The Eternal Wonder

by Pearl S. Buck

  Suddenly she began to weep in great, heaving sobs. She dropped the spoon into the bowl and covered her face with her hands. He leaped to her side and put his arms about her. He was as tall as her now, and suddenly he felt her small and in need of help and protection. But he did not tell her to stop crying. Somehow he knew better than that. He could no more take his father’s place with her than she could take his father’s place with him. They had to continue as they were, mother and son, sharing as much of life as they could.

  As though she felt what he was thinking she suddenly stopped weeping. She lifted her head from his shoulder and pushed him gently aside, wiping her eyes with her apron.

  “I must finish the gingerbread,” she said.

  He left her then and went upstairs to his own room and, drawing the armchair to the window, he sat watching the dusk change to darkness. He was not thinking, he was only feeling—feeling his loneliness, feeling his mother’s loneliness, feeling the emptiness of the house, the emptiness of his world. He did not turn on the light but sat in darkness until his mother’s voice called up the stairs.

  “The gingerbread is just perfect, Rannie!”

  Her voice sounded natural, and almost gay. He went downstairs then and into the brightly lighted kitchen.

  “I’ve also made Irish stew,” she said, “and a tossed salad. The gingerbread is for dessert.”

  She had set the table for their evening meal in the kitchen and this she had never done before. Until now they had always eaten dinner in the dining room. He could not imagine his father eating this meal in the kitchen. Now he sat down, glad that his mother had put these two places here, so differently from their usual meal. Suddenly he was very hungry and later was ashamed of himself that he ate every bit of the Irish stew and salad she put before him and still ate two huge helpings of the hot gingerbread and its sweet, spiced sauce. Afterward he felt full and sleepy and they went early to bed.

  IN THE MORNING SHE SET the table again in the kitchen. He had not slept well, waking fitfully and often to think of his father lying alone on the hill. His imagination, always too quick to summon reality, brought to life before him the picture of his father’s body lying in the grave. He saw, again, every detail of the dead thing once his father but now no more. He saw the closed eyes, the sternly set mouth, and even the pale folded hands. The hands were the most dead. His father had beautiful hands, strong and well shaped, active hands, working, gesturing, always expressive. The stillness of his father’s hands he could not forget.

  “Would you like scrambled eggs, Rannie?” his mother asked.

  She was calm this morning. But he could tell by her eyes that she had wept in the night, unsleeping.

  “Thank you, Mother,” he said, and again was ashamed that he could be so hungry in the midst of sorrow.

  His mother scrambled eggs and made bacon and set them before him. Then she went to the window and fetched a pot containing an amaryllis bulb. A handful of sturdy green leaves surrounded a thick stem that bore two open flowers, still in bud but almost ready to open. She set the pot on the table.

  “Those two flowers opened yesterday,” she said. “I wonder if the third one will open today. Three is the perfect number for amaryllis, I always think.”

  She spoke conversationally, almost as though he were a stranger, or only a neighbor, a visitor, but he understood that she was trying to begin life again, that she was determined not to weep again, at least in his presence, and he tried to help her.

  “The bud looks as though it were ready to open now,” he said.

  He ate his breakfast slowly. His mother drank coffee and buttered a thin slice of toast.

  “Won’t you eat an egg, Mother?” he asked, suddenly anxious. She was all he had now. Their relatives were all far away and he did not know them except by hearsay.

  “I will eat when I can,” his mother said. “It will take time to get back to myself. Today I must get his clothes packed into boxes to send to the Salvation Army.”

  “Shall I help you?” he asked.

  “No, dear,” she said. “I think I want to do it alone. He wanted you to have all his books, of course. But you should use the study now as your own. Feel free to change it as you like.”

  He knew it was not easy for her to speak these words, but she was trying to do what his father wished—to give him freedom. But freedom for what?

  Suddenly he noticed the amaryllis bud. It was already half-open! While they had been talking, between long silences, the bud had become almost a flower, though not quite full-blown. He pointed it out to his mother. She laughed, for a moment forgetting.

  “Why, so it has,” she exclaimed. “I never knew an amaryllis bud could open so quickly. But then I’ve never sat in front of one just as I am sitting here now.”

  She gazed, half-dreaming, at the flower. “It’s symbolic, somehow—the opening of a new flower at this moment when we’re so sad. It means something—I don’t quite know what—but as though your father were saying something to us. It’s comforting somehow.”

  She looked at him wistfully. “Oh, Rannie, I do hope I’ll be the sort of mother you need! I’ve always left you to your father since you were a baby, that is … because he’s … he was so much wiser than I, and he knew you were no ordinary child. I hope … I hope I’ll be able to … not of course take his place—that I could never, never do—but fulfill my own place as perhaps I haven’t, because perhaps I haven’t felt it necessary, but you must help me. You must tell me if there is anything I should be doing that I’m not doing, for it won’t be lack of willingness, darling, but just that I don’t know enough.”

