Pearl Buck - The Eternal Wonder

“Congratulations,” he said.

“Yes,” Chris continued. “Happened last year when Ruthie and I got married. Remember Ruthie?”

Did he not? He had never forgotten the glimpse he had had of that rosebud organ, in childish ignorance that was scarcely old enough to be curiosity. He wondered if Ruthie remembered.

“Of course I remember,” he said. “She was so pretty.”

“Yeah,” Chris said proudly, but pretending carelessness. “I had to marry her to keep the crowd away. She’s pretty, all right. In fact”—he paused for a short laugh—“she was so damned pretty that our kid’s coming a little too soon. We had to hurry the wedding. Course, there was no question I wanted to marry her, but we had to hurry everything. This here garage—I might have waited another year or two—our folks had to help out. But—”

He slapped his knees. “It’s done. I’m on my way, I’m makin’ out. Business is good here on the truck route.” He glanced at the open door. “Here comes Ruthie now, bringin’ me a hot lunch. Have a bite with me? There’s always plenty. She don’t skimp on anything, Ruthie don’t. She’s a damned good kid.”

Ruthie reached the door and hesitated, basket in hand.

“I didn’t know you had company,” she said.

“Come in, hon,” Chris shouted. “Guess who this is!”

She came in, and set the basket on the table beside Chris, and stared.

“Did I see you before?” she asked.

Yes, she was pretty as ever, he thought, her face fuller but almost as childlike as he remembered. But her body was the body of a woman ready to give birth. The mystery of birth! He had scarcely thought of it yet. He had scarcely thought of women, his life so much the life of his mind.

“Yes, you have seen me before,” he said.

They waited while she continued to stare at him. Then she shook her head.

“I don’t remember you,” she said.

He felt a quick relief. She did not remember him. Probably there had been many episodes, none as childish as the one he remembered so vividly.

“He’s Rannie!” Chris shouted, laughing at her puzzlement. “’Member little ole Rannie in school? Always knowin’ all the answers? You sure were a damned know-it-all, Rann—makin’ fools out of the rest of us. We didn’t like you too well for it in them days either.”

“You wouldn’t like me any better now,” he said in a quiet bitterness.

“Aw, it don’t matter now,” Chris said with kindly warmth. “I got my garage. I got my girl—what else do I need? I make good money.”

Ruthie sat down, her eyes still gazing. “You’ve changed,” she announced. “I wouldn’t of known you anywhere. Didn’t you used to be sort of runty?”

“Naw, he wasn’t ever runty—he was just a kid besides us—too smart for us, I reckon. Well, it takes all kinds. What’d you bring? Pork and beans—enough for an army! Have some, Rannie.”

He rose. “No, thanks, Chris. I must be on my way, I’m leaving town—”

“Goin’ where?”

“New York first—Columbia, perhaps. I am to finish in another year. Then I may go on to my doctorate. I haven’t decided.”

Chris let his jaw drop. “Say, how old are you now?”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen!” Chris echoed. “Hear that, Ruthie? Still a kid and talkin’ about bein’ a doctor!”

He opened his mouth to explain, “not a medical doctor,” and then did not explain. What was the use? These were not his people.

“Good-bye,” he said. He put out his hand to Chris and then to Ruthie. “I’m glad I came by before I went.” They were warm, they were honest, they were kind, but they were not his people and he went away leaving them behind forever.

“WHEREVER YOU GO, SON,” HIS mother had begged him, “stop and see my father—your grandfather—in New York City. He lives alone there in a little apartment in Brooklyn. I don’t know why. He rarely writes to me now. When he came back to America after my mother died, he went to the city where he was born. He said he’d always wanted to live there and to live alone. I’ve felt badly about it—but he was never like anyone else. Sometimes I wonder if you take after him!”

He did not promise that he would seek out his grandfather. He did, however, go to New York and take a room at a small hotel—simple but to him horrifyingly expensive, although his mother had given him the money on which they had once planned to go to Europe before his father died. It was a long, narrow room, “self-contained,” the landlord called it, because at one end there was a small gas stove, a smaller refrigerator, and a sink with a cold-water faucet. Down the dark and dusty hall upon which it opened there was a communal bathroom in which beside the toilet was an old four-legged bathtub. But the room itself was furnished after a fashion, and the bed was clean. The landlord, an ancient bearded Jew who wore a small black cap on his head, was proud of the room.

“You can see a tree outside the window when spring comes,” he said. “A wild tree to be sure; no one planted it, but it grows bigger every year down there out of a crack in the cement.”

This was to be his home then for how long he did not know. For he had not yet made up his mind to go to any school or college, in spite of what he had told Chris. Teachers were not to be trusted. No one was to be trusted. He would live alone and learn. Somewhere in this endless city there were books, a library, museum, and these would be his schoolrooms, these and the streets. There was everything here in the city. He was not ready even to see his grandfather. He had not realized how much he needed to be alone and free—free even of school and teachers. He decided not so much consciously as instinctively, that he would not go back to college nor think of doctorates and degrees. He wanted to learn about life, learn through living. Suddenly he realized that he knew nothing—nothing at all.

HE WAS NOT LONELY BEING ALONE, for all his life he had been lonely, and now he did not notice that he was any more so. Now, since there was no one who knew him and he knew no one, he could think his thoughts undisturbed. He did not so much think as wonder. Wonder was his atmosphere, wonder at all he saw and heard. The city enveloped him as the sea envelops a fish. He rose early, for in the early morning the city was different from the city at noon or in the evening and the night. The streets were clean, for all night great machines had marched ponderously to and fro, sweeping with great insulating brushes or spouting splashing falls of water that spread over the asphalt and ran gurgling down the drains. In the morning the air was cool. If the wind blew in from the sea, the air was almost pure, but that was before people poured into the streets, before great trucks came lumbering in from the highways, filled with food and goods and spewing out of their tails a foul, thick smoke, before cars and cabs raced each other against the changing streetlights.

He liked to go early to the river, which ran down to the sea. He enjoyed the fish markets and the sellers and buyers of fish of every kind. This was all so new to him, for he was an inlander, born and bred. Most of all he loved the ships. Someday he would sail in a ship across the Atlantic Ocean. But for now this city was huge enough for him to explore. With his already trained and disciplined mind, he divided the city into its parts, racially and nationally. Not all of these people spoke English, and he would try to find out from what part of the world they came—Puerto Ricans, speaking Spanish? It did not wound him, or even touch his real being when they cursed him with strange curses because he was white and different from them. He understood instinctively, with his envisioning mind, why they could naturally hate him. Why not? They had reason to hate him. And the blacks he studied with endless wonder, wandering through their streets, watching them, listening to them with their strange mouthing of the English language so that he found them more difficult to understand than the Puerto Ricans, even though the latter spoke an impure Spanish. The blacks were different from all the others. He felt it, he knew it. With his orderly, comprehending mind, he knew it.