Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  “Still taking pictures, eh?”

  “Stephen!” She clapped her hand to her mouth.

  Mann smiled. “It’s all right. Good photographers are supposed to snoop.”

  She lowered her hand with a feeble wave. “I didn’t get anything.”

  There was a long pause as they studied each other. He was as changed from her memory as she must seem to him. Always spare, he was now bony, his skin deeply lined, and the once full lips now thin and pinched. But his eyes still bore that restless drive.

  “How long have you been back!”

  “A year. More. I lose track. Say, it’s bitter out here. Shall we get some coffee?”

  She chewed her lips, thinking. “All right. There’s a pastry shop a few blocks from here. French. They have coffee.”

  “You don’t drink coffee, do you?”

  She smiled. “No. But it’s only habit.”

  “All of life is habit,” he said. “Or the breaking of it.”

  He took her arm. They walked in the direction she had indicated and came at length to a pink box of a shop with glittering cases full of napoleons and puff pastries. A row of pink-shaded wall lamps gave the place a cozy glow, and it was filled with young Chinese and Shanghailander couples trying to look “Continental.”

  They found a table toward the back where they would be less conspicuous. A young girl with dark bangs and moony eyes took Mann’s order for two cafe au laits. He emptied his pipe into the ashtray in the center of the table, kept tapping it against the glass rim.

  “Sarah’s run away, did you know?” said Hope. “With a sailor—”

  His tongue flicked across his lower lip. He started to nod, then glanced away. “Anna left me, too. Four years ago.”

  “Oh—” This time his name twisted on her tongue. “Stephen, I’m sorry.”

  He would not meet her eyes.

  The girl brought their coffees. Hope sipped suspiciously. “Why, it’s good!” Her relief at this minor discovery startled her.

  He smiled. “It’s all right.”

  They began to talk. She brought him up to date on her children, described Yen’s new enterprise, Paul’s assignment to the Control Yüan in Nanking, their exile from Kuling since Mao Tse-tung’s Communists had occupied Kiangsi. He told briefly of Anna’s desertion in Pretoria for a botanist who had been her teacher at normal school. Of his life in Tientsin since then, back at the same clinic where he had worked before, and the general tenor of life in the north under Peking’s last warlord, whose preferred method of execution was the garrote.

  “It bewilders me,” he said, “how the Chinese can continue to call us barbarians when they have beasts among them like this man.”

  “You know … about Jed Israel?” He nodded slowly.

  “At least you missed that.” She trained her eyes on the pressed tin ceiling, fighting tears. “They killed Paul’s son, too. Jin.”

  He moved his hand closer, but did not try to touch her, and they sat for several minutes without speaking. The bell over the door jangled almost continuously. Young couples laughed and chatted, watching each other with interest and Hope and Mann not at all.

  “Where are you working now?” she asked finally.

  He gave her a long look and removed his hat. Underneath, the top of his head was bald. He grinned. “We get old, we come full circle. Shanghai Native.”

  “No!”

  “Still the most humane hospital in Shanghai.”

  She covered her face. The tears that she had contained before now rolled freely down her cheeks. She was laughing. Crying. They were so old. They barely knew each other, yet they went back forever. She didn’t know what they were doing here. She didn’t really care. It was as though she’d reached the end of the earth and discovered a friend there waiting.

  She touched his sleeve. He made no move to return the touch, only watched her with amused tenderness.

  “I’m going home in February. Back to Seattle.” For a moment his lips remained parted, as if he meant to continue. Instead he finished his coffee.

  She had no reason to be surprised. No business being sorry. But she was. “Why now,” she blurted, “after all these years?”

  His eyes rested on her with an ease that she did not recognize. “I’m finally old enough to admit I’ve failed,” he said. “And to realize there’s no shame in that.”

  After a long pause, she asked, “Was it a coincidence, our meeting today?”

  He smiled sheepishly and shook his head. “I’ve been meaning to see you for the longest time. Come to your house, gotten as close as the gate. Today I turned the corner just as you were leaving. Forgive me, I followed you.”

  “Why?”

