Hidden Flower

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Mother, I can see how you feel about that. I did, too, I confess. Before I really knew Josui, I used to think about that and wonder why I didn’t connect her with—the others. The answer is that I don’t connect her with anybody I have ever known. She is simply herself, the woman I love, whom I have made my wife. It happens that her ancestors came from some islands in the East instead of the West. She might have been born in England, for example.”

  “Our ancestors came from England,” his mother said.

  “Just a handful of islands,” he repeated. Then he thought of something and smiled wryly. “Her father felt just as you do, Mother. He didn’t want me for a son-in-law because I am white.”

  This did not interest her. She could not imagine Dr. Sakai. He continued to look down thoughtfully upon the crimson carpet.

  “Mrs. Sakai was very decent,” he went on. “She is really a Japanese—one of those picture brides—”

  His mother lifted her head suddenly. “A picture bride?”

  He wished that he had not spoken the words. “Oh, it was long ago. Our immigration laws forbade the entrance of Asians and the men had to choose their wives from pictures of women in Japan and be married by proxy or something like that.”

  “She can’t have been of a very good family even in Japan,” she said coldly. But still she was not interested.

  He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and tried to smile, searching her face for a gleam of light.

  “Well, Mother?’

  She met his eyes again. “If, as you say, it’s done—”

  “It is done,” he said firmly.

  “The only thing is—”

  “What, Mother?”

  She would not go on. “No, nothing. A foolish idea of mine.”

  “But, Mother—”

  She cried out passionately at this moment. “No, Allen, let me alone for a while. I shall have to tell your father. It will be a blow to him. We had thought of your marrying somebody here—Cynthia, we hoped—and we had dreamed of seeing our grandchildren running around the house. It’s such a big house. I never had as many children as I wanted. I couldn’t, you know.”

  “There may be children, Mother.” He spoke for her comfort and then he saw the frightful mistake. For now she really could not control herself.

  “Oh, no, Allen!” She cried out the words and sprang to her feet.

  “Mother!” He shouted in alarm and sprang to catch her. She fell into his arms weeping, and nothing he could do would stay her terrible sobs. He had never seen her weep, she had not used tears upon him, and he knew that these tears were not for her own defense. He held her hand, muttering over and over again, “Mother—don’t! You’ll see—”

  But she tore herself away from him and hurried from the room.

  Mr. Kennedy, coming home from a leisurely walk through the town, was aware of disturbance in the air of his home. The morning walk was a habit established after his father died, leaving him the sole heir to a fortune accumulated as a cotton broker in Nashville, Tennessee, and a horse breeder in Kentucky. Each morning soon after a late breakfast Mr. Kennedy visited certain friends, never the same ones on consecutive days, and by little talk and much listening he was the best-informed man in the county. Several times a year he made trips to different parts of the country to find out what people were saying and thinking. His general wisdom would have fitted him to run for Congress, even for the Senate, but he had no wish to use his information or to impart it. Had he been reared in a different family he would have been a professor in philosophy, or had he possessed a turn for words he might have been a poet. As it was, he was an amiable man with a well of wisdom which was seldom fathomed but which be enjoyed in his profound inner habitude.

  So sensitive was his receptive nature that he had only to enter his front door on this pleasant day, near the hour of noon, to know that something was wrong. He walked softly to the coat closet, hung up his gray cloth topcoat and his hat and dropped his walking stick into the large blue porcelain Chinese vase which stood in one corner of the hall. Almost immediately he heard his son’s footsteps upstairs and then coming down.

  “I’m glad you’re home,” Allen said, rounding the last curve of the sweeping stairway. “I didn’t know where to look for you. I’m afraid I’ve upset Mother dreadfully. She’s locked her door.”

  The locked door was a signal. They looked at each other. “I don’t know how to tell you,” Allen said.

  “I rather think I can guess,” Mr. Kennedy replied.

  He led the way into the empty living room and sat down. “I knew it was coming sometime or other,” he went on. “We’ve known for quite some time that you had a private interest in Japan. Colonel—”

  Allen broke in, feverish with impatience. “Father, what upset Mother is that I am married to Josui Sakai.” He perched on the arm of a big velvet chair, unconsciously disobeying one of the earliest rules of his childhood.

  Mr. Kennedy’s large pale face with hanging jowls flushed a delicate pink. He had a fine smooth complexion, and a light sandy beard which he kept closely shaved except for a tiny goatee under his hanging lower lip. The lids of his pale-gray eyes were waxen and half closed. He did not lift them unless he was disturbed. He lifted them now.

  “Son,” he remonstrated, “you might have told us.”

  “I didn’t expect to marry immediately,” Allen said. “It suddenly seemed the right thing to do. I still think it was. Her family is a good one. Besides, I am not the sort who could have done anything else. At least I don’t think so. Maybe it was just that I saw too much of the other sort of thing and it turned my stomach.”

  Mr. Kennedy did not reply to this. The relationship between him and his son was close and completely literal. Sentiment had no part in it.

  “What sort is the girl?” he inquired. His large pale hands were stretched out on the arms of the chair and they looked peculiarly helpless, as though they had never been used very much, as indeed they had not.

