by Louis Begley
Mr. Storrow and she took a villa on the Lago di Garda every summer until he died, she informs me; quite unusual, as Mr. Storrow was most fond of ocean sailing. The boys spoke Italian, like little natives! Later, there were too many memories—and those people in black shirts!
I wonder whether other rich ladies noticed that all might not be well in Italy or Germany. I don’t put the question. I talk about Laura’s house and vineyards and the cooperative that makes white wine with the grapes she grows. Also about her gallery, which I haven’t seen.
Cousin Emma wishes to know whether I have made a romantic declaration. That is the expression she used, year after year, about Kate, whom she never met. I think about Laura’s organs and shake my head. When I take my leave, she reaches into her corsage and hands me a check. She has given me money before, sometimes at Christmas and on my birthday, but never such a large amount. I try to kiss her again, but she waves me away. She has a strange way of laughing, like a bass giggle. It had to be a big check, she tells me, to fill the space left by her missing bosoms!
Perhaps it is then that the plan takes form: This boy will not have children, he will never marry, or if he marries it will be an old woman. Can I appoint my money and have it stay in the trust? First to this Max, since there is nobody else, and then, if I am right and there are no little Hafter children, to the pickaninnies?
I learned later that the next day she telephoned the bank lawyer.
III
STILL A HERO in China: at the banquet at Quan Ju De, the best of duck restaurants, a two-story duck hospice really, after we had eaten our way through all the recognizable parts of our web-footed friend, and were about to attack bowls of fragrant duck soup that only looked as though it had been made with cream, my friend and mentor, Mr. Dou Lizhen, the chief of the legal department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, started his formal toast. I had grown accustomed to these obligatory spurts of oratory, predictable like a bad sonnet, and in fact had already become able to work within the form myself, free of embarrassment or stage fright. Although his English was close to perfect, he spoke in Chinese, for the benefit of our fellow guests. I was the only foreigner. After every couple of sentences he would pause to allow Miss Wang, the young woman who had been assigned to be my guide and guardian, to interpret. I tried to catch the four-tonal directions of a Mandarin speaker’s speech, which give distinct meaning to what would otherwise be homonyms, missed most of them, and then, smiling with appropriate modesty, relaxed as the beautiful Miss Wang, standing at parade-ground attention beside Mr. Dou, rattled on, in her brisk BBC manner, about the bridges of friendship I had built through my work on the joint venture law, the many times my Chinese friends and I would walk over these bridges hand in hand (here I wanted to shout, Wang and Dou, block that metaphor!) straight into the open doors of the new China, and how, in the spirit of mutual benefit and with due regard to the four great principles of modernization decreed by the newly minted Chairman Deng, my seminar on contract law problems had strengthened the relations between our countries. Normally, when the speaker had treated these main themes, he stopped—unless by way of a coda there was to be an anecdote about me, and I rather thought that this time a personal touch might be in order. Instead, my state of devil-may-care ease induced by glass after glass of mao-tai gave way to watchfulness as I heard my Mr. Dou recommend that President Reagan, having recovered from Hinckley’s bullets (Dou put that more periphrastically), give full respect to America’s great leader Mr. Nixon and study deeply his ways of bringing peace to the world. I knew that minutes after he sat down I would have to be on my feet and in my answer touch on that very subject, as to which it would not do to disagree with the previous speaker. Fortunately, he did not go into the matter deeply. That made it possible—after the quiz-kid feat of addressing each of my fellow duck eaters by his full name as I went around the table clinking glasses—to speak with tranquil conviction of the strength of the personal ties that bound us, my taste for Peking duck in all of its manifestations, and the resolution I had formed to return to China whenever the “relevant authorities” found it convenient—and then to end on an elegant and noncommittal note. I drank to the Shanghai Communiqué, the ninth anniversary of which had just passed. A puff of added inspiration, and I raised my glass also to Harvard University. After all, was it not Harvard that had loosed Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s improbable Sancho Panza, upon America, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and so many other interesting locations on our tired planet?
