“Our son asks me to allow him to return to our old home.” He spoke always in Chinese to his wife, as a reminder that he did not consider her English good enough. His own was pure, with an Oxford accent. He had visited Oxford once for a year’s lectures.
“Let him go then,” Mrs. Liang exclaimed. She came in and sat down on a large square stool, and her satin gown wrinkled over her breasts and her belly. Dr. Liang looked away.
“You do not understand, mother of my sons.” He always called her “mother of my sons” when he wanted to be very Confucian. “His life would not be safe. I have reproved our Communists so openly here that they will try to kill him if he goes to China.”
She sighed loudly at this and plucked from the knot of her hair a gold pin with which she scratched her inner ear. “I told you to stick to Confucius,” she complained. “Why should you talk about Communists? No one in America wants to hear about them.”
Dr. Liang closed his eyes at this stupidity and at the sight of the hairpin. At one end of it was the earpick and at the other a toothpick. He had besought her to throw this primitive implement away but she had refused. “How then would I pick my teeth and clean my ears?” she had demanded.
“American women do not use these instruments,” he had said.
She had stared at him. “How do you know?” she had asked shrewdly.
“Not in public, I mean,” he had said hastily.
They had compromised after ten years of argument upon her not using the pin publicly. That is, she did not use it before Americans. Chinese she did not consider the public. She used the earpick now, first on her right ear and then on her left, a busy look on her face. This helped her to think, she often declared.
“I cannot allow you to be killed, my son,” she now said to James. “If your father is sure there is danger, then you had better stay here for a year or two longer. That is a good job you are offered in the medical center. They think highly of you there.”
Dr. Liang was delighted. She invariably took the children’s part against him and he had braced himself for her stand against him now.
He rose. “You see, my son! You can scarcely disobey both parents. Your mother speaks wisely. This is very sensible of you, mother of my sons. Now, please, allow me to do my work. I am in the middle of a very important chapter on Confucius and Communism.”
“Do leave the Communists out of your book,” Mrs. Liang exclaimed. “Otherwise it can’t sell.”
“No, no,” he said humorously, “you don’t understand. It is all in joke.”
“But why joke about them?” she asked.
“Come, come, now, let me do my work.” He commanded and she retreated protesting. When he turned to speak to his son again, he was gone. James had left the room by the door into the dining room.
Dr. Liang stood irresolute for a moment. Then he sighed, pulled out a large silk handkerchief from the pocket of his expensive dark broadcloth suit, wiped his face and hands, and sat down before his desk.
Outside his father’s deeply carpeted study James found his sister Mary. She was a small slight girl who could easily have looked not more than twelve years old except that her dress was that of a twenty-year-old young woman, which she was. Her hands were clenched tightly on her breast and her pretty face was anxious.
“You sent Mother in!” James whispered.
“But to quarrel with Father!” she whispered back. “It’s so hopeless.”
They tiptoed away hand in hand through the hall and opened the door and went into the lobby outside. James pushed the button for the elevator. “Father always forces a quarrel,” he said. “Will you be cold without your coat?”
“No — the sun is warm enough. Jim, why do you let yourself be forced?”
“I don’t know.” His voice was helpless and his face grim.
The elevator clattered, the gate banged open and they entered. They were silent before the elevator man, although they knew him well and were fond of him. Whatever their division behind their own doors, the Liang family presented a calm front before the people in whose land they were aliens.
“Nice day,” the elevator man offered.
“Fine,” they answered together.
They left the elevator decorously, side by side. James was tall and Mary came below his shoulder. The elevator man watched them affectionately. “Nice kids, even if they are Chinese!” he told the second elevator man. “You never see them comin’ in drunk and havin’ to be hauled up like some of the rest of ’em.”
The second elevator man scratched his head with his forefinger. “The old Chink is kinda stingy, I notice.”
“Don’t ask us no favors, though — no dogs to drag out in all kinds of weather.”
“Nice family,” the other agreed, and yawned.
Out in the sunshine James walked along the street with the long noiseless step that was his inheritance of grace. Mary took two steps to his one. The street was quiet, for it was far uptown. To their left now was the river, spanned by the George Washington Bridge. This bridge had deeply affected their lives. As children it had made them imagine bridges over oceans to China, and it had persuaded them to believe that it was always possible to cross stretches of hardship and unhappiness and set foot on other shores. It had made Peter, by the time he was ten, decide to be an engineer.
“Did Father say you could go?” Mary asked.
“No — and Mother only helped him — not me.”
“Oh, and she promised!” Mary cried.
“She said something about staying here for a year or two. You know what she means. She wants me to marry and have a son.”
“How can she be so old-fashioned?” Mary moaned. “She might as well have lived her whole life in our village!”
James shrugged his broad shoulders and lifted his hand to push back the lock of strong black hair that the river wind had blown over his forehead. “I’m not thinking only of my self,” he said. “I’m thinking of you, too, Mary. If I can’t go, they won’t let you.”
“I suppose you could ask Lili to marry you now,” Mary suggested. “That would be a compromise, wouldn’t it? Let’s sit down, Jim. The wind beats at me and blows the words out of my mouth.”
He turned to the benches that stood near the railing above the river and chose an empty one at some distance from the others. A curve in the embankment sheltered them, and the sun poured down upon them.
“You’ll think me a coward,” he said abruptly. “I’ve never told Lili that I want to go home.”
“I know you haven’t,” his sister said in her sweet voice. “But I’ve told her, Jim.”
“Mary!” His cry was mingled with reproof and relief. “Without asking me!”
She nodded her head. Putting up her little hand she brushed back the strands of her soft straight black hair which had escaped from the two thick braids wound about her head. “I had to make her see how much it meant to you.”
She was too delicately kind to say that Lili Li, to whom he had been secretly engaged for eight days, might not want to live in China.
“What did she say?” Fine tense lines sprang to life in his face. The calm of his outward manner was a habit, worn as separately as a coat which he took off or put on.
“She didn’t say anything — she just looked at me,” Mary replied. “You know the way she looks.”
“I know.”
They were silent for a while, gazing out over the river. Ships shone in the sunlight. A man-of-war glittered with flying flags. A yacht, bright with brass, steamed busily toward the harbor. Across the river an enormous sign announced a pleasure park.
James knew very well the way that Lili Li could look. Her great dark eyes were like oval gems of onyx set into the smoothness of her soft face. Her lips were full and rested sweetly together. She painted them, as all girls did, and they looked like a red camellia against the cream of her skin. Silence was her charm. Where other Chinese girls were chattering and restless, in imitation of American girls, Lili was quiet, and every movement was slow and all her slender body was rich with repose. The Li family had come from Shanghai only a year ago, Mr. Li for a gall-bladder operation by American doctors and Mrs. Li to see that Lili, the only child, was educated in American schools. They were wealthy and kindly, and they were frankly glad to be in a country where life was still comfortable. Mr. Li, a prudent man, had years ago sold his silk mills to the Japanese and had deposited his fortune in American banks.