Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, in equal surprise. He did not then, as he seemed to do, eat whatever was before him. It was that her mother always set before him what he liked. The eggs came in boiled and she cracked two in a cup for Francis, a quick irritation hot in her breast when they burned her fingers. Why should his fingers not be burned? He was late to his breakfast as usual. She should have called him. Now she remembered that each day their mother called him several times and she had forgotten this morning to call him at all. She must go — but before she could rise he was at the door.

“Say, what’s the matter?” he demanded indignantly. He halted, his eyes astonished upon Joan. “Say, where’s Mom?”

“She’s ill,” Joan answered coldly. But when she looked into his tempestuous face she felt herself beginning to feel like her mother. His cheeks were ruddy and dark and he had put on his red tie. Her voice grew milder. “I forgot she always called you. Here are your eggs. It’s late — you’d better begin.”

Now she could remember what her mother did for Francis. Now she knew she had always secretly noted with a small inner jealousy everything her mother had done for Francis. But she did it all too, this morning, half against her will, buttering his toast, stirring the sugar and cream into his coffee, putting the jam in his reach. Even her voice for the moment sounded like her mother’s voice. “Hannah, bring in fresh toast for Francis — Frank, pass me Father’s cup.”

Then perversely she found a pleasure in it, the pleasure of something to do. Last night she had wept herself to sleep — yesterday she had met Martin in the dale where she would never meet him again. But this morning was another life for her. There were things she must do — a house, a family, a sick woman to be tended. When Francis had swallowed his breakfast and dashed up the stairs to see his mother, before school, when her father had wiped his lips and folded his napkin meticulously into the old silver ring that he had had since he was a child and had gone away into his study as usual, it was somehow pleasant to sit there in her mother’s place. It was pleasant to answer Hannah.

“Miss Joan, I’d better be getting down to the butcher’s.”

“I think you needn’t go today, Hannah. We’ll have baked beans tomorrow — Francis likes them — and today we can have that meat left over made into hash.”

“Just as you say,” said Hannah, docile as she had never been before, Hannah who had once spanked her for spilling a tin of coffee into the sink. She clattered a heap of dishes together and went back into the kitchen.

Now as she sat in her mother’s place the whole room began to shape about her in a new way. It was almost like a strange room in some other house. All her life she had seen the table, the chairs, the pictures, the old carved buffet, from her own place and in a certain same composition of planes and angles. At this moment these were all changed, just as the garden was changed as she looked out of the window. She could see from the window what she had not seen before when she sat at the table — the north corner of the lawn, the two big maples, and the front of the church and the steeple, but with the top cut off. She felt the whole house gather about her strangely. Today she was something more to it than she had been yesterday. Yesterday it had looked to her mother but today it looked to her. And it was more to her, too, than it had ever been. Yesterday, only yesterday afternoon, it had been no more than a place from which to escape. In the afternoon after the heavy Sunday dinner it had been dull and close and heavy about her, and she had been impatient with its dinginess, and so she had escaped into the sunshine and then against her own will her feet went toward the dale. But this morning she did not want to escape — she must go all over the house, straightening, freshening, putting fresh flowers in the vases. It was almost her own house.

The door opened and Francis thrust his head in the crack. “You still sitting there? Say, Joan, I didn’t want to wake her up. She was sound asleep and she looks awfully tired, even when she’s asleep. Besides, I didn’t want to tell her I’d be home late tonight — we’re going down the road — a bunch of us—”

She found herself speaking for her mother anxiously. “But, Frank, your lessons—”

But to him she was nothing but herself. “That’s my business,” he retorted, and banged the door.

She jumped from her seat. She was furious with him for a second, a sister’s fury, but her father came in helplessly, and she paused. “What is it, Father?” she asked.

“On Monday afternoon,” he began, “I usually make pastoral visits, and I’ve mislaid my little black book. I cannot remember where I went last, and I usually mark the name. Your mother wrote down the complete list for me alphabetically in a little black book, and I can’t find it.”

She was needed again and so assuaged for Francis’ independence. “Where did you have it, dear?” she asked. Her voice was rich with kindness, as her mother’s was when any of them needed her.

He put his hand to his brow in a gesture of bewilderment. “I can’t remember,” he said in agitation. “Your mother—”

He was for the moment as different to her as the house. Was this simple creature the priest of God whom she saw coming out of the vestry every Sunday morning to preach to them all, radiant with assurance? She said as she would have said to console a child, “It must be in your study somewhere. I’ll come and hunt for it.”

She went out and he followed her hopefully. Under a heap of his papers she found it. “This it?” she said, holding it out to him and smiling.

“Yes,” he answered, and laughed a small noiseless laugh and sat down at his table, instantly forgetting her. She went back to the dining room and began to clear the table. She hurried happily. There was a great deal to do.

All morning the house grew thus at once more strange and more real. She tiptoed several times to her mother’s room, but each time her mother lay motionless in sleep. Heretofore her own room had been the only real part of the house to her. In her own room she had been meticulous, placing the furniture exactly, studying the effect of each picture and small ornament. But the rest of the house had been neutral, a place in which to live and share life. There were certain pictures she did not like and secretly she had wished when she came home from college that her mother would take them down from the walls. She had thought often, If ever I have the chance I’ll take them down. Now she looked at them uncertainly — Hope sitting upon the world, Christ entering Jerusalem, Samuel in the temple. But, no — her mother would be up tomorrow. The house was not quite her own.

Tomorrow came and her mother was not up. When Joan entered her room this second morning already it did not seem strange to see her mother lying there. But today there was fear in her mother’s dark eyes. “You’d better send for Dr. Crabbe, Joan,” she said, and then, “I don’t feel able to get up and wash myself. Fetch the basin here, dear.”

This was no common weariness. Joan, troubled, watched her mother wash herself slowly, stopping often to rest. The skin on her face and hands shone yellowly. She lay back and closed her eyes and the lids were like shadows upon her face. Joan crept on tiptoe with the basin and towels, and set them down and ran to find her father.

At this hour, at seven o’clock in the morning, he was where he had been for thirty years. She knocked furiously upon the door of the study, for even now she would not have thought of entering otherwise. She had seen her mother there knocking. She knocked impatiently and frightened, and then without waiting she pushed into the room. He was on his knees by the worn old brown leather armchair, his head in his hand. At the sound of her entrance he looked up.