The Art of Confidence

by Wendy Lee

  “Charlie and I—we have a connection,” Vicki said. “We always have. You and I—we’ve given each other as much as we can possibly give. Charlie wants to start over, he wants more children. . . .”

  Harold knew there must have been a pragmatic reason for her turning to Charlie. He cringed inwardly at thinking about how his wife must have confided in Charlie about their marital problems, but that was the least of the indignities he would have to suffer at the hands of his so-called friend.

  “What about Adrian?” he asked.

  “You’ve seen how well Charlie gets along with him. Of course, he could never take your place. You’ll be able to see him anytime you want.”

  His wife had thought through her new future with Charlie much more thoroughly than Harold had anticipated. Perhaps as long as she and Harold had been unhappy together, which had been at least a year. This wasn’t Vicki having an affair with an old boyfriend because she needed a distraction, which was what Harold had initially hoped. This was Vicki wanting to get out of their marriage, and Charlie being the most convenient way to do it.

  He couldn’t fight Vicki on this. There was nothing to fight. She had made up her mind long ago, and her decision did not involve him. Just like the decision the shareholders had made about his role in the company his father had founded. He could put up a protest, but in the end, it wouldn’t matter.

  “You can have the house,” he told Vicki. “Starting from now on. I’ll go to a hotel.”

  Vicki seemed taken aback by his easy surrender but didn’t try to stop him when he left the room. After Harold had finished packing a bag, he stopped by Adrian’s playroom to say good-bye to his son. The playroom was stocked with enough toys for a day-care center, and it took a while for him to get Adrian’s attention.

  “Daddy’s going away for a little while,” Harold told him.

  “Bring me back a present?” Adrian asked. “Bigger than the ferry?” Harold noticed the Staten Island Ferry replica lying in the jumble of other toys.

  “Of course.”

  Where should he go? Harold had told Vicki he’d go to a hotel, which was the most logical place, but that just seemed to emphasize his failure. He had no reliable friends whom he could stay with, and he didn’t want to have to explain or make up an excuse. You did not invite pity from other people. Then he thought of one other person, someone whom he was not connected to either by blood or friendship, whom he didn’t need to impress, who would accept him as he was.

  When he reached Auntie Mai on the phone and asked if he could stay with her, rather than asking him why or acting surprised that she hadn’t heard from him for so long, she agreed. Instead of taking a car, Harold walked to the closest bus stop, which was only used by housekeepers, gardeners, nannies, and other invisible people who came into the district for the day. Settling into his seat, Harold wished he truly were invisible.

  * * *

  The next morning, when Harold awoke, it took him a few seconds to realize where he was: lying in a single bed swathed in a pink mosquito net, in a small, dim room with no other furniture but an old armoire. He would have thought he was dreaming until he saw his bag lying on the floor. Then he remembered everything that had happened the day before, when he’d lost both his job and his family in one afternoon.

  He could hear the movements of someone else bustling around in the apartment. The evening before, when he’d arrived, Auntie Mai hadn’t asked him any questions but led him to his room. After he’d gone to bed, he could hear her settling into her living room, the television volume turned down on a soap opera. He was sure that if he told her what was going on between him and Vicki, it would rival any soap opera plot.

  When he emerged from his room, the table had been set with a simple but hearty breakfast of rice congee, boiled peanuts, and pickled vegetables.

  “Did you sleep well?” Auntie Mai asked, and Harold assured her that the television had not kept him up, that the bed was comfortable, that he hadn’t gotten bitten by mosquitoes.

  Then he said, “I was thinking of going to Yangmingshan Number One Public Cemetery today to see my father’s grave. Would you come with me?”

  “I have one patient I need to see today,” she said. “Otherwise I have the afternoon free.”

  Harold and Auntie Mai took a bus from the Wanhua District past the grand white edifice of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and the cool greenery of Da’an Forest Park, in which he had often sought refuge as a student at nearby Taiwan National University. Their destination was a condominium complex on the edge of the park. Auntie Mai’s patient must be quite well off.

