Homesick (10 page)

“Are you sick?” Lin Nai-Nai asked.

“No. It's just that sometimes when I think about the people in Wuchang, I don't want to swallow my food. I won't do it anymore, so don't tell.” I was ashamed of myself for lying, so I ran out of the room to find Kurry who was a comfort to me in my guilty times. She'd purr and blink her eyes as if she were saying, “What's the difference?”

But although I looked all over the house, I couldn't find Kurry. I was always afraid that she'd streak out the front door sometime when it was open, and even though this was Hankow, not Wuchang, I didn't want her outside. (In Wuchang there were no dogs or cats left, my father said; they'd all been eaten.) She was allowed, however, in the enclosed courtyard between the house and the servants' quarters, and when I looked out the glass window in the back door, I saw her in the courtyard, crouching between Yang Sze-Fu and the serving boy, eating from a blue rice bowl. I was the one who fed Kurry. Why was she eating with the servants? More important,
what
was she eating?

I stood still and watched. The two men were squatting on their heels, eating their evening meal, shoveling rice into their mouths with chopsticks, dipping into the large bowl of vegetables and meat that sat between them. Every once in a while Yang Sze-Fu would pick up a bite and drop it into Kurry's bowl. Once he laid down his chopsticks and stroked Kurry on the head and talked to her.

Before the summer I had often squatted in the courtyard with the servants while they ate, so I went out now and joined them.

Yang Sze-Fu seemed embarrassed. “The cat likes Chinese food,” he explained.

“You like my cat?” I asked.

He shrugged. “A cat is a cat. There are no foreign cats, no Chinese cats, no capitalist cats, no Communist cats. Just cats.”

He picked up a cup of tea and took a loud sip from it. I noticed how, as he held the cup, he tried to hide his pinkie, and I remembered how he used to flourish it as if he felt especially superior when he was drinking tea. Suddenly I saw that no matter how strong a Communist Yang Sze-Fu was, he missed his nails and I felt sorry for him. I decided not to worry about potassium anymore.

 

When my father came home in the evenings now, the first thing he did was to announce how long the siege had been going on. The twenty-third day, the twenty-fourth day. It was as if this was the only way he could keep track of time. Then he would tell us the news. Sometimes the Communists had allowed a few boat-loads of sick and wounded to cross the river to hospitals that the Y.M.C.A. had helped to set up. These refugees had terrible stories to tell: houses destroyed, people sleeping in the streets, children dying, water running low, disease spreading. I' listened now because this was Lin Nai-Nai's war and I wanted it to be over. Already I was helping Lin Nai-Nai fill baskets with food to take to Wuchang as soon as the city gates opened. She knew her family might refuse to see her, but she had to try, she said. I bought a big bar of milk chocolate for her little brother, but I didn't always tell her the news that my father brought home.

Sometimes the news was so bad that my father wouldn't even tell us. Instead, he'd go to the piano and pound out the one piece he knew by heart, “Napoleon's Last Charge.” I loved the piece, but even more, I liked to watch what it did to my father. He could sit down at the piano, looking as if he had given up on China, but pretty soon his left hand would get the cannon booming and the drums beating. His right hand would say Giddyap to the horses and off they'd go, galloping off to battle. Then both hands would charge faster and faster up and down the keyboard, armor clashing, bugles blowing, and by the end, I knew it didn't matter whether Napoleon ever fought again or not. My father had won.

Still the siege went on. One night at supper I tried to imagine what people in Washington, P.A., talked about at the end of the day.

“What do you suppose they think is news?” I asked.

“Well, they're probably worrying about the first frost now and wondering if they should cover up their tomatoes,” my father said.

We all laughed. Suddenly it seemed both wonderful and funny to have nothing more than a frost to worry about.

“Can you imagine us when we get to Washington, P.A.?” I asked.

My father tipped his chair back. “I suppose I'll be watching the papers to see how Pittsburgh is doing in baseball.”

“And Blanche and I will be talking about the length of our skirts,” my mother added.

“And I'll be roller skating all over the place.”

It wouldn't be long now, I thought. We were due to go to America on the twenty-sixth of April and this was the first of October. I counted on my fingers. “Just six more months,” I said. “Plus a couple of weeks.”

My father brought his chair down slowly. “We hope,” he said.

“What do you mean—
hope
?” The date of our going back to America had always been a sure thing. We had our reservations. We knew the name of our ship, the
President Taft.
We had even bought a Dodge car that would be waiting for us in San Francisco so we could drive across the continent to Pennsylvania.

“Well, Jean,” my father said, “you can see what war is like. If we were scheduled to leave Hankow next week, for instance, we couldn't do it. I'm needed here.”

“But the siege will be over long before spring,” I pointed out. “You said yourself you didn't think that Wuchang could hold out much longer.”

“Yes, and then we'll have to take care of the people, the living and the dead.” But that wasn't all, I found out. Even after Wuchang had fallen, the war wouldn't be over. This was only what my father called a “skirmish.” The main part of the Nationalist Army hadn't even arrived.

“Well, for heaven's sake,” I exploded, “you don't expect to hang around China until it's all through fighting, do you?”

“No. I expect we'll go to America on schedule. I just thought I'd warn you. Delay is possible.”

I should know by this time, I thought, that nothing in the world was sure. Certainly nothing on this side of the world. I felt the tears beginning when Mother put her hand over mine.

“We're going to begin lessons tomorrow morning,” she said. “So get your pencils sharpened and your desk in order. School begins at nine o‘clock.”

