The Year She Left Us (10 page)

“I'm moving out as soon as I make some money. That's it.” Her eyes looked dead, but her mouth was nervously twitching. She took a last drag and flipped the cigarette over the rail. Charlie stepped forward to block her from leaving, but Ari didn't move.

“Come inside,” Charlie said. “I can hardly see you.” She backed away from Ari and ushered her into the kitchen. The lights glared down. Charlie took a deep breath.

“Help me understand. Are you asking to work for a while before you start college? Because if that's what you want to do, we can discuss it.”

“I'm not asking anything.” Her voice flat and distant.

“Are you worried about money?” Charlie asked in a rush. “I don't want you to worry about the cost. We've already planned for your college expenses. You can help, of course—I won't say no to that.” She gave a hollow laugh. “But now's not the time to let money get in the way.”

“I don't need money. I—” Ari's mouth clamped for a second into a thin pink line. Her eyes flicked to the kitchen clock and stayed there. “I'm going to get my old job back and look for other work. When I've got enough saved up, I'm going back to China. Like I told you, I was just getting into it there.”

“There are good exchange programs—” Charlie began, but Ari shook her head. “Please, Ari,” Charlie said. “You have to let me speak. If you don't want to start school right away, we can discuss it. You have to have some sort of plan. You can't just bounce around. What's going on? What's the mystery here?”

Ari buried herself deeper in the folds of the bulky jacket. “I'm good at bouncing,” she said. Her head was drawn in so far, Charlie could hardly hear her. “Remember what the orphanage aunties wrote? ‘Like the Bowns.' Maybe all I'm good for is bouncing. From one place to another, that's how my life is going to go.”

“I understand how hard things have been for you lately, but—”

“If ‘lately' means my whole life, then, yes, you're right.”

“No,” Charlie said. “You were a happy baby! You loved school; you had lots of friends, best friends, who started out the same as you. A.J. and Becca and all the other playgroup girls. They can't wait to get to college.”

Ari shrugged, and Charlie saw what the shrug cost her: her daughter's eyes stayed empty, but her face drained to white. “It's that business with WeiWei,” Charlie declared. “It's brought up all sorts of feelings. I understand that. I truly do. Every adopted child wonders about her biological family. But at some point, honey, you've got to let that go.”

“God!” Ari cried. “I'm so sick of you looking for explanations! Can't we just agree that we won't talk anymore? I can't give you any reason for why I feel this way. There is no reason. So let's just
shut up
.”

Stop now
, Charlie said to herself,
this isn't going anywhere
, but she was locked into the skid. “We
will
talk. You won't run away from a simple family discussion. I won't let you shut me out, like with what happened in Kunming—”

At that, Charlie paused. She rubbed at her forehead and felt the hard bone of her brow. Her feet ached; the kitchen light was ghastly.

“You have a family,” she started again, “a family who loves you. And I'm sorry that it isn't picture perfect, but believe me, if you saw some of the families I deal with in my work . . .”

Like an officer in the road or a sworn witness, Ari raised her hand between them. The sight of her wrapped finger caught like a hook in Charlie's eye. The evening damp lay heavy in her kitchen. “You're never going to understand me,” Ari said.

Charlie had no answer.

CHAPTER 14

GRAN

T
his morning I awoke thinking of the baby. Still I see the red face, hear his thin cry in my ears. He visits me in my half-twilight moments, shredding my pleasure at the first conscious breath of the day or my contentment after a well-earned nap. His mouth open. His eyes gummed shut. A twisted torso with no proper limbs—in the blurry glimpse I got sixty-one years ago, I saw one arm with a fisted hand moving, or was it a foot, shaped like a concubine's bent and broken lily?

“Shall I clean its eyes, Doctor?” I asked the attending physician, who hadn't given his customary orders. He was turned away, busying himself with his instruments. The mother lay silent in a twilight sleep of her own. Head Nurse hadn't made a motion.

The doctor didn't answer. I didn't know what to do.

“Doctor, shall I clean its eyes?”

“Leave it,” he ordered. I looked at Head Nurse. Her cap was tilted downward, her gaze fixed to the linoleum floor. A tray clattered noisily off to the side. I didn't look at the baby, but I heard its cry catch. Next time I looked, its face, not a face, was turning blue. Head Nurse didn't move a muscle. The doctor stayed as he was, turned away and fiddling.
He's doing something about it
, I was still telling myself.
In another second, he's going to turn back around and get started.
I thought of Father's hands—his elegant fingers with clean white nails he kept more neatly trimmed than Mother's. The clever hands of the son of a tailor. The doctor's hands weren't as beautiful as Father's, but for three months of nursing training, I'd watched them cut and sew and tug.
He knows what to do.
There was something they expected from me, but I hadn't a notion of what. Another minute passed, dragging me into comprehension.
The doctor is waiting. And I must wait, too.

When no sound rose anymore from the table, Head Nurse looked, then quietly said, “Doctor.”

He turned around to make sure that the baby wasn't breathing.

“Clean this up,” he said.

I didn't have to do it. Other people came in and took over. I was ordered from the room before I could bend down to take a look.

It was a boy, I'm certain.

