China to Me (45 page)

You see, I failed too.

Charles spoke about the general situation only once more. It was when we were having tea.

“You might think of going away,” he said abruptly.

“I wouldn't,” I said. “Why?”

For once he tried to put weight into his light voice, and he looked straight at me. “You know that if it happens I can't help you,” he said.

“Yes, I know.”

“I'll be busy in the war. I can't stop and look after you and the baby.”

“Of course.”

“You could go to Singapore, perhaps. Cooper thinks it's criminal of me not to make you go.”

“But you can't make me go, can you? I'm American.”

“No, I can't.”

“And Singapore, and Manila — they're all in the same boat, Charles.”

“You could go to America.”

“With this baby?”

He was silent.

“How do you know America will stay out of it, anyway?”

“That's so,” said Charles. “Well, I'll have a beer.”

Tony had a try too. “Now will you go?” he said pleadingly, when the news looked a little rocky.

I said, “No.”

“All right. Come in the same time next week.”

American service men were ordered to send their wives away and there was weeping and wailing in all the pretty little houses where they had settled down.

“How's Sandy?” I asked an American Navy captain one day, just before the exodus.

“Not so good,” he said. “Somebody showed her a dishpan and a wash-tub, and she's scared to death.”

Then the Chase and the National City banks sent out orders for the wives to be sent away. The Peak houses were hastily packed up, and there were tearful leave-takings, and the men went back on a bachelor basis. After a while the only American woman I knew was Charlotte Gower, doctor in anthropology, and professor out at Ling Nan University, which was maintaining a sort of double life, half in Canton and half as a refugee institution in Hong Kong, in borrowed classrooms at the university there. I love Charlotte. We had met through Dr. Jim Henry, president of Ling Nan. Charlotte had once written me a note suggesting that we meet at the American Club for lunch, and I wasn't at all pleased.

“A missionary anthropologist? Lummy,” I grumbled. “Well, I guess I'll have to.” I accepted, and turned up more or less on time to find Dr. Gower waiting for me with another woman. They looked forbidding, and my heart went down to my french heels. They both had high collars, short haircuts, and rather scholastic-looking spectacles.

“Will you have a drink before lunch?” asked Charlotte. I glanced from one to the other, and then committed one of those social crimes which are occasionally necessary.

“A tomato juice,” I said primly.

Charlotte said over her shoulder, “One tomato juice, two old-fashioneds.”

I have often blamed her for this and maintained that she can never make it up to me, but it is the only thing I wouldn't forgive Charlotte.

Charles asked her to come and live with me the last six weeks, and she did. I think she had a row with the faculty over it, but she did. Charles heaved a sigh of relief and went back to work. We would talk in the evening, Charlotte and I, while the sun set over the Pacific with a rather disappointing lack of color — sunsets in Hong Kong are nothing to brag about — and upstairs the pianola played a song which I should think would curl Carola's hair whenever she hears it. It was the same song, night after night, and I don't know the name of it, but whenever I hear it even now my back aches a little, and my blood races, and again I am sitting heavily in my Hong Kong living room, waiting for the Japanese to come and bomb us.

Chapter 36

I began asking around, among experienced ladies, the same questions that we all ask when the time comes. “How will I know?”

An interesting point was that everybody had a different story to tell. I have never heard two firsthand reports of childbirth that sounded remotely alike. The only thing that all women seem to have in common on this subject is a kindly desire to reassure you, the novice, and a natural tendency to discuss it over and over again. I was lunching one day with two Chinese women, Billie Lee and Elsie Soong.

“It's going to be quite all right,” Elsie said. “I've had five, my dear, and I know all about it. It's nothing to worry about, nothing at all. Don't believe anybody who tries to frighten you. Oh, how well I remember my first. My mother hung a knotted towel over the head of the bed, you know, so that I could hang on to something, and my hands were in ribbons, my dear. It took almost three days. I'll never forget it as long as I live.”

