Letters From Peking

  He sat up surprised. “Mom, how did you know?”

  “Oh, I know,” I said, trying to laugh. “I really know more than you think I do.”

  He lay back to stare again at the moon.

  “It’s nothing to talk about—not yet, I guess. She’s the girl in that red and white house down the road. Summer people.”

  I knew people had moved into the house, but I have been too busy to call on them. Sometimes I call on our summer neighbors and sometimes I do not. Now of course I must go.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Allegra.”

  “A fanciful name!”

  “It’s pretty, though, don’t you think?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “The last name is Woods,” he went on.

  “What does the father do?”

  “Business of some sort in New York. He isn’t here much. Allegra’s here with her mother.”

  “How did you happen to meet?”

  “She was walking down the road one day, toward Moore’s Falls, and I happened along and she asked where she was.”

  “You must bring her to see me, if you really like her,” I said. All the warnings were quivering inside me. My son is in danger. The hour I had foreseen since the day he was laid in my arms, new born, has now come. A girl has looked at him. He has looked at the girl. What girl is this?

  “It’s getting cold,” I said. “We must go inside and shut the doors.”

  I hope the friendship will not move too quickly into something else. Rennie brought Allegra here today. They have been meeting every day, I think. It is so easy here in the valley. The long summer days begin early and end late. Rennie works hard with Matt, cleaning the sugar bush on fine days and packing maple sugar or bottling syrup, while I tend house and garden and the barn. Yet there are hours after sunset and before bedtime. I cannot ask him always where he goes and when he will come back. He wants now to be free.

  Today, when I had cleared away our supper, he went out and I saw him striding down the road with purpose. In less than an hour he was back, bringing the girl with him.

  “Mother,” he said, now very formal. “This is Allegra Woods.”

  I was doing the mending in the living room and the lamp was lit, and Baba was sitting in peaceful silence in the brown leather armchair, his feet, in velvet Chinese shoes, on the hassock. Of course he was wearing his crimson silk Chinese robe. I had helped him wash his hair and his beard today and they were snow white.

  “How do you do, Allegra,” I said, not getting up. But I took my spectacles off by habit, since it is not good Chinese manners to greet a stranger, or a friend, in spectacles.

  The young girl made a graceful movement toward me, not quite a bow nor yet a curtsey. Then she put out a slim hand.

  “How do you do, Mrs. MacLeod.”

  “This is Rennie’s grandfather,” I said, looking toward Baba.

  For some reason of his own Baba decided to be difficult. Instead of greeting Allegra he said in Chinese, very clearly,

  “Who is this female?”

  Rennie flushed. He pretends he has forgotten all his Chinese but when he wishes he remembers it perfectly. He spoke in sharp English. “Grandfather, this is my friend Allegra Woods. Mother wanted to meet her.”

  Baba stared at Rennie, nodding his head like an old mandarin, and would not say a word to her. Nor would he look at Allegra.

  “She should be at home with her parents,” he said in Chinese.

  I laughed. “Allegra, you mustn’t mind him. He lived in China for so many years he has forgotten he is an American.”

  Her blue eyes grew wide. “In China? Rennie didn’t tell me.”

  Then Rennie has not told her everything. I must be careful not to tell too much.

  “Yes,” I said cheerfully. “We all lived there. Rennie’s father is still there. As a matter of fact, Rennie was born in Peking.”

  “Really?”

  “Very really.”

  “But I thought China was communist?”

  “Just now, yes.”

  “Then how can his father—”

  “He is the president of a great college and he feels it his duty to stay with his students.”

  “I see.”

  But she didn’t see, that I knew. She looked thoughtfully at Rennie, her eyes big and blue.

  “Get some ice cream, Rennie,” I said. “There’s plenty in the freezer.”

  “Come along, Allegra.” He seized her hand.

  This is the beginning. I do not know the end.