  Mann gave her a long studied look, then filled and lit his pipe. He smoked for a while, still watching her as if considering his options. At last he said deliberately, “I keep feeling that we’re unfinished, Hope.”

  She forced a laugh. “People are never finished—except in death.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean.”

  She avoided his eyes. “I know, but I’m trying to tell you, that notion of completion is an illusion. Nothing ever turns out as we imagine it will. It’s impossible, what you mean.”

  “I can believe in failure,” he said. “But I don’t agree with you.”

  “I think—” But her gaze fell on the gnarled, careworn hand that lay clutching that dull pink napkin. The bones stood out like starved ribs, the knuckles pressed white as tiny bleached skulls underneath the blue-veined skin. Her hand.

  “Walk me home?” she asked.

  “If you like.”

  “Yes.” She rose. “I’d like it fine. And we’ll say goodbye properly. You’ll sail to America. And maybe one day I’ll have a postcard from Seattle?”

  Mann pulled the pipe from his mouth and sat watching the smoke continue to curl from its bowl. Then, in a single movement, he dumped the burning embers into his cup and replaced the empty pipe stem between his big ivory teeth.

  Fifteen minutes later he left her at the corner of her street with a dry, embarrassed kiss that landed just east of her lips. He told her to give his best to her children. Regards to her husband. Take care of herself. He did promise to write, and he’d look for her articles when he got back to the States. When he smiled the lines radiated from the corners of his eyes. He tipped his hat, and walked away.

  5

  Teddy and Jasmine wore her down. Pearl had gone off to a tea at the rectory, to be followed by supper with Googoo Noble and friends. Morris was going out to the pictures to celebrate the government sponsorship Paul at last had secured for him to attend university in California the following fall. But he was taking his friend Flossie, which meant the younger two were not welcome, and besides, he was seeing some Greta Garbo movie. Teddy and Jazz wanted to see the new Gary Cooper western, The Virginian.

  “Wasn’t it Virginia where you grew up, Mama?” Teddy coaxed.

  “Not Virginia. Kansas.”

  But Jasmine was already putting her coat on. “There’s a five o’clock show at the Lyceum. We can make it if we hurry.”

  Within the hour Hope was transported back to a world in which men rode horses and called women “ma’am.” She remembered the long, flouncy skirts she’d worn as a child, those sausage sleeves and droopy bonnets that made her feel like a reluctant sunflower. She saw in the faces of those cinema cowboys both the tormentors and protectors of her youth, and cringed when the fateful moment came (volubly anticipated by the more experienced cinemagoers in the audience) for Gary Cooper to put an insulting Walter Huston in his place: “If you want to call me that… smile.” There was nothing quite like the innocence and simplicity of this exported vision of America. No wonder the Chinese could not get enough of it.

  It was nearly nine when they got home, and with school the next day she hurried the children to bed. Within the hour Morris, too, returned, mimicking Garbo. “Gif me a visky—ginger ale on the side—and don’t be stingy—” he batted his
long, thick black eyelashes “—baby.”

  Hope threw her slipper at him. “Valentino, you may be, but Garbo you are not. You didn’t see Pearl outside, did you?”

  He shrugged and affected a coquettish moue. “I haf seen no vun who von’t gif me a viskey.” Then he draped one hand across his brow and slunk down the hall to his room.

  She watched him enviously. Was it even remotely possible that her children were as lighthearted as they seemed? No. In a word. Yet their capacity for pretense seemed inexhaustible. That was one thing they’d gotten out of Shanghai.

  She lay back against the sofa pillows, adjusted her glasses, and opened The Right to Be Happy, by Mrs. Bertrand Russell. She’d heard Mr. Bertrand Russell give a lecture in Shanghai several years ago, and was impressed with his sympathy for the Chinese and his criticisms of British colonialism. She wondered if Mrs. Russell could possibly be as outspoken as her husband. Certainly, if the chapter entitled “Sex and Parenthood” was any indication, the answer was an emphatic yes. There is no instinct that has been so maligned, suppressed, abused, and distorted, Mrs. Russell wrote, as the instinct of sex. Yet sex-love is the most intense instinctive pleasure known to men and women, and starvation or thwarting of this instinct causes more acute unhappiness than poverty, disease, or ignorance.

