Time Is Noon (16 page)

So, dubiously, they had left the wreaths and the great silver star shone above the chancel and they set her there under it.

But it was all strange and awry. It was strange for the father to be in the pew with them instead of the mother. He was out of place there, while the short stout Methodist minister stood in his pulpit to praise the dead.

He felt shorn and embarrassed. To hear these praises made even her memory unreal. “A good and faithful wife,” a strange voice said, “a shining light in the community, a friend to us all—we shall miss her.” It seemed indecent to hear his wife thus publicly commended. He shrank within himself. Mary—his mind was full of Mary, Mary going about the house at her little swift half-run, Mary at the table managing for them all, Mary—but he could not quite remember her face now. He had never been good at remembering faces. Her eyes had been brown, he knew. He remembered that because when they were alone in the night and she had got into bed first as she always did because she was so quick, she lay looking at him, her eyes strange and dark and quiet, and this look always made him uncomfortable although he did not know why. She was so strange when they were alone together—he wanted the light out because she was always less strange when he could not see her. Her warm and present body was familiar to him, but when the candle was lit her dark silent eyes made her strange again. They had argued about the candle lit in the night. She said, “Let me light the candle, Paul, I want the light. The darkness weighs me down.”

But he did not answer. He held her and hurried on. It was not only that her eyes were dark and strange, but the light made him ashamed of what he wanted to do. He argued it with himself in the daytime, in the study, working on his sermon, the Bible open before him. Why should he be ashamed when it was lawful wedlock? Why should he want the darkness to hide him? But if she prevailed, and sometimes she had, then desire went out of him and he felt himself injured and helpless, and he could not see why, because to put such things into words seemed shameful to him …

“So He giveth His beloved sleep,” the voice from the pulpit declared with unction.

But her mother did not want sleep, Joan cried passionately in her heart. She wanted to be awake, to live, to run and to work and to laugh. She begrudged even the sleep of night. She arose early every day, eager to be awake. She asked nothing except not to sleep. But God had given her only sleep, eternal sleep. A rush of anger rose up in Joan, anger against God, God was suddenly real and alive to her, a shape of force, definite and inexorable and powerful. They were all lost in that power, helpless in the reasonless tossing ocean of God’s power. Tears filled her eyes, furious tears. She looked at the family. She gathered them together in her heart, her father, Rose, Francis, and each was touching. They were forlorn and deserted. God had robbed them. Her father was very pale, even his lips were suddenly dry and pale. He was not listening. He had opened a hymnbook and he was reading a psalm in the back. Rose, pretty Rose, her little sister, was sitting quietly, her hands folded, sitting so still, her tongue moistening her lips now and then. And Francis was her mother’s love. She must be responsible now for Francis and for all he did. His face was twisted and set into sternness against weeping. He alone of the three was staring rigidly at what lay beneath the Christmas star.

… She had died, after all, his mother. Now he need never tell her. There would never come that moment when he would go into the house and see her face and know she knew. For nothing of him was hidden from her long. There was something between them so hot and close that when he tried to hide a thing from her she knew it. She caught it from him by sight and smell and touch. And he knew when she knew. He was helpless with her, loving her and hating her at the same time because she was so close. She had been too close sometimes so that he was rebellious and wanted to be free of her, flinging himself away from her, flinging himself against her will. He wanted to obey her because he wanted to please her. He was driven to disobey her because she was too close and he loved her more than he wanted to love her.

Now that she was gone, he was half dead too. He wanted her back, he wanted her close again. There was no one in him really except her. As soon as this damned preacher was done talking he’d go and find Fanny.

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 said, 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—”