The Beauty of Humanity Movement (130 page)

Bình sits with the old man, their bowls empty and abandoned at the side of the bed. H
ng pushes himself upright with Maggie’s arrival, Bình fluffing up and repositioning the pillow behind the old man’s back.

“How are you?” she asks, setting her bowl down on top of the bookshelf.

H
ng throws back the bedcovers to reveal his old man’s leg. It is swollen and as purple as an eggplant. Maggie pulls the bedcovers back over his leg and smooths them across his chest. His shirt is unbuttoned and he is so thin that the skin between his ribs flutters with his heartbeat.

“You have lovely hands,” says Old Man H
ng, looking mournful for a moment. But then he suddenly brightens, grabs hold of one of her hands, shakes it. He frantically pats his shirt pocket with his other hand, the bedcovers, his thighs.

“Are these the clothes I was wearing when you found me?” he asks Bình.

“Well, no,” says Bình, “those have been laundered.”

“Can you bring me the shirt?”

Bình rises and opens T
’s armoire and pulls out H
ng’s shirt.

“Check the pocket,” says H
ng.

Bình pulls out a frayed business card stamped with the insignia of the Hotel Metropole, as well as a piece of paper folded into four. He unfolds it to find Ðạo’s faded portrait, removed from both its frame and its place on the altar.

“T
rn it over,” says H
ng. “Contributors, March 1956,” Bình reads from a page with a torn edge. “Here is Ðạo, listed as one of the poets, Phan Khôi as editor, and yes, look at this: Lý Văn Hai. The illustrator.”

“Oh my God,” says Maggie, standing up to look over Bình’s shoulder. She covers her hand with her mouth. She coughs. Her eyes fill with tears. There he is: Lý Văn Hai, the artist, her father. Alive. In the company of a circle of men of great talent and courage and feeling.

H
ng pushes himself upright. “This is the reason I was coming to see you, Maggie. Rushing through the rain that day like a man possessed.”

Bình turns the paper over to look again at his father’s faded portrait.

“It was the only paper I had to offer the woman who drew it, Bình. It’s the endpaper from
Fine Works of Spring
. You’ll draw a new portrait
of Ðạo, a far better one. Despite your claims to the contrary, Bình, you are an artist.”

“And you, my dear,” says H
ng, patting Maggie’s hand, “are the daughter of Lý Văn Hai, illustrator of
Fine Works of Spring
.”

H
ng chomps his dentures back into place after breakfast the following morning and reclines against the pillows of T
’s bed. He has the satisfaction of having delivered Maggie a hero, but has begun to feel diminished himself. There’s something humiliating about being in this room with its posters and books and toys. It is the room of a boy. H
ng cannot imagine being such a boy, a boy of 2007. Everything in the room seems alien to him—even the Vietnamese words on the poster of a kitten clinging to a tree branch seem like they’re written in a foreign language. What does this mean: “Hang in there, baby?” Don’t give up? Does T
really need this kind of mantra?