Letters From Peking

  My mother could be distant too, in her small way, and on that day she was frigid. She sat in the parlor to receive him, dressed in her grey silk. Beside her was the mahogany tea table and the silver tea set her mother had left her, and the best porcelain cups and saucers which a seafaring ancestor brought home from Canton, China, a hundred years ago.

  “Mother,” I said, “this is Gerald.”

  My mother put out her small pale hand. “How do you do,” she murmured. She was a little woman but she could put on immense dignity and did so.

  “I am well, thank you,” Gerald said in his warm pleasant voice, “and very happy, Mrs. Kirke, to meet you.”

  “Sit down, Gerald,” I said, trying to be at ease while I was instantly furious with my mother. For she could be amiable if she wished, never quite losing her dignity, but gentling it. She had a rare but pretty smile. There was no hint of it now on her severe narrow face.

  “Such a beautiful house,” Gerald said looking about him. “I like these old houses that belong to their landscapes.”

  My mother was unwillingly pleased. “It’s too big,” she said, and began to pour tea.

  “There is no need for houses to be small,” Gerald said. “A house should be like a gem, always in proportion to its setting.”

  “I suppose you would like China tea,” my mother said, “but we always use Indian.”

  “I would like it then with cream,” Gerald said. He was composed and at ease, while, as I could see, he was quite aware of my mother’s mood. And when he had his tea and was eating scones, for my mother could be very English when she chose, and she always chose to be so when she put on all her dignity, Gerald said,

  “Ah, scones! I haven’t had these since my Scotch grandmother died.”

  “Oh, and was your grandmother Scotch?” my mother inquired.

  “She was, although her family emigrated early to Virginia,” Gerald said. “When I was small, however, she came to visit us and she liked our city so well that she stayed until she died, and we buried her in the cemetery with the other white people.”

  “What was your city?” my mother asked, nibbling her scone.

  “Peking, the ancient capital of China,” Gerald said, exactly as though he might have said London or Paris or Rome. “This is good tea,” he said. “Indian tea can be quite bad, as Chinese tea can be, too. You are a connoisseur, Mrs. Kirke.”

  “I was taught as a girl to know my teas,” my mother said. She was trying not to unbend and she made a pretense of lifting the cake plate and then put it down again.

  Gerald laughed. “In a minute, please! Grandmother taught me not to take cake while I was still eating scone.”

  Mother had to smile then, a very small, cool smile, but I laughed, partly at her and partly because I was happy.

  “You were too well brought up, Gerald,” I said.

  My mother instantly turned on me. “Elizabeth, I do not understand that remark. You yourself have been well brought up, I think, and Mr. MacLeod is entirely right, and you shouldn’t be facetious at the wrong time.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother,” I said. It was the slogan of my childhood, taught me in secret by my father. “Liz,” he said, and Liz was his version of my stately name, “Liz, it’s so easy to say ‘I’m sorry.’ It costs nothing and it saves a mint of pain. Those two words are the common coin of daily life, but especially between people who love each other.”

  My mother turned her profile to me and she chose to speak to Gerald.

  “Did your grandmother MacLeod live in Richmond?” she asked.

  “She did,” he said. “There are old Scotch families in Virginia, and my grandmother always insisted that her great-great-grandfather Daniel was among the first founders. Perhaps he was.”

  “Very interesting,” my mother said. Family trees were her hobby and I saw that I need not exert myself. Gerald had won her cool little heart, so far as it could be won.

  This is not to say that she had no misgivings. More than once after that, when Gerald came to visit before we were married, she summoned me to her room late at night, after Gerald and I had parted, and there she sat upright in her Windsor chair, wrapped in her grey flannelette dressing gown and her hair in black kid curlers.

  “Elizabeth, I have a dreadful fear that when you have a child it will look Chinese. Children do take after the grandparents. You are the image of your Grandmother Duane.”

  “He might look like the MacLeods,” I suggested.

