She looked hard into the courtyard, into the rooms which boxed around it, each presenting a wall which was half windows. Small panes, old-fashioned wood trim. In one of those rooms he wrote The Phenomenon of Man. Connected the scientific and the divine.
She had reread the book late the night before. Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfil them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what isdeepest in themselves. This is a fact of daily experience. Your daily experience, Pierre, she thought, gazing into his house. Did you really love her? Did you enter her heart and mind? Or did the two of you always remain outside each other? She pounded on the gate again.
"Come on," Spencer sighed. "Nobody’s here. Let’s go."
Alice took the steaming teacup and extended it to Mrs. Meng with two hands, the old way. The aged lady’s face creased with pleasure. She liked the old customs.
"Eh, Six Tranquillities Black! Where did you find it?"
"Hong Kong." Alice poured her own cup. "It’s nothing, a trifle, but I know how you like it." She glanced at the large brick of tea wrapped in a torn page of the South China MorningPost which she had placed on Meng Shaowen’s table. Another forgotten grace of old Peking, the constant affectionate gift-giving.
"It is I who should serve you, when you come to my home," the old lady protested happily. The room was dark, the slatted shutters closed against the July heat. Long shadows fell over all Meng Shaowen’s accumulated treasures: the Qing dynasty embroideries in their dusty frames, the bed quilt which had come from Meng’s own mother, the luminous sparrow carved from white jade, the photos of her son, Jian; and, on Meng’s desk, the ornate old European-style clock, ticking off the days and months and years of life that still remained. Mrs. Meng shivered. Despite the summer heat she pulled her sweater closer.
"You, serve me? No, Mother Meng. And haven’t we known each other too many years to talk polite?" Alice smiled at the old lady, who was always the first person she called upon returning from any trip, always the first person she went to visit. Yet at the same moment Alice noticed how old Mrs. Meng suddenly seemed. Was it last winter, or the winter before, that Meng Shaowen’s hair had gone so white and her fingers had twisted into the tangled briars of arthritis? Or was it back when her husband died? Was it then that Mrs. Meng’s eyes, once snapping sharp through long nights of debate over the Chinese classics of literature and philosophy, had begun to rheum over?
The Chinese lady doubled forward in a raking cough. "Forgive me, girl child. Though it’s the time of heat there’s cold in my lungs."
"Nothing to forgive."
Mrs. Meng reached out and brushed a stray hair from Alice’s forehead.
Alice clasped the old woman’s hand.
"It’s my sorrow, I never had a daughter."
The words hung. But you had a son, Alice thought. Jian. And I almost married him. And if I had I’d be your daughter now.
"They have a daughter," Mrs. Meng said. "Jian and his wife."
"Yes. I know."
"Little Lihua! She’s my heart and liver!" The old woman’s face wrinkled up in fondness. Then went serious. "Of course, girl child, Jian’s wife is not like you! She is Chinese. She is not free with her mind like you foreigners. Jian once said he never knew any other woman like you. He said he could talk to you about anything."
Alice knew this was probably true. Most Chinese were educated through rigorous rote training. To even read books one had to memorize four, five thousand characters. So to a Chinese intellectual, more used to deduction than questioning, rarely presented in conversation with the unexpected, a Western woman-a smart, open-minded, sassy woman-was a marvelous companion. But only a companion. There seemed to be in the Chinese men she had known, even in Jian, the only one she had actually loved, the same hesitation she had to admit she felt within herself. They were exhilarating companions. Fantastically exciting as companions. But marriage?
"Perhaps this road is better," Mrs. Meng said gently. "It would have been hard for you and Jian. You can never be Chinese."
"Of course not," she said instantly. Yet Alice had begun to feel, during the year she was with Jian, that she had a place she belonged in the Meng family. A clan, a mother. A Chinese mother who taught her all the old techniques she herself had used to keep house during the decades of privation: how to maximize the things that were rationed and stave off hunger by using the hou men, the back door, to obtain more. Wash clothes in a bucket. Cook with a handful of coal. Buy slowly, cautiously, use the windowsill as your refrigerator in the winter.
Mrs. Meng had recited the history of the Meng family, told the names of all the ancestral souls who now dwelt beyond the Yellow Springs. Alice would always listen closely, Jian beside her, bored. Like so many modern young intellectuals he was impatient with feudal superstitions. Though he, an astute student of history, at least respected the past.
Jian. The bright, narrow black eyes, the expressive hands. Now a professor at Bei Da, Beijing University. Jian, loving her in his narrow bed in his small room, whispering to her in his musical, beautifully modulated Mandarin, of her body, its strange-feeling skin, the exotic way she walked and talked, and of his studies: the majestic tide of Chinese civilization, revolutions, upheavals, the march of legends and dynasties. Then the Khans and the Ming and the Qing and the Republicans and then the Warlords and finally, as if in a last gasp of Luanshi, Chaos, before the Communists nailed things down strangling tight, the rampaging Japanese. He had taught her that China’s power lay in its endurance, its shoudeliao.
Jian. So open minded about some things. He knew he was not her first man but he never asked her to explain. Then, after a year he asked her, awkward and limpid at once, if she would come with him to his superiors at the danwei and "talk about love." Marriage! She said she needed to think about it. She knew instantly, sinkingly, that Horace would ruin it. He would wage some kind of war that would force her and Jian apart. And that was exactly what happened.
And since then no man seemed to be what she wanted.
"Yes," she said haltingly to Mother Meng now, "I often think back and forth on it. If not for Horace, Jian and I would have married."
"It’s a bad road for you. Your baba forbade you." Meng used the familiar, intimate word for father even though Alice always referred to her father only by his first name. "And the blood and the flesh can never be untied. Isn’t it so? But, girl child"-Meng lowered her voice-"listen to me. How old are you now?"
"Thirty-six."
Mrs. Meng shook her head. "Eh. Too pitiable! How can one tell how old a foreigner is? So you can no longer bear children."
"But in America, Mother, lots of women-"
"Ai-li." Meng drew her closer. "Children are for young women with strong bodies and innocent hearts. As you get older you eat too much bitterness. There’s a legend, you know. It’s like this. When you die you approach the Yellow Springs. Old Woman Wang waits for you there with the wine of forgetfulness. You drink this wine, you forget the life you’ve just finished. You are pure for the next life. You are yourself. And while you’re still young this self is true-because all the memories, the pain, the burdens, have not started to come back to you yet."
"What do you mean, come back to you? Doesn’t the wine erase everything?"
"By the last dynasty, people were burying the dead with cups that had holes in them." A smile touched at Mrs. Meng’s thin, corrugated mouth. "Old Woman Wang didn’t mind if you brought your own cup."