  A middle-aged woman met them at the door, her anxious face relaxing a shade when she saw Auntie Mai. She led them into a spacious bedroom—with an expansive view of the park below—where a hospital bed had been set up. Upon it lay an elderly man—possibly the oldest person Harold had ever seen—hooked up to a ventilator. With the deep wrinkles coursing down his face and his frail, twisted body, he looked less like a human and more like a tortoise. He remembered when Vicki was pregnant with Adrian and he had seen an early sonogram. While Vicki had been overcome with emotion, Harold had merely thought the embryo that would turn into his son looked indistinguishable from the images he had seen of amphibian, reptilian, and mammalian embryos. Perhaps all life was meant to look the same at the beginning and the end of it.

  “He just turned one hundred years old,” the woman who had let them in confided to Harold. “Two weeks ago he was still eating out at his favorite restaurants every night.” By her attitude, he guessed she was not a younger second wife but the patient’s daughter.

  Watching Auntie Mai tend to the old man, Harold thought about his mother’s last days in the hospital, the beepings of monitors and machines, the flurry of interchangeable nurses. Being at home seemed like a preferable way to go, for both the patient and their family. Why hadn’t his father chosen this option? He certainly could have afforded it. Harold wondered whether his father had established Auntie Mai in his household by then and had wanted to keep the two halves of his life separate.

  A student at the time, Harold had gone to see his mother at the hospital whenever he could, sometimes skipping classes. Early on, when she was still lucid and discovered what he was doing, she’d scold him.

  “Don’t waste the tuition your father is paying,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “We all know I’m going to go work for him after graduation.”

  “You might not want to. You might want to do something on your own.”

  Not as long as his father had any say in it, Harold had thought. Sometimes he wondered whether his father purposefully kept his son dependent on him, so that he could control what happened to him.

  “When was the last time he came to see you?” he asked his mother. “I’ve never seen him here.”

  “He comes when he can. You know how much your father doesn’t like hospitals.”

  His mother’s deterioration was gradual but unmistakable, until one time when Harold visited, she did not recognize him at all. He might as well have been one of the nurses or doctors; there were so many of them, he had trouble keeping them straight, too. When, alarmed, he asked a nurse what was going on, she just indicated the morphine drip hooked up by his mother’s side.

  In her delirium, his mother talked about her childhood in Nanjing during the Japanese Invasion; how her family had fled inland twice, once during World War II and then ten years later during the civil war with the communists. She and her mother and siblings had moved to Taiwan after the defeat of the Nationalists, while her father, a government servant under Chiang Kai-shek, had gone missing for two years. Of course, Harold had heard versions of this history from his mother before, but not as she was telling it now, as a wide-eyed girl listening to the Japanese bombs dropping in the fields beyond; and as a teenager on a boat crossing the Taiwan Straits, not knowing the whereabouts of her father, and full of fear about the future ahead.

  All he coul
d do was listen and bear witness to her passing, as the one-hundred-year-old man’s daughter was now doing. At the end of the caretaking session, she thanked Auntie Mai and handed her an envelope with what Harold assumed was her payment. It didn’t surprise him that Auntie Mai seemed to be operating a private nursing business. He felt a little better about imposing upon her, knowing that she was probably making a decent wage.

  “How long do you think he has to live?” he asked her about her patient as they took the elevator down.

  “A week at the most. That will be enough time for the rest of the family to arrive from where they live in America.” Auntie Mai shook her head over the children’s lack of filial piety.

  “At least he has a daughter who takes care of him.”

  “She’s the oldest and unmarried. Perhaps she’ll be able to have her own life once her father dies. One hundred years old is far too old to be alive,” she added.

