Homesick Page 4

  "Call her Millie," she whispered. "She hates Lee."

  David was behind. "She's shy," he said, whispering too. "And hard to talk to. But remember, you promised."

  Edward followed, pushing past to get to the Christmas tree.

  Back at the car Mrs. Hull was standing at one side, bending over and looking in. Even from the back she looked like someone who studied American fashion magazines. Mr. Hull was standing on the other side of the car, also bending over. They were obviously talking to Millie. After a few minutes Mr. Hull straightened up and came to the house, carrying Millie's suitcase. Mrs. Hull and Millie followed.

  I was surprised at Millie. I guess I expected everyone to look happy on Christmas, but I could tell by the way she walked with her head down that she wasn't happy. When she reached the door and did look up, what struck me was her expression. She had the same secretive, stubborn look that Vera Sebastian had. Well, she was scared, I told myself. I would be scared too if I were in her place.

  I grinned in a way that was supposed to show that at least I wasn't anyone to be scared of. "Come on up and see my room," I said.

  She followed.

  "Bring your suitcase," I suggested.

  Her suitcase was standing inside the front door but she didn't turn around. "No," she said. "Not now."

  Upstairs I showed her not only my room but all the rooms and each time she said, "Uh-huh." By the end of the tour I was talking so loud, it was as if I thought she was deaf. "Let's go downstairs," I said. "Your presents are under the tree."

  Sitting beside the tree, Millie opened her packages slowly, careful to untie the ribbons, careful not to tear the paper. Each time she said "Thank you" dutifully as if she'd been told to say it. She did seem to like her sweater because she put it on, and I noticed that when she thought no one was looking, she took the silver dollar out of its box and slipped it into her sweater pocket. When she had finally finished, Andrea and I tore open our gifts to each other. A can of camomile flowers for me, a package of fortune-telling cards for her.

  The other guests arrived now and at my mother's nod, I made the rounds, dropping a British School curtsy to each one. I only did it to please my mother, but it was a mistake. The missionary ladies tried to be cute and, giggling, they curtsied back. Andrea looked ready to throw up and the sailors, who had obviously not been in a curtsying crowd before, blushed. Fortunately Wong Sze-Fu, the serving boy, saved the day by announcing that dinner was ready, so we trooped into the dining room. The turkey, surrounded by a ring of candied red apples, sat on a silver platter at my father's place. Rising triumphantly from the center of the table was a butter pagoda, unusually tall and splendid. As we sat down, I thought that now things would be better. Once we started eating, people would perk up and be jolly. Maybe even Millie.

  What I hadn't counted on was that those three sailors would be quite so shy. I could see that they wanted to be friendly but didn't know how. So my father began talking about Christmas at home in Pennsylvania and before long all the grown-ups were talking about old Christmases. The sailors told about their families in New Jersey and Illinois and Ohio and the missionary ladies chimed in about Michigan and Maryland and Mr. Hull described Christmas in Los Angeles, California, and Mrs. Hull said, no, it wasn't like that at all. Of course this left the children with nothing to talk about. Not one of us had been to a single state in America.

  Well, I thought, after dinner we'd go into the living room and sing around the piano. Then things would be better. But when the time came, Millie didn't want to sing. She sat on the couch, and although Andrea and I urged her, she wouldn't even join in for "Deck the Halls," my favorite. She wouldn't come to the piano when Phillip, the sailor from New Jersey, asked her, even though he was the cutest of the three sailors and I didn't see how anyone could turn him down.

  Andrea looked at me 'and shrugged as if she'd given up, but when the missionary ladies and the sailors left, Millie suddenly seemed to come to life. Edward suggested that we children should play hide-and-seek, and right away Millie smiled as if she'd been waiting for something like this. "Let's," she said.

  David said he'd be "it," and as the five of us ran into the hall to start the game, I took Millie's hand.

  "You can hide with me," I said.

  "Thanks, but I'd rather hide by myself." Millie answered in a tone that was almost friendly, so I didn't feel bad. And since I'd shown her the house, I didn't suppose she'd get lost.