  “There’s no guarantee,” she retorted, “and how I could bear to have a Chinese grandchild I do not know. I could not explain it in Boston.”

  For my mother was never a true Vermonter but always a citizen of Boston, spiritually and mentally.

  “Don’t worry, Mother,” I said. “Gerald and I will live in Peking.”

  This startled her indeed. “You’ll never go and live in China,” she said, remonstrating.

  “Didn’t you come and live in Vermont?” I parried.

  “But China,” she persisted.

  “Peking is no more remote than London or Paris or Rome,” I said, echoing the beloved.

  “I never knew anyone to go to Peking,” she said, resisting the idea of its nearness.

  “Grandmother MacLeod went,” I reminded her. “What’s more, she’s buried there.”

  “She couldn’t help dying, wherever she was,” my mother declared and grimly.

  “She wanted to be buried there—Gerald says so.”

  My mother could only sigh.

  “Kiss me goodnight,” she said. “I’ll never go to Peking,” she added as I leaned to kiss her cheek.

  “You might,” I said gaily. I was too happy to be anything but gay in those days, though she shook her head.

  She was right. She never went to Peking. Within in a year after Gerald and I were married, she died of a sudden chill that developed quickly into pneumonia and I remembered what she had said every winter, drawing her grey shawl about her.

  “These Vermont winters will be the death of me,” she always said, and, in the end, it was true. She was winter-killed, but part of it was the winter she carried in her own soul, wherever she was.

  Yesterday before twilight, the sky darkened suddenly under a cloud, hurricane black, a flying cloud that sailed high over the mountains encircling the farm. A strange unease fell on man and beast and even on me, though I have seen hurricanes enough. So the heavy sandstorms used to fall upon Peking. But there was neither sand nor rain in yesterday’s cloud. A few drops fell from the swollen shape above and then the wind hurried it on.

  Whatever the wind was, it blew the darkness away and today the valley lies under a scintillating sun and the warmth of it draws the mists again from the melting snow.

  I dread the spring this year. I try not to look at the clock. It is useless now to watch and wait for the postman. I shall never get another letter from Gerald. I tell myself that every day. When Matt brought in the mail this morning, I did not turn my head. “Put it on the desk in the office,” I said. But I went to look, just the same, knowing there was no letter.

  So I was busy, for we have the orchard to prune before the sap begins to run in the sugar bush. We raise good apples, old-fashioned and sound. The cellar is still stocked with them, although I have been giving them away all winter. My favorites are the pound apples, each weighing a pound, or very nearly, red-skinned and crisp and a nice balance between sour and sweet. When I bite into one I remember that Gerald does not like apples. Chinese apples are pithy and tasteless, but even our good American apples could not tempt him. He came sometimes to help us pick the apples but I never saw him eat one. Instead he talked of pears. Yet once when I brought him a plate of Bartletts he did not finish even a pear.

  “They are soft,” he said. “The pears in Peking are as crisp as celery and full of clear juice.”

  “Then they are not pears,” I said to tease him.

  “Wait and see,” he said.

  For by then we knew we would be married as soo
n as he had his doctor’s degree. And when I did eat Peking pears they were different indeed, indescribable and delicious, pears certainly, but not American in taste or texture. At first I thought they were plucked before they were ripe, as the Chinese harvest their peaches, preferring a slightly green taste to the mellow sweet of ripeness. But the pears were ripe and they held their freshness all through the winter.

  …We have pruned all day, Matt and I. He is a silent fellow, a Vermonter, lank and lean, his teeth gone too early from a wretched diet which nevertheless he will not improve. He looks upon my brown breads and green salads with distaste and refusal and though I press him to share my luncheon, he sits apart and munches what he calls lunch meat between two huge slabs of the cheap bread, which I consider not bread but a solidified foam of white flour and water. Matt knows of my years in China and doubtless he wonders about Gerald but he never asks me a question that does not pertain to the farm. Save for this, his conversation consists of bits of bad news from the valley. Thus today I heard that the deep quarrel between young Tom Mosser and his wife has now reached the point of blows.