  We live in a narrow valley. One word can start a forest fire of gossip—one word, for example, like Communist. Or even a word, say, like China….

  “Did you have to tell her everything at once?” Rennie groaned that night when he came home.

  “I did not tell her everything,” I said.

  Baba had gone to bed, but I had waited, knowing that he must accuse me.

  “She said now she knew why I seemed queer,” Rennie said and choked.

  I longed to put my arms about him but he would have hated it. Better to speak the truth and speak it whole.

  “You will have to accept yourself,” I said. “You are partly Chinese, one fourth by blood but more, perhaps, in tastes and inclinations. We shall have to see. One thing I know. You will never be happy until you are proud of all that you are—not just of a part. You have a noble inheritance, but it is on both sides of the globe.”

  I did not look at him. I kissed his cheek and went away. The Allegras of this world are not for him, but he will have to find it out for himself. Then when the pain is over he will discover a woman who is his, and whose he can be. Whether she is Chinese, or American, who knows or cares?

  What, I wonder, made me know Gerald was mine? I was, it seems to me now, a very ordinary girl. There had been nothing enlarging in my childhood. Even my mother was a limiting influence. She had no large emotions, no world feelings. The church to which we went taught me nothing of the much-talked-of and seldom practiced brotherhood. My father was skeptic, but he was not a preacher even of his own ideas.

  I remember that spring day in my senior year at Radcliffe. I was hurrying to my class in philosophy, my arm full of books, for I was a studious girl, but in those days we were not ashamed of it. Nowadays, it seems, if I am to judge by what Rennie tells me, boys do not like studious girls. Allegra, for example, has a pretty way of seeming stupid, although I do not know whether she is. But I did not think of such pretense. I was late to class that spring day, and much distracted by the beauty of the season and the warmth of the sunshine, while I tried to keep in my head the ponderous meanings of Kant’s categorical imperative. And at that predestined moment I saw Gerald run with his striking grace down the steps of the hall I was about to enter. I shall remember forever, though my eyes, one day, be blind with age, the glint of the sun on his black hair, the lively glance of his black eyes, and the clear smoothness of his cream skin.

  The Chinese have some magic in the structure of their skin and even a little of the blood seems to purify the flesh. Rennie has the same faultlessness of skin. I do not wonder that Allegra likes to dance with her cheek against his as I saw them doing last Saturday night in our small community center. So too do I love to dance, cheek to cheek, with. Gerald. We did not speak that day on the steps, but we looked full into one another’s eyes, and instantly I made up my mind forever. I would learn what his name was and tell him he was mine.

  It did not happen in a day or a week but it did in a month. For I kept looking at him because he was handsome, and then because he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. Soon I was speaking to him, managing to walk out the door of a classroom when he did. And he was so shy that I had to keep on walking beside him down the corridor lest he leave me, and so to the front gate of the building and into the street. He could not shake me off. And then, making a pretext of his being foreign and perhaps without friends, I asked him one day to meet my mother, and so it all began. I was in love.

&nb
sp; And yet when he let me know at last—oh what a long time it was before he let me know, two months, three months, four months—I thought he would never tell me. Even when he began to tell me, he hesitated, he delayed.

  “Go on, go on,” I said, laughing with joy.

  “I don’t know whether you can consider me as a friend—” He wet his dry lips.

  “I can and I do,” I said.

  After we were married, I asked him why he stammered so much that day, for it was day, high noon, and we were sitting on a bench beside the Charles River, our books piled on the ground at our feet. He said, stammering again, though by then we were in our bedroom by the east court of the Peking house, and we had been happy together that night and were about to sleep,

  “The—the fact is, I never thought I’d be—be in love, you know—with an American girl.”

  “Didn’t you, now,” I teased. “And whom would you be marrying please, if not me?”

  And he said soberly, “I had always supposed I would marry a Chinese. My uncle told me it was my mother’s wish.”