  While everyone scattered, I crept into my favorite hiding place, the little closet tucked under the stairs. I closed the door and although I could just barely hear David beginning to count, in a few minutes I couldn't even hear that. Scrunched up on the floor in the dark, I planned how Millie and I would play Uncle Wiggily after everyone had left. I suppose the time passed faster than I thought, for suddenly I realized that it had been quite a while since I'd heard anything. Surely I would have heard pounding steps or at least one "Home free!" but when I opened the door and crawled out, I couldn't see any signs of the game.

  My mother and father were standing in the hall, looking unhappy.

  "Where's everybody?" I asked. Then I noticed that Millie's suitcase that had been standing by the front door was gone.

  "Where's Millie?" I shouted.

  The way my mother and father led me into the living room, I knew that everything had gone wrong. Everything. My mother explained: As soon as the game had started, Millie had taken her suitcase and run out to the Hulls' car. The grown-ups had heard the front door closing, so they had investigated.

  "No one could do anything with her," my mother said. "So they went home."

  "How could they?" I was crying. "How could they sneak off like that without even saying goodbye to me?"

  "Oh, Jean," my mother sighed, "it happened so quickly. David was trying to pull Millie out of the car and Mrs. Hull was getting mad at Mr. Hull and right in the middle of everything Mr. Hull told everyone to get in the car and he just drove off." She put her arms around me. "I know," she said. "I know."

  "Even if Millie had stayed," my father said, "you wouldn't have had a good time."

  "She didn't like me," I sniffled.

  "She didn't seem to like anyone." My father pulled his handkerchief out of his breast pocket so I could blow my nose. It was then I noticed that Millie's pencil box and paper flowers and Andrea's fortune-telling cards were still under the tree and I began to feel sorry for myself all over again. Oh, I knew the Hulls would feel bad—especially David—but I didn't have room for anyone's feelings but my own. I picked up my snowflake paperweight and I shook it and shook it. I shook until the snow came down in a perfect fury of a storm.

  "After supper we'll go upstairs, you and I, and start reading one of your new books together," my mother suggested. "How would you like that?"

  "All right."

  Usually I loved it when my mother lay down on my bed and we got interested in a new story together, but somehow tonight when my mother kicked off her shoes and stretched out beside me, I didn't want a book. She was still dressed in her black velvet dress and her pearls. She still smelled of lavender sachet and I just wanted her to talk.

  "Tell me about when you were a little girl in Washington, P.A.," I said. (My parents always called their hometown in Pennsylvania, Washington, P.A.)

  So my mother told me the old stories about her pet cat, Kitty Gray, who had been so mean and about her sister Blanche's pet cat, Big Puss, who had been so sweet. She told how her brother George used to chase her and Blanche out of his tree house and how rough their older sister, Sarah, had been when she gave them their baths.

  "And what did you do when she rubbed too hard?" I asked.

  My mother laughed. "Why, we splashed her. Yes, until she was wet right through her apron."

  "You and Aunt Blanche don't sound as if you were always good."

  My mother was still smiling. "I guess we weren't."

  "Then how come," I asked, "that you expect me to be one-hundred-percent perfect?"


  My mother snapped back from her little-girl time. "All I want you to do is try," she said.

  I wished I had never asked. I wished she had never answered. But what I said next came as a surprise even to me. I propped myself up on my elbow.

  "Why can't we adopt a baby?" I asked. "Not an eleven-year-old. A baby. Why not?"

  Sometimes when my mother was given a hard question, she'd say, "Maybe" or "We'll see." Not tonight.

  "Well, we can't," she said. Then quickly she began talking about Washington, P.A., again.

  And I began thinking about my grandmother. I wondered if she would put my doily on her dining-room table. After my mother had said "good night" and left the room, I got up and went to my desk. I took out the first sheet of my brand-new stationery.

  Dear Grandma, (I wrote): Thank you so much for the petticoat. It is lovely,

  I didn't want to spoil my stationery by writing the whole truth about our Christmas, so I just told her what I got and signed my name, along with love and kisses.