By the time the banquet was over, the only diners left in the downstairs part of the restaurant were our drivers, lingering over the remains of a chauffeurs’ meal. The private dining room we had occupied was windowless; we had not seen the sky grow dark over Beijing. Now we stood on the sidewalk, beside the huddle of black cars, shaking hands in that city’s vast and obscure silence broken only by low-pitched human voices and the dring-dring of an occasional bicycle bell. The yellow rectangles of light framed by the restaurant’s windows and its door filled one with confused longing. Miss Wang and an older bureaucrat of uncertain rank installed me in the car assigned for my use and then got in themselves to accompany me to the hotel. I had come to understand the practicality of that polite gesture, which was repeated by dinner companions every evening: afterward, the driver would deposit them wherever they lived, probably miles away, at the edge of Beijing’s endless outskirts.
The next day was Saturday; work ended at noon, or possibly—I had not penetrated that particular mystery—at the start of the sacrosanct rest period that precedes the lunch hour. But I had realized early on that it was useless and possibly annoying to my clientele of civil servants to try to conduct my seminar on Saturday mornings. As a result, I enjoyed Western-style weekends, devoted to sleeping late, as a compensation for the absurdly early morning hour when, according to local custom, I started operations on the days I taught, and to long visits to the Forbidden City. I felt happiest there; my predilection amused my hosts. Reluctantly but wisely, they gave up organizing visits to ball-bearing factories, model schools, and establishments in which I might have observed the industrial confection of Tang-dynasty horses or folk art objects. There was a difference, however, between respecting my choice and allowing me to be unsupervised. Miss Wang accompanied me to the Imperial Palace and on the walks I liked to take at the end of the afternoon in the Muslim quarter south of Tiananmen Square. If I wanted to play hooky and be alone with my thoughts I pleaded the urgent necessity of preparing my course, implying that I would stay in the hotel. Then, feeling guilty, jaunty, and sly, I would stride westward on Chang An Boulevard, the blue-clad crowd, itself in constant motion, parting before me magically like the Red Sea.
I called her Miss Wang in public, and also in my thoughts. When we were alone, I used her first name, Jun Jun, because she considered that more friendly. And I was far from disliking her presence, notwithstanding my occasional rebellious search for solitude. The Mao suit was still de rigueur in China, for men and women, as was the absence of all makeup. The garment worn over it was almost universally a lined green field jacket or an army coat without military insignia. Miss Wang, though, was the owner of a wine-colored ski parka, purchased in Canada, where she had visited with a trade mission. She wore this high-fashion object with pride, notwithstanding the recent mild weather, and what with its bulk and the floating nature of those blue suits, the notion I had of her body owed more to inflamed speculation than to anything I had actually observed. I imagined her wonderfully thin, but not bony, with only dark aureoles where her breasts should be, and no hips at all. Her legs, I hoped, would be shapely, worthy of the pretty, black-slippered feet on which she trotted beside me. Quite short—her head arrived just above my elbow—she had the unspoiled face of a child caught midway between a smile and a pout. At times, when I wanted her to look at some gargoyle on a palace roof, I could not resist tugging on her pigtails. I thought at first it was imprudent of the ministry to give me an interpreter-guide such as she, and wondered wheth
er it was not, in fact, a conscious experimental provocation, undertaken with the thought that if I succumbed to her charms the incident could be stored away for some possible future use. Gradually, I came to the conclusion it was absurd to suspect it could be in anyone’s interest to embarrass me while I was performing services China urgently wanted. In any case, I was determined to remain on the ground of good comradeship with Miss Wang, saving the intimacies I urgently desired and imagined for solitary meditation in my hotel room, and the time when her dream of coming to study law in America might be miraculously realized.
We parted in the drive of the Beijing Hotel. She said she would come back in the morning for our usual palace visit. This time, I did not object.