  That is what he said, long ago, when his mother was nothing to me except a dead woman, and what she said meant nothing, either. I had even forgotten that midnight, until now, when Allegra brings it out of my memory.

  I keep looking at the picture of Gerald’s mother. I have put it away again and again. Each time I say forever, until or unless some day I must show it to Rennie, and then her face appears in my mind and I am restless until I see her with my eyes. So tonight I have taken her picture out of the locked drawer of my desk, and it lies here before me, the same calm unchanging face. It is not cold. The surface only is cold. Behind the calm steadfast eyes of a Chinese woman I feel a powerful warmth. We might have been friends, she and I, unless she had decided first that I was her enemy. She would have decided, not I. I was never deceived by Chinese women, not even by the flowerlike lovely girls. They are the strongest women in the world. Seeming always to yield, they never yield. Their men are weak beside them. Whence comes this female strength? It is the strength that centuries have given them, the strength of the unwanted. It was always the sons who were welcomed at birth. It was always the sons who were given privilege and protection and pampering love. And the daughter had to accept this, generation after generation, and to bear it in silence. She learned to think first of herself—to protect herself in secret, to steal what she was not given, to lie lest the truth bring her harm, to use deceit as a shield and a cover for her own ends, those ends her own safety and her own pleasure when she was only a female, but how magnificent in sacrifice if she were a great woman, as Gerald’s mother was.

  I have put the picture into the drawer again and locked it fast. But it haunts me. Today, which is Saturday, Baba and I being at lunch together alone, since Rennie is off fishing, or so he told me, I could not refrain from speaking again of her.

  “Baba, you remember we were speaking of Gerald’s mother?”

  “Were we?”

  He was eating neatly with chopsticks, a habit which he assumes whenever I cook rice, which is often, because he accepts it with appetite when he will take nothing else.

  “Yes, we were,” I said, “and I want to talk more about her.”

  He put down his chopsticks. “What is it you wish to know?”

  “I have a picture of her upstairs.”

  He turned quite pale. “How is it you have it?”

  “It is in a magazine.”

  I could not tell him Gerald had sent it.

  “Fetch it,” he said.

  I ran upstairs and brought it down and placed it before him. He put on his spectacles and looked at it carefully. “Ye-es,” he said slowly, “ye-es, I can recognize her. But it is not as she used to look.”

  “How did she look?”

  He knitted his white eyebrows, thinking. “When I lifted her wedding veil, I thought her nearly beautiful.”

  “Yes, Baba?” This was because he paused so long.

  “Afterwards I was not sure. She could make her face quite strange to me.”

  “Why did she?”

  “I did not ask. We were never close enough for questions.”

  I could not deny my impulse. “But you had a child together.”

  A faded pink crept into his cheeks. “Well, yes.”

  “You won’t deny Gerald, I hope?” I had to laugh at him a little.

  “No—oh no. But you see—”

  “I don’t, Baba.”

  “A child doesn’t have much to do with one—you know. I mean—well, such things happen.”

  “For men—not for women.”

  “I daresay.”

  He cleared his throat. “At any rate, after Gerald was born, there was no more of that sort of thing.”

  “Your wish?”

  “No—hers.”

  “How well you remember, Baba!”

  “I forget very much,” he said vaguely.

  He took up his chopsticks again and began to eat. He remembers but he no longer feels. And I wonder if by some strange chance that Chinese woman did love him long ago, and because he did not love her, she took what she had, the child, and made the child her own. Who can tell me now? But the child was Gerald.

  Tonight the moon is full upon the mountains and the shadows in the valley are black. Our valley is wide, and the terrace looks westward upon it. The graveled road is silvered and I see two figures walking slowly at the far end into the trees, their arms entwined. I know they are Rennie and Allegra.

