“Tell your wife she is wrong and the rest of you are right,” I said. “Your daughter is lucky. She has a family who wants to keep her. I am sure that American parents in your circumstances would wish they were as lucky as you and your wife in having such a family.”
His honest face cleared. “Thanks,” he said.
He led me back to the luggage station. “Anything to declare?”
“Nothing,” I said. It was true. I had nothing.
“Okay,” he said, and marked my bags with chalk and smiled at me. “So long,” he said. “I’ll never forget you. This is my lucky day. Wait till I tell my wife. She won’t believe me. It’s a miracle.”
It was a miracle for me, too.
And then, as though to test me, I was alone again. I had never traveled alone before his illness. Traveling had always been a gay business for us. He was a delightful traveling companion. He always knew what there was to see, and where we should go and I went with him in careless happiness. Now I had to find the restaurant and get something to eat. We had been given dinner tickets. But where was one to go? I wandered about, feeling stupidly helpless and shy. When a woman has always been accompanied by a cheerful, knowledgeable man, to be suddenly alone is a bewilderment. I wandered the wrong way, asked someone and went in the opposite direction and arrived too late in the restaurant and saw no available seat. I was about to leave again and think no more of food, when a pleasant-looking American approached me and asked if I were looking for a place to sit, and if so, there was one over yonder — two, in fact, if I didn’t mind having dinner with him.
I accepted with relief and he led the way to a small half-hidden table. We sat down, he ordered dinner, and I was grateful. The inner solitude was invincible and permanent, I knew that, but it was as if somewhere he saw my predicament and since he could not be with me, he sent strangers in his place. I asked this stranger’s name. He gave it to me and told me he was a scientist and had been sent from Washington to work with other scientists in Japan. Again part of my life reclaimed me. Science, especially nuclear physics, has long been my avocation, and I listened now with understanding and interest, quite detached from my inner self. The Japanese, he told me, were excellent scientists, and in particular they know more about the ionosphere than any other scientists in the world. The ionosphere, that state of the upper atmosphere where, as Clyde Orr says, “radiations produce a witch’s brew of metastable molecules and ions, atomic entities having electric charges,” (Between Earth and Space, page 21). It is the birthplace of electricity, the source of electric storms, against which the energy stored in the earth plays an eternal duet of contrapuntal violence. Again my mind was stirred by irresistible curiosity and I was reminded, as though he, wherever he was now, had reminded me that life could go on in these interests which we had shared. An hour passed and the voice came over the radio bidding us take our seats in the jet again. Somehow the day had passed and three times a human being had been sent to speak to me, help me, and remind me of life.
Night fell once more. I did not know what night to call it, a nameless night, since time had stretched itself longer than its name. I had lived twenty-four hours beyond the span between Sunday night and Monday morning. I had made the initial step into my future life. This night I slept, fitfully but without fear. No one could take his place, he would not expect that, nor could I, but strangers would come when I needed them, and I could learn of them and let them go, because another would come. It was like the universal motion of all life, the waves of energy that beat about our globe, made up of innumerable separate particles. What are human beings but particles, and we come and go, too, ceaselessly, in waves of motion and substance. My life was now part of the whole, a separate particle, alone and apart, yet drawn inescapably into the surge and withdrawal of the human tide.
When next dawn came it was to pour its golden light upon the landscape of America. The voice on the radio announced that we would now begin the descent over the city of Allentown in Pennsylvania. Allentown is only a few miles from my farmhouse home. Did the children dream that I was passing by, but far above them in the clouds? I made a hasty toilet, drank coffee, and then we came swiftly down and down, and I saw the gleaming towers of New York.
Now friends had to be faced again and family and for a moment I dreaded it. It had been easier here in the shelter of those who knew nothing about my journey and why I made it. I had told no one, and so needed not to meet the strain of sympathy. It was time now, however, to meet my children and especially to accept their help. In comforting me, they too would be comforted.
The morning was fair. Sunshine poured through the mists as I walked across the airfield into the port. There inside the door my dear and only sister and two of my daughters waited and with them the faithful Pennsylvania Dutchman who has driven my cars for many years. I looked into each face and whatever I had dreaded melted away. I had been wrong — it was good to be with those who knew me and loved me and whom I loved. I am rich in three sons and six daughters, of these six, the eldest is the child who never grew, to whom I owe so much, and five others ranging from my competent, professional, occupational-therapist daughter to the gentle half-American child of eleven who came to me from Japan. The two youngest daughters are half-Japanese, their fathers, American soldiers. The next, lively and an organizer, is half-German, her father American, too. The little middle one, the married one with three perfect babies, is the one who lives across the brook from me, the one with dark hair, big violet eyes and a fiery temper, softened by a quick sense of humor. Each son has his individual strength, each daughter her peculiar grace, each an indispensable place in my life. But today I was glad the three younger daughters were at home and that the middle and older ones were here to meet me with my sister, three strong and understanding women.
Of course we were close, closer than we had ever been even in our happy life together. His death quickened every bond between us. Nor did I overlook the quiet understanding of our driver. He took my baggage checks and led us to the car and we got in and waited for him. In a few minutes we were on our way home, through the streets of New York to the Lincoln Tunnel and the Turnpike. It was all familiar and safe, a journey I had made hundreds of times through the years, at first always with him, and in the last five years alone. It had taken seven years for his strong body and fine brain to end their span on earth.
And what fun it had been from the very beginning, how satisfying the years together! We had begun in New York, where his life had been for thirty years before we met. The first winter we lived in a cosmopolitan hotel in a suite of pleasant rooms and it had not been strange to me, for with people passing to and fro from all parts of the world, it might have been a hotel in Shanghai or Peking. And the next year, when we adopted our first two babies, we moved to a terraced apartment, and began our life as parents. He had always wanted a big family and how we enjoyed its gradual accumulation! Two years slipped by, and they held nothing but joy and content, and we took two more babies. Then his next dream, which was to live in the country, became a necessity. Four small children can scarcely be contained successfully in any apartment. My own childhood had been spent in a spacious old tropical bungalow, surrounded by gardens and beyond the wall the hills and fields outside the city of Chinkiang, in Kiangsu province, a port city on the great Yangtze River. I could not imagine a child growing up on cement among towers, however beautiful, for in its city way I love New York. We moved then to our farm home, and he devoted himself, as he had always hoped he could, to editorial work. He was a reluctant business man, and had his brilliance been only a little more channeled, he might have been a writer of books. As it was, he wrote a few as varied as he was himself, the clever rhymes for children, a humorous mystery novel, a fine nonfiction work on Marco Polo, simplified again for young people and published by Random House in the Landmark Series, and a critical study of Buffalo Bill, a character in whom he took much skeptical interest.