Y
ifu has written again. I open her letter and read once more about her excessively talented grandchildren—you'd hardly think they were human; one imagines performing seals—and Robert's prodigious prostate. They still live in Pasadena in that big house with the swimming pool and orange trees in the yard. Has anyone mentioned to Yifu that she's old and decrepit? She thinks she's going to live forever. Perhaps she's already arranged it by witchcraft or voodoo or with engineered cell life from Robert's famous lab. I wouldn't put anything past Yifu Yen. “We're coming to Berkeley in October,” she writes. “They're giving Robert a special award.” She names some prize with an honorific so long that it sounds made up to me. “We were so sorry to miss you on our last several visits. I hope this time you might be less busy. I'll have a free day because Robert is giving a lecture. He's finally learned how to work the PowerPoint by himself. May I come for a visit and take you out to lunch? It's been too long! I'm dying to see you.”

She's dying to see me. I should be so lucky. If she hadn't described to me in her last letter the vivid details of her cholecystectomy—she no longer has a gallbladder; her bile was backing up—I'd sit up and applaud her unmitigated gall at keeping up the pretense that we've not seen each other in two years because I was simply too busy. She's deliberately overlooking a perfectly good social slight. My husbands are gone, my children grown. I sold my restaurant, and my nursing days are long over. An exciting day of travel means a trip to the doctor's office. I have hours by the clockful but no yen to see Miss Yen. That's a little chuckle at Yifu's expense. Charlotte would sigh at me—she was always telling Ari that to respect a person's name was to respect the whole person. Solly, Chollie. Some people work hard to earn our disrespect. Yifu is one of them, a woman who can't be trusted. She took eighty years of friendship and, in one blabbermouth moment, poured it down the drain. I haven't forgotten how she turned Rose against me. No, I'll not sit down with Yifu to reminisce about the old days. What's done is done, the bad along with the good. There's nothing to be gained in recounting our schoolgirl years, and I don't see why she would want to since her memories can't stack up to mine. I had many more suitors and was president of all the student clubs while Yifu warmed the secretary's seat. We had mixers every weekend, Bryn Mawr and Valley Forge, or Bryn Mawr and U. Penn. Knowing that Yifu and I shared our every confidence, the boys who fancied her used to ask me for advice. I'd usually mention chocolates, the ones with cherries inside. It was a good way to get the treats we both loved. I was always surprised when a boy hankered for Yifu, but the heart is irrational and its judgment is often faulty. Robert's attentions were the biggest surprise of them all because we could see how intelligent he was and knew he would be successful. Yifu met him at a skating party. She wanted George, but I had spotted him first at a Chinese student holiday party in New York City, two days before Christmas, 1949. We married one year later at a Presbyterian church in Baltimore, with punch and tea sandwiches served afterward at George's professor's house. Rose was my maid of honor and Yifu my only bridesmaid. I wore a beautiful dress from Jay Thorpe on West Fifty-seventh, ivory white with panels. Yifu borrowed it when she and Robert got married, though of course she had to let out the side seams and bring the hem way up. We shared absolutely everything, a mistake I learned the hard way.

She's trying to mend fences. It's a little too late for that.

O
nce Ari was old enough to use words as weapons against her ghosts, she asked me questions about my past that I didn't answer. I blame myself for not taking the time to sit with her, for assuming that she was too young to talk to. Maybe, if I had painted her a more complete picture, she would have been reassured that the tree indeed reached back and she was a twig on one of its branches, but I was mean in the beginning with my interest and attention. My neglect was excusable; I had concerns of my own. Herbert was courting me, and he went about it with captivating reserve, waiting for three years—he was George's liver-transplant doctor—before asking mutual friends to invite us both to dinner. I could tell he'd been carrying a torch for me the whole time since George's passing. He proposed over dinner at Huangpu River, the second-best Shanghai cuisine restaurant in L.A. The Pearl was the best—that was my restaurant, a perfect jewel I built and owned for fifteen years. I stole my chef from a Chinatown sty where he was wasting his talent on brown sauce for the masses. He was the heat, and I was the flame, drawing them in with my witty conversation. I played Portia in middle school at Miss Allingham's School in Shanghai. The stage suited me; with audiences, I was a natural, a talent I brought to my restaurant every evening. I had a flair for the front of the house as good as any impresario's under the Big Top and could recall the names and favorite dishes of everyone who came in for dinner, or at least the important ones. I had to close the Pearl when George fell ill.

Herbert could see that I was very lonely. He proposed an adventure: that we move to Taipei, where he'd been offered a plum position, and buy a grand apartment that I would make into a home and a salon for entertaining. We could throw lively parties the way my parents had hosted all the interesting and important people in Shanghai when I was a girl. Herbert had plenty of money; his family was wealthy, so he had even more than George, who'd wasted his earnings and broken his health by working for poor people when it's the rich ones who can pay. I loved George; he didn't disappoint me, but he could have been so much more. Why shouldn't a Chinese head up a major U.S. medical center? Father could have done it had he had George's chances. Herbert knew how to focus on the opportunities ahead. I never knew his first wife, but I could see that before her illness she'd taken very good care of her husband. Their children were successful. Herbert wore good suits and drove a late-model Audi. We were already in our sixties, so there was no mother-in-law to lurk. We married and moved soon after Ari turned one, hardly of an age when she could absorb my lessons. I'll always regret that we left that car behind.

