by Aimee E. Liu
She strained, rocking forward and back, still in darkness.
“You’re going to make it,” said the voice again. A man’s voice. Familiar but unplaceable. “Wherever you’ve been, you can put it behind you now.”
The cool sensation moved again over her brow, resting briefly on her closed eyelids. When it lifted, she blinked. The light was excruciating, but after a few more trials, she was able to look at the man seated beside her. A thin, angular man with long ears, full lips that continued to move. “I knew you could do it. Come, take a sip of water if you can. It’ll help the burning.”
He slipped an arm around her shoulders to brace her, held a glass to her mouth. She choked on the water, but he insisted she try again. The effort, though agonizing, helped force her to consciousness. By the time she’d figured out how to let the drops trickle down her throat, her mind was a clutter of questions.
“My children,” she mouthed.
“It’s all right. They’re outside, you hear them playing? When you have some strength, we’ll call them in. By some miracle the fever missed them both.”
She lay back. From the filthy chamber where she lost consciousness she had come to a soft, clean bed in a whitewashed room filled with books and pictures and sunlight. The wall beside the bed was hung with Chinese phrenological and acupuncture charts. A third was blocked by a tall folding screen with images of cranes. There was an enamel basin and chamber pot, a rough-hewn door, and an open rectangular window through which Hope could now distinguish the children’s voices, Yen’s low growl behind them.
She raised herself up. “I told them,” she whispered, “stay on the table.”
Her attendant wrung out the cloth in the basin. “They did, too. That’s right where we found them. They’re good kids. You’ve done a fine job with them. Can’t be easy.”
Their eyes met. His were a mossy brown struck through with glimmers of blue and green. Again, she felt the tug of recognition, but something he had said, she wasn’t sure what, started her crying.
“Hey,” he murmured, coming closer. “You had a bad streak of luck. That’s all.” He glanced down. “By all signs, the baby’s pulled through, too.”
She followed his eyes. He—someone—had removed her clothing and placed her in a soft white muslin shift, which was all that covered the low swell of her belly. The baby. She drew the blue counterpane up to her chest. The baby.
“My husband,” she rasped. “Have you—”
“I’ve telephoned around Tientsin. He’s known here, and I’m told he left safely for the south the night before you arrived. Sun Yat-sen’s called an emergency assembly in Canton. That may be where he’s gone. Don’t try to talk out loud, Hope. I can understand if you mouth the words slowly.”
It dawned on her that she had no more idea of her own whereabouts than she had Paul’s. “Where?” she mouthed as instructed. “How did we get here?”
“You’re in Tientsin,” he answered. “Thanks to Yen. You were ten miles upriver. Not many servants would run that distance for a foreign mistress. Fortunately, he’s from around here and knew of my clinic. You’re very, very lucky.”
She nodded, tears starting again. She remembered the lies that night and the sickness that followed. Morrie’s reaching arms and the rats, the throb of her own hateful voice as she ordered her children not to touch her.
She shut her eyes. When she opened them she understood at last that it was Stephen Mann staring back at her. She became conscious of the fever still firing her skin, the fall of her unpinned, dirty hair on her shoulders. She attempted to lift her hands, but she had no strength. Her only defense was to look away.
Jude the Obscure, read the spine of the first book her eyes came to. The Tempest. Dante’s Inferno. The Scarlet Letter. Beneath them stood a low oval table with a shaving pot, brush, and towel, and a small gilt-framed photograph of an elderly man and woman smiling down from a Model T Ford.
Mann was following her gaze. “Let me confess before you accuse me. This is my house. The clinic is down the road, but I wouldn’t have dreamt of leaving you in anyone else’s care, and my attentiveness—” he glanced at a neatly made-up cot in the corner “—might have been misconstrued.”
She dragged one shrunken arm across her lap. Her hand appeared in her still uncertain vision as an assemblage of match sticks. “I’m sorry,” she mouthed.
