World and Town (28 page)

But out come her binoculars instead. For there sits Carter, laughing up a storm, joking and whistling. He produces a harmonica and another guitar—or, no—what is that? A banjo. Hattie didn’t even know he played the banjo. But there he sits, strumming the thing and howling and generally showing off. And there’s the whole family, come out to watch him—Sarun and Mum tilting their heads back and forth while Chhung taps his foot and slaps his knee. He’s still wearing his brace, but can sit all afternoon in his guard chair now; it’s an encouraging sight. How much more cheering yet, though, to see him like this—imitating someone in a Western, it seems. Hattie can’t hear much over the banjo, of course, but her mind supplies a soundtrack easy enough:
Tap, slap, tap, slap
. Is this the demonic man of the afternoons and evenings?

Tap, slap, tap, slap
.

Tap, thwap, tap, thwap
.

Carter switches back to his guitar, waving his audience good-bye; and now the lesson begins. Sophy plays; he points something out. She plays a little more; he nods—better. They both bend over their instruments; you can almost see the learning move between them, like a ball. What a good teacher he’s always been! Learning is a dance, he used to say, and even from a distance Hattie can see how their rhythms are firmly in synch. He imitates that little waggle she makes with her head; she laughs; they try different picks. He presents a book to her. Then for stretches of time that grow longer as the lesson goes on, they drape their arms over their respective instruments and talk; the symmetry ends. For he is mostly talking and gesturing now, while she is mostly holding still, rapt.

Hattie can remember holding still, rapt, once upon a time, herself.

Carter’s ways of moving have not changed, Hattie sees. The motion of that stick, for example, as he draws something on the ground; the moment of pondering that comes next. He ponders with his elbows on his knees, his wrists loose, his hands dangling like fruit—hmm. An exaggerated pondering this is, more about modeling pondering than about pondering plain and simple. And now come the retreat of the hands, the advance of a foot. His back straightens as he corrects a line with his heel, making an elaborate scuffing motion. He rolls his eyes as if to suggest just how mistake-prone he is, how very like a normal Joe—a little corny self-deprecation, designed to put you at your ease. Which Hattie always did love him for—the out-and-out graciousness of it. Never mind what he’s explaining, which, if Hattie knows Carter, may or may not have anything to do with the guitar at all. The handedness of nature, the location of the fertile crescent, the miracle of gastrulation—Carter could be talking about anything, believing as he does both that one thing should be allowed to lead to another and that you should never cordon off certain topics as too technical or too abstruse. Or too sensitive: Hattie does hope he and Sophy will get to talking about the Bible one day—Sophy going off in the blue car more and more, Hattie notices. To that center. That church.

Ginny’s church.

In Chinese, Hattie would say Carter
huì zuò rén
—that he has a way with people. Which is not so much a matter of skill, maybe, as of humility.
I never go walking with three people
, Confucius said,
but
that one of them proves a teacher
. Now she watches as he lays down his stick and, with a rueful smile, looks at his watch. How genuinely he would love to stay, his body says. What a marvelous time he has had. But, well, next week. He stands and stretches. Mum appears, then disappears, then appears again; so that when Carter leaves, it is with three paper plates of food, in a stack. His shadow against the trailer as he thanks her is enormous. Hattie watches as he turns his car around—watches Sophy watching him turn around, too. Standing there on the crate by the front door, waving, her head tilted to the side. One hand plays with her hair.

A fifteen-year-old girl! A sixty-seven-year-old man!

But, well, a father figure.

Mum appears behind her; Carter waves to them both in his rearview as he heads up the drive. Did he notice Sarun digging? Did he register the pit? What with all his waving, he could well have missed it, Hattie sees.

Well, maybe she’ll point it out next time. For now, she puts on some music—first, some Brahms four-handed piano music. Then a Brahms clarinet thing Carter’s mother used to love.
Proof
, she liked to say,
that some blooms come late
.

Joe, of course, used to have a different reaction to it—to Hatch music, as he called it.

Carter Hatch, Carter Hatch
, he used to say.
Why didn’t you marry that Carter Hatch?

And when Hattie said it was him, Joe, she loved, he laughed.

