One day there was a knock upon the door and she opened it and saw the new minister. She asked him to come in, as she asked anyone to come in who stood there, and waited for him to tell his errand.
He began brightly and quickly. “You are in my parish, Mrs. Pounder, and I have missed your face in the congregation.” She fixed her eyes on him fearlessly and strongly, and he began again. “God is ready to forgive us if we come to him.”
“Forgive?” she said clearly. “For what am I to be forgiven?”
“God …” he began, the sweat breaking out a little on his lip.
“If there were a God,” she said quietly, “I could not forgive Him.” He looked at her bewildered and went away soon. She watched him trudge down the road. I spoke exactly as Mrs. Mark would have spoken, she thought, amused.
If it had been a generation earlier she could not have lived thus freely. But the times had loosened everyone. The village paper told of strange doings in the great towns, men and women living anyhow, drunkenness and heedlessness. Automobiles began to be built in long flying lines of speed, open to the winds. They raced through the village, full of young men and women going so fast their faces could not be seen. They were blurring lines of scarlet and green and yellow and kingfisher blue, and their hair streamed behind their profiles, sharp against the sky.
One morning old Mrs. Kinney stepped from the curb. Sarah Kinney had run back for a shawl and had been slow, and old Mrs. Kinney had been provoked. She called shrilly, “Sarah, I’m going on!”
She stepped off the curb to punish Sarah, and a car tore by at her left side, threw her and went on. It was a long red car, and all the young faces were turned straight ahead and it did not stop. Miss Kinney, running out, saw no more. She screamed and ran to her mother. Old Mrs. Kinney was lying on the road, dying. But she paused long enough to say with impatience, “You’re always forgetting something.”
“I declare I miss her,” said Dr. Crabbe to Joan at the funeral. “I feel downright cheated. I believe I could have kept her going another ten years.”
Behind her black-gloved hand Miss Kinney whispered excitedly, “I’m going back to Banpu as soon as I can brush up on the language!”
But day after day passed and she did not go. “I shall begin brushing up right away,” she said gaily, and then she forgot and played in the garden among the falling leaves. They made her laugh, falling on her face, on her spraying white hair. She shook her head at them, laughing.
So Joan’s coming and going seemed gentle. Besides, she had been a child there in Middlehope. The old were growing older and they saw her still a child. “Joan will turn out all right in the end,” they said, seeing her still a small girl, wayward for a moment. But she was a woman, making her life out of what she had about her.
When she went into the store for food or clothes or shoes, the clerks greeted her as smoothly as they did another. It was true Ned Parsons was a little wary of her, kind but wary.
“What can I do for you?” He made her nameless. There was no saying “Joan”—it seemed too close now that he had two children. And Netta never quite forgot that he had once been in love with Joan Richards, or very nearly in love. She talked at night in bed against women who left their men.
“Nothing makes it right, I say,” she cried. “I’d feel it my duty to make the best of it.” She hinted against Joan. “There’s things about her I’ve never told even you—her and Martin Bradley.”
He said mildly. “I thought Martin was sweet on you once.”
But she screamed at him out of the darkness. “Me? No, thank you! I wouldn’t have married Martin Bradley if he was the last man on earth. I wouldn’t touch him or let him touch me—he gives me the creeps—always did, too! I never did understand Joan Richards—”
But Netta talked against women. She’d talk against his own sister. “There’s Emily—she’s got a good job in the city, works on a newspaper. She hasn’t anybody except herself. You’d think she’d sent Petie something. She didn’t even write when little Louise was born—People are so selfish.”
He listened. Netta talked so much. He couldn’t answer everything. He had stopped answering her years ago. His mother had been such a quiet woman, smiling and dreaming and writing her stories. They used to think her silly when they were growing up. He was glad now he had not been quite so impatient as Emily had been. Emily had said to her mother, “I don’t see how you can expect any publisher to take such drivel as you write.” But Emily was always on their father’s side. She’d get angry when they came home from school and dinner wasn’t ready and their father would be puttering distractedly about the stove, and their mother’s voice would drift down from the attic, “I’ll be right down.” But very often she wasn’t right down and Emily was angry and left home as soon as she could get a job. It seemed she was all the angrier because she herself secretly wanted to write stories and couldn’t be happy at anything else, though she always made fun of it.
