Hidden Flower

by Pearl S. Buck

  She faced him and compelled his answering stare.

  “Josephine!” he said loudly, “you know that law was made against the niggra!”

  “It’s the law,” she repeated.

  He had got up and left her, but before he could sleep he had called his own lawyer, Bancroft Haynes. It was true. The law of the state did forbid Allen’s marriage, because the girl had in her the blood of Asia. Now he had to tell the boy somehow.

  The door opened and Allen came in with Josui. Mr. Kennedy had dreaded this moment and here it was. He rose slowly to his feet, staring at the girl his son held by the hand, a shy lovely girl, whose cream-white skin was flooding pink and whose great dark eyes were humid with fear. Why, he thought, what a sweet face, what a timid child, a suffering child, anxious to please, pleading to be understood! All his pity, ready and trembling, rushed toward her.

  “This is Josui,” Allen said.

  Mr. Kennedy crossed the room heavily and put out his large soft right hand. “I am glad to see you, ma’am,” he said with his finest courtesy. “You have come a long way and I make you welcome.” He felt her small firm hand in his and he pressed it gently. “You must be tired and maybe a little homesick.”

  “Oh, no, thank you,” Josui replied in a voice just above a whisper. She was overpowered by Mr. Kennedy’s size. So big a man, but instantly she saw how kind. She smiled, her lips quivering and her eyes larger than ever as she looked up at him.

  Mr. Kennedy gazed down on her almost tenderly, relieved to see her so obviously not colored. Why, there were plenty of girls in the best Southern families who were darker by a good deal. He would certainly tell Josephine.

  “You’re a little bit of a thing, aren’t you?” he said. He turned to his son. “Are they all as little as she is?”

  “Josui isn’t so little, Dad,” Allen replied. He was heartened. His father had responded at once to Josui’s delicate, almost touching charm, and he was proud of her. His father would understand how a man could fall in love with her. His father would be on their side.

  Between the two tall men Josui suddenly smiled. She was no longer afraid. This big fat good man who was her father-in-law would help them and everything would be nice. She liked him, she could never be afraid of him, she would be very happy living in his house. It was no wonder that Allen was wonderful, he being the son of such a father. And she also would be a perfect daughter-in-law.

  She pulled away from Allen. “Please, Father, sit down,” she exclaimed. “Allen, we don’t have some tea. Call, please, and tell downstairs to bring up tea and some little eating things.”

  “I don’t want anything to eat,” Mr. Kennedy said in the same tender voice. She was such a cute little thing! “I’ve only just finished my breakfast and Allen will tell you that I’m a hearty eater at breakfast. But then I eat very little in the middle of the day. Night is when I have dinner.”

  He sat down and she hovered about him. “Some whisky-soda?” she coaxed, “or a coke, maybe?” She had learned to drink and say coke, while they traveled, because she did not like alcohol.

  “Well, a whisky-soda, maybe,” Mr. Kennedy said to please her.

  So Allen must order it and she was not at ease until the boy brought it up on a tray and then she would not let Allen touch the glass or the ice, but she must do everything herself. Only when Mr. Kennedy was served, when she had carried a little table to his side and had set everything exactly upon it and had actually seen him with the glass in his hand, was she at ease. She stood waiting and anxious until he had taken a first sip.

  “It is nice?”

  “Perfect,” he replied heartily, willing to say anything to please her. “Now you sit down, honey, and rest yourself. I want to hear you talk. I want to know how my son is treating you. He better be nice to you!”

  “Sit down, Josui,” Allen commanded.

  She sat down at once, not answering, her graceful little body still unrelaxed, looking from one to the other of the two men.

  “Does she spoil you like this all the time?” Mr. Kennedy asked of his son.

  “It’s the Japanese idea of what a woman ought to do,” Allen said, smiling.

  “They’re wonderful people,” his father said.

  Then he remembered. Long habit made it easy for him to forget what was sad or hard or troublesome and for the moment he had forgotten. But of course he couldn’t talk before this little creature. Her heart would be broken and it must not be. He and Allen must think what to do. He must help his son to do the right thing. But what was the right thing exactly?

