Pearl Buck - Angry Wife

Lucinda turned to her third son. “Tell me instantly what you mean,” she demanded.

Pierce interposed, “My dear, young men always quarrel. I advise you to go back to your seat.”

But Lucinda did not heed him. “John, you are not going North!”

“Yes, I am, Mama,” he replied. He stood, towering above her fragile whiteness. “I hate it here—”

“Indeed? You hate your home?” Lucinda’s voice was tinkling ice.

“Not Malvern — exactly,” John muttered.

“Oh — not Malvern — exactly,” Lucinda repeated.

The mockery in her voice lit the wrath in her son again.

“I take it back,” he cried. “I do hate Malvern — and everything in it—”

“Oh!” Lucinda’s hands flew to their place under her breasts. “Pierce — you hear him?”

Pierce bent his head sadly. “My dear — he must be free,” he murmured. “We cannot make Malvern a cage—”

Lucinda turned from him and suddenly her hand flashed like the blade of a sword. She slapped John’s cheek as once she had slapped Georgia’s, Pierce thought in horror. “There!” she cried. “That’s what you deserve — you silly boy!”

John gazed at her, shocked to the soul, and then turned and strode away. They heard him rush up the stairs to his own room.

“Lucinda, you have done something that can never be undone,” Pierce said.

She burst into tears. “I don’t care!” she cried.

“Don’t cry, Mama,” Carey said.

But Pierce answered, “Go away, my son. You ought not to be here.”

Carey, hesitating, saw the look in his eyes, and went away and Lucinda wept on and Pierce sat silent and let her weep for he could not comfort her. At last her anger dried her tears and she went away without a word to him, and shut herself in her rooms.

All day she did not come downstairs and John did not appear until he had found that his mother had shut herself in with a headache. Then he came downstairs and to his father.

“I want to go away,” he said.

“Of course,” Pierce said. “How much money do you need?”

“A hundred dollars or so,” John replied. His eyes were too bright, as though he had shed tears, and his cheeks were flushed. But Pierce asked no questions. He went to the safe behind the panels of his office and took out cash and gave it to his son.

“Tell me where you are and write to me every week,” he said.

“I will,” John promised him. And then in sudden gratitude, he cried out, “Papa, thank you — for — everything! And I’m going first to Uncle Tom’s house.”

“I thought so,” Pierce said, and let him go.

THE YEARS SLIPPED PAST, and he marked them by the growth of trees he had planted in new orchards. The apple trees he had put in on the south hillside began to bear and the chestnuts he had put on the west knoll were burred. He had to order the sycamore over the east terrace cut back because it shaded the house and the rhododendrons were rich on the banks below the gardens.

There were more than trees to mark the years. Mathews’ children grew up and started livery stables and grocery stores in the nearby towns, and inside his own house he had two grandchildren and Carey, two years after he left home, married the daughter of a millionaire mine owner.

Pierce did not like his new daughter-in-law. She was effusive over the charm of Malvern but he heard her praise with grim calm.

“It’s delightful, isn’t it, Carey? Such a wonderful background—” she exclaimed. Listening to her, watching her, Pierce decided not to give Carey the MacBain house. It would allow this young woman to stay too near. He’d keep it. Maybe by some strange chance, Tom would come back to Malvern. He dreamed of such strange things these days, gazing at the mountains.

Pierce looked to the mountains increasingly now when he was bored or lonely. He was often both. His Sally was planted deep in South America, with children of her own. Those people apparently did not believe in birth control — it was their religion, he supposed. But he could not reach out to Sally any more. And Lucie was Lucinda’s own shadow. He had never found a way to communicate with the child, though she was child no more, and engaged now to a young fellow from Baltimore — but he had no interest in it.

He met John MacBain sometimes, but John was tired and he was worried now by the talk of automobiles. If people bought cars of their own what would railroads do? There was even talk of freight being hauled by motor vehicles.

“It seems like railroads will never rightly come into their full glory,” John MacBain mourned. “People are always inventing something new before they get the good out of the old. We’ve only just begun to think about street cars and automatic stokers and here they’re plotting automobiles—”

Somewhere in the years John MacBain and Molly had reached the river which must part them or which they must cross together. Pierce knew of it, for John had sent for him abruptly one day from New York. Pierce had gone at once, with great distaste for that northern city, but with invincible loyalty to his friend. He found John and Molly together at the Waldorf in a state of mind that was iron on John’s part and fire on Molly’s.

Pierce was surprised to find them together in the same suite, for he had imagined that only Molly’s broken promise and final desertion could have moved John to go to New York after her. He sat in the room with them both.

“Pierce, you decide,” John announced.

“Decide?” Pierce murmured.

“Whether I’m being fair or not,” John went on. “I’ve let her have her rein now for years. Pierce, you know the whole story. But the time has come to stop. If I’d been — a whole man — it would have been time to stop — even with me. She can just as well stop with another man — and I mean Henry Mallows, by Gawd!”

Molly burst into loud tears, but John refused to be moved. He turned to Pierce pathetically. “Pierce, either she can stay with me and grow old with me decently or she can leave me. My patience has given out.” He pounded the table and overturned his glass of whiskey and water and the liquid spread over the floor.

Molly flew to mend the damage. “Oh, look what you’ve done, you big lout!” she cried in a trembling voice. She ran for a towel and wiped up the wet. “The table’s spotting, too!”

“Never mind,” Pierce said. He waited until she came back and then he went on, musingly. “Tables and chairs and things last so much longer than we do — I often think of that at Malvern. All the things I’ve gathered there — they’ll be there, but I won’t. There isn’t much time left for nonsense — after fifty—”

His quiet words brought a still cold air into the heated room. John sighed and, Molly wiped her eyes.

“You two,” Pierce said affectionately, “I can’t spare either of you and so you must stay together somehow. I don’t want any more changes in my lifetime — whatever comes after.”

He went home again after they had dined together and there had been no more talk. John and Molly went to Europe unexpectedly, and when they came back Molly had given herself up to fat and comfort and from then on John and she jogged along. Pierce looking at them wondered why it was that he and Lucinda could not do the same. But he could not, as John had, demand nothing but simplicities of marriage.

“I’ve given everything to my marriage,” Pierce said to himself. John and Molly had come for a brief visit before going home to Wheeling. Then they were gone and the house was somnolent. Martin’s family lived in the west wing, and when Pierce wanted quiet he drew a bar across the door between and it was understood that it remained so until he drew it back again. Mary Lou was compliant, never emerging, indeed, from the sweetness which she kept wrapped about her like a veil and through it Pierce saw her only dimly. But Martin seemed happy — as, happy as he needed to be. Pierce knew his eldest son well enough now to know that he demanded little from life beyond comfort and security and these he took for granted from Malvern.