This gesture of old-fashioned courteousness resulted in his glasses slipping off his nose and onto the ground. He didn’t seem disturbed by the accident. In a moment, he had stooped down to retrieve them and set them back in place.
“Yes,” Addie said when he was standing and facing her again, “it was only uncertain for a time whether the mission could spare us both. I was ready for a change, and in the end it worked out.”
“You must be tired,” Mr. Wickford repeated. He looked around the courtyard as if he might find a bed to offer them right there. “How long has it been since you began your travels?”
“More than two months,” Addie replied. “We left in early July.”
“Yes, from Shansi, wasn’t it? I confess I know very little of the place. Never been up north, myself; I came to Chungking years ago, and I’ve stuck here all this time. But I know it’s a far distance.” He held out his hands as if producing a gift, then grasped one hand in the other and half bowed to Poppy. Addie was nervous for his eyeglasses, but they stayed on his nose this time. “The loss of the sisters,” he said without transition, “was a great blow to us here. I confess I was far from certain that the Board would replace them this quickly. Well, not replace; they really can’t be replaced—” He blinked at the two women; it seemed that he had baffled himself.
“How long were they here?” Addie asked, trying to recall if Poppy had said anything about the women whose places they had come to fill.
“Four years and a half,” Mr. Wickford said ruefully. “They came to us in the autumn of ’94. Miss Rose, the youngest, was just eighteen at the time, and Miss Olivia was twenty-three. Between them was Miss Margaret, who turned twenty-one the very day they arrived. I remember it perfectly. Some of our congregants gathered to welcome them, and when they discovered that it was her birthday, they insisted that she eat noodles. The Chinese up north have this custom as well, I suppose?”
“We eat a good deal of noodles in Shansi,” Poppy said, “and for no particular occasion.”
Mr. Wickford nodded, satisfied. “Poor Miss Margaret—no sooner is she over the doorstep of the mission than she’s being asked to adopt Chinese customs! But she smiled very prettily and sat down to eat as if it were exactly what she had expected. This was typical of her manner. Every action she undertook was approached with enthusiasm.” He trailed off, lost in memory. Addie supposed he must have been in love with the young woman and had his heart broken. Had he ever declared himself? If so, she didn’t suppose he’d been able to make a strong case. He had a kind of softness in his manner, but it was the softness of a bruised peach.
Poppy asked what had taken the women from the mission, and he looked surprised at the question, as if he assumed that the sisters were famous all over China. “Sadly, Miss Rose fell ill last winter,” he said, “and when she still hadn’t recovered by the spring, Miss Olivia and Miss Margaret decided she had better go back to Pennsylvania. They feared it was the wet climate we have here that was preventing her recovery. The lungs, you know.” He patted his chest in sympathy. “You can’t blame them, though it would have been better if they hadn’t all decided to leave. Send her back, by all means, I said. Send her home to get well, but don’t deprive us of all your service and your companionship at once.” He looked from Addie to Poppy. “It seemed to me that only one of the sisters could have accompanied Miss Rose, and let the other one stay. Just one as a traveling companion would have sufficed. But they were devoted to one another, from the first to the last.”
“You must miss them greatly,” Addie said.
“Thank you, Mrs. Baker. Their loss was a great blow to the mission. They did much good converting the women of Chungking—but then, the unencumbered female missionaries always do. The wives and mothers have too many other concerns to put their whole hearts into the endeavor.” He stopped a moment, and then a look of horror came over his face. “Oh, dear. Please forgive me for speaking so thoughtlessly. Of course you’ve both lost your husbands.”
Addie had been beginning to look around the courtyard expectantly—she was ready to see their room and settle into their new home—but at these last words she felt her heart shivering in her chest.
“Yes,” Poppy said. “Sadly, we have.”
Mr. Wickford was silent a moment. Then he went on: “And now here you are, and we’re certainly very happy to have you both with us in Chungking.” He put his arm out and, gesturing around the courtyard, said, “I apologize that we’re in somewhat tight quarters here. The city, as you no doubt noticed as you came in, is built on steep hillsides, which makes more expansive residences a challenge. The church is much grander. It’s on flatter land a half-mile distant from here, down closer to the wharves. I’ll take you to see it later.”
“And how many people are living here?” Poppy asked.
“Right now we have twenty-two foreigners altogether at the mission, including the children, but we’re spread out, you know. Here we have five—I suppose it will be seven, now that you’ve joined us. You’ll meet the Gregorys later this afternoon. They’re all out at present.”
They continued their tour of the building. He showed them two of the rooms that opened off the courtyard; the other rooms on this level were for the servants, he explained. The first was a storage space, filled with barrels and boxes. The room next to it was a study with shelves of books lining two walls. Mr. Wickford pointed out a general system of catalog, which had prayer books and hymnals and Bibles taking up most of one wall, and the other devoted to a mixture of historical and geographical works, biographies, philosophical treatises, and a few collections of poetry. “Of course,” he said, “we have several volumes published by the Board as well. Missionaries’ accounts from other parts of the world.” They were standing in the doorway. He gestured to the left side of the room and went on, “You’ll find Africa there, and South America. There are several from the Orient, but few from the Far East.”
