The Year She Left Us (11 page)

The foreign guests who crowded our home on Sundays spoke mostly French or English in a babble that grew louder if no clergy were present and the whiskey decanter came out. Mother, having been born in New York City, spoke English readily; it was her Mandarin that was poor. I had to correct her all the time. She served chicken and fruit and cake to the ladies because Cook knew how to procure whatever we needed in the black market, which supplied everybody's larders. Raw clams and mussels were Father's favorites; he would urge the gentlemen to eat their fill.

“Except,” Naomi said, when I told her all about Father, “for Mr. Ben Cohen. Perhaps he preferred to eat chicken with the ladies.”

Ha, I said. Her point was well taken. My memory is faulty, my stories incomplete.

But there was no shortage of provisions on our table, and Father was the perfect host. The French, especially, loved to come to our house. Father allowed me to sit in the corner and listen to the men talk of politics and war, history and war, the perfidy of the Japanese and the Allies' staunchness. Rose was too timid to hang about with the men, but I was proud to see the guests lean in to catch Father's every word.

At the end of luncheon, Father would stand to offer a toast. I have a photograph of him from one of those Sundays, standing in the courtyard with a group of smiling gentlemen. His collar is open, and his hair is mussed. An easy laugh brightens his round face. On the back of the photograph in Mother's handwriting is a little poem. Perhaps she wrote it—she was always scribbling—but the words sound more like Father's.

Why worry?

All mortals must die

So let's not worry.

Chase our fear away.

Sirens may scream

And shells may rain

And bombs fall.

Let's have a cup of tea.

Father owned the hospital that served many foreigners and the Chinese in government or university posts. Several other ob-gyns worked there, but all the ladies wanted Father to be their doctor.

“Oh, Dr. Wu,” I once heard a woman sigh. She was a pretty young Englishwoman in a blue day dress sitting across from me in the waiting room at the dentist's office. I was ten years old—this was right after Mother and Rose and I had returned to Shanghai from Kuling, and Mu-you had been sent to live with Father's cousin in Hangzhou—and sitting with my ears pricked for the sound of the nurse's footsteps. Rose was with me, and we were both nervous, for we disliked the dentist, though we loved the reward: Mother taking us out afterward for ice cream sodas and an American movie. “He has the gentlest hands,” said the young woman. “I won't see anyone else. When my time comes, my husband has promised that Dr. Wu will get to the hospital if my husband has to pull the rickshaw himself.”

The second woman, wearing a tented maternity smock, giggled. “You wouldn't be the only one getting special treatment. I heard he took very good care of Lady Brad . . .”

Bradford? Braddock? I didn't hear the name clearly, though I certainly heard the “Lady.” I stuck my hands flat on my chair and inched to the edge of my seat. I wasn't guileless enough to keep from staring at the women, but they took no notice of me, or perhaps they believed I couldn't understand English.

“ . . . thing ended when his wife came back,” I heard. “And then her husband found out and packed her off to Hong Kong.”

“Pity,” said the first woman, “she was always such fun at parties.”

“Who's Lady Bradford?” I asked Mother when we got home. We spoke English at home for Mother's convenience. She was knitting a sweater for Mu-you, which she was hurrying to finish. A missionary couple whom she knew through the YWCA was traveling to Hangzhou and could take money and clothing and tinned foods to Father's family. Mu-you was four. A spinster cousin took care of him. She'd gotten fat, Father joked, from eating her way through our presents.

“Mu-you will like this, don't you think?” said Mother. She held it up for me to see. It was gray wool with a snowflake pattern. We'd laughed in Kuling the previous winter when it snowed for the first time, astonishing Mu-you into running in sweeping circles under the bleak winter sky. Rose had tried to teach him how to catch snowflakes on his tongue, but of course he couldn't do it. “He'll learn,” Mother had said. A fantasy. He wouldn't.

“He won't be able to pull it on over his head,” I said.

