, and we mustn’t forget it, shall we, you and me?”

  “No, never.”

  They looked at all the paintings and then she said, “Now it’s time for you to be going home, dear. Your Mom will be worryin’.”

  They stacked the paintings carefully and walked away together, hand in hand, out into the clear twilight. Then he gathered his courage.

  “Grandmom!”

  “Yes, Rickie?”

  “Can I have his big paintbox?”

  She was startled, and he held his breath, waiting.

  “Why, I couldn’t—I don’t know as he’d want me to give that away,” she said. “What would you do with it?”

  “Paint pictures. Please, Grandmom—anyway, when I’m grown up—like Grandfather!” He was clutching her waist.

  “My goodness,” she said, amazed. “Where’d you get such a notion? Nobody else in our family paints pictures!”

  “I don’t know—it’s been inside me always. Please, please!”

  Inside him! Then it occurred to her for the first time, looking down into the pleading face at her breast, that of course William could be inside this boy. But somehow she had never thought of it before. She looked at him solemnly.

  “You’ll have to be awful good,” she said.

  “I will,” he said gravely.

  He dropped his arms from her waist and stood, a little figure haunted, William’s spirit looking out of his eyes.

  A Biography of Pearl S. Buck

  Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated by critics and readers alike for her groundbreaking depictions of rural life in China. Her renowned novel The Good Earth (1931) received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman to have won this honor.

  Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck spent much of the first forty years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries based in Zhenjiang, she grew up speaking both English and the local Chinese dialect, and was sometimes referred to by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhju. Though she moved to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she returned to China afterwards to care for her ill mother. In 1917 she married her first husband, John Lossing Buck. The couple moved to a small town in Anhui Province, later relocating to Nanking, where they lived for thirteen years.

  Buck began writing in the 1920s, and published her first novel, East Wind: West Wind in 1930. The next year she published her second book, The Good Earth, a multimillion-copy bestseller later made into a feature film. The book was the first of the Good Earth trilogy, followed by Sons (1933) and A House Divided (1935). These landmark works have been credited with arousing Western sympathies for China—and antagonism toward Japan—on the eve of World War II.

  Buck published several other novels in the following years, including many that dealt with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other aspects of the rapidly changing country. As an American who had been raised in China, and who had been affected by both the Boxer Rebellion and the 1927 Nanking Incident, she was welcomed as a sympathetic and knowledgeable voice of a culture that was much misunderstood in the West at the time. Her works did not treat China alone, however; she also set her stories in Korea (Living Reed), Burma (The Promise), and Japan (The Big Wave). Buck’s fiction explored the many differences between East and West, tradition and modernity, and frequently centered on the hardships of impoverished people during times of social upheaval.

  In 1934 Buck left China for the United States in order to escape political instability and also to be near her daughter, Carol, who had been institutionalized in New Jersey with a rare and severe type of mental retardation. Buck divorced in 1935, and then married her publisher at the John Day Company, Richard Walsh. Their relationship is thought to have helped foster Buck’s volume of work, which was prodigious by any standard.

  Buck also supported various humanitarian causes throughout her life. These included women’s and civil rights, as well as the treatment of the disabled. In 1950, she published a memoir, The Child Who Never Grew, about her life with Carol; this candid account helped break the social taboo on discussing learning disabilities. In response to the practices that rendered mixed-raced children unadoptable—in particular, orphans who had already been victimized by war—she founded Welcome House in 1949, the first international, interracial adoption agency in the United States. Pearl S. Buck International, the overseeing nonprofit organization, addresses children’s issues in Asia.

  Buck died of lung cancer in Vermont in 1973. Though The Good Earth was a massive success in America, the Chinese government objected to Buck’s stark portrayal of the country’s rural poverty and, in 1972, banned Buck from returning to the country. Despite this, she is still greatly considered to have been “a friend of the Chinese people,” in the words of China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai. Her former house in Zhenjiang is now a museum in honor of her legacy.

  Buck’s parents, Caroline Stulting and Absalom Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries.

  Buck was born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, West Virginia, on June 26, 1892. This was the family’s home when she was born, though her parents returned to China with the infant Pearl three months after her birth.

  Buck lived in Zhenjiang, China, until 1911. This photograph was found in her archives with the following caption typed on the reverse: “One of the favorite locations for the street barber of China is a temple court or the open space just outside the gate. Here the swinging shop strung on a shoulder pole may be set up, and business briskly carried on. A shave costs five cents, and if you wish to have your queue combed and braided you will be out at least a dime. The implement
s, needless to say, are primitive. No safety razor has yet become popular in China. Old horseshoes and scrap iron form one of China’s significant importations, and these are melted up and made over into scissors and razors, and similar articles. Neither is sanitation a feature of a shave in China. But then, cleanliness is not a feature of anything in the ex-Celestial Empire.”

  Buck’s writing was notable for its sensitivity to the rural farming class, which she came to know during her childhood in China. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “Chinese beggars are all ages of both sexes. They run after your rickshaw, clog your progress in front of every public place such as a temple or deserted palace or fair, and pester you for coppers with a beggar song—‘Do good, be merciful.’ It is the Chinese rather than the foreigners who support this vast horde of indigent people. The beggars have a guild and make it very unpleasant for the merchants. If a stipulated tax is not paid them by the merchant they infest his place and make business impossible. The only work beggars ever perform is marching in funeral and wedding processions. It is said that every family expects 1 or 2 of its children to contribute to support of family by begging.”

  Buck worked continually on behalf of underprivileged children, especially in the country where she grew up. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “The children of China seem to thrive in spite of dirt and poverty, and represent nature’s careful selection in the hard race for the right to existence. They are peculiarly sturdy and alert, taken as a whole, and indicate something of the virility of a nation that has continued great for four thousand years.”

  Johann Waldemar de Rehling Quistgaard painted Buck in 1933, when the writer was forty-one years old—a year after she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth. The portrait currently hangs at Green Hills Farm in Pennsylvania, where Buck lived from 1934 and which is today the headquarters for Pearl S. Buck International. (Image courtesy of Pearl S. Buck International, www.pearlsbuck.org.)