Then he pressed the doorbell and waited. Impatient, he pressed again. The door opened a few inches and he saw Sung’s frightened face peering at him.
“Sung!” he cried.
Sung put his finger on his lip. “Very sick—your grandfather.”
He pushed his way in, past Sung, and hastened to his grandfather’s room. There, stretched upon the bed his grandfather lay, his hands crossed on his bosom, his eyes closed.
“Grandfather!” Rann cried, and leaning, he put his hand on the folded old hands.
His grandfather opened his eyes. “I am waiting for Serena,” he murmured. “She is coming for me.”
He closed his eyes again, and Rann gazed at him, frightened and awed. How beautiful this aged face, the waxen skin, the white hair, the carved lips above the elegant hands! Suddenly he could not bear to lose his grandfather.
“Sung!” he called sharply. “Has a doctor seen him?”
Sung was at his elbow. “He not want doctor.”
“But he must have a doctor!”
“He talk he wishing die. He begin die last night—maybe five, six o’clock. He talk some lady only I don’t see, and he talk he too tired waiting her and must go her side somewhere—I don’t know. So no more eating, he talk me, but I make soup anyhow. He no eat. Just lying there all night talking this lady. I sit here all night too, not seeing lady, just hear him talk like she here.”
“He is wishing himself to die,” Rann declared.
“Maybe,” Sung agreed. “Man wishing die, he die, in China same.”
He shook his head, resigned and calm, but Rann went to the telephone and dialed. His mother’s voice answered.
“Yes?”
“Mother, it’s I,” he called.
“Rannie, where are you? What—I didn’t know you—”
He broke across her joyful surprise.
“I am with Grandfather—got in yesterday from Paris. Mother, he’s dying—he won’t see a doctor. He just lies here in his bed, waiting.”
“I’ll take the next flight out,” she said.
RANN AND HIS MOTHER spent the summer in New York doing all that they could to instill in his grandfather some will to return to living. Each doctor who came conducted extensive examinations and at last declared that there was nothing really wrong with the old man.
“It seems he simply has no wish to go on,” the last one had said with finality.
He refused any medical care and feeding him was a matter of forcing hot broth between his thin lips.
Autumn passed quickly into winter and on a brisk day with the feeling of snow in the air Rann’s mother had gone into Manhattan to purchase a few warm clothes, for she had brought none with her to New York and hesitated to return home with her father so ill.
When she returned, Rann met her at the door. “Grandfather died an hour ago, Mother,” he told her.
Tears came quickly to her eyes and she gave him a quick embrace and kiss. “We have been through this before, Rann, and we know life must go on.”
“But there’s so much I don’t know how to do,” Rann said. “What—”
“I’ll get the proper things going. You look tired and you need to rest. Have you eaten? No? You really should, you know, we both should. There is no need to make ourselves ill.”
Sung hovered about them. “I fix. I know. Soup maybe with sandwich. Coffee.”
He went away, soundless in his felt slippers and Rann put his arms about his mother.
“I’d forgotten,” he muttered. “I’d forgotten what death is like. But he wanted to die. He kept hearing—someone—call him.” He remembered then that his grandfather had not told his mother about Serena.
“My mother—,” she broke in.
He sat down in a carved chair. No, he would not speak of Serena. If his grandfather had wanted his daughter to know, he would have told her. Now he would keep the secrets of the dead.
“He simply willed himself out of life,” he said.
THEY WERE IN THE JET flying westward. A few days and it was as though his grandfather had not lived. Yet both of them were conscious of the urn of ashes they had left behind. It was macabre. The ashes were so meager, a handful of chemicals that a quick wind could blow away.
“I’ll send the urn to you in a couple of weeks, if you’ll give me the address,” the man at the crematory had said.
They had looked at each other, mother and son.
“He’s never left New York after he returned from Peking,” his mother said.
“He was happy here,” Rann said, and thought of Serena.
“You can rent—or buy—an alcove here,” the man suggested.
In the end that was what they had done. They had left the final dismantling of the apartment to Sung, and then suddenly his mother had changed her mind.
“Your grandfather left everything to you, son, even this apartment which he owned. Why not keep it? Sung can take care of it. You may not want to stay in a little Midwestern town. You will want a place of your own, someday, if not now, and in New York, doubtless. He has left you very comfortably well off. You can certainly afford it.”
So they had left the apartment to Sung, and just as it was. The thought of it pleased him. He could come back.
“I will come back,” he had told Sung.
“Please, sir—soon,” Sung had begged.
Now sitting next to the window in the airplane he watched the clouds floating about them in the sky. He was aware of monstrous bewilderment, shock, weariness. When his father died it had been expected and prepared for. His mother had prepared him and so indeed had his father.
“Your father is approaching his next life,” his mother had told him.
“Is there another life?” he had asked.
“I want to believe there is,” she had said firmly.
He had accepted this, as in those days he had accepted everything, it seemed to him now. And his father had spoken easily of his future beyond Earth.