Billie, watching my face, interposed hastily. “Don't you give it a thought,” she said. “Look at me, small as I am, and the doctor said he'd never pull me through, but it wasn't bad at all. Not at all. Easy as anything.” Her vivid little face took on a reminiscent look: “Of course,” she admitted, “I do remember saying to the nurse, ‘Kill me, kill me, I want to die. … ' ”

I went home and read a good book.

Suddenly my life seemed full, overfull, of kind ladies coming in to sit with me. I couldn't imagine where they had sprung from. They didn't leave me alone for a minute, and I was bewildered and grateful and annoyed in turn. I didn't have time to read any more, or muse, or listen to that pianola upstairs, or wonder what was going to happen, or anything. It took me quite a while to find out why. Charles had done it. He had been going around saying, “I do wish you'd look in on Mickey if you have the time. She's alone so much, you know. I can't do it myself, but I would appreciate it if …”

It was very nice of him, very touching, and the only evidence I had of the worry he was undergoing. Then I complicated matters by forgetting I was pregnant. I was going downtown to see the doctor, then have lunch with Hilda in the Parisian Grill. We were celebrating my book or something, and I had asked the proprietor, Emile, to put a half bottle of champagne on ice, and I took a taxi down. As sometimes happens, I forgot all about the baby. I was sitting down and didn't keep in mind the fact, which Gordon King was always telling me, that my center of gravity had shifted. So when the taxi stopped in front of Tony's office I jumped out in the old lighthearted way, and I fell over and sprained my ankle.

A crowd immediately gathered, mostly of eager Chinese who all too evidently expected me to have the baby then and there. They hovered over me and asked questions, picked me up and helped me into the Gloucester, kind as can be, and started telling each other about their aunts and cousins who had lost progeny in the same way. I bless the unknown name of the amah who massaged my ankle with something that smelled of wintergreen. It kept me from fainting, and I managed to reach Hilda and then get my foot tied up, and we took the champagne home and had it there. But until Carola arrived that ankle stayed sprained. Very uncomfortable. It was the other ankle, too.

Ah King was getting pretty mad at the whole thing. He said I ought not go out so much. He said I ought not eat fruit at all; every sensible Chinese knew that, he said, whereas I didn't eat anything else. It was most unorthodox and dangerous. I had never known him to be so talkative before, but now I learned a lot about him. He had a daughter, and once upon a time he had had a son, but the son quarreled with him and ran away, and joined the Army, and Ah King hadn't heard from him since. That summer trouble came to what remained of his family. His wife and daughter, living over in Kowloon, fell ill and wouldn't get well again, and at last Ah King told me about it.

I made Tony visit them. Owing to an outrageous landlord's ruling, servants weren't allowed to keep their families with them in our house, and he found the two women in a little hovel, crowding unspeakably with a lot of other people. They had typhoid, and Tony managed to squeeze them into the government hospital in Kowloon, though all the hospitals during those years when refugees flooded the Colony were pitiably crowded. After a bit they recovered and came home, to my place: I said to hell with the landlord. It wasn't a legal ruling anyway. I paid the hospital bills, which were very low; about twelve Hong Kong dollars altogether, as I remember. That is what it cost me to buy Ah King's lifetime devotion; that is what saved my life, and Carola's, later on. Not expensive, was it?

Gordon King looked at me with a dead pan, as usual. “You have lost ten pounds in the last few months,” he said.

“Why, that's wonderful,” I said brightly. “Isn't it?”

“Perhaps.”

The room at hospital had long been waiting for me. Tony was nervous as a cat; he had expected the baby earlier. Gordon waited and waited, and finally tried to induce things, and still nothing happened. Charlotte and I chatted about everything else in the world, and still nothing happened. At last Gordon said that he would take me into hospital anyway, on a Sunday evening. Charles was to be ready with the car at five. He had to rush for it. There was trouble at the border with the Japanese, and one of the police over in the New Territories thought he had discovered a secret munitions road on British ground. Charles hurried over to the mainland to look at the road, which was a false alarm, and then hurried back. In the meantime things had at last started. Three o'clock, I think it was.

