The Distant Land of My Father (42 page)

Late in the party, when only a few friends and Jack and my mother and grandmother and I were left, I went outside. The others were talking in the living room, but I was tired and wanted to just sit for a while, so I went outside to look at the garden I’d worked on so long ago.

I stood on the patio and listened to the crickets. There was a fingernail moon that was just a white scratch against the dark sky, and there were more stars than I’d seen in weeks. I had only stared up at the sky for a minute before I saw a shooting star, and I heard my mother say, “Did you make a wish?”

I turned and found her sitting on the chaise lounge, her back to the house, hiding her from view. The air had grown cool the way it does at night in Los Angeles, and she had wrapped a white shawl around her shoulders. The light was dim, but I saw that she was smiling. “Well, did you? You don’t want to waste a wish.”

I sighed. “I’m too tired,” I said. “And I can’t think of anything I want that I don’t have.”

She nodded and seemed pleased. “That’s wonderful. I think that’s called happiness.” Then she patted the chair next to her and said, “Sit with me for a while?”

“Gladly,” I said, and I sat down and pushed off my sandals and tucked my feet up underneath me.

The garden was lovely, overgrown and wild, fragrant with roses and jasmine and eucalyptus. In the light that spilled out on the patio from inside the house, my mother seemed ethereal and lovely and otherworldly in her beautiful cheongsam, so much like she had seemed in Shanghai that I found myself staring, as though she were someone I hadn’t seen in a long time. Apparently she could tell, even with her eyes closed. “You’re staring, Anna,” she said softly. “Have you forgotten your manners?”

I felt my cheeks redden, and I feared I might even cry as though I were a child who’d been reprimanded. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled.

She waved my words away and smiled at me. “Don’t take everything so seriously,” she said, and she looked at me closely. “You
are
tired.”

I sighed. “The party. I feel like I could fall asleep right here.”

She nodded, and then she was quiet for so long that I was thinking she’d fallen asleep when she cleared her throat and said, “You should probably see this.”

She held a folded paper out to me, which I took. “It’s a letter from your father,” she said, and when I winced, she laughed softly. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to see him. He’s only asking to borrow some money, but you might as well know about it. I wouldn’t put it past him to ask you next.”

“What happened to
his
money?”

“It’s gone,” my mother said simply. “I think he spent quite a bit before he was imprisoned. The Communist government kept the rest.”

I unfolded the letter and held it up so that the light from inside fell on it.
Eve,
it began,
I’m well and living near Santa Barbara in Carpinteria, a little place not far from the beach. Am raising chickens, something I learned about in the not-so-good days in Shanghai and briefly in Hong Kong. The enterprise will be all right, but getting started is tough. Could you see your way clear to helping me out with a short-term
loan? A thousand dollars would turn everything around for me. I’ve been unable to recoup anything from before the—

I turned the paper over, looking for the rest of the letter, and I looked at my mother. “Where’s the rest?”

She shook her head and waved vaguely toward the house. “It was just talk,” she said coolly. “I’ve misplaced the second page.”

“You aren’t going to give him any money, are you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. He supported us for a long time, and now he doesn’t have anything. I don’t need much anymore, and it seems only fair to give back some of what was his.”

“What possible reason can you have to trust him? Maybe he’s bluffing. Maybe he has plenty of money.”

She laughed. “I doubt that. He’s working as a school janitor until he can get the chicken farm going.”

I felt ignorant and in the dark. I asked, “And how would you know that?” and I hated the accusation that I heard in my voice.

“Another letter. He keeps me posted about his goings-on. I don’t know why, really. Habit, I guess.”

“You shouldn’t correspond with him,” I said, and then I forced myself not to say more, because I had the oddest feeling. I felt jealous, even betrayed, and I didn’t know why.

My mother said, “We’ve known each other for a long time, Anna. We had a child together. Those are hard ties to break. If your father wants, for reasons of his own, to remain in touch with me, I won’t say no.”

I considered my options and said nothing for perhaps a minute. I mainly wanted to say,
You can’t!,
and stamp my foot and throw a fit, and to get her to promise that she would have nothing to do with this man I considered dangerous.

