Peony: A Novel of China (4 page)

“When I say I will be here midway between morning and noon meals, I am here,” Madame Ezra said. “Even after a feast day,” she added.

“No one doubts it,” Ezra replied tranquilly.

He was an ample man, black-bearded and olive-skinned, and he filled the wide Chinese chair. This morning a long Chinese robe fell to his feet. It was of dark wine-colored satin, brocaded in a design of circles, and over it he wore a sleeveless jacket of black velvet. On his head he had wound a vivid turban of silk, and the fringed ends spread above his right ear, where he wore a heavy gold earring. The other ear was bare. His feet too were bare, and he wore leather sandals studded with gold. Feet and hands were large, to match his heavy frame and his big-featured face. With his size he moved in a slumberous fashion, yet he was not languid so much as indomitable.

Madame Ezra gazed at him with mounting impatience. They were a well-matched pair and she knew it. She loved him heartily, but he could make her more angry than anyone else.

“Have you seen David?” she now demanded.

“I seldom see him in the morning,” Ezra replied. “Moreover, I have been at the teahouse since I rose from my bed. I had promised to meet Kung Chen there.”

He coughed behind his large smooth brown hand. “What a clever merchant!” he said with admiration. “He and I—we’re a pair. We respect each other. One day he has the best of me and the next day I have the best of him. But the end is coming now—we are almost agreed. Naomi, if I bring this contract to conclusion, as surely I will after the caravan comes, I shall have an outlet through the House of Kung for all my imports of ivory, porcelain, peacocks, western trinkets, and musical instruments—in short, for all foreign goods. Through their shops I shall pour my merchandise.”

The two bondmaids, Wang Ma and Peony, had taken their usual places. Wang Ma stood behind Madame Ezra and Peony behind Ezra. They were as little noticed as though they were pieces of furniture, but this they took as a matter of course. Ezra leaned on the table. “Naomi, I have something to propose to you. Now be patient—”

“Well?” Madame Ezra’s voice was edged with impatience.

“Kung Chen has a daughter, sixteen, very pretty—”

“How do you know?” Madame Ezra demanded.

“Well—hm—I saw the child, quite accidentally, the other day. He had asked me to come to his house—very unusual. But we wanted to talk privately about the contract. She was there in the main hall. Of course, she left instantly. But Kung said she was his daughter.”

Madame Ezra contained herself with difficulty. She pressed her lips together and gazed furiously at her husband. “I suppose you are about to suggest that I accept this Chinese girl as my daughter-in-law?” she asked bitterly.

Ezra shrugged and spread out his big hands, palms upward. “Well, my dear, you see the advantages. I am an importer of foreign goods, he is a merchant with shops in a dozen big cities, you see. After all, we are living in China.”

“I see nothing except that you are asking a monstrous thing!” she cried.

“Eh?” Ezra lifted his shaggy eyebrows.

“You know that David must marry Leah!” Madame Ezra’s rich voice threatened tears.

“Now, Naomi,” Ezra began. “You can’t mean that you are going to insist on that, after all these years!”

“I do insist!” Madame Ezra retorted. “All the more after all these years!”

Ezra spoke with persuasive gentleness. “But a foolish promise, Naomi, made by two sentimental women over their children’s cradles!”

“A sacred promise,” Madame Ezra declared, “made before Jehovah, to preserve our people pure!”

“But Naomi—”

“I insist!”

“It’s a little late to talk about purity. My own mother was Chinese,” Ezra said.

“Don’t remind me of her!” Madame Ezra screamed.

Ezra lost his temper suddenly and completely. His face purpled. He rose to his feet. But Wang Ma was quicker. She stepped in front of him and she pushed him to his chair, her hands on his arms.

“Master, Master,” she remonstrated.

He sank back. Wang Ma poured a bowl of tea and gave it to him with both hands and glanced at Madame Ezra. Ezra took the bowl and set it down abruptly before his wife.

“Drink tea, Naomi,” Ezra said shortly.

Now Wang Ma filled Ezra’s tea bowl and presented it to him. Peony drew a white silk fan from her wide sleeve and began to fan him gently. He sighed, relaxed in his chair, and lifting his turban, he wiped his face and head with his silk handkerchief and put the turban on again.

“Perhaps we had better send for David,” he suggested at last.

“There is no use in sending for him until you agree with me,” Madame Ezra said.

“But perhaps he will help us to agree,” Ezra retorted.

“I will not have you mention this Chinese girl to him,” Madame Ezra replied.

