Inheritance (38 page)

Many days I wait for you;

Fine days, frost shining days.

Clear sky, boats shake in the breeze.

Soon it will be winter.

I put the poems in my safe-deposit box, pressed between the pages of the tattered book of fairy tales. Inside the book I’d also saved Hu Ran’s faded notes and the two old photographs I had brought with me all the way from Chongqing. After more than four decades of preservation these items had shrunk and faded. Only my mother’s pearls seemed indestructible, uncoiling from their pouch as if alive, a rope of graduated silver orbs with the largest pearl bigger than my thumbnail. They shimmered in the light, casting a kind of radiance over the dingy papers, and for a moment I imagined what my mother might say. “Houses, money, and jewelry hold their value, Hong. All else diminishes.”

Still, the photos held my interest. One was the print of Yinan as a girl, holding a single rose. She wore her hair pulled back and a pale dress that fit her awkwardly, as if someone else had just adjusted it. It was her pose that held my attention: the downcast face and lifted eyes, the expression of timidity. But there was also something else, something other than timidity, which cast her image in a haunted light.

In my parents’ wedding photo, they seemed almost unbearably young. My father’s face held no evidence of future suffering or wisdom. He was merely handsome in his lieutenant’s uniform, his expression both cocky and oddly pure. At his side, my mother was perfect. She wore her hair in a chignon, its weight tipping her head back and lifting her chin. Even then, at nineteen, she held herself with dignity, absolute control. Her high, oval forehead shielded impenetrable thoughts. Her intelligent gaze was clear as water. The delicate curve from nose to mouth, the mouth itself, the jaw: in nothing could I see the smallest weakness. Still, it must have been there. A wayward swirl in her hair, a sunken bone, some brief mistake. A telltale fingerprint of fate. Where was it?

I studied Yinan’s photo, searching for a resemblance between the beautiful sister and the plain one. In each of them, it seemed to me, there was a look of privacy, hinting at a place that couldn’t be touched. I believed this was the part of themselves that they would share with no one but each other. My mother and my aunt had always been close, and even in their betrayal they drew together in a way that left out everyone else. The betrayal had made a phantom sister that could not be replaced by any other person. Through the years, they were unable to exorcise this ghost. Each sister had a hollowed soul, like a room kept waiting in expectation of an important visitor.

FOLLOWING MY FATHER’S
sudden visit, my mother stopped speaking to me. She wouldn’t return my calls or answer my letters. I tried to talk to Hwa. But Hwa, too, was still smarting from my mother’s anger. When she’d discovered Hwa had known about my trip to visit Yinan, my mother had given Hwa a thorough tongue-lashing. Hadn’t I done enough? my sister asked. Did I need to talk about what I’d done, as well?

I did need to talk about it. Not to gloat, as Hwa suspected, but because my conversations with Yinan, Yao, and my father had raised up darker feelings that I couldn’t put to rest. Only my mother could release them. But my mother had made up her mind: she would speak to me only when she wished. And so, for many months, I waited to be summoned.

Hwa said my mother reacted little to the news of Yinan’s death. It’s quite possible she’d had some intimation of its coming, some instinctive knowledge or perhaps a dream. The day she learned the news, she kept all of her appointments. She met with her attorney. She scolded her broker for selling some stocks in Pu Li’s company, threatening to fire him, and he sent a fruit basket in apology.

But in the following weeks, it seemed that my mother’s old ferocity had been replaced with mere vigilance. Perhaps she knew it, too. That summer, she had a black and white photograph taken of herself. She demanded that Hwa drive her to the big temple once a week. The monks kept ashes there, near a stand of trees several hundred yards from the temple building. The ashes were kept in slots that reminded me of old apothecary cabinets. My mother donated money to make certain her own ashes would be in a prominent location. Hwa told me she’d ordered a blown-glass paperweight to be set on the shelf before her slot. Inside the clear globe shone, impeccable, a red glass flower.

Hwa called in October, after her stroke. “You’d better come now,” she said. Tom was on a retreat for the school where he taught, and so I flew alone into San Francisco on a brilliant autumn day and took a taxi to my mother’s house.