“Yes, where are our writers?” Poppy said. “We’ve been here long enough that it’s rather surprising we’re not better represented on these shelves.”
“My understanding is that there are two or three in the works as we speak. Reverend Jameson in Fukien—perhaps you’ve heard of him?”
Addie and Poppy both shook their heads.
“No, you might not have; he writes a good deal, but it’s intended for the audience back in America. In any case, he’s put together a chronicle of his time in China that I expect will be read rather widely, once it’s finally published. He’s been writing it for sixteen years, however, so there’s no telling when that will be. There’s always more to tell, yet at some point you must say: ‘Here is where I stop.’ That’s what I’ve said to him many a time, and I suspect I’ll have to say it many times more before he listens. Of course, I haven’t seen him for a decade.” He pulled the door closed and they backed out into the courtyard again. “This is the life we’ve chosen as missionaries, isn’t it? You say good-bye to friends without knowing when or if you’ll ever see them again.”
His words set off a kind of anxious vibration in Addie’s chest. No doubt Mr. Wickford had meant nothing by the comment, and yet it felt as if it were directed especially at her. She’d left her own sons, her own husband, and she hadn’t even said good-bye.
That night, after settling into their new room, Addie and Poppy stayed up reading books they’d borrowed from the library below. An oil lamp burned on the table between them, and they both lay on the side of the bed nearest to it, books raised to catch the light. Poppy was reading a Chinese tract, something abstruse and impossible that scholars studied and that had somehow found its way onto the mission’s bookshelves. She confessed that she was able to understand only a small part. “I do believe I’m like that idiom Old Hsing told me, about the man who rides through a field of flowers and from his height can only see the colors.” Old Hsing was an elderly man back in Lu-cho Fu who had gone up through the Mandarin scholars’ system when he was young but never passed the exams in T
’ai-yüan. After that failure, rather than try again, he had decided to become a tinker. He had spent the nearly five decades since then walking the streets of Lu-cho Fu banging his pot with a spoon, and after she arrived in town, Poppy had sometimes joined him as he walked to hear his discourses on Chinese language, philosophy, history, and literature. Her reference to the old man now made her eyes go glassy.
“I’m not sure I know that particular idiom,” Addie said. “You know I don’t have a dictionary in my mind, as you do.”
“‘Riding a horse while looking at flowers’—something like that. The meaning is that you don’t take in the details. At least, I think that’s what it means.” She rolled her neck and moved her shoulders. “It’s a pity that the language is so different down here. Who knows if they even have that saying in Chungking.”
“Surely you’ll be fine. It shouldn’t be too difficult to pick up the dialect here.”
“I certainly hope not. But who’s to tell.”
Ever since they had started inland from Shanghai, Addie had given up trying to understand much of anything that was spoken around them, yet for some reason she’d assumed that once they got to Chungking, they would settle in quickly. China was China, after all—it was absurd to think that moving from one part to another could be like crossing into a whole other country. But the people not only spoke differently here, they looked different, too. They were smaller and darker than they were in the north. The climate was different, and so was the look of the city, with its buildings nearly piled on top of one another and its narrow stair-step streets. She was not only many miles from Lu-cho Fu, she felt as if she were all the way over on the other side of the world—as far from Owen and the boys as she was from her family back home in America.
She glanced down at the page she was reading from an account of a missionary’s time in northern Africa. The winds, so filled with the red sand taken up from the hills, danced under a sky bleached as white as the bones in the butcher yard. The people trod silently under this sky, dressed all in white with their heads wrapped in turbans. This was almost how she had imagined China years before, just as strange and foreign. And perhaps the accounts she wrote to the home churches and to her family made it seem that way. The feeling was entirely different, living here, belonging here—as much as they ever could belong to the place. She would belong to Chungking, she vowed, even more than she had to Lu-cho Fu.
19
Come with me.
This was what she remembered of Poppy’s words when she thought back to the conversation about going south. There were reasons, of course. Good reasons. But in the end it was as simple as this: Poppy was leaving, and Addie couldn’t bear to go back to the life she’d had before. Where Poppy went, she would follow. And now that they were in Chungking, it was no longer an idea—something without form or shape—but a physical place, a city. It was red mud and slick streets. It was air that was full of soot and water and the stinging smoke of spicy peppers frying in oil.
In any case, it was life, which turned out to be a day-to-day matter with enough distractions to keep one from thinking too much. Most mornings, they awoke early and left before nine. They spent part of the day in the sick clinic, attending to the ill and to opium addicts. The rest of the day was spent visiting women in their homes or setting up such visits. They weren’t needed in the school, since two of the other missionaries had taken on the duty of teaching and seemed to have no desire of giving it up. This was just as well. Addie preferred to be out in the city, moving from place to place.
Mr. Wickford had given them a list of homes that were friendly to their visits. They would go out onto the streets, weaving their way among the water carriers and other coolies who seemed to make up most of the pedestrian population, asking directions and getting lost, and finally knocking on the appointed doors, where they were welcomed inside cramped houses so narrow they seemed sometimes to sway in the wind. The interiors were invariably dark, the walls stenciled with mildew. Even inside, the life of the city seemed to penetrate. The calls from coal sellers seeped through the walls, and periodically the dank scent of the river wafted in, too.