  Once outside the building, Harold offered to pay for a taxi to Yangmingshan Number One Public Cemetery, but Auntie Mai thriftily insisted on taking public transportation. So they took the MRT to the Beitou District, slightly northwest of the direction Harold had come from the day before, and boarded a bus with a number of other families heading to the cemetery and farther into the park. A few foreign tourists were scattered among the passengers, and Harold remembered that the cemetery also held the graves of some famous people, including the American advisor to Sun Yat-Sen, the father of modern China. They disembarked at the cemetery’s entrance and proceeded through its grounds, well-kept save for roving bands of stray dogs of every size and breed, who appeared indifferent to people unless they carried food.

  The last time Harold had been to his father’s grave had been on April fifth, for Qingming Festival, or Tomb Sweeping Day, which was a national holiday since it was also the day of Chiang Kai-shek’s death. Vicki and Adrian had come with him, and Adrian had run around the tombs, ranging from simple headstones to near mausoleums, as Vicki had helped him clear his parents’ graves of weeds. She’d been reluctant to go on this trip, and about bringing Adrian, as she considered it too morbid for a child of three to be playing in a cemetery.

  “This is his heritage,” Harold had told her.

  “Then why not take him to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall?” she suggested. “He has relatives on both sides who worked for the government.”

  While this was true, Harold felt the connection was too tenuous. And perhaps there was some guilt on his part that he only visited his father’s grave once a year on Tomb Sweeping Day. As a compromise, he had bought Adrian a kite, and after cleaning, burning incense, and bowing in front of the grave, the three of them went to a clearing to fly it. They weren’t the only families who were doing this, as kite-flying was a common activity during the holiday. Some said the kites were able to bring messages to the dead, while others contended that the kites represented departed souls from this earth. Harold had grown up with the first tradition; in order to convey the message, you had to let the kite go free.

  Adrian’s yellow butterfly joined the colorful spread of kites jostling for position in the sky. Whenever Harold tried to guide his son’s hands with his own, Adrian pushed them out of the way, wanting to fly the kite by himself. That made Harold think, rather sadly, of all the things that Adrian would no longer need him for someday—already was starting not to need him for.

  When they were ready to go home, Harold told Adrian he should let the kite go.

  “No!” Adrian insisted. “It’s mine!”

  “If you don’t let the kite go,” Harold tried to explain, “you can’t send a message to your grandfather.”

  Adrian had never met his paternal grandfather, and on that day he had barely made the connection between the tomb they were visiting and a person he was related to, but Harold still hoped to be able to uphold this part of the kite-flying tradition.

  He looked at Vicki for help. She sighed and said, “Adrian, if you do what your father says, he’ll buy you an ice cream.”

  The promise of the treat convinced him.

  “Think of something you want to say to Ye Ye,” Harold instructed.

  Adrian tilted his head and looked quizzically at his father.

  “Maybe that you miss him?”

  “Harold,” Vicki said, putting her hands on Adrian’s shoulders. “That’s enough. If you want to take part in this ridiculous custom, go ahead, but don’t force your son into doing it for you.”

  Harold didn’t think he had been pressuring Adrian, but he fell silent. He placed his hands over Adrian’s, and for once, the boy let him. Then, on the count of three, they released the kite. It floated over the others and out into the empty blue beyond.

  “Ice cream!” Adrian bellowed.

  They headed toward the entrance of the park, where they’d spotted a line of vendors when they’d first arrived on the bus. Adrian sat on a bench with a chocolate ice cream cone while Vicki crouched next to him, a handful of napkins ready. A few feet away sat a trio of stray dogs, hungrily watching every lick.

  Halfway through, Adrian announced, “I’m done,” and before either of his parents could take the remainder of the cone from him and throw it in the trash, he made as if to toss it on the ground. Before he could do so, one of the dogs leapt up and grabbed the cone. Sharp teeth closed around Adrian’s hand. At Vicki’s scream, all three dogs ran away. After a second of shock, Adrian started to howl in pain. Harold knelt on trembling knees to examine his son’s injury. To his relief, the dog’s teeth had barely broken the skin. Harold took the napkins from Vicki and pressed them against the wound.

