Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  Forces are strong, morale high, many hundreds of cadets from Chiang’s new military academy, plus many thousands of volunteer propagandists. Maybe Jin told you, I have requested him for my unit. If all goes well, perhaps we both meet you and babies in Kuling during August.

  Please do not worry for me, Hope. There is goodwill in the countryside. People are tired of fighting and hunger. If Borodin and Chiang stand together, the country will follow.

  Enclosed money will pay for steamer to Kiukiang and keep you in Kuling this summer. I am sorry not to send more, but pay is scarce. I am promised another sum when we reach Wuhan, will send to you then. For safety, best go to mountains when children’s school end and stay until you hear from me. All will be well there, no fighting.

  Your husband,

  Paul

  Sarah peered over her shoulder. “Do you know where he is?”

  “Marching north from Canton. Somewhere in Hunan. I try not to think about it.”

  “It’s hard to picture Paul and Jin as soldiers.”

  “Soldiers! Is that what you thought?” Hope gave a peremptory laugh. “You’d have to count words as weapons, which I guess they do, but not the way you mean. My husband is a propagandist, my dear. He may be schooled in military tactics, but he’s never so much as touched a bayonet. The plan, as I understand it, is for his unit to travel ahead of the troops, not with them. He meets with the local officials, village leaders, and warlords, persuades them to join the United Front of the Kuomintang. Meanwhile his volunteers—like Jin—tout revolution to the villagers, so that when the soldiers march into town everyone’s throwing flowers.”

  “Or spears. What, exactly, does Paul say to prevent them putting his head on a block?”

  Hope grimaced. “‘Only the United National Front can exterminate the foreign oppressors who enslave and murder workers and children.’ A cheery appeal, don’t you think? But according to the reports Yen brings up from Kiukiang, it’s working like a charm.”

  “I’ve lost track. Do we count as foreign oppressors, or collaborators, or both?”

  “I try not to think about that either,” said Hope. “Whatever the answer may be today, it’s bound to be different tomorrow.”

  “You sound positively jaded.”

  “I’m tired. Poor William Cadlow. I haven’t written a thing since Teddy was born, and he keeps sending pep notes to start me up again, but the truth is, I can’t bear to look too closely anymore. It’s getting grim, Sarah. Pithy little stories about students doing the Charleston and dressing like Theda Bara trivialize China. Yet whenever Paul tries to explain the current political situation I feel myself going numb.”

  “Seems to me, you could use a diversion.”

  Teddy rolled over, chortling, scrambled to his feet and made straight for the picnic hamper. Hope sighed, “You’d think I had enough.”

  Sarah, who was seated closest to the food, handed the toddler a tea biscuit. “When Jasmine and I went down valley this morning, there was quite a commotion outside the Fairy Glen Hotel. A man had arrived on a litter. His wife was shouting for medical help and the man was telling her to pipe down. Seems he’d decided to walk up the mountain instead of riding, and he’d slipped and broken his leg—”

  “Sarah,” Hope interrupted. “You’re bright red.”

  “Oh, this good-for-nothing Irish skin. You could at least indulge me my little run-around. All right, guess who they were.”

  “No.” Hope passed back the India rubber ball that Teddy had just tossed in her lap. “Not now, love.”

  “Ball,” the child insisted, this time rolling it over her shoulder. “Mama p’ay.”

  Sarah said, “It’s Stephen Mann.”

  When Hope failed to comment, she went on, “He introduced me to Anna. I—I didn’t tell that you were here, Hope, only while he was having his leg looked after she said they meant to find a place for the summer. Then I remembered Pearl’s friend Shirley saying her family could only stay the week and wanted to let their house, so I mentioned it. Anna was awfully grateful—”

  “A diversion,” Hope said bitterly. “You really are something, Sarah.”

  “What! I’m only the messenger. Don’t go blaming me.”

  “You’re evil.”

  “Evil, am I? And what are you? What’s your Dr. Mann? We’re all of us evil in our own ways. All scrambling for the good. Might as well face up to it, Hope. Think a bit, you should thank me.”

