The Third Son (15 page)

My mother glanced at Yoshiko, and her expression softened. “Take your time before you get pregnant,” she said. “Spend some time being happy.”

The cold platter reached me at last, and I bit into a piece of duck, chewing busily in the uneasy silence that followed. Marriage had seemed the most natural thing in the world, until today.

13

O
KAY,
S
ABURO. WHERE IS
it?”

“
Sa-huai?
”

“The dress!”

“What dress?”

“Your mother’s dress! Don’t you remember?”

I stopped in my tracks. It was the evening before our wedding and we were on Chungcheng Road in front of a clock shop whose owner was pulling down its corrugated iron front for the night.

Yoshiko stared at me. “She promised me, remember?”

“Yes . . . ” I remembered. I also remembered my mother’s fury in the intervening weeks when she discovered that Yoshiko would not be accompanied by any dowry to speak of, other than her clothes.

I looked at Yoshiko helplessly as hurt, disappointment, and panic played over her delicate features. One by one, the shop owners around us pulled down their metal doors and turned their keys in the locks.

“Oh, I knew I shouldn’t have relied on her! It’s just that my parents asked her about it and she reassured them . . . I can wear one of my reception dresses,” she said, biting her lip. “I have a cheongsam. It’s burgundy brocade, with silver, very pretty . . .”

I was failing her already. My parents would ruin her life before she even stepped in the door.

But suddenly, Yoshiko leaned in toward me, eyes shining. “I have an idea!”

A
ND THEN MAGICALLY,
in the morning, she was my bride. To an explosion of firecrackers she stepped out of her house by my side, regal as a queen, her head adorned with a white tiara and glittering topaz earrings. Her lips were deep red, her cheeks lightly rouged. Her dress was a suffusion of white gauziness, in the Western fashion, with a round neck and little sleeves, draped with a lace shawl that was fastened over her bodice with a pearl brooch. The skirt was full and trimmed with real red roses.

Yoshiko’s mother had served her a ceremonial meal—her last, in accordance with tradition, as a member of their family. We pulled away in our hired car toward my parents’ house. Behind us trailed four more cars displaying her clothes and jewelry—a very modest dowry.

Yoshiko dabbed very carefully at her eyes and smiled at me.

I touched her gauzy shawl in amazement. “Where did you get this?”

She laughed. “The seamstress’s daughter. We found a rental dress and she sewed all night.”

“You can do anything, can’t you?”

“Of course. And so can you.”

W
E FOLLOWED MY
father’s massive form across my parents’ great room to the Tong family altar. Yoshiko’s eyes, while dutifully downcast, traveled across the dull floorboards from the dusty windowsill to the patched ottoman by my father’s chair. I had not realized before seeing my bride here that our house could have been cared for any other way than it always had. Now, seeing Yoshiko arrange her skirt and kneel doubtfully on the floor, I saw that the cursory efforts of my exhausted mother and her overworked maid could not match the pride of place and home that made Yoshiko’s house shine. Our floor was darkened and dull; the brass fixtures on our lamp were tarnished; the chest of drawers on which the family altar rested was chipped and scratched through its veneer. As Yoshiko knelt, I caught a glimpse of her shoes—incongruously sparkly and deep pink. Amused, I tried to catch her eye, but she was somberly placing a stick of burning incense between her palms and bowing her head before the large scroll behind the incense pot, where my father pointed out our family tree, illustrated with the faces of kings, princes, and princesses. I did the same, breathing in the scents of the incense smoke and the large purple orchid pinned to my lapel.

We squeezed past my mother’s piles of old shoes and newspapers in the hallway on the way to the dining room for our welcome meal. Yoshiko clutched at her shawl to keep it from being marred by the dust and ink.

My family name promised riches and aristocracy, yet how much poorer in some ways was our home life, compared to the one she knew.

At our reception I watched her, glamorous as a movie star in the shimmering reception gowns her friend had sewn for her over the past few weeks. She smiled graciously, circulating through the banquet hall with a tray of tea, serving all my father’s relatives, his business associates, his political connections, key local members of the Nationalist Party. In return, they placed red envelopes of money onto her tray. Each time she came out with a new tray, she wore a new dress and was rewarded with new red envelopes.

I heard my father, Taoyuan’s newest and most popular representative to the People’s Political Council, lecturing at the next table, where Kazuo sat with a sour expression on his face.

“There are hierarchies, overlapping hierarchies,” my father said, clearing his throat. “Within the family, within the community, within the government infrastructure, it is like a series of grids. You must learn these grids and work them well in order to use them as so many ladders. If you try to escape these grids, you will fall.”

Yoshiko walked up behind my chair, and I stood up to meet her. She was wearing her brocade cheongsam, embroidered with silver, and she smiled up at me, her skin pale against the burgundy. I took her tea tray for a moment to give her a rest, my fingers brushing the soft skin of her arm. Her dress hugged her body, accentuating her curves, and I wanted the reception to be over, to feel that soft body under the stiff brocade.

She looked into my eyes and laughed.

The table behind her—my friends from junior college—began chanting together.

Yoshiko glanced over curiously. “What are they saying?”

The chant rose. “Give me back my one dollar! Give me back my one dollar!”

I laughed and waved to the table.

“Is that a drinking song?” Yoshiko asked.

I shook my head. “They used to visit you in the pharmacy.”

She laughed so hard she had to wipe her eyes.

W
E LEFT THE
next morning for our honeymoon, staying in a Japanese-style hotel overlooking the startling aqua blue of Sun Moon Lake.

