Honor and Duty (58 page)

The major, an Oxford-educated Rhodes scholar, was moving the discussion to the French war in Indochina. I couldn’t wait.

Mrs. Malloy, a department secretary, entered, giving him a note. I felt she was trying to look at me in a consoling fashion.

“Mr. Ting, return to your company for a telephone message.”

I entered 4-West wing of the University of California Hospital, carrying my overnight bag and a flower bouquet. I had been classified Military Airlift Priority 1B, medical emergency leave/family, and had been booked on a night-flight C-141 from McGuire AFB in New Jersey to Travis AFB. Now, in San Francisco, I was surrounded by a surly hostility. Few said anything, but many looked at me with dislike. I had gone to West Point to become American, and now in the city of my birth, riding public transportation on the way to the med center, I was the enemy.

“You don’t get it, do you?” I asked a guy my age with long hair who was trying to drown me in his glower. “If someone attacked us, you’d expect me to die for you.”

He turned his head away from me, laughing, making my words sound silly. He made faces to fellow passengers, who agreed with his sentiment. Once again I was the skinny Chinese kid, drawing ugly laughter. Did they think I invented Hitler, Tojo, Chingis Khan, and Stalin? I got off at Parnassus with my face red with anger. I looked like Guan Yu.

I already missed West Point. Mike was coaching Mr. Spanner in English and math. Mr. Zerl had suffered a knee injury and was despondent about his gridiron future, but had managed to teach Mr. Spanner how to shine shoes. Mr. Parthes had seen a picture of Pearl and had joined the Spanish Club. They all might make it.

“Kai,” said my father in the corridor, the use of my name evidence of his distress. He looked tired, deep lines of sleepless worry creasing his cheeks and forehead, deepening the sockets of his eyes. My father looked old. We shook hands, but he could not look at me. She had to be very sick. I put down my bag and the flowers. After twelve hours of transportation, I was where I was supposed to be, but I didn’t want to go in.

Megan Wai-la, my sister, stepped out from the room, crying softly. “Oh, Little brother!” She threw her arms around me.

It felt great to hold her, and I could’ve stayed there a long time, enjoying the closeness, but she broke our grip first.

“You’re so big!” she whispered. She wanted to smile but was unable to hide her dismay at the sight of my uniform.

“There’s nothing wrong with wearing this uniform,” I said.

My father was proud of my comment. But I had compounded old wounds in the family, pulling scabs from my sister’s psyche, to no one’s benefit. It delayed me from seeing Edna. Again, I was seven years old, afraid to enter my stepmother’s room.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Megan. “You look good.”

“Oh, it’s okay, you monster,” she said, in her fine English accent. “I have no right to judge you; you’re my brother. Hurry. She’s waiting.”

Edna lay in a room with two beds, one empty. She had the window view. A plastic white curtain was partially drawn, and she lay so still I feared she was dead. A television faced her, and muted, meaningless sounds came from a small gray portable speaker by her pillow. He hair was white, her pale skin blanched, her body thin and seemingly without muscle. A tube ran from her nose, and she had an IV in her arm with a bag of clear fluid suspended on a rack above her.

Dad had not been able to tell me what had felled her. All he could do was choke out the words “Edna in the hospital, bad.”

I knew it was a stroke—a real one.

“You’re not serious,” Janie had said.

“This could be a chance to patch things up,” I said.

“It’s not my job,” she said. “It’s up to her.”

“Look. I don’t want to go, but I have to.”

“I do not have to,” she said. “Nor do you.”

“Don’t you feel anything? A duty? She’s
chimu
, whether we hate her or not. You’d be going to respect her, her status, not her record as a parent.”

“
Gahng
and
lun
?” she asked.

“Yes—
gahng
and
lun.
”

“I have no
gahng.
I’m the ghost. I feel nothing for her.”

“But—you suggested we get rid of her. Now God’s doing it for you. I just think it’s a good idea to make peace.”

She sighed, long and deep. “I’ll never have peace because of that woman, dead or alive. What she did was so wrong, so hateful.”

She was asleep. I stepped closer. I hadn’t washed. I placed the bouquet on the bed, went to the bathroom sink.

“Hello, Kai,” she said quietly.

“Hi, Edna. How are you doing?” I said, drying my hands.

Outside, below on the street, a siren wailed, a car honked its horn, and some young man began shouting his anger.

“Fine,” she said.

“You look rested,” I said.

The Honor Code forbade even social lying. West Point had always striven to be as strict as she, and usually failed. I had been proud of the Honor Code. Lately, it had been making me sad.

“You look wonderful,” she said. “Handsome. So presentable.”

She had always thought me ugly, but she loved uniforms.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Senile diabetes. It’s affected my eating and functions of other parts of my body. Can’t eat. Now, my heart.”

She tried to wave her hand. She breathed slowly, once, twice. “The truly terrible, terrible thing—things—are the needles. I
hate
them,” she said, frowning, her voice weaker with every word, sighing softly from the exertion. It was like watching water shut off from a tap.

“How soon before you get out of here?” I asked.

She raised her eyelids to see me. I moved a chair to her bedside so she could look at me more easily.

“What uniform is that?” she asked.

“Khakis,” I said.

“I’m not leaving here.” A sigh. “I’m dying.”

“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true—you’re exaggerating.”

