“Why are you laughing?” Il-han inquired. He pulled a low carved stool to her bedside and sat down.
“I am remembering you on that high white horse,” she said, laughing, “and the servants behind you with paper umbrellas and the little man carrying the big duck.”
He smiled at her. “Were you watching?”
It was one of the joys of their life that he found surprises in her, thoughts, feelings, acts, which she never finished telling him.
“Yes,” she said joyously. “Did I never tell you! I was watching and the moment when I saw you laugh — I–I — was glad.”
He reached for her hand. “Glad of what?”
“Because I knew I must love you.”
Their hands clasped. “What if the duck had flown away?” This he said to tease her, since it is a bad omen for a marriage if the wedding duck escapes.
“I would not have cared,” she said. “I had seen you and I would have followed you anywhere.”
“Now — now.” He pretended to scold her to hide the excess of his persisting tenderness, after all these years. “Is this the way to speak to a man? You are too bold — you have not been well brought up!”
“I am very well brought up, and you know that,” she retorted, pretending to pout. “All Pak women are well brought up. Do we not belong to the truebone? We have royal blood, too — as well as you Kims!”
“Truebone to truebone,” he said and put her hand to his cheek.
She smoothed the cheek, and then, allowing this to go no further, she withdrew her hand.
“All the same,” she said, “on our wedding day you bowed too carelessly at the table before the gate. Three times, I think, instead of four! You were still trying not to laugh at the duck.”
“The duck would not stay on the table, as you very well know,” he reminded her, “and I saw myself coming to meet my princess with a duck flapping after me. As it was, your father looked shocked when he led you out of the house!”
“You had not seen me until that moment and yet you thought of ducks!” Her words were mock reproach but her dark eyes rested on his face with such a look that he bit his lip.
“Shall I ever forget—” he murmured.
He rose impetuously and lifted her in his right arm and buried his face in her hair. For a moment they embraced and then she pushed him gently away.
“We are not behaving well, father of my son — This is not our wedding night.”
“A month yet before we are free to—” he muttered the words restlessly, and broke off.
She fluttered her eyelashes at him and looked down at the satin bed quilt and pretended to pull a thread.
“You have not told me what you think of our second son.”
He drew a deep breath. “Wait,” he besought her. “Let me cool my heart for a moment.” He got up and walked about the room, paused before a painting of the sacred mountain of Omei in faraway China. Then he returned to his seat
“This second son,” he said, “is not respectful to his father. He slept the whole time he was in my presence. Otherwise, I think well of him, although he is not so beautiful as the first one. He looks like me. Though I will not grant that the Paks, in general, are more handsome than the Kims, you being the exception to all women.”
She shook her head. “I did my best to make him perfect but—”
“But what?”
“He is not quite perfect.”
“No?”
“This—” She touched the lobe of her own perfect left ear. “It is pinched. It is not like the other one.”
He heard this and clapped his hands. A woman servant entered.
“Bring me my second son,” he commanded.
“What can this mean?” he inquired then of his wife.
She shook her head again and tears came welling into her eyes.
“Ah now,” he cried and impetuously reached for her folded hands and held them in his. “It is not your fault, my bird.”
“It is the evil of some spirit on him before he was shaped,” she sighed. “A touch on the lobe of the ear — I must ask the soothsayer what it means.”
“Where were our samsin spirits?” he asked, half scornfully.
It was an old quarrel between them, never ended, a small battle in which neither yielded and neither won. The samsin were the three spirits whose duty it is to guard the conception and growth and development of children in the house. He did not believe in samsin, and she did not believe, she said when he teased her, and yet she had prepared the symbols.
“The threads, the papers, the streamers of cloth, they were hanging yonder on the wall the night that we—”
He put her hands down gently and walked to the wall at the far end of the room. Yes, they were still there, the material evident presence of the samsin, looking now somewhat dusty and torn. How could these poor relics have influence on the birth of a child? Gazing at them with contempt, he felt the old disbelief well into his mind and heart. Folk tales, the fumbling efforts of peasant peoples and ignorant priests to explain the miracles of life, even his sister-in-law wanting to be a Buddhist nun! He longed to know and understand in new ways, to find other paths than in the books of the dead. His father, sitting day after day in his study, poring over the ancestral history of the Kim family, proud of the dead and censorious toward the living — this was the curse of Korea, this slow dying while men were still alive, begetting sons for the future, but dreaming of the past. He put out his hand and tore down the dusty symbols.
“Il-han!”
He heard his wife’s cry and he turned to her. “How many years I have been longing to tear down those rags! And now I have done it!”
“But, Il-han,” she breathed, “what will happen to us?”
“Something new and something good,” he said.
At this moment the servant entered with his second son. He took the child from her and dismissed her with a nod and he carried the child to the bed and laid him beside the mother.
“Show me,” he commanded.
She turned the sleeping child tenderly and pushed back the soft straight black hair that fell against his left ear.
“There,” she said, “see what happened to him, even before his birth.”
He leaned to see closely. The deformity was slight. For a girl, who must wear jewels in her ears, it might have been a defect more grave. Nevertheless it was a defect, and he did not like to think that a son of his could be less than perfect. Yet what could be done now? The shape was made, the flesh confirmed by life. No use to see a doctor — herbs could not change this permanence. And the thing was so small, the lobe of the ear tucked in as though a thread had drawn it up, and could be released again. A quick sharp knife could do it, if one had the skill.
He touched the child’s soft ear, and then covered it with the dark hair. “I have heard that the western physicians know how to correct by the knife,” he said.
She gathered the child in her arms. “Never! A western doctor? You do not love your son!”
“I do love him,” he said gravely. “I love him enough to wish he were perfect.”
Tears brimmed her eyes. “You blame me!”
“I blame no one, but I wish he were perfect,” he replied.
“And I,” she cried, the tears streaming down her cheeks, “I will not allow a foreign doctor to touch him! As he was born, let him remain. I love him. He is my son, if you will not have him for yours.”
“Be quiet, Sunia,” he commanded. “Do you accuse me of being less a parent than you? It is simply that if the child can be made perfect, he should be perfect.”
She cried out at him again. “You think only of yourself! You are ashamed of your child! Oh, you must always have everything — so — so perfect!”