THE DOORMAN STOOD
on a silk rug darkened and crushed from equipment wheels and foot traffic. Hwa waited, pale, behind him. We faced each other and nodded. From somewhere in the house, I heard the whirring of a machine.

“Mama’s lost her vision,” Hwa said. “They don’t know if it’s a temporary thing. But she can still talk, her mind is clear.”

“It’s good to see you,” I told my sister.

She looked down at the rug. “Let’s go.”

My mother’s room was quiet and in perfect order. A bit of light fell upon her beige satin coverlet, embroidered with a hundred characters for longevity. As I moved toward her, I could see that some mysterious process keeping her alive had withdrawn itself. She had become a long, pale filigree of bones covered with a waxen layer of living flesh. But when I reached the bed, her eyes opened, fierce.

“Ma,” my sister said. “It’s me.” Her voice was high and thin.

“Who else is there?”

“Did you have a good nap? You’re looking better.”

My mother’s eyes moved toward Hwa. She snapped, so suddenly that I flinched, “Don’t lie to me, you ninny.”

Hwa hurried out of the room.

My mother’s gaze moved away from Hwa and stopped not quite where I was standing.

“It’s me,” I said. “It’s Hong.”

I sat down in the easy chair beside my mother’s bed. For some time we were silent. I looked out of the window, where the shape of a live oak stood out against the hills that had burned through their green and bleached to a lion-colored gold. Its gnarled branches reached against the evening sky. I sensed the age of the tree, the waning of day, and an uncomfortable, crabbed power that moved toward its end.

It was true we’d become enemies, although I’d never wished to be. Soon my mother would be gone—I would no longer be at risk. Yet we were at odds. I could hear it in the churning of the machines; I could feel it in the air, in the gathering dusk. I felt the need to vanquish her, to strike, as if I couldn’t believe that the black and violent center of my world would ever vanish.

“We’re angry with each other,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I know you disapprove of me for going back to find them. But you must have thought of them so many times in all those years. Weren’t you just a little glad I did it—glad that you could see him one more time before you died?”

“Our lives are none of your business.”

“But your lives are all I remember. They’re at the heart of what I know.”

She said nothing, but her head moved, slightly, to the side, a shadow of her old gesture of impatience.

“You think you know so much,” she said.

“Didn’t you even want to know that they survived?” I asked. “They did survive, you know, despite all of your decisions. Even you can’t have complete control over other people.”

I remembered that my father had tried to hint this to her once, on that last, rainy afternoon in Shanghai. How did it feel now to her, listening in darkness? A spasm of weakness, or perhaps pain, passed over her face, but I couldn’t stop. I was thinking about my father in his wool coat; of my aunt Yinan crying after forty years. I was thinking about Hu Ran, perishing in the water while my mother’s furniture came straight through the blockade; I could see my brother, Yao, his life broken, his eyes burning, as he said that it was too late for him.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “When you treat them terribly, you’re injuring yourself. You don’t consider your own feelings. You loved them more than anyone else, and you still love them. You love them both, and yet you ruined them.”

“Tell me,” my mother said, “what would you have done? You think you know me well, but do you know yourself? How much would you have sacrificed to keep the one you wanted most?”

I opened my lips but could not speak.

She stared straight ahead, bravely, into the darkness. Then perhaps she shook her head again; her head fell to the side, a movement signaling that it was time for me to go. Her eyes closed. “You were always his daughter,” she said, almost to herself. “You wouldn’t understand.”

She was right. We know so little about the people who have come before us. And so my mother and I reached a kind of truce. We waited in silence, listening as the wings of night swept over us. As I left the room, I handed her the string of small buddhas she kept on her night table. She couldn’t move her fingers but she liked to hold the beads. Something in their regularity comforted her, as in the prayers she’d repeated for the past few decades. Now I knew she wasn’t praying for release, forgiveness, or an easy end. The prayers gave her strength. They somehow deepened her resolve to live until her end without changing.