You're correct, Naomi used to tell me. The young people, they're full of questions. Why do they have to know? There's no use living in the past. That was the message we newcomers embraced. Our silence instructed our children not to delve deep, but their children ask away because they weren't taught to keep quiet. They have no model at home of survival and then restraint. They're writing reports for their third-grade teacher or a college short story or a misery memoir. Some of my friends—my old Shanghai schoolmates and our Taipei circle—feel special to be questioned, to be asked to spill their stories before their memories trickle away. Naomi and I knew better than to be flattered into confession. It's why we were friends. We didn't share what was private, though we knew we each had secrets. A secret keeper can spot a kindred lockbox: the maneuvering away from discomfiting topics, the careful explanations and omissions politely deployed. We knew not to tread where our curiosity wasn't welcome.

Ari asked, and I ignored her.

T
here are scraps that come to me, stories I might have shared.

When I was thirteen, Father saved my best friend, Yifu, without lifting a finger. It was 1941. Four years earlier, the Japanese had invaded China. Mother had begged Father to let us all live together—she always pleaded for our family to stay united. The year that we had spent in Kuling without Father, right after the Japanese invasion, had been very hard on Mother, though not on Rose and Mu-you and me, for Kuling was our paradise, our mountain Shangri-la. Mother said that we couldn't spend another winter in Kuling in our summer house with no proper insulation, and that Shanghai wouldn't be any more dangerous than mountain life in Kuling, so long as we kept to the sectors where Chinese were permitted. Father agreed that we could return to Shanghai, except for my brother Mu-you, whose condition so troubled Father.

It must not have been a school day, or Yifu and I would have been at Miss Allingham's, the missionary school we attended. I spent many hours at Yifu's house, which was a few streets away from mine. She was a plump girl even then and had a silk scarf from Paris and an English-language dictionary that stood in the parlor on its own piece of furniture. We both liked American movies and went often; there were loads of movie theaters at that time in Shanghai. Yifu was partial to Shirley Temple and my favorite was Laurel and Hardy. We were alone in the house except for the cook and a housemaid. A man came to the door; he said his name was Mr. Wong. His pants were torn, and his eyes jumped about. He said that he had just come from the university where Yifu's father was a professor. Japanese security men had come and taken him away, he said. As he was being led off, her father had asked Mr. Wong to go to his house. He needed money and a family member to help him.

“Where is he?” gasped Yifu. “Can you take me to him?” Her mother was out and wouldn't be home until dinnertime.

“Get all the money you have in the house,” Mr. Wong said. “I will take you to him.”

Yifu rushed upstairs to remove two gold bars out of the family's hiding place and packed a rucksack with clothes and food for her father. We all lived in fear that our fathers would be arrested and accused of spying, and she knew that the Japanese might detain her father for days. I eyed Mr. Wong. He stood nervously just inside the door, taking care not to stare at the valuable wall hangings or the big shelf of books in Chinese and English.

Yifu is a fool
, I thought.
This guy is up to no good.

“Yifu!” I called, loudly enough for Mr. Wong to hear me. “I'm going to call my father at the hospital. He'll know what to do. Wait for him to get here.”

“Who is your father?” asked Mr. Wong, just as I knew he would.

“Wu Wei-Wen,” I said proudly. I watched Mr. Wong gulp and go pale.

“Yes, that's fine,” Mr. Wong said. “I will just go and check with the taxicab driver, who is waiting to take us to where the professor is.”

When Yifu reappeared, we looked for Mr. Wong. He had vanished from the courtyard into the streets of the city.

Just the mention of Father's name was enough to frighten off bandits.

You have to remember that these were the war years. People did desperate things.

S
unday afternoons the world came into our house. First, we went to church—Mother's father was a Presbyterian minister, so we never missed Sunday service—and then we went home to prepare for our weekly open house. The Chinese, French, British, and Americans arrived by pedicab and taxi, sweeping through our front gate. I stood in the courtyard and observed the ladies in their wide-shouldered suits nipped smartly at the waist and clever hats and high heels that clattered. There were Jews, too—I told that to Naomi. A Mr. Ben Cohen, I remember him coming often. Father greeted Mr. Cohen the same as everyone else, with a big laugh and a slap on the shoulder. Father didn't have the narrow worldview of so many Chinese of that time. From humble beginnings to Johns Hopkins University and Peking Union Medical College—everyone saw how remarkable Father was. At PUMC, he met Mother, who worked in the office there. How surprised she must have been that Father selected her over all the others. She wasn't beautiful. She was tall and broad-shouldered, good for playing field hockey, and she could carry as much as the servants. Her father was Toishanese, her mother an American missionary lady. I suppose, being Eurasian, Mother must have seemed exotic. She was educated, too—she had studied biology and chemistry at Hunter College in New York City—and though it wasn't Bryn Mawr, it served her well enough. Mother declared it her entrée to the world. A sentimental notion, since her entrée clearly was Father.