Thanks to Mr. Dou’s fortuitous family tie with the manager of the hotel, I was living in the fortress-like central building, constructed long before World War II, and not in one of the dreadful additions, the earlier of which was built with Russian assistance and on a Soviet model, and the later, even more tawdry, by Canadian interests. Accordingly, I had a room of bourgeois proportions and a bathroom equipped with large, old-fashioned fixtures. Many of the other rooms and suites in this part of the hotel were used as representative offices of Swiss and German banks and well-known industrial corporations; on my own floor were located the combination sleeping quarters and offices of several American law firms waiting for clients to sprout from the soil of new capitalism. But, as an initial matter, my presence in the Beijing Hotel—instead of the squalid Friendship establishment, where I might have been together with other visiting professors, Eastern European engineers, and Japanese businessmen—was due to the change in my personal circumstances, which had enabled me to say to the foreign ministry that I needed no stipend and would, moreover, pay all my travel and living expenses if only I was given a car and driver and the opportunity to rent a decent place to stay. My cousin Emma had died the previous year, carried away by a stroke and not, as she had feared, by cancer. Against all reasonable expectations, without ever having uttered a word about it—the thought that I might inherit from her more than a few thousand dollars or a piece of Hafter furniture had never entered my mind—she left me the use of her very large fortune. From a how-to-make-ends-meet law professor I was magically transformed into a man who was potentially rich. Potentially, because the charity that would have received this ton of money had my cousin not chosen to surprise it and me decided to contest the validity of her bequest. I was convinced that the challenge was frivolous, an opinion shared by the trustees, who, without awaiting the outcome of the litigation, had begun to pay me an allowance that lifted me many stories above my old existence.
THE NEXT MORNING, in one of the deserted eastern courtyards of the Forbidden City—where grass advancing timidly across the glazed tile roofs of detached palaces bears witness to decades of neglect—I was in fact discussing with Miss Wang, quite seriously this time, what needed to be done to get her into a Law School program at Harvard. Paradoxically, it was best to apply for a year of graduate work, on the basis of not much more than her good intentions and the undeniable fact that no one in her generation had received a conventional education. The Cultural Revolution had taken care of that. Then if she did well—her intelligence and grasp of the English language were so fine that I felt confident she would—one could hope she would be admitted to the regular program of studies and, in due course, would emerge as an American lawyer. She needed to get permission to leave China, and a certain amount of specific backing from her ministry as well, since the Law School’s center for Far Eastern studies made no bones about wanting to be on good terms with the Chinese authorities. One would have to be able to show that she was a horse that would run on the track of Chinese bureaucracy when the time came for her to go back home. The question of funds we could face later. I told her I thought that problem could be solved: there were regular Law School scholarships and possibilities of foundation support as well. A strong recommendation from me would do no harm, and she could count on it. Because I thought the departure for America had to be her project, I took care not to let her guess that, in a pinch, I might cover the tuition myself.
The powerful, melodious beauty of the place we were in, forms and colors recombined in seemingly unending variations, and its mad and tragic history always awakened in me a sort of heightened sympathy: it was as though I were on the verge of crying tears of gratitude. Exactly what for, I don’t know. Perhaps it was quite simply the good luck of being in that place; possibly, in a circular fashion, I was moved by my own ability to feel so deeply. In any event, I responded strongly to the blush of happiness that appeared on Miss Wang’s face: she also liked this Imperial Palace and its memories—in fact, of all the Chinese with whom I had walked there, she knew the most about its customs and history and was freest of the errors abounding in simplified guidebooks and stupidly repeated by official guides. At this moment, though, she had been transported to the land for which her years at the foreign language institute had been an unintended preparation. There she would at last use every phrase of those dialogues among lively, optimistic students she had memorized so well out of her schoolbooks. She had glimpsed the magnificence of it for such a brief moment only, with her group of comically dressed trade officials, deadly serious behind gold-toothed grins, when she made that single trip to Ottawa and Toronto. She embraced me, and I was about to kiss her on both cheeks, where they were reddest, when from behind I heard a voice I could not fail to recognize. It was Charlie Swan’s.