But his mother never seemed to know Emily was angry. She was always quiet, thinking and smiling to herself and saying, “I really think I’ve got it this time.” A quiet woman was nice in the house …
“I’d like to see some clear blue gingham,” said Joan’s cheerful voice. Joan always had a lovely rushing voice.
“Let’s see. Netta’s just made some dresses for Louise out of this.”
“You’ve never seen my Mary’s eyes!” Joan’s voice was like laughter. “There—that sky color!” She looked just as she used to, a little heavier maybe, but she was tall. Netta was growing thinner all the time. Netta boasted, “Joan Richards—there, I forget all the time she’s married—Joan Pounder’s hair’s getting real gray. I haven’t a gray hair myself. I take after my mother. She hasn’t a gray hair at sixty!”
Joan’s smooth rosy face under soft early-graying hair—He tied up the bundle of blue gingham. “Here you are,” he said abruptly. “Anything else?”
“No, thank you, Ned!” Her voice was like singing and she walked out of the store as though she were dancing.
Ned’s getting bald, Joan thought, the blue gingham under her arm. He looks dyspeptic. I wonder if Netta’s a good cook? She thought a little tenderly of Ned’s pimpled young face, yearning at her over a guitar. It seemed very long ago. He would be ashamed now if he knew she remembered him thus. But so he had been and it made a small memory, precious, too, in its way. Everything in life that was her own now was precious. She had used to plan so much for the future, to want everything. Now she wanted only to sort out of the world that which was her own. She had only lived in Middlehope. She heard of strikes and ferment outside, of hunger marchers, of men jailed for discontent too freely spoken. A turn outward, at a moment, and she might have been one of them. But she had made the inward turn.
She was drawing near to the house and now she saw someone sitting on the stone steps of the little porch. She had left David at home to watch Mary and Paul, but this was not David. She came nearer and it was Frankie. He was sitting quietly and compactly, waiting for her, his hands in his pockets. The winter air was biting cold. She hurried toward him. “Why, Frankie!” She had not seen him in months. Fanny had come and gone irregularly. She had been away working, she said, and had taken Frank with her. She had not been to get her money for nearly a month. “Why didn’t you go in, Frankie?”
“Your boy told me to, ma’am, but I thought I’d rather wait here.”
He had grown a great deal. He was much taller than David, tall and strong, brown-skinned, dark eyes madly lashed. But his lips were like her father’s lips, purely, coldly set into the round soft oval of his face. His body was not lean and angular as David’s was. It was soft-limbed, lightly fleshed. She looked him over swiftly.
“I thought I gave Fanny money to get you some new clothes!” The boy was completely out of his clothes, his hands dangling out of his short sleeves, his trousers tight about his legs.
“I haven’t seen her, ma’am—not in a mighty long time. She went away and left us.�
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“Where did she go?”
“She said she was going to New York to get a job. The factory’s closed again, ma’am. There’s a strike on again, and they aren’t going to take back any colored hands. Lem stayed a week and a day or two and he went to get a job at the pants factory in Newville he heard was looking for help.”
“Where have you been all this time?”
“Waiting—waiting for her to come back. She told me to wait. But I finished up everything to eat in the house.”
She stood looking at him, and he looked back at her trustfully, quietly, waiting for her. Did he know what she was to him? She could not tell.
“Where are her other children?”
“Willa’s got a job at the chapel dancing—she’s only fifteen but she looks grown up—and Roberta’s got a fellow to feed her. Roberta’s the oldest.”
He stood looking at her patiently with his lovely mournful dark gaze.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” she said, distraught.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t expect you would. Fanny’s always saying so, too.”
