Peking Story (3 page)

I had never heard of the Assemblies of God, but we were not inclined to question him too closely, being more than happy to accept him if the American consulate was satisfied. We knew that Aimee's family was indifferent to the religious aspects of the occasion, and was concerned only that the simple Chinese ceremony be included. As I have said, the signing of the certificate is the core of it; beyond that, there may be some slight additional ceremony, though this is not necessary. Both bride and bridegroom are sponsored by a relative or close friend, rings are exchanged, and the presiding friend — in this case the Reverend Mr. Feng — wishes the couple long life and many babies.

The Reverend Mr. Feng, probably briefed by his brother, quickly understood what was wanted, and I made an appointment to meet him in Mr. Kepler's office the next morning.

“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Kepler when, with Mr. Feng beside me, I explained that we had found a suitable minister. “The Assemblies of God. That's fine! Fine! And when will the wedding be? I'm attending as the consular witness, you know.”

Trying not to show the relief I felt, I told him the wedding would take place at Aimee's house two days later, at eight o'clock in the evening. I then explained that we were trying to keep our marriage a secret, particularly from the troops occupying the front courtyards of the house, since we didn't know what the reaction of the Communist authorities would be, and that we would tell anyone who might be curious about people coming and going that night that we were having a small private party. For some reason, the secrecy seemed to appeal to Mr. Kepler, and he said heartily, “You can depend on me!”

I pointed out that the Reverend Mr. Feng knew no English and that therefore the marriage ceremony would be entirely in Chinese. Mr. Kepler was sympathetic; he appeared to believe that conducting the Christian ceremony in Chinese had something to do with keeping the wedding a secret.

The Reverend Mr. Feng returned with me to Aimee's, where she and I spent some time haggling with him about his fee. There were many paper currencies in use in Peking then, and the stability of all of them was doubtful. When people discussed the price of anything more valuable than a pack of cigarettes, they talked in terms of silver or gold dollars, or perhaps pounds of millet or bolts of cloth. The Reverend Mr. Feng wanted silver — twenty Mexican dollars' worth. Five dollars Mex. Would have paid a servant's wages for a month. We finally agreed on nine dollars Mex. It was high, but the Reverend — again, no doubt, briefed by his brother — was well aware of his value to us. We told him we were trying to keep the wedding as simple and as Chinese as possible, and asked for his cooperation. He promised to do his best.

Aimee and I had two days to get ourselves ready. Since I had no ring to give her, and no money to buy one, she gave me a diamond ring to put on her finger during the ceremony. I was not allowed to see her costume before the wedding, but she had already prepared mine — a sky-blue gown of fine Tibetan felt, and a vestlike jacket of patterned black silk to be worn over it. I was also to wear black silk shoes and white socks. Though details differ, this is a fairly standard formal wedding costume for men. Aimee didn't care for the garish red of the traditional Chinese wedding dress and would say only that she would wear a self-designed adaptation of it.

All the other details were left to friends and servants. I had been told not to appear before eight o'clock on the night of the wedding. It was decided to use the main gate again, for that night only; it was lacquered red and had a great, sweeping roof, and so would be much easier for our guests to find than the small one opening onto the back alley. There was an entrance court just inside the gate, and behind it lay the courtyards where the Communist soldiers were quartered.

The night of the wedding was cold, and when I arrived at the gate I found a group of soldiers warming themselves around a wood fire there. They seemed rather nervous and hostile — perhaps because of the sudden traffic that evening through the gate they had come to consider exclusively theirs. Off to the left, a little door in the wall of the entrance court opened on a corner of the garden, and I found a servant waiting beside the gate to lead the guests there. From inside the garden door, a line of paper lanterns hanging overhead marked out a way along stone and pebble paths, through rock grottoes, under a wisteria arbor, past faintly reeking, quietly chomping horses, through groves of rustling bamboo, to the Hall of Ancient Pines, where the wedding was to take place.

