Homesick (7 page)

I leaned against the doorframe while my father twisted his face to shave down one side.

“How do you suppose the oysters will be this summer?” I asked. “Do you think this will be the year I'll find a pearl?” (I always hoped.)

My father put down his razor and straightened his face. “I've been meaning to tell you,” he said. “We can't go to Peitaiho this summer, Jean. We'll be going to Kuling.”

I couldn't believe it. There he was with soap over one half of his face, saying Kuling, not Peitaiho, just as if he were saying cornflakes, not Grape-Nuts.

“What do you mean—
can't
?”

“With all the trouble in Hankow,” he said, “I can't be so far away. I'll have to travel back and forth.”

“Well, why don't you tell me things?” I shouted. “Why couldn't I have been around while you were still deciding? You think it's easy for me to throw away all my plans just like that?”

“We just decided last week,” my father said.

“Then we'll never go to Peitaiho again,” I pointed out. We'd be leaving China in April of the next year and we'd be in America the next summer. “Never.” I hated the word
never
and hoped that, hearing it, my father might find some way to change our plans.

“Maybe we should put off going to America.”

“You know I don't mean that.” My father had no business trying to turn this into a joke.

He sighed as he picked up his razor, but the soap on his face had dried and he had to wipe it off and begin again. “I know you're disappointed,” he said. “And I'm sorry. But you'll like Kuling. You've just forgotten it.”

“I haven't forgotten how you go up the mountain.”

“You're older now; you won't be scared.”

“Mother is a grown-up,” I reminded him, “and she was scared.” Who wouldn't be? The only way up the mountain to Kuling was by sedan chair. Two coolies, one in front and one in back (four or even six coolies if the person were heavy), carried the shafts of your chair up a narrow, pebbly, dirt path that twisted its way up the steep mountain. Sometimes going around a sharp corner, your chair would swing right over the edge of the mountain. If a coolie stumbled, there was no place for a person in a chair to go but over and down.

Of course I understood why we had to go to Kuling, but that didn't make me feel any less cross. Since it was Sunday, I felt cross anyway because, as far as I was concerned, Sunday was a lost day. Not only did I have to sit through Sunday School and church, but even after that I couldn't be natural. I wasn't allowed to embroider on Sunday, for instance. Or skip rope. Or play games. The only thing that I liked about the day was singing hymns. When I came to a line like “Fight manfully onward,” I could believe that if I held out, one day I might really get to Washington, P.A.

But this Sunday in church we sang no “onward” hymns and needless to say, I didn't listen to Dr. Carhart's sermon. Instead I played my usual climbing game. There were more rafters in that Union Church than I've ever seen in any building. The whole ceiling was a maze of rafters crisscrossing and flying up from wooden columns on the floor. In my mind I would shinny up one of those columns and then work my way from rafter to rafter, figuring out how to make my next move, seeing how far I could get.

Today I was balancing myself just above the altar when I heard Dr. Carhart say that he knew what death was like. I hung tight to the rafter. Of course I wondered about death since grown-ups never talked about it, at least in front of me. Sometimes waking up in the middle of the night, I would think right away about death, as if the idea were just waiting in the dark to pop out of me. Well, Dr. Carhart said that he'd once taken a train from Switzerland to Italy and at the border the train went through a long dark tunnel. Then suddenly it burst out of the tunnel into a blaze of light and you were in Italy. That's what death was like, he said. It was a glory. Nothing to feel sad about.

I had to admit he made it sound interesting. Maybe everyone should travel from Switzerland to Italy, I thought, just for practice. Yet why couldn't I believe Dr. Carhart? He was a grown-up and a preacher; he ought to know what he was talking about. But part of me was never sure about grown-ups.

Personally, I was certain I'd prefer Peitaiho to Italy. Indeed, I never stopped being sorry that we weren't going there, but I did feel better one day in the middle of May when my father said we were going to Kuling early. Before school was over.

On the day before we left, I took a note from my mother to Miss Williams, explaining my absence for the rest of the term.

“But you'll miss your examinations,” Miss Williams said after she'd read the note.

“Yes, Miss Williams,” I smiled.

“I don't know how I can give you a report card.”

I kept smiling.

“You know you have done very poorly in arithmetic.”

“Yes, Miss Williams.”

“Well, perhaps you'll just have to take the examinations in September and get your report then.”

Somehow I couldn't stop smiling. September? Why should I worry about September now?

The next morning when we got on the boat for the trip to Kiukiang where we'd start up the mountain, I thought: Ta-ta, Miss Williams. Ta-ta, Ian Forbes and Vera Sebastian and the king of England. I was off and away! Two whole days and one night on the Yangtse.

Why did I love the river so? It wasn't what you would call beautiful. It wasn't
like
anything. It just was and it had always been. When you were on the river or even looking at it, you flowed with time. You were part of forever. At first I looked among all the boats we passed for a new junk that might be mine, but after a while I decided it didn't matter. My boat was somewhere out there. Wide-awake, eyes peeled.

I was so happy on the river that I had put the mountain trip out of my mind until we were actually in Kiukiang and I could see the mountains rearing up in the background. We had made friends on the boat with two young Catholic priests from New Jersey who were also going to Kuling, so we included them in our party. After spending a night in a hotel in Kiukiang, we went by car across the plains (rice fields on either side of us) to the base of the mountain where we rented our sedan chairs.

