The Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  I laughed. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “You couldn’t have known—”

  She waved my words away like nuisances. “I did know. That’s what I’m saying. When I first thought of us going, I sent your father a telegram, with what I thought was good news. I received his response two weeks later. ‘Don’t come’ was the gist of it, without much more of an explanation than that.” She paused and cleared her throat, and I wished I could tell her that was enough, that I didn’t need to know more.

  “I knew what we’d find. I knew about his feelings toward me and our marriage.” She let her breath out softly. “I knew about Leung Mancheung, the woman at Jimmy’s on that awful night, and I suspect there were others. But I didn’t know what else to do. I knew how hurt you were, how much you missed him. And I missed him. I couldn’t imagine giving him up, and I didn’t think it possible that he would give you up. So that trip was sort of my last resort—and I thought you were my ace in the hole. That was wrong, and I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  It was the first time in my life I could remember my mother apologizing to me—and the first time I could remember a time she had reason to—and I just sat for a few moments, trying to fit this new square fact into the round hole of memory, waiting for things in my mind to be revised. “Of course I forgive you,” I said finally. “But I’m glad we went. Because now I know who he is, and I won’t forget, and I won’t be fooled by him.”

  My mother said, “Oh, Anna. There’s more to him than that,” and it was only then that I heard sadness in her voice. She was staring out at the back of the garden, where the junipers that my father had planted so long ago were twice as high as the fence. “Do you know what I thought when I met Joseph Schoene? I thought, Here is a man I can watch forever. He was so driven and ambitious, with this wonderful energy.” She laughed grimly. “It never occurred to me that that energy would backfire. Or that he would grow tired of watching me.”

  “He didn’t grow tired of it,” I said. “He just stopped.”

  She closed her eyes and nodded slightly. “Thank you,” she said. “I think that was a compliment.” She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Do you know what the strange thing is? I still love him. I’m sure that doesn’t make sense to you. It certainly doesn’t to me. But it’s true.” And then she spoke in Mandarin, a first since our return from Shanghai. “Jênhsin nan mo,” she said softly. “‘The human heart is hard to grasp.’”

  Neither of us spoke for a few minutes then. I felt so sad inside, and although I wanted to comfort her, I didn’t know how. I stared at the night sky and tried to find the few constellations I knew—the Big and Little Dippers, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, Orion—and I thought that what looked like a bright star to the east might be Jupiter, and I tried to think of what to say.

  We heard laughter from the house then, Jack’s voice the loudest, and my mother smiled. “He seems very happy, Anna. I think you’re good for him.”

  “Hope so,” I said. “He is for me.” And I couldn’t help but smile because he was happy, and it was so obvious. He’d been near me all evening, resting his hand on my waist, dancing with me on the patio, telling me I looked pretty so often that I began to feel myself glow. And once, when we found ourselves alone in the kitchen, he took me in his arms and whispered that I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. I had never felt so intensely loved, and the feeling left me in awe.

  The laughter from inside quieted, and Jack began telling a story. I could hear the rise and fall of his voice but not the words, the way you hear adults talking when you’re a child. Then there was more laughter, and something from my grandmother. Someone opened a bottle of beer and the cap bounced around on the tile floor in the kitchen. I heard Francis Albert Sinatra singing “I Get a Kick out of You” and I knew that Jack had put on Songs for Young Lovers, an album he liked so much that he took it with him to friends’ houses, just so they could hear it, too.

  “He’s crazy about that album,” I murmured.

  “It’s lovely,” my mother said. “An anniversary present?”

  I laughed. “Nope. He didn’t give me a chance. He bought it the day it was in the stores.”

  She nodded. “That sounds like him. Always a little ahead of the game. What did you give him?”

  “I’m glad you asked,” I said, for her question answered one of my own, and I knew how to comfort her. “I gave him a box of twenty-five H. Upmann cigars, Churchills, which are supposed to be cool and mild.” And then I thought of my father’s cigars when I was a child. “These are Dominican cigars, not Philippine.”