  2

  The Tsai house stood less than a mile from the Leons’, in a meadow nestled down by the stream. From the main trail, the welcoming procession could see over the surrounding wall and into the yard. A manservant stood talking to someone inside the house, and a maid was sweeping the brick walk that connected the outer buildings. The yard was shaded by a tall silver birch, under which lay a chaise longue draped with a red plaid blanket.

  As the party started down to the gate, Anna stepped from the house. Though still at some distance, Hope was shocked by her plump, ungainly posture, the pinched expression of her face. She wore a beige chemise that fell formless to the knees. Her once ginger hair, now in an Eton crop, had gone much grayer than Hope’s own, and her eyes squinted shortsightedly behind wire-rimmed glasses as she strained to make out who was coming.

  “It’s us, Miss Van Zyl!” Pearl waved wildly. “Pearl and Morris Leon. And Mama and her friend. Do you remember?”

  Anna clapped a hand to her mouth and darted to the gate, calling behind her, “Stephen, do you hear? It’s Hope Leon and the children. They’re here!” By the time they reached the bottom of the hill, the gate was flung open and Anna was hurling herself into Hope’s arms. “I can’t believe it! After all these years? And here, of all places. Hope, it’s so good to see you. And Pearl! No, it can’t be. Morris! Little Morris. The size of you! Oh dear, you all look so wonderful.” Before Hope could open her mouth, tears were spilling from Anna’s still incandescent blue eyes. The glasses came off. She busied herself with a handkerchief, and hugs were exchanged all around.

  “I always meant to write,” said Anna. “Even before Stephen and I married, but we were always so busy—always on the move …”

  “Never mind. It’s good to see you again.” Hope stopped, momentarily losing her train of thought. Sarah caught her eye. “Oh. Yes, this is Sarah Chou. You met, of course, but perhaps you didn’t make the connection. Remember, I used to tell you about her in Peking?”

  “The one with the beautiful auburn hair! Of course, you are.” Anna looked as though she might cry all over again as Sarah munificently embraced her.

  “Anna!” Mann’s voice boomed from behind the birch. “Bring them, will you?”

  “Beware.” Anna touched Hope’s elbow. “Doctors make the world’s worst patients.”

  “Do they?” Hope’s smile felt pasted on.

  The red plaid of the chaise lengthened with their approach, its occupant suddenly visible. Then Anna’s hand dropped away and the children fell behind her, and Hope was facing him again, saying hello, what a surprise and how was he feeling, how had the accident happened …

  “I was trying to be a stoic, as usual.” The familiarity of his voice caught her like a wave. His hair had receded, squaring back his forehead, and was now silvery brown. He had grown a boxcar mustache, was thinner, bonier, but the same restless colors moved through his eyes. Even with his leg in a cast and his torso cranked up onto his elbows, he seemed to tower over her.

  “I thought doctors were invulnerable,” she said.

  “Have to be made of stone to be invulnerable.” He studied her. “You look wonderful, Hope.”

  She turned abruptly and motioned to Pearl and Morris. “Remember the children?”

  “Pearl.” Mann shook his head. “You’re a grown lady. And Morris. I guess a lifetime’s passed.”

  “We’ve brought some things to welcome you.” Pearl lifted the basket she was carrying. “And to make you well. You’ll find it quite impossible to be unhealthy in Kuling.”

&nbs
p; “Delighted to hear that. Thank you.”

  “You are so lovely,” said Anna, the old inflection turning her words to a question. She beckoned to her maidservant. “Let’s have some of that ham right away, shall we? And here, An-ying, put these glorious lupines into water and bring some tea for our guests.”

  “So, Doctor.” Sarah moved next to Hope, lacing an arm around her waist. “Do you hate me too much for keeping them a surprise?”

  “Not too much.” He grinned, and Hope pulled away. Her heart was pounding so that she was sure they must be able to hear it. She refused to look at Sarah.

  “Yen’s at the house with the others,” said Morris, bringing two wicker chairs from the terrace. “He says hello.”

  “Hello to Yen,” said Mann. “What others?”

  “Jasmine and Teddy.” Sarah fell into one of the chairs. “Hope’s younger children. And my boys, Gerald and Ken.”

