Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

I did not move, I did not stir. I did not set foot upon the floor. In my bed I lay, the faint moonlight streaming across the counterpane, and I listened. He ate at the kitchen table. I heard the clink of a dish and the scrape of a chair. He ate well, for it was a full half hour, perhaps more, before I heard the door to the stair open, the little winding back stair that goes only to his room. I heard the sound of water running into the bathtub cautiously and at half cock, so as not to wake me. Then he did not want me to wake. I had decided wisely. I would not go to his room, not even to gaze at him asleep. But oh, how thankful was I that he had come home! My heart climbed out of my bosom toward heaven in thankfulness. Thank God, thank God!

When all was quiet I would sleep. So I told myself, yet how could I sleep until I knew how he was? Yet I would not go to see. Though he lay there in his bed, only a room beyond mine, he was as far from me at this moment, or nearly, as Gerald was in Peking. A wall was between my son and me. He had become a man, and I knew it. I must wait for him to tell me what he wanted to be to me. Perhaps he does not need a mother, perhaps he wants only a friend, an older woman friend, one who merely happened once to be his mother.

I waited, the hour creeping slowly by and I imagined hours until I looked at the bedside clock. Only an hour and ten minutes had passed. Then I heard the door handle turn softly. I lay motionless and did not light the lamp. When I saw him standing there in the doorway, wrapped in his old red wool bathrobe, I spoke as easily as if he had never been away.

“Is that you, Rennie?”

Though who else could it be? But in such foolish words great moments are encompassed. And he answered as easily.

“How are you, Mother?”

“I am well. Did you just get back?”

“I had something to eat downstairs.”

He came toward the bed and sat down on the edge of it, and we gazed at each other in the moonlight.

“Shall I put on the light?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Let’s just sit like this. Unless you want to sleep. Did I wake you?”

“Perhaps you did,” I said, pretending to be sleepy. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t get up as early as I used to. Matt milks the cows.”

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

I strove for indifference. “I’ve bought a black ewe and twin white lambs so that I need not cut the grass.”

“I saw them in the moonlight.”

Then it seemed we had nothing more to say. I would not let a question escape from the prison of my heart. Whatever he wished to tell me I must accept as answer. But nothing prepared me for what he said next.

“You haven’t asked me where I have been, Mother.”

“You might have written me,” I said.

“I couldn’t,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter where I’ve been….Mother, why did you let me be born? I asked you before.”

“You didn’t wait for my answer,” I reminded him.

“I will wait, now,” he said.

He is the one to ask the questions, not I. I can only answer as honestly as possible.

“Your father and I love each other with all our hearts and when there is such love between two young and healthy human beings, one a man, the other a woman, a child is their hope.”

“You might have thought what it would mean to me.”

Oh what a bitter cry this was!

“It is only fair to your father to tell you that he thought of it and that I denied the need. I said that our child would be so strong, so beautiful, so self-sufficient, that he would meet any situation and be the conqueror.”

His eyes were as black as dead coals set in the pale cream face.

“When I was in China,” he said, “they called me a foreigner. I did not care then, for I thought I had a country — another country. I thought it was America.”

“People have been kind to you here,” I said, my tongue and lips as dry as pith.

“It is not kindness I want — it is love.”

“You have much love,” I said. “Your father loves you and I love you. And love will come to you from others, some day from a woman.”

“Allegra is not allowed to love me,” he said. “Her parents forbid it.”

“Can she not be disobedient?” I inquired. “My mother forbade me to love your father, too, but I disobeyed. And I have never been sorry.”

No, I am not sorry, though Gerald’s last letter lies upstairs in my locked box, a thing alive with sorrow. I know he will never write me again.

“Not all women are strong,” Rennie said and he looked at me with something like distaste. “And because a woman is not strong,” he went on, “it does not mean that her love is the less valuable.”

“What is Allegra afraid of?” I tried to hide my scorn.

“She is not afraid of me,” he said. “She is afraid of what I carry in my veins, the genes, the ancestry, the irremovable part of me, that which I cannot change.”

“You mean the Chinese part of you,” I said.

He nodded, and he knotted his hands together. His hands are all American, not smooth and pale as Gerald’s are, but hard and strong at the knuckles.

“I thought so,” I said, “the very part of you that I love most and am most proud of because I love your father, you wish you did not have. Shame on you, Rennie!”

“You don’t understand,” he cried. “You are American, your ancestry is pure—”

“O pure,” I cried back at him, “the rebels of half a dozen nations in Europe, the renegade young son of an English lord and an Irish girl, a crafty Dutch merchant who cheated the Indians out of their land, a strain of German—”

“None of that matters,” he said stubbornly. “You are all white.”

I yielded. It was not the moment for argument.

“Say what you please,” I said.

“I am going to Kansas,” he went on. “I’ll work on Sam’s ranch this summer, and go to college in the autumn. Sam will get me a scholarship.”

No “if you please,” no “if you don’t mind, Mother,” no “unless you need my help here at home.” But I am proud too and I do not ask my son’s help.

“I wonder that you came home to tell me,” I said.

“So that you know,” he said, his jaw as hard as iron.

There was my fate laid out before me, and I must take it with both hands and without complaint.

“When will you go?” I asked.

“I suppose I ought to stop long enough to see Baba,” he replied.

“A little longer,” I protested.

Perhaps it is time for me to tell him of Baba’s wife, his grandmother. Some of this rebel blood in him comes from her. She suffered, too, because she was not loved. Perhaps she can help him now as I cannot.

“Stay a day, at least, Rennie. There are things I want to say to you before you go — things I have never told you.”

He looked at me quickly with those dark, dark eyes.

“All right,” he said, “if that’s the way you want it—”

…Where will I find a home for my son? Where can he find the country to be his own?

When Baba woke the next morning we went upstairs. There he was, lying upon his pillows exactly as he had gone to sleep, his white hair scarcely ruffled, his dark eyes vague and only half open. I spoke to him.

“Baba, good morning. See who has come to you.”

He opened his eyes and stared at us. “Who is that?”

“You know.”

“Is it Gerald?”

“No — no — no. It is Rennie.”

He did not know Rennie. He has forgotten his own grandson. He moved his lips. “Should I know him?” he inquired at last.

“Yes, you should,” I said. “He is Gerald’s son — and mine.”

“Gerald’s son,” he mused. “Had Gerald a son?”

I turned to implore. “Rennie, forgive him. He is so old. He has forgotten everything.”