Letters From Peking

  “Hello, Mrs. MacLeod! I thought I’d come along with Rennie and see how my old gentleman is. You can throw me out if you don’t want me for Christmas.”

  He shakes my hand enough to break my wrist, and his blue eyes twinkle and glow. He throws his arms across my shoulders and kisses me soundly on my cheek. And all this time, while I am stammering some sort of a welcome, I see only Rennie, standing there waiting, a slight tall dark young man, smiling, and saying not a word. It occurs to Sam that he has been boisterous, for he steps back.

  “Excuse me, ma’am.”

  And Rennie comes forward and takes my hand in both his, and he stoops and kisses me on the other cheek, so lightly that I scarcely feel the touch of his fresh cool lips.

  “Hello, Mother—”

  He looks down at me, I look up at him. He is not saying anything more now. I hasten to speak.

  “Come in—come in. It’s cold tonight. Come in where it’s warm. Good skiing weather tomorrow, Rennie!”

  They come in and Rennie stands looking around the hall and into the living room. I have lit all the lamps and I have lit the candles on the dining-room table. The table is set with my best linen and my mother’s old silver. I have put a bowl of holly on the table. We cannot grow holly here, and I bought it at a dear price at the florist’s shop in town.

  “Does it look the same to you?” I ask Rennie.

  He shakes his head and does not reply. No, it does not look the same to him because he is not the same. He is changed. And I discern in him a heartbreaking fear of me, his mother. He is afraid that I will try to make him what he was before, a boy and not a man. He is not willing even to be my son if he has to be a boy again. I understand this in a flash of pain.

  “Would you like to go to your rooms?” I asked very formally. “Rennie, your room is ready, and I have only to put some towels in the guestroom for you, Sam. I’m glad you came.”

  Yes, I am glad. When I first saw him I was almost angry that a stranger had come with my son. But I know why he came. Rennie wanted him to come so that he would not be alone with me, his mother. He needs a man to keep him safe from me. I must be very cool and calm. I must make no demands on this tall silent young man. So I am glad that Sam has come. It will be easier to treat them both as strangers.

  “You know your room, Rennie,” I said cheerfully. “And, Sam, if you will turn here to the right—”

  “How is the old gentleman?” Sam asked briskly.

  “He’ll be delighted to see you,” I said, and hoped that Baba would remember him.

  “Where is he?”

  “Here.” I opened the door of Baba’s room, and Sam went in but I saw Rennie pass by and go into his own room and shut the door.

  “Well, well,” Sam shouted. He descended upon Baba and shook his hand while Baba stared at him helplessly.

  “Sitting here looking like an old Emperor of China,” Sam bellowed amiably. “How are you, Doctor MacLeod?”

  He drew up a wooden chair in front of Baba and sat on it facing the back, his sandy hair on end and every tooth showing in his grin.

  “I am well,” Baba said cautiously. He looked at me, appealing, and then at Sam. “Are you my grandson?” he inquired gently.

  Sam roared. “Not quite—not quite! Rennie hasn’t changed that much. Don’t you remember me, sir? I fetched you to the shack on my ranch. Don’t you remember? Why, you and me were wonderful friends!”

  Baba remembered slowly. He nodded his head. He tapped his dragon-headed cane softly two or three times on the carpet.

  “Sam,” he said cautiously. “It’s Sam.”

  “Right,” Sam cried with delight. “Why, you’re in fine shape. You’ve been taken real good care of—”

  I longed to leave them and slip away to Rennie’s room. If I were alone with my son surely there would be one good moment of embrace, just one, and I would ask no more. But Sam was watching me. When I stole toward the door he stopped me.

  “Ma’am,” he said, “you won’t misunderstand me when I say it’s better to leave Rennie to himself for a while. He’ll come back to you in good time but it’ll have to be his time.”

  “I feel it,” I said, and sat down and waited.