He looked down and scuffed the dead grass a little. Then she saw he was barefoot.
“You haven’t any shoes on,” she cried.
“No.” His voice was acquiescent, mild. “Fanny was going to get me some before snow, she said, but she hasn’t come back.”
He looked at her apologetically.
“I’ll be all right in a year or two, ma’am, when I’m grown enough to get a job somewhere singing. It’s only just now I haven’t anywhere to go.”
He was so uncomplaining, he so took for granted that he was homeless and that he was nowhere wanted, that her heart ached over him. And everywhere about him, like a visible aura, hung an air of Francis. No single feature was quite the same. Francis’ brown hair was here blacker and curlier, his dark eyes were darker and more liquid, his head rounder and his face fuller. But there was the likeness in his look, in his pose, in the way he stood, his weight relaxed upon his right leg, his hands in his pockets. There was even a look of herself—She caught it, hauntingly, like a fleeting glimpse into a distant mirror.
“Come in with me,” she said quietly. The old familiar need to do for her own flooded into her again. In the troubled world there were the few who were her own. She took Frankie into her house and closed the door against the cold.
Inside, David was lying upon the floor reading furiously, his face set as though for a fight, his hands clenched in his hair. Mary was sitting beside him, absorbed with a little doll. In his corner in a pen she had made for him Paul was clinging to the side. He was six now, and he still said not a word. To these three she said calmly and with resolution, “This is Frankie.”
She went into the kitchen at once and quietly began to prepare the supper for them all.
She had not for a long time heard from Roger Bair—not, that is, for weeks. That was a long time. He had asked her to send him a picture of herself and she had none to send him. She had not had a picture taken since she left college. Instead she had written how she looked and what she did, and sent it to him. “Do you see me? Thirty-three years old, hair already a little gray and never cut. Height, five feet nine, weight to correspond, eyes green-blue, tending to be a little stern, maybe? There—I can’t write of myself.”
She also asked David. “David, write down how I look. Someone wants my picture and I haven’t a one.” He stretched himself before the fire with pencil and pad and considered her seriously and wrote hard, for almost an hour, his tongue between his lips, scratching out an occasional word. When it was done he folded it very small and gave it to her.
“Shall I read it?” she asked.
He blushed brilliantly. “I don’t care,” he muttered, and ran out of the house into the spring evening. But she did not read it, telling Roger she had not. “I told my boy David to write you a picture of me.”
She had not heard from him since. She could not forget that she had not. It gnawed in her all day and she remembered at night with a feeling of emptiness that it was a long time since she had seen his handwriting. But she waited. She would wait and if the time went on she would ask Francis. But she read the newspaper carefully each day because she grew a little frightened. Among the headlines of stocks falling headlong and swarming runs upon banks she searched for a news item—PILOT CRASHES. But it was not there. It came at last to be almost enough that it was not there.
In her house her life was divided into the four children. David was the warm vivid center about which they moved. He was the one who was always having something happen to him. Every particle of him was adventure. She could go all day with her heart in her mouth because in the afternoon his school team was playing the Clarkville team. He was so little but he would go wherever the big boys went. When he burst into the house shouting for her, shouting, “We beat ’em—we beat ’em!” her heart let down in instant relief. “Oh, David, I’m so glad!” “Yep,” he boasted, “we beat ’em ten to nothing—to nothing, mind you, Joan!” He was strung so high, so fine, suffered in such an abyss of agony, he was so impaled by pain, joy such ecstasy, that the house vibrated with him. She was involved in all his being. He was shy with her for a while until he asked her, “Did you read what I wrote about you?” She shook her head, smiling. “I sent it off just as you folded it.” He was relieved, his shyness fell off him like an awkward garment not his own. He was not naturally shy.
