The Angry Wife (7 page)

Well, that was over. Malvern was in fruit again. They were eating roasting ears and greens and their first new potatoes, grown from a half bushel he had traded with Molly MacBain for a hen and a rooster. He smiled at the thought of Molly, and flushed under the summer sun. Lucinda was to have her child in early autumn. She had announced it to him last night, although it had been obvious to him for months that she was pregnant. But he knew better than to mention it to her before she chose to tell him.

“Mr. Delaney,” she had said last night in her room.

“Well?” he had asked. He was lounging in her low chair preparatory to dressing for dinner. She made him dress every night now as she had before the war.

She herself was already wearing her yellow taffeta, which she complained was in rags and tatters, except that Georgia held it together by delicate darning. She had looked neither ragged nor tattered, however, as she sat in her highbacked chair, her hands folded together like magnolia petals.

“You may expect an addition to your family, Mr. Delaney,” she said.

“Indeed!” he cried. He sat up and took his hands out of his pockets. “When, may I ask?”

“In the first two weeks of September, likely,” she said.

She sat very straight and full of dignity, and he smiled and went over to her and took her head between his hands and kissed her forehead.

“Careful of my pompadour, please,” she cautioned him.

He sat down again. “And what shall her name be, Luce?” he inquired.

“I had thought of Sapphira,” she replied. “It’s a Bible name,” she added.

He reflected. “Wasn’t she a liar, Luce?” he asked.

“She obeyed her husband, I believe,” Lucinda replied. “It is in my memory that her husband bade her tell a lie.”

He had burst out laughing. “Why, Luce, all women are liars! They don’t need to have men teach them.”

“Indeed they are not,” she had cried.

“Indeed they are,” he had cried back at her, “and if you plague me I shall utterly destroy your pompadour.”

He knew by now that a threat to disarrange her hair was the surest way to subjugate her, and she knew that since he came back from the war he was capable of doing it. Twice when she had plagued him he had tumbled and tossed her and left her half crying with rage.

Riding over the fields solitary in the morning he smiled, thinking of the evening. He was tender toward her always, even when he was rough, accepting her little tempers and tantrums with loud laughter, and holding her hands when she fell into a rage. For she could beat him when she was angry and this amused him mightily. It seemed to him that she was the essence of all that was feminine and he loved her profoundly, more he knew, although he would never acknowledge it, than she could possibly love him. He did not blame her for this. She loved him as well as she could, and she could love no one better, or so he believed. With that he could comfort himself. Yet he wondered if there were somewhere, in some women, something more than she could give him. He blushed now when he thought of this. Luce had given him sons and she would give him daughters. He had no reproach against her. But it was strange how war loosened the withers of a man’s soul. Many imaginings came into his own mind now which before the war he could not have had. He was beset by the continual knowledge of the shortness of time and the richness of life. War had shown him both.

He lifted his hand and drank in the morning sunshine. Once when he and Tom were children they had kept a pet crow, and on a fine morning like this one, the crow would bathe its body in the sun. It would ruffle its feathers and hold them apart for the sun to penetrate into the skin, and then, still unsatisfied, it would turn its beak to the sun and open it wide and let the sun pour down its throat, as though the light were food. He opened his own mouth now and felt the sun warm on his tongue. He could almost taste it, sparkling and pure.

At the boundaries of Malvern he found John MacBain, leaning on a fence, his straw hat pulled down over his eyes. He was on his feet again, thin as a withe and leathery, alive, but with a curiously dead look in his eyes.

“You there, John!” Pierce called and cantered his mare. Then he jumped down and threw the reins over the beast’s neck and sauntered toward his neighbor.

“Feeling well again?” he asked.

“Well as I’ll ever be,” John MacBain replied. He was chewing a twig of spice bush.

“You look pretty good,” Pierce said gaily. He was warmly aware of the blood coursing through his own potent body, and of his child in Lucinda’s womb. He was too kind to dwell upon his own good fortune. “Going to farm again, John?” he asked.

“No,” John MacBain said. “I’m thinking of moving away—take Molly to Wheeling, likely, and get me a job in the railroads. Railroads are the coming thing in the state, I hear. The city’ll give Molly life, I figure. It’s hard on her just fussing around an empty house.”