Ancient Pines was an imposing room, where many great men of China had been entertained by Aimee's father. Except for a few sofas and overstuffed chairs, it was furnished in Chinese style. The floors were of polished black tile and were covered with Chinese carpets. Six hexagonal lanterns of glass and carved wood hung in a row from the ceiling, and from the corners of each hung long red silk tassels. Potted flowering plants and orange and lime trees were scattered about the room, and Chinese landscape paintings decorated the walls, except for the north one, which was paneled with mirrors. When I arrived, about twenty guests were already there, and servants were carrying immense quantities of food and drink to various sideboards and tables. The windows had been covered with rice paper to shield us from the eyes of wandering soldiers.

Mr. Kepler was there, I saw, sitting directly under a lantern and talking, with visible enjoyment, to one of Aimee's attractive younger sisters. In a few minutes, Hetta Crouse, a mutual friend, came in with her husband, William Empson. Hetta is South African, and a sculptress; William is a British poet and critic, who was at that time teaching in Peking University. Hetta was to sponsor me, and I asked her if she had brought her seal.

I should explain that everyone in China has a seal. It is the equivalent of a signature, which is not valid there, the Chinese being convinced that a signature can easily be copied but that no two seals are ever alike. Even children have to use seals when they register in school or sign receipts for their supplies.

“I brought a whole bloody sackful,” Hetta said, dumping a collection of seals of all sizes from her handbag onto a table. “Some of them are mine, and some are William's, and some are the ones the children use, and I don't know where we got the others. But we must use all of them on your certificate. They'll look
very
important.”

In a short while, the Reverend Mr. Feng came in. He was dressed as before, with the dingy scarf hanging fore and aft, and his cane in hand. He carefully removed his coat, though not the scarf, switching the cane from one hand to the other as he did so, and, after shaking hands with me, joined Mr. Kepler. Servants continued to bring delicacies to the tables and sideboards until they could hold no more, and it became evident that both the food and the guests were ready. Then Mme. Hu, Aimee's godmother, who was to give her away, entered with a flourish and, speaking in English in deference to the foreigners present, announced, “The matrimony begins!”

The Reverend Mr. Feng jumped to his feet and, scarf flowing, strode to the center of the room just as Aimee appeared at the door, flanked by two of her sisters. Her dress, which went from neck to ankle, was scarlet, gold, and black. Enormous gold butterflies, and phoenixes dripping jewels and mounted on springs, trembled on her head. Coiled gold dragons hung from her ears. She was wearing the high-platformed shoes of the Manchu nobility, which had gone out of fashion more than a generation earlier, and, tottering into the room, she looked like something out of Chinese opera.

No one spoke. Aimee made her unsteady way to the side of the room opposite me, and immediately all the guests and participants except the Reverend Mr. Feng hurried to take their places with one or the other of us — Aimee's family and friends grouped behind her, and my party, which included Mr. Kepler but was decidedly outnumbered, behind me. Hetta stood at my elbow facing Mme. Hu and Aimee. The Reverend Mr. Feng was alone in the middle of the room, facing the south end, balancing himself lightly on his cane. After a moment, Aimee and I stepped in front of him, and I could see Aimee, her eyes demurely cast down, and the Reverend Mr. Feng's scarf reflected waveringly in the mellow old mirror panels of the north wall.

The Reverend Mr. Feng rolled his eyes upward and opened his mouth. No one was prepared for the volume of his voice. Aimee swayed visibly on her platforms. The reverberations of his first sentence faded, and he started again, softly, slowly, with agony in his voice, which increased in volume until he reached a new fortissimo. Again there was silence. We were steeling ourselves for a third outburst when he began a rhythmic chant that rose and fell. I was sure he had passed into a trance. Nothing he said was intelligible to me, but it certainly didn't sound like a marriage ceremony. Just what, I wondered, were the Assemblies of God, and what had we let ourselves in for?

I could see Hetta's frozen face in a corner of the mirror. I wondered what she was thinking — what they all were thinking. I hoped Mr. Kepler was satisfied with his Christian ceremony; this was all his fault. I looked directly at him, but his eyes were closed and his face expressionless. The food is cold, I thought. What can we do? Can't someone stop him?