  “I didn’t know Jack liked cigars. And since when are you the aficionada?”

  I shrugged, an attempt to fake nonchalance and hide my enjoyment of her confusion. “Since yesterday when I bought them. And no, he’s not an avid cigar smoker. He just likes one once in a while.”

  “Then why a whole box of them?” she asked. Her exasperation was obvious.

  I was quiet for a moment, letting her question hang in the still night air for dramatic effect. I could almost hear her wondering what kind of a wife was I?

  “He’ll need them seven months from now,” I said casually. “To pass out when the baby comes.”

  She looked at me as though I were crazy, but when I nodded, she shook her head and just looked amazed. And then she smiled.

  “We were going to tell everyone tonight,” I said. “But the doctor thought it better to wait a little longer, to be sure everything was all right. But I thought you’d want to know, and I figured you could keep a secret.”

  “Oh, Anna,” she said, “a baby,” and she shook her head again. “I’ve been so worried about you.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve seemed tired, and not quite yourself. I thought you were sick.” She shrugged and seemed a little embarrassed, but then she started to laugh, softly at first, but it kept going, and soon she was laughing hard, the way you do with your best friend when you’re fourteen. I watched for a minute, waiting for her to regain her composure. The sound startled me, and I realized I hadn’t heard my mother laugh for a long time. But now she laughed and laughed and laughed. Tears ran down her cheeks, and then I started to laugh, too, and each time one of us tried to speak, we only laughed harder.

  “Why are we laughing?” I managed to say once, but it only set her off again. All she could do was shake her head.

  Finally she was quiet, and when she had wiped her cheeks, she reached over and squeezed my hand. “I’m happy. I thought you were sick, and I’m relieved.”

  I was still at the end of laughing. “I thought you were sick, too,” I said. “You’ve looked—”

  But she waved my words away. “A baby,” she whispered, “you’re going to have a baby. The whole world feels different now.”

  a promise

  ON A TUESDAY MORNING a few weeks after our anniversary party, my mother and I went to early Mass together and then to breakfast at Fosselman’s on Mission Avenue in South Pasadena, for old times more than anything.

  My mother and I sat at a booth and I ordered dry toast and a glass of milk, a combination that would have repulsed me at any other time in my life, but I was three months pregnant and never hungry in the morning. I wasn’t the only one with a diminished appetite. My mother barely glanced at the menu before closing it, and when the waitress asked for our order, she answered only, “Hot tea.” She didn’t seem like herself, and I kept trying to figure out what was wrong. Her color wasn’t good, and she seemed not just tired but weary, as though something more than lack of sleep had fatigued her. Although it was August and already warm outside at nine in the morning, she said she was cold, and she wore a scarf around her neck because she said she had a sore throat. I asked if she was coming down with the flu and she dismissed my question and said curtly that it was nothing to worry about, then changed the subject before I could ask more, and I knew not to try. But when she reached for the sugar, I saw bruises on her wrist, and I asked what had happened. Again, she
was casual. “Oh, I’m always bumping into things,” she said, and she sat with her hands in her lap, out of my sight, during the rest of the meal.

  That afternoon I called my grandmother with my concerns, mostly for reassurance. My grandmother was the most down-to-earth, unsentimental person I knew. I thought I was getting anxious over nothing, another kind of side effect of pregnancy.

  “I know,” my grandmother said when I described my mother at breakfast. “I’m worried about her. She doesn’t seem well, and I’ve been nagging her about it. Last week she finally promised she’d see Dr. O’Connor.” My grandmother paused, and then she said softly, “I think something’s wrong,” and for the first time in my life, I heard fear in her voice.

  That was how my mother’s illness started: so gradually and unobtrusively that it was easy to ignore. She was so casual about the bruises and the fatigue and the sore throat that I shrugged it all off and chalked my uneasiness up to unnecessary worry, so much so that in September, when, after doctor’s appointments and tests and consultations and examinations, she was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia, I was as shocked as if I’d never noticed anything wrong.

