Waiting
Helen R. Hull
The Touchstone, vol. 8, Feb. 1921, pp. 346-354, 394-397.
When Anne Stephens, in her early forties, reached the plain to which her life had climbed, and looked back along the path she had come, some half a dozen incidents stood out clearly defined. In their place along the path they had seemed no more prominent than many others. But from her final elevation much of the rest was lost, too vague, too hidden in underbrush to be visible.
She remembered one still, white winter day. She must have been very young, for she was small enough to sit unobserved beneath the window bench in her father’s work shop. Content, still and white as the day, filled her. She watched the colorless vibrations above the small rusty stove in the corner and sniffed the comforting air, thick with fresh paint and sawdust. Her father worked above her, humming under his breath. That feeling of content must have been his, too. Perhaps hers came from him. He was making something, a case for the works of an old clock, she thought. Then the door flew open, and crisp, sharp as the winter air, her mother stood on the threshold, her blue eyes hard and snapping.
“So you’re out here, wasting your day, John Stephens, when you might be finding something useful to do!”
Her father stepped away from the bench so that his curly fair hair no longer caught the pale sun. He smiled apologetically.
“Put away your rubbish and go help Johnnie in the store. If you can’t get work for every day for yourself, the least you could do as a man is to be of use to your son! Is that Anne, now, under the bench! Come into the house.”
Her mother slammed the door and was gone, but the still content had fled. Anne crawled out, shaking the shaving curls from her hair. Her father fingered the polished boards on his bench, and then picked up the tools.
“It’s the fun there is in making things. The only joy that is good. Women don’t know it—the joy of making.”
Then there was a night, how much later Anne did not know, when she woke with her heart cold at the sound of her mother sobbing. She crept out to the head of the stairs to listen.
“It’s only that she isn’t good enough for you, my Johnnie, my first-born! Johnnie, I’ve worked my fingers to the bone for you—slaved for you—to give you what you desired—and you have no more love for me, your mother!”
And then a voice cajoling, caressing, John, her oldest brother.
“Now, mother, can’t a man take a wife? A man has a mother and he wants a wife, too, doesn’t he? Now, mother—”
Anne knew that her mother had thrown her arms about John’s neck. She had always known that her mother loved John more than the rest of them.
“Go your way!” her mother’s voice shrilled out. “You’re cruel, stubborn and set. Keep her away from me, I tell you. I’ll hate her!”
“Now, mother, you wouldn’t. I’m bringing her home for dinner this Sunday, and I’ll show her what a mother I’ve got. You’ll be used to the feeling by then.”
“Leave me alone! I’ll have no more to do with you!”
Anne had crawled hastily back to bed, and had listened in the dark to the choking, sobbing breath of her mother as she climbed the stairs. Sunday John’s sweetheart had come to dinner, and Anne had waited, tortured, for something to break. Her mother’s cheeks were bright between the smooth bands of her heavy hair, but John had thrown his arm over her shoulders and joked at his Marie—“See how you’ll have to work to make up to me for leaving such a mother!” And nothing had happened.
Then there was the dreadful time after Pearce, the second brother, had come home from the west, where he had gone in search of gold and found only the seed of death, so that he lived but three days after he had come back. Anne felt the chill darkness of the house; it was as though the grave sod had been piled over them all. Her mother, coming into the house after the funeral, had stared for a moment at her father. Anne remembered her face distinctly. The skin had drawn tightly over the high cheekbones and temples, and a gray, dusty pallor lay upon it. She had gone into her room and locked the door. How many days had she stayed there? Anne heard her father begging outside the door, begging against that awful silence within. Finally he had cried, crouching on the floor, cried like a little child; then he had called out, “Unless you come out, Kate, I will bring my axe and chop down this damned door!”
Anne remembered the slow opening of the door, the dreadful pause while her mother stood above her father, staring down at him. She had said, “If part of my body was torn off, you would give it time to heal. And you can not let me be—” Suddenly her father had taken her mother in his arms, and she was crying, too. Anne had run away, out of the house.
Another thing she remembered. She had been sitting in a crotch of the old apple tree at the side of the house, sewing for a doll. She had a family of dolls whom she tended carefully, without enthusiasm. As she sewed, a wonderful idea had seized her, gripping her heart with its splendor until she was dizzy. She had climbed down from the tree and gone in quest of her mother. She had found her in her low rocker, sewing, her eyes shining. One of her rare, light moods was upon her. Anne stood in front of her, trembling, eager.
“Mother, will you—that is, I want—”
“Well? Don’t stammer.” How fast that little pricking sound of the needle ran!
“Will you tell me, please, where I can get a baby? Of my own? I must have a baby.”
“What are you talking about?” Her mother dropped her sewing, wary suspicion in her eyes.
“I want a baby—” Anne found it difficult to say more.
“Who has been telling you things you shouldn’t know? Come here!” Anne had shrunk away. “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing—I just thought it—please, mother!” She winced under her mother’s sharp grasp.
“Have the children—” Her mother sighed. “Oh, you are so stubborn! Don’t shut your mouth that way! What has been said to you about babies?”
“Nothing! Nothing!” Anne was hot with shame now, an inexplicable, harrowing shame.
“Well, think nothing of them, then. You’re a baby yourself. Don’t let me hear you talking of such things.”
Anne had played no more with dolls.
One day at school the teacher had said, “Now, children, let’s all think what we want to be when we are grown up.” She had gone round the class until she came to Anne. “Anne, do you want to be a milliner or a teacher, too?” Anne shook her head. “No, I want to be a mother.” The sound of the laughter, sudden like thunder, rattled against her still. She had never spoken her desire again.
After that came a stretch of years in which she made two discoveries. One was the magic of color and form; she could capture it with brush and paint, and the other was the extraordinary wonder of her own body. During the Christmas week of her last year in school her class had a sleigh ride. She had gone reluctantly. The drive was a blur of sensations: chill air tingling in her nostrils, the smell and crackle of hay in the huge bobs, sharp bells on the horses, the crunch under the runners, the yellow glow from the swinging lanterns. Songs and shouts and giggles, and then, on the way home, silence, with low whispers, until the boy next Anne had slipped his arm about her and pulled her close against him. Strange, maddening thrill, all ecstasy and sweet shame. She had never seen the boy again; he was a cousin of someone, visiting. But the thrill became part of her dreams.
There was one dream. Sometimes she could cling to it when she had wakened. Sometimes she knew only from the still, white peace with which she woke that she had dreamed it. She lay in a great meadow which curved against a blue sky under the sun. No wind stirred. She lay there, not as herself, but as the meadow, part of the quiet, waiting soil.
In March of her year at the normal school, Anne met Robert Duffy. He had come over from the university for a short series of lectures. Anne had been unruffled by the comments upon him; he was the youngest man on the staff of the university, with a reputation of brilliance and the forecast of a great future. When he walked out on the platform, Anne, in her corner, leaned forward, the pupils of her eyes dilating. He was thin and dark, with hasty gestures, and a hostile eagerness sprang from his voice and eyes.
At the end of his second lecture, Anne waited at the edge of the crowd about the platform. She proffered some question, simple, almost irrelevant, and as he answered her, stood near him, her brow, her beautiful throat, her relaxed fingers, touched with subtle humility. After that he watched for her, and Anne’s days leaped up like a ship at the flick of the wind. Robert Duffy may have thought he drove her down the seas before him. Anne knew.
He had not wished to marry so immediately. He was working for a degree, was developing a new chemical theory. But Anne, lifting his hands to clasp the pillar of her throat, had said, calmly,
“Why wait? You are tired and nervous now for someone to take care of you.”
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