Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

“Then I am glad I told. It is better for you to know before they fall too much in love.”

“I should say so.”

Her mind was busy in her face. She flushed with thought, she bit her small full lips, she forgot me. Her plump small hands were clenched together on her lap. Suddenly she looked up and her eyes met mine.

“You poor thing,” she said, “it’s dreadful for you, isn’t it?”

“What — Rennie?”

“The whole business — marrying somebody way off — a Chinese!”

“My husband is American,” I said. “His father registered his birth at the American Embassy in Peking. Rennie was registered there, too.”

“Still and all — it’s different, somehow.”

“I’ve been completely happy,” I said. “So happy that I must make sure Rennie will be happy, too. I couldn’t let him marry a girl who merely tolerated his being partly Chinese. She must be glad of it. She must be proud of it. She must understand that he is the richer for it, as a man and a person — yes, even as an American.”

She could not follow me. She tried, bless her, for somehow I could not keep from liking her more and more. She is simple and honest. I hope she will continue as my friend, whatever happens. I would like to know someone like her intimately, so that we could talk as woman to woman. I miss a good friend. Matt’s wife is good, but she is ignorant and besides she and Matt quarrel over some past grief which neither tells me. They live alone on the mountainside opposite ours, their children gone now, and they quarrel constantly. Matt groans sometimes on a grey morning, “Oh, that woman has been the death of me these forty years!” And when I take a lettuce to Mrs. Matt she tells me of Matt’s wickedness and how he won’t shave but once a week however she tells him, and she declares that he’s been torture these forty years. She has no capacity for friendship. But Mrs. Woods is a happy wife and mother. I can see that. It is not her fault that her heart holds only a cupful.

And it is her fortune that her husband needs no more. For he came in after a while, a thin, bald man, his eyes very blue. This is his vacation, he told me. He works in an accountant’s office in Passaic and he has two weeks a year free to do what he likes. I suddenly pitied him. Two weeks!

“Do you enjoy your work, Mr. Woods?” I asked. This was after we had been introduced, and he told me what he did, and how good it was just to loaf.

“I like my job, but I’m glad not to work,” he said.

“Though there’s plenty of work to be done about the place,” his wife said in reproach. But she spoke gently and even lovingly, and he smiled at her. He was not afraid of her, and she would not urge him. It was an amicable marriage between equals, and therefore pleasant to contemplate. They would understand, to the extent of a cupful, what I mean when I talk about happiness.

“I am your neighbor, Mr. Woods, and frankly I came to see you and Mrs. Woods about my son and your daughter. They are both so young,” I said.

He was instantly embarrassed as only good American men can be embarrassed when anyone mentions male and female together in the presence of their wives or mothers or middle-aged women. For all their adolescent interest in physical sex, they are singularly pure and unsophisticated. They scatter their seed around the earth these days, begetting children in Europe and Asia as innocently and irresponsibly as young tomcats in spring. They pause to mate, and then wander on.

“Mrs. MacLeod tells me her husband is Chinese,” Mrs. Woods said significantly.

“No, no,” I cried. “I said that he is American, an American citizen, although his mother was Chinese. She was a lady of high birth, her family one of the great families of Peking. She is dead now.”

“No kidding,” Mr. Woods exclaimed in a low voice. “Well, now! I don’t know as I ever heard of anyone mixed like that.”

He was bewildered. It was obvious that he was shocked and at the same time was too kind to show it. He did not want to hurt me. He was sorry for me, and couldn’t put it into words. He looked at his wife helplessly. They were both sweet people and I began to love them, knowing while I did so that they could not understand me now and would never understand me. Gerald had been right to stay in Peking.

But I had Rennie to think of and I got up. “Thank you both,” I said as cheerfully as I could. “Please don’t worry. Rennie will be going off to college soon, and young people forget easily. I don’t think it has gone very deep. As for Allegra, she is so pretty that she must have a lot of boy friends.”

They grasped at the suggestion. “She is very popular,” Mrs. Woods said proudly.

“In fact,” Mr. Woods said, “she was voted the most popular girl in high school last summer.”

“Some of our friends think she should try for beauty queen in our state,” Mrs. Woods said, “but her father doesn’t like the idea.”

“No, I don’t,” Mr. Woods said.

“I agree with you, Mr. Woods,” I said. “It would be a pity.”

Allegra came in at this moment. She had been sleeping, and her cheeks were rose pink. She had put on a white sleeveless frock, short and tight, and only a young pretty girl could have suffered its severity. She is pretty — I have to grant that. And I can see how my tall dark son might fall in love with her. Ah, but I hope not deeply!

“Speak to the company, sweetie pie,” Mrs. Woods said. It was pitiful and touching to see how the parents adored this child, their only one.

“Hello, Mrs. MacLeod,” Allegra said with a quick smile.

“I’m afraid Rennie kept you up too late, last night,” I said. “I scolded him for it.”

“Oh, I can always sleep,” Allegra said. She sat on the couch beside her father and he put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed her against him.

“How’s my honey?”

“Just fine,” Allegra said and leaned her fair head against his shoulder.

“You shouldn’t sit up so late. It’s like Mrs. MacLeod says.”

She pouted at him and did not answer and he squeezed her again. Mrs. Woods watched them tenderly. “They’re such chums,” she murmured, adoring them both as her possessions.

Nevertheless they were anxious for me to be gone. They would not talk to the child before me. I got up and bade them goodbye, making no haste, as if nothing important had happened, as though we had not rearranged two lives. We lingered on the porch, the three of them following me. We admired the sweet williams along the path. There is no view from their house, just the path and the flowers and the white gate in the fence. And so I went home. And when Rennie came in to supper I said nothing at all of what I had done. He ate in a hurry and in his work clothes, and then rushed to his room to bathe and change. In a few minutes he raced through the kitchen in clean blue jeans and a fresh shirt.

“Goodnight, Mom,” he called as he went.

“Goodnight, son,” I said.

He went to his rendezvous, and when I had washed the dishes and had settled Baba for the night, I went to my room and locked the door. Tonight I would not sit up. Tonight I could sleep. Whatever I had to meet, I would face it in the morning.

“She has gone,” Rennie said.

I waked early and got up immediately, knowing what awaited me. When I came downstairs he sat there at the kitchen table. He had made a pot of coffee and was drinking it, black and strong.

“You haven’t been to bed,” I said.

He blazed at me. “How could I sleep?”

I sat down and poured myself a cup of coffee. “Go on. Say whatever you want to say. Let’s have it out.”

My son was terrible to see. His face was pale and his eyes were burning black. His lips were parched and bitten.