And then my mother said, “I want to tell you something. I thought for a long time I’d keep this to myself, but apparently my old age is getting the best of me.”

“You’re forty-four,” I said.

“It was a joke,” she said dryly, and she glanced at me. “What’s happened to your sense of humor?”

I shrugged. “A casualty of my tiredness, I guess.”

She nodded. “Fatigue will flatten a sense of humor pretty quickly. Take the air right out of you.” And then she took a deep breath and said, “I owe you an apology.”

I started to speak, but she held her hand out, silencing me. “Just let me keep going. I haven’t rehearsed this speech much. As I said, I didn’t really plan on giving it.” She turned slightly in the chaise so that she faced me. “I’ve always felt that apologies don’t count unless you look the person in the eye. Don’t you agree?”

I nodded stupidly, afraid of what was to come.

“I shouldn’t have taken you to Shanghai so long ago. It was selfish and stupid of me, and my only explanation is that I didn’t realize just how bad things would be. I’m sorry for putting you through all of it—the trip, the weather, the filth. Your father.” She squinted at me, as if trying to understand something in my expression. “I shouldn’t have brought you along.”

I laughed. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “You couldn’t have known—”

She waved my words away like nuisances. “I did know. That’s what I’m saying. When I first thought of us going, I sent your father a telegram, with what I thought was good news. I received his response two weeks later. ‘Don’t come’ was the gist of it, without much more of an explanation than that.” She paused and cleared her throat, and I wished I could tell her that was enough, that I didn’t need to know more.

“I knew what we’d find. I knew about his feelings toward me and our marriage.” She let her breath out softly. “I knew about Leung Mancheung, the woman at Jimmy’s on that awful night, and I suspect there were others. But I didn’t know what else to do. I knew how hurt you were, how much you missed him. And I missed him. I couldn’t imagine giving him up, and I didn’t think it possible that he would give you up. So that trip was sort of my last resort—and I thought you were my ace in the hole. That was wrong, and I hope you’ll forgive me.”

It was the first time in my life I could remember my mother apologizing to me—and the first time I could remember a time she had reason to—and I just sat for a few moments, trying to fit this new square fact into the round hole of memory, waiting for things in my mind to be revised. “Of course I forgive you,” I said finally. “But I’m glad we went. Because now I know who he is, and I won’t forget, and I won’t be fooled by him.”

My mother said, “Oh, Anna. There’s more to him than that,” and it was only then that I heard sadness in her voice. She was staring out at the back of the garden, where the junipers that my father had planted so long ago were twice as high as the fence. “Do you know what I thought when I met Joseph Schoene? I thought,
Here is a man I can watch forever.
He was so driven and ambitious, with this wonderful energy.” She laughed grimly. “It never occurred to me that that energy would backfire. Or that
he
would grow tired of watching
me.
”

“He didn’t grow tired of it,” I said. “He just stopped.”

She closed her eyes and nodded slightly. “Thank you,” she said. “I think that was a compliment.” She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Do you know what the strange thing is? I still love him. I’m sure that doesn’t make sense to you. It certainly doesn’t to me. But it’s true.” And then she spoke in Mandarin, a first since our return from Shanghai.
“Jênhsin nan mo,”
she said softly. “‘The human heart is hard to grasp.’”

Neither of us spoke for a few minutes then. I felt so sad inside, and although I wanted to comfort her, I didn’t know how. I stared at the night sky and tried to find the few constellations I knew—the Big and Little Dippers, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, Orion—and I thought that what looked like a bright star to the east might be Jupiter, and I tried to think of what to say.

We heard laughter from the house then, Jack’s voice the loudest, and my mother smiled. “He seems very happy, Anna. I think you’re good for him.”

“Hope so,” I said. “He is for me.” And I couldn’t help but smile because he
was
happy, and it was so obvious. He’d been near me all evening, resting his hand on my waist, dancing with me on the patio, telling me I looked pretty so often that I began to feel myself glow. And once, when we found ourselves alone in the kitchen, he took me in his arms and whispered that I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. I had never felt so intensely loved, and the feeling left me in awe.

