“It doesn’t seem as if anything could be wrong with such a lovely child.”
“No, it doesn’t, does it?” said Joan gratefully. It was true that among the sick children Paul looked sound and beautiful. She could not help being proud of him, a little. At least, sleeping, he was beautiful. The other woman’s child began to cry fretfully.
“She gets so tired, the poor little thing,” the woman said, trying to shift the weight of the huge head. “The doctor is late. They’re always late. I wish I had back all the hours I’ve wasted waiting for doctors.”
“Can’t they do anything?” Joan asked. Under the bulging enormous forehead the little girl’s face looked out, weazened, tiny, mouselike, twisted in old, old suffering.
“I don’t give up hope,” the mother said fervently. She bent and kissed the great forehead. “I keep hoping. You’ve got to hope.”
They all had the same hope, Joan thought, looking at the women’s faces. They looked eagerly at each other’s children, relieved when their eyes fell on one worse than their own. They looked quickly away from Paul because he seemed so sound, and they stared at crippled, deformed children hopefully.
When the doctor came in, their faces turned to him together, their eyes following him, searching his face eagerly. He came in, a robust, middle-aged figure with a small square beard and very clear agate-gray eyes. He was talking loudly and positively to a younger man who was with him.
“I tell you, Proctor, the diagnosis is perfectly obvious in ninety percent of these cases. The congenital undeveloped mind is consistently different from the birth-injured case that is possibly mentally normal. I never confuse the two—Just look at these here—”
His eyes ran, cold, darting, analyzing, along the walls. He was directly in front of her. She could smell a strong clean perfume upon him. She could see the hairy underside of his chin, the sharp triangle of his nose, the cold agate-gray eyes gazing downward. They did not see her. They saw only Paul. He had waked and was lying quietly in her arms.
“I am his mother,” she said steadily.
“You needn’t wait, my good woman, unless you want to. I don’t have anything more to say anyway. Take him home. When he gets too much for you, you’d better find a good institution.”
He passed on, talking and talking. She had turned in agony to the young doctor. But he had not met her eyes. He was listening closely and with respect to the cold, intelligent, knowing voice. She rose, pressing Paul’s little cap to his head.
Let her go home now, to the attic. She could fend off the pain until then. She would not examine the words until then. When she got home, under the close dark roof, she would take them out of her memory and comprehend them and let the waiting pain flow over her and cover her at last. Around her the patient women sat, not heeding. The door of the doctor’s office opened and their faces turned to it. A nurse came out, white and brisk, “First case, please!” No one saw her as she slipped away.
Bart met her at the station in his car. She climbed in and sat in silence beside him. He clattered along the rocky country road. She knew he was showing off to her. He wanted her to say how well he drove the car. The speedometer crept up and she could feel him wanting her praise, and when it did not come, perversely driving too fast that he might force her to say something. He had no imagination and so he never sensed danger. He could climb the barn roof and laugh when she looked away, shuddering. But if they were all killed, it would be well. She said nothing and at last he slowed down, sullenly.
“What did the doctor say about the kid?”
She seized the blade of pain in both hands. “He says Paul will never be right.”
She looked out over the fields. The corn was tasseling, and the summer was at its full. The forest green was deep and dark.
If Bart were a grown man, if he was really what his body seemed, she could turn and give Paul to him and rest her head upon his shoulder. There would be a bottom to this pain then. It would not go deeper and deeper fathomless, endless, a black tunnel through which she must walk alone all her life, without light to guide her to the end.
“Shucks, you can’t believe everything them city doctors say, Jo. He’s healthy as can be.”
“His body’s all right.”
“He’ll turn out good,” Bart repeated heartily. “You see if he don’t.”
She did not answer. The road was deep with dust. The sunset was flaming out of orange dust.
Bart cleared his throat. “Need rain,” he remarked. “Good growing weather for the corn, though.”
“Yes,” she said.
The house was just around the turn. They were there.
Now they were at the kitchen door. Bart’s mother was at the stove, frying potatoes.
“Supper’s ready,” she said, without turning her head.
“I’ll be down soon—don’t wait,” she answered. She carried Paul upstairs and washed him and fed him and laid him in his crib. He was tired and fell into effortless sleep. She fetched the small oil lamp from the box she used as a table and stood looking at him. These must be her moments of dreaming now, these moments at night when he was fast asleep. She could dream that he was like any other child. He had had a day of play, shouting, calling, chattering, crying, carrying out his busy little-boy plans, and now at the end of the day he was tired out. As his body grew she could pretend he was going to school, that he played baseball and rode a horse. When a young man’s body lay asleep, she could dream he was going to college. Her imagination flew in agony down the years. This was the waiting pain. Now it was come—now it could no longer be put away. It was here. It would go with her night and day as long as she lived, walk with her wherever she went, wait in her awake or if she slept. It seemed now she would never sleep again.
She opened a drawer to put away Paul’s cap. There lay the song she had begun to write on the day before he was born. The opening lines were there, the gay and triumphant beginning. But she had not known the ending. Today she knew. She took the paper and tore it into bits and went to the window and let them fly out into the deepening dark. Then she blew out the light and groped her way down the stairs.