  Then I added a P.S. on the back.

  How do you like the name Marjorief (I wrote) .

  I still thought that if my name were Marjorie, things might be different.

  Since the revolution began in earnest in Hankow, it was impossible to ignore it. Every few days there was a strike of some sort. Student strikes. Worker strikes. Coolie strikes. There were demonstrations and marches and agitators haranguing about how foreigners ought to be kicked out of China and how poor people should take money from the rich. Even our servants listened to the agitators. Once Lin Nai-Nai came home and told my mother that a wonderful thing was going to happen in China. All the money in the country would be gathered up and divided equally so that there would no longer be rich people and poor people.

  "If they do that," my mother said, "maybe you won't have as much money as you do now. There are many more poor people in China than there are rich."

  But I could tell that Lin Nai-Nai thought that the money dividing would be part of a great new China where men would stick to one wife and women wouldn't bind their feet.

  Once an agitator gathered a crowd around him in front of the Y.M.C.A. building. He shouted about the Y.M.C.A. being a foreign organization with a foreigner in charge who should be run out of town. The man in charge, of course, was my father and when he heard what was going on, he slipped quietly out the front door of the building so that he was standing behind the agitator without the agitator seeing him. My father put his hands casually in his pockets and cocked his head as he listened to the man carrying on. Then my father smiled and winked at the crowd as if it were a huge joke that the agitator should b$ calling my father names while my father was right there behind him. The crowd thought it was a joke too and laughed. Of course the agitator lost face and that was the end of that. My father was lucky, but at the same time he had many Chinese friends, even among the coolies. Some of his friends were for the Communists, some were against, but my father had made up his mind not to take sides. He worked in the Y.M.C.A. so he could help those Chinese who needed help in whatever way they needed it.

  Occasionally there were riots. The first time the riot siren blew, we were eating supper. My father, who was a member of the riot squad (organized to help put down riots, with tear bombs if necessary), rushed out of the house and my mother began pacing. She hadn't been feeling well lately and I could tell that she certainly didn't feel well now. She had me sleep in a cot in her room that night, and after I got into bed, she sat down beside me.

  "I want to tell you something, Jean," she said. "No matter what I ask you to do tonight, I want you just to do it. No questions. No arguments."

  It was on the tip of my tongue to ask, "Like what?" but I realized that was a question in itself. Of course I knew what my mother was afraid of. She thought a mob might burst into the house and she wanted to hide me, but I wasn't sure that she knew the best places or would even think of the closet under the stairs. And I wasn't sure that she was planning to hide with me. Still, I didn't say anything.

  She lay down on her bed with her clothes on, but I knew her eyes were open, just as mine were. We were both listening, but all we heard were the usual night sounds. A beggar woman crying for money to bury her dead baby. Dogs howling. Every night ten greyhounds that belonged to the Frenchman across the street wailed as if the world were coming to an end.

  But we heard no fighting. I spent the time deciding how I would save my mother instead of letting her save me, but as it turned out, neither of us had to do any saving. About three o'clock in the morning Mr. Hull came into the yard below our window and called to my mother.

  Both of us ran out on the balcony.

  "Arthur's all right," he said. "It's all over. Everything's under control. He'll be back in about an hour." He talked some more but I didn't listen. I just stood on the balcony, looking up at the night sky, at the crook of the moon, at the Spangle of stars—each one in its proper place.

  Oh, Grandma, I thought, that is the same moon and the same stars that will be over your grape arbor and your henhouse tomorrow. It was almost too hard to believe.

  There was upheaval all around me that spring, and although it was often scary, it was also hazy, like passages in a book that you just skim over. "We're living right in the middle of history," my father would say, but it seemed to me I could understand long-ago history better than history today. All I hoped was that however this revolution turned out, Lin Nai-Nai would get her wishes. And I hoped that all the people who had drawn rotten lives would be given a change of luck.