The colors are imperial, my love, he was saying, only the son of heaven had the right to these yellows, greens, and blues, and the potent red. That is why the rest of Beijing is gray: it wears a smock of humility, like the puritan maidens who were my great-aunts and cousins. At the ends of the cornices, dragons and sea monsters, to frighten away evil spirits. You have seen these same protectors displayed in bas-relief on the sloping marble slabs that lead from the courtyards to each palace the emperor might enter, like this one here. His sedan chair would pass over the zone thus purified, the bearers on each side mounting the steps that are parallel to it.
I considered prolonging the embrace of Miss Wang, and keeping my face buried in the shoulder of her parka, until he had moved past us, but curiosity got the better of me. I looked in his direction. Even heavier and larger than in Italy, where I had last seen him, and in deference to the season wearing a tweed suit of such exquisite heather tones that I wondered whether it had been woven for him alone by old crones on the Isle of Wight, he was otherwise unchanged. He held the arm of a beautiful and blond young man. It was Toby, the playful Eros of the Rumorosa.
Max, you wicked snoop, boomed the voice thus distracted from architectural history, which one of my incantations has summoned you here, with such mischievously delayed effect? All my invitations declined, offers to visit ignored, and yet here you are, in the one place where I would have thought Toby and I could be tête-à-tête! Or is it tit for tat, since we find you in a pleasantly delicate situation with this young lady?
He laughed generously at his own joke.
Genuine pedagogic pleasure, Charlie, nothing more. I was congratulating Miss Wang on the road map we have just worked out for her future legal studies! She is a student in the seminar I am leading, the best interpreter in China, and my true friend.
I did not think that Charlie measured the consequences of joking, even in this empty corner of the Imperial Palace, about a “delicate situation” between this poor child and a guest of the Chinese government’s to whom she had been assigned as a guide; the disparity between the risk to her and my achieving an unexpectedly clearer understanding of the nature of his feelings for Toby was enormous. I now think that my habitual caution led me to exaggerate, but at the time I truly believed that nothing in China concerning foreign “friends” went unobserved. I resolved to remind Charlie not to joke about Miss Wang and me if we met again, and not to mention the incident, even if he kept back her name, in anecdotes with which he might wish
to titillate his Chinese contacts.
The object of my worry seemed unconcerned by the conversation and, in fact, glad to meet these two men, one of whom was near to her in age. Glancing at me as though to see whether I would object, she proposed that we continue the visit together.
Splendid! decreed Charlie, let’s go to the eunuchs’ quarters. They are a great curiosity. Toby will be amused.
I interjected mildly that they were, on a diagonal, at the opposite end of the Forbidden City, and that by the time we had gotten there, looked around, and returned to the East Gate, where Miss Wang had told the driver to meet us, the poor man would be in a state of anxiety and the hotel kitchen closed. I could think of no other place we might have lunch. Charlie brushed these worries aside, saying that his car was waiting at Coal Hill, only a few minutes from where he proposed to go. We would then have plenty of time, both to rescue my driver and to have lunch. It turned out that he and Toby were also at the Beijing Hotel. And so we set off, passing the great ceremonial reception halls and the very small palace where the emperors actually lived, and then turned toward the quarters of the empress, the concubines, and the eunuchs. Charlie was well informed about the palace and had the sort of eye one would expect in an architect for tricks of perspective, vistas that suddenly appeared in the moonlike opening in a wall, and the effects of occasional asymmetry in these marvelously repetitious groupings of buildings and open spaces. He resumed with brio the lecture to Toby the encounter with us had interrupted—the chance to address a larger audience may have acted as a stimulus—sometimes pulling on the boy’s sleeve when he thought his attention flagged or taking hold of his ear to make sure his head was turned in the direction of the medallion or other detail of decoration he wanted him to notice.