  I found the name alone terrifying. A few days after her diagnosis, I went to the library to try to learn from medical books what was happening to her body. I had to steel myself to read about the uncontrolled growth of leucocytes, the white blood cells that defend the body against germs and viruses. I read about the damage caused by that frantic growth, the way that white blood cells flood the tissue and blood, and the way in which the bone marrow becomes unable to produce red blood cells, which leads to anemia. And because it was happening to my mother’s body, it all seemed unbearably violent. Easy bleeding, I read, and in my mind I saw my mother’s bruised arms, enlarged spleen and lymph glands, weakness, fever, frequent infection—the language of cancer.

  The illness was classified according to the type of white blood cells it affected, and it was also classified as chronic or acute. Chronic leukemia was the “better” version, developing more slowly. A patient with chronic leukemia could live with the disease for many years. Acute leukemia—my mother’s variety—was the more aggressive and dangerous type. Without treatment, it could lead to death within a few months, usually as the result of bleeding or infection. What caused the disease was unknown, as was its cure.

  When I’d read all I could, I left the library and went outside into the hot September day. The Santa Anas had kicked up, and the hot desert air had blown every trace of smog to the west, so that the purplish-brown San Gabriel mountains were so beautiful and clear and distinct that they seemed magnified. I blinked in the bright light and sat down on a stone bench just outside of the library and waited to feel like myself. I hadn’t eaten breakfast and I was weak, and I thought I should wait a minute before heading for home. It was Saturday and Jack had the car, so I had taken the bus there and would need to take it home.

  I closed my eyes and let the sun beat down on me. I felt myself getting hot, and whatever energy I had dissipated. I thought I should get up, but I was too tired, and although a voice inside said, Get up and walk to the bus, a louder and seemingly more authoritative one said, Just stay here, and then I couldn’t and wouldn’t and didn’t get up, and I thought, It’s all right, you’re falling asleep, and I gave in.

  I woke inside the library, and for a moment, I thought I’d just fallen asleep in there and that I’d only dreamed I’d gone outside. But my head hurt, and when I touched the place that seemed to produce the pain, someone said, “No, no, dear. It’s just a cut, but leave it alone,” and I looked up to find the librarian staring down at me. She wore a light blue blouse that looked like the sky, and her hair was a beautiful deep chestnut color.

  “You fainted,” she said, “and you bumped your head on the bench, but it doesn’t look like anything to worry about. We’ve called your husband and he’s on his way. In the meantime, just rest.” Then she smiled kindly. “When is the baby due?”

  I put my hand to my stomach, embarrassed. I’d only started showing a week or so earlier. “February,” I said, and a voice inside asked, Will she still be alive? “Yes,” I said out loud, and the beautiful librarian looked puzzled. “Yes, in February,” I said weakly.

  When Jack arrived, the panic and alarm in his face were so startling that I thought something else had happened, something besides me. “What is it?”

  He looked confused. “I was worried.”

  I shrugged. “I was reading about”—I couldn’t say the word—”her. And then I went outside and got too hot and I hadn’t eaten and—” I stopped.

  He put his arm around me to help me up. “You have to take better care of yourself,” he said gently. “She’ll be all right.” He wore a UCLA T-shirt that he’d had since he was a freshman, and he smelled of sweat and cut grass, and the sight of him made me feel better. He looked up and saw the librarian watching us, and he said again, “She’ll be all right,” and I nodded.

  I rested that afternoon under Jack’s somewhat strict supervision. I ate a turkey sandwich and an orange and felt fine, but getting up was not allowed, and I realized I was under a kind of house arrest. I put up with it, figuring I could do so for an afternoon.

