Put that way, it sounded unreal, and she could hardly believe it herself. She said it aloud and still it seemed strange, as if she were speaking of some one else, not of herself. She wondered whether all women felt that way, and whether her mother had felt like that when she had married her father. What had her mother felt? Looking back, Jean wondered.
What had been the relationship between her father and mother? Certainly there had been no feeling of nearness between them, none of that spiritual contact so strong between herself and Herrick; that thing that made long hours of silence closer than words; that sense of knowing what he felt.
Jean thought of the first time Herrick had kissed her in the spicy darkness of the acacia and of the physical repulsion that had frightened her. And of the other night, when he had pleaded, "A real one, Jeany," and she had wondered what he meant.
How had her mother felt the first time her father had kissed her? Had she known what a "real kiss" was? When she thought about it directly, as she was doing now, she had no memories of her father's kissing her mother, or of their ever sitting hand in hand as she and Herrick sat often, watching the sun drop into the sea. She seemed to have no special memories of them together at all.
Suddenly Jean sat up. She had one. It came to her with the clarity of a photograph. She could see the streak of sunlight across the bare, scrubbed floor, the brightly polished stove, the box of geraniums in the window. She could smell the clean smell of the place and feel again the stillness.
It had been a Sunday, a warm, blue day, like to-day. All afternoon she had been in the garden trying to amuse herself and not succeeding. She could recall, so sharply that it made her smile, the desperate effort, and her final relinquishment of it. It was so useless to battle against Sunday. Besides the monotony of her own home, Jean had always felt the burden of the whole world, locked into the petrifying inaction of the Blessed Sabbath, and struggling to rest and enjoy it therein. This particular Sunday had been almost paralyzing in its peace, and Jean could see herself, a small figure in a checked dress and pebble-goat shoes, come shuffling along the gravel walk, scuffing her toes because she had always been told not to. But the unusual sound, at that hour in the afternoon, of her father's voice in the kitchen, stopped her at the door, and she stood peering through the wire screening. She saw her father come slowly across to her mother, who stood shrinking between the table and the sink. For months after that, Jean had smelled the dust in the screen and felt the rusty wire pressing the tip of her nose, whenever she thought of it. Her father had come close to her mother and stopped. His face was white and his lips trembled and Jean had been afraid he was going to cry.
"Marty, can't you forgive? Aren't you human at all?"
The words had bitten into Jean's memory because it was her father who was saying them in a queer voice and with a strange white face. Then he had come closer and tried to put his arms about her mother, but she had shrunk back with a sob that brought Jean at a bound into the kitchen. Her father's arms had dropped to his sides. The blood rushed into his face and for a moment he had stood with his mouth open. Then with a shrug he turned away and said in his natural voice:
"You'd better ask that God of yours for a little common sense."
At that Martha had unclasped Jean's protecting arms and gone quietly out of the room. A few moments later Jean heard the front door slam. For the first time in her life her father did not come back to supper. But, mixed with the tragedy of her mother's red eyelids and the silent supper, was a tingling excitement that something had happened on Sunday. It gave an elasticity to the rigid Sunday routine that for months had filled Jean with a pleasant sense of possibility.