  And Rennie’s door opened at last and he came in. He had changed his clothes to brown slacks and a tweed jacket that I had never seen before. His black hair was brushed smooth and he wore a red tie. I saw him as a man, a very handsome man….Though young, he has reserves of power somewhere. Shall I ever know him again and if so, then how?

  “How are you, Grandfather?” he said and he came to Baba and knelt at his side as a Chinese grandson might have done and took Baba’s hand.

  Baba stared at him reflectively.

  “Are you my son Gerald?” he asked.

  “Only your grandson,” Rennie said.

  They looked at each other and, face to face, I saw the resemblance between them for the first time. Rennie’s profile, changing with manhood, takes on the Scotch lines and not the Chinese.

  “My grandson,” Baba repeated, and suddenly he leaned forward and kissed Rennie on the forehead. I had never seen him kiss anyone before. Rennie was moved, and put Baba’s hand to his cheek.

  “I’m glad I came home,” he said. He turned to me and I saw tears in his eyes.

  We had a merry evening after that. Those two young men made a chair of their crossed hands and they carried Baba downstairs and he sat at the table with us. Then, for gaiety, I ran upstairs and put on my wine velvet dinner gown, which I had not worn since Gerald and I parted. The last night in Shanghai we went alone to dine at the Astor Hotel and afterwards to dance, and I put on this one festive gown that I had saved through all the war. We danced cheek to cheek, forgetting the crowded streets outside, and determined for a few hours to mingle with the European guests gathered in the hotel, most of them ready to sail away forever from the country they loved but to which they could never belong. And we knew, Gerald and I, without ever saying it, that he would stay and I must go. I am sure he knew.

  For a moment tonight I was about to take the gown off again, and then I would not. Everything I was and owned must become a part of this house, this valley, and I have no other country than my own. So I went downstairs, and the two young men stood up when I came in and each of them looked at me with surprise. I was suddenly a woman, and they had not realized it before. Well, I was glad that Rennie saw me as someone else than mother, for perhaps he will not fear me so much. As for Sam, it does not matter what he saw.

  I put Rennie at the head of the table, and I sat at the foot, with Baba at my right so that I could cut his meat for him. The soup was hot in the Chinese bowls I had once bought in New York because they were like the ones I had in Peking, only the ware is not so fine, and so we began our evening meal. And Rennie was suddenly quite gay, too, and he began to talk, and Sam was as suddenly silent and almost shy.

  “I’m going to teach Sam to ski,” Rennie said. “He’s lived in such flat country that he doesn’t know what it is to ski down a mountainside.”

  “There are extra skis in the attic,” I said.

  “I don’t know as I want to come down a mountain,” Sam said. “It takes nerve, the kind I haven’t.”

  “Of all the kinds of nerve you have,” Rennie said, “you should be able to summon another. I’ve seen you come down out of the sky in that single-engine plane of yours at a speed that ought to make you ready to ski down Everest itself.”

  “I don’t carry the engine on my feet,” Sam said.

  They were hungry and they ate heartily and I sat and watched them. It was good to have guests at the table. I had sat alone so long. I took pride in the roast lamb and the peas and the small browned potatoes and lettuce salad. And I had remembered the apple pies that Rennie loves, served with cheese slices and hot coffee.

  “I don’t remember your being such a good cook,” Rennie said, throwing me a smile.

  “This is a special effort,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t like to
have to eat as good a dinner every day,” Rennie declared. He had recovered from whatever shyness he had and was himself again. I saw him let out his belt a notch or two, hiding this from me politely. Rennie’s good manners are as natural to him as breathing. He absorbed them in Peking from the most mannerly people in the world, and though he tried to be rough and rude when he left China, he was old enough now to dare to be himself, or very nearly. He was still cautious with me.

  When dinner was over the knocker clanged again. We had left the table, I forbidding any help with clearing. Time enough for that later, I told Sam, who began at once to stack dishes. Baba was lifted into the living room and put in a chair by the fire, and I had sat opposite him, and Rennie and Sam had pulled up the yellow satin sofa facing the chimneypiece when we heard the clangor.