“I hear about the railroads, too—” Pierce said. He did not want to talk about Molly.

“Or mining,” John MacBain said moodily. “There’s coal mines opening toward the north of the state. I want to do something I never did before—start out fresh.”

“We’ll miss you for neighbors,” Pierce said.

“I’ll rent you the land but I shan’t sell the house,” John said. “I was born in it and so was my father. We’ll be back and forth, likely—summers, anyway.”

“That’s good,” Pierce said.

The bleakness in John’s eyes was a grey wall between them. He felt the constant knowledge of impatience that haunted them, and unable to think of further talk, he mounted his horse again.

“Well, see you again, John. Let me know before you go. Lucinda will want you both over for dinner.”

“It’ll be a while yet,” John said.

Pierce rode away, feeling the envy in John MacBain’s eyes burn into his back. War was cruel and unjust—as cruel and unjust as God, who gave down rain on the good and evil. He resolved that as little as possible would he consider anything except the joy of life itself, of food and sleep and riding and hunting, of wine and children and sunshine and earth and the seasons. He would live for himself and his own, “so help me God,” he thought, “from now until I die.” He hardened his heart toward John MacBain and toward every maimed and wounded creature, and was arrogantly proud that he was whole.

It was nearly one o’clock when he rounded the turn of the road and cantered up the avenue of oaks that led to the house. He dismounted and tossed the reins to Jake who came running out to meet him.

“She’s lathered, you see,” he reminded him.

“I’ll rub her down good,” Jake said.

Pierce mounted the steps of his house and took satisfaction in the mended terrace and the newly painted porches. He owed money everywhere, even for the fresh white paint on the house, but men trusted him and Malvern. Their confidence was in tomorrow, and tomorrow would come. He leaped up the last steps and met his brother coming down the stairs into the hall, and was struck again, as he continually was, with Tom’s good looks. The youthful sallowness and slimness were gone. He had actually grown taller this last year.

“Tom, you should have ridden out with me this morning!” he shouted. “God, how the land is producing!”

Tom smiled. “You should have called me, Pierce,” he replied. “I found you gone when I came down for breakfast. Bettina said you’d been gone an hour.”

“Oh well, I’ll let you be an invalid another month or two,” Pierce said indulgently. “Where’s Luce and the younguns? I’m starved clean to the bottom of me.”

“Lucinda has been sitting in the summerhouse,” Tom replied. He stood leaning against the door jamb. “Here comes Bettina with the children.”

Pierce turned and saw Bettina walking across the green lawns. She held a book in her hands, and the two boys were tugging at it. She stopped, and dropping on her knees she opened it, and they pored over it together.

“Queer how those two girls know their books,” he said. “I wonder who taught them.”

Tom did not answer and Pierce looked at him and saw what made him aghast. He had been trying not to think of it—but now Tom was well and it had better be said. Tom—Bettina! He felt suddenly sick.

“Reckon I’ll go and wash,” he said. “If you see Luce, tell her I’ll go straight to the dining room.”

“All right—” Tom’s voice was dreaming, and Pierce mounted the stairs on tiptoe. Did Lucinda know? Or was there anything to know? And what would he say to Tom? Nothing, probably! What a man did with a colored wench was his own business. Still—Tom! Here at Malvern!

He went into his dressing room and poured the water out of the jug into the ewer, and felt the blood suddenly begin to pound through his body. Tom was not at all the sort of fellow to take up with a wench. Damn Lucinda for bringing two such pretty girls into the house! Now there would be mulatto children running around, cousins to his own children, and nobody saying a word because nobody would dare.

“I shall ship that Bettina away,” he thought angrily. He scrubbed his hands and went down to the dining room and held his head very haughtily while his family gathered. Lucinda sat at the foot of the table and Tom at her right and the two boys opposite him. Pierce busied himself with his soup and then with carving the fowl. Lucinda asked him questions and he answered them. Yes, the wheat was very fine, as fine as the oats had been, and if the hot weather held the corn would be good, too. They were lucky.

“Then why are you so cross, Papa?” Martin asked.

Pierce cursed himself for not being able to hide his thoughts even from a child. “I have worries,” he said shortly.

