Gift of the Golden Mountain (38 page)

     She made her way around to the road. His car was there. What looked like an old temple bell had been hung near the front door. She pushed it cautiously. One low, hoarse note sounded. She pushed it harder. The sound echoed out, low and clear, until it was absorbed by the fog. She tried the door. It was open.

     "Hayes," she called out from the entry. "Hayes, are you here?"

     It was cold inside the house. The bright flowered covers on the furniture only made it seem colder.

     "Hayes?"

     "Here," she heard.

     "Where?"

     "Here."

     He was standing in the doorway to a bedroom—she could see the rumpled bed behind him—wearing a down jacket, unshaven and weary.

     "Eli told me." It was not what she had meant to say.

     He only looked at her.

     "It's cold in here. Could we build a fire?"

     He looked at the fireplace as if it were a problem too large to solve, but she was already on her knees crumpling newspapers.

     Smoke swirled into the room, stinging their eyes. "The
damper," he said, moving in beside her to open it.

     She coughed. "I'm sorry," she said, "Hayes, I'm so terribly sorry."

     He nodded.

They walked on the beach. She held on to his arm, and told him about Eli's call, and asked if he could talk to her about Andy and he said no, no he couldn't, but that he wanted her to talk.

     "What shall I talk about?" she asked. "What is it you want to hear?"

     "Stories," he told her, "the sound of your voice . . . tell me some of your family secrets."

     It was as if she had it all down on tape somewhere deep inside and she had been waiting for someone to hit the play button. She could even listen to herself—to her own voice, low and mesmerizing:

     "You know about my father," she began, as they settled in front of the fireplace with half a bottle of Teacher's Scotch between them, "But let me tell you about my grandfather. You may not believe it, it is such a fantastical story. He was born in China— his mother was Chinese, his father British. His name was Wing Soong and he worked as a gardener on the Malibu Ranch, which Kit's parents owned. My grandmother lived there too—she and Kit's mother were sisters. So, my father was the illegitimate son of a Chinese gardener and a spinster lady. Kit and he were born within weeks of each other, so they were reared as twins, and he was brought up as one of the Reade children. It suited the sisters perfectly, you see. Because Kit's mother wasn't very interested in being a mother and Lena, my grandmother, was. She raised all of the Reade children."

     She paused, poured several fingers of the amber liquid into each of their glasses and settled back into the cushions she had
placed in front of the fireplace.

     "But it's my grandfather I wanted to tell you about, because he was extraordinary—and Kit feels it is still too dangerous for anyone to know, so I really am telling you a family secret."

     He had been looking away and she wasn't sure he was listening so she touched his arm. He turned, and she continued. "My grandfather, Wing Soong, was a political activist—a follower of Sun Yat-sen. Grandfather had been organizing in southern California, actually training young Chinese for military roles, and when the revolution began—my father was a boy, about ten I think— my grandfather returned to China with a contingent of soldiers trained in southern California.

     "You probably know your modem Chinese history better than I do—anyway, Grandfather was part of that group that eventually followed Mao Tse-tung and became the Chinese Communists. The story goes that my grandfather would have liked to find some middle ground, but there was none—Chiang Kai-shek represented everything he abhorred. So Grandfather made the Long March, and eventually he became quite a high functionary. He was close to Chou En-lai.

     "After he left California, my grandmother saw him several times—always in secret. Once in Hawaii, again in Macao, and, the last time, in Shanghai in 1929, just before Chiang started exterminating Communists. I've read my grandparents' letters—they are in the family archive." She stopped, took a small, precise sip of scotch, and smiled. "If there is such a thing as a 'great' love, they had it. My father was with them in Shanghai—he was about twenty-five and already had a reputation as a radical. Wing Soong had spent a lot of time with Dad and Kit when they were young and both of them adored him. Dad was in his thirties before he learned that Wing Soong was his father. They hadn't told him because they wanted to protect him—Grandmother had witnessed the Communist witch hunts after World War One, and she was afraid for Dad. It's ironic, I suppose—the committee that investigated
Daddy never did find out that his father was a top-ranking Chinese Communist, but they hounded him to death anyway. Am I talking too much?"

     "No," Hayes said, "but you are making this up, aren't you?"

     "I swear I'm not," she said, "truly."

     He reached for her hand, she held tight to his and went on: "My father was in the China-Burma theater during the war, as a correspondent, working with General Stilwell's staff. With Stilwell's help, he managed finally to get into the far north of China—"

     "Shensi Province," Hayes said.

     "Right, Shensi near Yenan, where the Communists were encamped, to interview Mao and Chou, but mostly to see his father, to tell him . . ."

     "That he knew?" Hayes asked.

     "Yes, and that he was terrifically pleased and honored. The way Daddy described it to me, a group of war correspondents was finally allowed to go to Shensi, General Stilwell arranged it with the help of a couple of young U.S. foreign service officers who thought we should at least be willing to talk to the Chinese Communists. There were about ten of them, in all, in the group, and they had to fly over the Hump—the Himalayas. By the time he got there he was half frozen and almost deaf from the noise, so he kind of stumbled onto the tarmac. That was when he saw this very tall, very straight figure standing off to one side. The wind made his eyes water, he could hardly see but he said he knew. He just knew. So he used the figure as a guidepost, and headed straight for it, and when he got there it was Wing Soong. 'Just the same except in an old man's body,' Daddy said, with white hair instead of the black he remembered.

     "My Dad said, 'Father.'"

     "Wing Soong said, 'Son.'"