  “He took a knife to her—not the blade, though,” Matt said.

  “What then?” I inquired.

  “The handle,” he said. “It was made of horn. He dug it in her.”

  “Where?” I inquired.

  “Buzzim,” he said briefly.

  Bosom? Mollie Mosser has a big rich bosom and she wears her sweaters too tight. I did not continue the conversation.

  “I want to finish the orchard before Rennie comes home from school,” I said. And we went back to work.

  And so, while my thoughts wander far from my Vermont hillside, I prune my apple trees, remembering that fruit is borne on the small and twiggy branches, and never on the bold young growth. Saw and shears I can use well enough, and I take the large branches first, cutting upwards for an inch or two, lest the wood split. When the saw is sharp, my neighbors say, it is time to prune the fruit trees, a saying true enough, for during the winter, when the weather is not fit for outside work, I oil the tools and sharpen the saws and the scythe. I have an old-fashioned wheel of sandstone that does well for the larger tools, but the small ones I sharpen by hand against a strip of flint. And I have learned to prune severely. A close clean cut heals soon—that I have learned. But I know that too deep a cut will never heal. The branch will bear no fruit.

  Nothing can hold back the spring. It comes against my dread, and I watch the signs. Rennie asks me every few days, “Mother, no letter?”

  I shake my head. “I am afraid it is getting difficult for your father,” I say. “The anti-American feeling in China is growing under the skillful communist propaganda.”

  Rennie muses, “What is communism, really?”

  “Who knows?” I reply. “It is what people make it.” And I tell him of Karl Marx, the strange little man, long dead, who lived his narrow little life, and somehow managed by the power of his wayward brain, to lay hold upon millions of human lives.

  “Even our lives, Rennie,” I said. “Because of him we are separated, you from father and I from husband.”

  “And can my father not free himself?” he asked.

  How could I answer this? “I suppose,” I said, “that if our country, here, went communist we’d stay, believing in our past and in our future, and hoping that somehow we’d escape.”

  “And could we?” he persisted. “And can my father?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Nor I, Mother,” he said. “And I don’t know even if this is my country.”

  “It is yours because it is mine,” I said. “And let that be the end of it.”

  It is not the end, as I well know. Rennie will have to choose his own country.

  And sooner or later I shall have to tell him that I have his father’s last letter upstairs, locked into the secret drawer of my mother’s old desk, for there will be no more letters now.

  But I put off the day. Rennie went on talking this evening after our supper, which we ate by the kitchen fire. It is an old chimneypiece, used once for cooking, or so I suppose. A crane is built under it and a great pot hangs from the crane, in which I still heat water when electricity fails in a summer thunderstorm.

  “I should think my father could get a letter to us somehow,” Rennie continued.

  “We do not know what rigors are imposed upon him,” I replied. “It is dangerous for him that his father is American.”

  “Where is my grandfather MacLeod?” Rennie asked.

  Rennie likes apples. I keep a wooden bowl of them on the kitchen table for our evenings and while he talked he was biting deeply into the white flesh of a red Baldwin.

  “He’s in Kansas. We shall have to go and find him one of these days,” I said. “And do you forget that you used to call him Baba?”

  I should have been looking at seed catalogues, but I was doing nothing except stare into the fire. I had planned long ago to visit Gerald’s father. It was one of my beloved’s last requests to me that day when we stood on the dock in Shanghai.

  “Go and see my father and take Rennie with you,” Gerald bade me. “It will comfort him to see his grandson.”

  “Is that why you are sending us to America?” I demanded.

  “One reason “among others,” he replied.

  “In that case I will stay here,” I retorted.

  “You must go,” Gerald said, “and Rennie must go with you.”

  And then reluctantly he said what we both knew and had never spoken aloud. “Your lives will not be safe here if you stay.”

