Time Is Noon

by Pearl S. Buck

  No, he couldn’t go and find Fanny on the very day of his mother’s funeral. That was worse even than he was. It had been bad enough to go when his mother was dying. But Fanny was the only one who could make him forget. He was trembling with the need to cry. Fanny was the only person to whom he could cry and not be ashamed. When he had put his head down on her breast and cried, “Fanny, she’s going to die!” Fanny had hushed him in her arms and murmured over him richly. “Sweet boy, cry and ease yourself—cry and cry, sweet boy. It’s no shame to cry on me—” He was trembling with the need to cry again …

  Joan saw his hands, wet, trembling, twisting. She slipped her hand into his arm and held him. She must take care of them all now—her father, Rose, Frank. She gathered them all to her, they were hers, hers. She would care for them and defend them, comfort them and love them, protect them against everything, even against God.

  The people rose and she rose too. The organ was playing quietly, “For all the saints who from their labors rest.” It was nothing to her that Martin was playing, nothing that people were singing softly and sadly to his playing. She would carry on her mother’s life. She would never rest. She would go on doing her mother’s work, working, working, making her mother’s life go on.

  “Good-bye, Joan,” the nurse whispered to her as the singing slid to an amen. “I’m catching the train for my next case. I almost didn’t have time for the funeral. But I like to stay to the funerals if I can, especially if I get fond of the patient like I did. I’m lucky today—just got a telegram this morning there was an arthritis case waiting, and, they’re apt to last. Now remember what I said and look out for a little fun for yourself. She was sure a grand case, and I’m sorry she had to go. But don’t sit and grieve.”

  “I’ll be very busy,” said Joan steadfastly. She grasped the thick strong hand gratefully and clung to it a little. It was something to cling to for a moment. But almost at once it was pulled heartily away and the ruddy round friendly face disappeared among the faces gathering around her. She lost the rough touch of the hand in many gentle touches of other hands. “Dear Joan, let us do anything we can.” “We’ll all miss her, sir.” “Francis, my boy, Ned says he’ll be over first thing tomorrow—wants you to go hiking if you feel like it. I said I didn’t know if it was the thing—”

  Against her cheek Joan felt Mr. Billings’ gusty breath and he whispered windily in her ear, “She was a real lady, your mother was—never niggled over anything—bought it or didn’t buy it, but no complaining like some I know. I’ll be sending the meat up just the same, as nice a side of lamb as I ever had—I said to Mollie you wouldn’t be wanting turkey this Christmas.” There were tears in his small black eyes and they glittered on the insurmountable mounds of his cheeks, and then ran down by his ears. Joan’s heart flew to him. “Thank you—thank you for your feelings especially,” she said, and somehow for the first time was a little comforted.

  Used as she was to leaping from her cot many times in a night, it was strange to lie quietly in her own bed again in her own room, so strange that for long she could not fall asleep. When at last she did sleep it was only for a little while. She woke to find herself standing in the blackness of the night, groping for her mother’s bed. “Yes, yes,” she was muttering, “here I am—here—here—”

  But her hand fell on nothing and instantly in the darkness she was awake and she knew what had happened. She remembered that they had put her mother in the churchyard, there on the far side of the church, away from the house. Her mother was lying now in the utter closed darkness of the earth, forever sleeping. For an instant she, too, was in that narrow buried cell. She saw the somber intensely sleeping face. Her hands flew to her breast. Her mother would not be changed yet. Oh, somehow she must get her out and away, into the air again, into life again!

  Then she heard the sound of a cough from the next room, her mother’s room. Her father was there. He had moved back again this very night. Into the same bed where he had been used to sleep he had gone, and now he lay alone. She listened. He was awake. She had heard him cough once more and felt a new pity for him. She forgot she had been angry with him. He was alone, too, and she must go to him. She opened the door softly, a small crack. He lay there in the bed, the candle lit beside him, the covers tucked beneath his arms. On his breast he held his large thin hands folded. He was staring ahead of him, but she was not sure he did not sleep. He had opened the windows wide and in the stir of the air the candle threw a moving shadow over his face.

  “Father,” she said softly, tentatively. He turned and looked at her from afar off, solemnly.

  “What is it?” he asked her.

  “I heard you coughing—are you wanting anything?”

  He hesitated. “No, nothing,” he replied quietly.

  She waited, but he said no more, and she closed the door and went back to her own room, her pity in her still, but now somehow cold.

