Inheritance (37 page)

Junan had also held a kind of power, and wielded it with no outward regrets. Certainly, he thought, she must hold somewhere the same scars, the same troubled memories. Now he would carry to her the bitter news of Yinan’s illness. Perhaps his news would soften her and she would yield to his request. Didn’t the most hardened, aged general feel a moment of compassion upon learning the misfortune of his former enemy?

ON THE PLANE
to San Francisco, my father dozed and tried to read the newspaper, but his eyes tricked him so that certain characters looked like the characters in Junan’s name. This jolted him to an awareness of what he was doing. He didn’t want to see Junan, but he had promised. He was dreading the sight of her, and every minute he came closer.

He arranged for the cabdriver let him out early so he could walk and steady his nerves. Later he wrote to me that California seemed too perfect to be real, with houses so new that the trees were quite small with trunks and branches as smooth and slender as the throats of young girls, and the streets unbroken under the sun. His shadow hovered beneath him, bent and hollow on the pavement.

His eyes, grown farsighted with their years, detected the red roofs of the renowned university and the distant, glittering buildings of San Francisco. It was a windy day with little smog, good visibility. His gaze followed the road and then a turn to the right, until he glimpsed a long, pale brick wall that marked the boundary of my mother’s house.

He knew about the house and still he was surprised. What he saw seemed to float in the back of his eyes, every shape and line familiar, from the squat, ornamental sculptures to the faint glitter of green tile that lay within. He felt for a moment as if he were looking at a place that had long since passed out of the real world, and even the smells of grass and flowers were as faint as the perfume of dreams. Walking slowly toward the house, he saw the foliage against the wall and then her line of rosebushes, proud and meticulously tended, lifting huge, precise ivory blossoms high against the brick.

He felt his thoughts rising lightly, borne like a scent on the wind, and he found himself standing once again in the old courtyard where he had entered, so many years ago, wearing his foot soldier’s uniform, looking for Junan’s father. He could almost smell the kitchen, hear the clicking as Wang Daming mixed the paigao tiles. He was a young man again, with his watertight confidence and unassailable hopes, heart beating before the elegant, worn walls, trying to guess at the opulence and mystery within. How he had wondered about the charms of Wang Daming’s beautiful elder daughter who lived there.

Had he really changed? he wondered. Had love or time changed him one bit, or was he still that man who moved so thoughtlessly forward?

He expected somehow that she would be standing at the door, as she was the evening they had met. But when he knocked on the door, it was opened by a small, indifferent manservant.

With an effort of will, he announced himself.

“Please tell the madame that Li Ang has come to pay his respects.”

The man turned and vanished. In a moment, he was back. This time, Li Ang detected signs of a disturbance. The man’s hands trembled as he closed the door. He looked dazed and shaken by a sudden bolt of wrath, and Li Ang knew his visit was a surprise.

He was shown through a large room and into the courtyard. As he came closer to the garden, he caught a glimpse of color and knew there would be flowers of such profusion and rarity as he had not seen in sixty years. There would be a goldfish pond with a willow tree, fruit trees, and a mulberry. There was indeed all of this, and in the center of the garden were enormous black stones that she must have had brought there from towering foreign mountains, tall shapes like petrified wood, swirling with deep obsidian-colored patterns.

Near these stones, she sat alone. As he came closer, he noted the elegance of her bones, even more clear since the flesh had melted away. The throat and face and hands had grown small with age. She had conquered what emotion had seized her upon learning of his visit, and sat perfectly composed, with her hands folded in her lap, weighted down perhaps by the gold and pearl and enormous jade rings on her wrists and fingers. More jade and heavy gold lay around her throat. Her oval face was pale. Behind her, on a narrow table, three elongated statues of the bodhisattvas watched him with stone eyes.

He bowed slightly, and she nodded in return.

Even after so many years, it was a shock to come face-to-face with Junan’s powerful will. Her eyes were slightly lidded over in an expression he remembered well but had never quite learned to read. Only one person might have been able to tell what she was thinking, and Yinan was far away.

He reached into his bag and produced a gift, a box of candies of a kind he recalled she had once liked, bright, hard candies twirled into many shapes.

“Well,” he said, and smiled at her. “How are you, Junan?”

“I am perfectly well. Of course, my strength isn’t what it used to be. And you, you’re getting so old!” she said.

“But reports of my death were inaccurate, I fear.”

She frowned; he hastened to make peace. “I’ve become an old man,” he said. He added gallantly, “You, on the other hand, are very much the way I remember.”

But he found the changes to her face and body unsettling. After so many years of separation he had come to imagine Junan as the woman of his youth, her skin forever white and fresh, her lips red, eyes sparkling.

“Let me pour you a cup of tea.”

“No, no,” he protested. “I’ll do it.”

“All right,” she said.

Reassured, he slowly poured their cups, careful to control the movement of his hands. “A pity that you don’t drink brandy before dinner,” he remarked.

“It can’t be helped.”

“Let’s drink to meetings after many years. Ganbei!”

