The Third Son (12 page)

She looked up at me, and I told her about Yi-yang and Wen-shen and their scheme to ask her for aspirin.

She burst out laughing. “I charge all those guys a dollar,” she said. “Here I have this whole long line of customers, and these boys are asking for things they don’t even need.”

I laughed, too, glad I hadn’t gone in to gawk with Yi-yang and Wen-shen or made up a story when I had gone myself.

She smiled up at me, eyes shining in the silvery light. “So that
was
you watching in the window when your brother was there?”

“It was.” I smiled, too. “I should have gone in.”

“Why didn’t you? Were you afraid of your brother?”

I changed the subject, telling stories about my classmates. She laughed easily and often, and so I told her more. I found myself telling her stories I’d never told anyone—about fishing with my bare hands in the countryside, and how I’d worked on my running technique at Taikong. I told her how I was teaching myself to repair radios. Everything I said seemed fascinating to her, and it was almost impossible for me to stop talking, as though I’d saved up all these things to tell her for my whole life.

“I think I could make a radio shop work,” I said. “It’s just a matter of building up the capital first.”

She turned her head to the side for a moment, her face in shadow. “You will. I still remember that car you made in the hardware store,” she said.

“It’s late,” I said.

“I should go.”

I touched her elbow to help her off the fence, and her hand rested for a moment on my shoulder as she stepped down. A memory roused in me that I could not trace, and as she began to pull away I held her arm. She looked up at me, eyes reflecting the starlight. I could smell the perfume of her hair.

“You’re meeting Kazuo for dinner?” I said.

“Yes.”

I thought of Kazuo burning my book.

“Then meet me in the morning at the train station,” I said. “We’ll go to Taipei. Do you know the Sintori Noodle Shop?”

She laughed. “All right.”

I left her by the big front windows of the pharmacy and walked home, mind racing, heart bursting, my body flushed with warmth. The cicadas screeched in the dark alleys between the buildings I passed, and the spicy moistness of the night air filled my lungs. Yoshiko, the girl I had looked for all my life. I had been a fool not to look harder. I would be an even bigger fool to stand by and let her go.

I turned south toward my parents’ house, and as I walked, with the feel of her hand still on my arm, the memory came, flashing through all the curtained years of solitude and pain. She had touched me that way after the air raid. It had been my first such touch, and my last, until today.

11

W
E HURTLED EAST TO
Taipei, the train’s whistle amplified in the metal interior of our passenger car. I breathed in the smell of burning coal sweetened by the light scent of Yoshiko’s perfume.

Her head swayed gently as she looked out the window, her eyes reflecting Guanyin Mountain and the northern countryside where I had wasted three years of my childhood. With the train’s rocking movements, the red wool of her jacket shoulder brushed against my upper arm. She was so slight and gentle. I wanted to claim her, make her mine, promise her a world of happiness. But what did I have to offer her? After last night’s euphoria I had awoken feeling the burden of my past mistakes, of my limited life.

She looked out the window with sadness in her face.

“I leave for my military-service year tomorrow,” I said.

She turned to me, her eyes illuminated with the sunlight slanting in from the window. “Tomorrow! Where will you go?”

“Kaohsiung. I’ll be taking that train instead.” I pointed ahead to the train approaching on the adjacent tracks.

The train whooshed past, filling our car with its roaring clickety-clack, clouding our window with steam and flecks of black coal.

Yoshiko blinked in the filtered light, shadows of the passing windows sliding across her face as she watched the train, so I could not read her expression. When the train had passed, she was silent for a moment, then absently indicated the direction the train had gone. “My mother is from Hsinchu. Actually, she’s from the mountains, but she lived in Hsinchu before she got married.”

“The mountains? She’s an aborigine?” I said.

“No—well, she says no, but she grew up among them, and she looks so different from other people. She calls herself a hill person. She has white skin like mine, and those high cheekbones. It’s possible she’s part aboriginal or part Dutch or something.”

“Why did she leave the mountains?”

“Her father sold her when she was twelve. They were desperately poor. He made cedar mothballs for a living and they had to haul them down the mountain to the market and all the way back up again every week. She kept complaining about it—she’s a terrible complainer—and finally when she was twelve and complained one more time, her father said, ‘Fine. We’ll sell you.’ And he sold her to a rich banker and his wife in Hsinchu.”

“Then how did she end up in Taoyuan?” I asked.

The dimple on her cheek reappeared as she smiled. “Well, the vendors at the market all talked about this pretty girl and asked who her parents were, and somehow word got to my father’s family.”

“I see.”

“A pretty good match for an adopted daughter, even with my father’s name problem.”

“What problem?”

“Perhaps you don’t know what my surname is?”

“It’s Lo, right? I asked my friend and he said—”

“That’s right. And the odd thing is that my father is the only one in his family with that name. His father, brothers, cousins—everyone else is named Cheng.”

“Why? Is your father adopted?”

She shook her head. “Only my grandfather knew, and he became senile before he died, so there’s no way to know now. We know he’s not adopted. But he’s been treated the same as his brothers, so for my mother it was a very good match.”

“Does she still complain?”

“Of course. But she has a better life than she would have if she’d married someone poor like her father and stayed in the mountains.”

She glanced at me sideways and my heart sank.

W
E GOT OFF
at Taipei Main Station. On the crowded platform, I saw other men glance her way, and I was both proud to be with her and ashamed not to be worthy of her.