  He became grave and Josui, reflecting at once the mood of those nearest her, looked at Allen and was afraid again. She wished that he could speak Japanese, for then she could ask him what she had done that was wrong. He did not look at her, and then suddenly she could not bear the silence and the father’s almost sorrowful gaze not at her or at Allen but at his glass, the carpet at his feet, the window. She stole across the floor to put her hand on Allen’s shoulder. “Do I something wrong?” she inquired in a whisper.

  “No, of course not,” Allen said in his natural voice. “But I think my father wants to talk to me alone, Josui. Suppose you go in the other room.”

  She knew instantly that something was very wrong but she obeyed like a child. She walked away to the bedroom door, opened it, went in and then closed it noiselessly behind her.

  Mr. Kennedy knew then that he had to face it. There was no escape. He put down his glass. “Son, I have bad, bad news.”

  Allen waited, not answering.

  “Had I better give it to you straight?” Mr. Kennedy asked.

  “Of course, Dad.”

  “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

  He leaned forward in his chair and put his elbows on his knees and his big soft hands hung between his knees. He clasped them, his fingers twisted. “Son, your mother is right, I guess. It’s not a legal marriage.”

  “What do you mean?” Allen demanded.

  “Not in our state,” his father said heavily. “There’s an old law, forbidding marriage between the races. Your mother found it somehow. I reckon some of the ladies she goes with heard about it somewhere. Maybe she knew all the time but I don’t believe she did.”

  “That old law was meant for the colored people,” Allen said coldly.

  “That’s right,” his father said. He was sweating terribly and big drops burst out of his high forehead and ran down his cheeks by his ears. “But it seems—forgive me, son—that it includes everybody not white.”

  “Who said so?”

  “I asked Bancroft Haynes and he said it did.”

  He got up and went to the window and stood looking out so that Allen could get over it by himself for a few minutes.

  “We don’t have to live in this state,” Allen said.

  “Of course not,” Mr. Kennedy turned around, relieved that thus his son spoke. “The thing to do is to go to another state and go through a civil marriage. Then you’re safe. If you’re sure what you want to do.”

  “Why do you say if I am sure?” Allen demanded. He was suddenly angry with his father, outraged at the implication of doubt.

  Mr. Kennedy answered peaceably. “You know your own mind, son. I’m just saying.”

  “We will certainly go to another state,” Allen continued in the same angry voice. “We’ll go to New York. I’ll find a job there. You can tell Mother that I’ll never come home again.”

  “I’m not going to tell her any such thing,” Mr. Kennedy said reprovingly. He sat down again and took up the glass and drank it half empty and set it down again. “I don’t think it would be right of you even to think it. I hope you’ll come home often. You’re her only son.”

  “She doesn’t treat me like one,” he retorted.

  “Now you’re acting childish,” his father said. “She loves you too much, I reckon. She can’t cut herself off from you and that’s the trouble. The placenta still bleeds. It’s not just you but it’s all the life that she
looks for from you. When she found she couldn’t have another child, I thought she would kill herself with crying. I thought she’d never get over it. I held her in my arms all night long, sitting up in that old chair in my room. We couldn’t either of us sleep. I don’t think she’s ever forgiven God for that. She doesn’t say her prayers at night—hasn’t for years, though she goes to church every Sunday. But she holds it. She even holds it up against me in some way I don’t understand, though God knows it’s not my fault.”

  “She wants everything her own damned way,” Allen growled.

  Mr. Kennedy evaded this. “She’s a pitiful, wonderful, childish creature,” he said with musing tenderness. For the first time he spoke to his son as to a man. “She’s so strong and capable and managing and bossy that sometimes I can’t hardly stand her. And then I remember the other side of her, the stricken child she is. I reckon you can’t be expected to understand that, son. But I do. She’s everything in her own way, and I’ve found her interesting. I couldn’t have loved a woman that wasn’t interesting.”

