“I’m not ready to pray yet,” she said aloud, quietly, rigid, soundless, her eyes wide open, while the moon poured and poured into the window, filling the room with something cold and irrevocable and wild with regret.
“Don’t make me have to pray yet.
Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.”
She seemed to see her whole past life, the starved years, like a gray tunnel, at the far and irrevocable end of which, as unfading as a reproach, her naked breast of three short years ago ached as though in agony, virgin and crucified;
“Not yet, dear God.
Not yet, dear God.”
So when he now came to her, after the passive and cold and seemly transports of sheer habit she began to speak of a child.
She talked about it impersonally at first, discussing children.
Perhaps it was sheer and instinctive feminine cunning and indirection, perhaps not.
Anyway, it was some time before he discovered with a kind of shock that she was discussing it as a possibility, a practical thought.
He said No at once.
“Why not?” she said. She looked at him, speculative.
He was thinking fast, thinking She wants to be married.
That’s it.
She wants a child no more than I do.‘It’s just a trick,’ he thought. ‘I should have known it, expected it.
I should have cleared out of here a year ago.’
But he was afraid to tell her this, to let the word marriage come between them, come aloud, thinking,
‘She may not have thought of it, and I will just put the notion in her head.’
She was watching him.
“Why not?” she said.
And then something in him flashed Why not?
It would mean ease, security, for the rest of your life.
You would never have to move again.
And you might as well be married to her asthis thinking,
‘No.
If I give in now, I will deny all the thirty years that I have lived to make me what I chose to be.’
He said:
“If we were going to have one, I guess we would have had one two years ago.”
“We didn’t want one then.”
“We don’t want one now, either,” he said.
That was in September.
Just after Christmas she told him that she was pregnant.
Almost before she ceased to speak, he believed that she was lying.
He discovered now that he had been expecting her to tell him that for three months.
But when he looked at her face, he knew that she was not.
He believed that she also knew that she was not.
He thought,
‘Here it comes.
She will say it now: marry.
But I can at least get out of the house first.’
But she did not.
She was sitting quite still on the bed, her hands on her lap, her still New England face (it was still the face of a spinster: prominently boned, long, a little thin, almost manlike: in contrast to it her plump body was more richly and softly animal than ever) lowered.
She said, in a tone musing, detached, impersonal:
“A full measure.
Even to a bastard negro child.
I would like to see father’s and Calvin’s faces.
This will be a good time for you to run, if that’s what you want to do.”
But it was as though she were not listening to her own voice, did not intend for the words to have any actual meaning: that final upflare of stubborn and dying summer upon which autumn, the dawning of halfdeath, had come unawares.
‘It’s over now,’ she thought quietly; ‘finished.’
Except the waiting, for one month more to pass, to be sure; she had learned that from the negro women, that you could not always tell until after two months.