Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

I do not know who taught Gerald this high truth, but he knew it when he came to me. Perhaps his mother told him. There was something clear and free between them, something that he has not shared with me because it belongs to her. There has never been any confusion in Gerald’s mind between wife and mother. He wished no mothering from me and he made no Freudian connection between me and his mother. There were no repressions in him. He created the physical relationship between us with delicate artistry, satisfying himself in so doing and me. How he did it is not something to be described. It is to be remembered by him and by me. It will be my duty to explain to Rennie, when he marries, his responsibility to beauty.

That night, so long ago now, when Gerald entered my room for the first time, he came in beauty and what he conveyed to me was the beauty which is the stuff of true romance. And so it continued through the years of our life together. Never in haste and always with tenderness, he made me his love. Now, without him, I have this, my memory.

I find I must not dwell upon memory or it becomes unbearable. If Gerald were dead, then memory would be all that I have. The gift would be completed, the life finished. But he lives. Because he lives I too must live, though memory remains between us like a cord, so that I cannot be separated from him. Yet we are apart in time and space, and time must be filled and space occupied.

I am thankful that the sap has begun to run in the sugar bush for I have no choice now but to be busy. Rennie has permission to stay out of school for a few days. His grades are high and his teacher says it will give her a chance to help some of the dull ones. The three of us, Matt, Rennie and I, work from dawn to dark and at night I am too tired to dream. I think of cutting off my long hair but today when I was impatient because it fell down my back, the hairpins failing to hold in the wind, Rennie protested.

“I shall certainly cut this off,” I cried, seizing the long tail of sand-blond hair and twisting it hard against my head.

The wind carried my words to Rennie and he cupped his hands and called to me. “You shall not, either!”

Later when we were eating our luncheon I asked him why he would not let me cut my hair and he said because he did not like a short-haired woman.

“I am not a woman,” I said. “I am only your mother.”

“Short-haired mother, then,” he retorted and laughed at me.

I wonder if Gerald laughed as easily when he was a boy. There is no one to tell me. I shall never know.

It is strange how devious is the human heart. I had no sooner written those words than I thought, there is Gerald’s father. He will remember. Out of that chance thought there grew a plan and so quickly that it mast have lain ready to be discovered. As soon as this sugaring is finished, Rennie and I will go and find Gerald’s father. When we were carrying the buckets to the trees on the north side of the sugar bush, where they are always late, with all the wile of a serpent I said to Rennie the next day.

“Rennie, how would you like to have your MacLeod grandfather come and live with us? Another man in the house—”

“I think I remember him,” Rennie said.

Gerald’s father left Peking before the Japanese entered. He said quite simply that he could not bear to see it, and he bought a steamship ticket for San Francisco. From there he went to a small town in Kansas, Little Springs. I have no idea how he lives now. He has written to us once, soon after we came to Vermont, and wanted news of Gerald, which I gave, telling him all I could. He has not replied.

“Well?” I said to Rennie.

“I shall have to think about it,” Rennie said. He is prudent, this boy, and to that extent is not my son. Perhaps my mother has given him prudence. If so, it is not the niggardly prudence she had. Rennie is cautious and careful. He thinks, but when he has decided he is generous.

The days passed while he thought, and a day at sugaring is long and short at the same time. It is hard work but we are fortunate. My father tapped the trees and laid pipes throughout the bush, and those pipes run into three main large pipes. By force of gravity the sap is conveyed to a small but fairly modern sugar house in the valley and near our house. All the years I was growing up and going to college, my father’s ingenuity went into such matters and now Rennie and I, with Mart’s help, make sugar with twice the ease that our neighbors do. They see and wonder and sometimes give spare praise to my father, but none of them do likewise. They continue to carry buckets as they have always done and as their ancestors did. I used to be impatient with them until I lived in Peking and learned the value of ancestors to a family. I am glad that through his Chinese grandmother Rennie has ancestors for a thousand years behind him. I have been able to give him only a scant two hundred years of English men and women.

Sap runs fast in the warm sunlit days into the sugar house. When that begins then Rennie and Matt do the outside work and I stay in the sugar house. The milking gets done anyhow and we eat from our stores of food, cooking no more than to heat what is already prepared in the glass jars of summertime and harvest.

We had no time to talk, for we dropped into sleep immediately after supper, Rennie’s cheeks burned with wind and snow and mine with fire, and while we rubbed them with oil we all but fell asleep. Today, however, winter has returned. The pipes are frozen and the roads are drifting with deepening snow. We can rest, Rennie and I, and Matt has taken over the sugar house for the time being. We dallied over our kitchen breakfast and Rennie picked up his first book in days, for it is a Saturday. I interrupted him.

“Rennie, have you thought about your grandfather coming to live with us?”

He looked up from the window seat where he was lying, feet against the wall, and the book propped on his breast.

“I have thought,” he said. “I’d like it.” And he went back to his book.

Son of Gerald! He has thought, in silence he has decided, and it is as good as done. When the dishes were washed I went upstairs to consider the room the grandfather would have. The house is too big for us. My father had a mania for space. He wanted many rooms, and none small. The house he left behind him could house a dozen children. Half stone, half timber, it stands facing the south and the valley. Every summer someone from New York or Chicago wants to buy it from me. I am offered a fortune large enough so that we need never sugar again. And I always refuse.

So now I walk the wide upstairs hall and reflect upon the rooms. I choose the corner at south and east. Rennie has the southwest room, because he likes to sleep on holidays and does not want the wakening sun. But an old man will not sleep late and this is the room. It is square, as all the bedrooms are, it has four windows, weather-stripped for winter, and a fireplace stands between the two to the east. Deep window sills and seats beneath them, a floor of wide pine planks, walls papered a faded pink, and there it is. My mother chose this room when she was old and her furniture is here, Victorian walnut, and the white ruffled curtains that she made and hung. The bed is absurdly large, the headboard high and scrolled and the footboard solid. It is a good room for an old gentleman. There is even a desk. My mother had my father’s small rolltop brought here when he died, and I can see still her sitting before it and writing letters, everything in order in the pigeonholes. My father kept it filled to overflowing and never tidied. It will be pleasant to see someone sitting there again.

And then I face myself. I want Gerald’s father here so that I can talk about his son. I need to know much I do not know. I thought I knew Gerald, my husband — heart, mind and body — and so I did in the days when I saw him with my living eyes. But now I have only the eyes of memory and there is much I cannot see because I do not know. And somebody must tell me, lest my life be stopped at the heart.