Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

“Hello, Mother—”

He looks down at me, I look up at him. He is not saying anything more now. I hasten to speak.

“Come in — come in. It’s cold tonight. Come in where it’s warm. Good skiing weather tomorrow, Rennie!”

They come in and Rennie stands looking around the hall and into the living room. I have lit all the lamps and I have lit the candles on the dining-room table. The table is set with my best linen and my mother’s old silver. I have put a bowl of holly on the table. We cannot grow holly here, and I bought it at a dear price at the florist’s shop in town.

“Does it look the same to you?” I ask Rennie.

He shakes his head and does not reply. No, it does not look the same to him because he is not the same. He is changed. And I discern in him a heartbreaking fear of me, his mother. He is afraid that I will try to make him what he was before, a boy and not a man. He is not willing even to be my son if he has to be a boy again. I understand this in a flash of pain.

“Would you like to go to your rooms?” I asked very formally. “Rennie, your room is ready, and I have only to put some towels in the guestroom for you, Sam. I’m glad you came.”

Yes, I am glad. When I first saw him I was almost angry that a stranger had come with my son. But I know why he came. Rennie wanted him to come so that he would not be alone with me, his mother. He needs a man to keep him safe from me. I must be very cool and calm. I must make no demands on this tall silent young man. So I am glad that Sam has come. It will be easier to treat them both as strangers.

“You know your room, Rennie,” I said cheerfully. “And, Sam, if you will turn here to the right—”

“How is the old gentleman?” Sam asked briskly.

“He’ll be delighted to see you,” I said, and hoped that Baba would remember him.

“Where is he?”

“Here.” I opened the door of Baba’s room, and Sam went in but I saw Rennie pass by and go into his own room and shut the door.

“Well, well,” Sam shouted. He descended upon Baba and shook his hand while Baba stared at him helplessly.

“Sitting here looking like an old Emperor of China,” Sam bellowed amiably. “How are you, Doctor MacLeod?”

He drew up a wooden chair in front of Baba and sat on it facing the back, his sandy hair on end and every tooth showing in his grin.

“I am well,” Baba said cautiously. He looked at me, appealing, and then at Sam. “Are you my grandson?” he inquired gently.

Sam roared. “Not quite — not quite! Rennie hasn’t changed that much. Don’t you remember me, sir? I fetched you to the shack on my ranch. Don’t you remember? Why, you and me were wonderful friends!”

Baba remembered slowly. He nodded his head. He tapped his dragon-headed cane softly two or three times on the carpet.

“Sam,” he said cautiously. “It’s Sam.”

“Right,” Sam cried with delight. “Why, you’re in fine shape. You’ve been taken real good care of—”

I longed to leave them and slip away to Rennie’s room. If I were alone with my son surely there would be one good moment of embrace, just one, and I would ask no more. But Sam was watching me. When I stole toward the door he stopped me.

“Ma’am,” he said, “you won’t misunderstand me when I say it’s better to leave Rennie to himself for a while. He’ll come back to you in good time but it’ll have to be his time.”

“I feel it,” I said, and sat down and waited.

And Rennie’s door opened at last and he came in. He had changed his clothes to brown slacks and a tweed jacket that I had never seen before. His black hair was brushed smooth and he wore a red tie. I saw him as a man, a very handsome man….Though young, he has reserves of power somewhere. Shall I ever know him again and if so, then how?

“How are you, Grandfather?” he said and he came to Baba and knelt at his side as a Chinese grandson might have done and took Baba’s hand.

Baba stared at him reflectively.

“Are you my son Gerald?” he asked.

“Only your grandson,” Rennie said.

They looked at each other and, face to face, I saw the resemblance between them for the first time. Rennie’s profile, changing with manhood, takes on the Scotch lines and not the Chinese.

“My grandson,” Baba repeated, and suddenly he leaned forward and kissed Rennie on the forehead. I had never seen him kiss anyone before. Rennie was moved, and put Baba’s hand to his cheek.

“I’m glad I came home,” he said. He turned to me and I saw tears in his eyes.

We had a merry evening after that. Those two young men made a chair of their crossed hands and they carried Baba downstairs and he sat at the table with us. Then, for gaiety, I ran upstairs and put on my wine velvet dinner gown, which I had not worn since Gerald and I parted. The last night in Shanghai we went alone to dine at the Astor Hotel and afterwards to dance, and I put on this one festive gown that I had saved through all the war. We danced cheek to cheek, forgetting the crowded streets outside, and determined for a few hours to mingle with the European guests gathered in the hotel, most of them ready to sail away forever from the country they loved but to which they could never belong. And we knew, Gerald and I, without ever saying it, that he would stay and I must go. I am sure he knew.

For a moment tonight I was about to take the gown off again, and then I would not. Everything I was and owned must become a part of this house, this valley, and I have no other country than my own. So I went downstairs, and the two young men stood up when I came in and each of them looked at me with surprise. I was suddenly a woman, and they had not realized it before. Well, I was glad that Rennie saw me as someone else than mother, for perhaps he will not fear me so much. As for Sam, it does not matter what he saw.

I put Rennie at the head of the table, and I sat at the foot, with Baba at my right so that I could cut his meat for him. The soup was hot in the Chinese bowls I had once bought in New York because they were like the ones I had in Peking, only the ware is not so fine, and so we began our evening meal. And Rennie was suddenly quite gay, too, and he began to talk, and Sam was as suddenly silent and almost shy.

“I’m going to teach Sam to ski,” Rennie said. “He’s lived in such flat country that he doesn’t know what it is to ski down a mountainside.”

“There are extra skis in the attic,” I said.

“I don’t know as I want to come down a mountain,” Sam said. “It takes nerve, the kind I haven’t.”

“Of all the kinds of nerve you have,” Rennie said, “you should be able to summon another. I’ve seen you come down out of the sky in that single-engine plane of yours at a speed that ought to make you ready to ski down Everest itself.”

“I don’t carry the engine on my feet,” Sam said.

They were hungry and they ate heartily and I sat and watched them. It was good to have guests at the table. I had sat alone so long. I took pride in the roast lamb and the peas and the small browned potatoes and lettuce salad. And I had remembered the apple pies that Rennie loves, served with cheese slices and hot coffee.

“I don’t remember your being such a good cook,” Rennie said, throwing me a smile.

“This is a special effort,” I said.

“I wouldn’t like to have to eat as good a dinner every day,” Rennie declared. He had recovered from whatever shyness he had and was himself again. I saw him let out his belt a notch or two, hiding this from me politely. Rennie’s good manners are as natural to him as breathing. He absorbed them in Peking from the most mannerly people in the world, and though he tried to be rough and rude when he left China, he was old enough now to dare to be himself, or very nearly. He was still cautious with me.