Pearl Buck - Time Is Noon

She also asked David. “David, write down how I look. Someone wants my picture and I haven’t a one.” He stretched himself before the fire with pencil and pad and considered her seriously and wrote hard, for almost an hour, his tongue between his lips, scratching out an occasional word. When it was done he folded it very small and gave it to her.

“Shall I read it?” she asked.

He blushed brilliantly. “I don’t care,” he muttered, and ran out of the house into the spring evening. But she did not read it, telling Roger she had not. “I told my boy David to write you a picture of me.”

She had not heard from him since. She could not forget that she had not. It gnawed in her all day and she remembered at night with a feeling of emptiness that it was a long time since she had seen his handwriting. But she waited. She would wait and if the time went on she would ask Francis. But she read the newspaper carefully each day because she grew a little frightened. Among the headlines of stocks falling headlong and swarming runs upon banks she searched for a news item — PILOT CRASHES. But it was not there. It came at last to be almost enough that it was not there.

In her house her life was divided into the four children. David was the warm vivid center about which they moved. He was the one who was always having something happen to him. Every particle of him was adventure. She could go all day with her heart in her mouth because in the afternoon his school team was playing the Clarkville team. He was so little but he would go wherever the big boys went. When he burst into the house shouting for her, shouting, “We beat ’em — we beat ’em!” her heart let down in instant relief. “Oh, David, I’m so glad!” “Yep,” he boasted, “we beat ’em ten to nothing — to nothing, mind you, Joan!” He was strung so high, so fine, suffered in such an abyss of agony, he was so impaled by pain, joy such ecstasy, that the house vibrated with him. She was involved in all his being. He was shy with her for a while until he asked her, “Did you read what I wrote about you?” She shook her head, smiling. “I sent it off just as you folded it.” He was relieved, his shyness fell off him like an awkward garment not his own. He was not naturally shy.

But after a while she saw he had something to say to her and she put herself quietly in his way, that he might speak. “You’re a comfort to me, David. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Remembering the rare precious praise her mother had given her, she was lavish with her own praise to them all. Even to Paul she gave praise. “That’s just fine, Paul — now walk to me, here, Good boy, good boy—” He staggered his few steps industriously, clutching her hand, turning his empty face up to catch her praise.

The warmth in her voice freed David’s tongue. “I just want to tell you,” he said offhandedly, “that I only wrote good things about you.” He was turned away from her, but she saw that his trim close-set ears were crimson. “Thank you, David,” she said composedly, careful not to be tender. He turned over the pages of a book he was reading. “I said,” he added, suffused, “I said I wished you were my real mother.” She wanted to run to him and take him in her arms, to fondle him and adore him. But she knew him. She went on with her sewing. “You are like my own son,” she said. She lifted her eyes and he met them and a deep look passed between them. “Guess I’ll go out a while,” he said quickly.

“Fresh cookies in the jar,” she reminded him. So that was the picture he had given to Roger. It was easier to wait for Roger again.

She had been anxious until she knew what David would feel of Frankie. She was silent while David watched Frankie, weighing him.

“Why is he so brown if he isn’t Chinese?” he asked starkly before them all.

“Frank is American,” she answered. “There are many Americans who are black. Frankie’s mother was dark and his father was white. That’s why he is brown and why his hair is curly and why he has his lovely voice.”

“Sing,” David commanded.

Frankie opened his mouth and began to sing. The song was abominable, musical claptrap, but his voice startled her again. It flowed out of him richly, largely, noble in its volume, dignifying the cheap tune. They listened, even Paul listened, his eyes wandering, searching for the source. Mary stretched out her arms, imperious to be taken and brought near.

“What else do you know?”

“I know a lot of things,” said Frankie. He began to sing again. “Like a river, glorious, is God’s perfect peace.” She listened, remembering her father.

“Who taught you that?” she asked.

“I’ve heard ’em singing it down in South End,” he answered. “Some of the old folks sing it. Fanny sings it sometimes when she’s feeling good.”

Well, she had found a peace, too. And David loved Frankie. “Sing something funny!” he would demand. And Frankie, his great eyes suddenly droll, sang a witty tune, “De farmer say to de weevil.” David listened, laughing. He loved Frankie because Frankie could make him laugh. But Frankie, without knowing it, shaped himself to each one of them. He made David laugh, he fetched and carried for imperious Mary, he lifted Paul to his feet and urged him to stepping. “There now, ’atta boy!” And to Joan he was something she did not understand. But she knew that if she were to grow old and weak, David might be wandering beyond seas, and Mary would be having her own way, and Paul would be as he had been born, but Frankie would come back to see that she had food and shelter. There was faithfulness in him. She could feel it, deep and steadfast in his quiet lovely look.

David and Frankie grew together, sleeping in the same room, going to the same school. But Frankie was far below his grade. David came home one afternoon bleeding, blown with battle.

“Why, David!” cried Joan horrified, hastening for water and bandages.

“Some of the fellows laughed at Frankie,” he said furiously. “They said he was dumb and they called him a nigger, and I socked ’em. He’s just dark, isn’t he, Joan?”

She looked at Frankie and caught his look, full of deep self-realization.

“Let me wash you, David,” she said. “Turn around and let me see you.” He turned, not knowing in his anger that she had not answered. When he had gone clattering upstairs to change his bloody shirt, Frankie spoke to her.

“I know I’m a nigger, ma’am.”

She looked back at him impulsively. But he might at this moment have been Francis, cut in bronze! She leaned to him and quickly kissed his forehead. “You are one of my children,” she said.

He warmed and melted, wavering, longing. But he did not dare to come too near her. He took her hand and held it against his cheek. His cheek was hot and soft beneath her palm. Now she felt this other flesh. It was as sweet, as sound, as any flesh, not strange to her. “There,” she said. “Run along and find David. I’ll spread you both some bread and jam.”

But under this passage of the days there was a stillness. They were very nearly enough, these children. Paul was nearly enough of sorrow. He was there among the others, blind, stumbling, mumbling at his hands, seizing gluttonously upon his food. His placid baby face was changing. The vacancy of his mind was beginning to shape it inexorably and more swiftly than wisdom might have shaped it. He was nearly sorrow enough, but not quite. There might be, she was beginning to know, a sorrow deeper than Paul, even as there was a joy deeper than David’s and Mary’s growing, sweeter than Frankie’s singing. They were not quite enough, all of them, for her sorrow and her joy. Something bright had ceased to weave beneath her, as though Roger were not living. Silence was worse than death. She never could bear silence since she had left Bart’s house. To be alive and silent was more meaningful than death. Day after day went past and he was silent. She came to feel she was living on a far island, out of sight and sound. Above her in the air, around her in the seas, people came and went and moved and struggled. But she heard nothing. Fanny had not come back. Francis did not write. Even in the village there was silence. No one came near her, day after day. Only Mrs. Winters had come twice, to look at the children. “I want them to know their grandmother,” she said. But both times she had stared at Paul.