“Cousin Pei can help him,” Mother said. She resumed her knitting, the needles clicking steadily, making a quiet sound like soft rain falling on the tin shed roof. Cook was doing our shopping and the
amah
and the housekeeper were busy at the back of the house, so the afternoon was unusually quiet. We were sitting in the parlor where Mother served tea to YWCA ladies and visiting missionaries who came to talk about schools for the poor and improving rural conditions. The chairs were softer in here, not the polished wood of the formal dining room chairs, but I rarely sat for long listening in on their conversations because I found their subjects dull.

“Do you know Lady Bradford?” I persisted. “Is she a real English lady, like a maiden in distress?” I loved the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

Mother snorted. She paused to count the rows in her snowflake pattern.

“Where did you hear her name?”

“Two ladies in the dentist's office said she was Father's patient.”

The needles flashed. “Father has many patients. It's a big job, running a hospital.”

“And then he goes on Saturdays to the Red Cross hospital, too,” I said, eager to join in Mother's defense of Father, though what he was accused of, I wasn't certain. Mother seemed to be protecting him—her words were ones of praise, but she spoke them to me with an uncharacteristic coldness and turned away, her broad shoulders like a wall between us.

“I wish he wouldn't go on Saturdays,” I said. “I wish he would stay home and be with us, like before.”

“In wartime, everybody has to do their part. If Father didn't help the Red Cross, many poor women at the municipal hospital wouldn't get proper care. I'm at the end of my yarn. Will you help me with this? Hold up your hands and I'll wind this into a ball.”

“You
hold up
your
hands.” Mother did as I said. I drew a loose skein of gray yarn over her rigid hands as carefully as Cousin Pei would be pulling Mu-you's new sweater over his head. This way, Mother would have to look at me. I began winding the yarn into a woolly ball.

“Do all of Father's patients have babies?” I asked. I was ten. I didn't know exactly what an ob-gyn did.

“Some do. But Father takes care of all their problems. Not just delivering babies. For good health, a woman has to have examinations and such.”

It was a big skein, more than she would need to finish Mu-you's sweater, but still I wound slowly, fixing her with my eye.

“So they take a test when they go see Father? Like Miss Peek gives us a test at school?”

Mother shifted her big bottom in the chair. I expected her to color, as so many ladies did, but she surprised me. She looked straight back at me and said with a smile, “Father makes sure that a woman's reproductive system is working the way it should. They lie on their backs on his examining table. He reaches up inside them and feels with his hand whether their female parts, like the uterus and the cervix, are in good condition. If they're pregnant, he can tell if the baby is growing nicely.”

I stopped winding. The image shocked me. Mother laughed.

“It's not so bad as all that. It doesn't hurt, and it's good for the mother to know that everything is fine, that everything is normal.”

“So there's a way to tell if something isn't normal?”

Mother paused. She knew I was thinking of Mu-you.

“Sometimes he can't tell. And even if he can tell, sometimes there's nothing that can be done about it. The baby might be born with problems. Like Mu-you was born different from other children. That baby needs a special kind of love. You find a way to take care of that baby and you keep on taking care of him as he grows older, and even when he's grown up and still needs a lot of attention, you keep on taking care of him because that baby is yours forever. We'll take care of Mu-you for the rest of his life, you and me and Rose and Father. That's our job, to take care of Mu-you. And sometimes we'll get help from other people, like Cousin Pei, who knows how to be patient, but nobody else will love Mu-you the way we do because he's our special boy. He's a good boy, isn't he?”

I nodded. He was a good boy, sunny and often laughing, though he couldn't talk right or feed himself or play games or hold a book in the proper position. I was crying a little bit, but Mother was smiling fondly at me. She might have given me a hug had her hands been free. Mother gave us a lot of hugs, more than regular Chinese parents.

“And he's ours to take care of forever.”

“What about God?” I asked. “Will he take care of Mu-you?”