My mother was really much better. She was up for most of the day now and her keys hung around her waist, which meant that she was back in charge. (I envied her the keys: desk drawer keys, kitchen cupboard keys, trunk keys, door keys. Foreigners locked up everything.) She was even well enough so that we had visited friends, which was a treat. Since I wasn't allowed out alone now, days often became boring and I was glad that we'd be starting lessons and I thought my mother must be glad too. She had been a Latin teacher before she was married and my father said she'd been a whiz-bang.

We began school on the thirty-first day of the siege. I had my pencils, razor-sharp, lined up on my desk with a red pencil for my mother to use for marking papers. I had put a little bell on the desk so she could ring it when a class was over or when it was time for recess. I thought it would be like play-school. Of course I expected to work, but I thought we'd have fun pretending to be teacher and pupil when we were really mother and daughter.

I guess I hadn't understood what it meant to be a whiz-bang. My mother started right off with complicated arithmetic, and since she didn't know French, she said she would teach me Latin.

“Latin?”
I cried. “No one in America studies Latin until they're in high school. You said so yourself. You were a high school teacher.”

“So you'll have a head start.” I could see my mother wasn't pretending anything. Even her voice became the kind of teacher voice you didn't argue with. So I learned about dative and ablative cases and I solved problems about how long it would take a train to go from Hankow to Peking if it were going so many miles an hour and stopped five times on the way. I knew that grown-ups never figured out such problems; they just looked at timetables. But when I pointed this out to my mother, she said someone had to make up the timetables. It didn't make a bit of difference that I intended to write stories, not timetables, when I grew up.

Of course I liked some subjects more than others. I learned the capitals of all forty-eight states, and when my mother called out the name of the state, I snapped back the name of the city. I liked reading about explorers planting flags all over the New World and I marveled how they never looked mussed up in their pictures, although I thought exploring must be dirty work. But there was Balboa taking possession of the Pacific Ocean and he was neat as a pin. Still, the best part of every day was when my mother rang the bell which meant that school was over and she could be my mother again.

On the fortieth day (October 10, 1926) the siege was over and my mother declared a school holiday. Lin Nai-Nai and I went to the market to buy fresh food for her baskets because she expected to go to Wuchang the next day with my father. As a member of the relief committee, my father was already there and would be going back and forth for a long time, I supposed.

But when my father came home that night, he looked too sick to go anywhere. He said he wasn't sure if he could even eat supper. As he lowered himself into a chair in the living room, he just shook his head.

“You can't imagine it,” he told my mother. I think he'd forgotten I was in the room or he might not have told all that he did. So many dead rotting bodies in the streets! In just one hour he'd counted sixty bodies being wheeled through the city gates in wheelbarrows. “And I figure there are at least fifty thousand sick people that will have to be brought to Hankow.” His voice cracked as he spoke, and I guessed he was thinking about sights too pitiful to put into words.

“A bomb went through the roof of the Wuchang Y.M.C.A. building,” he went on, “but they continued to give out free rice as long as they had it.”

Part of my father still seemed to be in Wuchang, which must have been why he looked so sick and why he didn't seem to hear the knock on the living-room door.

My mother called, “Come in,” and there was Lin Nai-Nai.

“Excuse me, Mr. Gau,” she said, “but you promised that I might go to Wuchang with you. What time should I be ready tomorrow?”

It was my mother who answered. “Oh, Lin Nai-Nai,” she said, “I think you should wait a couple of days until the city has been cleaned up a little.”

Lin Nai-Nai stood firm on her little bound feet. “If my family are hungry, they are hungry now.”

My father dragged himself back from wherever he'd been, looked at Lin Nai-Nai, and nodded. He told her to be ready at seven o‘clock. They would cross the river in the relief committee's launch and he would see that she got as far as the Wuchang “Y.” He knew she hoped to stay for a while with her family—that is, if they'd let her.

“Leave a message for me at the ‘Y,' ” he said, “so we'll know your plans. And when you're ready to return, I'll arrange for it.” He pulled out his wallet. “You'll need some money.”

The next morning after my father and Lin Nai-Nai had left, my mother suddenly announced that we'd have another school holiday.

“Let's go visiting,” she said.

“Not to the Gales',” I begged. Mr. Gale owned the Dodge agency and Mrs. Gale was my mother's best friend. They had no children but they did have two pet monkeys, Nip and Tuck—disgusting creatures who should have been left in the jungle. They were not housebroken, but for some reason Mrs. Gale thought she was doing me a favor when she dropped one in my lap for me to play with.

“All right,” my mother agreed. “How about the Lit tles in the Episcopalian Mission?”

It was a good choice, one of the few places where I still had friends. Many families had left Hankow and many had sent their children away for their education—to boarding school in Shanghai or to relatives back home in England or America—but at the Episcopalian Mission there were three girls, Nancy Little, Margaret Masters, and Isobel Wilbur, all a little younger but I didn't mind that. What I liked was that there was space to play in the center of their circle of houses. Trees and grass and swings.

When my mother went inside to visit with Mrs. Little, Nancy and I ran to the swings. And how I ran! It was as if my legs had been holding back and holding back without my knowing it. I jumped on a swing and pumped myself right up to the sky. Margaret and Isobel came out and we played tag and climbed trees and shouted until we were out of breath and then we threw ourselves down on Nancy's porch.

We lay there panting for a few minutes and suddenly I heard myself say something I had not planned to say at all.