“I don’t want your help,” Louise pouted.
“Nevertheless I must help you,” Mary said in the same steadfast voice. “What did you tell Pa that made him so angry?”
Tears came into Louise’s eyes. Her courage was not deeply rooted and now it began to fade. What had seemed only a sweet exciting secret when she was with Estelle had become a frightful thing when she was besieged by her family. Chastity for a woman, seemingly so lightly considered by her schoolmates, returned to what she had been taught by her Chinese family — the test of all that woman was.
“What did you tell Pa?” Mary insisted. Her voice, in spite of herself, became stern.
“I told him — I told him—” Thus truth began to trickle from her with her tears.
“Go on,” Mary commanded.
“When he said — when he said — he would never consent to — to an American son-in-law—” she began now to cry in good earnest.
“You said—” Mary prompted her relentlessly.
“I said it was too late!” The words came out of Louise in one burst.
“You haven’t married Philip secretly!” Mary cried.
Louise shook her head, and then she said in a very small voice, “No. But I can never marry anybody else — because — because—”
She could not finish but now Mary knew. She sat quite still, gazing at Louise, who turned and flung herself face down on the bed and sobbed aloud. There had been many times when Louise had lain there sobbing for some small trouble and always Mary had gone to her to soothe and comfort her, as the elder sister. But now she did not move. She felt sick and she did not want to touch Louise. It had never occurred to her to imagine that Louise would have let Philip — she could not put the thought into words, even in her own mind. That Louise could be silly, could allow Philip perhaps to kiss her and fondle her, that she could dream of his marriage to her, all was believable. But not this—
She rose, not able to endure her own sickness, and she went to the closet and took out a dress for the street. Without speaking, while Louise sobbed on, Mary changed into this blue dress and brushed her hair and touched her lips with red. It was not often she painted her lips, but now they felt pale and dry. Her face in the mirror was pale and her eyes looked strange. Louise looked sidewise at her in the midst of her weeping. “Where are you going?” she asked.
“Outdoors,” Mary said. “I want to be alone.”
Louise broke into a fresh wail. “Aren’t you going to help me?”
Mary’s hand was on the door, but she paused. “Yes, I will help you, but just now I don’t know how. I shall have to think.”
She went out and closed the door softly, and softly she crept down the stairs. In her father’s study she heard her parents’ voices murmuring and she tiptoed past the door and out into the hall. The elevator man was talkative and she could scarcely force herself to answer his questions. “Yes, thank you,” she said, “my brother in China is quite well. Yes, he likes it there. Of course, after all it is our home. Yes, some day doubtless we will all return to China. Yes, of course we do like it here — but it is not our country.”
She was out in the street at last. It was hot and dusty with the late summer lingering into autumn and people looked tired. She walked slowly toward the river, biting her lips and trembling as she went. She longed exceedingly for James. Yet how could this ever be put into a letter? And what could she do indeed? Her parents, she knew, were worse than useless. They would be utterly bewildered. In old China Louise would have been put to death. But old China was gone. Young Chinese women since the war — well, there had been plenty of American GI babies with Chinese mothers. That would be no argument with her parents. In a strange mixed fashion, for all her father’s modernity, he still belonged to the old China because for him China was something Confucius had made, and Confucius would have said that certainly Louise ought to die, because she had dishonored the family. Her father would not say Louise had to die, but he would make up his mind never to forgive her.
Mary sat down on a bench by the river and lifted her eyes toward the bridge. It shimmered a beaten silver, and in the haze of noonday the arch lifted high above reality and the distant end was miragelike. James seemed lost to her, as though he were in another world. China was another world, a better one than this, she ardently believed. She felt profoundly lonely without her brother, the only person in the family with whom she could communicate. She had never, as Louise had, thrown herself into her school life. Around her was always the cloak of indifference, of being Chinese, and on guard alike against hostility or too lavish adoration, she had maintained herself separate. Only James had crossed that barrier and with him alone had she found friendship and companionship. Since he had gone, she had scarcely spoken to anyone beyond the casual talk of small necessities.
Now her pent-up heart demanded frankness, and as she sat there, a small solitary figure, resolutely ignoring the tentative eyes of curious men as they strolled past and yet feeling them with a sort of subdued anger, residual from her disgust with Louise, she began to think of Philip. There was Philip. He, too, had been responsible, and he ought to know what he had done to their family. A Chinese girl was part of her family until she married and became part of another family, and nothing could separate her. What had happened to her brought its weight upon them all. She ought to go and talk to Philip. If James were here he would talk to him, without doubt or hesitation, but James was not here, and Peter was too young, and so she must do it, for obviously her father could not. Her father could be angry and he could even beat Louise but he would not lower himself to talk to Philip. He would say and perhaps rightly that Louise was to blame because the woman is always to blame.
She sighed and then got up and crossed the street to a drugstore. There at the pay telephone she called Estelle Morgan. A maid answered. Miss Estelle was not back yet from the sea-shore. Was Philip there? Mr. Philip was just leaving for an appointment at his father’s office. Could she speak to him, then? It was urgent. A moment later Philip’s fresh tenor voice came over the wires.
“Hello?”
She knew him a little, not much. She had seen him two or three times when he came for Louise, but usually Louise met him outside. She remembered him as tall, and somewhat too slender for his height, and she remembered that his face looked too young and perhaps too fine-featured for a man.
“Philip Morgan?”
“Yes.”
“This is Mary Liang. Could you — may I — talk with you for a few minutes? Not over the telephone, I mean. It’s — it’s quite important.”
A second pause, then two and three before he answered. “Yes, of course, Mary. Only it just happens that I have to meet my father. He’s waiting at the office for me.”
“If I got into a taxi, could you wait for me and we could drive downtown together?”
There was a second’s pause again, then two, then three.
“All right, Mary.”
He hung up the receiver and she flew to the door and caught a passing taxi and gave the address while she slammed the door.
In ten minutes she drew up before the quiet house in Sutton Place, and then she saw Philip come out of the door. He smiled in answer to the doorman’s greeting, and she caught a fleet look of surprise on that doorman’s face when he opened the taxi and saw her there.
“Hello, Mary,” Philip said. He sat down beside her.
“Hello,” she replied, and felt his wary diffident mood.
“Stays hot, doesn’t it?” he asked, trying to be casual.
“Yes,” she replied. Then she took her heart in her hands. She had only a few minutes. But she needed only a few minutes to find out all she needed to know.