“Of course, we don’t know, but with the passionate will to live that we humans seem to have, there’s the probability that life continues. It’s all right with me either way. I’ve had a wonderful time here—love and work and you, my son. What a glorious life you will have! Joy to you—”
“Don’t,” he had whispered, fighting off his tears. “Don’t talk about it!”
His father had only smiled, but they had never talked of death again. One of these days when he was ready to face it, he must think it all through—gather all the evidence. Now he wanted only to live. He leaned back in his seat and fell suddenly asleep. The plane was jarring to the ground before he woke.
THE OLD LIFE FELL INTO PLACE. The house enfolded him. Here he had been infant and child. Here he had learned to walk and talk and wonder. For a few days, even weeks, it was comfort to fall into a familiar niche, to wake in the morning in his old room, to go downstairs to the logs blazing in the fireplace, the gentle clatter of his mother preparing breakfast, to know the day lay ahead of him, his to possess. Neighbors came in to greet him. After a while even Donald Sharpe called on the telephone.
“Well, Rann—back from your jaunt abroad? What’s next?”
“I don’t know, sir—I suppose military service somewhere. My induction notice has arrived and I’m to go on Thursday for the preliminaries.”
“No idea where, I suppose?”
“No, sir.”
“Try to come and see me before you leave!”
“Thank you, sir.”
He would not go. He knew too much now. He was no longer a boy. And yet he was not quite a man. There were these years facing him, a barrier between past and future, years when he must lend his body to his country, years which he must spend in some unknown place, performing an unknown duty. There was no use in planning until these years were over, and still he could not keep fro
m planning.
He listened, without hearing, to his mother’s determinedly cheerful chatter. There was a comfort in being with her but that was all. Yet though he knew his life had now proceeded beyond her ken or reach, he was aware that she, too, knew this and so she did not question him about Lady Mary or about Stephanie. Of Lady Mary he did not speak, but he told her of Stephanie, briefly and casually, at breakfast one morning.
“The sort of girl who is—well, one of a kind. She isn’t French, nor is she Chinese, and certainly not American, and yet somewhat each.”
He was silent for so long that his mother encouraged him.
“She sounds interesting, at least!”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Yes, certainly she is interesting. Very complex, perhaps! I feel I’d have to be a good deal older before I’d understand her.”
He paused again, undecided, and then went on.
“You’ll be amused by this, Mother! Her father is an old-fashioned Chinese, though he’s lived in Paris for so many years. He has no son, and it seems that when this is the case a Chinese may ask his son-in-law to become his son and take his name. Well, he asked me to be that son-in-law!”
He was half-laughing, in some embarrassment, and she laughed aloud. “How could you refuse such an offer?”
“Well, Stephanie had warned me. She told me she didn’t want to marry at all. And certainly I don’t … not at this point in my life when I don’t know—can’t know—my future.”
She grew suddenly serious. “Have you any idea inside yourself, Rannie? Of what you want to do—and be?”
“No, except that I don’t want to work for anyone. I don’t want to be part of a corporation or in any organization I can’t control. I want to work by myself, for myself. It’s the only way to ensure my independence. I know, of course, that whatever else I do, I will also write. It’s already sort of a compulsion in me.”
She looked at him with troubled eyes. “You’re taking a great risk, aren’t you?”
“But on myself,” he said.
They were silent for a moment. He piled pancakes on his plate again. His appetite was enormous.
“Eat,” she always said. “You have a big body and very little flesh on your bones.”
“Well,” she said now, “you’re lucky in one way, at least. Your grandfather left you all he had. We won’t know yet just how much it is, but he wrote me that you wouldn’t starve, and that you would always be comfortable if you were careful.”
“He wrote that?”
“Yes, before you came home. I think he knew he hadn’t much time.”
“We liked each other, Mother—though I didn’t know what to make of him.”
He hesitated and then told her what he had not planned to tell her.
“You don’t know it—but he married again, after Grandmother died.”
He watched her face and suddenly it grew hard. “It was never a marriage. She simply moved in—Serena Woolcotte. Oh, there was some sort of civil ceremony but not a proper marriage. We knew about her.”
“We?”
“My aunt and I.”
“But he never told—”
“There are things one doesn’t need to be told. Everyone knew Serena.”
“What was she?”
“A woman whose father had too much money and too little time and left her to meddle in men’s lives.”
“Mother!”
“Well, she did!”
“But that doesn’t tell me anything—meddle in men’s lives!”
“She had nothing else to do and that’s why I warned you against your Lady Mary!”
He stopped short, not wanting to talk about his Lady Mary. He got up from the breakfast table. He had been notified to report for induction, and this was the day.
