No Certain Home

by Marlene Lee

  She felt unwelcome—no, not unwelcome so much as caricatured—by the Press Club in New York. At a banquet honoring some newspaperman or other, wives of reporters she knew from China looked her over while their husbands hugged and glad-handed her. Apparently she was considered to be some sort of character. The worst part about being a character, a revolutionary, a sexually free feminist, is that a lot of people didn’t take you seriously.

  At times even she didn’t take herself seriously and thought her critics were right. She went even further and thought herself ludicrous. “What a rotten life I must have led …” she wrote Aino. “If only I could meet one man whom I could be proud of, and say, ‘I slept with him!’ But I have to creep off in some corner of myself and contemplate such things in shame.”

  For all her efforts, she had not loved nor been loved as she would have liked. She had sought to overcome her fear of sex the only way she knew how: practice. Once she got the hang of it, she’d considered it her right. Love, though, had proved to be more than a collection of rights. It had proved almost unobtainable.

  Battle Hymn of China received good reviews. She took advantage of her growing reputation as a China expert and booked herself on a public speaking tour. The trips made her nervous. She never felt equal to the people she was addressing. She practiced her speeches ahead of time and underlined certain words and phrases to be emphasized. She marked pauses and tried to keep her voice from rising. She developed chronic indigestion from the meals she ate at head tables.

  But when the speeches themselves were over and questions came from the audience, Agnes forgot about herself and her performance and engaged wholeheartedly with the Americans who questioned her. She bound them to her by her sincerity and wide experience.

  “What made you go to China?” a girl asked after a lecture at a private church college in Mississippi. The auditorium was small. Polished railings, dark oak wainscoting, a mural painted by a regional artist. It was an auditorium of the type to be found in hundreds of small American colleges. An auditorium where young people’s minds were sometimes ignited, sometimes put to sleep.

  Agnes looked up into the balcony at the questioner. The tall, thin girl sounded passionate, and her question seemed to carry a charge, as if the answer might have an effect on a choice being made that very day.

  “I went to China because”—Agnes paused—“because it was my destiny.” There was a hush. “A bridge was needed between the two halves of our globe. I am a thin cable in that structure.” She wanted to make sense to these boys and girls, for boys and girls they seemed, not college men and women. Limited by a comfortable life, they were just now stirring into wakefulness. Many of them would be fighting in Europe or Asia soon. Some would die for America.

  “We are here for a short time,” she said to the girl in the balcony. “Some of us are placed in positions of risk.” No one coughed. Not a hinged seat creaked. The stained glass window above the speaker’s platform, Jesus’ blue gown, the red robe of a disciple, an orange sun, cast colors out into the audience.

  “All my life I have followed my heart and sought knowledge. My search led me to people whom I admired greatly. Those people led me to tasks which needed doing. I am a writer. I had to earn a living, so I went to a continent where there was a great deal to write about.” Instead of exhorting the young audience to action, she found herself summing up her life.

  “I believed I could break out of my limitations and help China break out of hers. I did not resist change. I welcomed it. And I took responsibility for what my country was doing. It is not enough to live only for oneself or one’s family.”

  She straightened the papers in front of her and looked up at the girl. “I did not know it would be so difficult to live for an elusive ideal.” She sat down in the speaker’s chair. At first there was no sound. In the moment of silence before applause began, she knew she was one of those who is strong enough to do necessary work. One of those who knows what her work is. About that she had no confusion.

  Pearl Buck studied Agnes across the luncheon entrée in the dining room of the Waldorf Astoria. “Madame Chiang Kai-shek,” she said, her eyes gentle but disturbed, “has told others that you will never be allowed to enter China again.”

  Agnes laughed a quick caw of a laugh. “Her sister says the same. I’ve earned the enmity of the Madames, both right and left.”

  Mrs. Buck rested one arm on the edge of the table and brought her maternal face closer to Agnes. “I can understand Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s feelings,” she said, “but what happened between you and Madame Sun Yat-sen?”