The laughter from inside quieted, and Jack began telling a story. I could hear the rise and fall of his voice but not the words, the way you hear adults talking when you’re a child. Then there was more laughter, and something from my grandmother. Someone opened a bottle of beer and the cap bounced around on the tile floor in the kitchen. I heard Francis Albert Sinatra singing “I Get a Kick out of You” and I knew that Jack had put on
Songs for Young Lovers,
an album he liked so much that he took it with him to friends’ houses, just so they could hear it, too.

“He’s crazy about that album,” I murmured.

“It’s lovely,” my mother said. “An anniversary present?”

I laughed. “Nope. He didn’t give me a chance. He bought it the day it was in the stores.”

She nodded. “That sounds like him. Always a little ahead of the game. What
did
you give him?”

“I’m glad you asked,” I said, for her question answered one of my own, and I knew how to comfort her. “I gave him a box of twenty-five H. Upmann cigars, Churchills, which are supposed to be cool and mild.” And then I thought of my father’s cigars when I was a child. “These are Dominican cigars, not Philippine.”

“I didn’t know Jack liked cigars. And since when are you the aficionada?”

I shrugged, an attempt to fake nonchalance and hide my enjoyment of her confusion. “Since yesterday when I bought them. And no, he’s not an avid cigar smoker. He just likes one once in a while.”

“Then
why
a whole box of them?” she asked. Her exasperation was obvious.

I was quiet for a moment, letting her question hang in the still night air for dramatic effect. I could almost hear her wondering what kind of a wife
was
I?

“He’ll need them seven months from now,” I said casually. “To pass out when the baby comes.”

She looked at me as though I were crazy, but when I nodded, she shook her head and just looked amazed. And then she smiled.

“We were going to tell everyone tonight,” I said. “But the doctor thought it better to wait a little longer, to be sure everything was all right. But I thought you’d want to know, and I figured you could keep a secret.”

“Oh, Anna,” she said, “a baby,” and she shook her head again. “I’ve been so worried about you.”

“Why?”

“You’ve seemed tired, and not quite yourself. I thought you were sick.” She shrugged and seemed a little embarrassed, but then she started to laugh, softly at first, but it kept going, and soon she was laughing hard, the way you do with your best friend when you’re fourteen. I watched for a minute, waiting for her to regain her composure. The sound startled me, and I realized I hadn’t heard my mother laugh for a long time. But now she laughed and laughed and laughed. Tears ran down her cheeks, and then I started to laugh, too, and each time one of us tried to speak, we only laughed harder.

“Why are we laughing?” I managed to say once, but it only set her off again. All she could do was shake her head.

Finally she was quiet, and when she had wiped her cheeks, she reached over and squeezed my hand. “I’m happy. I thought you were sick, and I’m relieved.”

I was still at the end of laughing. “I thought you were sick, too,” I said. “You’ve looked—”

But she waved my words away. “A baby,” she whispered, “you’re going to have a baby. The whole world feels different now.”

a promise

ON A TUESDAY MORNING
a few weeks after our anniversary party, my mother and I went to early Mass together and then to breakfast at Fosselman’s on Mission Avenue in South Pasadena, for old times more than anything.

My mother and I sat at a booth and I ordered dry toast and a glass of milk, a combination that would have repulsed me at any other time in my life, but I was three months pregnant and never hungry in the morning. I wasn’t the only one with a diminished appetite. My mother barely glanced at the menu before closing it, and when the waitress asked for our order, she answered only, “Hot tea.” She didn’t seem like herself, and I kept trying to figure out what was wrong. Her color wasn’t good, and she seemed not just tired but weary, as though something more than lack of sleep had fatigued her. Although it was August and already warm outside at nine in the morning, she said she was cold, and she wore a scarf around her neck because she said she had a sore throat. I asked if she was coming down with the flu and she dismissed my question and said curtly that it was nothing to worry about, then changed the subject before I could ask more, and I knew not to try. But when she reached for the sugar, I saw bruises on her wrist, and I asked what had happened. Again, she was casual. “Oh, I’m always bumping into things,” she said, and she sat with her hands in her lap, out of my sight, during the rest of the meal.