“No, no,” Ezra said, “that I promise! But we could find out how he feels about any marriage. That, at least—”

“Why at least?” Madame Ezra broke in. “It is the most important, not the least.”

Ezra slapped his knees. “Peony!” he shouted. “Go and fetch my son!”

“Yes, Master,” Peony whispered. She moved out of the room, noiseless and graceful. Wang Ma filled the tea bowls again.

Madame Ezra went on, “I will not grant that David can decide this matter.”

“You wouldn’t want him to marry a woman he hates, Naomi,” Ezra said more mildly.

“Who could hate Leah?” Madame Ezra rejoined. “She is a beautiful girl—and so good.”

“Certainly,” Ezra agreed.

“What our old rabbi would have done without her—” Madame Ezra said.

“His son is good for little,” Ezra said with sarcasm.

“Aaron is still a child.”

“Only a year younger than Leah.”

“She seems much older.”

“Yes,” Ezra agreed absently. He fell silent.

He had in fact told his wife a lie. It was not he who had seen the pretty daughter of Kung, but David. But how could he have explained to his wife that he had purposely sent David to the house of Kung? He had sent him with a message to Kung Chen at the exact hour when the ladies of a house are freshly dressed and wandering about the courts for change and exercise. When David came back he had said teasingly, “Why are your eyes so bright, my son? What have you seen?”

David had blushed as a young man should and had shaken his head. “Here is the answer, Father,” he had replied shortly, and had put Kung Chen’s letter on the table.

Now Ezra closed his eyes, sat back in his chair, and circled his thumbs slowly one about the other. Behind the veil of his eyelids his acute and restless mind worked busily, sorting out the threads of his emotions. He was not confused so much as complex. In his veins ran the blood of two hearty strains. Half of the blood was nearly pure, but his father had taken as a second wife a young Chinese woman of strength and beauty, and he was her son. Outwardly his mother had seemed to adopt all the ways of his father’s house. But Ezra, her son, alone knew how untouched was her heart. In her own room, in the secrecy of her being, she had laughed at the foreigners with whom she lived. While she had enjoyed the pleasures of being a rich man’s wife and had eaten until she had in her age grown immensely fat, her pretty features sunk in mounds of rosy flesh, she had actually given up nothing of her own ways, and had even influenced the man she had married. Old Israel ben Abram, as the years passed, had begun to neglect the feast days once carefully observed in the house, and compromise became his habit. But when his Chinese wife died, leaving his son Ezra a boy of fifteen, in an excess of remorse and smitten conscience he had betrothed him to Naomi, daughter of a leader of the little colony of Jews in the Chinese city.

Ezra, at that time indolent and romantic, had yielded. Naomi was handsome and there was something fascinating in her cool young strength. After their marriage, he found the habit of compromise, taught him by his Chinese mother, a practical weapon. Naomi was too strong. It was with compromise that his brain was now busy.

Madame Ezra spoke suddenly. “Ezra, open your eyes—you look foolish.”

“Certainly, my dear,” he replied. He opened his eyes.

“Not so wide, stupid!” Madame Ezra said impatiently.

He drooped his lids and his lips twitched with secret laughter. She threw him a sharp look and he caught it as though it were a glass ball and threw it back at her. She looked away.

“David is a long time in coming,” she remarked.

“He may have been on the street somewhere, Lady,” Wang Ma hastened to reply. Every servant in the house rallied to the defense of the young lord.

Before there could be an answer they heard his footsteps. Peony preceded him, drawing aside the scarlet satin curtain with delicate fingers. He stood there, tall and dark, his impetuous eyes searching the two faces now turned to him.

“You sent for me, Father—Mother—”

“Come in and sit down, my son,” Ezra said kindly.

“Where have you been?” his mother asked at the same time.

He answered neither of them. He sat down near his father and Peony poured him a bowl of tea and silently set it on the table beside him. Then she took her usual place behind Ezra and drawing the fan again from her sleeve, she opened it and began to move it slowly to and fro. Her eyes were half hidden beneath her drooped lids. David looked at her and away again. It was impossible to discern from that smooth pearly surface what thoughts flowed beneath.

“David, it is time—” Madame Ezra began.

The young man whirled around on his seat. “Time for what?” he demanded.

“You know, my son,” Madame Ezra said. She humbled herself, she made her voice pleading, knowing full well how easily this beloved only child could harden himself.

“I don’t know, Mother,” he retorted.