  “Mother would like Josui, if she would only let herself think it possible,” Allen said, argumentatively. “The truth is, Father, I’m lucky. We fell in love at first sight. She might have been simply a beautiful girl. Instead she is much more.”

  “How long have you known her?” Mr. Kennedy asked.

  “Not long, but enough to know that there is a great deal more to know.”

  He got up and moved about the room, not looking at his father, talking as he went. “I can’t tell you why or how it happened. I worked terribly hard this year, especially after the change in command. Then one day some of the fellows said they were going to take a few days off to see Kyoto and Nara, and I thought to myself that I hadn’t had a day off in months and so I went along. I happened to see her going into the gate of a college. I reckon we just—looked at each other at the psychological moment. Heaven knows! I might have passed by without a second thought. But I didn’t. I went back again the next day at the same time and so we met. It isn’t just that she’s beautiful, I tell you. Perhaps it’s that she has that touch of the unusual that made me aware. She’s not like any other woman I have ever known. Perhaps it’s because she is Oriental—how do I know? I’ve been over there for three years and maybe it has crept into my blood. I’ve heard men say it does. I’ve heard them say they can’t marry American girls when that happens.”

  Mr. Kennedy sat looking helpless, his large pale mouth gaping a little, but he was not helpless. He was listening and thinking. He knew perfectly well what his Josephine, his little Empress, could make out of all this. He understood what his son was talking about. Hadn’t Southern men always known? And their wives let them go so far but no further. The tides of the sea were not more regulated than the inner dominion of white women in the South.

  “Your mother is never going to like it,” he said in a pallid voice. “She wouldn’t have minded the other thing. I reckon our women are used to that. But having a young woman—who isn’t white, mind you—coming in here as her daughter-in-law
is quite something, and I don’t know that she can take it. I’d better go upstairs.”

  He hoisted himself up on his large flat hands and trod heavily across the floor to the stairs, and mounted them slowly, planting his feet solidly on each step. When he reached his wife’s bedroom door he rattled the handle gently.

  “Open the door, Sugar!” he called.

  He waited and after some moments he heard her move across the floor. Then the door opened and he went in and took her in his arms with a patient familiarity. Her head went to his shoulder and he patted her hair.

  “Did he tell you?” she said against his coat.

  “Yes, Sugar.”

  “What shall we do?”

  “I always say, Sugar, that the best thing is to do nothing at all. Just let things take their course.”

  “But he’ll bring her here!”

  “We’ll have to let her come.”

  “I won’t!”

  “Well, if you won’t, that’s something, too. I reckon then he’ll leave the house and they’ll set up somewhere else.”

  She pushed him away and he sighed and stood waiting while she walked about the room, rubbing her temples with a cologne-drenched handkerchief.

  “I have a splitting headache.”

  “I was afraid you would have.”

  He sat down carefully in a low rose taffeta chair. He was too large for it and he felt uncomfortable but he knew it to be the only chair he could sit upon in this room.

  He waited while she dabbed her temples, loving her, knowing that in spite of her pettishness, her possessiveness, her domineering ways, she was a good woman, a good wife, and that the strength of the nation was in her. If everybody were like him there would be no order and maybe no decency. The house would be a shambles and everybody in town would be taking advantage. He wished that she could have been a little more passionately in love with him, but a man couldn’t have a good wife and a mistress at the same time. If he had been more energetic he might have fallen into the temptations of other men, but it was too much trouble. He loved peace, and in his home he found it after his fashion.

  “Sugar,” he began gently. “You’re too big a woman to take it like this. I know how you feel. I feel something like that, too. I kind of wanted Cynthia to be the mother of our grandchildren. But our boy wants something different and he’s done it. We can’t take it back. We have to accept it. Let’s see what we can do to make it a success.”

  She was twisting the handkerchief, knotting it and then untying it, her flushed face, still so pretty under the slightly graying curls, bent upon the nervous task. “How can it be a success?” she demanded. “Marriage is something more than just two people, Tom. It’s building a family. And they mustn’t have children. They just mustn’t!”

  He did not reply. He knew what she meant. The picture of little half-Japanese children running around this house was unnerving indeed, “Maybe they won’t have children,” he said, somewhat feebly.

  “You know they will,” she retorted. “Haven’t you read about the birth rate over there? All those Oriental women breed like rabbits. No, it’s got to be prevented.”

  He was too delicate minded with women to ask just what she meant and so he said nothing. He sat looking large and tired, his face the color of his sandy gray goatee and eyebrows and hair,

  “Allen has to be brought to his senses,” she said. “He must see for himself that it simply won’t do.”

  “But if he’s married?” he suggested.

  “He can be divorced.”

  He saw a lightening look in her face, a brightening hope, an idea. She dropped the handkerchief.

  “Tom, maybe they aren’t really married!”

  “He says they are, Sugar.”

  “But maybe they’re not. What is Buddhism, anyway? That’s no real religion. And certainly a temple isn’t a church—it’s full of idols. Those Japanese probably took advantage of him.”

  He felt sorry for her now. “That won’t mean anything to Allen. He wants to believe he’s married to her.”