“Charlotte,” I said, “this is it.”

“Are you sure? You've had two false alarms, and made poor Mrs. Armstrong rush over —”

“No doubt about it,” I said. “This time, I know.”

One does forget. I can remember only that I was excited and glad. I felt drunk. I chattered like a magpie to Charles as we drove to hospital, and timed the pains the way the doctor had told me to. In the hospital bed I lay there beaming, and made friends immediately with the Chinese girl who was physician in charge. Late at night it stopped a little, and they gave me a pill and I slept. It would be all over by the next night, I thought. But it wasn't.

One does forget. I can remember the facts, but not the feeling. It was pretty much the same every day, and it went on every day for five days, until Friday, and I couldn't get rid of that baby. I walked so long that I had a blister from the bedroom slippers. My ankle hurt, but I didn't pay any attention to details like that. Between attacks I began to be frightened. Everyone was very bright and hopeful, but I began to imagine they were holding out on me. And then, too, I felt silly. People would call on me and ask what the trouble was, and go home, and then I would try again. It wasn't any use.

Thursday night Gordon King said, “Do you remember a suggestion someone once made about you?”

“Caesarean, you mean?”

He nodded. He wasn't deadpan any more; he looked kind. “In America they would have operated already,” he said, “but though I'm a surgeon I hate to operate unnecessarily. Now I think it's necessary. Well?”

“Why,” I said, “of course.”

We had to get Charles's consent first. When he had gone I lay back and thought about the doctor. A few days before he had suddenly amazed me by saying, “How much of this do you want to feel, before we help you?”

I stared at him and said, “Did you think I was doing all this to write a book about it?”

“Why, yes,” he said. “Isn't that the idea?” And tonight he had said as he was going out, “Now you will know all about both methods.”

People are really very odd. He looked as pleased as if he were making me an invaluable gift, and I suppose from the scientific point of view he was.

I thoroughly enjoyed the operation. It was my ideal of an experience: something happening to you that you can watch without feeling it. They gave me a spinal whatever-it-is, and I watched the surgeon's hands at work, in the reflecting metal on the light overhead. Just once something made me sick, and they gave me morphine and I slept for a minute or two. But for the rest of the time there I was, a living head and brain, and no communication with anything below the neck. I was elated and excited and yet calm.

All of a sudden there was an outraged, indignant little yowl like that of a Siamese cat, only several times, and Gordon and Tony together said, “It's a girl!”

Everybody turned to me, lying strapped and paralyzed, and said again, “It's a girl!”

I said, “Oh?” politely, because they seemed so excited about it, but I was wondering if I quite liked that. Then I asked the other one of the two inevitable questions: “Is she all right?”

“All right. All right.”

The Siamese yelping went on and one of the nurses said, “Nothing wrong with her lungs, anyway.”

Anyway? Anyway? Immediately I was suspicious again. They weren't telling me everything. There must be something wrong. Why wasn't it all finished? I could see that the gloved hands were still working. Was he doing something that would fix it so I couldn't have any more children? It wouldn't be any use asking him; he wouldn't tell. The clock hands went round and round; the baby had been taken out of the room. What was the matter?

“Fibroma,” said Gordon King. “Fairly big one, too. I thought that lump, the last few days, couldn't be twins. Well, you're a lucky girl. We'd have had to have that out within a month anyway, and the child couldn't have survived a normal birth.”

“All right, now?”

“Oh yes. Want to see it?”

They were moving my body, so oddly not mine, so heavy and lifeless, to the trolley. I was thinking about something else.

“I'll have a boy next time,” I announced, comforting myself, and the nurse in charge rolled up her eyes and closed them.

I wasn't used to new babies, but she did look awfully small to me. The human eye can't be smaller than a certain size, evidently, so her eyes were enormous in her face, stretching out on each side to the temple. She looked like Charles, but not very bright. Then I had a chill and she disappeared.

He came in late that afternoon; I thought it was the same time of day, but it wasn't. He'd been busy with the general, but Tony found him and let him know.