     "They stood together on the tarmac for a long, long time, with their arms around each other, and suddenly my father was no longer cold, and he could hear perfectly and see clearly."

     Hayes was looking at her.

     "I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't mean to cry." She smeared the tears that were running down her face with the back of her hand. He took her wet hand, held it between both of his, then put his arm around her and pulled her to him. "I know you loved him," she whispered, her face pressed into his sweater so that she could feel his heart beating.

     After a while Hayes said, "Go on . . . Wing Soong. What happened to him?"

     "He died at a ripe old age—nearly ninety, I think, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. It was in the papers.
The New York Times
even ran a photo of him, with Chou and Mao in the 1930s. He was well over six feet tall, and he towered over them— though Chou was tall, too. The
Times
obituary mentioned nothing of Grandfather's California years, it only said that he was father of Tsiao Jie, a top party functionary. She is out of favor and is supposed to have been banished to the countryside near the Manchurian border."

     "Did you know about him?"

     "Her. She's my aunt. Grandfather's pet name for her was 'China Rose.' Her mother's name was Tsiao Min, she was a peasant girl who was on the Long March, and they were living in a cave when the baby was born, that would have been about 1935. Something went wrong—the baby was crippled, and the mother died not long after. Wing Soong raised the little girl, and then she took care of him in his old age. I don't know why she took her mother's name because she and her father were devoted to each other."

     "Strange," Hayes said in a weary voice. "Neither of his children, or his grandchild, took his name."

     May thought about it. "I suppose he thought it would be safer for her—sadly, it didn't seem to help her in the current troubles. Daddy met Rose when she was eleven, right after the war. She would be about thirty-five now. He said she was quite small and very plain, except for the eyes—which he described to me as 'great
and dark and filled with sweetness.' He said she made it possible for him to leave, that he would have been heartsick going away from his father had not Rose been there to help them both. He always hoped to go back and spend time with her. And maybe he thought I would go, too. He did insist that my birth certificate carry the name Wing Mei-jin. He really wanted to believe that one day China and this country would come to some kind of a rapprochement."

     Night had closed in, surrounding them; the only light in the room was from the fireplace, and it was burning low. Hayes rose, slowly, made his way to the kitchen, and returned with a kerosene lamp. The bottle of scotch was empty.

     "Should I get another?" he asked.

     "This one didn't seem to help" she told him, so he threw another log on the fire and sat staring into the flames.

     "Tell me about your mother," he said.

     "My mother," she repeated, and sighed. "What I feel is that I have to find her, look at her face to face, confront her. I suppose you're thinking: 'Ah, she wants her mother to put her arms around her so she will not feel cold, so she can hear clearly and see clearly and feel wonderful.' I know it isn't going to be like that. That's not what I want. Sometimes I think I want to tell her off, to let all the anger I've felt all these years out, get rid of the bitterness. Like lancing a boil, I suppose. Wing Soong stayed with his son when he was young, and helped him and loved him, and when he left it was for a great cause. My grandmother understood that, and so did my father, who after all followed in his father's footsteps. But my mother simply left, walked away from a newborn baby, and all I can tell you is that I have to ask her why. To her face. And she has to look at me, I'm going to make her do that."

     When she didn't speak for a time, Hayes prompted her with a single word: "How?"

     She sighed. "Kit has been doing some digging for me. I think she must have a direct line into the CIA or else she has a connection with the Hong Kong tongs. She found out about China Rose
being sent to the far north when no information was coming out of China. I do know that it was through Rose that Kit learned the name of the village where my mother was working as a doctor. Kit thinks that Grandfather may have seen my mother before he died, and she knows for sure that Rose visited her and, at least before these current troubles, kept touch with her. It's still hard for me to think about my mother as a living person. In a way, I've always thought of her as if she were dead."

     The word reverberated through the room: It seemed to echo, to move up into the high ceilings, and fly back at them . . . dead dead dead dead.

     She chose her words carefully: "Can't you please talk to me now, can't you find some words to say about him?"

     He shifted, took an envelope out of the pocket of his shirt, and handed it to her. "This came on Monday."

     She looked at the return address: Cpl. A. L. Diehl. She opened the letter, held it close to the lamp, and began to read in the flickering light. Andy wrote in a square, boyish scrawl:

Hey, Bro,

     Prepare yourself for a miracle. A letter from the Brat. It may take awhile for me to finish it—in between mortar rounds and fire fights and all the shit that goes on out here—but I've got a lot to say, so let's get started.

     I'm not going to bore you with the gory details of life in the trenches, putting up with a bunch of jerks from Kokomo, Indiana, and places like that. Actually, the guy from Kokomo isn't a jerk, but he's about the only one who isn't. Where do they get these crackers? Forget I asked, I'll only get a lecture from you on how the U.S. Army scoops up all the poor dumb kids who couldn't figure out how to go to college or get braces on their teeth or fake heroin
addiction to stay out of this shit-kicked war, and sends them over here to catch all the fucking fire the Cong are throwing in this direction.

     Time out. Chow. At least that's what they said it was, but I won't tell you what it looked like to me. God, I keep thinking of Miyo's teriyaki. I can almost smell it.

     I've been thinking a lot about all of that—I mean all of us, back home. What it was like. Mom and Pop and you and me at home. About all the shit all of you put up with, with me. My being such a screw-up, I mean. I'm not going soft in the center, or make any big apologies, all I really want to say is thanks. "That's okay Andy boy," you are supposed to say now, "you were worth it." Then you laugh a har-har laugh. Got it? Just kidding.