“Sorry! You’ve been to the river and back again, and you’re apologizing to me? I’ve never seen anyone work so hard to hang on to life. You fought like a tiger.”
She looked up. The circles under Mann’s kind eyes were dark as nickels. His shoulders slumped from fatigue, and, judging by the stubble on his lean cheeks, that shaving pot hadn’t been used in days. “How long have we been here?”
“Almost a week.”
“What kind of fever?”
“Diphtheria.”
A chill ran through her, so strong and sudden that she began to tremble. In her urgency to explain, she choked on the words, “My mother—”
“I told you not to talk. It’s the fever. It coats your throat and tonsils. That’s why you must keep drinking.” He drew a blanket around her shoulders and gave her another sip of water. “Your mother?”
Her lips moved in this new silent language. “Died of diphtheria.
“You were very young?”
She nodded. “A baby.”
“You’re not going to die, Hope.”
He sat with his elbows braced on his knees, one hand cupped in the other. The contradiction between his determined words and this pleading gesture confused her. She tried to reassure herself by picturing Paul in the doctor’s place, but the image that resulted was so still, so closed and unreadable that it started her trembling all over again.
For days Hope remained too weak even to manage a spoon. She had lost so much weight that her wrist-bones stood out in knobs and her chest sank beneath her collarbones. Mann’s maidservant Fresh Rain had to carry her to the chamber pot and bathe her, but the fever had broken. Hope’s voice was gradually restored. She could smile. Yen brought news that Paul had been in Shanghai and was now on his way to Canton. The infant in her womb sprang to life, as if in defiance of the rest of her body, and the children were regular and enthusiastic visitors.
“Dr. Mann has a puppy!” Morris reported. “He let us play with him. His name is Mister Bacon ‘cause he’s all stripey. Isn’t that a funny name?”
“And there’s an old man who lives next door who keeps a canary,” said Pearl. “And every afternoon he opens the door and the bird flies to the top of the willow tree here in our yard, and when the man calls, the canary flies right back into her cage. Imagine!”
“Imagine.” Hope smiled and shook her head.
“Are you feeling better, Mama?”
“Much better, my sweets.”
“Will we have to go home soon?”
“Dr. Mann says I’ll need a few more days.”
“It’s nice here,” said Pearl.
“Dr. Mann’s nice.”
“Yes,” Hope said. “I know.”
Evenings, when he returned from his rounds at the clinic and the children had gone to bed, Mann would sit by her side in his garnet wing chair, and they would talk of books and medicine, and music and photography, and writing and China—and home. He told her about the forests and mountains of his native Washington, of trees so big around that loggers made houses from their hollowed-out trunks. He described the green of the place, a dense, drenching, limitless color. “You can feel the life beneath your feet.”
In her turn, she talked of the plains, the humility of space when the horizon unspools in a perfect circle and the sky feels taut as a drum. She told about the dust storms and twisters, of crouching in a dank, lightless cellar while the earth flies apart overhead, and of other nights so still it seemed you could cut the air into slices. She told him about the family that had raised her, about her father and Mary Jane and Li-li and Thomas. During the breath in which she was debatin
g whether to begin the tale of her marriage, Mann announced he was one of a family of fifteen children, all born on a land-grant farm in Alberta before his parents decided that not even potatoes would grow in Canadian soil. They’d retired to Seattle and started a boarding house, which grew into a successful hotel, the children working as staff. All the others were still there.
“And what made you different?” she asked.
“I was the youngest.” He knit his hands across his lap and stretched his legs straight. He had about him an ease, a complete and unguarded presence, that reminded Hope acutely of Frank Pearson. “Fourteen brothers and sisters all assuming authority over me. I guess it made me a bit power hungry.”
“You don’t seem very power hungry to me.” She smiled. “I always wondered what it would be like to have real brothers and sisters.
He pulled the lantern closer between them. “Now you have children instead.”