IN THE KITCHEN,
Hwa’s heels echoed on the spotless floor. All the lights were on, and the faucets had been shined to an almost painful gleam. Hwa let running water slop over the lip of the teakettle. When she set a glass plate of sesame candies on the table, a piece jumped off the plate. I reached out and took it so as to make her forget about it. Hwa pushed in a drawer so sharply that I jumped back. She marched to the stove and stood over the teakettle, waiting.

“I don’t know why I put up with her for so many years.” Her voice was stifled and shaking.

“Hwa,” I tried to comfort her. “I know she seems harsh, but—”

“She is harsh.” Hwa was crying. She sobbed, curled into herself, and when I put my hand upon her shoulder it felt resistant, like a shell.

“Hwa, it’s not your fault. It’s all mine, and she knows it. She doesn’t mean to be cold to you.”

Her sobbing rose higher.

“Meimei, you know she loves you. You’ve been so good to her for all these years. When she’s had a chance to rest, she’ll want to talk to you to make sure it’s all right.”

Hwa raised her face and looked at me. Her eye makeup was smudged and her lips were pale.

“No. That’s not what happens. Do you know what’s going to happen? I’ll go back to her and break down in tears. Then I’ll beg for her forgiveness. That’s what I always do.”

She waited for my response, but I didn’t know what to say.

“She’s still upset that I didn’t tell her Baba was coming.”

“You wanted to protect her,” I said. “Can’t you explain?”

“No, that’s you. You’re the one who’s allowed to explain.”

Hwa’s words shot toward me, as if searching for a place to strike, and I braced myself.

Hwa said, “Deep down, Ma knows what she’s like. She knows that anyone who stays with her gets whittled into nothing. So she’s lost everyone she’s ever really loved. She lost our father and Yinan. She loved you, and she let you go. She knew what you were doing, all those years ago in Shanghai. I would tell her you were with Pu Li, or playing basketball, or whatever stupid excuse you’d invented, and I don’t think she ever believed me. She let you go your way, even though it almost killed you.” She turned her wet, wrecked face to me. “She asked for you yesterday.”

“Hwa, you’re just upset.”

“You never had to marry the man she picked out for you. You never had to live with her. Do you think I didn’t know who Pu Li really wanted to marry? Do you think I didn’t know what I was doing?”

Her eyes were glittering, absolute.

“Listen. I’m not blaming you. But do you know how they ‘proposed’ to me? His mother wrote him a letter, from Taiwan. I didn’t even know she had done it. Then his mother asked Ma, ‘Is this okay?’ I was still heartbroken over Willy. I didn’t have the energy to say no. The next time he came home, he knew that it was all decided. He never asked me. Never even spoke about it.”

“Hwa.”

“You didn’t care. You were so beyond it all. Making your escape from us.”

“I didn’t mean to leave you, Meimei.”

Hwa looked away. “At any rate, Pu Li didn’t love you enough to insist on you. He did what his mother told him.”

“Meimei,” I said. “After all this time has passed, surely it doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters.”

“Surely you love each other, after all these years.”

“Yes,” she said. She was crying again. “We love each other now. But it still matters.”

For a few moments she seemed to take a satisfaction in my silence. She washed her teacup and saucer and put everything away. But after some time, she grew uneasy. She glanced at her watch. Then she stood up, wiped her eyes, ran a hand through her hair, and left the kitchen. I heard her footsteps crossing the courtyard; I knew my mother could hear them, too. Hwa would go to her and close the door, and somehow, in that hollow room, the two of them would conduct the dark and necessary ritual of forgiveness.

THE DAY AFTER
my mother died, her lawyer, Gary Liu, drove over to Hwa’s house, bringing an envelope of rough brown silk marked over the flap with an impression of her largest, most elaborate chop. Inside the envelope was her will and the instructions for her memorial services. She would be cremated, and there would follow the traditional forty-nine days of mourning. She left everything she had to her four grandchildren, except for the house, which she gave to the temple, along with an endowment for its upkeep.