  Rennie turned to me. “Do you expect someone?”

  “No,” I said. “I cannot imagine who would come at this hour.”

  He went into the hall and opened the door and Bruce Spaulden stood there, holding in his hand a bunch of pink roses wrapped in cellophane. Rennie stared at him. They knew each other, for Bruce had brought Rennie through tonsillitis, but they stared as though at strangers.

  “No one is ill here,” Rennie said.

  “Rennie!” I cried. “For heaven’s sake—”

  I went to the door myself and Bruce held out the roses and I took them.

  “Come in,” I said. “We are sitting around the fire.”

  He came in and Rennie stood watchful and silent. I put the roses in an old gray pottery bowl that had stood on the table since I was a child. Before I sat down I saw that Baba had fallen peacefully asleep, his head thrown back and his eyes closed.

  “Ought we to take him upstairs?” I asked Bruce.

  “He looks comfortable,” Bruce said, “and he couldn’t be more soundly asleep.”

  We sat down and Rennie was silent between the two men and I caught him looking at me strangely now and again. I felt suddenly happy as I had not been for a long time and soon we were all talking, and Bruce got up and went to the pantry and made some hot coffee, for he will not drink anything else, but Rennie fetched the wine that I keep in the house and poured out glasses for himself and Sam, and I wanted nothing and so we sat down again and the talk flowed triangularly between the two men and me. Rennie sat silent and watching.

  I really belong here, I kept thinking. It is here I was born, and if I were not so lonely, I could forget Peking and at last perhaps I could even forget Gerald. I have not laughed for a long time but I found myself laughing, laughing at the three men. Each in his way was playing for my attention, Sam very brusque and western and masculine and Bruce dark and caustic and wary, and Rennie the young man standing aside from the fencing between the two older men, but watchful and tending the fire. The talk ranged but it was all for my ears, the fencers preening and displaying themselves before my eyes. I felt a tenderness, amused, unspecified, but valid.

  “Revolution,” Sam declared, “is an inevitable process. We do not grow by accumulation, as barnacles do. We burst our skins, like snakes, we cast off the old encasements, and emerge afresh.”

  I was amazed to hear him speak without a trace of his harsh western idiom. The ranchman’s drawl was a shield. I had never seen the real man before.

  Bruce drew upon his pipe, slowly and deeply. Twin jets of smoke feathered from his thin nostrils. “There never was a revolution in man’s history that paid its way. The end is always lost in the conflict and confusion out of which evil men rise to power.”

  “You can’t hold back revolution for all of that,” Sam insisted. “Endurance has its limit. Explosion is inevitable. Look at China—”

  He turned to me and the winds of Asia rushed into the warm closed room. I was swept across the sea again. By force of will I refused to go.

  “Let us not talk of China,” I said. “Let us never talk of China. Who knows what is happening there?” Rennie looked up from the fire and the iron poker dropped from his hands. His eyes met mine. I knew I should have to tell him.

  The life went out of the evening. I could not listen now to the argument between the men. They continued, their eyes covertly upon me, demanding attention which I could not give….How can I tell Rennie about his father?

  …“Come into my room, Rennie,” I said when the evening was over. I was casual, I made my voice cheerful. “You and I have had no chance to talk. Let’s light the fire and settle ourselves.”

  We had said goodnight to Bruce at the front door and then to Sam at the head of the stairs. Bruce held my hand for a moment, and I could not be warm. “Thank you for the pink roses,” I said stupidly.

  “When I think of roses I think of you,” he said under his breath. That was much for him to say but I could not muster a smile in reply. My heart was already hammering in my breast. How can I tell Rennie so that he will not hate his father?

  “Sit down, Rennie,” I said.

  I sat in the old red velvet armchair that had once belonged to my Boston grandmother. He sat down in the wooden Windsor opposite me. He had lit the fire in my room and the logs were dry and already blazing.

