Hidden Flower

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Ah,” she said softly, looking down at the child. She knew that his eyes could not focus but he seemed to see her. He had enormous black eyes and a gay tiny face.

  “A little boy!” she called to Josui.

  Josui, sleeping under anesthetic, did not reply.

  “Do not take the baby away,” Dr. Steiner ordered the nurse, “I wish to tend him myself.”

  The nurse wrapped him in an old clean sheet and placed him on an empty bed. Dr. Steiner went to the bed and gazed down at Lennie. Little indeed did the young mother say, but this morning just before she went under the ether she had held the cone delicately away for a few seconds and then she said very distinctly to the waiting doctor.

  “Please, two things to be remembered. I do not wish to see the child. He is to be named Lennie.”

  “No surname?” Dr. Steiner asked.

  “None,” Josui replied. Then, gripped with pain, she had put the cone resolutely over her face.

  “Lennie,” Dr. Steiner repeated experimentally. The name suited him. He had a smooth little face, quite pale, with no redness, and his tiny body was perfect. He was a small baby, only a little over five pounds, and he had been born easily. Indeed, when he emerged from his prison it was almost sportively, carelessly, certainly lightheartedly.

  He looked up at her now, impatient, or so she imagined, for laughter. She was amazed, for did not newborn babies simply continue their long sleep? Not so Lennie. He was ripe for life, and the ugly tenderhearted woman felt a turning within her breast, a stir, a yearning. She was not maternal, she had not longed for children, perhaps because she had never allowed herself to hope for a child. Her approach to the newborn was one of respect for an unknown human being, an arrival, who must as carefully and thoroughly as possible be prepared for a long and healthy life. The body was her concern, indeed her duty, and beyond that she had never allowed her thoughts and curiosities to explore. But Lennie was someone the like of whom she had never seen before. Wrapped in his white sheet, his tiny hands clenched under his chin, his black eyes, huge and already clear, regarded her with appraisal. “So you,” the child might be thinking, “you are a human being!”

  Pity that this gaze did not fall upon the young mother! She turned to the patient and watched the tasks which the nurse now performed about the bed. They were quite routine. Josui slept as though she did not wish to wake. She lay relaxed and unconscious, and so pale that the doctor again felt her pulse. No, it was young and strong. She was quite normal. She simply did not wish to wake and the wish made the anesthetic more potent.

  “Take her away,” the doctor said. “She does not wish to see the child.”

  Two orderlies waited outside the door and at the summons of the nurse they came in and wheeled the bed away. Another nurse appeared for the child. Dr. Steiner commanded her to wait.

  “I wish to examine this child very thoroughly,” she said. “I will wash him myself.”

  The nurse did not reply. Every one in the hospital knew the stubbornness of this woman doctor, the German that she was, incomprehensible, demanding an exactitude of performance that created rebellion everywhere, and yet so competent that reluctant admiration compelled obedience. In this mixed mood the young American nurse, half contemptuous, half understanding, brought a basin of warm water, soap and clean gauze, a sterile towel. Without the slightest hurry, forgetful of other patients who waited, Dr. Steiner washed the tiny boy carefully, noting every detail of a frame sturdy and yet minute, the square set of the shoulders, the good shape of the intelligent head, the composure of the small mouth, and then again and again, the extraordinary eyes.

  “A very remarkable child,” she remarked to the nurse. “There is something here. It is more than the individual, you understand, nurse? There is a racial bounty here, which one often sees when races mingle. This is what Hitler never understood. When old stocks cross, something new is born. Ah, yes!”

  The nurse scarcely listened. She was a red-haired young woman with a pretty pink face and her mind was on her own affairs. She had yet an hour to go before her eight-hour shift was over for the day. Then she had a private program for the hours until midnight, each item delightful and to be spent in the company of her present young man whom she might or might not marry. He was certainly not Japanese or Jewish or German, or any of the strange breeds. He was a good American.

