The Third Son (14 page)

“How could it fail?” I said. “It was always busy with all your boyfriends.”

“It’s my father’s specialty, failing businesses.” She spoke smoothly, ignoring my aggressive tone. “What about you? What are you doing here?”

I meant to explain that I was on leave, that I was preparing to meet my uncle at Taikong, but instead I blurted out, “You said no to my brother.”

She searched my face. “That was months ago.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t like him.”

“You didn’t like him? Or you found someone else who’ll make more money?”

She looked taken aback for a moment, and her brow wrinkled. “What do you mean?”

“You’re en—” I stopped, seeing the indignation on her face, her unadorned hands. “Kazuo told me—”

“Told you what?”

“That you found someone else.”

“He did?” Anger flashed across her face, and then she folded her arms, looking at me. “Well, I suppose he’s right. I did.”

“Who?”

She put her hands on her hips, frowning, and then laughed so her dimples showed. Her eyes flashed. “Me!”

“What do you mean?”

“I won a job at the national bank! Now I make more than my father and my brother combined.”

“Oh!” I said. “
You’re
working at the bank!” I looked into the street, where a jeep honked at the boy’s dog, which had gotten loose again. I felt suddenly light. “So you mean, you don’t have to marry rich anymore.”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t really want to, anyway.” She glanced up at me with hurt in her eyes, and anger. “You believed him!”

“I—I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s a good thing you saved me those times.” She jabbed her finger toward my chest. “Otherwise I would kill you.”

“You saved my life, too, you know,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You told me to run,” I said. “When the plane came at us.”

“You mean you wouldn’t have?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Her eyes searched mine, scanning my face, back and forth, and then she looked down, the back of her neck flushing pink. Her eyelashes quivered over her cheek, and her rose-trimmed collar rose and fell against her collarbone as she breathed. Inside me, any anger or shame at being duped by Kazuo drained away, subsumed in a tide of warmth.

“Well, that’s too bad,” I said.

She looked up, wide eyed. “What do you mean?”

I laughed. “Too bad you don’t need to marry rich. Because I’m going to be a rich American.”

She laughed, too. “Oh yes? How?”

“I’m taking the exam in the fall.”

“Hm.” She looked thoughtful. “Don’t tell my mother. She didn’t even want me to date anyone from Taipei.”

I laughed. “You don’t really think I’ll pass, do you? The pass rate is one in five thousand.”

“Of course you will. Only, I’m sad about the radio shop.”

“That’s still over ninety-nine percent probable.”

“You don’t pass an exam by chance.”

“I didn’t even go to a real college.”

“You have books,” she said. “The books are the same.”

I laughed to hear her speak my own thoughts. “Just don’t throw away your broken radios.”

“I’ll hang on to one, just in case.”

I took her hand, utterly surprising in its softness, as though she lacked the rough exterior everyone else had. My heart pumped, and she smiled up at me, her face open and radiant. It was like looking upon the sun.

T
HOUGH THEY GRUMBLED
about the speed of our courtship and impropriety of the third son marrying first, my parents had no good reason to prevent our engagement. For our part, we pushed to get married as soon as possible. Once we had made up our minds, every day that stood between us and our wedding night was excruciating. Plans began for the engagement ceremony, the wedding, and the construction of our new living quarters, which would expand our house in the traditional style to form a corner between my parents’ and Kazuo’s rooms. I saw from the foreman’s sketch that our marriage bed would be separated from Kazuo’s room by only a small sitting room.

I felt both elation and terrible confusion. How could I be thinking about taking the American entrance exam when I was marrying Yoshiko? The Asian quota for American visas was completely inflexible, and students were not allowed to bring their wives. Yoshiko’s mother was furious with me, only calming down when I reassured her that no one from the county had ever passed.

“And if I do go,” I said, “it will be for only a year.”

The old woman narrowed her eyes. “A lot can happen in one year.”

“S
TOP WORRYING ABOUT
it!” Yoshiko swatted at me with her purse.

She was standing in a pair of pink shoes, each trimmed with a tiny rhinestone bow. She walked back and forth in front of the mirror in the shoe store. “There. What do you think?”

“Pretty,” I said, though the pairs she had tossed aside looked fine to me, too.

“Now,” she said, “no more brooding, or I’m not going through with the engagement.”

I considered for a moment. “How about if I take the exam after a year? It’s too busy now, and I missed weeks of studying and I’ll never pass it now—”

“Take it,” she said. “Next year it will be even harder.”

“But I promised never to leave you the way your father did.”

She whirled around on her heels, the white skirt of her dress swishing around her calves, and put her hands on her hips. “Take it,” she said. “I’m not a child anymore. I can take care of myself.” She turned back to the mirror. “You already saved my life before. I know I can trust you.”

“I thought you liked the idea of a radio shop,” I said, feeling stung. “Would it make you so much happier if I had an American degree?”

“I will be happy when you are happy,” she said, tossing the shoes into their box, where they fell with two dull thuds. “Will you be happy with a radio shop?”

T
HE NEXT TIME
I saw the pink shoes, they were peeping out beneath the hem of Yoshiko’s matching taffeta dress as she sat on a stool in the middle of her parents’ immaculate living room. Her hair gleamed in the lamplight, and her eyes darted about, taking in my father as he sank into her father’s armchair and gesticulated, making sophisticated proclamations about the utility industry’s current inability to keep pace with modern development. He crossed his legs, dangling a silk slipper from his toes above the gleaming floorboards. He had only slightly wrinkled his nose at having to walk through the dressmaker’s shop to climb the stairs to the house. He was, after all, an elected representative of the working class and could not afford to show disdain for those who lived above their shops and were illiterate.