“Oh, God,” Mother said. She quirked her mouth and gestured, keeping her hands upright. The yarn didn't budge. I kept on winding. “Who knows the story there?” She laughed. “That's not a good thing for the daughter of a minister to say, is it?” She held me in her smile. “It doesn't matter, in terms of our duty to Mu-you. No, not ‘duty.' I don't want you to think that Mu-you is a duty. We do it because we love him and he loves us, and that's all there is to it.”

“Does Father love him?”

Her face changed. I saw a shadow cross.

“Yes, Father loves him.”

“And it's not a duty?”

“It's love and duty with Father,” Mother said. “That's often the way men are. But for you and me and Rose, it's love, love, love.”

I couldn't answer her. I was used to talking with Father and doing as Father said, but here was Mother setting out her own law of the land. Her demands were born of love, she said, but they were demands nonetheless—that much I understood. At my mother's insistence, I was to act and feel a certain way. She had given me a job and the emotion to go with it. She had never spoken so frankly to me before, though, looking back, I shouldn't have been surprised that a scientist from New York City would know her own mind and unleash it once in a while.

“Remember this,” Mother said. “We act out of love, and we always take care of family. As for Lady Bradford,” she added.

I held my breath. I had forgotten all about Lady Bradford.

“There will always be those women who interest your father. Don't worry about it. He knows his duty.”

She slipped the last yard of the skein from her hands and watched me finish winding. I handed her the ball of yarn, as neat and round as a pomelo fruit.

“It's perfect,” she said. “The perfect tension. If you'd wound it too tightly, the yarn would be stretched and spoiled. Too loose, and the knitting gets tangled. Now tell me.” She reached into her basket and brought out a loop of string on which five small buttons were threaded. I recognized them; they were made of jade and cut from a ladies' blouse that someone had given Mother. The blouse was much too small for my hardy mother, but she had saved the buttons—I had hoped for me.

“Shall we sew one of these into Mu-you's sweater?” Mother asked. “A piece of jade to bring him good luck?”

I hesitated. Mother understood.

“One for Mu-you,” she said, “and you can have the other four to sew onto your own sweater. Whenever you button it up, you'll think of your little brother.”

I nodded and got out my sewing basket, and when Mother was done knitting the last rows of Mu-you's sweater, I sewed one jade button on the inside near the bottom. This was a custom, to sew in a piece of lucky jade, and though we were a modern family and not superstitious, I could see by the way that Mother checked my stitches that the button gave her comfort. She smoothed the finished sweater and then rested her hand on top of my pigtailed head. “You really are a treasure, my Penny Perfect.” I grabbed her around the waist and hugged her tightly, her dress soft against my face and her neck smelling of talcum. I felt as mighty as the chair bearers who carried us up the mountain. I had the strength to do anything that Mother asked of me.

Later, that strength left me. I couldn't, or I didn't, do as Mother had asked. In between those two notions lies a dark hole of pain.

I dream of the baby, blue-faced and flopping. His feeble cries fill my restless nights. His veined and ruined body shudders and then lies still. I was a young woman, following doctor's orders. I cannot sleep for thinking of that baby.

S
ee where it leads, peering into the past? This is exactly why I never allow myself the luxury of reminiscence. One starts with good memories, and then everything blackens. There's no telling where the path will take you.

No matter. The page will keep my secrets. This is only a kind of exercise to exorcise the ghosts. It's good to have a project, a place to put all my feelings. I put my feelings into words, and then put away the words like I stash spare buttons in a long tin box, which I stick on a shelf and don't bother with ever again. When was the last time I took down that box of buttons and poked a finger through it? If I did, I'd never find anything useful, nothing to replace what's missing or to match my present needs. The jade buttons I never used again, though they turned up later when I least expected. Even so, I find that I can't bring myself to discard a single button. I blame it on the war years and on the Depression. We threw away nothing. I box up the buttons, neat and tidy, and hide the box where nobody can find it. Then I face forward and get on with life again. I've always told my girls to follow my example. Write it all down and then throw it away, or if you can't dispose of it, at least try to hide it. Why nurse the pain of the past? You're better off walking away. There is nothing to be done about it. Some things you must abandon.