The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [58]
Howard lowered his eyes and once again he saw the pansy. There it shone, a wide-open yellow flower with dark red veins and edges. Against the sky-blue of Marjorie's old coat it began in Howard's anxious sight to lose its identity of flower-size and assume the gradual and large curves of a mountain on the horizon of a desert, the veins becoming crevasses, the delicate edges the giant worn lips of a sleeping crater. His heart jumped to his mouth....
He snatched the pansy from Marjorie's coat and tore its petals off and scattered them on the floor and jumped on them!
Marjorie watched him in silence, and slowly he realized that he had not acted at all, that he had only had a terrible vision. The pansy still blazed on the coat, just as the pigeons had still flown in the park when he was hungry. He sank back onto the couch, trembling with the desire and the pity that had overwhelmed him, and said harshly, "Haw long before your time comes?"
"Oh, Howard."
"Oh, Howard,"—that was Marjorie. The softness, the reproach—how was he to stop it, ever?
"What did you say?" he asked her.
"Oh, Howard, can't you keep track of the time? Always asking me..." She took a breath and said, "In three more months—the end of August."
"This is May," he told her.... He almost warned her. "This is May."
"May, June, July, August." She rattled the time off.
"You know for sure—you're certain, it will happen when you say?" He gazed at her.
"Why, of course, Howard, those things always happen when they're supposed to. Nothing can stop me from having the baby, that's sure." Tears came slowly into her eyes.
"Don't cry, Marjorie!" he shouted at her. "Don't cry, don't cry!"
"Even if you don't want it," she said.
He beat his fist down on the old dark red cloth that covered the couch. He felt emotion climbing hand over hand up his body, with its strange and perfect agility. Helplessly he shut his eyes.
"I expect you can find work before then, Howard," she said.
He stood up in wonder: let it be the way she says. He looked searchingly around the room, pressed by tenderness, and softly pulled the pansy from the coat.
Holding it out he crossed to her and dropped soberly onto the floor beside her. His eyes were large. He gave her the flower.
She whispered to him. "We haven't been together in so long." She laid her calm warm hand on his head, covering over the part in his hair, holding him to her side, while he drew deep breaths of the cloverlike smell of her tightening skin and her swollen thighs.
Why, this is not possible! he was thinking. The ticks of the cheap alarm clock grew louder and louder as he buried his face against her, feeling new desperation every moment in the time-marked softness and the pulse of her sheltering body.
But she was talking.
"If they would only give you some paving work for the three months, we could scrape something out of that to pay a nurse, maybe, for a little while afterwards, after the baby comes—"
He jumped to his feet, his muscles as shocked by her words as if they had hurled a pick at the pavement in Columbus Circle at that moment. His sharp words overlaid her murmuring voice.
"Work?" he said sternly, backing away from her, speaking loudly from the middle of the room, almost as if he copied his pose and his voice somehow from the agitators in the park. "When did I ever work? A year ago ... six months ... back in Mississippi ... I've forgotten! Time isn't as easy to count up as you think! I wouldn't know what