  Hope gently closed the book. She snapped out the light and lay staring at the ceiling. How was it that, even when sex was stripped of its procreative function, it could still have such a preoccupying pull? She sighed, recalling Paul’s urgent attentions during his visit last week. No matter how little passed between them in other aspects of their lives, he still came to her. And then Stephen returning the other day, after all this time …

  A car door slammed, and the street out front echoed with youthful good nights. There, Hope thought, there’s Pearl, and I can go to sleep. But the jangle of keys and door-clicks that followed came from the neighbor’s house. She checked the clock. Nearly midnight. Surely they wouldn’t have gone over to Hongkew to dance. She’d warned Pearl, with all the pickets agitating against the Japanese, it was too dangerous. But Pearl had retorted, she was twenty-three years old and knew perfectly well what was what, and besides, they were all in a group coming from church. Pearl was twenty-three going on twelve, and the boys in her crowd hardly inspired confidence. Pearl was always reminding her that Trevor, at least, had been a good one. But Trevor was dead.

  Another hour passed. Hope got ready for bed, lay down and closed her eyes, but every ten or fifteen minutes she’d get up to look out the window. It was wintry damp out, the streetlights blurring the leafless plane trees, reflecting on the wet pavement. At one-thirty she called the rectory. No answer. Then she woke Googoo Noble, who said Pearl had never turned up for supper. Hope telephoned the police. No, they had picked up no one of her daughter’s description. No Eurasians all night, they said pointedly.

  She told herself: Once, when you were Pearl’s age, you met a man who swept you off your feet. He took you sailing. You lost track of time. It was three o’clock in the morning when he brought you home, four before he let you go.

  “Maybe she’s met her Frank Pearson,” Hope said aloud.

  Ten minutes later footsteps sounded on the pavement outside. The gate creaked, there was a fumbling at the lock. Before Pearl could get in, Hope was downstairs, clutching her wrapper. Whatever words she had thought to utter went out of her head when the door opened.

  Pearl’s face was like a chalk painting caught in rain. The kohl with which she had rimmed her eyes now ran in black tracks down either side of her nose. Her mouth was a disfigured blur of cherry red lipstick, her hair twisted in wild black knots. Her skin beneath its smash of paint was ashen, and her eyes were empty and dull. She looked at her mother with no recognition, no emotion. The lumpen mouth moved but no sound emerged. Only then did Hope notice the ripped stockings, the torn green voile, the open coat.

  She took her dazed child by the shoulders and shook her. “Who did this?” she shouted. “Who did this to you?”

  “I don’t know.” Pearl’s nose was running. “Father Desmond was handing me some punch, and then—” The darkness spilled down her face. “I can’t remember.”

  Hope lost her mind that night, but not in rage or despair. She lost it in control. She started the water from the tap and helped her daughter to stand in the tub while she gently washed the blood from her legs, cleaning deep inside, replacing the smell of human brine and iron with the soft, sweet scent of lavender. She rinsed her with the hand shower, sent the residue down the drain, then scrubbed the porcelain around her feet until all trace was gone. Only then would she fill the bath and permit Pearl to lie down. She massaged her shoulders and neck, rubbed her arms and legs, hands and feet and spine as the hot water rose about her, soaking out the stupor and pain. She shampooed the girl’s hair with rose water, salved the bruises and minor abrasions, then powdered the doctored skin with talcum. She fed her aspirin and apricot juice for the headache that started when the drug began to fade, and put her to bed on immaculate linens, sat watching and tenderly holding her hand as the sleeping eyes flitted back and forth beneath their translucent lids. She burned the clothes.

  All night she kept her vigil, haunted by the filth, the laughter that filled her imagination. The trust violated and crushed. She is alive, Hope kept telling herself. She will live beyond this. I will take her away. She at least has a chance to recover. But Hope could not complete any comparison between her daughter and Jin and Jed or even the women and children who had been mowed down during the Terrors. The martyrs had been warned of the risks, and they were striking, protesting, marching for a cause. They had suffered and died with honor. Pearl had realized nothing, had suffered for nothing except the amusement and contempt of monsters. A priest!