They were all silent after that, and in silence they ate the green apple tart which was their dessert. He called for the new cheese and Georgia brought it to him, and he took it coldly from her. He would settle his house once for all.

Lucinda looked at him inquiringly when he rose.

“I wish you’d come into the office, Lucinda,” he said still coldly. “I have something to talk about with you.”

She followed him and Bettina came in for the children. He cast a swift look at her and imagined that under her gathered skirt her body swelled, and he grew deeply angry. How dared Tom do such a thing in this house!

He shut the office door firmly behind Lucinda and sat down at the desk and shuffled some papers. She sat down in the leather armchair which his father had brought over from London years ago for this very room.

“Well, Pierce?” she inquired.

Then he found himself unable to speak. The blood came up under his collar.

“Put down those papers,” she said. “Tell me what it is you have done.”

He put down the papers at once. “I haven’t done anything,” he said savagely. “It’s your own colored girl I want to talk about.”

“Georgia?”

“No, Bettina.”

Now he wished he had never begun. For it was not only Bettina of whom he must speak, but also his own brother. Instinctive loyalty beset him. Must he betray his own kind? Women never understood these things.

Lucinda’s face had grown sharp. “Pierce, what do you mean? Tell me this minute. What’s Bettina done?”

“Nothing that I know of. Probably just my imagination.”

But she knew him. The faint look of guilt that haunts a man’s face when he speaks to his wife of sex now haunted his and he was betrayed.

“Pierce Delaney, do you mean—”

He banged both fists on the table. “I don’t mean anything. I don’t know whatever got into me to think I had to tell you.”

But she pursued what she smelled as relentlessly as a cat pursues the scent of a mouse. “If I thought that Bettina could be carrying on right under my own eyes in my own house, I’d—I’d have her strapped. I don’t care how light-colored she is—she’s nothing but a nigger. What has she done? Why—why, Pierce, she hasn’t said anything to you?”

He sighed in a great gust. “Good God, no! Now I’ve got you started, I wish I hadn’t spoken.”

She forced him on. “Well, you have spoken, and you might just as well go on and tell me everything, because I’ll find out anyway.”

He now saw how slender was the proof of what he suspected. What had he seen? Nothing except such things as the look on Tom’s face when Bettina happened to be crossing the grass with the children.

“I haven’t seen a thing,” he protested, “not a living thing.”

“Pierce Delaney!” Lucinda screamed. “You stop!”

He began to sweat and he pulled out his silk handkerchief and mopped his forehead and his cheeks. “Well, nothing I could really say I saw,” he amended.

But she squeezed it out of him word by word and he told her.

“Maybe Tom was only smiling at the sunshine or something,” he groaned at last when he had faltered out his suspicion. “Maybe he was pleased because I said the crops were going to be good.”

“Oh, fiddle!” she cried, in such profound contempt that he felt allied to Tom as never before.

“Anyway, I certainly am not going to accuse my own brother,” he protested. “Not without some proof.”

“Pierce Delaney!” she said sternly. Her hands were clenched under her breasts. “You know as well as I do that you saw something or you wouldn’t have tried to tell me and then take it back. Whether you speak to Tom or not is just nothing. It’s I who will speak to Bettina.”

She rose, spread her skirts and floated out of the room like an outraged swan, and he groaned again and laid his head down on his arms and knew that he must go and warn his brother. For a moment even Malvern was filled with misery. Then suddenly he lifted his head. He had thought of escape. He Would go and find Georgia and warn her and she could warn Bettina, who would warn Tom. He jumped up, suddenly nimble at the thought of mercy for Tom, and went out into the hall.

At this hour of the day, where would Georgia be? In her room, maybe, in the attic, or maybe in the pantry, where Lucinda had said they took their fragmentary meals, standing at the tables. He walked softly through the halls toward the pantry. The front door was open as he passed and out on the lawn the children lay stretched on a blanket on the grass for their naps, while Joe sat near them, back against a tree, droning out a story. The air was still and hot and filled with noonday sleep. He opened the door to the pantry and saw no one. Beyond the door into the kitchen he heard the mumble of Annie’s voice complaining to her little slaveys, and he walked away again into the great front hall, and stood listening. Would Lucinda have found Bettina already? Where was Georgia?