  “He’ll be okay.” He tried to calm her down.

  Vicki clutched Adrian to her. “What you mean? That dog could have rabies. We need to take him to the hospital as soon as possible.”

  “Of course.” Harold kept from pointing out that her panic was probably making Adrian more upset.

  A small crowd had gathered around them now, including a man who drove a taxi and offered to take them back into the city. He dropped them off at the closest hospital, which was Chen Hsin General. Carrying Adrian, Vicki rushed into the emergency room while Harold paid the driver, then hurried in after his family. Luckily there weren’t many patients this holiday afternoon, and a young female doctor was able to see them within minutes.

  Harold leaned against the wall opposite the examination table while the doctor gave Adrian a tetanus shot and bandaged his hand. Vicki stood by their son’s side, murmuring what a brave little boy he was and promising him all kinds of treats.

  “Don’t worry,” the doctor said. “The bite might leave a small scar, but your son will be fine.”

  Vicki looked horrified, as if she were being told that Adrian might lose a limb.

  Back at home, Harold took over and bathed and put Adrian to bed, the boy’s right hand wrapped up in white gauze as if he was holding a baseball mitt. Harold held Adrian’s other hand until his son fell asleep.

  When Harold came out into the living room, he found Vicki sitting in the dark.

  “How is he?” she asked.

  “Asleep. It was quite a day for him. For all of us.” He moved closer to his wife to comfort her, but the grim expression on her face made him pause.

  “I blame you, you know,” she said.

  “What?”

  “For getting him that ice cream.”

  “It was your idea.”

  “To make up for the fact that you were going to take away his kite! And for what? Some silly belief that kites bring messages to the dead? You didn’t even seem that concerned when that dog bit him.”

  “Vicki,” Harold said. “I may not show it in the way you do, but I was concerned. I am concerned. But you heard the doctor. Adrian’s going to be fine.”

  “If you consider a scar to be fine.” Vicki stood up. “I know you didn’t have the best relationship with your father, but that doesn’t mean you have to have the same with your son.”

  Harold had no chance to
say anything in his defense before she left the room.

  * * *

  Now he and Auntie Mai approached his father’s tomb, a modest edifice of pink marble compared to some of the elaborate memorials nearby. To his surprise, the grave was relatively clear of weeds and debris.

  He looked sideways at Auntie Mai, and before he could ask, she said, “I come here sometimes. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Shamefaced, Harold again recalled his rude reaction to her appearance at his father’s funeral, how he had thought it an insult to his mother’s memory. “I don’t mind at all. I only come here once a year myself, during Qingming Festival. I know in order to be a filial son I should come more often.”

  “It must be hard for you,” Auntie Mai said. “You’re a busy man with a family.” She paused, gauging his reaction. “How are your wife and son?”

  Harold supposed there was no way he could avoid explaining why he needed to stay with Auntie Mai instead of his own home. “They’re fine, but Vicki and I . . . we’re going through some difficulties in our marriage.” It took him a great deal to admit this, but somehow it was easier with a relative stranger like Auntie Mai than with someone he knew well.

  “You can get help,” Auntie Mai offered gently.

  “I don’t think so.”

  As modern and Westernized as Vicki liked to think herself, Harold knew she would never consent to go to a marriage counselor. He himself thought marriage counselors were mostly for expats, or Taiwanese married to non-Taiwanese. Family problems needed to be kept within the family—that’s what his father had taught him. Otherwise why had he carried on with Auntie Mai while Harold’s mother was still alive?

  Harold looked at the pink slab of marble where his father’s name in Chinese characters was etched in gold. “I don’t think he would care as long as I had a son to carry on his name and his legacy. Although I’m not so sure about the second anymore.”

  “I read about your company in the newspaper,” Auntie Mai said, saving him from having to reveal the other source of his recent disgrace. “I think you were right to say what you did. Something should be done about the way those workers are treated.”