H
ow easily she could never have met this Carter Hatch! But one day back in Qingdao they began to talk about the Communists the way they used to talk about the Japanese. The People’s Liberation Army, they said. The fighting. The fighting. The fighting was everywhere; the fighting was coming. It was coming here. And then where would they go? Everywhere else in China people moved inland. But how could they move inland, with the Communists inland of them? They had best learn to swim, said Hattie’s father
.

Hattie’s mother begged a favor of one of the missionary couples with whom she’d originally come to China. Of course it was a tragic story, a terrible story, that the Wilders’ daughter had been killed in an anti-foreigner uprising—the sort of story that tested a person’s faith in
God to the utmost. But it did mean they had an extra set of papers with which to leave the country. And so Hattie’s mother wrote them: Please. If you would please at least take my daughter. How she wished she had made the kids citizens! Everything would work out eventually, she was sure. But if the Wilders would first take this daughter, well, how grateful she would be
.

The Wilders’ daughter having been adopted and, it so happened, a half-half like Hattie. A
hùn xúe’er.

“
It’s God’s will,” said Reverend Wilder
.

Molly Wilder’s hair had been lighter than Hattie’s, but with some hydrogen peroxide Hattie’s was made to match; a doctor carved a small cut into Hattie’s right cheek, too, where Molly Wilder had once been hit by a windmilling ski. Of course, Hattie was amazed, as she sat for her surgery, to think of this Molly, skiing. And what exactly was a windmilling ski?

Never mind. Her mother found some eye shadow like Molly Wilder’s—green stuff, the color of inchworms. She curled Hattie’s eyelashes with a scissor-handled clamp, and applied mascara; the mascara came in a cake, like a slice of ink stick. And when she was done, Hattie’s brothers gaped. A foreigner! Even Mrs. Wilder, when she saw Hattie, was amazed. “Molly!” she cried, and swooned. She was wearing a cross heavy as a pickax; it lodged itself in her armpit
.

And the next thing Hattie knew, she was having supper with her mother’s family in Iowa. The food was strange, and the forks and knives, but she had expected that. The slabs of meat, the blood on the plate—she had been warned. And hadn’t she grown up in Qingdao, after all, with an American mother? She had eaten all sorts of things. The silence, though—she had never in all her life sat at a silent table
.

“
Days don’t get more glorious than this,” Grandpa Amos would say eventually, with a flare of his enormous nostrils. He raised his jutting eyebrows, as if to counter some shrinking force centered in between his eyes. “And to have our grandchild returned to the bosom of the family. Well, we have to thank the Good Lord for that.
”

“
Pa,” one of Hattie’s uncles would say then. “You have been saying that every night for a week.
”

“
Well, it’s still true.” Grandpa Amos smoothed out his napkin as if, like his face, squares of cloth wanted attention if they were to maintain their rightful expanse. “And isn’t she a joy.
”

Grandma Caroline shook. Though she had Hattie’s mother’s
name, and Hattie’s mother’s ways, she was, awfully, nothing like Hattie’s mother at all. Instead, she was thin and nervous, with hands that trembled so bad she sat on them. And, as if to go with her darting way of talking, she had a stinging way of thinking
.

“
I suppose her stature is her father’s,” she said now. “Doesn’t it seem her father’s?
”

Hattie tried not to cry
.

“
How about if you tell us something about China,” said Grandpa Amos, consolingly. “How about if you tell us what it’s like there?
”

And, staring at the sprigs on the plate ware, Hattie tried to think what to say. Farmers that they mainly were, her aunts and uncles were disappointed that she knew nothing about soy—what they grew—though she was at least able to explain that farmers did not use combines in China, preferring, as they did, water buffalo. And of course, Hattie did like soy sauce, and soy milk. More than that she really couldn’t supply; but happily, Uncle Jeremy insisted that that was enough—maybe because he, unlike the others, had nothing to do with the growing of anything. He was an anthropologist—a kind of spy, he explained, if you can imagine a spy looking, not for secrets, but for understanding
.

