Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

She wrote to Rose. “Does David laugh and smile? Does he make sounds?” Rose replied, surprised, “You forget David is nearly a year old. He is trying to talk. He is very delicate and he has been ill so much, too.” She sent a small photograph of a grave little boy, held by a cheerful dark-faced Chinese woman. She studied the small shape. It was a delicate face, a thin body held very straight. The eyes looked out, intense, tragic, and the mouth was pursed into some rebellion. Her heart rushed to him. If I had him I’d build him up, she thought. He needs good food — he ought to get out of that climate. She went and picked Paul up from his crib. He was beautiful. She took pride in his size and health. His body was fat and solid, the dimpled hands chubby, his thighs broad and well-fleshed, his cheeks scarlet and his lips apple-red. But he was so lazy.

“Lazy, lazy!” She laughed at him and nuzzled her face into the fragrant creases of his neck. “Sit up, lazybones! It’s time you were sitting up!”

But when she took her hand away from his back he fell against her, softly, effortlessly, and leaned upon her. “You don’t try,” she scolded him. Then, sick with her love for him, she held him against her. Children were not all the same, she thought, cuddling him. Not all children could be the same. And he was so dear to hold, a lovely baby to hold, leaning in her arms, willing to be held.

“David is so independent,” Rose wrote. “He is so difficult to keep in bed when he is ill. He is a very difficult child to control.”

She kissed Paul’s soft whitish hair under her chin. Against her bosom he lay, his full pink cheek pressed against her breast. He did not cry even to be fed. It was as though he did not know her bosom lay there beneath his cheek. His lips never went seeking. He was like a pretty, plump doll. She held him to her firmly.

“Not all children can be the same,” she said.

And after a while after the winter was passed and spring came again, he began to hold his head up a little and to reach sometimes for the toys she made him — a red dog she sewed, a green rabbit. Perhaps if his toys were bright he would see them better. He would reach for them and hold them and soon they would drop from his hands and he would not miss them. She ran to pick them up for him, to play with them for him, to coax his hands to hold them.

One windy April day she took him outdoors, and above the gusty wind she heard a steady roar. She looked up quickly to see the plane driving through the huge white clouds, flashing across the blue between. “Look, look,” she cried to Paul. She held him up, and with her hand under his chin she forced his gaze upward. And if by any chance Roger Bair was there, so high above her, would he look down and see a woman holding a child up to him? But Paul’s eyes could not catch the swiftly moving shape.

“Look, Mother’s boy! See, darling!” she cried. But his eyes slipped away quickly. She followed them. At what was Paul looking? He seemed not to look seeingly at anything, his gaze as silent as his voice.

But the silence was not as it was before his coming. It was not empty silence, not lonely silence in the house. He was there, growing, eating, sleeping. He was there to be carried in her arms. She carried him in the spring to the woods and made him a bed upon soft old leaves and he lay in the warming sun while she found bloodroot and violets and she carried him into the orchard and saw him seraphic beneath the blossoms, his cheeks pink too, his hair a fluffed gold, his eyes blue. She must have him everywhere. When he was awake, she propped him in pillows near her while she worked. When he slept, she ran to see if he still breathed.

Nothing else was real. Bart was surly with her these days. “I’m still nursing him, Bart,” she said steadily. “I’m not willing — not until I’ve finished nursing him anyway.” Bart glanced at her often from underneath his thick red brows. He tried to catch hold of her awkwardly when she happened to pass him. But she made her body tense and cold against him and he let her go. Once his mother said to her, a faded pink in her cheeks and red staining the folds of her neck, “If you take care, you don’t need to keep Bart waiting till the baby’s done nursing.” Joan was ironing one of Paul’s little dresses and at the words she turned her head quickly back to her work. Bart had complained of her.

“I can tell you what you can do,” the voice came again from beside the stove — halting, thick with embarrassment. “I can tell you what my own mother told me. She said to me the day I married Abram—‘a man can always spit outside the pot’—that’s what she told me.”

Joan went on steadily … Now run the iron along that tiny tuck, now along the fine edge of lace. She folded the little dress and for a moment lifted her eyes to the window and gazed into the maple trees. They were summer green, the fresh young leaves now fully grown. A little wind moved among them and stirred the clear green shadows and the branches showed for a moment, dark and smooth. She knew the branch shape of every tree. On winter mornings she had lifted her gaze to them, bare against a gray sky, or standing noble under snow, statues in the storm. She did not answer. She could not answer with this sickness in her. Let her think of lovely things, of the ferns in the rocks of the wall, of the lilies growing under the trees. But what she saw against the inner curtain of her brain was a man’s face, Roger Bair’s face, thin and finely drawn upon her brain. And she knew she could never go back to Bart now. She picked up the pile of dresses and climbed the back stairs to the attic and put them away in the round-topped trunk, the smell of their newly ironed freshness warm in her nostrils. She went over to the crib and looked down at the child. He was lying awake and he looked back at her. “Paul,” she whispered. “Paul.” All her lonely being rushed out and laid hold upon this child. “Speak to me,” she whispered, “your mother—”

He was nearly eight months old. She fell upon her knees and wrapped her arms about him and lifted his head in her hand. She forced a smile to her lips and nodded her head to him to draw his wandering eyes back to her face. They came wavering back to her at last, the great beautiful blue eyes. For a moment they met her eyes fully, for a moment before they slipped again. For that moment she looked down into their depths, caught and plumbed them and stared down into them. They were empty. He could not answer her because he did not know her. She held him rigidly a moment, terrified, and then laid him gently down. Something was wrong with Paul. It was as though when she laid him down he was gone away forever. She went to the window and stood there. She had a fantasy that somewhere a little boy had tiptoed away and closed the door and left her alone again.

It began to come to her in the early dawn that perhaps the real Paul had never been born at all. She sat holding him, holding his body to which she had given birth. She had sat holding him all night. She could not bear to lay him in his crib. She must have his warm body in her arms at least. It’s like holding him dead, she thought. It’s holding my dead child. Paul is dead.

In the early morning she heard Bart’s footsteps on the stairs. He stumbled upon the threshold and caught himself. “Say, where did you put those blue shirts I had last summer? I’ve got to make hay today and I’ll roast at best.” He saw her face bent over the child. “Kid sick?” he asked. He came over and took the child’s hand in his great hand. The small plump white hand lay there in his lined, grimy palm.

“Bart,” she said, “there’s something wrong with this child.” She forced every word slowly.

But Bart grinned. “He looks all right — not fevered — hand’s cool as a cucumber.”