  Hope sat down. Stephen’s undisguised pleasure irritated her almost as much as Sarah’s glee. For her part, Anna seemed oblivious. “So many children,” she sighed. “What a lucky life you lead.”

  “Aye, lucky!” Sarah laughed. “Now that is the word, if ever I heard one.”

  The servants returned with two laden tea trays, and the children seated themselves on the grass. Anna thumped her husband’s pillows and raised him to a sitting position. Helping him with his teacup, lathering a biscuit with honey, she was resigned in her movements, her calm, her discipline. All the while, she talked of the ordeal of their trip. The previous week torrential rains had hit the Yangtze Valley, flooding the plains as they had two years earlier, when Hope and the children had themselves witnessed what Anna was now describing. The rain brought the river over its banks and stretched it to an inland ocean. Fields, farms, roads, and trees were all submerged, and the turgid waters would thicken here with the thatch of a roof, there the carcass of a pig or child. Steamer passengers watched whole families clinging to treetops, men paddling wooden troughs, women sitting stone-faced and mute on the island of a village parapet. Around them, water for as far as the eye could see.

  “Those poor, poor people,” said Anna. “Not a sign of help but what they could do for each other.”

  “God forbid the steamers should stop and take the poor souls aboard,” said Sarah. “I know. The river was already rising when we came up. The Brits traveling with us were placing wagers on death toll predictions.”

  “Ugh!” Pearl wrinkled her nose. “Can’t we change the subject? Here, Mama.” She reached into the basket and brought up Hope’s Graflex. “Let’s do the picture now.”

  Hope sighed. She hadn’t wanted to bring the camera, but the children insisted. “I hardly think Dr. Mann—”

  “No,” he said. “Absolutely, we should have something to remember this day.”

  “I still have that picture you took of us at the races.” Sarah pinched Hope’s arm. “Remember, Doctor?”

  “How could I forget?”

  Hope pretended to busy herself with the camera. In the aftermath of Chapei, she’d destroyed her own copy of that photograph, and the negative.

  She stared into the viewfinder. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Oh, Mama!” Morris spoke with disgust. At fourteen, he was a wizard at things mechanical, and only too pleased to point out when others were not. He lifted the lens hatch. Hope had no choice but to proceed.

  The children posed in rakish attitudes. Anna perched behind Mann’s reclining figure and smoothed her rumpled bosom. Sarah leaned against the silver birch, tugging her cloche down vampishly over one eye. But it was Stephen who thwarted her. Each time she brought the group into focus, his gaze would press through the lens so insistently that she had to look away.

  Finally, she gave up. She pointed the camera, felt for the release. And shut her eyes.

  Pearl was right about Kuling’s healing powers. Within a week Stephen Mann was up on crutches and circling his garden. Two, and he was venturing as far as the Taoist shrine up the trail. By month’s end he and his canvas crusher and cane were regular visitors at the Leons’, often joining the family for a swim, boat ride, or round of croquet, and all remarked on the good spirits that seemed to accompany his restored athleticism. Anna took advantage of her husband’s independent wanderings to go off on her own to hunt for mountain wildflowers. And Hope would maneuver around Mann’s attentions by snaring the children into a game of bridge just before he arrived to make a fourth, or starting a planting project with Yen in which Mann was spontaneously included, or luring Jasmine and Teddy to a butterfly hunt or fishing expedition with Mann as wildlife expert. He bantered easily with the children, though she noticed from the first introduction that his dealings with the two younger ones were suspiciously imbalanced. “She’s a feisty gal,” he’d say when Jasmine jumped with both feet into mud puddles, but little Teddy’s ability at age two to pair words and pictures in Jasmine’s first-grade reader drew no comment. Sometimes Hope caught him watching the boy with such a sour, resentful expression that she was tempted to shake him, Yes, that is our baby—mine and Paul’s.

