Honor and Duty (42 page)

“You could’ve gone to him. After she died, you were the only one. He would’ve listened to you, the son! We didn’t count.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Did you even try?” she cried.

I shook my head. “I couldn’t have even imagined doing that.”

“
I
would’ve if they had done this to
you
” she said.

“But I was a kid! You were a teenager.”

“You’re making Chinese man excuses! It doesn’t matter. You were the
son.
If you really cared, you would’ve done it. You would’ve just tried. Why did you tell me the truth? Why didn’t you lie and tell me you tried even if you didn’t? I used to pray to God that you had done this for me—that you had gotten Dad to help. But you didn’t even try.

“Don’t ever say you were too young.… Mah-mee prepared you to do everything before she died. She tutored and taught you to read, told you stories of smart boys. About K’an Tse, who borrowed books and never forgot what he read, the boy who turned the pages without stopping. Mah-mee took Uncle Shim from me to teach you calligraphy and the
tsung cheh
, the old ways. He lived for you. She loved you more than she loved me.… She loved you more than anyone.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “That’s crazy talk.”

She blew her nose, drying her eyes. “I hate this,” she said.

“God, I hate this. I knew it would be like this, seeing you.”

A great physical weight pressed on my chest. A sudden headache lanced from temple to temple. Breathing was labored. I wanted to run away. I felt like dying. I imagined suicide: pulling a grenade pin and bending my head over it in a prayer for relief. I couldn’t stand this, drowning, suffocating in my sister’s misery. I pulled out my wallet and began extracting bills.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m leaving,” I asked.

“Just like men,” she said.

“Jesus!” I hissed.
“Ch’a lu t’ung ku!”

“Fork pain? What’s that?” she asked.

“Chinese chess. Being caught in a dilemma. Stuck if I stay, wrong if I leave.”

“Shwa jungwo hwa?”
she asked.

I hated that question. I shook my head.
“Bu shr,”
I said.

Don’t speak. “I’ve forgotten everything.”

We were quiet for a while.

“I must look awful,” she said.

“You look great,” I said.

She looked at me, thinking of something. “Remember
tseuh?
”

I frowned into my memory. “Yes,” I said. “The porridge.
Tseu’h.
With the shredded pork and pickled somethings—vegetables,”

“Remember,” she said, “the three of us at the old yellow table in the middle of that old kitchen, eating
tseuh
, next to the large black stove where Mah-mee used to burn toast?”

I nodded. I remembered the table where I had gone mad. “She used to burn toast?” I asked.

“She thought charcoal was healthy. Alejandro thinks it might have induced her cancer.”

Mah-mee. Cancer. “The cancer god has taken your mother,” Father had said. I was breathing fast and no air was in my lungs, and I was wheezing audibly, coughing unsuccesfully to clear it.

“I told myself that’s when you could talk to Daddy. It would just be the two of you, eating
tseuh
, while he read the business section and Herb Caen, and you sat there, silently, next to him.

“You would say to him, in that clear, high, musical boy’s voice that Mah-mee taught you: ‘
Ba-ba
, can’t live without Janie Ming-li. You must bring her home.’ Eleven words.” She repeated them very slowly, with clear pronunciation.

I felt in Janie’s voice the music of someone else: an older woman with a high, slow, musical, intense voice, so many things inside it that my small brain could not hold all the nuances, all the emotion of a woman who had loved me and died. I felt a deep, abiding pain inside my chest, my eyes straining to cry for the hole that was inside me, ever growing.

It was the kind voice of Momma LaRue; the soft, gentle voice of Harper Lee; the song of mothers speaking to sons. Janie’s voice was hers, and also someone else’s: Mah-mee’s. I knew that. My whole body was coming apart, against my muscles. Doesn’t matter, I said. Means nothing, I said. Through all my childhood inadequacies, I had never been dunced as a momma’s boy. I hadn’t had a momma to run to. I was vulnerable to a new set of feelings, and I hated it.

“You know,” Janie said, more to herself than to me, “I picked the words you’d use, like helping you learn to write. These words are the best. Words you could’ve used. Should’ve used.” She put her head down again, her shoulders gently shaking. She wiped her face with the napkin. Her cosmetics were smeared around her eyes. She looked at herself in a small mirror, dried her eyes, and reapplied the makeup. I was trembling in a fit of isometric tension, trying to stop the impulse to cry. I focused on her makeup procedure. I watched her. When
she applied the makeup to her eyes, she opened her mouth. She glanced at me. For a split second, she smiled.

