Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

But Netta talked against women. She’d talk against his own sister. “There’s Emily — she’s got a good job in the city, works on a newspaper. She hasn’t anybody except herself. You’d think she’d sent Petie something. She didn’t even write when little Louise was born — People are so selfish.”

He listened. Netta talked so much. He couldn’t answer everything. He had stopped answering her years ago. His mother had been such a quiet woman, smiling and dreaming and writing her stories. They used to think her silly when they were growing up. He was glad now he had not been quite so impatient as Emily had been. Emily had said to her mother, “I don’t see how you can expect any publisher to take such drivel as you write.” But Emily was always on their father’s side. She’d get angry when they came home from school and dinner wasn’t ready and their father would be puttering distractedly about the stove, and their mother’s voice would drift down from the attic, “I’ll be right down.” But very often she wasn’t right down and Emily was angry and left home as soon as she could get a job. It seemed she was all the angrier because she herself secretly wanted to write stories and couldn’t be happy at anything else, though she always made fun of it.

But his mother never seemed to know Emily was angry. She was always quiet, thinking and smiling to herself and saying, “I really think I’ve got it this time.” A quiet woman was nice in the house …

“I’d like to see some clear blue gingham,” said Joan’s cheerful voice. Joan always had a lovely rushing voice.

“Let’s see. Netta’s just made some dresses for Louise out of this.”

“You’ve never seen my Mary’s eyes!” Joan’s voice was like laughter. “There — that sky color!” She looked just as she used to, a little heavier maybe, but she was tall. Netta was growing thinner all the time. Netta boasted, “Joan Richards — there, I forget all the time she’s married — Joan Pounder’s hair’s getting real gray. I haven’t a gray hair myself. I take after my mother. She hasn’t a gray hair at sixty!”

Joan’s smooth rosy face under soft early-graying hair — He tied up the bundle of blue gingham. “Here you are,” he said abruptly. “Anything else?”

“No, thank you, Ned!” Her voice was like singing and she walked out of the store as though she were dancing.

Ned’s getting bald, Joan thought, the blue gingham under her arm. He looks dyspeptic. I wonder if Netta’s a good cook? She thought a little tenderly of Ned’s pimpled young face, yearning at her over a guitar. It seemed very long ago. He would be ashamed now if he knew she remembered him thus. But so he had been and it made a small memory, precious, too, in its way. Everything in life that was her own now was precious. She had used to plan so much for the future, to want everything. Now she wanted only to sort out of the world that which was her own. She had only lived in Middlehope. She heard of strikes and ferment outside, of hunger marchers, of men jailed for discontent too freely spoken. A turn outward, at a moment, and she might have been one of them. But she had made the inward turn.

She was drawing near to the house and now she saw someone sitting on the stone steps of the little porch. She had left David at home to watch Mary and Paul, but this was not David. She came nearer and it was Frankie. He was sitting quietly and compactly, waiting for her, his hands in his pockets. The winter air was biting cold. She hurried toward him. “Why, Frankie!” She had not seen him in months. Fanny had come and gone irregularly. She had been away working, she said, and had taken Frank with her. She had not been to get her money for nearly a month. “Why didn’t you go in, Frankie?”

“Your boy told me to, ma’am, but I thought I’d rather wait here.”

He had grown a great deal. He was much taller than David, tall and strong, brown-skinned, dark eyes madly lashed. But his lips were like her father’s lips, purely, coldly set into the round soft oval of his face. His body was not lean and angular as David’s was. It was soft-limbed, lightly fleshed. She looked him over swiftly.

“I thought I gave Fanny money to get you some new clothes!” The boy was completely out of his clothes, his hands dangling out of his short sleeves, his trousers tight about his legs.

“I haven’t seen her, ma’am — not in a mighty long time. She went away and left us.”

“Where did she go?”

“She said she was going to New York to get a job. The factory’s closed again, ma’am. There’s a strike on again, and they aren’t going to take back any colored hands. Lem stayed a week and a day or two and he went to get a job at the pants factory in Newville he heard was looking for help.”

“Where have you been all this time?”

“Waiting — waiting for her to come back. She told me to wait. But I finished up everything to eat in the house.”

She stood looking at him, and he looked back at her trustfully, quietly, waiting for her. Did he know what she was to him? She could not tell.

“Where are her other children?”

“Willa’s got a job at the chapel dancing — she’s only fifteen but she looks grown up — and Roberta’s got a fellow to feed her. Roberta’s the oldest.”

He stood looking at her patiently with his lovely mournful dark gaze.

“I don’t know what to do with you,” she said, distraught.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t expect you would. Fanny’s always saying so, too.”

He looked down and scuffed the dead grass a little. Then she saw he was barefoot.

“You haven’t any shoes on,” she cried.

“No.” His voice was acquiescent, mild. “Fanny was going to get me some before snow, she said, but she hasn’t come back.”

He looked at her apologetically.

“I’ll be all right in a year or two, ma’am, when I’m grown enough to get a job somewhere singing. It’s only just now I haven’t anywhere to go.”

He was so uncomplaining, he so took for granted that he was homeless and that he was nowhere wanted, that her heart ached over him. And everywhere about him, like a visible aura, hung an air of Francis. No single feature was quite the same. Francis’ brown hair was here blacker and curlier, his dark eyes were darker and more liquid, his head rounder and his face fuller. But there was the likeness in his look, in his pose, in the way he stood, his weight relaxed upon his right leg, his hands in his pockets. There was even a look of herself — She caught it, hauntingly, like a fleeting glimpse into a distant mirror.

“Come in with me,” she said quietly. The old familiar need to do for her own flooded into her again. In the troubled world there were the few who were her own. She took Frankie into her house and closed the door against the cold.

Inside, David was lying upon the floor reading furiously, his face set as though for a fight, his hands clenched in his hair. Mary was sitting beside him, absorbed with a little doll. In his corner in a pen she had made for him Paul was clinging to the side. He was six now, and he still said not a word. To these three she said calmly and with resolution, “This is Frankie.”

She went into the kitchen at once and quietly began to prepare the supper for them all.

She had not for a long time heard from Roger Bair — not, that is, for weeks. That was a long time. He had asked her to send him a picture of herself and she had none to send him. She had not had a picture taken since she left college. Instead she had written how she looked and what she did, and sent it to him. “Do you see me? Thirty-three years old, hair already a little gray and never cut. Height, five feet nine, weight to correspond, eyes green-blue, tending to be a little stern, maybe? There — I can’t write of myself.”