The Temple to Guanyin, Goddess of Mercy, was on the edge of the old Chinese quarter. It was a Qing-era building with elaborate red-and-blue frescoes painted along the curving eaves, ornate but run down. Inside Alice found no one except a novice monk, a boy no older than fifteen with a saffron robe and a close-shaven black fuzz covering his head.
"Wo lai bao-miao, " she said to him tentatively, I’ve come for the ritual of reporting a death at the temple.
He looked at her blankly.
"My friend has died," she explained.
He removed a packet of incense wrapped in red paper from a pile of supplies on a side table, and handed it to her. "Simao san," he said absently, Forty-three cents.
She counted out the coins.
He waved her toward the altar, a bank of Buddhas rising up behind a sweet-faced, larger-than-life statue of the Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin.
She lit the incense, stuck it into one of the sand-filled bowls, and bowed three times. "Meng Shaowen," she whispered, "on July fourteenth of this year, you drifted away from this world and went to the Yellow Springs. There you met Old Woman Wang, who gave you the wine of forgetfulness to drink. In this way you could go on to your next life with your sins, your memories, wiped away…" Another start, Alice thought. It was what she needed too.
She stood silent, staring up at the statue. Guanyin had a beautiful face, shaped like an almond, narrow black eyes, and a rosebud mouth. She stood with her hands outstretched, her colored robes swirling gracefully around her.
It occurred to Alice, for the first time, that Guanyin looked exactly like the Virgin Mary.
Strange she’d never noticed.
A note from Guo Wenxiang was slipped beneath her door at the Number One:
Mo Ai-li, I am happy to inform you that I have obtained some information about the Dutch missionary Abel Oort.
He died in Yinchuan in 1934. Tomorrow evening, if you are free, I will take you and Dr. Spencer to his grave.
She wrote the English translation beneath the spidery characters and slid the note under Spencer’s door.
Back inside, her door locked, she removed all her clothes and stood in front of the mirror. Too boyish, that was her problem. A spare, narrow-hipped frame that rose from slim, wiry legs. Not much of a waist. Her breasts swelled out only slightly. Well shaped, though, she thought, twisting her body to put one of them into silhouette. And she had a reasonably good-looking bottom. She turned and looked at it over her shoulder. Her pigu, as the Chinese called it. Round and white and no droop. Not yet. She faced front again. Her eyes trailed down her pale belly past her legs to her feet, knotty and curiously strong looking. Too long for her small body, not soft and white as they should have been, but at least they were not all wide and splayed out.
Feet were important to Chinese men, or at least they had once been. Alice, as yet another way of achieving separation with herself, had often imagined herself with bound feet. Three inches long, that had been the ideal, and the helpless woman with soft pleading and submissiveness in her eyes would sway above them in that lotus-foot gait. Take me. Alice had read that the most profound sexual act in old China was when a woman actually allowed a man to remove her foot bandages and do things with her deformed foot. She knew that many women were married to men all their lives, bore them many sons, and never let them do it.
Often Alice had imagined it: the soft-eyed woman finally saying yes, the yards and yards of white bandage spiraling into a heap on the floor, the tiny wrinkled hoof, bare, the smaller toes bent under, sometimes fallen off. The strange smell of decayed flesh mixed with sweet talcum. The foot, pitiable, longed for, lifted at last in the man’s ivory hands.
"Horace," she said, glancing at her watch in the dim flickering public phone stall-it was four forty-five in the morning where he was, "-why didn’t you tell me there was a problem?"
"There is no problem," came back the sleepy, insistent voice.
"But Roger told me there was a chance it might be-" She stopped, not wanting to say the word, cancer. "He said it might be something serious."
"Did he? Well, it’s not, though I love hearing from you. Alice darling, you haven’t called me so much in years! Not since your first week at college."
"I got a little scared when I heard your message, Horace. And then when I talked to you and Roger. You can understand that." She pressed her lips together, holding back the words and the thoughts. To be any kind of person she needed, desperately, to stay away from him. With him, she was Alice Mannegan. The Alice from the Alice Speech. Prejudice and revulsion clung to her like a smell. And it was her own personal curse that she lacked the authority to tell him so, bluntly. She just couldn’t. He was too powerful, too in control. All she could do was stay away.
And yet Horace was all she had. She was in so many ways his issue: the auburn hair, the small frame, the high intelligence. There was a confused stream of familial commitment between them that-despite everything-still survived and still had love in it. It was an alliance Alice couldn’t imagine living without.
And she knew Horace couldn’t imagine it either. "Come back, sweetheart. Please. Come back and visit me."
"I can’t right now. Soon maybe, but not now. I’m on a job."
"I miss you so much."
"I know. Me too. Horace, come on. Tell me what’s going on."
He coughed. He had stopped smoking years ago, at her urging, but he still coughed, especially in the morning. "I’m just on the antibiotic, sweetheart. Really. It’s okay."
"Are you taking care of yourself? Are you getting enough sleep?"
"Are you coming home?"
She sighed. "Horace…"
"Seriously," he continued. "It’s a big country, America. There’s lots of room. You could come back. You don’t have to be anywhere near your old dad."
"Oh, Horace," she said, instantly moving the conversation away from the word Dad, as she always did.
"You could come back and live somewhere else," he insisted.
"It’s not that. It’s just that this is my life-working-you know." She didn’t want to say what she felt, what she knew to be true: that he had ruined America for her, that she could no longer be there, that for better or worse she was entwined here in China. Though what would her life be like after-if-Horace was gone? She tried briefly to imagine a world without him. His dominance, his paternalism, vanished. Would she be free, then? Could she be herself, could she love someone?
These thoughts, first shafts of light in darkness, made her wince; she quickly closed them off. No, she thought, taking a deep, jagged breath. Losing Horace would be awful.
Her father was still talking, a stubborn edge to his voice. "Well, then, just come and visit."
"I’ll try."
"Okay."
"Horace, be sure you get enough sleep, and vitamins, and everything."
"Of course, my darling."
Please don’t die, she thought desperately, hanging up. Don’t leave me.
All through the next day she was able to think of nothing but Horace, and the possibility that he was seriously ill. By the time they got back to Yinchuan in the afternoon she had decided to call Roger. That was it. Get hold of Roger, and just demand that he tell her the whole truth. How sick was Horace? What exactly had the doctors said? She lined all this up in her mind as she walked up Sun Yat-sen.
At the public phone hall they kept her waiting. Forty-five minutes, then an hour. It was outrageous. She had never waited this long before in a public phone hall, anywhere.
She plodded back to the counter again.
"Qingwen, " she said politely to the fuwuyuan. "I’ve been waiting such a long time-"
"Destination?"
"United States. Washington, D.C."
"Oh, yes," the woman said. A sudden light flooded her eyes. "Calls to Washington take a long time."