Through the decade that had separated us and made us strangers to each other, I saw the face of a sister who consistently had set aside her youth to mother her baby brother, quashing her own needs to smile at the questioning little lost boy at her hip.

“So, Kai. You never said that, to him, to Daddy. Did you ever think about saying it to him?”

“Janie, does your voice sound like your mother’s? Mah-mee’s?”

“Do this for me,” she said, very intently. “If you had said it, how would you put it?”

“I don’t talk to him very well.”

“You don’t?” she asked. “But you’re his son.”

“That makes it tougher on both of us,” I said. “We mostly have long silences with each other. Lately, he talks to me about politics. Communism.” I ground my teeth and the pain subsided.

“Really!” she said, blinking. “He used to talk to you all the time. Ah … until Mah-mee died. Then,” she said, “then, all he did was read and smoke a pipe.”

“You have our mother’s voice, don’t you?” I wanted her to say yes so I could remember Mah-mee, and to say no, so I couldn’t.

“I don’t know,” she said reflectively. “Maybe.”

“I know I missed you. I didn’t miss her. I missed you.”

“That’s impossible,” she said. “How could you not remember—and miss—Mah-mee?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just didn’t.”

“You have a very bad memory,” said Janie. “Incredibly bad.”

“I remember your Bible lessons. On a felt board, with felt Bible figures. Jesus, and the man who wasn’t Jesus … the disciple who turned in Christians to the Romans … Jesus washing the feet of a bad lady.” I laughed. “Wonder who they were. I remember singing.
’Yasu tiahng nu, wah see ching.…
’ Was I always a lousy singer?”

She shook her head, her hair swaying. She showed her fine teeth for a moment. I thought she was going to smile, so I smiled, imitating her face as if it were Toussaint’s.

“God abandoned me,” she said. “God made us run from China, and our home, away from our whole family and my
amah and my wet nurse and our kitchen, to run on the road like dogs. God killed the Chinese people, using the Japanese Army as His instrument. God littered little Chinese girls in old wells and in bushes and made them cry to me in my sleep. God destroyed our family, ruined China, made us lose everybody. God brought us to this land poor, and He killed Mah-mee and brought Edna into our home. God made my father give me up and made my brother forget my name. Daddy stopped laughing and your voice became hoarse and ugly, and you could never sing again.”

“Jesus,” I breathed.

“Yes, Jesus. Where was he, with all his talk about helping the broken people?
I
was broken! Why didn’t he come back? I loved him so
much!
I believed in him! Why didn’t he save us? I prayed to him for you to save me with Daddy. That’s when I realized Jesus was just another Chinese man. He should’ve come back, but didn’t, and apologizes for nothing! You missed the bombing of Shanghai. The enemy soldiers. The Run out of China. I was only five but I already knew what soldiers did to women and girls. The little dead girls on the road, flies on their eyes … America and Canada, they have no problems compared to what we had. We had awful trouble. And we didn’t leave it behind. We escaped, but it followed us here. Satan sent Edna for the sins of our great-grandfather.”

Sins of our great-grandfather? The magistrate with his own army? What had he done? It didn’t matter; I was a soldier so the horror of Nanjing could never happen again. I would protect Asian women. But Janie had followed Edna; neither trusted God, and both saw Satan. I feared
wupo
, witches, and Ts’ao Ts’ao, the evil one.

She pulled on a diamond ring on her hand.

“I don’t remember much,” I said. “I remember when I started making Dad’s lunch, and mine, that I missed you.”

“Oh, you just missed my woman
k’u-li
, labor. That’s awful!”

“I missed you at dinner. After school, getting my gym bag, looking up the stairs to the attic, knowing you were gone. When I came home from the Y or Chinese school at night, and the place was so empty without you. At bedtime, when we used to brush our teeth together and you always checked mine to make sure I did it right. Remember? Edna’s liver and onions would stick between my teeth.… I missed your prayers. Couldn’t say them without you. Missed you when I got up in
the morning and I didn’t hear you singing songs to God, it was just me.

