Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

As Kenneth talked, she saw — beyond his own beauty and intelligence and playfulness — an innocent soul that longed for truthfulness. And it asked her, in many ways and again and again, to come out of the box in which she had been keeping her own inmost, honest self. It welcomed embarrassment, because embarrassment was the entry point to candor. And it basked in the light of self-revelation.

“What was that tune you were whistling in the hall today?” she asked him. “Or should I say whistling while making fun of me?”

“Something inspired by you! Not to suggest anything inappropriate, but it came to me the other day in the shower.”

Now she freely laughed. “You think I’m ridiculous.”

“A little bit.”

And again he began to whistle and wiggle around, as though in impersonation of someone’s lumbering walk.

“I do walk like that, don’t I?”

“You do!”

“How embarrassing.”

“You should be proud of it! Exaggerate it a little. Like this. ”

He jumped up by the table and, to the astonishment of everyone but her now, began to strut in time to the tune. And, relishing her humiliation, she waited a minute before beckoning him back to the table, something he thoroughly seemed to relish.

For a while, they sat perspiring again over their soup, and then she said, suddenly seeing there was really no reason not to, “I like you, Kenneth.”

That November, hours in advance of a party, Katie Ne Win sent a car to bring Louisa to the Government House. Because of Kenneth — and because of the honesty he inspired in her — Louisa had determined finally to raise the subject of Daddy’s friend, Rita Mya. But as soon as she and Katie were alone in the drawing room of the Victorian mansion, Katie — in lavish jewels, and with a gleam in her eye — drew back, peering at her with a smile.

“You’re keeping a secret,” she said to Louisa. “Yes, I see it. The shining eyes. The confidence. The clearness of complexion, the charming reddened cheeks. I’m not wrong, am I? Ah! This is something to savor! Louisa has a secret! And tell me, what is his name? Someone you’ve met here?”

Feeling the heat of her feelings for Kenneth rise to her lips, Louisa nearly divulged everything. But she saw a flash of pain in Katie’s eyes, of something more personal than jealousy. And instantly she understood that it would have been an unforgivable mistake to confide in Katie, who relied on her to mirror her own need for diversion from truth and its ugliness. And yet, blinking at the woman, Louisa found herself uttering, “What is it?”

The question was, if not unwelcome, clearly too much for Katie. She rushed away to the table, where she found a box of cigarettes and then searched around for a light.

Trying to make up for her blunder, Louisa took some matches from her own handbag and said, “Let me,” and went and lit the quivering cigarette at Katie’s mouth, before the woman turned to a window and the far-off view of her husband bending over his golf club on the lawn.

“He’s been in a foul mood,” Katie said after a minute, and then she gave a little stifled laugh. “Ever since his last trip to China he’s wanted everyone to call him ‘Chairman.’ Will you be shocked if I tell you that he asks me to refer to him like that when we’re—” She turned and gave Louisa a wicked wink. But seeing Louisa’s timidity, she added, “You’re still very naive, aren’t you? That’s why I like you. Stay just like that.”

As always, her every word seemed to have a second meaning, and a third, leaving Louisa to wonder if Katie wasn’t faulting her for an innocence she envied, and also warning Louisa against persisting in that innocence for long.

“Sometimes I think his men love him more than I do,” she continued saying now to the window. “Aung Gyi. Maung Maung. They love to call him ‘Chairman.’. Chairman Ne Win. Disgusting, don’t you think?” She took a suck from her cigarette, while beyond her, on the grounds, Ne Win peered out at a distant target. “Aung Gyi would do anything to wrest the throne from U Nu and seat my husband on it. But, like a lover who never has enough attention, he’d also do anything to hurt him. Now you know love’s torments, don’t you, darling?” She turned to Louisa, as though remembering her all at once. “Just wait until your new flame sees you around other men. Do you know what Aung Gyi said about me to Win? That — ha! — he saw me flirting with someone else. So what?”

She smiled at Louisa again, yet her eyes shone with mortal fear. And Louisa, frightened for the woman — for them —stepped forward, reaching out to touch her arm.

Katie thrust the smoldering cigarette at her. “Take it,” she said. “It makes me sick.”

And as though to sweep her revelations further out of sight, she called abruptly to the servants, and then broke into a series of complaints about all she had to do to direct them in preparation for the afternoon’s party.

Louisa moved to take the cigarette, still extended toward her, though the falseness that had reclaimed her hostess and this room seemed suddenly unbearable, suffocating. And as she took the damp cigarette between her fingers, grasping for something else — for some speck of goodness and truth — she sputtered, “There’s a woman being held in Insein Prison — a Burman medical student by the name of Rita Mya. We’ve never spoken of my father, but he—”

“What nonsense are you saying?”

The servants had appeared, and before Louisa could answer Katie rushed at them, throwing her gold shawl over her shoulder.

“I expect you to play doubles with me in lawn tennis this afternoon,” she said to Louisa in passing. “We must prevail!”

But at the door she stopped, adding without looking back, “I will see about the medical student, Louisa. I know it’s hard, but chin up.”

Several nights later, Gracie appeared in Louisa’s bedroom, looking pallid and afraid and filled with tender affection. She was carrying something, a little amber-colored medicine bottle, which she half concealed in her slight hand.

“Is something wrong?” Louisa said to her.

Gracie seated herself on the edge of the bed, where Louisa was studying for her midyear examinations. Earlier that evening, the two of them had gone to see a Burmese movie with Kenneth and Myee, and on the bus ride home Louisa had been mildly diverted by Gracie’s own preoccupied state, so at odds with her usual smiling lightness.

“Tell me to stop talking,” Gracie said now, still hiding the medicine bottle in her hand.

“Why would I do that?”

“Because — because I don’t know if I have the right to say what I’m about to.”

Louisa felt a chill of apprehension as she smiled and grasped Gracie’s free hand. “You have every right to say anything you want to me, little sister.”

Gracie gave her hand a quick squeeze, then instantly dropped it. “I can tell how happy Kenneth makes you,” she said. “And how obviously happy you make him. But are you sure about what you’re doing?”

“What is it that you think I’m doing?”

Louisa had tried to speak without accusation, yet a look of defensive anger coursed through Gracie’s usually placid face, and she jumped up from the bed and covered her eyes even as she continued to clasp the bottle. “It’s Mama!” she moaned. “She put me up to it! She doesn’t want you to marry him. And she gave me one of her stupid potions to make you fall out of love.”

Mama. Yes, the woman had been unusually cold with Louisa of late, never forbidding her to entertain Kenneth or his friends at the house or to go along with a group to the city, but distantly on the lookout for a sign of — what was it? Misbehavior? Disloyalty to the family? A joy so complete it might lift Louisa forever up out of her mother’s longstanding misery?