“
It’s good to have you home,” he said, adjusting his glasses. And, “You have your mother’s spirit, may we see her again one day.
”

That made Hattie want to cry, too, as did the ongoing efforts to save her heathen soul. “Eternal life,” Grandpa Amos would say, over ice cream. “Maybe you’re not ready to accept Christ’s sacrifice. I can understand that. But eternal life.” He’d shake his head. “That’s a lot to give up.” Grandma Caroline sat her down on a hard bench. “ ‘The unbelieving shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone,’ ” she said. “That’s what the Good Book tells us. Fire and brimstone. Do you know what brimstone is?
”

“
Sulfur,” said Hattie
.

“
So your mother did teach you something.
”

“
She told me to look it up myself.
”

For all the tension, they certainly would have held on to Hattie, had that seemed the Lord’s plan. But, well, Grandpa Amos’s prostate; and Grandma Caroline’s thyroid, besides. The Good Lord did not seem to be equipping them for a young girl’s care. Plus how much sense did the country make for Hattie, anyway? A place she would probably be treated like a freak, said Uncle Jeremy. No, the answer was for the family city folk to take her—if only he and Susan weren’t
headed to Tanzania! But, well, Susan’s research. Uncle Jeremy did have some Christian friends, though, also living in the city, with a big house. What if Hattie were sent to live with them until her parents got themselves out of China? Picture her a kind of exchange student, he said. Though, of course, if she were to teach the other kids a little Chinese, well, wouldn’t that be nice?

H
ow many musical instruments the Hatch family had! Their music room housing not only several violins, but a viola, and a cello, and a harp, and several wind instruments, besides. The piano was Mrs. Hatch’s baby Bechstein; Dr. Hatch’s Steinway console sat closed up in a corner. Maybe with its big name and small sound, it really would be relegated to the basement someday. In the meanwhile, the piano in the basement was Carter’s no-name spinet
.

“
To each his own ears,” Mrs. Hatch would say gently. “If you would please just close the basement door.
”

Carter being a fan of country music, of all things, who, besides the piano, played the harmonica and guitar
.

Hattie had just turned seventeen when she came. Carter was fifteen—blue-eyed like his father, and still growing but huge already, people said. Taller than his father, and gangly, with a way of twisting himself up that was almost girlish. No one would listen to him play except Mrs. Hatch, when she wasn’t fund-raising for her symphony, and Hattie—which Carter said didn’t bother him. Still, he would always tell Hattie when he had learned a new song, and play it for her first chance he got
.

“
Is it insipid?” he would ask
.

“
Insipid?” She would frown. “I don’t know. What does that mean?
”

That made him laugh. “Insipid is what it is. Like it never read any books. Like it never met a sarcastic person. Like life is a field full of daisies.
”

“
But you like it?
”

“
I don’t know. I guess. I mean, it’s not a Brahms quintet.” He strummed a little
.

“
What’s a quintet?
”

People called him a sweet boy, almost as brilliant as his older brother Anderson. He was the charming one, the sensitive one, the one who would play four-handed piano with his mother. Reedie was
the baby. Hattie liked them all, and tutored them as best she could, though they were not too keen on learning an extra language. Weren’t Latin and French enough? Dr. Hatch wanted them to be Renaissance men, but even Renaissance men, they complained, did not speak Chinese. The only reason they paid any attention whatsoever to their tones or characters was because they knew how stranded poor Hattie was. Dr. and Mrs. Hatch talked about it—the Revolution, the chaos. It was in the newspaper
.

“
Do you think you’ll ever see your real family again?” Reedie would ask at dinner, playing with his food. “I mean, your Chinese family?” And, “Is it true Jeremy told your American family we were Christian?” And, once, “Are you going to stay long?
”

Mrs. Hatch shushed him
.

They were as interested in Confucius as her mother’s family had been in soy. She tried to explain that her family was only
pángzhī—
a side branch of the family tree, or not even that. A twig. She tried to explain that her parents were from Qingdao—a big city, a port city. The Germans, she tried to say, the Japanese. Occupation. The Communists. The Hatches listened. But things Confucian had a special handle for them—Miss Confucius, they called her. “What would Confucius think of Kerouac?” they liked to ask. “What would Confucius think of Brylcreem?” It was just how American families were, she thought, full of banter; and how much better to be bantered about than not, especially since, as the reality of her situation began to dawn on her, she could not always leave her room. Then what a blessing it was that one of the boys would eventually knock on her door—dispatched, of course, by Mrs. Hatch—and demand a Chinese lesson
.