Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

But then she was struck with delayed remembrance. Of course there were her mother’s things, her dresses — oh, no one could touch them. “Rose and I must do that—”

She could not forget it, now that Hannah had spoken, and she could not bear to have it done. She would put it off a few days. It was still good to have her mother’s things in this house. Let them hang in the closets, lie in the drawers. Let as much as could be rest as her mother had left it. She clung to all of her mother.

Then one by one they came down to the breakfast table, Rose, Francis, and her father, carefully dressed, for it was his day for pastoral calls and it did not occur to him to delay duty. She took her mother’s place without question now. She served them in silence, and in silence they received her service.

The next day she and Rose together opened the drawers of the bureau in her mother’s room. They opened the closets, and took away everything that was her mother’s. There were not many things besides the gay bed-jackets — her few house-dresses, her brown suit, her best dress of a dark wine-brown silk, her black winter coat long worn, the brown velvet toque she had made herself. But because the garments were all long worn, because they had seen them so often, upon her, they were still part of her now.

And there were the gloves worn to the shape of her hands. And there were the shoes, mended at the heel, with here and there a small neat patch. Old Mr. Pegler, the cobbler, had used to mend them for nothing. He would not come to church, he said, for he followed Ingersoll. But he mended the shoes she had brought him and would not take payment. “Not, mind ye,” he said stoutly every time, his glasses pushed up on his bald head, “because you’re the minister’s wife. I do it because I want to.” And she, because she was proud, took him a cake now and then, for his wife was long dead and he did for himself, and he loved her dark chocolate cakes and her silvery angel food. “I can do everything for myself except the sweet stuff,” he told her, crinkling his little round meaty cheeks. “It takes a woman to do the sweet stuff.”

Sorting over the shoes Joan suddenly recognized among them pairs of her own, shoes she had thrown away because they were not fit to wear, or so she had thought. Her mother had said nothing. She had taken them to Mr. Pegler and he had mended them and she had worn them that she might add a little to the secretly saved money. It hurt her heart to see what her mother had done, and none of them had noticed it. She began to realize that none of them had noticed their mother. They all took from her, each took what he needed for his own life, without seeing that she also needed something from them for herself. But now it was too late—

Joan, looking at all these things, cried out to Rose, in a low voice, “What shall we do with them? I feel as if we buried her body, we should have buried these, too.”

Rose looked up. She was kneeling at a drawer. “We could give them to the mission at South End,” she said in her reasonable, practical way. “They would be doing good there.”

“No,” said Joan abruptly. “I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear to think of her clothes, her dresses, the things she made and wore — put on that riffraff—”

She gathered them into her arms, all she could hold of her mother’s garments. “I’ll pack them away for now,” she said. “I’ll put them in that old round-topped trunk in the attic that she kept our baby things in. There will be room for these, too, there are so few—”

She mounted the attic stairs, her throat tight with tears, hugging her load. Inside her heart cried out, “Oh, Mother, Mother, Mother!” From the things came the smell of her mother. It was not scent. Her mother had never used scent. It was the odor of her mother’s body as it once was, the odor of clean and healthy flesh. She knew it, she remembered it. In her childhood, sitting upon her mother’s lap, wrapped in her mother’s arms, there was that fresh, slight odor. She loved it then, it added its comfort to the embrace. Once, when she was very small and her mother had been away a day and left her with Hannah, in intolerable loneliness she had run to the closet and opening it, she had buried her face in her mother’s dresses, and there was the odor of her mother and it comforted her.

It comforted her now. It brought back her mother’s health and her old vigor. She forgot that odor of death from the sickbed, and she remembered her mother as she had been, her open smooth forehead, her clear wide dark eyes, the brown of her face mingled with the red in her cheeks. She stood at the head of the attic stairs, remembering — staring, smiling at what she remembered—

Then she saw the round-topped trunk was open. She went to it and saw the baby clothes tossed this way and that. The tray was partly full of small socks and shoes and crocheted baby jackets, all in confusion. She understood instantly. Here her mother had kept her little store of money, and from here her father had taken it. But now it mattered no more. That, too, was over. Only she was glad her mother had not known the end, glad she had slept and not heard her father’s footsteps hastening up to the attic stairs. She put down her load upon a chair, and lifted the tray and set it on the floor and kneeling began to sort it. Here were Francis’ shoes, and here a red jacket he had had. She could remember it because her mother had made it and had loved it on him. Lifting it to fold it she saw something else — an envelope addressed to her in her mother’s writing. Joan Richards. There was her name, her mother’s writing. It was like hearing her mother’s voice. She tore it open, her heart throbbing in her throat—

“Dear Joan — my darling child—” That was like her mother to begin a little formally and then to rush to warmth.

I write this to you because you are the eldest. I have worried so because I have nothing to leave my children. It is so hard to begin life with nothing at all, and because of this several years ago I began to put by a little of the housekeeping money. There are always ways to cut down for something one wants very much. It has been a joy to do this. Now today you are graduated. I have been tempted to take this money — it is nearly a hundred dollars now — and use some of it for a nice present for you — a watch. I always think a lady’s gold watch is nice, perhaps because I have always wanted one. But something makes me feel I am not to live very long. I am tired much of the time. And I have nothing to leave my beloved children except this little heap of money. I leave it to you Joan, to use for yourself, for Rose, for Francis, as you must. I can trust you. You have always been a dear honest child. I shall tell your father it is for you.

Mother

So her mother spoke to her. But it was too late. She folded the letter and thrust it into her dress and went on sorting. In her bosom the letter lay like pain. Rose came upstairs, her arms full. “I think there are no more,” she said. “Shall we put them into the bottom?”

“Yes,” Joan answered. “Fold them and put them away.”

She would not tell Rose or Frank of the letter. They would not understand. Perhaps Frank would hate his father. And they must not hate each other — none of them must hate any of the others. She could understand. She would find a way to help the others if the need came. She must find some way.

She rose and packed her mother’s things steadily into the trunk, and when they were all put away she closed the lid and locked it fast. Their babyhood, their childhood, their mother’s life — all were locked away now, forever. It darted across her mind that there was nothing there of the man’s — nothing of their father at all. He had come and taken all he wanted and he had left nothing behind. There was no human thing he possessed which could have belonged there with the mother’s garments, with the little children’s garments. She turned away and looked at Rose and smiled, her heart hard with the pain of the letter.