The Rebellion of Yale Marratt (58 page)

 

 

When he got back to Chengkung, Stower had returned from Calcutta. He
was jubilant. "It's all set, Yale! I've even made arrangements to fly
back to Calcutta with Tay Yang. They are delighted. Especially with the
five-thousand-rupee a year present! Are you sure you have the money?"

 

 

Yale wondered what Stower would think if he knew that the small canvas
bag that Yale was using for a foot rest contained a million rupees.
He smiled and told Stower that the difficult problem was not the money,
but how to convince Tay Yang that she couldn't stay with them any longer.

 

 

It took several nights to do it . . . to explain to Tay Yang that she
was going to live in a very nice home with very nice people . . . far
away across the mountains. She smiled at them, her eyes big and black
in her creamy round face, and agreed enthusiastically. "Go far. Long
way. 'Ale come. Captain come. Nice."

 

 

When they finally made her understand that she would not see Yale and
Captain Stower for a long time -- neither of them had the heart to say
never -- she became very quiet. Try as they would, neither Yale nor
Stower could get another word out of her the remainder of the day except
a resigned, "Tay Yang go far away. Aw-right. Okay."

 

 

Stower received his orders to return to the States before Yale. Within
three weeks after the end of the war the base was being rapidly
de-activated. Yale knew that very soon he would be re-assigned back to
India. They agreed that when Stower left, he would take Tay Yang with
him to Calcutta. Stower made arrangements with one of his pilot friends
to smuggle her aboard a C-47 to Dum Dum airport in Calcutta. Neither he
nor Yale had revealed to anyone that their "houseboy" was a girl.

 

 

The day before Stower's orders directed him to leave for Calcutta,
Yale decided that they should give Tay Yang a going-away party. He
and Stower took her into Kunming, and as she followed them bewildered
from shop to shop, they bought her dresses, underclothes, stockings,
and shoes; trying them on her for size, while she touched the materials,
staring at them in awe, unable to believe they were for her. Yale bought
her a watch, a pearl necklace, and a bracelet. Then he insisted on
returning to some of the clothing shops they had already visited while
he purchased additional dresses and stockings, to the delight of the
Chinese shopkeepers. Stowers finally protested that he would be unable
to lug all the stuff to Calcutta.

 

 

"When I arrive with all this junk they'll think Tay Yang is wealthy,"
Stower warned him. "This Elton family where she'll live hasn't much
money."

 

 

That night they opened boxes of K rations. By candle-light in their
room they had a farewell party. They helped Tay Yang dress in her new
clothes. When Yale fastened the pearls around her neck she suddenly
started to cry. They watched her, the candlelight shadows dancing on her
face, a pink ribbon tied through her short black hair, and realized for
the first time that Tay Yang was a very pretty young woman. At a loss
for words, they didn't know how to console her. Yale told her that he
would write to her. They wrote out their addresses and told her that
she could write to them. All the time they talked Tay Yang just looked
at them and said nothing, while tears streamed down her cheeks. They
couldn't even be sure she understood them.

 

 

Both Stower and Yale agreed that they felt like heels. But there was
nothing they could do. Again Yale wondered whether he and Stower had the
right coolly to decide Tay Yang's future. He gave Stower fifty thousand
rupees and told him that while he appreciated what the English family
was doing he would prefer that Stower set up a simple trustee arrangement
with some bank in Calcutta so that they would be sure that Tay Yang was
supported until she married. Whatever was left could be a dowry.

 

 

When Stower wondered aloud whether she would meet any Chinese boys in
India, Yale knew that he was really wondering whether they were doing the
right thing in taking Tay Yang out of China. Would it be simple kindness
in the long run to take her into Kunming, give her some money and say
good-bye? Where should love for another individual cease? At what point
did responsibility for your brother become a yoke around his neck?

 

 

Yale was even more doubtful when he took Tay Yang to the plane the
next morning. She was dressed like a boy again in her blue denim coat
and pants. Yale kissed her cheek. Several Chinese soldiers watched with
interest as they boosted her through the cargo door. Stower stood beside
her in the plane. She spoke rapidly in Chinese, and waved good-bye
to Yale. One of the Chinese soldiers looked at Yale curiously, and
laughed. Yale asked him what she had said.

 

 

"She?" the soldier asked bewildered. "Not boy? Girl?" Then his face
broke into a grin. What he had heard finally made sense. "Oh. She say:
'Too bad you no marry her. Make fine wife.'"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PART THREE

 

 

Then if any device could be found how a state or an army could be made
up only of lovers and beloved, they could not possibly find a better
way oj living, since they would abstain from all ugly things, and be
ambitious in beautiful things toward each other; and in battle side by
side, such troops although few would conquer pretty well all the world.
-- PLATO
Symposium

 

 

 

 

1

 

 

The shore route between Boston and Midhaven is about thirty miles shorter
than the highway through Hartford, but in January it is not always the
best way. One portion twists and turns through the Connecticut Hills
as it follows the original dirt road trails of the early 1800's. After
snowstorms it gets plowed carelessly.

 

 

When Yale left Boston he was so lost in thought that he was almost
in Providence before he realized that he had planned to come back
through Hartford. Now, he knew that he should have kept his mind on his
driving. It had been snowing since early morning. The half hour radio
forecasts warned of continuing snow, and perhaps the worst blizzard in
ten years.

 

 

He grabbed the wheel a little tighter. The snow whipped across his
windshield in such a fury that at times the road was almost completely
obscured. The glare of lights from infrequent cars moving in the other
direction created a momentary blindness that forced him several times
to bring his Ford convertible almost to a stop.

 

 

When he had started for Boston early that morning he had ignored the storm
warnings. Four months of hanging around after his discharge, trying to
make up his mind what he wanted to do, had left him jittery and nervous.

