The Third Son (26 page)

“I don’t believe you,” I said, though his surprise confused me. “She hasn’t said anything to me.”

He shrugged. “Women lie.” He pointed his chin toward the front desk, which was dark. “By the way, you have mail.”

24

M
Y HEART POUNDED SO
that I could barely work the key in my door. The door caught as I pushed it open, and I reached in to switch on the light, half expecting Nationalist agents to be standing under the dangling bulb, but the light revealed only the same quotidian barrenness of the days before—my single bed with its coarse brown blanket, a small wooden table, and a chair of orange melamine with uneven steel legs.

I closed the door behind me and looked at the letter from the front desk. It was from Yoshiko, forwarded by Mrs. Larsson. The original postmark was from almost a month ago. I examined it closely for signs that it had been opened before but could find none. I ripped it open so hastily that a picture fell out onto the floor. When I picked it up, a shock went through me. In the picture, Yoshiko wore a dress I recognized from our honeymoon—silk (I knew it to be red, though the picture was black and white) with velvet trim around the collar—but whereas on our honeymoon the dress had accentuated her curves, here in the picture, just a few months after the birth of our son, the dress hung slack. Shadows pooled beneath her cheekbones, so that she resembled her mother.

Kai-ming, glumly propped up on his mother’s lap, also looked terribly thin and had bags under his eyes.

Li-wen had been telling the truth.

I paced back and forth, holding the picture, remembering my words in Jin-fu Temple.

I’ll have you know I am not your father. I would not leave you to starve.

History would repeat itself. Yoshiko had chosen the one man who would do just as her father had done.

I took some slow breaths to calm myself and then stopped my pacing to read the letter.

Your mother has been forbidding me to tell you, but now I feel I must disobey . . .

Your mother is so stuck in her old frugal ways, never getting enough food. I admit I am proud, and I will not stoop to fighting over the dishes at dinner or beg your mother for more. As a result I have grown very thin and weak. For some weeks I have been coughing and coughing. When I cough I feel that my eyes will explode. Sometimes I cough so that I vomit what little food is in my belly. And at night I lie in bed shivering, though it is ninety degrees outside.

In the mornings, though, I feel better. And so over the past few weeks I kept convincing myself that I was better. I don’t want to be sick now. Not when you are going to bring me to America.

Your mother has also noticed I am not able to keep up with her when we go to the market. She bought a black chicken to make soup, but of course I had to share it with the whole family and hardly got anything but broth.

But then I started coughing up blood, and my friend May-ying urged me to get an X-ray.

My mother dragged me down to the roentgenogram clinic. She held my arm so tight she left marks on my wrist. She kept saying, “You foolish girl! Don’t you remember your brother?”

The X-ray showed tuberculosis. What bad luck!

I sat in Toru’s office coughing and shivering, wrapped up in a towel. My mother was hysterical, saying I was going to die just like my brother, that it was your fault for leaving—though it’s not, of course! But I have faith in Toru. I have been in that office so many times with Kai-ming and he has saved Kai-ming’s life that many times.

Toru moved around the office, opening all kinds of packages with all kinds of needles and bottles. He gave me an injection called streptomycin. It’s some kind of miracle drug, something new from the West. It cures everything, but very slowly. I’ll need to take it for four months!

My mother asked if I should go to the hospital, and for a while Toru didn’t answer. I thought it was because he was busy writing something down in his book and he didn’t hear her, so I repeated her question.

But then it turned out he did hear the question and he was too embarrassed to answer. Because he does think I should go to the hospital, but he already talked to your mother about it when he heard from the roentgenogram clinic, and she refused to let me go. She said, if Toru can give me the medicine, why should I go to the hospital?

My mother was so mad she was shaking her fists in the air. She looked like an old witch, with her drab old clothes and her face all twisted up. She kept saying, “Too cheap to pay for the hospital! Two cars and a chauffeur!” Maybe it was my fault that I had told her about your sisters’ Japanese pearls and gold bracelets, their alligator-skin purses and shoes. My mother kept saying your mother was hoping I would die so they could get a girl with a dowry. Of course I know your mother is not that bad, and she really does like me, possibly better than she likes her daughters, but she is very stuck in her old ways.

I got my mother calmed down and she called your mother to offer to take care of me herself, at my parents’ house. Closer to Toru’s office, she said, but she also meant cheaper than the hospital.

But your mother thought this would not look right. She sent the rickshaw to pick me up.

So here I am, back in our room. I can’t work anymore. Every day my mother comes with a bowl of herbed chicken soup for me, and then we go to Toru’s office for another injection. He says I really need three injections a day, but how can I go back and forth to his office three times a day? I have to take care of Kai-ming.

Every morning your mother chats with me, about her backaches, her stomachaches, and she says to me, “You must not tell Saburo that you have tuberculosis.”

Isn’t that strange? I asked May-ying what she thought. She said if you can’t tell your husband you’re sick, then who can you tell?

Her eyes were wet as she told me this, and I squeezed her hand. Poor girl! I didn’t mention to you that when her fiancé went last year on military service in the South, he got a village girl pregnant . . .

So now you know everything. Your mother will be terribly angry with me for disobeying her, but I don’t care.

Have you or Professor Beck heard from Senator Dickey? Please get us over soon.

The blood rushed to my head. My ears rang as though I had been slapped. What a fool I was! After twenty years, could I never learn? Here I was again, groveling to my parents, yearning for their love and approval, and they had struck me down one more time.

I put my hand to my head, knocking into the lightbulb by accident. Shadows careened around the room.