  Nevertheless, she was not cruel, and when Dr. Steiner placed the child in her arms she received him with the semi-tenderness which her training had told her was the proper attitude for small babies. It was now accepted that a baby did better if there was at least an imitation of tenderness in his early life. Every day each baby in the nursery was held for fifteen minutes by appointed nurses, and thus the infants received the impression of maternal warmth.

  “Place this child in the corner crib,” Dr. Steiner ordered. “I shall come every day myself to see him.”

  “Very well, Dr. Steiner,” the obedient nurse replied. She carried him away, removed from the corner crib a small girl who was the seventh child of an Irish policeman, and put Lennie in the crib. She should have changed the sheet, but the newborn child was half-Japanese, he could not easily die, and the Irish girl baby was also healthy. The hour was speeding by and she had many small details yet to finish before she could hope to pass the head nurse without fear of delay. Quickly she put the few necessary garments upon Lennie, laid over him the pink flannel blanket which had been over the little girl, and left him to sleep. When the new nurse came on she would report the change in babies, that Dr. Steiner would come herself to see this baby, that details must therefore be attended to with care if the doctor’s always short temper was to be avoided. The German was not afraid of anyone and when she was angry she bellowed long harsh German words which no one understood but which were unspeakable in sound and meaning.

  Before Dr. Steiner went home that night she tramped into the nursery and went at once to the corner bed. There he lay, the incomparable child, and now he was peacefully asleep. He lay stretched out, not curled as are most new arrivals from the womb, but testing his tiny length, his hands relaxed. She took one of the hands, so infinitely small, so perfect. Yes, it was quite relaxed. She had read that the children of Asia did not clench their fists as the western children did. These fingers, delicate, pointed, were as softly loose as flower petals. Such children came into life, perhaps, accepting their fate, unresisting, wise with the wisdom of ancient peoples in their blood. Interesting speculations upon which she brooded, there “was so much beyond the body which could be only imagined now but which someday might be known, someday when the human brain concerned itself with life instead of with death. And then, still gazing at Lennie, it occurred to her to remember his loneliness, how nowhere in the world was there a single human being who cared whether he lived or died, none who waited for him, now that he was born. Where would he go when his brief days in the hospital were over?

  She left the crib abruptly, and went home by her usual circuitous route of two trolley cars. Her house was a small ugly modern bungalow outside the city. She had tried to live in an apartment and had found it unbearable. A house she must have although she was a bad housekeeper. She locked the door when she went away and now she unlocked it, as usual jamming the key because she pushed it too hard into the keyhole. She always got up early in order to leave the house reasonably clean. Now here it was as she had left it, and as she liked it to be, graceless indeed to any eye but her own, the table piled with books and pamphlets, except where a straw place mat held a knife, fork, and spoon, a plate and a cup. She went about the small house, the two rooms and a corner cupboard of a kitchen, a bathroom into which she had to insert herself sidewise, and she talked heavily and aloud in German as she trundled about the rooms bathing and putting on a faded cotton wrapper, and then heating the soup and spreading the thick slices of brown bread which made her supper. Muttering and guttural, she inquired of herself whether she was mad, what she would do with a child, how could she afford to hire s
omeone who would understand that this child was a miracle, a human being not expendable, a creature too valuable to be thrown away. She sat down at the table and carefully removed her false teeth, both upper and lower plates, and then in comfort she chewed upon her bare gums, the bread softened in the soup. She had lost all her teeth in the concentration camp. Some of them had been knocked out, some had fallen out. She wore the plates for the sake of those who had to look at her, but when she wished to be comfortable, to be herself, she took them out. Sometimes, when she had a difficult and dangerous operation to perform she startled the nurses by wrenching them out of her mouth and handing them to the nearest one. “Take care,” she commanded most sternly. “They cost me very much—a fortune!”

  When she had eaten she brushed the teeth carefully and dropped them into a glass of antiseptic by the kitchen sink. She washed her dishes, set the straw mat again for the morning, and then sat herself in a large stuffed chair covered with faded red velvet. Beside it was a square table, and upon it were a telephone, magazines, books, pamphlets, manuscripts, a cigar box, a saucer of kitchen matches, and a cracked plate for an ash tray. She opened the box and took out a cigar, lit it and smoked in outer calm but in furious inward thought.

