“Too high,” someone shouted—a young woman with traditional bangs and an army jacket. “It is too high a price.”
“Have you considered the alternative?” Mourning Dove said.
There was silence for a moment, and then a lean young man in the third row shouted, “China has coal, and wind, and tides.”
Mourning Dove was lighting another cigarette. When she closed her Zippo she looked at the man who had spoken and said, “Coal blackens the skies and the lungs. It is dangerous to mine. The wind and tides are a perpetual delight, but they will not power the factories of Hangchow nor warm the hearths of Shanghai. That is a dream.”
The young man only looked more furious. “Coal may be burned with precision and the skies made safe from its breath. One must take pains.”
Before Mourning Dove could speak I said, in English, “Coal has its own tax of death, its own blight. I am a merchant of coal and speak from experience.”
A heavy man with a Charlie Chan mustache sat in the second row, wearing a business suit. “Who speaks?” he said loudly. “Who is this pale devil with the voice of a bear?”
“I’m Benjamin Belson,” I said. “I do not endorse Mourning Dove’s decision to build reactors. I cannot speak for the dead. But the decision was not a foolish one and Madame Soong has taken responsibility for it.”
Several voices cried out, “Foreign devil!” And then Charlie Chan stood and said, “Your English tongue is that of the killer Macbeth. Take your English and go home.”
I remembered those student rioters who had burned my effigy and told me to go home. I am proud of my Chinese; it was a thrill to use it. “I am home” I said in Chinese. “I am a citizen of the People’s Republic, and Mourning Dove Soong is my foster mother. I bring a new uranium, star-born, that will not destroy life.”
At my first words in their own language, many of them were clearly shocked. Several seated themselves, as if mulling it over. But the older man was relentless. “I cannot accept your professed gift to China. China has been promised gifts from white devils before. Opium was such a gift.”
“I am not British,” I said angrily. “I love China. I am dismayed to see its ancient culture discarded and its men become soft. But China’s greatness is everywhere manifest, as was that of America in the time of my grandfathers. I too mourn the accident at Wu and know the cost of China’s wealth is incalculable. In this case the dead speak.”
The old man was adamant. “Only the devil calculates with lives.”
Mourning Dove was watching his face. She spoke directly to him. “Someone must,” she said.
They stared at each other for a long moment. Finally he said, between his teeth, “Murderess,” and sat down. Another voice, from the back, picked up the cry of “Murderess” and then another. I heard a man shout, “Capitalist!”
And then a voice rang out from behind me and I turned to see Isabel standing by me with her hands on her hips, facing the audience. The part in the curtain was still moving from where she had just stepped through. She was in Lady Macbeth’s russet gown, but the stage makeup was gone from her face and it looked pale under the lights.
“What kind of Communists are you?” she said.
“English,” someone hissed.
Isabel’s voice could have waked the dead. “I am not English,” she said, spacing the words out. “And you are hypocrites. You make me ashamed for the great Mao and for his discipline.” She pointed at the old man. “Your jacket is from Saks. Solar power cannot make such jackets.”
Several of the more thoughtful ones had become quietly attentive. Finally a young woman who had been silent spoke up from about twenty rows back. “Yes, we live well. Must others die for that?”
Mourning Dove answered. “Yes.”
And immediately I said, “Not anymore.”
The anger was still in the air, but less powerfully. For a long minute everyone was silent, wondering if it would start up again. Then a couple in the back row got up and left the theater. More followed, and after a while the three of us were alone onstage with the footlights still blazing on us.
“Mother,” I said, “I’d like you to meet Isabel.”
In the gutters of Chang An Avenue lay occasional clumps of leftover red confetti, from some parade or other that afternoon. It was bitterly cold and halos of frozen mist surrounded the streetlamps. An occasional official car droned by under electric power, its red fender flags flapping. Party officials were on their way to meet sweethearts or were coming back from gambling clubs. A sleek electric bus hummed past us, with most of its seats empty.
“Did you mean that, Ben? That China was wise to use nuclear power?” Isabel said.
“I did at the time,” I said. “But I was defending Mourning Dove. God knows how many have died of leukemia alone.”
“I’ve thought of that.”
“Isabel,” I said, “I’m not impotent anymore.”
“That should ease your temper.”
“Yes.” There was a lighted skyscraper between us and Tien An Men Square and we were heading toward it. It looked a bit like the Empire State Building. “They’ve lost a quarter million people,” I said. “Maybe twice that. If they’d burned it right, coal would have been more humane. But they were in a hurry, and they had all that uranium at Sinkiang and Kiangsi…” I felt a sudden wave of sadness.
“Mourning Dove didn’t need your help,” Isabel said.
Two Mercedes limousines hummed past us, down the middle of the broad old avenue. From one of them came the muffled sound of Broadway music, a new musical called Oriental Blues. What strange transactions the modern world conducted!
“Anyway, it’s over. I’ll have my ship back in three weeks, and they’ll start changing cores.”
Isabel was wearing an enormous down-filled coat and a black watchcap pulled over her ears. I had my hands jammed in my pockets against the cold. Expert opinion said it was not an ice age, but here we were in another horror of a winter. “You were magnificent in the play,” I said, for the second time. “I’ve never seen a Lady Macbeth like you.”
“Ben,” she said, “it’s a fine play, but sometimes it felt like Fifty-first Street, with you.”
That annoyed me. “I’m no murderer.”
“That’s not what I mean. You can be awfully bombastic.”
“I’ve changed,” I said.
“I hope you have,” she said, a bit grimly. We walked in silence for a while. Abruptly she stopped and turned to me. “Ben,” she said, “I don’t want to be a supporting actress in your melodrama.”
That hit home, and I said nothing. We were coming up to the skyscraper. There were ideographs incised on an arch over its entrance. We stopped and looked at them.
“I can’t read Chinese,” Isabel said.
“It Says INSTITUTE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF HAPPINESS BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN.”
She hesitated. “You weren’t the only cause of those fights,” she said. “When I let you move in, my life felt empty and I expected you to fill it.”
“And did I?”
“With a vengeance.”
“Look,” I said, “that’s all past. You’ve got a career that’s clearly taking off. Fieler wants you to do Ibsen in New York. I have to buy into Con Ed or start up my own company. I’ve got to mount another voyage for endolin and uranium. We won’t be focusing on each other all the time. Besides, I can get it up now. Sometimes I can’t get it down.”