“Janie,” I breathed. “You used to sing ‘Amazing Grace.’ ” I remembered Marco Fideli asking me to sing it in hard times.

She nodded. “Mah-mee’s favorite hymn,” she said.

I lurched up and stumbled to the bathroom on feet that were not mine. The pressure behind my eyes, in my head, swelled against the walls. I entered a stall that was too small and pressed my forehead against the cold metal door, gritting my teeth, trying to stop from crying, panting like a lost patrol member racing on a thrashing, branch-snapping run through thick woods with a pack of aggressors in pursuit. Muscles convulsing, I groaned, crushed my mouth with my right hand, knocking my glasses off onto the hard floor of the lavatory as the tears rushed out and noises that were foreign to me escaped from my throat and my ears. I began hitting the door walls until I was weak and wet, quivering on the wall.

When I finished and opened the stall door, three waiters and a cook with a knife were facing me.
“C’est bien?”
asked the cook.

“Fine, great,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Are you okay?” Janie asked.

I took a deep breath and sat down. “I would have talked to Dad at breakfast.” I flexed my face, opening my eyes very wide to not allow any more tears out. I felt bad, and weak, and drained, and immoral, having cried. “I would’ve said: ‘Where Janie? When she come back? You miss her, too, right?’ ” My voice cracked. I put my head down and began to cry, trying to swallow the sobs and failing, using all my strength to stop the tears, unable to stop, the crystal tinkling against itself as I wept. I hated this, hating myself, my weakness, my incredible bullshit weakness. What was wrong with me? I felt broken. Why was this happening? I no longer felt like a man. I had become a child.

“I
did
say that,” I whispered. “I really did. They didn’t answer. They never answered. I forgot. I forgot I said it.”

After a bit, I looked at her. Janie looked stricken.

“You really don’t cry, do you?” she asked. “It sounded like you were dying. I mean, you don’t even know how to cry.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t cry,” my face wet as I swabbed at it with both coat sleeves. “I try not to cry.”

“When did you stop asking about me?” she asked. She awkwardly reached across the table and touched my arm. Pat, pat.

“I was easily defeated then,” I said. “Maybe I still am.”

“By whom?” she asked.

“Dad,” I said. “Edna,” I said. “Math.”

“Why should you be afraid? You’re the son! He loves you—more than you can ever know. And you’re
huge.
”

“You keep saying that. It doesn’t matter. It’s only good for boxing and fighting. Sports. It didn’t help with Dad.”

She looked at me, once again the older sister, the acting mother, the one possessed of greater knowledge.

“Father loved you. You should have seen him, and Mah-mee, when you were born. They went
crazy.
I had no idea that the craziness about sons had anything to do with
us.
But with you, we discovered the truth. Mah-mee, for all her celebrations about us, just wanted a son. After all that stuff about Jesus Christ and Christian equality of women, she was still old-way Chinese. And when I saw what all the fuss was about—it was this little
thing
—this big!” She pressed an angry thumb against the tip of her little finger.

“Gee,” I said, “it’s grown a bit since then.”

“Don’t change the subject. They expected great things from Jennifer and you, nothing from Megan, and less from me. Mah-mee used to rub my cheek and say, ‘Oh, Little Tail, you are so lovely. So beautiful. Don’t worry about school, or grades. Just marry a man with a warm heart, and have many sons!”

I closed my eyes tightly. Janie’s voice was musical, and light, each sound controlling the beating of my heart, threatening to kill me.

“But
you.
You were the genius. She ordered me to take care of you, to keep your genius intact. To make you into K’an Tse.”

“Ah,” I said, “that’s why I’m stupid. You didn’t keep my genius intact.”

“You’re at West Point,” she said. “How did you get so big?”

“I lift weights and eat like a potbellied pig.”

“You’re exactly what Dad wanted,” she said.

“I was bad in math and it drove him nuts. He tried to teach me math.” I stopped. “Janie, he doesn’t like me. I’m just a thing for him to get the things he wants.”

“What do you think is the difference between us?” she asked.

“One foot and seventy pounds. You’re a lot prettier.”

“Did they kick
you
out?” she asked quietly.

The waiter cleared our plates. Only later did I realize I hadn’t asked for doggie bags. We drank coffee; mine was mostly cream and sugar, to kill the taste, which Army coffee required.