  Then after ten minutes or so she reached for the telephone, dialed, and holding the cigar in the corner of her mouth, securely wrapped about by her wide lips, she conducted a conversation.

  “Bray, is that you?”

  Far off she heard the fatigued voice of Miss Bray. “Yes, Dr. Steiner.”

  “The baby was born today.”

  “What baby?”

  “Bray, please, do not be stupid! The baby you sent me to be born from the beautiful Japanese mother. How can you forget?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Bray, can you hear me?”

  “I could hear you better if you didn’t talk so loud.”

  Dr. Steiner could guess that Miss Bray was tired and inclined to be pettish.

  “How can it be you don’t hear me because I talk loud?” she demanded. “This is nonsense.” She raised her voice. “Bray, I have made up my mind. I take this child.”

  She waited for the effect of this enormous announcement. Miss Bray remained silent.

  “You hear me, Bray?”

  “Yes,” Miss Bray said afar off, “I hear all right. But we aren’t supposed to give babies to women who don’t have husbands.”

  Dr. Steiner snorted. “How many husbands in the orphanage? You told me you put this child into that orphanage. He will get diarrhea and die. Ten babies this year it has been so. I will not have him the eleventh. I keep him. If you get into some trouble, let them come to me.”

  The day had been long and hot, and there had been an unusual number of sullen young pregnant women. Miss Bray was weary of sex and all its consequences and she did not for the moment care very much whether she lost her job. She had been thinking for some time that she would apply for work in the county home where the men and women were old and where even though they sometimes fell in love there could be no possibility of pregnancy.

  “Oh, all right,” she said quite crossly. “I suppose they won’t notice one baby more or less. I know I can’t get him adopted.”

  “I adopt him!” Dr. Steiner shouted.

  “Well,” Miss Bray said in a dry voice. “I hope you won’t regret it. I’ll get the surrender from the mother and turn it over to you.”

  “Good,” Dr. Sterner bellowed. She banged the receiver into place and sinking back into the chair she smoked ruminatively upon the shrinking cigar.

  When Josui was confronted with the paper of surrender, she hesitated. This was what she had decided upon and she must sign it. Yet she felt unable to do so because of a strange feeling of unfulfillment. Upon this paper there was no name on the surrender except the name of the agency, and she did not know where the baby was going. Yet it seemed quite beyond her strength to put her name upon a piece of paper which gave Lennie to nobody except an agency.

  “Is no one to take the child?” she asked Miss Bray.

  “It is better for you not to know about that,” Miss Bray said dryly.

  Josui heard this without answer. Then in a sudden little spasm she bent her head and hastily she wrote her name on the line marked Mother. Her eyes fell upon the word. Yes, she was the mother, she alone could give the child away and now she had done so. Tears rose to her eyes and hung upon the long straight lashes. Miss Bray did not look up enough to see them. She took the paper and blotted it.

  “I guess that’s all,” she said. “If you ever want to know how the baby is, you can write to us, or if anything happens to him we will let you know, but no news is good news, and I advise you just to forget about him.”

  “Thank you,” Josui said faintly. She got up, wiped her eyes, and took her handbag. “Good-by,” she said, still more faintly.

  “Good-by,” Miss Bray replied.

  So Josui went out into the sunshine, feeling bereaved, though it was her own doing. She had promised to return once more to the doctor for a final check, yet she would not have kept her promise had it not been that the doctor was unusual, someone strong and kind in spite of bad temper, and above all, a woman. She had once or twice thought that she would talk to the doctor about herself but she had not done so. It was better simply to remain as she was, unknown. As soon as this examination was over, she would write to Kobori, he would meet her, and when they met she would decide what she would do. She knew at least that she would never write to Allen, never see him again, for though her love remained, it was for someone dead, or who perhaps had never lived. Life as it must be lived was familiar. It did not occur to her that a life of renunciation could be lived here in California. California was remote for her now, though she walked upon its streets and under its sky.