The door was open. The air smelled of lilac and oranges. Mann’s house lay outside the city wall, and so he had offered, when she was well enough to be moved, to take her and the children to another doctor’s home inside the concessions, but he’d also confessed he enjoyed their company and didn’t mind at all sleeping in his study, where he had moved his cot once she was past the fever. So they remained his guests.
“You’re power hungry,” she prompted. “Is that why you became a doctor?”
“In part.” As he pulled up the cowl of his sweater, she noticed that his hands were thick and flat at the joints, ringless under short golden hairs.
“When I was ten,” he said, “there was a little boy who lived at our boarding house—about the same age Morrie is now. One day his mother said she’d give me a quarter to look after him. There was a park nearby, so I took him over. He was a real little lad, if you know what I mean. He looked up to me in the way I looked up to my favorite brother. And he was a goer. I taught him to throw a ball, and we climbed some trees. He asked to swing, and he was laughing so that I pushed him higher and higher. He was even with the top bar when suddenly he cried out my name. As I looked up he pitched to the ground, landed shaking and kicking, eyes rolled back. I yelled for help, but there was no one around. ‘Course, I had no idea what was wrong with him, never heard of an epileptic fit. I was terrified to touch him, afraid to leave him. His skin was turning blue, and the convulsions got worse. I tried to grab him, hold him still, but it was too late. His head had struck a rock.”
He leaned forward, caught the drape of the blue counterpane and rubbed it between those squared-off fingers. “I never got over that feeling of helplessness, watching him die and not even knowing what was wrong.”
“Poor child.” Hope touched his hand. His fingers curled around hers.
“The thing is, all my medical training, all the problems I’ve learned to cure only make me more aware of the ones that continue to defy me.”
“Defy you!” Hope shook her head and, suddenly uneasy at the sight of their clasped hands, let him go. “You sound like Ahab chasing his Great White Whale. I hardly think incurable disease has a vendetta against you personally.”
“Your reaction was personal enough,” he said quietly, “when you learned your fever was diphtheria.”
“My reaction was based on superstitious fear,” she retorted. “Anyway, you cured me.”
“Did I?”
The unexpected emotion behind these two words brought her head up with a snap. For the briefest of moments they locked eyes.
She looked away. “I’m afraid we’re overstaying our welcome.”
“That would not be possible.”
She tried to deflect his intensity, but the combination of feelings he had aroused made her flustered, unsure of herself. She fixed her gaze on his shoulders. Wide, athletic shoulders, which he squared with deceptive confidence. “Stephen,” she said.
He didn’t answer. It was the first time she had used his Christian name.
She lifted her eyes and found his expression changed again. The fierceness had left him. Now she was aware only of the yearning that had underscored it. And the regret.
“That’s how I’d like to think of you.”
“Do you think of me, Hope?”
“I’d be pretty ungrateful not to.” She forced a laugh. “You saved my life!”
“Yen and fate deserve more credit than I do. That’s not what I’m asking.”
Her wrists, as if by some warning instinct, had settled on the low, flinching dome of her belly. She sighed, looking down. “Pregnancy is a curious condition. Like carrying your conscience in your womb.”
“I was wondering what you had in there.” He threw her a deadpan smile and stood abruptly to leave. “I understand conscience is a heavy burden. You carry it better than I would.”
The following evening she read to the children from a book of poetry by Bret Harte, which Mann (even, and perhaps especially, in her thoughts, now Stephen seemed dangerously familiar) had given them. Morris had fallen asleep in the armchair, but Pearl begged for one more poem. Hope sighed, and turned the page. “It’s titled ‘Fate.’”
The verse was short. It opened with cloudy skies and tempestuous waves warning against a sail, darkness and danger discouraging a hunt. “‘But the ship sailed safely over the sea,’” she concluded, “‘And the hunters came from the chase in glee; and the town that was builded upon a rock was swallowed up in the earthquake shock.’”
Hope lifted her shoulders in a sudden shiver and closed the book.
“What’s it mean, Mama?” Pearl wanted to know.
