“I’ll send the urn to you in a couple of weeks, if you’ll give me the address,” the man at the crematory had said.
They had looked at each other, mother and son.
“He’s never left New York after he returned from Peking,” his mother said.
“He was happy here,” Rann said, and thought of Serena.
“You can rent—or buy—an alcove here,” the man suggested.
In the end that was what they had done. They had left the final dismantling of the apartment to Sung, and then suddenly his mother had changed her mind.
“Your grandfather left everything to you, son, even this apartment which he owned. Why not keep it? Sung can take care of it. You may not want to stay in a little Midwestern town. You will want a place of your own, someday, if not now, and in New York, doubtless. He has left you very comfortably well off. You can certainly afford it.”
So they had left the apartment to Sung, and just as it was. The thought of it pleased him. He could come back.
“I will come back,” he had told Sung.
“Please, sir—soon,” Sung had begged.
Now sitting next to the window in the airplane he watched the clouds floating about them in the sky. He was aware of monstrous bewilderment, shock, weariness. When his father died it had been expected and prepared for. His mother had prepared him and so indeed had his father.
“Your father is approaching his next life,” his mother had told him.
“Is there another life?” he had asked.
“I want to believe there is,” she had said firmly.
He had accepted this, as in those days he had accepted everything, it seemed to him now. And his father had spoken easily of his future beyond Earth.
“Of course, we don’t know, but with the passionate will to live that we humans seem to have, there’s the probability that life continues. It’s all right with me either way. I’ve had a wonderful time here—love and work and you, my son. What a glorious life you will have! Joy to you—”
“Don’t,” he had whispered, fighting off his tears. “Don’t talk about it!”
His father had only smiled, but they had never talked of death again. One of these days when he was ready to face it, he must think it all through—gather all the evidence. Now he wanted only to live. He leaned back in his seat and fell suddenly asleep. The plane was jarring to the ground before he woke.
THE OLD LIFE FELL INTO PLACE. The house enfolded him. Here he had been infant and child. Here he had learned to walk and talk and wonder. For a few days, even weeks, it was comfort to fall into a familiar niche, to wake in the morning in his old room, to go downstairs to the logs blazing in the fireplace, the gentle clatter of his mother preparing breakfast, to know the day lay ahead of him, his to possess. Neighbors came in to greet him. After a while even Donald Sharpe called on the telephone.
“Well, Rann—back from your jaunt abroad? What’s next?”
“I don’t know, sir—I suppose military service somewhere. My induction notice has arrived and I’m to go on Thursday for the preliminaries.”
“No idea where, I suppose?”
“No, sir.”
“Try to come and see me before you leave!”
“Thank you, sir.”
He would not go. He knew too much now. He was no longer a boy. And yet he was not quite a man. There were these years facing him, a barrier between past and future, years when he must lend his body to his country, years which he must spend in some unknown place, performing an unknown duty. There was no use in planning until these years were over, and still he could not keep from planning.
He listened, without hearing, to his mother’s determinedly cheerful chatter. There was a comfort in being with her but that was all. Yet though he knew his life had now proceeded beyond her ken or reach, he was aware that she, too, knew this and so she did not question him about Lady Mary or about Stephanie. Of Lady Mary he did not speak, but he told her of Stephanie, briefly and casually, at breakfast one morning.
“The sort of girl who is—well, one of a kind. She isn’t French, nor is she Chinese, and certainly not American, and yet somewhat each.”
He was silent for so long that his mother encouraged him.
“She sounds interesting, at least!”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Yes, certainly she is interesting. Very complex, perhaps! I feel I’d have to be a good deal older before I’d understand her.”
He paused again, undecided, and then went on.
“You’ll be amused by this, Mother! Her father is an old-fashioned Chinese, though he’s lived in Paris for so many years. He has no son, and it seems that when this is the case a Chinese may ask his son-in-law to become his son and take his name. Well, he asked me to be that son-in-law!”
He was half-laughing, in some embarrassment, and she laughed aloud. “How could you refuse such an offer?”
“Well, Stephanie had warned me. She told me she didn’t want to marry at all. And certainly I don’t… not at this point in my life when I don’t know—can’t know—my future.”
She grew suddenly serious. “Have you any idea inside yourself, Rannie? Of what you want to do—and be?”
“No, except that I don’t want to work for anyone. I don’t want to be part of a corporation or in any organization I can’t control. I want to work by myself, for myself. It’s the only way to ensure my independence. I know, of course, that whatever else I do, I will also write. It’s already sort of a compulsion in me.”
She looked at him with troubled eyes. “You’re taking a great risk, aren’t you?”
“But on myself,” he said.
They were silent for a moment. He piled pancakes on his plate again. His appetite was enormous.
“Eat,” she always said. “You have a big body and very little flesh on your bones.”
“Well,” she said now, “you’re lucky in one way, at least. Your grandfather left you all he had. We won’t know yet just how much it is, but he wrote me that you wouldn’t starve, and that you would always be comfortable if you were careful.”
“He wrote that?”
“Yes, before you came home. I think he knew he hadn’t much time.”
“We liked each other, Mother—though I didn’t know what to make of him.”
He hesitated and then told her what he had not planned to tell her.
“You don’t know it—but he married again, after Grandmother died.”
He watched her face and suddenly it grew hard. “It was never a marriage. She simply moved in—Serena Woolcotte. Oh, there was some sort of civil ceremony but not a proper marriage. We knew about her.”
“We?”
“My aunt and I.”
“But he never told—”
“There are things one doesn’t need to be told. Everyone knew Serena.”
“What was she?”
“A woman whose father had too much money and too little time and left her to meddle in men’s lives.”
“Mother!”
“Well, she did!”
“But that doesn’t tell me anything—meddle in men’s lives!”
“She had nothing else to do and that’s why I warned you against your Lady Mary!”
He stopped short, not wanting to talk about his Lady Mary. He got up from the breakfast table. He had been notified to report for induction, and this was the day.
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER HE WAS IN KOREA, stationed at a base on the line between north and south. Behind him lay the crowded miles of South Korea. In front of him were the mountains of North Korea. A bridge toward the left as he faced north was connection and prevention. If he crossed that bridge, he would be shot down. He had no intention of crossing it; indeed, he had a horror of it. At night he woke himself out of the nightmare that unwittingly he had crossed it. Day after day he patrolled the line between north and south, he and others with him, a dull, dangerous, mechanical task from which there was no relief or recreation—or at least recreation that attracted him.