  He met her pleading look with a tenderness he had never felt before. All his deepest love he had given to his father, but now he saw her separately, a childlike creature and yet a woman, of whose flesh he had been born and to whom in a way, too, he belonged.

  “There is something you can do for me, Mother,” he said.

  “And that is?” his mother asked.

  “I’d like to know everything about my father—everything—everything. I realized now that when we were together we always talked about me—or something I was thinking about. I was selfish.”

  “No, you weren’t selfish,” she said quickly. “He was simply—overcome with joy that he had a mind like yours to teach, to work with. He—he was—a born teacher and he revered a fine brain. He used to speak of your—your brain—as a treasure.”

  “But I want to know him now,” he said.

  She looked at him with a wondering love. “How could you know? …” she murmured.

  “Know what, Mother?”

  “That what you have just said comforts me as nothing else could! I’d never have thought of it myself—that I, I could keep him alive for you! I’ll do my best—I’ll remember everything. I can’t all at once, you know, Rannie—but as one thing and another happens in our lives, I’ll remember.”

  And in comforting her he himself was comforted. They had a way now to live, a purpose in their life together as mother and son. They would keep his father alive.

  IT WAS NOW EVENING and they sat in the study. She had decided that the study was the room where it would be best for them to talk. It would bring his father nearer, she said. Nothing in the room was changed. On the desk his manuscript lay half-finished in his father’s fine, close handwriting. Someday, his mother said, he, the son, would finish it. His father had allowed it and he had been reading it slowly, carefully, understanding and not understanding the philosophy it proclaimed, and yet fascinated by it. Every scientist an artist? Every artist a scientist? What was the secret they held in common?

  “Light the fire, son,” his mother said. “There’s snow in the air.”

  He stooped to set the lighter ablaze beneath the logs, as he had so often seen his father do. The logs were dry and the flames roared up the chimney.

  “Sit in his c
hair, son,” his mother said on this, the first of their evenings. “I like to see you sitting there.”

  He settled himself in his father’s chair. He liked sitting there, his body settling into the hollows his father’s body had shaped during the years.

  “I met your father in college,” his mother began. “I thought he was the handsomest man I’d ever seen. He wasn’t the sports type, not the football hero and all that, though he played a sharp game of tennis. When he found I was the champion tennis player, he challenged me promptly. I beat him—”

  She paused to laugh, her eyes suddenly sparkling. “I don’t think he liked that too well. And I told myself I was a fool and probably he’d never want to see me again. But I was wrong. He told me afterwards, when we’d got to know each other quite well, that he liked me for doing my best against him. He thought he was pretty good, and he confessed to being mortified at being beaten by a girl, but he’d have thought the less of me if I’d done any pretending. That was one thing he was always firm about. ‘I want the truth from you, Susan.’ I can hear him say it now.”

  She paused, a half smile on her face, and looked across to him, sitting there in his father’s chair. “I got the habit of truth, son—and I’ll never tell you anything but the truth. Let’s make it a bargain—truth between us for your father’s sake.”

  “It’s a bargain,” he said.

  She was silent for minutes, thinking. Then she began again, “I don’t want to go too fast. I want to make it last a long time. There’ll be evenings, too, when you want to do things. Evenings when we’ll have to decide what we should do. What do you want to do, son? I don’t think we ought to take the tour—we’ll need the money for your college education, even though they will give you your tuition as a scholarship for your father’s sake.”

  “I’ll go to college,” he said. “I can start at the beginning of the term in the New Year.”

  “But you’re not thirteen yet—and all those older pupils—what will they do to you?”

  “Nothing, Mother. I’ll be too busy.”

  “But you’ll miss all the fun of being your age.”

  “I’ll have other things,” he said briefly, but he did not know what things, so he urged her to go on with her story. “Go on, Mother.”

  “We soon fell in love,” she went on shyly. “In those days love was something important—not like today. But he said we wouldn’t be married until after his graduation. I was only a sophomore, but I didn’t want to go on. I only wanted to be with him. So in June we were married. It was a lovely wedding, I was the only child in my family, and they all wanted me to have the prettiest possible wedding. Besides, they liked your father. That’s one thing I didn’t like about coming to Ohio, Rannie, after your father got his doctorate. It brought us far away—so that you haven’t known my family. And since your father’s parents were dead and he was an only child, there’s been only the two of us to be your family.”

  “I haven’t missed anything,” he said.

  She was silent a long time now, her eyes fixed on the fire, dreaming, remembering, half-smiling. He sat silent, waiting, inwardly restless, and yet not wanting to break into her thoughts.

  It was to be true of all these evenings. She relived her life, dreaming, remembering, half-smiling while he sat waiting, inwardly restless. Suddenly she would look at the clock, astonished at the time.

  “Oh, it’s late,” she would exclaim, and the evening was ended.