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER HE WAS IN KOREA, stationed at a base on the line between north and south. Behind him lay the crowded miles of South Korea. In front of him were the mountains of North Korea. A bridge toward the left as he faced north was connection and prevention. If he crossed that bridge, he would be shot down. He had no intention of crossing it; indeed, he had a horror of it. At night he woke himself out of the nightmare that unwittingly he had crossed it. Day after day he patrolled the line between north and south, he and others with him, a dull, dangerous, mechanical task from which there was no relief or recreation—or at least recreation that attracted him.
“Get yourself a girl,” the nasal-voiced sergeant had drawled the first night his company had arrived at the base camp. “Don’t pick up with these broads that talk English. They’ve been around a lot and they’re rotten with disease. You’ll have to fight ’em off, though. They’re bold as brass—walk up to you and pull down your zipper before you know it! Naw, you find yourself a nice little country girl and shack up with her. She’ll look after you—they all know how, these little gooks!”
He had not taken up with anyone. He had simply watched the other fellows, laughing, shamefaced, apologetic, boasting as they found girls. He had no desire to imitate them. In a way he could not explain, he now comprehended that Lady Mary had instilled in him a certain good taste. At least they had made love in beautiful surroundings. She herself had been fastidious, clean, and perfumed. Now it was impossible for him to imagine lying with one of these crude Korean whores, unwashed and stinking of garlic, or even the girls in Seoul, whither he had gone on his first three-day leave. He saw them in bars and recreation rooms, aping the garb and the mannerisms of Hollywood stars of an earlier generation, and he could scarcely be courteous when one and another coaxed and wheedled as he sat apart and alone.
“You, nice boy! Lonesome, maybe? You dance, please? I like dance very much.”
“Thanks, no. I’m just here for a nightcap.”
“Nightcap?”
“A drink before I go to bed.”
“Where you sleep, big boy?”
“I am staying here in the hotel.”
“What room number?”
“I—forget.”
“Look your key.”
“I—left it at the desk.”
“I think you not liking girls. Maybe you only liking boys.”
“Certainly not!”
“Why you not dance, big boy?”
“Not tonight.”
One by one they tried and one by one they went away and he was alone and yet not lonely. That was the strange element of his life—he was never lonely because he was beginning to write. He had discovered that in communing with his own mind he was in communication with life. There was a certain permanence in putting down words on paper even in his letters to his mother. They were there in the morning, his thoughts of the night before. He was relieved of inward pressure. He could endure the stupidities of his life in this wild, strange country where he had no business to be. The people were like none he had ever known, basically a nomad people although they lived in villages centuries old. He found books about them in an English bookshop in Seoul and with his insatiable desire to learn and to know, he became absorbed in the mere comprehension of the Korean people. From learning he began to write his private conclusions: “They have never ceased to be nomads at heart, these Koreans! They began as a nomad people long ago in Central Asia and they wandered in search of a place to rest, being persecuted by warrior tribes. This explains their coming finally to this tail end of land, this peninsula, hanging between China, Russia, and Japan. There was nowhere to go from here, except to push northward into Russia, and across the Bering Strait, which then was a land bridge to what is now Canada and thence southward, who knows how far? It is no accident that Americans and Koreans are so much alike. Indeed today when the Korean mess boy was cleaning the tables he muttered something about one of the fellows being Choctaw, and when I asked what that word meant, he said ‘too-short man.’ Whereupon I remembered that we have a tribe of American Indians, the Choctaw,
who are short men. Coincidence? There is more than coincidence.”
And again, on a hot August night: “Today I was on border duty. I marched for hours on our side of the line, gun on my shoulder and staring into the sullen face of the North Korean guard on the other side. One step toward him, one step across the line, and he would have shot me. One step over the line toward me and—would I have shot him? No—I’d have thrown him back where he belongs. What absurdity! He is about my age—not a bad-looking fellow. I wonder what he thinks about while he is staring at my white face. Perhaps he is wondering what I am thinking about him. There is no possible communication. Yet under ordinary circumstances, were we not enemies we would have many questions to ask each other. Now we’ll never ask them. That is what I hate most about this war game. It cuts off communication between peoples. We cannot ask questions and so we cannot get answers.
“Tonight there was a breakthrough. Three North Koreans in the dark of the moon crossed the border. We caught them at once, but not before I shot one of them. Thank God I did not kill him—only a shoulder wound, but it bled horribly. Of course he was taken to the hospital here at the base. I suppose he will be turned over to the Korean command—probably shot after he is patched up. I can’t think about these irrationalities.”
And again, after his next period of rest and recreation: “I can’t understand, in spite of my own clamoring flesh, how our fellows can penetrate the bodies of these worm-ridden, germ-infested Korean girls! There must be decent girls but we don’t meet them, of course. I don’t want to meet them—any of them.”
And still later: “Today I met the general’s wife. She happened to be in his office unexpectedly. I have been appointed his aide as of last week and it was the first time I had seen her. She is between forty and fifty and still kittenish. I don’t know what to make of her. Fortunately, I don’t have to make anything of her, but she kept looking at me—bluntly put, at my crotch. Whereupon I looked above her head.”