At the table the food was dry in her mouth. She kept taking gulps of water to force it down. She must eat, of course. She must live now, as long as Paul lived. And his body had a long life to live.
“What did the doctor say?”
She looked up at Bart’s mother out of solitary deeps of pain. The question came from a long way.
“He said Paul will never be like other children.”
Over and over her life long she must be ready to say that. Wherever she went, people would say, “What is the matter with your baby?” After a while they would say, “What is the matter with your little boy?” They would say, “What is the matter with that young man?” Steadily, over and over, she must be ready to repeat, “He will never be like other children are—never as other young men are.” She must not flinch.
“Pass the bread,” Bart said. “I don’t take any stock in it.”
Sam passed the bread.
“It doesn’t pay to listen to doctors,” he said cheerfully. “I had a doctor tell me once I had a bone felon. But it was no more’n a boil.”
“I wish I hadn’t told you about Aunt Em’s girl,” said Bart’s mother fretfully. “Now you’ll get notions. They’re not one bit the same. Em’s girl was sickly from the time she got her fall. Paul’s different in every way. He’s just like Bart. Bart was an awful healthy baby. I said he’d talk when he got good and ready and he did. And Paul will, too.”
“Get some more milk,” Bart’s father interrupted. “I have to get done early tonight. There’s a meeting over at the church—a missionary from Africa’s talking. The parson wants a crowd and spoke to me as superintendent. Sam, get your good clothes on and go, too. You’d better go, Minna. He’s got lantern slides.”
“I haven’t planned,” she exclaimed in distress. “You ought to have told me sooner, so I could plan the work after supper.
”
“I’ll do everything,” said Joan.
“Wouldn’t you like to go though, maybe, Joan?” Bart’s mother, about to agree, paused. “It would be interesting—your sister a missionary and all. I’ll stay with Paul.”
“I’m very tired,” said Joan.
“Then maybe—” Bart’s mother said, unwillingly pleased. Then she said quickly, “It isn’t that I just want to see the pictures. I feel I ought to take an interest in the work the church is doing in heathen lands.”
“Yes,” said Joan. She turned to Bart. “Why don’t you go, too, Bart? You’d like the pictures.”
“Don’t know but I will,” said Bart.
So the house was emptied. There was only Paul and herself. The silence was complete. There was no sound of breathing or of footsteps. She washed the dishes and swept the crumbs away and set the table for breakfast and covered the table with the cloth. Then she bathed herself and brushed her hair and put on her nightgown. It was, she thought, as though she were laying herself down to die by her own hand. But she could not die, for Paul was alive. In the darkness she went to his crib and listened. He was breathing steadily, soundly. She felt his hand. It was warm and lax. She had done everything she could think of to do. She went and laid herself down in her bed and let agony fall upon her, unchecked at last.
But how could one live in agony day and night while a year passed, and then another and another? She would sleep a little and wake in the morning stifled, as one might wake in a dense smoke, or under a heavy weight. Before she was well awake, dragging her mind upward out of sleep, she knew something was wrong—terror waited. Then she was awake and there the terror was, fresh and sharp and new with the morning.
When she forgot, as sometimes she could forget, for a moment, for a moment of sunlight through shining leaves, for a moment of the phlox bed glowing under the noon sun, for a moment of dewy madonna lilies freshly blooming at twilight, the beauty of mists stealing up the hills from the valleys under the moon, the terror was there, new again, to be realized again and again. Better never to forget it than to have that continual new realization. “Oh, how lovely the hills are today under the moving shadows of the clouds!—Yes, but Paul will never be like other children.”
And there was no edge so desperately keen as when he himself made her forget, the close dearness of the nape of his neck when his fair hair began to curl against the white skin, the lovely roundness of his body in the tub. She could laugh with her passionate tenderness, adoring his loveliness, forgetting for a moment’s adoration, and feel her heart dissolve again in the eternal agony.
She longed to see other children. She plied Rose with questions of David. But Rose wrote unhappily that she was going to have another child. “I have so little time for the work now,” she wrote.
“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Joan cried aloud to herself, fierce with envy. She thought of going to Netta, and shrank from it. Meeting Fanny under the oak tree beyond the bend of the road, she begged her, “Bring little Frank with you next time. I want to see him again. It’s been so long.”
“Surely,” said Fanny. She had put on flesh in the past two years, and looked like a great dark poppy in a ruffled dress of scarlet lawn.
And the next week Joan could hardly listen to her for looking at the boy. There was some trouble. Fanny was in trouble, quarreling with her husband. She took pleasure in trouble and quarreling.
“Darling,” said Joan to the little boy, kneeling in the dust to him, “you’ve grown so big. Are you going to go to school?”
The child stared at her, charmed, his great black eyes soft and fathomless.
“If Fanny’ll let me—” he whispered.
“Don’t you say mamma?”
“She doesn’t like me to.”
Fanny laughed richly. “No, I don’t have any of them call me ma. It looks better. If I take him anywhere. I say he’s my brother.”