  It is a misfortune that these two met in the spring. It is not so easy to fall in love in winter. Winter is for married love in firelit evenings and a house enclosed in snow. The snow fell deep in Peking and the drifts against the gate were as good as any lock. The Chinese admire the beauty of snow, their painters love the white of late snow against the pink of peach blossoms or the red of berries on the Indian bamboo, but they do not like to go out in snow, their shoes being of cloth or velvet, and so Gerald and I had no visitors on snowy nights. Even the old watchman stayed prudently in his little room by the gate, and we were safely alone. We heaped the brazier with coals and we put out the candles and sat by the glow of the fire. That was the time for love, the long night stretching ahead in hours of endless happiness.

  Here in Vermont, too, the snow makes me prisoner, but not of love. I sit by the fire alone and Rennie studies his books in his own room. Now it is summer and I am still alone, for Rennie is with Allegra. They have reached the end of the road. They have walked out of the moonlight into the shadows beneath the maple trees. I cannot see them. It is not the first evening. A change began with the new moon this month. I knew it because I felt it in Rennie. He was silent and hurried, not by work or necessity but because of haste and urgency in himself. He came and went without speaking and if he saw me looking at him he knew I asked why he was changed, and he turned his head away and did not answer.

  Last night when he came in I could bear it no longer, for whom have I if Rennie leaves me? I had stayed until long past midnight upon the terrace, so late that the wind was cool and I wrapped my red wool scarf about me. Then I saw Rennie springing up the hill. He looked like a man in the night, so tall and strong and powerful. Something has made him a man. He came near and saw me and he did not come to the terrace, but went instead to the door of the kitchen.

  “Rennie!”

  At the sound of my voice he paused, his hand on the latch.

  “Yes?”

  “Come here, please.”

  He came, not unwillingly, even quietly and calmly.

  “You’re late,” he said.

  “I have waited for you.”

  His voice is a man’s voice now. “You mustn’t wait for me—not any more.”

  “I cannot sleep when I do not know where you are,” I said.

  “You will have to learn to sleep, not knowing.”

  He said this coolly and I was suddenly angry because I knew he was right. And being angry I could not keep from speaking the truth.


  “I know you are with Allegra every evening and I don’t like her.”

  It is the first time I have spoken my growing dislike for this girl whom Rennie is beginning to love. Beginning? I do not know how deeply he has gone into love. I do not know what he thinks about love. If Gerald were here, as he should be, to help me with our son, I could talk with him and heed his advice. But would he speak to Rennie? My neighbor, Mrs. Landes, a grandmother, says that fathers cannot “speak” to their sons. She says that her own husband would never “speak” to the boys. They are grown now and married, but he did not speak, and she could not speak.

  “But why?” I asked her.

  “Because it would make me feel naked before my own boys,” she said downrightly.

  Her boys have married good valley women. Perhaps in their plain inarticulate lives, it is better not to speak. Words may be too much for the simple acts of physical union. I do not know. But I have known the fullness of love, an achievement absolute in height and depth, and I wish for my son a like joy.

  “Sit down, Rennie,” I said. “It is late, but not too late for what I want to say.” He sat down on the low wall of the terrace, his back to the rising moon so that his face was in shadow and mine in the light. And I went on:

  “It is not that I disapprove of Allegra for her own sake. She is like many other girls, pretty and sweet and shallow. She will make some man quite happy, a man who does not need much, a man who is like most men, requiring little from anyone, a joiner of clubs, a hail-fellow-well-met sort of man, with plenty of easy friends, not a reader of books, a man who likes a gay music, if he likes any, a man who goes to the movies on Saturday nights and enjoys cowboys. He will be happy with Allegra and she with him, and they will do very well together, for the heart of each has the measure of a cup and no more, and so they fulfill one another. But you, Rennie, will not be satisfied with no more than a cup of love. You need a fountain, living and eternal. You must find a deep woman, my son, a woman with an overflowing heart. When you find her, believe me, I shall never lie awake again, however late you come home. I shall be at rest.”

  “You don’t know Allegra,” he said.

  “A mother always knows the girl her son loves.”