Duty, honor, respect—how much would Kai-ming respect me if his mother died on my account?

You’re just like Toru, burdened by convention. I do hope you’re happier.

I sat on my bed to read the letter again. I looked at my watch. It was early morning in Taoyuan, a perfect time to call, before my parents left the house. But the only telephone was in the lobby with Li-wen and the security general’s son.

Why had they come here? Was it to watch me? It didn’t surprise me in the slightest that Li-wen would work for whatever overseas intelligence network the Nationalists had here, but could it be a coincidence that he would be here with the very same agent I had come across in San Francisco? The fact that I had done nothing illegal did not reassure me in the least, not in the face of the Nationalists. The mere fact that I was staying in this establishment and reading its newspapers was enough for them to file some trumped-up charge against me.

I cursed Kazuo. If not for him, I would never have gone to Ann Arbor to meet Li-wen in the first place. But it was my fault for obeying my brother. Chen was right. The Americans were right. I was weak. A patsy.

I opened my door and poked my head into the hallway, still hearing the clinking of porcelain and the pompous voices of Li-wen and Kuo-hong echoing down the hall. I quietly shut the door and stepped over to my window. It overlooked a quiet alley that connected to Eighteenth Street, where I knew there was a telephone booth. I poked my head out into the steamy night and looked down, considering for a moment. About a ten-foot drop into darkness.

I climbed up onto the windowsill, pushed aside my radio, and paused, hearing the distant clattering of the Lake Street “L” mingled with the quiet sounds of the cars going by. And then I jumped.

I landed in a puddle, pain shooting down from my back to my knee, the warm water covering my ankles and splashing onto the front of my shirt. I smelled the faint odor of urine and quickly stepped out of the puddle and made my way down the alley to Eighteenth Street.

“Thailand?” the operator said.

“Taiwan.” My reflection looked back at me from the walls of the telephone booth, my face haggard and dirty. I sweated, my Japanese shirt and pants clinging to my skin. “Formosa. Free China.”

“But that’s Asia!”

“Yes, it is.”

“Sir, that’s sixteen dollars for the first three minutes. I’m afraid I can’t connect you, unless you happen to have fifty dollars in change.”

Of course I did not. That was the equivalent of a month’s rent.

“I have an address. It’s my parent’s house. Perhaps—”

“You can’t charge this call, sir. I’m sorry.”

I hung up and headed back to the alley, but when I got there, I realized my window was too high for me to reach. I looked around for a box or crate to step on, but there was none.

I made my way back up the alley toward Eighteenth Street. But just as I turned the corner, I saw them coming through the glass doors of the Formosan Club—Li-wen, the security general’s son, and a third man I did not recognize.

I quickly shrank back into the alley, flattening myself against the wall. Had they seen me?

“. . . not at all,” Li-wen was saying. “Just humiliated me in front of the Americans, that’s all. Got a light?”

There was some rustling. “Here. What were you doing inviting him, anyway?”

“I knew he wouldn’t come. Too principled, even for free food. And the Americans fall for it, see, because they don’t know how things stand at home. Whole lot of barbarians. . . Now, his brother, there’s someone to reckon with, you’ll see—”

“We’ll be late for the restaurant,” the security general’s son said. “Where is this place you’re talking about?”

“Sakura. It’s this way, but it’s far too unsafe to walk. We’ll get a cab.”

“But there are no cabs here. And it stinks of urine.”

“We’ll walk to that corner . . .”

Their voices grew even closer, and they crossed right in front of the alley. I crouched, turning to the wall. My arm moved up automatically to shield my face, and I was still, my nose pressed against stone that smelled, oddly in this city, of musty earth. I heard the screech of bus brakes and felt headlights sweep through the alley, filling me with fear, a primeval fear of discovery, of pain and punishment. And then I realized that I was in the habitual pose of my childhood, face in the dirt, bracing for my mother’s next blow.

I jumped up and turned to face the street, come what may.

The bus roared off into the distance, leaving only the glimmer and the low purr of well-behaved American automobiles within their marked lanes, gently stopping and starting at intersections. The trio of Nationalists made its way toward the opposite side of the street and into a cab and were driven away.

I
HURRIED TO
the glass doors of the Formosan Club, the lobby of which was now empty. What would I say to Yoshiko? Nothing about Li-wen or Kuo-hong, of course. I had to convince her that I was doing well, that I wasn’t making the mistakes she thought I was . . .

But when I tried the doors, they were locked. I felt for the keys in my pocket, but they were gone; in my anguish over Yoshiko’s letter, I must have dropped the keys on the floor of my room.

The front desk receptionist would not be in until morning.

Ah, misfortune! I was still that distracted, careless boy.

I sat on the front steps of the Formosan Club. But they were hard concrete and my back seized with the pain of sitting so low down, so I stood again. Now that I actually had no place to stay, I no longer wanted to be taken for a vagabond, and so I walked. I had no destination. I simply headed down the street.

Yoshiko with tuberculosis! I couldn’t bear to think of her, shivering and coughing, a prisoner in our bed. What would happen to me without her, and to Kai-ming? Frail as he was in her arms, he would surely die without her. I looked up into the night sky, and the lights from the city cast such a purplish glow on the heavens that it blotted out all but the very strongest stars. How unlike the sky over the streets of Taoyuan, which I had walked so many times, hand in hand, with Yoshiko. The life that I had fled so urgently seemed a paradise to me now. Yet it was my own people who had beaten me down so that I might abandon my own wife and child—my mother, my father, my brother, and Generalissimo Chiang.