One day not long after their arrival, they headed out in search of the residence of someone named Widow Liu. They had been told by one of the ladies they visited that she would like to meet them. She was very rich, the woman informed them, though not a Christian. “Perhaps she’s interested in donating to the mission?” Poppy asked, and the woman said, perhaps—though this was accompanied by a doubtful shrug.
The widow’s house was partway up a steep hill in the western part of the city. The street that went past it was a narrow stairway with uneven stone steps. One of the students from the mission school, a boy of ten or eleven, had led them there, walking ahead at such a quick pace that several times Poppy had called out for him to go slower. Each time, he turned and grinned, showing teeth turned at terrible angles. When they arrived at the house, he knocked firmly on the door, waited until a servant had admitted them, and promised that he would be waiting to take them back to the mission when they were done. Then he skipped down the stairs again and out of sight.
It was impossible to tell from the outside how large the house was. Rather than entering through a courtyard, Poppy and Addie were admitted directly into a narrow front room that led into a slightly wider and much longer one behind it. Several doors—all closed—suggested more and more rooms beyond, leading off in different directions, like the spokes of a wheel. The ceilings were low, but the furnishings were rich enough to indicate real wealth, all carved and gleaming wood with embroidered silk cushions. The servant, a tiny woman of indeterminate age, gestured toward the back of the room, where a voice called out from the near darkness: “Come in.” Addie and Poppy moved forward together, as if down the aisle of a church.
Seated in a wide chair flanked by tables on either side was a large woman whose features were somehow blurred; even when Addie’s eyes had adjusted to the dimness, she found it difficult to quite locate her nose and mouth. They’d been told that Widow Liu had been burned badly years before, but Addie hadn’t properly prepared herself. It was somehow worse than the injured faces of the two beggars who’d crouched at the entrance to the market in Lu-cho Fu, if only because she was half shrouded in darkness.
“Welcome,” she said. “Please, sit. I’m curious to meet the new sisters.”
Addie looked at Poppy in surprise. The widow’s speech was not quite a northern one, but it was not the dialect of Chungking, either.
“Oh, we’re not sisters,” Poppy said. Stepping forward, she pushed her hand out toward Widow Liu, who squinted as if she weren’t sure what to do with it. “I always shake hands when I meet someone, Mrs. Liu. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t see well,” she said in response, and though her voice had a complaining tone, she allowed her hand to be pressed between both of Poppy’s. “And you may call me Widow Liu. I don’t like this term ‘missus,’ and I am no longer a wife.”
“I apologize,” Poppy said and glanced down, flustered. It was not a state Addie was used to seeing her in.
“And what about you? You must shake hands as well.”
Addie stepped forward and took the woman’s hand. It lay in her own like a ball of dough, the skin cold and smooth, not like skin at all. “Very pleased to meet you,” Addie said. “Thank you for allowing us to come see you in your home.”
“Where else would you see me?” She laughed without moving her face any more than it moved when she spoke. Removing her hand from Addie’s grasp, she explained, “You wouldn’t see me elsewhere because I haven’t stepped foot over the threshold of this house for twenty years. Do you know what happened twenty years ago?”
“I’m sorry,” Addie said. “I didn’t understand you. My Chinese is not very good.”
Widow Liu laughed again, but this time it was a real laugh; her cheeks moved outward and her mouth opened wider than it had before. “You speak very well. I think you must understand
nearly everything. But you’re wise to say you don’t—that can be very useful.” She lifted a hand, and Addie turned to see the servant who had led them into the room, who was now standing against one wall. “Tea,” said Widow Liu, and the servant opened one of the doors and went down a dim passageway.
“Sit down. You make me nervous standing there.”
Poppy and Addie murmured their thanks and sat side by side on a bench opposite her. It was a small bench with a thin cushion and no back. They both sat stiffly and did not look at each other.
“Twenty-one years ago, my husband died. This”—she raised a hand to her cheek, the fingers fluttering lightly upon it—“this came after. Not very long after: less than a year. I might have left, otherwise—gone out again into the world. It doesn’t matter. The world comes to me, here. The world—everyone—comes to see me, to talk to me, to ask me for things. Just like you’ve come—I’m sure you’d like some of my money for your school or your church. But tell me, where do you come from? Europe or America?”
“We both come from America,” Poppy said.
“And you knew each other there?”
“We met at a mission in Shansi.”
The servant came in, lugging a tall copper pot with a spout, steam curling out of the end. She set it on the floor near the wall and left again. Addie waited for Widow Liu to resume speaking, but their host pressed her mouth together and closed her eyes. A moment later, the servant returned carrying a tray with a heavy stone teapot, a large bowl, and three porcelain cups. The three of them watched her go about her preparations, pouring the tea and dumping the first cup, which was too bitter to drink. Once she had filled each of the cups again, she covered them and set them back on the tray. Then she resumed her place against the wall.
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