Pearl Buck - Bridge for Passing

The two men stared, not to say glared, at each other. I opened my handbag and took out the Chinese fan I keep for such emergencies. Although the room was well cooled, I found it necessary to fan myself. I tried to think about something remote and pleasant, the mountains of Vermont, for example, as seen from my living room window there.

I heard a loud gust of a sigh. It was the production manager. He got up and stalked about the room, rubbing his head with his hands. He was muttering, still in English. “I am fearing something like this to happen — oh yes, goddam!”

He sat down and pondered. I know my Japan and I understood that he was very unhappy. Somebody had to lose face, and it could not be the aged and famous Japanese director. Nor could it be ourselves, since as foreigners, we do not know enough to lose face. He lifted his head and sent me a reproachful look. You, he conveyed to me, you know better. You should have spared me this.

“I am sorry,” I murmured from behind my fan. “I am so very sorry. But what can I do? If I had not told you, if we had gone on location, trouble would have been worse.”

“Ah, sodeska,” he sighed. “True — better get it over.”

He relapsed into Japanese. He could not speak English any more. “Tell them,” he said to the interpreter, “tell them that I will attend to it. Tomorrow I will see them. I am busy but I will see them.” He turned his back as soon as possible, and we returned to the hotel.

“At least it’s done,” I told the American.

He refused to be cheerful. “We have not seen the end of it,” he said grimly.

Next day it appeared that he was right. We returned to the studios and resumed casting. Everything was as it was the day before except we did not see the production manager, upon whom we depended for everything. Pretty actresses came in, reported that they had studied English for six years, declared that they could not speak English and left us again. Handsome young men came in with ditto. We were enormously cheered by an older actor who could take the part of Toru’s father and spoke perfect English. And all this time there was no production manager. When we inquired of a pretty girl, she went away and returned to say that he could meet us in the city offices at two o’clock. He was very busy, et cetera. We were served delicious meat sandwiches — yesterday beef and today spiced pork. I pause here to say that the beef in Japan is made of beer-drinking Kobe cows, hand-massaged every day by devoted cowboys, and is tender beyond any beef I have ever tasted.

At two o’clock promptly we were in the city offices. No production manager appeared on the horizon of today or any day. The American became indignant and I became resigned. The pretty girls trotted off and returned to say that the production manager would see us at five o’clock the next day, or the next or the next. This meant a delay in deciding upon our cast which we simply could not afford. We went back to the hotel and complained to my special friend by telephone. It was useless to think of food or sleep if the production manager had abandoned us. There was a long wait. She called us. This time the American took the brunt. He explained his position, unaltered and unalterable. He listened to her reply and his face cleared for the first time in two days. I gathered that the matter of the Japanese director had been settled. He had been invited to resign. Everything would be all right, my friend said.

But late at my solitary dinner I found myself suddenly without appetite, although a delicious crabmeat salad was put before me. A horrid knowledge stirred in me, an echo of the past, my past in Asia. Everything was not all right — not quite, not quite. There is always a price for victory. What it would be I did not know. I still do not know. A debt remains unpaid. I can only hope the production manager will not — what? It is quite possible I shall never know. At any rate, the episode was over for the day.

And always at the end of the day, every day, there came the return to no one! After the problems, solved and unsolved, after the coming and going of many people, the doubt and concern, the excitement of discovery, the shared laughter, the growing confidence in the work, each day had the same end. I went back to my hotel rooms, unlocked the door, went in and locked the door again. Flowers were fresh, the rooms cool, letters heaped on the table — letters from no one. The one letter I longed for could never be written because he was gone. I did not open the others. Let them wait until my Japanese secretary came and I was forced to work in order that she could work. Invitations were many, but I had no enjoyment in accepting them. A few I must accept, those which had to do with the sad and anxious parents of retarded children, a few others from old friends for the sake of past kindness. I fell then into the habit of having dinner sent to my rooms and of eating alone, so that I need not be compelled to smile at strangers who might approach me with questions and praise. When night came, life was suddenly meaningless.

Yet I was not impatient with myself. I knew from experience that time is needed for the absorption of sorrow into one’s being. Once that adjustment is made, growth begins again and new life. It was too soon. I found it was impossible to sit alone in the hotel rooms. Had he been with me, it would have been the best part of the day. It always was the best part. Much of our life had to be spent in separation during the hours of day, for each of us had a profession, a work. But how eagerly we looked forward to the evening, and to what lengths we went in order to spend it together! We went together wherever we had to go, I yielding to his necessity, he to mine, depending upon the importance we attached to the specific. occasion. And in the twenty-five years of our married life we did not spend a night apart, until it became necessary for him to live and work entirely at home. Even then I refused all invitations that kept me away for a night, until he ceased to know whether I was there or not. And when he ceased to know, everything was different, except memory.

I have discarded that time of not knowing. When I think of him, I think of him as I knew him, vivid, alive, with infinite variety in thought and word, dominant, invincibly prejudiced in some matters, as I used to say impetuously when we disagreed, and he smiled and accepted the accusation with amusement and no intention of changing himself. But he knew I did not want him changed. Whatever he was, he was himself, and I liked that. For example, he could not drive a nail without pounding his thumb and therefore wisely he refused to drive nails. He took no part in household matters, however busy I was. He would not eat what he did not like, no matter how good the dish might be for him. At the same time he disciplined himself in amount and quality of what he did eat. When he spoke, none of us interrupted. He was the father as well as the husband, and yet he refused to have any part in disciplining our big family. I am no disciplinarian myself, being given to laughter over naughtiness unless I am angry, and neither mirth nor anger is the right atmosphere for discipline. Teachers of our nine children were unanimous in one comment, always made sooner or later to us, but particularly to me, for he would not attend parent-teacher meetings and I had to go alone. The comment was simple. “Your children are spoiled.”

I agreed helplessly. How could it be otherwise when they had a mother who laughed too easily, and if she did not get angry easily, nevertheless when she did, she was in such vast temper that the child looked on astonished and thought she did not mean it? As for him, the extent of his discipline was to stare at the refractory child with cool disapproval and then turn to me with a remark made so casually that it stunned me unfailingly into feeble retort.