  Coming from Pearl, the question didn’t seem like gossip. It was more like a frank inquiry into human nature. Agnes took no offense at the famous author of The Good Earth.

  “I’m not Chinese enough,” Agnes said. “I think I talked too much. And one of Madame’s friends told me she was annoyed because I always ran up her staircase instead of walking. And she accused me of mishandling funds, which I didn’t.” Agnes still felt shamed by the whole episode. To have met a great lady, a great humanitarian, Sun Yat-sen’s widow; to be rejected because you failed in some way you didn’t understand—it was unbearable, even after all these years.

  “I’m low-class,” Agnes added. “Madame Sun Yat-sen isn’t.” She forbade tears to come to her eyes. She did nothing but cry in America, it seemed. She looked up and saw that the only tears being shed were Pearl Buck’s.

  Agnes put her hand quite close to Pearl’s on the white linen tablecloth. “What is it?”

  “You don’t bother with appearances. Therefore I don’t need to.”

  “You miss China, too,” Agnes said hopefully. It would be a bond between them.

  “That’s not why I’m crying,” said Pearl.

  “What, then?”

  “It is you.”

  Agnes abhorred pity. To be accurate, there were times when she enjoyed self-pity and indulged in it quite readily. But she would not allow anyone else to feel sorry for her. She brought her hand back to her knife and fork and began to toy with the elegant lunch.

  “I’m actually crying for my daughter,” Pearl said. “And for myself.”

  “Your daughter?”

  “You make me think of my child. She is as vulnerable as you, but without your gifts. She cannot learn and it breaks my heart.” She looked deeply into Agnes’ wide eyes and whispered, “Sometimes sadness washes over me and I can’t stop it. At such times I feel it is my fault that she is retarded.”

  “You haven’t failed your daughter,” Agnes said. Pearl Buck didn’t know how to fail a child, didn’t know how to abandon someone. She would have found Agnes’ abandonment of her family after Mother died shocking. But Pearl would never know because Agnes would never tell her. Pearl was from another class, a class so beyond Agnes that abandonment would never occur to her.

  “I abandoned my first husband,” Pearl blurted out.

  “You mean you divorced him, don’t you?” But Pearl wasn’t going to elaborate. She sat stricken, as if she could not believe anyone would divorce, certainly not herself. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief whose edging looked as if it had been embroidered in China. Agnes tried to sympathize. It was one of her failings that she couldn’t comfort people who she thought already had so many reasons to be comfortable.

  “Where are you living now?” Pearl asked after a bit.

  “A little hall bedroom on the west side of Manhattan. There’s a chance I may go to an artists’ colony in upstate New York and finish a writing project.”

  “Yaddo?”

  “Yes. Malcolm Cowley is on the board of directors. He’s an old friend. He suggested Yaddo. But first he has to get approval of the board.” Agnes reached for a roll. “I’m not often approved of.” She helped herself to butter. “I would worry if I were approved of.”

  Pearl signaled the waiter to remove the plates. “Tell me what you’re working on.”

  “A play. I’ve never written a play before. It’s set in China. It
opens during a flood. A brother and sister are walking along a railroad track that runs beside the Yellow River.” She had a sudden memory of the flood in Colorado where her family’s tent had been washed down the Purgatory River. “After their parents are drowned, the children go to Shanghai where they see great luxury, but they have to work in a metal-polishing shop for long hours under terrible conditions. In the same building is an office where a revolutionary writer and artist are making lithographed notices for political work. And then they go to a chocolate shop in Shanghai where they beg for candy… ”

  Pearl was listening with good manners rather than interest. Even if the play were the best play in the world, Agnes thought, even if she were explaining it brilliantly, Pearl wouldn’t find political drama palatable.

  It wasn’t the best play in the world, she acknowledged to herself. In fact, it was probably one of the worst.

  “You write well about the realities of war,” Pearl said quietly. “I’ve read Battle Hymn of China. It is very fine. You’re knowledgeable about a China I don’t know. I’m the daughter of a missionary, but you march with soldiers.”

