The Eternal Wonder (22 page)

“If it is our fate,” she said.

“Do you believe in fate, Stephanie?”

“Of course I do. At least the Chinese part of me does.”

“And the other—the American?”

She shook her head. “You’ll miss the airport bus. The taxi is waiting.”

“Aren’t you coming with me?”

“No. I’m not coming with you. I’d only have to come home alone. Besides, I want to be here when my father comes home.”

She turned her cheek and he kissed its cool, smooth paleness.

“Good-bye, Stephanie. We’ll write?”

“Of course. Now, be on your way!”

P A R T     II

W
hen he reached New York, Rann was impatient to leave at once for home. Yet here was his grandfather and he had not the heart to go without inquiring of him so that he could tell his mother how the aged man did. A lifetime, it seemed, had passed during this trip. He had gone away a boy in experience and he had come back a man. But he had been compelled too quickly. Lady Mary had done him a damage. She forced a physical maturity upon him. What would it have been like, he wondered, if he had loved a girl, shy and young, someone his own age or even younger, and had made his own sexual way, leading instead of being led, hesitating instead of being hurried, wondering instead of being impelled? But there had been no young girl. Stephanie—no, Stephanie somehow belonged to the future. Yet if there had been no Lady Mary, might it have been Stephanie?

He was too tired to answer his own question. A deep weariness, a mental lethargy, overcame him. He had grown too quickly. His mind was too crowded. He needed time for the approach to manhood, time in which to study his own nature, divine his own needs. The thought of the quiet house in which he had been born and where he spent his childhood, yet that also always too quickly he now felt, nevertheless presented peace to his troubled spirit. No, he would not blame others. It was he who hurried himself, his restless mind, his instant imagination his masters. He would sleep, he would eat, he would rest in his mother’s calm presence and gradually he would know what to do. Meanwhile he must consider the matter of military service. Those years loomed ahead—shadow or opportunity? He did not know.

He traveled the crowded, litter-strewn streets of Manhattan with a sense of distaste after the immaculate streets of England and France, seeing the people anew—his people, though they seemed strange to him for the moment. How little he knew them and how much there was to know, how much to learn! He had learned something, in a fashion, about himself, but what he had learned he now did not like. He had learned in fact that body and mind were at war in his big frame and that he had conquered neither. Indeed, he had not fed or satisfied either being, for here was his clamorous body, its passions roused, its instincts alive, and here his mind, hostile against that body. He did not want to see a girl’s shapeliness or imagine her unclothed, and yet he was compelled thus to see and to imagine. He rebelled against his body, for his mind was hungry and impatient for its own satisfaction. The war was within his own members, and somewhere a third part of him hovered—his will, hesitating between body and mind. Body was tyrant and somehow it must be subdued so that he could assuage the deeper and perpetual hunger of his mind.

In this troubled state he left his modest hotel room on his first morning in New York and journeyed toward Brooklyn, intending to stay a day or two with his grandfather and then proceed westward. It was a fair morning, sunny and clear, the sky cloudless, the people walking briskly in the warm, pure air. He took a cab and watched the scene that moved slowly outside the window. Strange, strange how a people shapes its world! This could not be any other city on Earth than it was. Dropping haphazard from the sky, he would still know at once that it was American and New York. The car trundled finally over the Brooklyn Bridge and wound its way through streets until it reached his destination and stopped. He paid the driver, greeted the white-haired doorman who remembered him, and went into the elevator to the twelfth floor.

Then he pressed the doorbell and waited. Impatient, he pressed again. The door opened a few inches and he saw Sung’s frightened face peering at him.

“Sung!” he cried.

Sung put his finger on his lip. “Very sick—your grandfather.”

He pushed his way in, past Sung, and hastened to his grandfather’s room. There, stretched upon the bed his grandfather lay, his hands crossed on his bosom, his eyes closed.

“Grandfather!” Rann cried, and leaning, he put his hand on the folded old hands.

His grandfather opened his eyes. “I am waiting for Serena,” he murmured. “She is coming for me.”

He closed his eyes again, and Rann gazed at him, frightened and awed. How beautiful this aged face, the waxen skin, the white hair, the carved lips above the elegant hands! Suddenly he could not bear to lose his grandfather.

“Sung!” he called sharply. “Has a doctor seen him?”

Sung was at his elbow. “He not want doctor.”

“But he must have a doctor!”

“He talk he wishing die. He begin die last night—maybe five, six o’clock. He talk some lady only I don’t see, and he talk he too tired waiting her and must go her side somewhere—I don’t know. So no more eating, he talk me, but I make soup anyhow. He no eat. Just lying there all night talking this lady. I sit here all night too, not seeing lady, just hear him talk like she here.”

“He is wishing himself to die,” Rann declared.

“Maybe,” Sung agreed. “Man wishing die, he die, in China same.”

He shook his head, resigned and calm, but Rann went to the telephone and dialed. His mother’s voice answered.

“Yes?”

“Mother, it’s I,” he called.

“Rannie, where are you? What—I didn’t know you—”

He broke across her joyful surprise.

“I am with Grandfather—got in yesterday from Paris. Mother, he’s dying—he won’t see a doctor. He just lies here in his bed, waiting.”

“I’ll take the next flight out,” she said.

RANN AND HIS MOTHER
SPENT
the summer in New York doing all that they could to instill in his grandfather some will to return to living. Each doctor who came conducted extensive examinations and at last declared that there was nothing really wrong with the old man.

“It seems he simply has no wish to go on,” the last one had said with finality.

He refused any medical care and feeding him was a matter of forcing hot broth between his thin lips.

