Time Is Noon (36 page)

She wrote to Rose. “Does David laugh and smile? Does he make sounds?” Rose replied, surprised, “You forget David is nearly a year old. He is trying to talk. He is very delicate and he has been ill so much, too.” She sent a small photograph of a grave little boy, held by a cheerful dark-faced Chinese woman. She studied the small shape. It was a delicate face, a thin body held very straight. The eyes looked out, intense, tragic, and the mouth was pursed into some rebellion. Her heart rushed to him. If I had him I’d build him up, she thought. He needs good food—he ought to get out of that climate. She went and picked Paul up from his crib. He was beautiful. She took pride in his size and health. His body was fat and solid, the dimpled hands chubby, his thighs broad and well-fleshed, his cheeks scarlet and his lips apple-red. But he was so lazy.

“Lazy, lazy!” She laughed at him and nuzzled her face into the fragrant creases of his neck. “Sit up, lazybones! It’s time you were sitting up!”

But when she took her hand away from his back he fell against her, softly, effortlessly, and leaned upon her. “You don’t try,” she scolded him. Then, sick with her love for him, she held him against her. Children were not all the same, she thought, cuddling him. Not all children could be the same. And he was so dear to hold, a lovely baby to hold, leaning in her arms, willing to be held.

“David is so independent,” Rose wrote. “He is so difficult to keep in bed when he is ill. He is a very difficult child to control.”

She kissed Paul’s soft whitish hair under her chin. Against her bosom he lay, his full pink cheek pressed against her breast. He did not cry even to be fed. It was as though he did not know her bosom lay there beneath his cheek. His lips never went seeking. He was like a pretty, plump doll. She held him to her firmly.

“Not all children can be the same,” she said.

And after a while after the winter was passed and spring came again, he began to hold his head up a little and to reach sometimes for the toys she made him—a red dog she sewed, a green rabbit. Perhaps if his toys were bright he would see them better. He would reach for them and hold them and soon they would drop from his hands and he would not miss them. She ran to pick them up for him, to play with them for him, to coax his hands to hold them.

One windy April day she took him outdoors, and above the gusty wind she heard a steady roar. She looked up quickly to see the plane driving through the huge white clouds, flashing across the blue between. “Look, look,” she cried to Paul. She held him up, and with her hand under his chin she forced his gaze upward. And if by any chance Roger Bair was there, so high above her, would he look down and see a woman holding a child up to him? But Paul’s eyes could not catch the swiftly moving shape.

“Look, Mother’s boy! See, darling!” she cried. But his eyes slipped away quickly. She followed them. At what was Paul looking? He seemed not to look seeingly at anything, his gaze as silent as his voice.

But the silence was not as it was before his coming. It was not empty silence, not lonely silence in the house. He was there, growing, eating, sleeping. He was there to be carried in her arms. She carried him in the spring to the woods and made him a bed upon soft old leaves and he lay in the warming sun while she found bloodroot and violets and she carried him into the orchard and saw him seraphic beneath the blossoms, his cheeks pink too, his hair a fluffed gold, his eyes blue. She must have him everywhere. When he was awake, she propped him in pillows near her while she worked. When he slept, she ran to see if he still breathed.

Nothing else was real. Bart was surly with her these days. “I’m still nursing him, Bart,” she said steadily. “I’m not willing—not until I’ve finished nursing him anyway.” Bart glanced at her often from underneath his thick red brows. He tried to catch hold of her awkwardly when she happened to pass him. But she made her body tense and cold against him and he let her go. Once his mother said to her, a faded pink in her cheeks and red staining the folds of her neck, “If you take care, you don’t need to keep Bart waiting till the baby’s done nursing.” Joan was ironing one of Paul’s little dresses and at the words she turned her head quickly back to her work. Bart had complained of her.

“I can tell you what you can do,” the voice came again from beside the stove—halting, thick with embarrassment. “I can tell you what my own mother told me. She said to me the day I married Abram—‘a man can always spit outside the pot’—that’s what she told me.”

