Lisa See - Peony in Love

“But she has no reason to be jealous,” Ren objected.

To which Ze pointed a thin finger at him. “You don’t love me.”

“What about your first wife?” Doctor Zhao circled back.

“Ze is my first wife.”

That stung. Could Ren have forgotten me so completely?

“Perhaps you forget that I took care of Chen Tong as she died,” the doctor reminded him. “Tradition would tell you that she was your first ( 1 8 8 )

wife. Were your Eight Characters not matched? Were bride-price gifts not sent to her family home?”

“Your thinking is very old-fashioned,” Ren said disapprovingly. “This is not a ghost infestation. Ghosts only exist to scare children into obeying their parents, give young men an excuse to explain away bad behavior with low women, or make girls languish over something they can never have.”

How could he say these things? Had he forgotten how we’d talked about The Peony Pavilion ? Had he forgotten Liniang was a ghost? If he didn’t believe in ghosts, how was he ever going to hear me? His words were so terrible and cruel that I decided he could only be saying them to comfort and reassure my sister-wife.

“Many wives go on hunger strikes because they’re jealous and ill-tempered,” the doctor suggested, trying a different approach. “They try to push their anger onto others by making them suffer with guilt and remorse.”

The doctor prescribed a bowl of jealousy-curing soup made from oriole broth. In one of the plays about Xiaoqing, this remedy had been used on the jealous wife. It had reduced the wife’s emotional disease by half but left her pockmarked.

“You would ruin me?” Ze pushed away the soup. “What about my skin?”

The doctor put a hand on Ren’s arm and spoke loudly enough for Ze to hear. “Just remember that jealousy is one of the seven reasons for divorce.”

If I’d known more, I would have tried to do something. But if I’d known more, maybe I wouldn’t have died myself. So I stayed up in the rafters when the doctor tried to expel the excess fire from Ze’s belly with a less scarring remedy by flushing her bowels with a tonic of wild celery.

Chamber pot after chamber pot was filled and taken away, but Ze didn’t regain her strength.

The diviner arrived next. I stayed out of his way as he brandished a sword wet with blood over Ze’s bed. I covered my ears when he shouted incantations. But no evil spirits haunted Ze, so his efforts produced no results.

Six weeks went by. Ze worsened. When she woke in the morning, she threw up. When she moved her head during the day, she threw up. When her mother-in-law came with clear soups, Ze turned her face away and threw up.

Madame Wu called for the doctor and the diviner to come together.

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“We’ve had a lot of bother in our household over my daughter-in-law,”

she said cryptically. “But perhaps what is happening is only natural. Maybe you should check her again and this time consider that she is a wife and my son is a husband.”

The doctor looked at Ze’s tongue. He peered into her eyes. He listened yet again to the various pulses in her wrist. The diviner moved a limp orchid from one table to another. He consulted Ze’s and Ren’s horoscopes.

He wrote a question on a piece of paper, burned it in a censer so the words would travel to Heaven, and consulted the ashes to receive his answer.

Then the two men bent their heads together to confer and refine their diagnosis.

“Mother is very wise,” Doctor Zhao declared at last. “Women are always the first to recognize the symptoms. Your daughter-in-law has the best type of lovesickness: She’s pregnant.”

After so many weeks of this and that diagnosis I didn’t believe it, but I was intrigued. Could it be true? Despite the presence of the others in the room, I dropped onto Ze’s bed. I sat astride her and peered into her belly.

I saw the tiny speck of life, a soul waiting to be reborn. I should have spotted it earlier, but I was young and unknowing about these things. It was a son.

“It’s not mine!” Ze shrieked. “Get it out!”

Doctor Zhao and the diviner laughed good-naturedly.

“We hear this often from young wives,” Doctor Zhao said. “Madame Wu, please show her the confidential women’s book again and explain what has happened. Mistress Ze, rest, avoid gossip, and eat the proper foods. Stay away from water chestnuts, musk deer, lamb, and rabbit meat.”

“And make sure you wear a daylily pinned to your waist,” the diviner added. “It will help relieve the pains of childbirth and ensure the birth of a healthy son.”

With much jubilation, Ren, his mother, and the servants discussed the possibilities. “A son is best,” Ren said, “but I would welcome a daughter.”

This was the kind of man he was. This is why I loved him still.

But Ze was not happy about the baby, and her condition did not improve. She had no opportunity to encounter a musk deer, and the cook completely banned rabbit meat and lamb from the household, but Ze sneaked into the kitchen late at night to nibble on water chestnuts. She crumpled the flower at her waist and threw it on the floor. She refused to feed the child growing inside her. She stayed up late writing that the baby ( 1 9 0 )

was not hers on pieces of paper. Every time she saw her husband, she wailed, “You don’t love me!” And when she wasn’t crying, accusing, or turning away food, she was throwing up. Soon enough we could all see pink pieces of stomach lining in the bowls the servants took away from the room. Everyone understood the seriousness of the situation. No one wants a loved one to die, but for a woman to die pregnant or in childbirth consigned her to a terrible fate: deportation to the Blood-Gathering Lake.

The Autumn Moon Festival came and went. Ze stopped taking in even water. Mirrors and a sieve were hung in the room. Fortunately, neither of these things was pointed up to where I kept my vigil.

“Nothing is wrong with her,” Commissioner Tan announced, when he came to visit. “She doesn’t want a baby in her womb because she has nothing in her heart.”

“She’s your daughter,” Ren reminded the man, “and she’s my wife.”

The commissioner was unimpressed and left with advice and a warning: “When the baby comes, keep it away from her. That will be safest. Ze does not like to see eyes on anyone but herself.”

Ze had no peace. She seemed terrified by day—shivering, crying, hiding her eyes. The nights gave her no respite. She tossed from side to side, cried out, and woke up in pools of sweat. The diviner made a special altar of peach wood and set incense and candles on it. He wrote a charm, burned it, and then mixed the ashes with water from a spring. With his sword in his right hand and the cup of watery ashes in his left, he prayed:

“Purge this dwelling of all evil lurking here.” He dipped a sprig of willow in the cup and sprinkled it to the four compass points. To reinforce the spell, he filled his mouth with the ashy water and spurted it onto the wall above Ze’s bed. “Cleanse this woman’s mind of the spirits of darkness.”

But her nightmares did not cease and the effects grew worse. Dreams were something I knew about and I thought I could help, but when I went abroad with Ze in this way I found nothing frightening or unusual. She wasn’t being hunted or harmed in her dreams at all, which mystified me greatly.

The first snows came and the doctor visited yet again. “This is not a good child your wife carries,” he told Ren. “He is hanging on to your wife’s intestines and won’t let go. If you give me permission, I’ll use acupuncture to get rid of it.”

On the surface, this seemed like a logical explanation and a practical solution, but I could see the baby. He was not an evil spirit; he was just trying to survive.