  He glanced at his son with a shy almost placating look, an unspoken plea, implicit in the revelation. Allen was touched and embarrassed. He could not see his mother in the role of wife. It was a nakedness that must be covered at once. He got to his feet almost briskly, eager to evade it.

  “I can see that you have done your best for us,” he declared. “Now it is up to me, Dad. You’ll stay for luncheon with us, won’t you? We’ll get on our way this afternoon, I think. I’ll be sending for my clothes and my books.”

  “I won’t stay today,” Mr. Kennedy said. He felt very tired and he was not sure he wanted to see that pretty child again. “I’ll come and see you again when you’re settled.”

  “I’ll let you know,” Allen said. They clasped hands strongly, and he resisted an impulse to put his head down on his father’s heavy bowed old shoulder. Instead he held his head high, and spoke in a resolute and strong voice. “I am glad you gave it to me straight. It makes everything clear. I know where I am.”

  Mr. Kennedy cleared his throat and tried to think of something worth saying. He felt his knees tremble and he wished that he could lie down for a while.

  “Well, son, good-by. Call on me if you need me. I’m always the same.”

  “I know,” Allen said. The familiar phrase was freighted with pathetic memory. His father had spoken these words at every parting. And yet there was never anything really that he could do.

  He smiled steadily until he closed the door upon his father’s retreating form and then he sat down alone and leaned his head in his hands.

  In the other room Josui waited. Honor forbade her to look or to listen when father and son talked together. Nevertheless she knew that something had been said, something told and heard, which was dangerous to her. She stood immobile in the middle of the hotel bedroom. She was tired, not only from the journey but because it had been many years since she had sat on chairs and slept on beds lifted from the floor. The muscles of her legs ached from strain, and her back was sore from the soft mattresses. She was weary, too, from determination not to feel bewildered and certainly not to appear so. How little she and Allen really knew each other! A heavy burden is put upon love when upon love must lean also understanding. Her love was strong enough but was his? She had thought so, and she did still think so.

  She heard the door of the other room close and when he did not call her she opened the door between them softly and looked in. He sat there with his head in his hands. What terrible grief had befallen him?

  “Allenn!”

  He jumped at the sound of her voice, and as though he had forgotten that she was there. His hands fell from his face.

  “Allenn, what is it?” she cried. She came in swiftly and knelt at his side. “Tell me, Allenn! How is it?”

  He was ashamed to tell her. How could he explain to her the need, which he supposed was real, for this law forbidding such union and how explain that which could not be explained, that a net laid for others had caught her, for whom it was not first designed? As well explain how a barrier, laid for wasps, prevented also a butterfly!

  “My mother isn’t well,” he said awkwardly. “My father says we must wait until she feels better. For the time being we must find a place to live by ourselves.”

  He saw her look change and he hurried on. “You know, Pittysing”—this was his playful name for her, devised from the play of love—“in America we don’t live at home with parents. I assure you it is not done. Most young people here would hate it, and I don’t think the older ones would like it for long. Maybe by Christmas we can go home for a bit. Meanwhile—”

  He got up, thrust his hands into his pockets and walked about the room, talking while she knelt there watching, her white face composed and her great black eyes expressionless as they followed him.

  “New York is the place for us, a great city where all sorts of people live and live together. You see, Pittysing, my home town is such a small place, and everybody has lived there for generations—a dozen families or so and their servants and satellites—put it that way. I don’t believe they have ever seen a Japanese.”

  “Then it is me,” Josui said.

  He had allowed too much to escape him. He stopped in front of her and stood, trying to smile, as he looked down into her upturned face.

  “Remember how your father felt about me? Well!”

  “But in America?”

  “Oh, yes, in America, my love! Especially in America! Had you forgotten? You were in Los Angeles until you were a big girl. Don’t you remember?” His tone was bitter.

  She did remember. She let her head droop and tears hung on her long straight eyelashes. “I thought it was changed,” she whispered.

  “Changing, perhaps,” he admitted. “I am part of the change, so are you.”

  She lifted her head at this, and met his eyes fearfully.