  Each evening he sat there submissively, his eyes fixed on the fire, and as his mother’s voice flowed on, broken now and again by laughter or a long sigh of remembrance, he enjoyed in himself the ability to see what she was saying. That is, as she finished describing an incident now long past, he saw it all as clearly as though taking place before him. He was aware of this ability, for as he read a book, whatever it was—and this had been always true ever since he could remember, or so it seemed to him—he saw what he read, and not the words or the pages on which they were printed. The ability had been of special value to him in school, always, and especially in mathematics, for when a problem was presented by his teacher or the textbook, he saw not the figures but the situation they presented and the relationship to the whole, so that he was ready with the answer immediately. Sciences, too, had been made very easy for him by this ability to visualize simultaneously as he read or listened.

  So now he saw his father as his mother told of her life with him as a young man. It was actual seeing. He had this ability that he supposed everyone had, until he discovered later on in his life that it was unique, and that he could actually see, in shape and solidity, a person or an object of which he was thinking. As his mother described his father, he saw the tall young man, fair-skinned, fair-haired, quick to laugh but always ready to listen and to wonder. He had never told anyone of this visual ability, but now he told his mother.

  “I see my father as he was, before I was born.”

  His mother stopped and gazed at him, questioning.

  “He walks very fast, doesn’t he? Almost running? He’s very thin but strong. And he had a little clipped mustache, hadn’t he?”

  “How did you know?” his mother cried. “He did have a mustache when we first met, and I didn’t like it, and he shaved it off and never let it grow again.”

  “I don’t know how I know, I don’t know how I see, but I know so well that I see.”

  His mother looked at him wistfully and in awe, and she waited.

  “Sometimes,” he went on almost unwillingly, “I think it is not good.”

  “For example?” she inquired when he paused.

  “Well, in school, for example, especially in math, the teachers thought I was cheating when we were doing mental arithmetic. But I could see. I wasn’t cheating.”

  “Of course not,” his mother said.

  He did not notice it then, and it was not until years later that he thought of it, but from this time on his mother told him no more of his father. She devoted herself to him, usually in a silence that was almost awe. She paid heed to his food, preparing him the most nourishing meals she could devise, and was anxious that he had sufficient sleep. But he forgot her. His mind was crowded with visions of creations. His thoughts were always of creations. But he ate voraciously, for his body was beginning to grow very fast. Until now he had been a boy of medium height. Suddenly, or so it seemed to him, he was nearly six feet tall, though he was not yet thirteen. He was so tall that it seemed to him he got in his own way. There was one advantage to this extreme height. It made him less conspicuous at the college. His face was still a boy’s face, but his bones were gangling, and he was as lean as a big bird, and still he held his head high.

  HIS PROBLEM WAS THE ETERNAL question: What should he be? Inventor, scientist, artist—the energy he felt surging through him, an energy far more than physical and yet pervading the restlessness of his body, was a burden to him until he could find the path for its release. He felt restrained and repressed. He sat in his college classes, holding himself in, forbidding himself the luxury of impatience with the slowness, the meticulousness of his teachers.

  “Oh, get on,” he muttered under his breath, his teeth clenched, “get on—get on.”

  He envisioned what they meant before they had finished a point. His imagination obsessed him. The very atmosphere was floating with ideas. He had so many ideas in the course of a day that he bewildered himself. How could he bring them into focus? What was this imagination of his, continually busy with creation but uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable? At least, he did not yet know how to control it and could not know until his will directed and compelled him to control his imagination.

  So far as he could discover, none of his classmates suffered as he did. He had no friends, for mere friendliness, and he was by instinct eagerly friendly, did not mean friendship. He felt, at times, that he was in a desert alone, a desert of his own making merely b
ecause he was as he was. He had long ago outgrown his mother and he had almost ceased to think of his father. He was totally absorbed in the problem of himself and what direction he should give himself. He lived in absolute loneliness for most of his time at college.

  One day in his third year, a chance remark of his professor in psychology class caught his attention.

  “Most people,” the professor said, “are merely adaptive. They learn as animals learn—a chimpanzee rides a bicycle, a mouse follows a maze. But now and then a man is born who is more than adaptive. He is creative. He may be a problem to himself, but he solves his problems through his imagination. Once his problems are solved, his mind is free to create. And the more he creates, the more free he is.”

  A sudden light broke across Rannie’s mind. He sought out the professor after the class, lingering until every other student had left the classroom.

  “I’d like to talk with you,” he told the professor.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to say that,” the professor said.

  “I SHAN’T BE HOME this evening,” he told his mother. “I have an appointment with Dr. Sharpe. He’s expecting me. I may be late—it depends.”

  “Depends on what?” his mother asked.

  She had a quiet, penetrative way of asking questions. He looked at her, thinking not of her but of her question.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said. “I don’t know how the talk will go. If I don’t learn anything from it, I’ll be home early. If I do, I’ll be late.”

  He ate his evening meal in the silence of abstraction. They had continued to eat their meals in the kitchen. While his father lived this meal had been the one formal occasion of the day, always set in the dining room. Breakfast was a brief pause at the kitchen table, luncheon a random sandwich, but his father liked the grace of dining at night with a change of garments, a table set with silver and china and a bowl of flowers. The dining room had never seemed too large for the three of them, but alone with his mother it was too large, too empty.