Yoshiko’s father, Swe-mu, sat on the couch with an easy smile, his eyes wide and sparkling like Yoshiko’s, crinkled at the sides. Far from exhibiting the lowliness of his status in my father’s view, he was trim and dapper as always, his hair neatly smoothed into place. The hand he extended bore a gold watch on its wrist, and in his breast pocket a silk paisley handkerchief brought out the deep burgundy of his tie. He looked incongruously slick next to his wife, who bowed before my father with a tray of tea, her face angular, her gray hair pulled back in a knot, her equally gray dress of uncertain vintage. She glanced at me suspiciously.

My father claimed center stage even at my own engagement. I stood uncertainly behind the couch, resting my hand on its polished rosewood frame, which I suddenly realized was far finer and more beautiful than any piece of furniture in my parents’ house. Yoshiko’s parents, for all their troubles, had many things my parents did not: a lifetime of working in the lumber business, good taste, and a willingness to part with their money.

“Pretty,” my mother acknowledged, looking, as we all did, at Yoshiko on her little perch as though at a parrot in its cage at the zoo.

In American movies I had seen rapturously romantic scenes, rings accepted in torrents of tears followed by passionate kisses and fade-outs. This was not like that. I felt instead like a guest who did not deserve to enjoy the party or even to have been invited. I was not worthy of this beautiful, doll-like creature sitting on a stool. I had tricked her somehow into believing that I was worth something. Because I had saved her life when I was eight and taken her mother’s rice sacks out from under the nose of Nationalist soldiers, she fancied me her hero. And the only way I could prove myself would be to leave her for the other side of the world.

I watched helplessly as my mother untied a silk pouch she had retrieved from her purse and took out a ring—ornate, braided twenty-four-carat gold, set with a ruby of deep pink, large as a pecan. She closed her fist over it, hoisted herself up from the couch, and shuffled over to Yoshiko.

“Your hand,” she said.

Yoshiko delicately extended her hand. My mother pushed the ring onto Yoshiko’s finger and then sank back wheezing on the couch next to me.

Everyone clapped and took pictures. Yoshiko beamed, showing off the huge ring on her finger. I smiled back at her but felt hollow, knowing I would never be able to buy her anything like that ring again.

My mother then took out another jewelry pouch and presented Yoshiko with two gold necklaces.

Yoshiko’s mother, Chiu-yeh, whispered to Swe-mu, “It’s shameful they would not agree to bring more. It’s nothing to them and we need the money—”

“
Ah-ah
,” Swe-mu whispered back, glancing at me over his shoulder. “I’m not selling my daughter.”

W
E WERE FINALLY
allowed to sit next to each other when it came time to eat.

“I hear,” Swe-mu said, his expression charming and deferential, “that you will win the election to the People’s Political Council by a landslide.”

“Ah.” My father wiped his face with the corner of his napkin. “Just among family, I’ll say that our campaign has been going quite well.”

Yoshiko’s aunts and uncles exclaimed, eyes bright with admiration for such fame and power, “The People’s Political Council!”

Swe-mu smiled. “And will you continue to represent the Young China Party?”

My father said nothing but put a slice of abalone in his mouth and chewed. He requested some more tea and washed down the abalone with it.

“Delicious, delicious,” he said absently.

Swe-mu smiled again and nodded his dapper head. “I’m so sorry . . . I had heard rumors that—”

“It’s true,” my father said. He cleared his throat and took another slurp of tea.

“I mean the rumors that—”

“It’s true,” my father said again. “I have joined the Nationalists.” He set his teacup down and stared straight ahead.

There was a momentary silence. I glanced at Yoshiko, who looked anxiously at her father. I had heard this issue discussed at home. My father was indeed a man of expedience, but in this case he had had no choice. The Nationalists would not tolerate someone of such popularity maintaining an opposing party affiliation, even if the supposed opposing party had actually been set up and was supported behind the scenes by the Nationalists. But this was not an issue that could be explained at an engagement party.

Swe-mu was looking down at his plate. He laughed lightly. I remembered what Yoshiko had said about her father, that he had refused to assume a Japanese name to get better rations. That he had abandoned his family for a year rather than be jailed by the Nationalist government. He was a man who would preserve his own value system at the expense of his family, and I hoped our wedding would not be the next casualty of his pride.

“The Nationalists!” Swe-mu said. “Well, I never thought my daughter would be marrying a—”

“Aren’t you getting land, Mr. Lo?” my father said suddenly.

Swe-mu looked up, blinking. “Land?”

“I seem to recall the former magistrate told me, before he was killed. Land, next to the lumberyard. Isn’t it yours?”

Swe-mu smiled and shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s my brother’s property.”

“Perhaps so,” my father said. He was looking off into the distance as though completely absorbed by the topic, but I knew that he, the savvy politician, had thought of it just in time, as a distraction. “I don’t know why I remembered him saying it had some connection to you and your name. Why else would your name be—”

“Well, that land used to belong to all of us . . .”

“I know a lawyer,” my father said. “Perhaps he’ll look into the matter.”

Swe-mu recovered himself and laughed. “I assure you there’s nothing to look into.” He scratched his head. “I’m sure my family would have told me if we had land coming to us. I assure you that if there are any sudden changes in my finances, I shall let you—”

My father coughed to cut short this embarrassingly forthright statement.

“A month is too short to have a wedding dress made,” my mother said, turning her head toward Yoshiko. “You can have mine. I was your size, before all the children.”

“
Hou!
” Yoshiko smiled.