“I pointed your husband out to you on the last night of the opera,” he said. “Were you unhappy with what you saw?”
“I didn’t look,” I answered.
“Oh, Peony, I wish now I’d told you more about him, but you know how your mother is.”
“That’s all right, Baba. I promise to do what’s expected of me. I won’t embarrass you or Mama. I’ll make Wu Ren happy.”
“Wu Ren is a good man,” Baba went on, ignoring what I’d said. “I’ve known him since he was a boy and I have never seen him do anything improper.” He smiled lightly. “Except for one time. That night after the opera he approached me. He gave me something to give you.” Baba shook ( 9 0 )
his head. “I may be master of the Chen family, but your mother has her rules and already she was angry with me about the performance. I didn’t give it to you then. Even I knew it was improper. So I saved what he gave me in a book of poetry. Knowing both of you, I thought that was the right place.”
A gift five months ago or now wouldn’t change how I viewed my future husband or my marriage. I saw duty and responsibility, nothing more.
“And now here we are, just a few days before . . .” Baba shook his head as though he was driving out an unpleasant thought. “I don’t think your mother will mind if I give it to you now.”
He let go of my hand, reached into his tunic, and pulled out something small folded in rice paper. I didn’t have the strength to lift my head off the pillow, but I watched as he unfolded the paper. Inside was a dried peony, which he set in my palm. I stared at it in disbelief.
“Ren is just two years older than you,” Baba said, “but he’s done so much already. He’s a poet.”
“A poet?” I echoed. My mind was having a hard time accepting what I held in my hand, while my ears seemed to be hearing Baba’s words from the bottom of a cave.
“A successful one,” Baba added. “His work has already been published, even though he’s so young. He lives on Wushan Mountain just across the lake. If I hadn’t left for the capital, I would have shown you his home from my library window. But I was gone, and now you are—”
He was talking about my stranger, my poet. The dried flower I held in my hand was the one he’d caressed me with in the Moon-Viewing Pavilion. Everything I had been dreading was wrong. I was going to marry the man I loved. Fate had brought us together. We truly were like two mandarin ducks mated for life.
My body began to shake uncontrollably, and tears streamed from my eyes. Baba lifted me up as though I weighed no more than a leaf and held me in his arms.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, trying to comfort me. “Every girl is afraid to marry out, but I didn’t know how bad it was with you.”
“I’m not crying because I’m sad or scared. Oh, Baba, I am the happiest girl ever.”
He didn’t seem to have heard me, because he said, “You would have been happy with Ren.”
He laid me gently back down on my pillow. I tried to bring the flower up to my nose to see if its scent still lingered, but I was too weak. Baba ( 9 1 )
took the flower and placed it on my chest. It felt as heavy as a stone on my heart.
Tears gathered in Baba’s eyes. How perfect that father and daughter should be united in their happiness.
“I need to tell you something,” he said urgently. “It’s a secret about our family.”
He had already given me the greatest wedding gift possible.
“You know I once had two other younger brothers,” he said.
I was so elated—because Wu Ren was my poet, we were to be married shortly, and we were living a miracle—that it was hard for me to focus on who Baba was talking about. I had seen these uncles’ names in the ancestral hall, but no one ever went to clean their graves at Spring Festival. I’d always supposed they’d died at birth, which was why so little attention was paid to them.
“They were just boys when my father got his posting to Yangzhou,”
Baba went on. “My parents trusted me to take care of this villa and the family in their absence, but they took the youngest boys with them. Your mother and I went to Yangzhou for a visit, but we couldn’t have chosen a worse time. The Manchus came.”
He paused to gauge my reaction. I didn’t know why he was telling me something so grim at this wonderful moment. When I didn’t say anything, he continued.
“My father, my brothers, and I were herded along with the other men to a gated area. We didn’t know what happened to the women, and your mother to this day has not spoken of it, so I can only tell you what I saw.
My little brothers and I had one duty as sons, and that was to make sure our father survived. We stood around him, shielding him not only from the soldiers but also from the other desperate prisoners, who would easily have turned him over to the Manchus if they thought it might save them.”
This was more than I had ever known. But as happy as I was, my mind was troubled. Where were my mother and grandmother?
Snatching this thought from my head, my father said, “I did not have the privilege of witnessing my mother’s bravery, but I saw my brothers die. Oh, Peony, men can be very cruel.”
He suddenly seemed unable to speak. And again I wondered, Why tell me all this now?
After a long while, he went on. “When you meet them, please tell them I’m sorry. Tell them we try to honor them as best we can. Our offerings ( 9 2 )
have been great, but they still have not granted our family sons. Peony, you’ve been a good daughter. Please see how you can help.”
I was confused and I think my father was too. My responsibility was to bring sons to my husband’s family, not to my natal family.
“Baba,” I reminded him, “I’m marrying into the Wu family.”
He closed his eyes and turned his face away. “Of course,” he said gruffly. “Of course. Please forgive my mistake.”
I heard people coming down the hall. Servants entered and removed my furniture, clothes, draperies, and dowry—everything but my bed—
from my room to take to my husband’s home.
Then Mama, my aunts, uncles, cousins, and the concubines entered and gathered around my bed. Baba must have made a mistake in counting how many days were left until my wedding. I tried to stand so that I could properly kowtow to them, but my body was weak and tired even as my heart was full of happiness. Servants hung a sieve and a mirror in the doorway of my room to render favorable every inauspicious element.
I wouldn’t be allowed to eat during the course of my wedding ceremonies, but I needed to taste a bit of the special foods my family had prepared for my wedding-day breakfast. I wasn’t hungry, but I would do my best to obey, because every bite would be an omen of a long life in har-mony with my husband. But no one offered me pork spareribs, which I was supposed to eat to give me the strength to have sons, while refraining from gnawing the bones to protect the vitalization of my husband’s fertility. They would want me to eat the seeds of the water lily, pumpkin, and sunflower to bring many sons. But they didn’t offer these things either.
Instead, my family stood around my bed and wept. They were all sad to see me marry out, but I was ebullient. My body felt so light and unburdened that I thought I might just float away. I took a deep breath to steady myself. I would be with my poet before the sun set. Between now and then, I would enjoy all the traditions and customs for marrying out a beloved daughter. Tonight—much, much later tonight—and at intimate times in years to come, I would entertain my husband with my memories of these beautiful moments.
The men left, and my aunts and cousins washed my limbs, only they forgot to add pomelo leaves to the water. They brushed my hair and pinned it up with jade and gold hairpins, forgetting to put on my wedding headdress. They put white powder on my face, ignoring the pots of color that would brighten my lips and cheeks. They placed the dried peony in ( 9 3 )