  “This makes me feel lonely,” she said in a small voice.

  “Two wandering stars,” he agreed, “seeking to make a universe of their own. It can be done, Pittysing.”

  He took her hands and pulled her to her feet. “No more kneeling, please, Mrs. Kennedy,” he said. “And I think I shall not call you Pittysing any more. It’s a honeymoon name. The honeymoon is over, my girl. Life begins. I shall call you Jo Kennedy. That’s good. Sounds American, eh?”

  He was brave with anger, courageous with rebellion. To hell, he thought, with the old and the past. He would get out of the army, go to New York, and find a job. He would become a good husband and provider. A father? He recoiled at the thought. Well, if so, an inconspicuous place, no neighbors, a cell in a beehive, a little apartment where nobody asked anybody anything.

  “Come along, Jo,” he said. He gave her a resolute hug, an embrace fired with no passion except wrath. “Get your things together. We’re going north.”

  Outwardly the change was easy. He was able to get a job without difficulty with a weekly magazine. His references were excellent, and he had the look and the experience. He showed his honorable discharge from the armed services, and his pay check was enough for the small apartment he found on Riverside Drive. Josui even found friends, a Chinese girl married to a Columbia student, and a Japanese couple studying education and child psychology.

  But the change had come between them. She and Allen began each to have a secret lonely life, while they clung together in determined love and for a time with passion more intense than they had ever known. And they were not children of the slums to whom this neat little apartment might represent a sort of heaven. They were not even children of apartment houses, elevators, little terraces, and high sooty roof tops. They were children of space and plenty. She tidied her tiny kitchen and thought of the vistas of her home in Kyoto, the latticed screens drawn away and one room opening into another as far as eye could see. He hung his clothes in a yard-square closet and thought of his rooms in the big-pillared house, his house by inheritance, a possession which could not be taken away fr
om him who was the lawful heir. They thought in secret of gardens and pools, and Josui sleeping dreamed of the splash of the waterfall thousands of miles away. To her, too, belonged the waterfall, the pools and the latticed house, the treasures of the tokonoma. Neither would for one instant have given up their love, but each dreamed of what they did not have and perhaps would never have.

  And each, too, kept secret a deepening hatred of the city. It was a transient life. Who can live in a honeycomb of cells and call it life? An embryo, perhaps, but not a living moving feeling human being, Josui thought in that secret life she guarded so well from Allen that he never dreamed it there, possessed as he was by his own furtive dreams. He could not yield his hopes, indeed, his determination, to find a way to gain his home again.

  He became increasingly angry with thwarted love of home and childhood and parents. He thought incessantly about his parents, living in the house he loved, and he was angry with his father even more than with his mother. The man should insist and demand, should force his will upon the woman. Not to do so was weakness in the male. He did not know that he himself was a man very different from his father. Though he had been too fastidious to enjoy a prostitute who belongs to any man, yet the subjection of a conquered country had changed him as it changes all men. There are men who feel compelled to force conquered women to submit to them, it is the final phase of war, the completion of personal victory. He would have declared himself not one of these, and yet he was. He was arrogant as his father was not, insistent for himself as his father was not. He was one of a generation who are physically dominant, who have conquered by body strength, and by so much did he differ from his father, who had no wish to dominate or to control anyone.

  So thinking, day after day, Allen became unconsciously more insistent, more demanding, more forceful even with Josui. She was astonished, not understanding why what she did was so often wrong. She was a perfectionist, a creature so anxious to do right and only right that she could spend hours arranging a bowl of flowers on the table in the corner of the small living room which was also a dining room. Yet attention to one detail did not prevent her determination to complete everything before Allen came home. She had no maid and wanted none, remembering that few women in America have servants. Also how would she occupy her time? She planned that when winter came, when she could not go out into the parks, she would attend some school. The city was full of schools. She sent for catalogues and studied them while she waited for Allen to come home on the nights when he had to work late. Every week there were such nights, and always one final night of madness when the magazine was, as he told her, “put to bed.” Sometimes it was dawn before he came in and always she waited.