“I am
not
,” she said, with weakened vehemence. “I really do think you gave me a stroke,” she said.

I was ready. I sucked in air. “I’m very sorry. Very sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she said, reaching for me, and I held her hand in mine. I looked at it, the way I would look at the paw of an unknown beast. I didn’t enjoy the touch, and I felt guilty.

“Strong hand. Just like your father’s,” she said. “You were always a good boy,” she said.

Jesus, don’t say that. After all these years of my being the worst thing in your life, you’re going to say that? Strength waned in her frail fingers. I had been a bad boy, the worst. I had hated my life. I had hated her. It was my secret identity.

“I should get Dad,” I said, taking my hand back.

“No.” She moved her lips soundlessly, licking them, resting, getting ready to speak. “Purse,” she said.

Her purse lay on the bedside table. It was new and had replaced
the old navy blue one she had carried for many years. “It’s not a very
handsome
purse,” she had said. “But it has exactly the right number of compartments,
exactly
the right amount of space, and the correct
feel
to hang on my arm as I go downtown, and it matches most of my clothes.” She used to talk to me like that when she was cheery. I think my father was always enchanted by her free use of emphasis, her explosion of exclamation points. They both spoke with an innate sense of drama, of pressured thought.

I stood and took the purse.

“Open,” she said.

Inside was a large envelope that was labeled “Kai Ting.” I remembered Janie Ming-li’s envelope, as she sat at our dinner table, a lifetime ago, in the twilight of our Chinese family. Did this hold my fate? What would Edna give me?

“Open,” she said faintly. “Rest,” she murmured, her arm falling off the bed. I put it back on the bedsheets, her fingers flat and unresponsive. I looked at her, so weak and helpless, her chest barely rising and falling as she laboriously drew breath.

She had been the living, sleeping, hounding terror of my life. Her voice kept me in childhood, ever vulnerable, always fearful, always wrong, and stupid, unworthy, hateful, and ugly. She had cuffed me for breathing, cursed me for not ending my asthma, evicted my sister, killed our cat, taken everything from me I valued, made me regret being a male, a Chinese, a person who had a friend. She had never apologized for anything.

In the envelope was a photograph that had been folded in half, with a note.

I pulled out the photo and unfolded it. One corner had been charred. It was the picture my sister Megan had given me in Angie’s cafe at the Y, on the eve of my fight with Big Willie Mack. After sleeping with the framed photo under my pillow, I had surrendered it when I was eight, on my handshake deal with Edna that had made her my real mother, and had given me a life without her physical punishment, opening the door for psychic abuse. I had given the picture to Janie. Edna had taken it from her.

My Chinese mother looked at me from the old black-and-white photograph. Her large, observing, serene eyes seemed bright. A rosebud mouth was composed so it could, in an instant, smile or laugh. Jet-black hair, parted in the middle, brushed to sweep along the contour of her head. A sculpted face with gentle cheekbones, dark eyebrows, and a round, pretty chin. She wore a light, high-collared Mandarin dress and a large flower in her hair just above her neck. She was beautiful.
This was my mother. My Mah-mee. I found in her lovely face no similarity to me. I used to dream of her.

The photograph had been folded horizontally, and the crease caused tiny fissures in the photo’s dried emulsion.

You do not honor your mother, or speak to her, Uncle Shim had said. You do not remember her or know her face.

Now I remembered her features. I had a clear, shining image of my mother, lying in her hospital bed, smiling at me with her large, luminescent eyes, communicating with me with her face, without words. She was trying to tell me something, something important, and I was little, I was six years old and I couldn’t get it. I smelled something horrible. Ether. It smelled like
sze
, death.

She was my
mu-ch’in
, my mother, Mah-mee, and she would never tire, never leave me. She was brave and resourceful and loyal. Everyone said so. Mah-mee kept smiling, nodding, encouraging, sending, communicating, radiating feelings, thoughts, assurances.

I love you, my only son, I always will, her eyes had said.

Hands pulled me away from her, down long corridors, and my eyes couldn’t hold her, and through a terrible, horrible maze of halls and doors and stairs, each step, each turn, each floor, and every door separating me from her, making me dizzy as I tried to memorize the patterns on the floor so I could go back to her, and someone was telling me
“Vyoh puh,”
don’t be afraid, that she would be all right, and I would be all right.
“Kwahla, kwahla!”
Hurry, hurry! But we were going the wrong way and by then I had no idea where Mah-mee was, or how I could find her again.

I started to cry, and I felt so counterfeit, so bogus, crying for my Mah-mee when I should be crying for Edna. This true, honest, clear image of my mother, my only image, shimmered like a desert mirage and folded into the photo in my hands. I lowered my forehead and touched it to the picture, bowing to her, and to the mother behind her, who lay in her deathbed.

I had passed on the picture to Janie through the deal with Edna, knowing that Janie would guard it as fiercely as I had. I did not know that Edna was about to erase Janie from our family tree, void the home of the memory, of the photographs, of the spoken name, of recollection of the existence of the two Chinese females who had been, in rapid succession, my mothers.

I sat there for a moment, looking at the photo of Mah-mee,
and then at Edna, and back again, in a form of filial visual rebounding that did not become simpler through repetition. I could not fit them together. I thought of Dad, who had married both of them. Dad, who would tell me nothing, leaving everything to feeble guesswork, to edited, polemic retellings, to vast and dark ignorance.