Madame Ezra pleaded, “Leah is eighteen, David. And you are a man. And I promised her mother.”

“Your promises have nothing to do with me,” he said shortly.

“But you have always known—” Madame Ezra reminded him.

“I do not know now,” he interrupted her. “Besides, I don’t love Leah.”

“Shame on you!” Madame Ezra cried. “Last night you were friendly enough.”

“This morning I remember her nose is too long,” David said.

Madame Ezra spread out her hands and rolled her eyes from one face to the other. “She is a good girl—pretty, too—and learned in our faith. She will be a light in this house after I am gone.”

“Still her nose is too long,” David insisted.

It had become a habit for him to oppose his mother, and he did so unreasonably now. He knew well enough that Leah’s nose was a handsome one, and had his mother kept silent, he might have remembered only Leah’s beauty. But he was still childish enough to want to be free at all costs, and now he glared stubbornly at his mother and then laughed.

“Don’t marry me off so young, Mother,” he cried gaily.

Ezra laughed out loud. Peony allowed herself the smallest of smiles. Wang Ma’s face was expressionless. Madame Ezra felt no support. She bit her lip, sighed, and summoned all her adoration of her son. When she turned to him again her full dark eyes were moist and her lips quivered.

“David, my son,” she began in her richest, softest tones, “do not break your mother’s heart. No, wait, I do not ask you to think of me, David. Think of our people! You and Leah, David—together—your children—carrying on the blood of Judah, in this heathen land! Such a good girl, David—a good wife, always loving you and the home, teaching the children about God! When the time comes for us to go back to our own country, our promised land—”

David broke in, “But I don’t want to go away. This is where I was born, Mother—here, in this house.”

Madame Ezra dropped her persuasion. Honest temper blazed in her full face. “Dare to speak so to your mother!” she shouted. “God grant us the chance to go back to the land of our fathers before we die—you and I and your father and all our house!”

Ezra coughed behind his hand. “I couldn’t leave my business, Naomi.”

“I am not talking about tomorrow!” Madame Ezra shouted. “I am talking about God’s good time, when the prophets lead us.”

“I may as well speak,” David said suddenly. “Mother, I want to tell you something.” He rose and they looked at him as he stood, tall and beautiful, before them. “Mother, I won’t marry Leah, because I love someone else.”

Madame Ezra’s firm jaw dropped. Ezra lifted his tea bowl. Peony stood, her eyes on David. The little silk fan was motionless in her hand. Wang Ma turned away her head.

“Who is it?” Madame Ezra demanded.

David faced his mother, his cheeks scarlet. “I saw someone—in the Kung house—”

“When?” Madame Ezra demanded with passion. Her strength returned.

“Two days ago,” David said simply.

Madame Ezra turned upon her husband. Her black eyes blazed at him. “You said—it was you who—”

Ezra groaned. “My dear, you compel us all to lie to you,” he remarked sadly. He lifted his heavy-lidded eyes to his son. “Go on,” he commanded him. “Now you have begun, finish! You saw a pretty girl. Did you speak with her?”

“Of course not,” David cried. “She—she said something—‘Oh, oh’—something like that—and she ran out of the room as fleetly as—as a—”

“As a fawn?” Ezra suggested dryly.

David looked astonished. “Father, how did you know? Have you seen her, too?”

“No,” Ezra replied. “Not this one. But I believe ‘fawn’ is the usual term.”

“What folly!” Madame Ezra said in a loud voice. “Ezra, I am shocked!”

Ezra rose suddenly. “I’m sorry, Naomi. Really, I can’t stay—Kung Chen is waiting and he is not the sort that does wait, you know.”

“Sit down, both of you,” Madame Ezra said imperiously. “David, you shall be betrothed on the tenth day of the eighth month. It is the anniversary of the day upon which Leah’s mother and I made our promise.”

She met her son’s eyes full and they looked at each other. His eyes fell. “I won’t—I won’t,” he muttered. “I’ll kill myself first.” He turned and strode from the room.

“Go after him, Peony,” Ezra commanded.

Peony needed no command. She was already halfway to the door and she disappeared behind the satin curtain.

To this revelation David had made she had listened with astonished ears. And she had dreamed that she knew all his heart! More than she had suffered last night for Leah’s sake she now grieved that David had hidden this from her. She ran across the corridor and out upon the long verandas that lined the courts. Where had he gone? She paused, finger to lips, her eyes closed, pondering. He would want to escape, and where could he escape except into the streets? She turned and ran swiftly and lightly toward the gate.