The child looked at her gravely as she laughed. Then he turned back to Joan and regarded her curiously and quietly with profound intelligence. That was the look Paul’s eyes should have had, that comprehending aware look. Francis, for all his waywardness, used to have it, and their mother seeing it would seize him and hold him and murmur over him. Strange to see Francis looking at her now out of the jungle!
“What are you going to do with this child, Fanny?” she asked anxiously.
The girl shrugged her shoulders gaily. “He’s all right, long as I don’t decide to go away. Long as that man behaves, that is!” She frowned darkly. “Not many men been to my taste like Frank was, though, I declare. Sometimes when I get thinking about Frank, I just lose my taste for them all. Isn’t he ever coming home? I wouldn’t bother him—just show him the boy and say hello.”
“No,” said Joan quickly. “He’s never coming back—he said so.”
The girl sighed, a deep full sigh.
“Well, I’ve got to be going. Thank you for the dollar again—it sure does help. I keep Frankie the nicest of any of my children.”
But she could not let him go. She felt the small body all over with her hands. It was firm and hard and shapely. She took his hand and it held to hers closely. The very feel of the body was different from Paul’s heaviness, the cling of the hand so different from Paul’s loose, varying clutch. She held the hand a moment and looked at it. She could imagine the smooth fresh skin white. But underneath, the blood ran dark.
“Is your little fellow all right?” asked Fanny. She was staring into a small mirror, rouging her already scarlet mouth.
Joan hesitated. Then she said firmly, “No, he’s not all right—there’s something wrong.”
Fanny lowered her mirror. Her face warmed with pity. “That’s too bad! My children’s all healthy. But I know a girl with a puny baby. She took her to a gospel meeting, and the preacher put his hand on her and she’s better—at least her ma says she’s better. Come on, Frankie—Lem’ll be mad, waiting for us!”
She had to let him go now. She rose and stood watching him walk sturdily through the dust. When she could see them no longer, she sat down beside the road, again desolate. Summer was passing, the corn was ripening, nothing was growing now. Summer after summer, before, she had left everything growing, pushing to bud and blossom and fruit, life full tilt with growing. Now it was stopped, over the whole land, over forest and field. There was no more growing. There was only ripening and slow downward dying. Another autumn was near. She got up and went home to Paul.
She kept remembering what Fanny had told her. There was a woman with a puny baby who took her to a gospel meeting and she got better. In South End the people were very ignorant and full of superstitions. Rose still wrote her long letters which Joan still sent to Mrs. Winters when she finished them, so that they could be read at missionary meeting. Rose said there were heathen women who went to temples if their children fell ill.
“In their blindness and ignorance,” Rose wrote, “they go to their gods and promise new robes or new shoes if the child recovers. It is difficult to persuade them to give up this foolish and wicked practice.”
On that first Sunday morning when she came home from college, it had not seemed necessary to think about God, because then she had taken everything for granted. God would take care of her. She had been told so often that God was good. Here in this home night and morning she sat while Bart’s father read “the Word of God.” She had not needed to listen, since God was good.
But now there was no use in pretending that Paul grew any better. He was no better. She played with him every day, singing over and over to him with desperate grim patience the gay childish songs her mother had sung to them all. “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s-man.” Francis used to pat his baby hands together in solemn ecstasy. “Paul, Paul, see? Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake—” She held his hands and patted them together day after day. Each day she waited to see his hands move a little upward of their own volition. “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake—” Day after day she let his hands fall and got u
p quietly to busy herself at some other task. It took a long time to teach little children—a long, long time. Her mother used to cry, “It does seem to me I have to keep telling you children the same thing over and over.” Every day she told Paul the same thing over and over.
Then one day when he was nearly five years old, she put his hands down. She went to the trunk and found a little box of toys she had made ready for his Christmas. Each year she had planned in happiness. “Next year, I’ll have a tiny tree. He will be big enough surely to notice the candles and to laugh at toys.”
She would not wait this time for Christmas. She lit the lamp and set it where he could see it. She opened the box and brought out a rattle she had bought, with bells on the handle, and she jangled it near him. She took his hand and curved the fingers about the handle and moved it gently. But when she took her hand away, the rattle dropped. She snatched up the lamp, sobbing, and held it above him. He did not recognize the light. His wandering eyes saw and slipped away.
“It is no use pretending anymore,” she said aloud, fiercely. She set down the lamp and put all the toys back into the box and set the box into the trunk and closed it. There never would be Christmas in this house. She knew it now. She began her old sobbing again. “Oh, God,” she said sobbing, “oh, help me, God!”
Her father used to teach them, saying, “Ask and you shall receive, for so we are taught.”
She searched in the trunk for her mother’s Bible. She and Rose had put it there. It had been years since she had read the Bible for herself. On Sunday afternoons when she was a little girl they each had to read a chapter. And once for a while when she was a young girl she had read it of her own will, to delight in the swinging powerful words. There was the Song of Solomon. And then abruptly she had put it aside and read instead the poems of the Brownings, and Tennyson’s “Princess,” and any love stories she could find.
Time Is Noon Page 30