She walked on with a confident click of her black patent leather pumps, knowing the exact location of the Sintori Noodle Shop, as her sister, Tsun-moi, worked in a bookstore down the street. I recognized her sister’s surname as one of the Hakka minority that were commonly adopted as maids.

“The sister she was supposed to replace works near here, too. My sister Leh-hwa—given away at birth, you know, to save dowry.”

“Yes.” I knew of poorer families in which a daughter was given away at birth. The family then adopted another girl to take her place and serve as a maid and future daughter-in-law.

“But she didn’t like her family, so she ran back home when she was sixteen.”

We walked a few paces before she spoke again.

“I was supposed to be given away, too, but I was sleeping. Bad omen. They took my cousin instead.”

We turned down Zhongshan Road, busy with signs, banners, bicycles, and motorcycles. We crossed the street to get to Sintori Noodle Shop and passed by a radio shop along the way. I stopped for a moment, looking in the storefront window.

“I thought Hsimenting, but this is a good location, too,” I said. “For a radio shop. Lots of foot traffic here.”

“True,” she said. “But shops are fancier in Hsimenting.”

“True.”

I saw the reflection of her in the window as she scratched her arm briefly. “Why not keep working at Taikong?” she said. “It’s so successful.”

A rickshaw whirred past behind us. I wondered which would be more important to her—my success or my happiness.

“I want to be on my own,” I said.

I
WALKED HER
home from Taoyuan Station. In only a couple of hours she would be meeting Kazuo, and then I would leave for my military service. I’d made her laugh many times, but was that enough to counteract my lack of promise as a provider?

Chungcheng Road still bustled, even on a Saturday, and we weaved our way up the sidewalk, dodging the bartering crowd, the crates of mangoes, and the dank puddles draining into the sewer. I pulled her out of the way of a series of drips coming off a red-and-white awning, and she smiled up at me, covering her mouth delicately with her hand to hide her front teeth, which were fake and crudely outlined in gold. Her eyes followed my glance. “I’m embarrassed about my teeth,” she said, with charming candor.

“Oh no,” I said. “You don’t need to be.”

“It’s because of all the treats my father brought me as a child.”

“All the Japanese
moachi
,” I said. “I remember.”

We made our way through the throngs surrounding the Jin-fu Temple gates and onto a quiet patch of sidewalk.

“My house is just up there.”

“It’s near the lumberyard,” I said.

She cocked her head, looking up at me. “Would you like to see the lumberyard?”

I nodded. I didn’t really care about the lumberyard, but I didn’t want her to go home.

We crossed the street and walked a block west. The crowds thinned, and our heels scuffed the sidewalk as we walked. We turned up a dirt lane, passing a row of small concrete shacks with corrugated iron roofs. She laughed and shook her head. “That’s the first thing my mother saw when she was brought in her palanquin from Hsinchu for her wedding. She nearly told everyone to turn her around.”

“What are they for?”

“Some are for storage, some are housing for the workers. Actually, my parents did live in one at first, but they soon moved into that house.” She pointed down the lane at a large two-story house. “We lived on the top floor with the number one and number two families. The first floor was all filled with wood shavings.” She smiled, forgetting this time to cover her mouth. “I played there with my cousin. And here, too.” She pointed to boards propped up into pyramids to dry. “We used to play hide-and-seek in them, though it was dangerous.”

She got a pebble in her shoe and sat down on a rock by a pile of logs, emptying out the pebble and rubbing a spot of dirt off the shoe’s heel with a lacy handkerchief, as she had when she was a child.

I sat next to her, looking around at the stark landscape. “You’re lucky to have so many happy memories,” I said. “No rich man can buy you that.”

She put the shoe back on her foot and stood, saying nothing.

She was silent all the way back to the pharmacy.

I hesitated in front of the door, despairing at having offended her. There was only an hour until she would meet Kazuo, and then I would be gone. Once again, my frankness would be my downfall.

She looked to the side, fiddling with her purse strap.

“Listen,” I said. “I didn’t mean—”

She turned to face me, eyes flashing. “You think I’m a gold digger, do you? You think I just want to marry a man for jewelry and fancy clothes?”

“I don’t know,” I said, taken aback.

She bit her lip and then motioned for me to follow her. “Let’s go to the temple.”

“The temple?”

I followed her back south, through the crowds. She reached Jin-fu Temple and pushed her way through the outer courtyard, where children threw wooden balls and old men sat talking between rows of flickering candles.

I leaned forward to whisper into her ear. “Watch your purse.”

She nodded, clamping her purse under her arm. She led me between the warrior guards, painted in all their twisting fury on either side of the massive gate. In the inner courtyard she stopped, pointing toward the corner of the temple. “There’s my mother praying to Matsu. She spends almost every day here since my brother died.”

Through the clouds of incense I spotted a slight gray figure bent in prayer. In my mind, a memory stirred.

Yoshiko sat on the edge of the low stone step behind a table where an orange-robed nun sold incense and oil. Yoshiko put her feet together and inclined her knees to the side, her legs tapering gracefully to her black patent leather pumps, so white that they shone in the smoky light. I sat next to her, leaning away from the passersby holding candles, paper money, and bundles of incense, and my shoulder touched hers.

She turned to face me. “You want to know how my brother died?”

“Yes.”

“
Hou
.” She folded her arms. “My father always had all these grand plans to go off somewhere and get rich.”

“I remember,” I said. “You said he was going to take you to Japan and China.”

“Did I?” Her eyes turned to me absently. “I trusted him then. That was before the restaurant failed, and the café, and the grocery store . . .”

“So you never went?”