  As for me, I went on with my own life—going to school, learning poetry, reading. Twice I managed to take an orange to my little friend in the Mud Flats. Actually the worst thing that happened to me had nothing to do with the revolution. My father came home one evening with the news that Mr. Hull had been transferred to the Shanghai Y.M.C.A. The whole family would move the next week. I felt as if I'd had the wind knocked out of me and I knew that I wouldn't have time to get it back before they'd be gone.

  They came for dinner the night before they left. I hadn't even tried to imagine how the Hulls would feel about the move, but since I felt bad, I took for granted that they would too. But they were excited, all except David. Ever since Christmas, David had stopped getting excited about anything. Sometimes I felt like shaking him and telling him to quit feeling so sorry for himself, but tonight I didn't care how David Hull felt.

  As soon as we were alone, Andrea began talking about Shanghai. They were going to live in a house with five modern bathrooms, she said. She was going to take dancing lessons from an Austrian dancer named Hans. And she'd go to the Shanghai American School.

  "Shanghai is so much more up-to-date than Hankow," she said. "More like the States."

  "Since when have you been calling America 'the States'?" I asked.

  Andrea just tossed her head as if that were too silly a question to answer.

  "My mother is going to have her hair bobbed when we get there," she said. "And my father says that's all right with him. Ever since we heard about Shanghai, they've been nice to each other."

  I could understand why Andrea was excited. I'd be excited just to have the five modern bathrooms, but right then I couldn't think of a single thing to be happy about.

  "Well, you've got something to look forward to too," Andrea said.

  I couldn't imagine what.

  "It won't be long now," she said.

  I supposed she must mean summer vacation. It was true. I certainly did look forward to the three months we spent every summer in Peitaiho on the ocean north of Peking. Once we had gone to the mountains in Ruling which was nearer and beautiful too. But not like Peitaiho. The most glorious moment of the whole year was when I first caught sight of the ocean. We'd be riding donkeys from the train station to our house on the beach when, halfway up a hill, the ocean would suddenly come into view. The blueness of it rolling on and on right out to the sky made something inside me leap. Free, I thought. The ocean ma
de me feel free. Free of school and grown-ups, free of goodness and badness and ugliness and loneliness. Sometimes in the winter when I walked past the beggars in Hankow, I would think of Peitaiho and be glad to know that it was in the same world.

  "Yes," I told Andrea, "I do look forward to Peitaiho."

  "How's your mother feeling?"

  I shrugged. It wasn't as if my mother were sick enough to stay in bed. I thought Andrea gave me a funny look but right away she put her hand on my arm.

  "We'll write," she said. "Probably sometime you'll visit us and then you can have a bathroom all to yourself."

  As soon as Andrea had left town, I began concentrating on Peitaiho. I made pictures in my mind of the summer until the pictures became so real I could leaf through them like pages in an album. A picture of us having a picnic on the Great Wall. (We did this once each summer.) Pictures of my father and me wading at low tide from rock to rock, chipping off oysters for our supper. A picture of us sitting on the porch at sunset, watching the sky flame up and then drift off into pinks and purples. "That's the best one yet," we'd say.

  My mother and father were both so busy these days I could never find time for us to go through my pictures together. But one Sunday morning when my father was shaving, I decided that I couldn't keep the summer to myself any longer. I often watched my father shave on Sunday when he was in no hurry. He'd stand in front of the mirror in his trousers, his suspenders loose over his undershirt, and he'd lather up his face until the lather stood in peaks like whipped cream. Since we didn't have a modern bathroom, he'd shave over an enamel basin and use hot water from a pitcher. (The bathtub, round like a big green salad bowl, took so many pitchers of water you never sat in more than a puddle.)

  I leaned against the doorframe while my father twisted his face to shave down one side.

  "How do you suppose the oysters will be this summer?" I asked. "Do you think this will be the year I'll find a pearl?" (I always hoped.)

  My father put down his razor and straightened his face. "I've been meaning to tell you," he said. "We can't go to Peitaiho this summer, Jean. We'll be going to Kuling."