  But her sickness and outrage were stayed by her own guilt. This was the fate that she had run from Fort Dodge to escape, only to bring it on her daughter.

  At breakfast she told the others that Pearl was ill. A fever, Hope said, perhaps the grippe. She would stay in bed until they were sure. In the meantime, she was to be left alone. Teddy and Jasmine argued over who would have the last piece of bacon. Morris complained that his article on the murdered racecourse mafoo had been bumped for a piece on the anti-Japanese pickets. Exhausted and frantic, Hope shooed them away, took a tray up to Pearl, who was just waking.

  She remembered nothing from the moment she was laughing at Father Desmond’s joke about a Chinese beggar knocking on St. Peter’s gate. She had finished her punch, was setting the empty glass on a small round table next to the piano, and before he could get to the tag line, everything just stopped. Next thing she knew, she was at the end of their block. Some men were steadying her on her feet and telling her to go on home. She tripped several times and lost her direction. When she looked back, the men were gone. No, she didn’t know who they were. She didn’t know if she knew them. She wouldn’t know if she ever saw them again.

  Then she laughed. “I’m all right, Mama. You’re being a silly. Someone spiked the punch, and I got drunk, that’s all. Let me up, I’ll go to work.”

  Hope pulled back. If Pearl did not remember, what purpose would it serve to force her? “You were bruised,” was all she said, in the end. “I want to make sure you’re all right.”

  The next day Pearl went back to work. For the next four weeks Hope waited. By the time Paul returned for Christmas, her fears were confirmed.

  Pearl refused to leave her room. “You tell him, Mama,” she pleaded. “I can’t.”

  Paul leaned his elbows on his desk, smoking hard as Hope told what had happened. He did not interrupt or react in any way until she had finished. Then, when there was nothing left to tell, he stubbed his cigarette out, folded his hands back into the sleeves of his mandarin gown, and said, “She must be married.”

  “Married! But who? They—”

  “I will arrange,” he said in a grim tone.

  “Arrange what?” Hope was enraged as much by his imp
assivity, his lack of outrage as by his presumption that marriage could set anything right.

  “Arrange marriage,” he said, and on the third repetition, his meaning finally sank through. An arranged marriage. A stranger. Chinese.

  “No!”

  “There is no other way, Hope.” There was neither hardness nor sadness in his voice. He might have been delivering one of his lectures. “Soon no one will have her.”

  She felt something snap within her chest. It was a dry, brittle sensation like the breaking of a wishbone. She stared at the rounded flesh of Paul’s face, at the incipient wattles beneath his chin, the still delicate ears and sagging shoulders, the distant strain behind his glasses. She remembered the way he had discarded Mulan, his recurring contempt for Sarah, the pitiless expression he had turned on Ling-yi. For this man she had felt passion and remorse, despair and sorrow. She had loved him, honored him. God knows, she had obeyed him. She had given up her homeland, her passport, left friends and family, watched four of his children, two of her own, die without his speaking one word of grief at their passing. More than once she had risked her own life for him. And for all his trespasses, his incomprehensible lapses and absences, she had forgiven him in the name of his father, his mother, his childhood, his country. No more.

  There was no forgiveness left.

  “You can’t,” she said. “I may have lost my citizenship when I married you, but Pearl did not. She is an American citizen. You cannot—you will not touch her!”

  “And you will not save her,” he replied quietly.

  He went to Pearl then. Hope watched him place the ragged tips of his fingers to her forehead, saw her daughter’s lips tremble as he held her. He never spoke a word of blame, or of consolation. By nightfall, he was gone.

  Never had she despised herself as she did that Christmas. First she ordered Pearl to bed, told the other children and the servants that she had a contagious stomach illness and was not to be disturbed. Then she told a miserably disappointed Teddy that, after less than twenty hours, his father had been ordered back to Nanking. Next time, she tried to console him, you can recite the new poem Yu Hu-hsu taught you, next time you can take Papa to visit Yen. But there was no comfort in her voice, no truth to her promises, and the boy’s slight frame stiffened under her arm, his little jaw trembling less with disappointment than resentment. It was not Paul but his mother he pushed away.