Joan went on steadily … Now run the iron along that tiny tuck, now along the fine edge of lace. She folded the little dress and for a moment lifted her eyes to the window and gazed into the maple trees. They were summer green, the fresh young leaves now fully grown. A little wind moved among them and stirred the clear green shadows and the branches showed for a moment, dark and smooth. She knew the branch shape of every tree. On winter mornings she had lifted her gaze to them, bare against a gray sky, or standing noble under snow, statues in the storm. She did not answer. She could not answer with this sickness in her. Let her think of lovely things, of the ferns in the rocks of the wall, of the lilies growing under the trees. But what she saw against the inner curtain of her brain was a man’s face, Roger Bair’s face, thin and finely drawn upon her brain. And she knew she could never go back to Bart now. She picked up the pile of dresses and climbed the back stairs to the attic and put them away in the round-topped trunk, the smell of their newly ironed freshness warm in her nostrils. She went over to the crib and looked down at the child. He was lying awake and he looked back at her. “Paul,” she whispered. “Paul.” All her lonely being rushed out and laid hold upon this child. “Speak to me,” she whispered, “your mother—”

He was nearly eight months old. She fell upon her knees and wrapped her arms about him and lifted his head in her hand. She forced a smile to her lips and nodded her head to him to draw his wandering eyes back to her face. They came wavering back to her at last, the great beautiful blue eyes. For a moment they met her eyes fully, for a moment before they slipped again. For that moment she looked down into their depths, caught and plumbed them and stared down into them. They were empty. He could not answer her because he did not know her. She held him rigidly a moment, terrified, and then laid him gently down. Something was wrong with Paul. It was as though when she laid him down he was gone away forever. She went to the window and stood there. She had a fantasy that somewhere a little boy had tiptoed away and closed the door and left her alone again.

It began to come to her in the early dawn that perhaps the real Paul had never been born at all. She sat holding him, holding his body to which she had given birth. She had sat holding him all night. She could not bear to lay him in his crib. She must have his warm body in her arms at least. It’s like holding him dead, she thought. It’s holding my dead child. Paul is dead.

In the early morning she heard Bart’s footsteps on the stairs. He stumbled upon the threshold and caught himself. “Say, where did you put those blue shirts I had last summer? I’ve got to make hay today and I’ll roast at best.” He saw her face bent over the child. “Kid sick?” he asked. He came over and took the child’s hand in his great hand. The small plump white hand lay there in his lined, grimy palm.

“Bart,” she said, “there’s something wrong with this child.” She forced every word slowly.

But Bart grinned. “He looks all right—not fevered—hand’s cool as a cucumber.”

“He doesn’t know me—he doesn’t sit up alone.”

“He’s too little,” Bart said.

“No, he’s not. Rose says David sat up long before this.”

“Kids aren’t the same. You fuss too much, Jo. Sam was sort of slow, I remember, but he turned out all right. Give him time. Here, kid—” He put his thick finger under Paul’s chin and tickled him. A slow vague smile came to the small lips. “Sure, you’re all right, aren’t you? Say, Jo, I wish you’d come and get me those shirts. Pop’s yelling to start on the hay.”

“All right, Bart.”

But then it was good to stir, to have to move and do something, to know the night was ended. She laid the child down upon the bed. After the shadows of night it was good to feel the stairs beneath her feet, to open drawers, to feel solid stuff in her hands, solid, coarse, everyday stuff.

She found the shirts and gave them to Bart. She went downstairs and busied herself about the kitchen. The sun was tipping the horizon and light spilled from it like shining water. In the barnyard across the road Sam was harnessing the horses, forcing them backward into the traces. Their great heads towered over him, snorting, protesting. The cows were coming in a solemn procession out of the gate and turning down the road to the pastures, lush with the full-grown grass. Behind them was Bart’s father, his shoulders bent beneath the weight of a full milk bucket in each hand. She fetched a cup and went to meet him to dip up the new milk. The old man watched her, grudging, silent, and went on his way into the cellar.

She stood drinking the milk in the sunshine. Within her was the waiting darkness of the night, to which she must return. But just for this moment it was morning. The trees, the hills, the sky were real. She stood among them in the morning. The night was behind her and before her, but here was morning. She looked upward to the sky, quickly, searching. It was a habit now to search the sky. But it was empty, high, above her, serene and blue.