  “Not yet—but wait. When he sees that it simply won’t do—oh, Tom, you can’t think of a slant-eyed woman walking around here in our house or even in the town! Who’ll invite her to parties? It will be the end of our whole life.”

  She was capable of anything, whether evil or good. “Sugar, I still think with a woman as big as you are here in this town, you could carry it off. You make the best of it and people will think the better of you.”

  She shook her head, bit her trembling lips, and put her hands to her hair to hide her face. “I can’t, Tom. I shall just pretend it isn’t so—and then try to get Allen to see it as I do.”

  He got up. “Well, I’ve given my advice for what it’s worth. I’ll give a little more. Take care you know your own son, Sugar.”

  He ambled away then, feeling that the most desperate need of his life was a stiff drink of Scotch.

  After he had mixed the drink he sat sipping it slowly on the front porch, reflecting upon the problems which encircled any person who allowed desires, standards, public opinion, station in life, and all the common cries of humanity to become of any personal significance whatsoever. If the little Japanese creature came into the house here, he would simply go on as he was. There was nothing she could do that would upset him. If he could not have both his wife and his son happy, he would at least be happy himself, and his happiness was well founded in the spiritual meaning of pleasant food, a regulated liver, the most comfortable bed in the nation, and the ability to sleep all night. He was aware that he had missed some stimulating human emotions, but he did not wish now to be stimulated.

  Meanwhile he was grateful that the bad news was broken and that his wife had faced it, although with what consequences he was not yet sure. If he knew her she would not talk about it any more. Her plans would be laid and she would proceed to carry them out and sooner or later he would know about them, though probably not until it was too late for him to do anything. She was too well bred to allow an atmosphere of hostility in the house, and when she came down to dinner tonight she would be her usual self. Allen had a good deal of his mother in him, and he too would probably behave as usual. The mere passage of time was healing as well as revealing and maybe by living with a fact for a while they would end up by living with it for the rest of their lives. They might get used even to slant eyes.

  When Allen came out of the house he found his father half-asleep, his empty glass on the floor. At the sound of footsteps Mr. Kennedy woke up and saw his son with a suitcase in his hand, his topcoat on his arm, and a hat on his head.

  “I’m off for a few days,” Allen told his father.

  Mr. Kennedy barely opened his slumberous eyes. “Where to?”

  “Washington.”

  “What you want to go to that hellhole for?”

  “I might ask for a job. And I want to see what is entailed in getting Josui over right away.”

  “Did you tell your mother?”

  “No. Say good-by for me, will you? I’ll only be gone a few days, likely. If I get the job, I’ll have to come back and get my things.”

  “All right, son.”

  His eyelids drooped, but Allen paused. “How is Mother now?”

  “She’ll be better,” his father answered drowsily. Whisky always made him sleepy.

  He watched his son climb into the car they had kept for him carefully during the years he was away and then he went soundly to sleep.

  Mrs. Kennedy had never believed in inevitables. Not believing she never accepted them. She had no confidante among her many friends, although each one thought herself close enough to know everything that Josephine thought and did. Certainly she never told her husband anything except what she wanted him to know and he was glad that she did not. To know the whole mind and heart of this willful woman would have horrified him. She suspected that he was pleased to know as little as possible, and that his sympathy, insofar as he would allow himself to be disturbed by it, might be
for the innocent Japanese girl, who was expecting to come to his house. He would conceal this sympathy as a piece of contrariness on his part, since he could not do anything about it, but he would side secretly with Allen. Men were shaped more by rebellion than by love. Mrs. Kennedy sometimes thought maybe rebellion was the stronger. Well, she could rebel, too.

  The life in the house went on much as usual while Allen was away and Mr. Kennedy grew used to hearing his wife’s pleasant voice answering the telephone. “Oh, my dear, we don’t take it seriously! You know how we mothers have to expect incidents from our boys—it can’t be helped, do you think, and it is the unfortunate part of a war. No, he isn’t really married! I think they went through some sort of engagement ceremony in a Buddhist temple, though whether even that would really hold over here, I very much doubt. At any rate, we just aren’t talking about it now.”

  The beautiful days stretched one into another. Roses in the garden began to bloom again, the late roses never quite so large or so gay as those of spring, and yet more fragrant. Allen sent postcards now and then, each declaring that he would soon be home for his trunks and then he did not come. There were delays he did not understand. Washington was a maze in which he felt lost. So far he had only a promise which might not mean anything.

  Mrs. Kennedy read the cards aloud to her husband at mealtimes with a look of detachment on her face. She had sent air-mail letters to the Colonel’s wife in Tokyo, grateful for warnings and asking for more help.

  “Is it possible,” she urged, “for Allen to be sent to Europe? That would be the most wonderful solution. If he could be sent away at once, before he has time to bring the girl here, it would spare us all.”

  Therefore in Washington, going from office to office, Allen found a curious and baffling delay. It was quite easy not to return to Japan. That was arranged almost at once. The next unexpected proposal was that he go to Europe and there do exactly what he had been doing in Japan. It was recognized that he had unusual ability in making analyses of political situations in foreign nations and there were aspects of some of the nations surrounding Germany which needed such analysis.