Pearl Buck - Angry Wife

She turned and smiled at him with pity. “I wish you wouldn’t bother. I don’t mind,” she said.

“It was only yesterday I decided I wouldn’t let you say master and mistress any more,” he reminded her.

“Yes, sir, but I know how you want to do, and so I don’t mind,” she said.

The girl’s lips were red and her teeth very white. He did not remember ever having seen a brown girl’s lips so red.

“Then where’s your mistress?” he asked. He heard the harshness in his voice and could do nothing to quell it. For the first time the future loomed as something monstrous. The end of this war meant that Georgia and all like her were free and they were his and Lucinda’s equals. The distance that had once been between had been taken away. Anything could happen, and there were no laws to check it. If there were to be new barriers, they must be made by people like himself, or there were no barriers — he refused to think further. There must be barriers, of course, between white and black.

“Pierce!” Lucinda’s voice floated up the stairs.

“She’s downstairs to meet you, Master Pierce,” Georgia said. As though she felt new distance shaping between them she returned to her old shape of his name.

He turned and left her standing there. From the head of the stairs he looked down at his wife at the foot. She had left the big front door open and she stood against a silver screen of light. Her golden hair caught it and the whiteness of her skin caught it and her eyes were like the sapphires she loved. She saw him and ran up and he met her halfway and took her in his arms.

“Pierce — in broad daylight—” she protested.

“Day and night,” he muttered, “night and day—”

He held her and for once she stood pliant in his embrace. But it could not last. The boys were running in from outdoors and behind them Joe was making efforts to catch them.

“Mama, Mama!” Martin screamed, and then saw them on the stairs. Lucinda turned in Pierce’s arms and smiled down at her two sons proudly. They stood gaping up at her and Joe turned and pretended to look out the door. Let her sons remember their mother, young and beautiful, standing in their father’s arms!

“What you doin’, Mama?” Martin asked.

Carey put his thumb in his mouth and continued his stare.

Lucinda forgot her role. “Take your thumb out of your mouth, Carey Delaney!” she cried.

She freed herself, ran down the stairs and pulled his thumb out of his mouth. It came out with a soft plop and she wiped it dry on her lace handkerchief. “You want to have buckteeth when you grow up?” she inquired. “Girls don’t love men with buckteeth.”

Carey gazed at her placidly. She flicked his cheek with her thumb and finger, and walked away into the drawing room. As soon as her back was turned he put his thumb into his mouth again.

Pierce, watching from the stairs, laughed. “Don’t you obey your mother, sir?” he inquired of his younger son.

“Not when she ain’t here,” Carey replied. He took his thumb out for these words and put it back. Regarding his son’s round red cheeks and bright blue eyes, and seeing the small gold curls which perspiration plastered to his forehead, Pierce burst into laughter, loud and fond.

“You’re a man,” he declared.

His laughter penetrated to the drawing room and Lucinda stopped, listened and frowned. Pierce’s laughter! He laughed easily, at jokes to which she always listened without understanding them. Since he had come home he laughed more than ever, but about nothing.

She shrugged her shoulders and dismissed the laughter for something far more important. A deep discontent ate its way into the pleasure of her days. Malvern had been conceived and born in Virginia, even as she had been. It had never come into her imagination that at any time of her life she would be living outside Virginia. But the war had dealt cruelly with her. Malvern lay on the eastern edge of the western counties that had seceded to make a Union. Now, irrevocably, she lived in a state that was hateful to her. Virginia was old and stable and proud, the home of aristocrats. But West Virginia was an upstart.

She gazed moodily at the gray mohair of the drawing room furniture. It had come, a generation ago, from France and even its fine close texture had yielded to the war years. It looked well, but she knew that Georgia’s fine stitches were woven in and out of it. She would not allow the children to sit on it, and even now, alone in the room, she sat in a wooden Windsor armchair.

She turned her head and saw Pierce at the open door in the hall. He was standing, his feet wide apart, his hands in his pockets, staring out over the land.

“Pierce!” she called. “Come here!”

Once he would have come instantly but now the imperiousness in her voice stirred distaste in him.

“What do you want?” he called back.

She rose in a flutter of ruffles and lace and ran out into the hall and pausing behind him she reached up and slapped one of his cheeks lightly and then the other.

“You hear me call?” she demanded.

“I answered, didn’t I?” he replied.

“But I want you to come when I call!” she complained.

She clasped her hands through his arm and dragged him half-unwillingly, half-laughing, into the drawing room.

“I want to know when I can have new satin for the furniture,” she demanded.

Pierce shook himself free from her. “Jiminy, Luce, do I have to tell you again that we have no money? If you can raise your own stuff you can have it. But you can’t buy anything. Well, we’re going to raise sheep. Malvern hills can grow good wool.”

Lucinda pouted. “I don’t want wool. Moths will chew it. I want satin.”

“Then you’ll have to wait until we can trade wool for satin, my girl,” he said firmly.

“Pierce, I can’t believe you haven’t got anything!” she protested.

“I have money to burn, and that’s all it’s fit for,” he said. “We lost the war, honey! How come you can’t understand what I tell you over and over? Our money is worthless. But we’re lucky we have the house and the land and a fair number of slaves ready to work for wages. And thank God, we’re not in a Southern state. We can begin to build new railroads and factories and open up the mines;”

“And I hate it that we’re not in Virginia any more,” she cried.

“It’s the saving of us that we’re not,” he said gravely. “We’ll escape a lot of woes.”

It occurred to him that he had not seen Tom since he came home to tell him that he had bought a horse, and in his impetuous fashion he forgot his wife and turned and strode upstairs.

Lucinda watched him, her hands folded one over the other as years ago her English governess had taught her to hold them.

“Put the hands into graceful rest when not in use,” she had proclaimed. She had taken the small Lucinda’s hands and laid them one upon the other just beneath the place where later her breasts would bud. There Lucinda now held them unconsciously when she did not embroider or pour tea. Their quiet was deceiving. Both her sons knew that those slender white hands, lying as quiet as the two wings of a resting bird, could fly out and leave a smart upon a small boy’s cheek, and then in the next second lie at rest again. When she spoke, they watched not her face but her hands.

She listened and heard Pierce’s step enter the bedroom above the drawing room. Then she went and stood in the tall French window that opened upon the terrace. Malvern lands were spread before her eyes. Sheep! Yankees raised sheep. She stood, seeing nothing while within her something grew hard and firm. She would not allow Pierce to change her life. She belonged to the South and in her the South would live forever. She would keep it alive.