  “The Army has asked me to speak before an officers’ training school at Harvard,” Agnes said, rather proud of being asked to help educate the establishment.

  Pearl leaned forward. “Do you think the Communists will take over China?”

  “Oh, yes.” Agnes didn’t say, “I hope so.” She’d never heard Pearl call for redistribution of the land. Never heard her say the upper classes must be stripped of their excess wealth so that everyone’s children would have enough to eat.

  “Are you willing to address a church convention in Philadelphia that has asked me to find a speaker?” Pearl asked when they’d finished their lunch.

  Certainly Agnes would. She would do it out of passion for China. And she would do it because she needed money.

  “Do let me know when you leave for Yaddo,” Pearl said. She called for the check. “And best of luck with your play.” In front of the hotel Pearl pulled on kid gloves. The doorman hailed a taxi.

  “Can I drop you somewhere, Agnes?”

  Agnes shook her head. As she set out for the subway she put her hand in her coat pocket and felt the roll and cutlet she’d smuggled out of the hotel in a linen napkin. It would make a fine sandwich. It would do for another meal.

  33

  Saratoga Springs, New York 1944

  Moonlight and white snow made midnight bright. Agnes saw her own breath, listened to her boots break through the white crust. Quite regularly snow crashed to the ground somewhere in the woods and a creaking pine bough, released, sprang slowly back to position. Agnes walked toward one of the lakes of Yaddo near Saratoga Springs, New York. She imagined speckled trout moving slowly beneath the ice, stoically swimming through winter. She loosened her hood. The cold almost had a smell. Perhaps it was the crisp absence of smell that gave the snowy night something like a fragrance.

  She looked up at the stars. In China it was day now. The personality of Zhu De shone on the daylight side of the earth. She, herself, filled this dark half. And Evans Carlson—she didn’t know where Evans was. In China, in the United States, perhaps somewhere between. Wherever he was, he filled both halves. Until today she hadn’t heard from him in a very long time.

  To be accurate, she hadn’t heard from him today, either. But in the morning mail a friend sent her a copy of a newspaper article Evans wrote. It was a review of her book Battle Hymn of China. After dinner she’d left the great dining room of the Yaddo mansion and run upstairs to her bedroom where she kept the scrapbook of his press writings. She’d grabbed scissors and paste pot and set out for the one-room cabin in the woods where she worked.

  She smiled now and bent down to pack a snowball between her gloved hands. Evans’ article had actually praised her more than her book. It almost seemed that he had written a love letter disguised as a review. On the pages of the New York Herald Tribune, for all the world to see, he described their reunion in Central China after several months’ separation. She had thrown aside, he said, “the barriers she had erected to shield a sensitive soul. The air of belligerency disappeared… ”

  She hadn’t known she was belligerent. All she knew was that Evans didn’t question her presence in China. He’d asked her what she knew about China and listened when she told him. And she was not belligerent around someone who cared for her.

  The snowball hit the tree and broke apart soundlessly. Agnes pulled up her hood and returned to the cabin. The fire had almost gone out. She added a log to the woodburner and knelt in front of the hearth to watch sparks fly up in the draft. The sweet piney smell of unburned wood stacked beside the fireplace mixed with smoke and sent out an incense from Yaddo to the winds of heaven where it was blown—how high? How far? She reread the review.

  “…a dispatch from Chongqing announced her arrival in an emaciated condition. In the interim she had traveled with troops of the Chinese Communist and Kuomintang armies on both sides of the Yangtze, the only foreigner to witness operations in Central China during the years 1938-‘39-’40.”

  Evans understood her. He praised her privately and publicly. He loved her; she loved him. For more than a year now she had read the war news, specifically all the news of him she could find. She read right through the procession of natural beauty here at Yaddo, read while leaves turned red and dropped, while rain fell through bare boughs and ran off the roof, while pine needles rattled down in a wind.