  But my little fainting incident wasn’t forgotten. It got everyone paying attention to me—Jack, my grandmother, my mother, his parents when we saw them. They were all worried that my worry over my mother would affect my health, and I felt all their anxiety every time they looked at me. And despite the fact that there were pregnant women just about everywhere you looked in that fall of 1954, my family seemed to view my condition as unique and even precarious, and I was as closely watched as my mother. We two worried over each other while everyone around us worried over both of us.

  In October, as I entered my sixth month, my obstetrician expressed concern over my blood pressure, which he considered a little high, most likely due to stress, he said, for he knew of my mother’s illness. I was told to take it easy, and since I’d planned on leaving my job at the Huntington Library in only two more months anyway, I quit then, which left me with more time than I knew what to do with. My mother was in a similar position, and though her reasons were different, the fact was that we were both tired and unable to do the things we usually did. So we began to spend a lot of time together, as if on a strange sort of vacation. We went to matinees, we played cards and Monopoly and Scrabble, we did puzzles, we read piles of books from the library and exchanged the ones we liked. On warm days, we sat outside in the sun, sometimes in her overgrown garden, other times our postage-stamp backyard. We were like best friends, and we quickly fell into a routine. In the morning she watched The Today Show, her one guilty pleasure, she said, and I knew not to call until it was over. Sometime after nine one of us would call the other and ask, “What are your plans for the day?” and be asked in turn, “What have you got in mind?”

  During those fall and winter days of 1954, I watched my mother transform herself yet again. Since that first time we’d left Shanghai when I was seven, I’d come to understand that she was someone who changed with her environment and the circumstances of her life, so I shouldn’t have been surprised at this latest transformation. But I was. She grew more open and talkative than I’d ever known her to be. Conversation seemed to soothe and relax her and, later, to make it easier for her to fall asleep. I gave up trying to follow her train of thought. One minute she might be asking what it was like for Jack to teach at a private school, and after I talked a bit about Flintridge and the boys in Jack’s classes and the way he met a group of seventh-grade boys every morning to tell them a stupid joke, she’d describe a certain dress shop she’d loved in Shanghai, a place I’d never heard her mention before. In fact, Shanghai was one of her favorite topics. She mentioned my father only in passing, when it was impossible not to, but she talked with obvious affection about our home in Hungjao, and the Bund and the Old City and Chu Shih and Mei Wah and that foreign life we’d lived so long ago.

 
; At the start, her talkativeness confused me; she had never been so forthcoming. But the transformation in her body was far more dramatic than any changes in her personality. She tired after very little exertion, she needed transfusions more and more often, and she appeared more frail each day. I didn’t even ask how much weight she’d lost. By Thanksgiving I understood: in those long conversations, in the give-and-take of our thoughts and feelings and pasts, she was telling me good-bye.

  On an unexpectedly warm afternoon during the first week of December, my mother and I sat outside with my grandmother on her patio. It had not changed since I’d seen it when we first arrived from Shanghai. Although it was December, everything was still green, and a few narcissus bloomed near the brick walk. My mother was lying on a chaise lounge in the afternoon sun, a glass of water on the table next to her. She had aged ten years in six months. Her disease was aggressive, to say the least, and it seemed that each day there was less energy, less strength, less her.

  My grandmother and I were on either side of her. I was just starting The Morning Watch by James Agee. My grandmother was reading the afternoon Pasadena Star News and commenting on what she read. The day before, the Senate had voted 67 to 22 to condemn Senator Joseph McCarthy on two counts of abusing the Senate, news that pleased my grandmother, but her relief was overshadowed by her concern for Pope Pius XII, who had collapsed and fallen into a coma the night before. He was seventy-eight years old and suffering from a perforated ulcer, and he had been fed artificially for the last four days. His physician had spent the night at his bedside, and the Pope had received the sacrament of Extreme Unction. And although my grandmother did not usually hold him dear, the fact was that he had traveled to the United States and become an acquaintance of President Roosevelt, whom she did hold dear, and so she said diplomatically, “We’ll pray for a happy death for our Holy Father.”