  “I can’t get used to the way you look,” I said. Indeed I cannot. His face has lost its boyish roundness. The cheekbones are defined, the jaw is firm. I should be hard put to it to say where Rennie came from, were he a stranger to me. Spain? Italy? Brazil? North India? Yet he is my own son.

  “Tell me what you like best at college,” I said.

  “Math. Math and music.”

  I have forgotten to say that Rennie has always loved music. This perhaps is my gift to him. Many hours of my own youth I spent at the old square piano downstairs in the parlor, but since I came home I have not been able to play. I have not even given Rennie lessons as I might have. Living on the brink of final separation from Gerald I have not been able to endure music. Yet I have never forbidden it to Rennie and he has played when he wished.

  “It’s a good combination, Rennie—the combination Confucius required for the civilized man. The superior man, the gentleman, must know the disciplines of mathematics and music.”

  “They are allied,” Rennie said. “They demand the same precision and abstraction.”

  I am awed by his growth in mind as well as in body. “Shall you go into music for livelihood?” I inquired.

  “I want to be a scientist. Science combines the abstract and the precise.”

  “Your father will be pleased.”

  To this Rennie did not reply. He never replies when I mention his father.

  “And what about George Bowen’s sister?” I inquired, half playfully. Now this would never do. I was avoiding the opportunity of his silence. I did not care about George Bowen’s sister.

  Rennie did not look at me. His eyes were fixed upon the fire. “What about her?”

  “Well, is she pretty?”

  “She is not pretty—she’s beautiful.”

  “Dark or fair? Short or tall?”

  “Tall, fair, and calm.”

  “Not like me—”

  He cast a quick glance at me, measuring, comparing, and looked again at the fire. “No.”

  “Do you like her very much, Rennie?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to know, I suppose I’d rather not be hurt again.”

  “There’s plenty of time,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  Here fell the next silence, and I would not let myself be a coward about it.

  “Rennie, I want to talk about your father.”

  He lifted his head at this, reluctantly interested.

  “Have you had a letter?”

  “Not recently—not from him. But I did have a—a special letter.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me when it came?”

  “You were too young,” I said. “You wouldn’t have understood. You’d have blamed him.”

  “What has he done?”

  “Wait,” I said. “I must explain.”

  And so I began at the begi
nning. I told him how we met, Gerald and I. I told him how we fell in love. I couldn’t tell him of our first night together. That belongs to Gerald and to me, a treasure locked in memory. I told him of Peking and how in those, years the love we had begun here in this narrow Vermont valley deepened and widened into a life complete in companionship.

  “There are a few such marriages, Rennie,” I said. “My mother told me I could never be happy with Gerald but she was wrong. I was happy and so was he. We delighted each in the other. The ancestors did not matter. Well, the truth is that perhaps they mattered very much. They added their peculiar and fascinating variety. I remember your father and I talked about them sometimes. I remember your father said once that our marriage was all the more complete because the responsibility for it rested solely on ourselves. Our ancestors would not have approved.”

  Rennie is too quick for me. “What is it that you really want to say?”

  “I want to tell you first that what has happened is not the fault of your father nor is it mine. If the world had not split apart under our feet, we would still be living in the house in Peking and not here.”

  “And why aren’t we?” he demanded.

  “You know,” I said. “You know and you needn’t ask. It is because of me. It is because I am American, and because your father is half American. And there is no fault in either of us for that. It is the split in the world that has driven us apart, exactly as though a tidal wave had rushed between us on a beach and swept us in opposite directions.”

  “He could have left China,” Rennie said.

  “He could not.”

  “And why not?” Rennie insisted. I saw by his bitter face that he was angry with his father.

  “I defend your father,” I said. “He is not here to speak for himself. And besides, if you must blame anyone, blame Baba. He married your Chinese grandmother without loving her, and that was the primary sin.”

  With this I got up and I fetched the picture of his grandmother and I told him about her and how the story of Han Ai-lan was imbedded in the story of her country and in the times in which we live.