Free The Eternal Wonder by Pearl S. Buck

girl, but he’d have thought the less of me if I’d done any pretending. That was one thing he was always firm about. ‘I want the truth from you, Susan.’ I can hear him say it now.”
    She paused, a half smile on her face, and looked across to him, sitting there in his father’s chair. “I got the habit of truth, son—and I’ll never tell you anything but the truth. Let’s make it a bargain—truth between us for your father’s sake.”
    “It’s a bargain,” he said.
    She was silent for minutes, thinking. Then she began again, “I don’t want to go too fast. I want to make it last a long time. There’ll be evenings, too, when you want to do things. Evenings when we’ll have to decide what we should do. What do you want to do, son? I don’t think we ought to take the tour—we’ll need the money for your college education, even though they will give you your tuition as a scholarship for your father’s sake.”
    “I’ll go to college,” he said. “I can start at the beginning of the term in the New Year.”
    “But you’re not thirteen yet—and all those older pupils—what will they do to you?”
    “Nothing, Mother. I’ll be too busy.”
    “But you’ll miss all the fun of being your age.”
    “I’ll have other things,” he said briefly, but he did not know what things, so he urged her to go on with her story. “Go on, Mother.”
    “We soon fell in love,” she went on shyly. “In those days love was something important—not like today. But he said we wouldn’t be married until after his graduation. I was only a sophomore, but I didn’t want to go on. I only wanted to be with him. So in June we were married. It was a lovely wedding, I was the only child in my family, and they all wanted me to have the prettiest possible wedding. Besides, they liked your father. That’s one thing I didn’t like about coming to Ohio, Rannie, after your father got his doctorate. It brought us far away—so that you haven’t known my family. And since your father’s parents were dead and he was an only child, there’s been only the two of us to be your family.”
    “I haven’t missed anything,” he said.
    She was silent a long time now, her eyes fixed on the fire, dreaming, remembering, half-smiling. He sat silent, waiting, inwardly restless, and yet not wanting to break into her thoughts.
    It was to be true of all these evenings. She relived her life, dreaming, remembering, half-smiling while he sat waiting, inwardly restless. Suddenly she would look at the clock, astonished at the time.
    “Oh, it’s late,” she would exclaim, and the evening was ended.
    Each evening he sat there submissively, his eyes fixed on the fire, and as his mother’s voice flowed on, broken now and again by laughter or a long sigh of remembrance, he enjoyed in himself the ability to see what she was saying. That is, as she finished describing an incident now long past, he saw it all as clearly as though taking place before him. He was aware of this ability, for as he read a book, whatever it was—and this had been always true ever since he could remember, or so it seemed to him—he saw what he read, and not the words or the pages on which they were printed. The ability had been of special value to him in school, always, and especially in mathematics, for when a problem was presented by his teacher or the textbook, he saw not the figures but the situation they presented and the relationship to the whole, so that he was ready with the answer immediately. Sciences, too, had been made very easy for him by this ability to visualize simultaneously as he read or listened.
    So now he saw his father as his mother told of her life with him as a young man. It was actual seeing. He had this ability that he supposed everyone had, until he discovered later on in his life that it was unique, and that he could actually see, in shape and solidity, a person or an object of which he was thinking. As his mother described his father, he saw