It was a hot day. We all wore pith helmets to protect us from the sun except Lin Nai-Nai who wore a Chinese straw hat. One of the priests led our procession; my mother came next, then my father, me, the other priest, and Lin Nai-Nai. Behind us came a string of coolies with our luggage strapped on their backs.

I had decided that I would not look to my right over the edge of the mountain at any time. Still, I could tell when the mountain became steep. My chair tilted back; the coolies stopped talking and began grunting. The muscles bulged in the legs of my father's coolies and the sweat poured down their bodies. I knew we were really high when the priest behind me called out to the priest in the front of the line.

“Just look at that, will you?” he yelled. “That must be three thousand feet straight down.”

I closed my eyes. Why didn't that priest just shut up and pray? I wondered. But no, he went right on. “What a view! You never saw anything like that in Paterson, did you?”

Pray, I begged him silently as I gripped the arms of my chair.

My coolies slowed down, shifting the shafts of my chair, feeling for their footing, so I knew we were going around a corner. I must be out over the edge.

A few moments later the priest must have been over the edge. And what did he say? “Wow!” That's all. Just—wow. I was surprised he hadn't flunked religion.

I didn't know that we had actually reached Kuling until I felt my chair being thumped down on the ground and I heard the welcoming voices of Mr. and Mrs. Jordan, whose house we'd be sharing. A Y.M.C.A. couple from another city, the Jordans had often visited us in Hankow and I knew I liked them.

I was stiff when I got out of my chair, so while my father was paying the coolies and we were saying good-bye to the priests and hello to the Jordans, I walked about. My mother came and put her arm around my shoulders. She seemed tired and pale after the ride up the mountain, but now that we were here, we both looked at the scenery for the first time. At the violet and blue mountains. At the pink and red azaleas that were scattered with such abandon over the hillsides.

“Isn't the color wonderful?” my mother whispered. She sounded as if she were afraid to raise her voice for fear the color would fade into Hankow gray.

“Yes.” I couldn't get enough of looking. My eyes must have been starved for color and I hadn't known it.

“And do you hear that?”

What I heard sounded like a stream and tumbling water.

“That's Rattling Brook,” my mother said. “We'll explore tomorrow.”

Right now we went into the house and let Mrs. Jordan show us around. The front porch was for warm days and sunsets, she said, and the glassed-in porch was for rainy times. Mrs. Jordan turned to me. “But I think what you are going to like best,” she said, “is your room.

Upstairs she opened the door to a room in the back of the house. The first thing I noticed was that the windows faced the mountains so I'd always be looking up and not down. And there was a window seat. And a little desk painted blue with shiny black knobs on the drawers. And a bookcase with books in it.

“Whoever had this room before was crazy about the Bobbsey Twins,” Mrs. Jordan said. “I think that's the whole set there. They may be too young for you but you'll find some old copies of
St. Nicholas
magazine.”

At each new discovery, I said “Oh” as if that were the only word for joy that had been invented, but when I looked at my bed, I said, “Ohhh.” Right in the middle of the bed, curled up like a cushion, was a tiger cat with a white bib. I sank down on my knees beside the bed and put my hand gently on the cat's fur. She opened her eyes and blinked at me as if she'd just been waiting for me to come along.

“Is she yours?” I asked Mrs. Jordan.

I saw Mrs. Jordan and my mother smile at each other. “She's yours,” Mrs. Jordan said. “She just walked in last week and made herself at home.” Mrs. Jordan explained that when she'd first come, they'd called her Ke-ren, the Chinese word for “guest,” but when she made it clear that she was staying, they shortened it to Kurry.

I liked everything about my room so much that I hardly felt I needed an outside to my world, but the next morning when my mother and I went exploring, I could see that the outside was far better than the inside. First, we went behind the house and between two banks of azaleas we found Rattling Brook, gurgling and bouncing topsy-turvy over stones.

“May I put my feet in?”

My mother nodded. The brook was obviously too stony for wading, so when I'd taken off my shoes and socks, I sat on the bank and let the water dance over my bare toes and splash up my legs.

Later we walked up the hill, looking for wild flowers. Actually, we didn't need to look. They were everywhere—buttercups, daisies, wild roses, violets. When my mother came across an unusual one, she would give an “Oh” of joy and tell me its name: daphne, wild heliotrope, pink orchid. Sometimes we'd stop and look up at the mountains and at the scarves of fog they wore around their shoulders. There were eagles up there people said and mountain lions maybe. My mother sat down on the ground and threw her head back to look at the sky. She was wearing her new blue dress, one of the loose dresses she'd made to keep her cool, and I thought I'd never seen her look so pretty. I thought I've never loved her quite so much.

That night I went to sleep listening to Rattling Brook and when I came down to breakfast the next morning, Mrs. Jordan told me that my mother was in the hospital. She had gone in the middle of the night and my father was still there with her. I pushed my plate of fried eggs away from me. “What's wrong?” I asked.

“She had pain in her legs,” Mrs. Jordan said.

Later when I asked Lin Nai-Nai what was wrong, she pointed to her middle and shook her head. So there was something wrong with her middle too. I didn't want to think about it. I looked over the Bobbsey Twin books and decided that it didn't matter which one I started since the Bobbsey Twins had been everywhere and done everything. I took the one that told about them on the seashore and went to the front porch. With Kurry on my lap, I began, pretending that life really was the way Bert and Nan found it—one good time after another and nothing ever going very wrong. When it was time for lunch, I put a marker in my place so I could begin again quickly just where I'd left off.