Together they raised their cups, and in this way they arrived at conversation. Junan’s body may have aged, but her mind was as quick and true as it had ever been. She provided him with gossip about their old acquaintances. Pu Taitai still insisted on living in Taiwan. There, she spent her time busily engaged in telling and retelling a kind of myth about the events of the first half of the century, a myth that acknowledged the basic events—the attempts of the Republic to hold the country together, the Japanese invasion, and the Communist takeover—but that, through ingenious shifting and careful balancing of forces and faults, managed to ignore their own defeat. For years, Pu Taitai had repeated the revised slogan,

Ten years of birth and gathering

Ten years of teaching them

After twenty years had come and gone, she had mentioned this less frequently, but Junan didn’t think she had ever ceased believing that Taiwan would someday triumph, and the Nationalists would return to mainland China and become, once again, its rightful government.

In America, Hsiao Meiyu had disinherited two of her grandchildren for marrying “foreigners.” Junan found it a pity that the son had married a blonde—the children would have such thin, light hair—but she didn’t wonder about the daughter, a paragon of terrible genes—small-eyed and dull-faced, with those fat, cucumber legs. What Chinese man would have married such an ugly girl?

“‘Patriotic.’” Li Ang cleared his throat. “On the mainland, a young woman isn’t called ‘ugly.’ She is ‘very patriotic.’”

He could hear in his own voice the old, flirtatious tone he had always used with her. He had missed this. It was the way they had once been together—not during the war, when each conversation had been fraught with the exhaustion of logistics and separation—but in the early days, when they had first been married. They’d barely known each other then; he had believed she couldn’t truly hurt or change him. And she must have believed the same of him.

Then Junan asked, “What brings you here?”

“Me?” He stalled for time.

“I know you wouldn’t come to visit me unless there was something you wanted from me. What is it?”

Li Ang took another deep breath. Suddenly the California air held no nourishment.

Years ago, Junan had said that he would come to her, begging. Now the situation was exactly as she had predicted; but knowing this didn’t make it any easier. He would come begging, but if he must beg, he would present a request whose refusal he could bear. He had prepared a question secret even from Yinan, turned it over in his mind as he lay awake during the past few weeks.

“Well,” he said, “it’s been a long time since we have met. And I’ve had many years to think about you.”

Still, Junan sat waiting. He might have been speaking to one of the tall cypress trees behind her.

“Yes,” he continued. “Many years to think of how I’ve wronged both you and your sister.”

Junan smiled.

“It’s true. I know what I have done.” He paused. He knew that what he said was true. For a moment he considered stopping here, asking for nothing. But he still cared what she thought of him. She didn’t respect apologies. He needed to press on.

“You have no reason to forgive me,” he said, “but will you at least take pity on Yao’s boy, Li Cai? He’s a very smart child, the star of his class. His father has suffered so much for my choices. Will you sponsor Li Cai to come to the United States?”

She didn’t answer but sat watching him closely.

“Throughout these years,” he added, “Yao has thought of you as his benevolent auntie. We have never changed his views. He would be forever grateful to you if you would help his child.”

“What do you really want from me?”

“I’ve just said it.”

“No, there is something else.”

He noticed then that his hands were still clenched on the arms of the chair. He took a deep breath. She had stripped away his cover. Now, naked and vulnerable, he must put Yinan’s request before her.

“I want you to put an end to this feud between you and Yinan. I want you to forgive her.”

She shook her head.

“Please,” he burst out, “Yinan—she is suffering. Only you, only you can put an end to this. Please, go to her. She is ill. She will die. Show her that you have forgiven her and both your spirits will rest in peace.”

He paused and looked up at her hopefully. His hands trembled. He blinked, to dry his eyes. The looming shadow of all he had lost, and was still to lose, fell over him, and he waited, as if they were both young and filled with promises. For a long moment she did not respond. She had folded her hands in her lap and now she sat frowning at the gold on her wrists and fingers.

“She sent you to do this.”

“She—”

“It can’t be done.”

Her voice was shaking, splintering apart. “Many different things bring peace to different people, and you know it.” She took a deep breath and when she spoke again he knew that she had calmed herself. “But you shouldn’t try to interfere in our quarrels.” She put a cool hand on his. “This was something between Yinan and myself. Between sisters. Surely you understand?”

“No,” he said. He realized then that he had never understood either of them. After all of these years, their bond, even in anger, had been a bond that he could not penetrate or know.

“Some things, once broken, can never be fixed.”

His voice was also shaking. “You know the three of us may never see each other again alive, Junan.”

With an effort she controlled herself. She stared at her hands until she could raise her calm, white face and bend her smile upon him again. “I know,” she said. “I don’t expect to.”

There was a long silence before he stood. He left the garden and walked back through the beautiful house, where the servant showed him out. Soon he would board the plane and fly back to her sister. He had missed Yinan terribly and he had gifts for her, photographs and presents. It was best to look to the future and put these things to rest. But his conversation with Junan had been burned into his mind.

YINAN DIED EARLY THE FOLLOWING
SPRING. MY FATHER WROTE
to me enclosing copies of her poems. It was some consolation, he wrote, to share his memories of Yinan with someone else who’d loved her. The poems were written in complex characters on many sheets of paper, some yellowed and others fresh, some in her own handwriting and others newly copied by my father. I read them all, many times, particularly one that he’d written carefully on a thick, cream-colored sheet.