  She entered the doctor’s office, looking composed and pale. Dr. Steiner was waiting for her impatiently. Miss Bray had told her that the young woman knew nothing about the baby and that she was to be told nothing. Dr. Steiner, snorting, had been prudent for once and had neither agreed nor disagreed. She had made up her mind about what she would do, and she began at once as soon as the young woman sat before her, holding her handbag tightly in both ringless hands.

  “Now I tell you,” Dr. Steiner said briskly, gazing at Josui with renewed pleasure in her pale beauty. “I want you to know, but say nothing, please, to Bray. I want not a quarrel with that good soul who is always stupid.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice importantly. “Now I tell you, I shall keep your baby! I want you to know he is with me, and also that he is extraordinary. He cannot be wasted, you understand, on some people who think he is not valuable. I keep him, I teach him how he is valuable, how he brings together in his one small being the whole world!” Dr. Steiner reached her short fat arms in a circle around the world. “I will make him a great man. How? Because he is something great already!”

  Josui heard this with amazement and emotion. She, too, leaned forward, her bandaged bosom aching with its burden of useless milk, an unusual fountain of milk, enough, the nurse had complained in the hospital, to feed triplets. “So I may know,” she breathed, “I know where he is!”

  “You may know,” Dr. Steiner said firmly. “You should know, my dear. And I tell you he is wonderful. And I wish that you take the child for a while if you like to do so. You come to my little house and stay with him as you like.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Josui said. All her resolve crumbled in wild desire. “I cannot stay long, please, but perhaps for one night?”

  “You come,” Dr. Steiner repeated. “Here is the key. You go there by yourself now and I bring him. You will sleep in the bedroom where is already a crib I have bought for him, and I sleep on the couch in the living room. Two days, anyway, you keep him by yourself. I am busy here. Stay more if you wish.”

  “But how will you—” Josui looked about the crowded office.

  “I have arranged,” Dr. Steiner said, “I have a good neighbor woman, kind, a grandm
other but not too old, her children gone. She takes him when I am in office. It will do. Old women are best lovers of children—we know that children are the true meaning of life, the link between yesterday and tomorrow for us. Go now, and be ready for him. I am bringing him myself during the lunch hour.”

  Josui took the key from the blunt fat hand. She bent her head for a moment and laid her cheek against that hand and then she went out, unable to speak. She walked slowly, trying to think what she was about to do. Then she was to hold her baby, after all, her child and Allen’s. She could hold him and wash him and feed him, and while he slept, what would she do? She could sew for him something to wear, little gifts, which perhaps the kind harsh woman would put away for him until he was grown, so that he might know his mother loved him. So she turned aside into a shop and there she bought pink and blue bits of flannel, needles and silk thread of pretty colors, and with this parcel under her arm she got on a trolley car and so came at last to the house which it seemed to her she recognized because somehow it looked like the doctor. She opened the door with the key and went in. This was Lennie’s home. She stood looking about her, never to forget the impression of the one large room, the solitary place at the table, the book-lined walls, the big shabby chair by a brick fireplace full of ashes. Beyond the door was opened into the bedroom. She saw an old iron bed, very clean, and a new crib, painted pale blue. New small sheets and blankets were piled there, the bed still unmade. Her heart swelled and choked her, but she would not weep. She took off her hat and her jacket, and she began with her usual neat and compact movements to spread the sheets and blankets, and so to make Lennie’s first resting place.

  Thus began the holy week.

  For it was a week before these two women could part. Lennie came home in Dr. Steiner’s arms, and she laid him upon the bed which Josui had made. It was noon and the day was hot, but inside the house the air was cool. Josui had turned on the electric fan and had set a pan of ice below it. She set a second place at the table, she opened the refrigerator and found food and made a luncheon of what she found, a dish nearly sukiyaki, a cold salad, some thin toasted bread. She found also a box of bottles and a sterilizer and tins of milk and dextrose. These were for Lennie, but she did not know how to make his food. And then she felt her breasts ache again. Could she not let him drink at her breast?