  I saw him glance about him as he spoke the words. For the first time Gerald was afraid. He had gone through war and bombing without a qualm. If he had ever been afraid he had hid his fear so that it seemed not to exist. But this fear he could not hide.

  “What of you?” I asked and certainly I was afraid.

  “Half of me is Chinese,” he said. “I shall make that serve.”

  “But will They?” I muttered. We were already calling the Communists “They.”

  “I shall become indispensable,” he replied.

  I wished with all my heart that this conversation had taken place when we were alone, when we were at home in Peking, in our house, in our bedroom, the doors locked, the windows closed. Then I could have thrown myself on his breast and forced the truth from him. Yet when could one force anything from Gerald? He has a will, a logic, which he alone can wield. I was standing beside him that day on the dock, the wind blowing my hair, and I could only ask in a stupid low voice that conveyed no passion, “And why, Gerald, do you wish to make yourself indispensable here?”

  “One has to choose,” he said.

  There was no time for more. The tug was waiting to take us to the ship, and in the silent crowd upon the small vessel it would not have been safe to talk. I kept thinking, I remember. When had it become dangerous to talk? At what moment had the people, and among them ourselves, ceased to be gay and communicative, hiding nothing from each other? When had they become silent and afraid? I do not know the moment. The change was gradual, but when it came it was absolute. And it had culminated in the silence between Gerald and me when we parted.

  I cannot sleep the nights through. I get up and prowl about the house, careful not to wake Rennie. His ear is too quick toward me. He guesses that something is wrong, but still I do not tell him about the letter. He thinks I grieve because I have not heard from his father for so many months. He says to me,

  “Mother, I am sure there are many letters waiting in some forgotten place. You know how the postmen are over there. They sit down to eat a bowl of hot rice, or they lie under a tree to sleep.”

  Actually this is not true. The postal service to and from Peking was always excellent, and I suppose it is no worse now. It was organized by the English, who are always thorough. I smile when Rennie tries such comfort. I say, “Of course you are right, and I will not worry. No news is good news.”

  It is a true old prover
b. How much better it would be now if I had not this letter lying like a live thing in the secret drawer of my desk! I have sealed it with red sealing wax, lest by some impossible chance Rennie might be rummaging one day and find it. And having sealed it, I swear to myself that even I will never read it again.

  …Last night I was too lonely. Oh, there is a loneliness which befalls me now and then and it is something more than death. I am still a wife, but without my husband. When a man dies, his widow dies by so much, too, perhaps. If her love has been great enough, a part of her dies and it can never be reborn with another man. But I am not a widow. In the night I wait and I lie in my solitary bed and all my dreams fly across the sea, annihilating time and space to seek the beloved. I walk the well-known street to our gate. It is barred against petty thieves but, bodiless, I go through and cross the courtyard and enter the locked door. The gateman does not wake. He cannot hear me, nor could he prevent me if he did. There is my home. It is as I left it, believing that surely I would come back. Gerald and I cannot be parted. That is what I believed.

  I said to the servants, “Keep everything as I have it.”

  “We will,” they promised.

  “Do not forget,” I said. “Our master must have hot food when he comes in at night, however late the hour.”

  “Never, never can we forget,” they promised.

  “I shall return,” I said.

  “Our mistress will return,” they said.

  Now, remembering, my soul passes swiftly through the rooms to the bedroom where Gerald lies asleep. Surely he lies asleep. Is he alone? Is he still alone?

  My soul stands fearful at the door. In a moment it flies back to me here. What, what was the day when Gerald wrote the letter? Does the letter tell the day? I am not sure. Soul in my waiting body, I get out of bed and I open the secret drawer of the desk. It is I who break the seal I set. I read the opening words again.

  “Let me tell you that I love only you.”

  I bend my head and weep. Is it not enough that he has written these words? What does it matter whether tonight he sleeps alone—or does not? I fold the letter, my heart unanswered, and I seal it once more and once more I put it away in the secret drawer in the locked box.