Pearl Buck - Angry Wife

It did not occur to him that he would ever see Sally again. He did not want to leave Malvern for so long and he was sure that Lucinda would never receive Alvarez Lopez de Pre’ here. Now that his dearest child was gone he tried conscientiously to know the children that were left. When Carey came home from law school at Christmas he made a chance to talk with him alone. He had always been uneasy with this son whose composure and cynicism, it seemed to him, had been born in his blood. Carey was like Lucinda’s father, and old Rutherford Peyton had intimidated all young men who came near him.

“Want Lucinda, do you?” he had said when Pierce came to ask for her. “Take her and welcome! Daughters are a drug in a man’s house after they’re sixteen.”

Lucinda had laughed but Pierce had been intensely indignant.

“Shall you practice in Richmond?” he now asked his second son one evening after dinner. According to Lucinda’s rite, she and Lucie and Mary Lou left the table after dessert and Pierce sat on with his sons over wine and walnuts. He cracked a nut with the silver nutcrackers.

“No, Father,” Carey replied. He had a clear tenor voice, pleasant but cold. “I’m going to set out for the new coal mines.”

Pierce crushed the nut and let it fall on the plate. “The coal mines!” he repeated, stupefied. It was betrayal. He hated the mines that were scarring the face of the State.

“I’m going to be a big corporation lawyer,” Carey said confidently. “My roommate’s father owns the Woodley holdings, and it’s a future for me. The way I see it”—Carey cracked a filbert with sharpness—“there is going to be increasing friction between capital and labor as unions develop—”

“Unions aren’t going to develop—”

“It’s my guess they are,” Carey replied. “That means corporations are going to want their own private lawyers to hold down the unions. There’s a fortune in it.”

Pierce looked at his son with distaste. Carey was fair, like Lucinda, and he had her cool quiet manners. “You’re going to get rich off the dissensions of men, are you?” he inquired.

Carey laughed. “There’s no surer way of getting rich,” he said lightly.

Martin poured his glass full of the port wine that Pierce was now making each year with increasing success. “Here’s to the future!” he cried. “May dissensions flourish and wars multiply on the earth!”

“I’ll drink no such toast,” Pierce declared. But he lifted his glass and passed it back and forth under his nose. “There’s real bouquet,” he murmured. He forgot the foolishness of his sons and drank the wine down with relish.

Nevertheless, he was not pleased with Carey, and two months later he still remembered his displeasure and took sides against him and Lucinda in a quarrel between Carey and his third son John.

Of all his children Pierce had paid the least heed to John. Named for John MacBain, the boy had grown up as little as possible like him. Once or twice John MacBain, in undying longing for his own children, dead and unborn, had tried to befriend the son that Pierce had named for him. But no friendship had developed. John had frankly disliked Molly. “She paws me all the time,” he said bluntly to Pierce, and he was impatient with old John. “He thinks about nothing but steel and locomotives and how to beat the unions,” he told Pierce.

But if no friendship had grown there had been a result. Pierce’s third son grew up with an intense disdain for business and business men, and a stern determination to hew his own life as he wanted it to be. Pierce knew that he went often to see Tom, and that he had long since ceased to ask permission or even to tell anyone when he went, and Tom’s letters now made no mention of the boy. That, Pierce knew, was because John did not want his mother to know what he did. This being true, Pierce asked himself if he should not inquire into it.

Uneasily one day he faced the young man, and John admitted it at once. Of all his sons John was still the most like Tom in looks, and Pierce had the strange feeling when he saw him, that he was gazing at Tom’s young self. But he could not or would not acknowledge that the likeness went deeper.

“Of course I don’t want Mama to know I go there,” John said. “I learned when I was small that I couldn’t tell her anything about myself — she has no sense of honor.”

Pierce said sternly, “You are speaking of your mother.”

John smiled, his eyes scornful and held his peace

Pierce waited, and then took the lead again. “Your mother has been brought up in the old tradition,” he said formally. “I confess that I have, too. We cannot change—”

“Don’t put yourself in the same category,” John said. “You’re a very different person. She’s a woman.”

“Then you should honor womanhood,” Pierce said. His words made him uncomfortable as he spoke them. There was an echo in them of old dead grandeur.

“I feel sorry for women like Mama — that’s all.” John crossed his long legs.

Pierce thought, “This boy has the most honest eyes I have ever seen — far more honest than mine ever were.”

“Sorry?” he repeated aloud.

“They’re living in a world that’s gone,” John said. “They don’t know it — but they’re afraid. They might know.”

“That sounds like nonsense,” Pierce replied.

“It isn’t,” John said pleasantly. “It’s sad truth. Poor Mama, she’s hanging on by her fingernails to the old romance — pretty white ladies living in lovely houses, protected by white men! But we’ve betrayed them — we’ve sneaked out of the back doors, after making sure they were quite comfortable, their little slippered feet on satin footstools.” He got up and walked to the window. “God, how I honor my uncle Tom!” he cried to the mountains beyond.

The room was very silent. Pierce could not speak. John sat down again and looked at his father. “I propose to go North,” he said. “I want to get away from the South. It’s rotten. I don’t want to rot with it.”

Here in his beautiful library, the great windows facing the mountains, Pierce heard his son destroy his home. He made feeble defense. “But this isn’t the South,” he objected, “we separated ourselves in the war.”

“We’ve never dared to cut the placenta,” John said harshly. “I want to go where my children never hear that a man’s color dooms him and that because a woman is black, she is not a woman but a female.”

Pierce winced and then smiled. “Where will you go?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” John answered, “but I’ll go until I find the place.”

“What will you do?” Pierce asked.

“I’m going to be a brain surgeon,” John said. “I’m going to find out for myself that men’s brains vary from the imbecile to the brilliant, but not from white to black.”

Carey’s voice interrupted them from the door. It was the first week of the summer vacation and the two young men were home together. “Is the dreamer dreaming again?”

“It’s no dream,” John retorted.

“Then it’s madness and the same thing,” Carey said gaily.

The two brothers did not love one another, and John lost his temper vehemently. “Leave my life alone, damn you!” he roared. “I don’t say anything to your little pettifogging lawyer’s plans! I’d rather cut my throat than make my living the way you’re going to do!”

Lucinda, hearing the loud voice, came in from the terrace where she had been sitting in the shade of a sycamore tree.

“Pray tell!” she said sharply. “What’s the fuss now?”

John put his lips together until they were white, but Carey smiled his bitter smile. “John is having heroics, as usual,” he said. “He wants to go North where he won’t see the horrid ways we have.”