“I don’t remember your being such a good cook,” Rennie said, throwing me a smile.
“This is a special effort,” I said.
“I wouldn’t like to have to eat as good a dinner every day,” Rennie declared. He had recovered from whatever shyness he had and was himself again. I saw him let out his belt a notch or two, hiding this from me politely. Rennie’s good manners are as natural to him as breathing. He absorbed them in Peking from the most mannerly people in the world, and though he tried to be rough and rude when he left China, he was old enough now to dare to be himself, or very nearly. He was still cautious with me.
When dinner was over the knocker clanged again. We had left the table, I forbidding any help with clearing. Time enough for that later, I told Sam, who began at once to stack dishes. Baba was lifted into the living room and put in a chair by the fire, and I had sat opposite him, and Rennie and Sam had pulled up the yellow satin sofa facing the chimneypiece when we heard the clangor.
Rennie turned to me. “Do you expect someone?”
“No,” I said. “I cannot imagine who would come at this hour.”
He went into the hall and opened the door and Bruce Spaulden stood there, holding in his hand a bunch of pink roses wrapped in cellophane. Rennie stared at him. They knew each other, for Bruce had brought Rennie through tonsillitis, but they stared as though at strangers.
“No one is ill here,” Rennie said.
“Rennie!” I cried. “For heaven’s sake—”
I went to the door myself and Bruce held out the roses and I took them.
“Come in,” I said. “We are sitting around the fire.”
He came in and Rennie stood watchful and silent. I put the roses in an old gray pottery bowl that had stood on the table since I was a child. Before I sat down I saw that Baba had fallen peacefully asleep, his head thrown back and his eyes closed.
“Ought we to take him upstairs?” I asked Bruce.
“He looks comfortable,” Bruce said, “and he couldn’t be more soundly asleep.”
We sat down and Rennie was silent between the two men and I caught him looking at me strangely now and again. I felt suddenly happy as I had not been for a long time and soon we were all talking, and Bruce got up and went to the pantry and made some hot coffee, for he will not drink anything else, but Rennie fetched the wine that I keep in the house and poured out glasses for himself and Sam, and I wanted nothing and so we sat down again and the talk flowed triangularly between the two men and me. Rennie sat silent and watching.
I really belong here, I kept thinking. It is here I was born, and if I were not so lonely, I could forget Peking and at last perhaps I could even forget Gerald. I have not laughed for a long time but I found myself laughing, laughing at the three men. Each in his way was playing for my attention, Sam very brusque and western and masculine and Bruce dark and caustic and wary, and Rennie the young man standing aside from the fencing between the two older men, but watchful and tending the fire. The talk ranged but it was all for my ears, the fencers preening and displaying themselves before my eyes. I felt a tenderness, amused, unspecified, but valid.
“Revolution,” Sam declared, “is an inevitable process. We do not grow by accumulation, as barnacles do. We burst our skins, like snakes, we cast off the old encasements, and emerge afresh.”
I was amazed to hear him speak without a trace of his harsh western idiom. The ranchman’s drawl was a shield. I had never seen the real man before.
Bruce drew upon his pipe, slowly and deeply. Twin jets of smoke feathered from his thin nostrils. “There never was a revolution in man’s history that paid its way. The end is always lost in the conflict and confusion out of which evil men rise to power.”
“You can’t hold back revolution for all of that,” Sam insisted. “Endurance has its limit. Explosion is inevitable. Look at China—”
He turned to me and the winds of Asia rushed into the warm closed room. I was swept across the sea again. By force of will I refused to go.
“Let us not talk of China,” I said. “Let us never talk of China. Who knows what is happening there?” Rennie looked up from the fire and the iron poker dropped from his hands. His eyes met mine. I knew I should have to tell him.
The life went out of the evening. I could not listen now to the argument between the men. They continued, their eyes covertly upon me, demanding attention which I could not give….How can I tell Rennie about his father?
…“Come into my room, Rennie,” I said when the evening was over. I was casual, I made my voice cheerful. “You and I have had no chance to talk. Let’s light the fire and settle ourselves.”
We had said goodnight to Bruce at the front door and then to Sam at the head of the stairs. Bruce held my hand for a moment, and I could not be warm. “Thank you for the pink roses,” I said stupidly.
“When I think of roses I think of you,” he said under his breath. That was much for him to say but I could not muster a smile in reply. My heart was already hammering in my breast. How can I tell Rennie so that he will not hate his father?
“Sit down, Rennie,” I said.
I sat in the old red velvet armchair that had once belonged to my Boston grandmother. He sat down in the wooden Windsor opposite me. He had lit the fire in my room and the logs were dry and already blazing.
“I can’t get used to the way you look,” I said. Indeed I cannot. His face has lost its boyish roundness. The cheekbones are defined, the jaw is firm. I should be hard put to it to say where Rennie came from, were he a stranger to me. Spain? Italy? Brazil? North India? Yet he is my own son.
“Tell me what you like best at college,” I said.
“Math. Math and music.”
I have forgotten to say that Rennie has always loved music. This perhaps is my gift to him. Many hours of my own youth I spent at the old square piano downstairs in the parlor, but since I came home I have not been able to play. I have not even given Rennie lessons as I might have. Living on the brink of final separation from Gerald I have not been able to endure music. Yet I have never forbidden it to Rennie and he has played when he wished.
“It’s a good combination, Rennie — the combination Confucius required for the civilized man. The superior man, the gentleman, must know the disciplines of mathematics and music.”
“They are allied,” Rennie said. “They demand the same precision and abstraction.”
I am awed by his growth in mind as well as in body. “Shall you go into music for livelihood?” I inquired.
“I want to be a scientist. Science combines the abstract and the precise.”
“Your father will be pleased.”
To this Rennie did not reply. He never replies when I mention his father.
“And what about George Bowen’s sister?” I inquired, half playfully. Now this would never do. I was avoiding the opportunity of his silence. I did not care about George Bowen’s sister.
Rennie did not look at me. His eyes were fixed upon the fire. “What about her?”
“Well, is she pretty?”
“She is not pretty — she’s beautiful.”
“Dark or fair? Short or tall?”
“Tall, fair, and calm.”
“Not like me—”
He cast a quick glance at me, measuring, comparing, and looked again at the fire. “No.”
“Do you like her very much, Rennie?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to know, I suppose I’d rather not be hurt again.”
“There’s plenty of time,” I said.
“Yes.”
Here fell the next silence, and I would not let myself be a coward about it.
“Rennie, I want to talk about your father.”