We made love on our futon, our ardor interrupted only occasionally by the unheralded whoosh of the shoji screens as the hotel maid, clad in a kimono and bearing a tray of tea, entered the room and provoked a flurry of flying bedclothes.

“
Hai!
Why don’t they knock?” Yoshiko giggled from under her sheet as the maid left.

At night we lay on the bare tatami, our bodies damp with exertion, our laughter ringing out into the darkness and melting into the screeching of the frogs in the marsh grass.

We traveled, huddling together on the summit of Alishan to watch the sun rise over the countryside where Yoshiko’s mother had spent her childhood.

And then, too quickly, we returned, and the first piece of mail that Yoshiko received at our house was a note from her boss at the bank notifying her that she had been fired.

“What! Just because I got married?” She sat down with the letter on our new rosewood bed and almost fell off the edge.

“Didn’t he warn you?”

“Well, he did say something about how none of the women there are married, but I never thought . . .”

“He wants that long line of young men.”

“That’s absurd. They never deposited more than a few dollars. I passed the exam to keep the books, anyway. I wasn’t supposed to be just a teller.”

I sighed. “You should have married a doctor after all.”

She looked up at me fiercely. “I didn’t want a doctor, I wanted you. Thank goodness you have that job at Taikong or we’ll never get out of this house.”

I said nothing but stood up and opened the new rosewood armoire that her father’s carpenters had built to match the bed. They had built it unusually tall, for my height, and it was beautifully, solidly made, the hinges turning smoothly, the finish polished and mirrorlike, easily the finest piece of furniture in my parents’ house.

“How much do you earn, by the way?” she said.

I opened and closed the drawers, feeling the wheels gliding on their runners, smelling the rosewood. It smelled like Yoshiko’s parents’ house.

“Saburo, how much—”

I sat down on the bed next to her. “Seven hundred NT,” I said.

“A month?”

I gave a short laugh. “A year.”

“A year?” Yoshiko looked up at me for a moment, her mouth open, her face flushed with heat down to the collar of her yellow silk shirtdress. “I made ten times that much at the bank!”

She got up and paced around the room. Then she rummaged in my bag and took out
Fundamentals of the English Language for Foreigners.

“Here.” She dropped it into my lap, then took out the chemistry and physics books and a couple of issues of
Life
magazine that I had borrowed from the United States Information Service office to read on the train to Sun Moon Lake.

“What do you expect me to do after I go to America?”

She shrugged. “Teach at Taiwan University. Be a scientist.”

“It won’t make me rich.”

“We’ll be able to live on our own.”

“You just got here. Maybe you’ll like it.”

She gave me a look.

“What?” I said.

“I’ve seen how they treat you.”

“You have?” I thought back on the brief times we had spent with my family. The engagement, the wedding, the reception, our first twenty-four hours as husband and wife. It hadn’t seemed remarkable to me. “What did you see?”

“They ignore you. They’re always talking about Kazuo. Calling you stupid all the time—”

“Not all the time—”

“I remember what you said, you know,” she said, folding her arms, “the day of the air raid.”

“What? What did I say?”

“You said no one cared whether you came home.”

I went to open the window as I had so many times as a child, looking outside for my refuge, my escape. The wind was blowing, rustling the grass and the leaves of the bamboo trees outside. My mother had not beaten me for many years, but even now, a bamboo tree was not all beautiful to me. I remembered how a bamboo branch felt across my chest, across my flank, how it could scratch you raw, give you bruises.

She stood up behind me. “No one will care if you leave, either.”

“No one from Taoyuan County has ever passed that exam,” I said, one more time. “Even the ones who went to Taiwan University.”

“So study,” she said.

I
STUDIED.
T
HROUGH
the cracks in the walls, the wind swept onto my desk, ruffling the dimly lit pages of my book. The exam that had loomed in my imagination since I was a child had been developed to winnow out 99.98 percent of test takers so as not to exceed the quota imposed on Taiwan by the United States. As a result, the test’s scope was paralyzingly huge. I charted my subjects out by the day. I reviewed differential calculus one day, Western history through the Renaissance the next. I wrote out chemical equations and reread my chapter on quantum mechanics. I quizzed myself on past participles and, when I became bored with my textbooks, read
Modern Radio
articles on new capacitor models and transistors, which I had never seen. I borrowed
Time
and
Life
magazine issues from the United States Information Service office so I could read about real-life cowboys on cattle ranches, about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, about many other famous actors I had seen in the movies, and about something called the International Geophysical Year,

which will become the greatest and most ambitious example of cooperation in the scientific community the world will ever see. Starting July 31, 1957, leading scientists around the world, free and Communist alike, will coordinate their efforts to track signals transmitted from satellites orbiting the earth!

There’s just one small problem: getting the satellites into space. But that’s just a matter of time, according to . . .

As I worked, Yoshiko slept on the futon, turned away from my tiny lamp, the light gently glancing off her hair and the soft contour of her cheek. I sat back, watching her rhythmic breathing. Even in her sleep, she held her hand over her belly, for we had learned, much to our surprise, that she had become pregnant on our honeymoon.

“No wonder you’ve been so hungry,” I had said.

She’d frowned. “Yes, and because there’s not enough food . . .”

I didn’t tell her that we had actually been getting more than the usual rations of food from my mother. My mother seemed quite enamored of Yoshiko and had been taking her aside so that they could do chores together or so my mother could complain about her ailments and her lot in life.