I was suddenly aware that the Reverend Mr. Feng
had
stopped, and was looking at me. For a startled moment, I thought he had been reading my mind, and then I realized that I was missing a cue. I nodded my head slowly. I wasn't sure, but I supposed he had said the equivalent of “Do you take this woman …” He turned to Aimee and said something, and she nodded, too, so I knew I must have been right.

Aimee held out her left hand and I put the diamond ring on it; then I held out mine and she put an alexandrite ring on it. We bowed to the Reverend Mr. Feng, then to each other, and finally to the guests. The wedding was over. What had seemed like hours had been, as the Reverend had promised it would be, only a few minutes. The food had not even begun to cool.

We put all of Hetta's seals, as well as our own and those of the other witnesses, on the Chinese marriage certificate. We ate all the food and drank all the drink. The Reverend Mr. Feng got his nine dollars Mex., and Mr. Kepler had, by his own testimony, “a most interesting evening.” But because, marriage or not, Aimee's father was still dying, and the soldiers, who were not to know there had been a wedding, were still in the house, I went home with the Empsons and played three-handed bridge until morning. And then I went to the consulate and paid my dollar, and subsequently locked among my most valuable documents a piece of stiff white paper with “U.S. Consular Service Marriage Certificate” printed in bold black type across the top. Typewritten underneath, making Aimee and me lawfully married in the eyes of the government of the United States, are the words “Rev. Joseph Feng of the Assemblies of God officiating.”

T
HE PRESENCE
of the soldiers in the front courts would have been trouble enough for the family, but they also had the task of keeping old Mr. Yu, who was confined to the rooms of his private courtyard, from knowing of it. The family felt that if he should learn of such an invasion of the privacy of his home, his last days would be days of defeat instead of days spent in the peaceful contemplation of a respected career. Four days after our wedding, Mr. Yu died without ever knowing that his beloved garden had been desecrated and that his mansion and fortune were collapsing.

Between the fall of Peking and Mr. Yu's death, the family maintained his courtyard and rooms as they had always been, but everywhere else in the house they did their best to conceal any evidence of their remaining wealth. Windows that had cracked during the bombardment of the city were left unrepaired. Carpets were removed and hidden, along with paintings, porcelains, silk cushions, and tapestries. The members of the family all did what they could to increase the air of destitution. Cooking stoves were moved into the larger halls, and ashes were scattered on the floors. One of my wife's sisters found, in a storeroom, a rusty ice-cream freezer, which looked mechanical and proletarian, and put it in the middle of the main hall. And, as a final touch, Ninth Sister, the youngest, came home one day with a sock-knitting machine.

The machine was a boxed mechanism entirely mysterious to me. It was operated by a crank, and protruding from the top of the box were long needles, set in a circle. A skein of yarn was put into the machine, and when it was cranked, a knitted cylinder came off the needles. As far as I could make out, you just stopped cranking eventually, sewed up one end of the cylinder, and somehow got a serviceable sock, but I'm sure there must have been more to the operation than that. Anyway, the family agreed that the machine looked fine beside the ice-cream freezer, and, furthermore, they all felt that it allowed them to tell the Communists that they expected to earn a living by making socks.

I don't think all this camouflage fooled anyone. Although the family did succeed in making the place almost unlivable, they would have had to burn it to the ground to keep even the most obtuse police inspector from knowing that the beams and pillars were of the finest cedar, and that the tiles of the floors rivaled in blackness and smoothness those of the Imperial Palace. And I am sure they would even then have had to commit suicide en bloc to hide the fact that they were people trained in the art of spending money.

Actually, they might have saved themselves a good deal of trouble, because they reversed the process and restored the house when the old man died. They decided to give him a funeral in orthodox grand style, and this decision led them to feel that they wanted, after all, to hold on to their standard of living as long as they could. They had already restored the Hall of Ancient Pines at the time Aimee, the Fourth Miss Yu, and I were married — an event that automatically gave me the designation of Fourth Brother — and most of the rest of the job was done for the funeral. We had decided that it was best I not move into the mansion until the end of the forty-day mourning period.