“When did Bart begin to talk?” she asked his mother, when Paul was well past a year old. For these many months she had spent her every moment watching Paul, measuring him, testing all his powers. Did he hear her when she called him? Yes, he turned his head slowly when she called. Did he see? Yes, his eyes followed the red flannel dog if she moved it slowly enough. Would he put out his hand to take it? Yes, he took it, but he let it fall. He did not remember that he had it.

Bart’s mother stirred the sauce made from the sweet apples. She used sweet apples for sauce so that sugar could be spared. “There’s enough sugar in food natural,” she said. “Folks shouldn’t want to keep eating sugar. It’s a flesh pander.”

Sam and Bart both bought cheap candy, secretly, like little boys, and ate it as men drink liquor, starved for sweetness. Bart’s pockets were sticky with the stuff when Joan washed his garments.

“Bart?” said his mother vaguely. “Oh, I don’t know—he was kind of late. He didn’t really talk before he was five, I guess. I remember some pestering neighbor woman came in one day when he was three and said it was funny he didn’t talk yet. But I always said he’d talk when he got ready to, and he did.” She stirred and tasted the stuff. “Em had a girl who never did talk, though. She had a fall, they always said. She never was just right. They got her put away finally. Em couldn’t do with her around when she was grown up—she’d act queer before folks.”

On a spring morning she waited for Fanny under the oak tree around the bend and when they came, she took Frankie’s hand and said, “Look at me, Frankie.” He looked up at her instantly, fully, his eyes directed into hers, knowing, intelligent.

“When did he talk, Fanny?”

“Who—him? That child? He talked as soon as he walked, I reckon—he wasn’t a year old before he was talking.”

“He’s very quiet,” she said.

“He talks when he wants to,” Fanny said indifferently. “And can he sing! Sing, Frankie!”

He dropped her hand then, and clasping his hand behind him, he opened his mouth so wide she could see his rosy red tongue and small white teeth, and he began to sing. His voice came out clear and full and unchildlike. “I’m singing with a sword in my hand, O Lord,” he sang fervently, swaying from side to side. She listened in silence until he finished. In the tree above them a bird began to twitter madly.

“Here,” she said to Fanny, giving her the dollar she had now been giving her each week.

“Thank you,” said Fanny. “Come on, Frankie, let’s go.”

But Joan did not wait. She was plodding down the road. And what sort of God was it of whom her father used to speak in such belief, who numbered the very hairs of their heads, who watched a sparrow lest it fall? So carelessly was a dark and nameless child born and gifted. But her child, her wanted child, had been given nothing.

Precious body of Paul! Let her keep his body sweet and fresh—his perfect body which she had made. She went to Clarktown and bought recklessly fine soft linen, blue, yellow, and gay gingham printed with flowers, and made him little suits. Above the vivid stuff his rosy face glowed. It was a beautiful body, the body of a beautiful little boy, the shoulders square, the thighs full, the dimpled knees and feet. She held him all the time now, sleeping and awake. At night she put him beside her in the bed. In the day she sat him astride her hip and held him as she walked and worked. She must feel his body. She had this body.

On one August day she dressed him carefully and drove into Middlehope to Dr. Crabbe. She drove down the street, not seeing it. The buggy top was up. That was to shield the child from the sun—the child and her. From the shadow she need see no one. She would reach there at noon and Dr. Crabbe would be at his own house—and everybody else would be at dinner. She planned all the way what she would say. She would be very calm and matter-of-fact. “Dr. Crabbe, I am worried about Paul. He is slow about doing things. I want you to see him. I want to know the truth.”

Yes, she must know the truth. She must press the cruel truth across her heart and know it whole. But she would be very calm and wait for him to see the truth and tell her. She had waited all these months, gathering herself to be strong, to be calm.

She went into his little dun-colored office and sat down, and his housekeeper, Nellie Byers, stuck her head in at the door. “That you, Joan? He’s just eating his dinner. My, isn’t that a cute baby you got? Yours, isn’t it?”

“Yes, mine,” said Joan. “I’ll wait, Nellie.”

She would be glad to wait, glad to have the chance to force down this hardness in her throat. But she had no chance. He was there at once. He wiped his lips with his napkin and threw it on the floor.