But after a while she saw he had something to say to her and she put herself quietly in his way, that he might speak. “You’re a comfort to me, David. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Remembering the rare precious praise her mother had given her, she was lavish with her own praise to them all. Even to Paul she gave praise. “That’s just fine, Paul—now walk to me, here, Good boy, good boy—” He staggered his few steps industriously, clutching her hand, turning his empty face up to catch her praise.
The warmth in her voice freed David’s tongue. “I just want to tell you,” he said offhandedly, “that I only wrote good things about you.” He was turned away from her, but she saw that his trim close-set ears were crimson. “Thank you, David,” she said composedly, careful not to be tender. He turned over the pages of a book he was reading. “I said,” he added, suffused, “I said I wished you were my real mother.” She wanted to run to him and take him in her arms, to fondle him and adore him. But she knew him. She went on with her sewing. “You are like my own son,” she said. She lifted her eyes and he met them and a deep look passed between them. “Guess I’ll go out a while,” he said quickly.
“Fresh cookies in the jar,” she reminded him. So that was the picture he had given to Roger. It was easier to wait for Roger again.
She had been anxious until she knew what David would feel of Frankie. She was silent while David watched Frankie, weighing him.
“Why is he so brown if he isn’t Chinese?” he asked starkly before them all.
“Frank is American,” she answered. “There are many Americans who are black. Frankie’s mother was dark and his father was white. That’s why he is brown and why his hair is curly and why he has his lovely voice.”
“Sing,” David commanded.
Frankie opened his mouth and began to sing. The song was abominable, musical claptrap, but his voice startled her again. It flowed out of him richly, largely, noble in its volume, dignifying the cheap tune. They listened, even Paul listened, his eyes wandering, searching for the source. Mary stretched out her arms, imperious to be taken and brought near.
“What else do you know?”
“I know a lot of things,” said Frankie. He began to sing again. “Like a river, glorious, is God’s perfect peace.” She listened, remembering her father.
“Who taught you that?” she asked.
“I’ve heard ’em singing it down in South End,” he answered. “Some of the old folks sing it. Fanny sings it sometimes when she’s feeling good.”
Well, she had found a peace, too. And Davi
d loved Frankie. “Sing something funny!” he would demand. And Frankie, his great eyes suddenly droll, sang a witty tune, “De farmer say to de weevil.” David listened, laughing. He loved Frankie because Frankie could make him laugh. But Frankie, without knowing it, shaped himself to each one of them. He made David laugh, he fetched and carried for imperious Mary, he lifted Paul to his feet and urged him to stepping. “There now, ’atta boy!” And to Joan he was something she did not understand. But she knew that if she were to grow old and weak, David might be wandering beyond seas, and Mary would be having her own way, and Paul would be as he had been born, but Frankie would come back to see that she had food and shelter. There was faithfulness in him. She could feel it, deep and steadfast in his quiet lovely look.
David and Frankie grew together, sleeping in the same room, going to the same school. But Frankie was far below his grade. David came home one afternoon bleeding, blown with battle.
“Why, David!” cried Joan horrified, hastening for water and bandages.
“Some of the fellows laughed at Frankie,” he said furiously. “They said he was dumb and they called him a nigger, and I socked ’em. He’s just dark, isn’t he, Joan?”
She looked at Frankie and caught his look, full of deep self-realization.
“Let me wash you, David,” she said. “Turn around and let me see you.” He turned, not knowing in his anger that she had not answered. When he had gone clattering upstairs to change his bloody shirt, Frankie spoke to her.
“I know I’m a nigger, ma’am.”
She looked back at him impulsively. But he might at this moment have been Francis, cut in bronze! She leaned to him and quickly kissed his forehead. “You are one of my children,” she said.
He warmed and melted, wavering, longing. But he did not dare to come too near her. He took her hand and held it against his cheek. His cheek was hot and soft beneath her palm. Now she felt this other flesh. It was as sweet, as sound, as any flesh, not strange to her. “There,” she said. “Run along and find David. I’ll spread you both some bread and jam.”
Time Is Noon Page 37
