The Angry Wife by Pearl S. Buck Read Free Book Online Page B

Pierce’s arms and smiled down at her two sons proudly. They stood gaping up at her and Joe turned and pretended to look out the door. Let her sons remember their mother, young and beautiful, standing in their father’s arms!
    “What you doin’, Mama?” Martin asked.
    Carey put his thumb in his mouth and continued his stare.
    Lucinda forgot her role. “Take your thumb out of your mouth, Carey Delaney!” she cried.
    She freed herself, ran down the stairs and pulled his thumb out of his mouth. It came out with a soft plop and she wiped it dry on her lace handkerchief. “You want to have buckteeth when you grow up?” she inquired. “Girls don’t love men with buckteeth.”
    Carey gazed at her placidly. She flicked his cheek with her thumb and finger, and walked away into the drawing room. As soon as her back was turned he put his thumb into his mouth again.
    Pierce, watching from the stairs, laughed. “Don’t you obey your mother, sir?” he inquired of his younger son.
    “Not when she ain’t here,” Carey replied. He took his thumb out for these words and put it back. Regarding his son’s round red cheeks and bright blue eyes, and seeing the small gold curls which perspiration plastered to his forehead, Pierce burst into laughter, loud and fond.
    “You’re a man,” he declared.
    His laughter penetrated to the drawing room and Lucinda stopped, listened and frowned. Pierce’s laughter! He laughed easily, at jokes to which she always listened without understanding them. Since he had come home he laughed more than ever, but about nothing.
    She shrugged her shoulders and dismissed the laughter for something far more important. A deep discontent ate its way into the pleasure of her days. Malvern had been conceived and born in Virginia, even as she had been. It had never come into her imagination that at any time of her life she would be living outside Virginia. But the war had dealt cruelly with her. Malvern lay on the eastern edge of the western counties that had seceded to make a Union. Now, irrevocably, she lived in a state that was hateful to her. Virginia was old and stable and proud, the home of aristocrats. But West Virginia was an upstart.
    She gazed moodily at the gray mohair of the drawing room furniture. It had come, a generation ago, from France and even its fine close texture had yielded to the war years. It looked well, but she knew that Georgia’s fine stitches were woven in and out of it. She would not allow the children to sit on it, and even now, alone in the room, she sat in a wooden Windsor armchair.
    She turned her head and saw Pierce at the open door in the hall. He was standing, his feet wide apart, his hands in his pockets, staring out over the land.
    “Pierce!” she called. “Come here!”
    Once he would have come instantly but now the imperiousness in her voice stirred distaste in him.
    “What do you want?” he called back.
    She rose in a flutter of ruffles and lace and ran out into the hall and pausing behind him she reached up and slapped one of his cheeks lightly and then the other.
    “You hear me call?” she demanded.
    “I answered, didn’t I?” he replied.
    “But I want you to come when I call!” she complained.
    She clasped her hands through his arm and dragged him half-unwillingly, half-laughing, into the drawing room.
    “I want to know when I can have new satin for the furniture,” she demanded.
    Pierce shook himself free from her. “Jiminy, Luce, do I have to tell you again that we have no money? If you can raise your own stuff you can have it. But you can’t buy anything. Well, we’re going to raise sheep. Malvern hills can grow good wool.”
    Lucinda pouted. “I don’t want wool. Moths will chew it. I want satin.”
    “Then you’ll have to wait until we can trade wool for satin, my girl,” he said firmly.
    “Pierce, I can’t believe you haven’t got anything!” she protested.
    “I have money to burn, and that’s all it’s fit for,” he said. “We