  She never acted on this temptation. She never touched his hand, even in passing, and their conversation was forcibly slight. They did not speak of their time in Tientsin, much less the meeting in Chapei. But the combination of Mann’s restored vigor with all that remained unsaid made Hope increasingly tense. She knew that whatever had not transpired between her and Mann had been of her own choosing. It was she who had stopped short of the open door. Yet as the weeks passed, everything twisted until she found herself blaming him for leaving, condemning him for not answering her unspoken thoughts.

  Then, one languid, overcast day in early August, they sat beside each other on a low stone wall dangling their toes at Paradise Pool. The older children were swimming. Teddy toddled up the beach under Ah-nie’s watch. Clusters of summer people strolled about the bathhouses or basked on the rock-strewn shore, but all were well out of earshot.

  “We’re even now,” he said suddenly. “You needn’t erect a fortress, you know.”

  She kept her eyes low and steady on the water. “What do I need, then?”

  “That depends.”

  She leaned forward and smoothed her skirt across her knees. “You and Anna have never said how it happened.”

  “It?” Though she refused to look at his face, she could hear the sneer in his voice.

  “How you fell in love.”

  She sensed, without knowing, that she had raised her voice. Now she overadjusted, felt him tilting closer to hear as she continued, “Was Yüan’s banquet really the first time you met?”

  There was an awkward moment filled with laughter from the beach and the skitter of footsteps behind them. Teddy was coming to play, but Mann took the ball from the child’s outstretched hand and tossed it back to Ah-nie. Teddy turned on cue and was off and away, commanding her to throw it “like that man.”

  “You learned that from your dog,” Hope said. “What happened to him, anyway?”

  “Left him with the Dutchman who replaced me in Tientsin. His wife needed company, and the pup kept bringing up difficult memories for me.” He held his eyes on her as he filled his pipe. The aroma of that cherry tobacco brought up difficult memories for Hope, too, but she said nothing.

  “Yes,” he continued, “that was the first time we met. Though you may recall, my attentions that evening were otherwise engaged.”

  She gave him an anguished look. “Don’t do this.”

  He paused, smoking. Then he cleared his throat and went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “I ran into Anna in Tientsin after—well, a few months after I last saw you. Mrs. Morrison had her out—to cheer her up, she said. We went for tea, and in the middle Anna broke down. Seemed she’d only recently learned her fiancé was killed at the Somme.” He studied the pipe cradled in his hand. “You know what they say about misery and company.”

  Hope lifted her face. The top of Lu Shan was buried in clouds.

  “Hey, Mama! Watc
h!” Jasmine did a back flip off the boat dock.

  “It’s none of my business,” said Hope, “but Anna used to talk about having a big family …”

  He let out a short, derisive laugh. “Yes, someone sent me that article you wrote about Margaret Sanger’s triumphal visit! Unfortunately, she never made it to Chungking, so I can’t very well blame it on her, can I?”

  “I’m sorry—” The bitterness of his tone jolted her. She should have known better.

  “Why? It’s hardly your fault.” Mann snapped his pipe against the wall, emptying it into the water.

  “But Anna seems,” Hope faltered, “—she seems happy?”

  “Ah.” He nodded. “Well, yes, and if you believe that, you must believe the change in her is the kindly mark of time. Maybe so. Maybe she was destined from the start to become a fat, humorless matron by thirty, but for some reason I didn’t see that seven years ago.”

  “That’s unkind.”

  “No, vicious. After all, she’s my nurse, my escort, my guardian angel. But there’s one thing she’s not, Hope.”

  A sudden leveling of his voice forced her to look him full in the face. His eyes were burning and the whole length of his body stretched taut as he reached for her. “Hope,” he repeated urgently.

  But in that breath she was up and racing for the beach. Her skirt pushed against her legs, her cries sprang out ahead of her. She took Teddy by surprise, caught him into her arms too suddenly, spun him too rapidly, but he laughed as she knew he would, his straight black hair flying into her mouth, his wide eyes snapping, little fingers grabbing her ears and neck. The boy squealed as he pulled her hat free, sent it sailing over the waves. Then mother and son ran pell-mell, splashing heedless as the water crawled up her skirt and Teddy, sensing nothing but fun, scooped up the boater and plopped it on his head, biting the sodden streamers.