Lee put his arm around the broad shoulders to comfort him. “You’re growing up. Maybe that’s it,” he said softly. “Sometimes I think the world tests us most sharply then, and we turn inward and watch ourselves with horror. But that’s not the worst. We think everybody is seeing into us. Then dirt is very dirty and purity is shining white. Aron, it will be over. Wait only a little while and it will be over. That’s not much relief to you because you don’t believe it, but it’s the best I can do for you. Try to believe that things are neither so good nor so bad as they seem to you now. Yes, I can help you. Go to bed now, and in the morning get up early and tell your father about the tests. Make it exciting. He’s lonelier than you are because he has no lovely future to dream about. Go through the motions. Sam Hamilton said that. Pretend it’s true and maybe it will be. Go through the motions. Do that. And go to bed. I’ve got to bake a cake—for breakfast. And, Aron—your father left a present on your pillow.”

Chapter 44

1

It was only after Aron went away to college that Abra really got to know his family. Aron and Abra had fenced themselves in with themselves. With Aron gone, she attached herself to the other Trasks. She found that she trusted Adam more, and loved Lee more, than her own father.

About Cal she couldn’t decide. He disturbed her sometimes with anger, sometimes with pain, and sometimes with curiosity. He seemed to be in a perpetual contest with her. She didn’t know whether he liked her or not, and so she didn’t like him. She was relieved when, calling at the Trask house, Cal was not there, to look secretly at her, judge, appraise, consider, and look away when she caught him at it.

Abra was a straight, strong, fine-breasted woman, developed and ready and waiting to take her sacrament—but waiting. She took to going to the Trask house after school, sitting with Lee, reading him parts of Aron’s daily letter.

Aron was lonely at Stanford. His letters were drenched with lonesome longing for his girl. Together they were matter of fact, but from the university, ninety miles away, he made passionate love to her, shut himself off from the life around him. He studied, ate, slept, and wrote to Abra, and this was his whole life.

In the afternoons she sat in the kitchen with Lee and helped him to string beans or slip peas from their pods. Sometimes she made fudge and very often she stayed to dinner rather than go home to her parents. There was no subject she could not discuss with Lee. And the few things she could talk about to her father and mother were thin and pale and tired and mostly not even true. There Lee was different also. Abra wanted to tell Lee only true things even when she wasn’t quite sure what was true.

Lee would sit smiling a little, and his quick fragile hands flew about their work as though they had independent lives. Abra wasn’t aware that she spoke exclusively of herself. And sometimes while she talked Lee’s mind wandered out and came back and went out again like a ranging dog, and Lee would nod at intervals and make a quiet humming sound.

He liked Abra and he felt strength and goodness in her, and warmth too. Her features had the bold muscular strength which could result finally either in ugliness or in great beauty. Lee, musing through her talk, thought of the round smooth faces of the Cantonese, his own breed. Even thin they were moon-faced. Lee should have liked that kind best since beauty must be somewhat like ourselves, but he didn’t. When he thought of Chinese beauty the iron predatory faces of the Manchus came to his mind, arrogant and unyielding faces of a people who had authority by unquestioned inheritance.

She said, “Maybe it was there all along. I don’t know. He never talked much about his father. It was after Mr. Trask had the—you know—the lettuce. Aron was angry then.”

“Why?” Lee asked.

“People were laughing at him.”

Lee’s whole mind popped back. “Laughing at Aron? Why at him? He didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Well, that’s the way he felt. Do you want to know what I think?”

“Of course,” said Lee.

“I figured this out and I’m not quite finished figuring. I thought he always felt—well, kind of crippled—maybe unfinished, because he didn’t have a mother.”

Lee’s eyes opened wide and then drooped again. He nodded. “I see. Do you figure Cal is that way too?”

“No.”

“Then why Aron?”

“Well, I haven’t got that yet. Maybe some people need things more than others, or hate things more. My father hates turnips. He always did. Never came from anything. Turnips make him mad, real mad. Well, one time my mother was—well, huffy, and she made a casserole of mashed turnips with lots of pepper and cheese on top and got it all brown on top. My father ate half a dish of it before he asked what it was. My mother said turnips, and he threw the dish on the floor and got up and went out. I don’t think he ever forgave her.”

Lee chuckled. “He can forgive her because she said turnips. But, Abra, suppose he’d asked and she had said something else and he liked it and had another dish. And then afterward he found out. Why, he might have murdered her.”

“I guess so. Well, anyway, I figure Aron needed a mother more than Cal did. And I think he always blamed his father.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I think.”

“You do get around, don’t you?”

“Shouldn’t I?”

“Of course you should.”