  Ah, but she was cold, her body cold, her feet cold! The air had changed in the night to great cold, and she huddled into her bed, suddenly forlorn and chilled to the heart. And then the pity which was in her turned upon herself and for herself she wept and wept until sleep came at last.

  But it was well to weep in the night and have it done. She woke in full dawn spent, with the quietness of one spent for a time, knowing that for a while she had wept her fill. She rose quietly, subdued, with no aching necessity for any weeping, and dressed herself and went downstairs and spoke to Hannah gently. “Good morning, Hannah.”

  Hannah was late and untidy. She had not combed her hair and she was moving about slowly, sodden with weeping, ostentatious with grief.

  “Let’s try and have everything as cheerful as we can this morning, Hannah,” she said quietly. “Mother would want us to.”

  She found a clean tablecloth and put it on the table, and out of all the flowers in the house she found some red roses Miss Kinney had brought. “I bought them,” said Miss Kinney in a piercing whisper. She had not wiped away the tears running down her small withered face. But Mr. Blum had not been willing to use anything except white flowers.

  She set the red roses on the table. The sun was careless and beautiful. It shone through the windows as it always did and poured empty cheerfulness into the room. She made everything ready and perfect for them all, postponing sorrow. Even Hannah’s trembling lips did not bring the tears again to her own eyes. She waited while Hannah dried her eyes upon her apron and listened when Hannah asked, “Do you want I should go over your mother’s things for you?”

  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 sai
d, 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.

  “It is all over for her, isn’t it?” she said. “Let’s go now and put his things into the closets and the drawers.”

  II

  EVERY DAY NOW AT THE MEALS SHE SAT IN HER MOTHer’s place. Her own place was gone and she had her mother’s. Without knowing it she even began to use her mother’s words and ways, to do all those things her mother used to do. About the house she saw as her mother would have seen. It did not occur to her to take down the pictures she had once despised. She was so mingled with her mother that the house, the family, became her own. She found herself watching each one possessively, jealous for the good of each. She had no life of her own.

  Her father gave to her each week the small sum he had been used to giving her mother and out of it she wrested fiercely their food and clothing. And then one night in her bed, lying awake in the light of the cold clear moon, she planned that she would do more. She would save still more fiercely and build again that small store of silver, bit by bit. She would do it for her mother.

  She leaped out of her bed and went to her little desk and wrote to her mother. She wrote an answer to the letter she had found. Mother, I do not know if you can see this or not, she wrote. But I am going to go on with the fund, and if Rose or Francis needs it, it will be there. She went back to bed planning where she might save a penny or two from, the meat, from the butter. Her father would not notice. The next day she put the two letters together in a little box her mother had used for handkerchiefs, a small sandalwood box someone had once brought her from Italy, and she took out of her housekeeping money twenty-five cents. She would save it somehow during the week.

  So bit by bit each week, some weeks only a penny, some weeks as much as a dollar, she added to what was in the sandalwood box, where her mother’s letter lay with her own letter. She kept the box in the attic in the tray of the round-topped trunk. He would not loo
k there again, thinking he had taken everything. It came to be a secret comfort to her, the knowledge of that small, steadily growing store, as it had been a comfort to her mother.

  But it was not easy to be her mother. She had not the years it had taken to temper her mother, to make her patient. She was eager, too eager, to do for them. Her young boundless strength rushed out to do for them more than they wanted. She straightened Francis’ drawers and he scowled at her. “I wish you’d leave my things alone.” It hurt her amazingly. He never had minded when his mother had done the same thing. “Leave my drawers alone, will you?” he demanded again. “I can’t find my things.”

  “I only put your clean collars—”

  “I can put my own things where I want them,” he said.

  And there was Rose with her strange, soft obstinacy. When the long Christmas holiday was nearly over Joan said briskly, “Now we’ll have to be getting you ready to go back to college. We’ll need to look at your clothes.” She thought of the sandalwood box warmly. If Rose needed a new hat or some little thing there’d be enough. Or she could give her something of her own. In the village she needed very little. There was a blue evening dress. She needed no evening dress here in Middlehope, where the gayest evening was to go with her father and have supper with one of the families in the church, a plain home supper. They would not have known what to make of an evening dress. They would have thought she was putting on airs. There was really no place to wear pretty clothes.

  “I want you to take my blue dress back to college with you, Rose. I don’t need it.”

  “I’m not going back to college, Joan,” said Rose.

  They were alone, making beds, now in Francis’ room. She paused, astonished. “Not going back?” she said stupidly, staring at Rose.