Autumn passed quickly into winter and on a brisk day with the feeling of snow in the air Rann’s mother had gone into Manhattan to purchase a few warm clothes, for she had brought none with her to New York and hesitated to return home with her father so ill.

When she returned, Rann met her at the door. “Grandfather died an hour ago, Mother,” he told her.

Tears came quickly to her eyes and she gave him a quick embrace and kiss. “We have been through this before, Rann, and we know life must go on.”

“But there’s so much I don’t know how to do,” Rann said. “What—”

“I’ll get the proper things going. You look tired and you need to rest. Have you eaten? No? You really should, you know, we both should. There is no need to make ourselves ill.”

Sung hovered about them. “I fix. I know. Soup maybe with sandwich. Coffee.”

He went away, soundless in his felt slippers and Rann put his arms about his mother.

“I’d forgotten,” he muttered. “I’d forgotten what death is like. But he wanted to die. He kept hearing—someone—call him.” He remembered then that his grandfather had not told his mother about Serena.

“My mother—,” she broke in.

He sat down in a carved chair. No, he would not speak of Serena. If his grandfather had wanted his daughter to know, he would have told her. Now he would keep the secrets of the dead.

“He simply willed himself out of life,” he said.

THEY WERE IN THE JET
flying westward. A few days and it was as though his grandfather had not lived. Yet both of them were conscious of the urn of ashes they had left behind. It was macabre. The ashes were so meager, a handful of chemicals that a quick wind could blow away.

“I’ll send the urn to you in a couple of weeks, if you’ll give me the address,” the man at the crematory had said.

They had looked at each other, mother and son.

“He’s never left New York after he returned from Peking,” his mother said.

“He was happy here,” Rann said, and thought of Serena.

“You can rent—or buy—an alcove here,” the man suggested.

In the end that was what they had done. They had left the final dismantling of the apartment to Sung, and then suddenly his mother had changed her mind.

“Your grandfather left everything to you, son, even this apartment which he owned. Why not keep it? Sung can take care of it. You may not want to stay in a little Midwestern town. You will want a place of your own, someday, if not now, and in New York, doubtless. He has left you very comfortably well off. You can certainly afford it.”

So they had left the apartment to Sung, and just as it was. The thought of it pleased him. He could come back.

“I will come back,” he had told Sung.

“Please, sir—soon,” Sung had begged.

Now sitting next to the window in the airplane he watched the clouds floating about them in the sky. He was aware of monstrous bewilderment, shock, weariness. When his father died it had been expected and prepared for. His mother had prepared him and so indeed had his father.

“Your father is approaching his next life,” his mother had told him.

“Is there another life?” he had asked.

“I want to believe there is,” she had said firmly.

He had accepted this, as in those days he had accepted everything, it seemed to him now. And his father had spoken easily of his future beyond Earth.

“Of course, we don’t know, but with the passionate will to live that we humans seem to have, there’s the probability that life continues. It’s all right with me either way. I’ve had a wonderful time here—love and work and you, my son. What a glorious life
you
will have! Joy to you—”

“Don’t,” he had whispered, fighting off his tears. “Don’t talk about it!”

His father had only smiled, but they had never talked of death again. One of these days when he was ready to face it, he must think it all through—gather all the evidence. Now he wanted only to live. He leaned back in his seat and fell suddenly asleep. The plane was jarring to the ground before he woke.

THE OLD LIFE FELL INTO PLACE
. The house enfolded him. Here he had been infant and child. Here he had learned to walk and talk and wonder. For a few days, even weeks, it was comfort to fall into a familiar niche, to wake in the morning in his old room, to go downstairs to the logs blazing in the fireplace, the gentle clatter of his mother preparing breakfast, to know the day lay ahead of him, his to possess. Neighbors came in to greet him. After a while even Donald Sharpe called on the telephone.

“Well, Rann—back from your jaunt abroad? What’s next?”

“I don’t know, sir—I suppose military service somewhere. My induction notice has arrived and I’m to go on Thursday for the preliminaries.”

“No idea where, I suppose?”

“No, sir.”

“Try to come and see me before you leave!”

“Thank you, sir.”

He would not go. He knew too much now. He was no longer a boy. And yet he was not quite a man. There were these years facing him, a barrier between past and future, years when he must lend his body to his country, years which he must spend in some unknown place, performing an unknown duty. There was no use in planning until these years were over, and still he could not keep from planning.

He listened, without hearing, to his mother’s determinedly cheerful chatter. There was a comfort in being with her but that was all. Yet though he knew his life had now proceeded beyond her ken or reach, he was aware that she, too, knew this and so she did not question him about Lady Mary or about Stephanie. Of Lady Mary he did not speak, but he told her of Stephanie, briefly and casually, at breakfast one morning.

“The sort of girl who is—well, one of a kind. She isn’t French, nor is she Chinese, and certainly not American, and yet somewhat each.”

He was silent for so long that his mother encouraged him.

“She sounds interesting, at least!”


“Yes,” he agreed. “Yes, certainly she is interesting. Very complex, perhaps! I feel I’d have to be a good deal older before I’d understand her.”

He paused again, undecided, and then went on.

“You’ll be amused by this, Mother! Her father is an old-fashioned Chinese, though he’s lived in Paris for so many years. He has no son, and it seems that when this is the case a Chinese may ask his son-in-law to become his son and take his name. Well, he asked me to be that son-in-law!”

He was half-laughing, in some embarrassment, and she laughed aloud. “How could you refuse such an offer?”

“Well, Stephanie had warned me. She told me she didn’t want to marry at all. And certainly I don’t … not at this point in my life when I don’t know—can’t know—my future.”