“Nothing.” Hope shook her head. “Mei fatse. That’s what it means. No matter how strong and safe you think you are, the earth can still open beneath your feet. Now run and get Yen. Poor Morrie will have a terrible crick if he sleeps in that position much longer.”
But after Yen had carried Morris off, Pearl stole back again. Seeing that Hope was neither reading nor sleeping but only lying with her eyes fixed on the far wall, she curled herself at the foot of the bed, and waited to be noticed. With Morrie asleep and Dr. Mann at his clinic, this was a rare chance to have her mother to herself. At length Hope sighed and shifted her position, drawing her daughter against her hip. “What is it?”
“Mama,” Pearl said, “why don’t we go to church?”
“Church!” Hope studied her more closely. The wide dark eyes were graver than usual and deadly earnest. “Do you wish we did?”
“When we were all alone,” said Pearl, “and you were so sick and I didn’t know what would happen to us, I thought maybe God could help, but I was afraid to ask because I didn’t really know how.” She laid her cheek thoughtfully against her mother’s leg. “And also I thought maybe I couldn’t because we don’t go to church.”
“Oh, Pearl, you don’t have to go to church to talk to God. You can talk to Him anywhere. Whenever you feel upset or uncertain. That’s better, I think, than saving your feelings for a particular day or place.”
“But how?”
“Just be very still and listen carefully to the voice that speaks deep inside you. The voice only you can hear. That always tells the truth. You know the one I mean?”
Pearl nodded doubtfully, but squeezed her eyes shut, clasped her hands tightly, and moved her lips. For a minute she sat perfectly still, then her eyes fluttered open. “I think He heard me.”
“See?”
“Want to know what I told him?”
“No,” Hope answered firmly. “I do not.”
The child straightened her mother’s bedclothes. “Aren’t you even a little curious?”
Hope restrained a smile. “Pearl, you know you can always tell me what’s on your mind. But your prayers are like a very, very private conversation. Something you should treasure, that becomes all the more valuable because it is yours alone.”
“Like a secret?”
“Not exactly. Secrets are often mean, sneaky. Something said behind another’s back. Oh, this is hard to explain, but it’s also important, so l
isten carefully and try to understand. Everyone has a special place—like a little room inside.” She tapped Pearl’s chest. “In this room you are completely free of what anyone else in the world may think. And because you are free in this way, you are also safe. No one will judge you there, so you’ve no reason to lie. This is where you and God talk. Now you may have similar conversations with other people outside this private room. You should always try anyway to tell the truth. But with other people you have to be careful, you have to think how they will interpret your words, how they may react. That’s what makes the world outside so much more complicated and dangerous, why it is important to have this inside place where you can be safe.”
“Safe even from earthquakes?”
After a pause Hope said gently, “It’s a different kind of safety. But yes, I suppose in a way … it’s where you go to piece things together after the earth’s fallen apart.”
Pearl wound the corner of the bedsheet around her finger.
“Does this make sense to you?” asked Hope.
“Yes.” She let the sheet unwind. “But will I get in trouble if I tell?”
“Pearl. I’m trying to make you see that you don’t have to tell, that no one in the world has the right to enter this private place of yours without your permission. And yes, sometimes you might get in trouble for opening your heart, for saying what you really believe.” She paused. “That’s why, when you do open yourself in this way, it should be with someone who loves you absolutely, someone who would never, ever betray your trust.”
“Do you love Papa that way?”
Hope winced at the unexpected question. “I… Yes, Pearl. Of course.”
“What about me?” Pearl asked. “I love you. I trust you. Why can’t I tell you?”
Hope leaned down and kissed the warm dark crown of her daughter’s head. “I treasure your love. Of course you may tell me what’s in your heart, my sweet. But you must understand, it’s not necessary. I want you to have your own hopes and dreams.”
“What if I just tell you one of those dreams and don’t say it was what I prayed for?”
Hope took the small face between her hands. “All right you! I will remember this moment when you’re twenty, and you’ll tell me it never happened.”