  It had not taken her long to lay aside the play and settle into something she knew better: the life of Zhu De. Her shorthand notes from Yan’an were harder to bring to life in America than they would have been in China. She could have written the book with ease in China. The materials that she needed, the people that she needed, were on the daylight side of the earth.

  She closed her eyes and pictured the caves of Yan’an, the terraces, the footbridge. She could see the uncomplicated smiles of the young peasant soldiers; Zhu De’s intelligent eyes and earthy stance. He was as near as the pheasant and deer who came to watch through her single window each morning. He was as deeply rooted in her life as the blue spruce and silver-green poplars were rooted in Yaddo soil.

  She exchanged her winter jacket for an old sweater, sat down in the rocking chair, and ruminated. Last night after dinner, Carson McCullers, the talented, intense, long-legged, boyish girl-woman in residence at Yaddo had come into the mansion’s library and stunned everyone by crying out, “I’ve lost the presence of God!”

  Agnes understood. She understood the difference between losing a thing and losing its presence. She had lost China, but not its presence. It would be far worse to lose the presence than the thing itself. It is important to keep God or China or an idea or someone you love alive by the force of your imagination.

  Just this afternoon Agnes had wandered into the enormous kitchen of the mansion for a cup of tea and come upon Carson and Mrs. Ames, the director of the artists’ colony, bent over a manuscript. At first they hadn’t seen her. She’d filled the kettle with water and set it to boil. Mrs. Ames, a brusque woman who ran Yaddo with a firm hand, looked up. Her smile, bathed in the snow-filtered light coming through the bay window, was rare.

  “We’re going over a thorny section,” she said, returning to the manuscript and applying her pencil to the margin. Carson read hungrily, tapping ash off the end of her cigarette and taking a quick swallow of sherry from the thermos at her elbow.

  “My sister has been asking for you,” Mrs. Ames said to Agnes.

  “Would you like me to read to her now?”

  Mrs. Ames laid down the pen and brushed Agnes’ arm with her large, liver-spotted hand that could wash a dish, cook a meal, knock smartly on the door of a resident who wasn’t following rules, nurse an invalid sister, improve a manuscript. “Could you? She so looks forward to seeing you.”

  Agnes had been helping Mrs. Ames with her ill sister for months. The sister was from Carson McCuller’s hometown in Georgia, and thus t
here was a bond between the three women. For Agnes, it was family.

  “Shall we take the station wagon to town tomorrow?” Carson said through a cloud of smoke. “I want to spend the entire afternoon hearing about China. And playing pool, of course.”

  Agnes shook a cigarette out of its pack. “Around four?” It was agreed. Agnes watched Carson through her own cloud of smoke. Such talent. Here at Yaddo she was surrounded by talent. Langston Hughes, for instance. She admired him more than she could say. A very American man. Practical, but able to reflect on vast subjects. She felt pedestrian by comparison.

  “Only certain things penetrate my hard soul,” she would tell Carson tomorrow. “I have standards and principles and prejudices and weaknesses. But Hughes looks on and listens and absorbs everything. That makes him an artist.” The play she’d started, then stopped, sputtered and dimmed each time she tried to present the truth of a character on stage.

  “Let the characters grow naturally,” Mrs. Ames had said, laughing at Agnes’ headstrong plunge into a scene. For weeks she’d returned from the main house to her cabin in the woods where she bent herself double trying to write a literary play, when what she really wanted to do was tell the audience straight out how things were in China.

  Now she was writing a biography of Zhu De instead. It wasn’t easy handling historical material. She should be a better researcher. She should have gone to college. Should have gone to high school, for God’s sake.

  Carson was so pale. The girl drank too much and didn’t eat enough. If Agnes had a daughter, she might be Carson’s age. Might be just like Carson. She rocked and half-closed her eyes, pretending for a moment that Carson was her daughter. Brilliant. Unsure of herself. Then she pretended that Lily Wu and Ding Ling were her daughters. Or perhaps she would have had a child like Pearl Buck’s little girl—eternally a little girl. Even a handicapped child would be your own flesh and blood; someone to love and care for.