 

 

It had been impossible to tell Liz and Pat that he was married. Not that
they could have any real objection to Anne. But how could he tell them
that he had no idea where his wife was. Pat would have looked on it as
typically Yale. To get himself married -- to be in love with a girl who
obviously didn't care about him. If Pat had known about the Hindu ceremony
he would have been amazed at such romanticism. Yale could imagine what
he would have said once he recovered from the shock. Something like:
"Forget it, Yale. It was a wartime romance. There were thousands of
them. You shacked up for a while with a dame. Lots of us did the same
thing in 1917. You huddled in each other's warmth like frightened
animals. Then the war was over and the need vanished."

 

 

Perhaps that was the truth. If it were, he didn't need Pat's counsel,
whatever it might be. He could well imagine Pat's utter surprise and
Liz's shock that he would consider a Hindu marriage inviolable. They
would have simply considered it an insane thing to have done. Something
he should forget as rapidly as possible . . . as Anne Wilson had obviously
forgotten. An interlude, which in a few years would seem completely unreal
to him; something one dreamed in the early morning hours vacillating
between sleep and wakefulness.

 

 

And yet it wasn't the marriage ceremony that bound him to Anne. It had
been the complete giving of himself, for the second time in his life,
to a woman. It was as if, in the giving of his love and the acceptance
of the love of both Cynthia and Anne, he had lost a part of himself,
irretrievably. In a true love union of a man and woman there was the
usurping of each other's personality. What was a man, anyway, but the
sum of his experiences? What more significant experience could man have
than the act of love?

 

 

Or was that an intellectualized concept . . . strictly his own? Had he
expected from Anne's love, as he had from Cynthia's, an emotional sharing
of personality beyond her wish or desire to accept? Was the simple act of
rutting the deepest relationship a man or woman could have? Didn't the
individual ego rebel at a merging of personality? Most people in love
maintained a distance. Most marriages were but a sharing of thousands
of superficial relationships.

 

 

Yale had pondered these questions every day since he had come home.
He compared himself to Swann in Proust's novel. He wondered if the same
quirk of personality obsessed him. To be forever in love with a woman
who didn't love you. A strange futility. Better to take a mechanistic
view of the man-woman relationship. A view uncluttered by romantic notions.
Something necessary but not essential in the life of a man. A piece of ass,
a fuck, a life urge without reason.

 

 

But then he would remember Anne, and the quiet of an Indian night
punctuated by the distant yelping of jackals. And the gradual penetration
of her body as she undulated her hips toward him, whispering, ". . . I am
you. . . ." The Brahmin chant of merger with God. A geometric progression
of men and women everywhere embracing each other while the ceaseless flow
of life whispered back, ". . . I am you. . . ." Until the sum total of
all lives, all life . . . was the one Nirvana.

 

 

A few days after he had returned to the States Yale started an extensive
search for Anne that had led him nowhere. He hired a detective who four
months later was still assuring him that they would locate her. Twice,
Harrigan had turned up what he called "hot leads." The first was the
Red Cross director who had known Anne in Paris. Yale went to New York
to talk with him.

 

 

"She came to me in August. She said her husband was in China," the Field
Director told him. "She seemed a little distraught, as I remember. Said
she had to go home. She wanted a transfer Stateside because her father
was ill. I didn't question her. I knew from her records that she had no
living family. Her husband was killed in the Pacific, you know. I suspected
that she must have been having a pretty hot affair. A friend in Talibazar
wrote and told me about your Hindu wedding. . . ." The Field Director
smirked unpleasantly, implying that he felt a Hindu marriage ceremony
for two Christians was peculiar to say the least. "Anyway, the simple
solution was not to argue with her. We sent her home. The records show
that she was at a canteen in Philadelphia until last September. After
that she left the Red Cross."

 

 

The Field Director knew nothing else.

 

 

A few weeks later Harrigan located a girl who had worked at the Red Cross
in Philadelphia and remembered Anne. All that she could offer was that
Anne was a strange person. "She kept to herself. Several of us guessed
that she was pregnant. But no one knew for sure. One day she was just
gone. . . ."

 

 

Yale was shocked. Could Anne have been pregnant? If she were, why hadn't
she contacted him? She knew where he lived. He had told her about the
Marratt Corporation. The truth must be that Anne didn't want to find
him. In India she had doubted that he really loved her. Now, she must
be simply giving him the easy way out. Anne had left him because he had
failed her, Yale thought bitterly . . . failed her the same way he had
failed Cynthia.

 

 

The car radio interrupted his thoughts with further predictions
on the intensity of the storm together with warnings to stay off
the highways. Gusts of wind whipped the car. The canvas top flapped
alarmingly against the metal supports. On curves he could feel the tires
slurch. Fifty-five miles to go before he would be back in Midhaven.

 

 

For the next six weeks he would have the house to himself. When Pat had
announced that he and Liz were going to Florida through April, Yale had
tried to conceal his elation. At least he would have time to think and
decide what he was going to do without the constant nagging that had been
going on for the past few weeks. Pat and Liz had left two days ago. Yale
grimaced, remembering the days before they had left. There had been one
long round of squirming to avoid a showdown. Every night Pat had made
Yale's attitude the subject of dinner discussions.

 

 

"I frankly don't know what the hell is the matter with you, Yale.
You act as if you were in the middle of combat. Do you need psychiatric
reorientation? All this crap about the serviceman readjusting leaves
me cold. All you have to do is to dig into some project. Get your teeth
into reality. The war is over. There's money to be made.

 

 

"When you first got home I had high hopes for you. You looked good. Mature.
I hoped that after a couple of weeks of hanging around, you would come
down to the plant. There's a new office waiting for you, boy. Your name is
on the door. The Marratt Corporation is in great shape. We've ridden this
thing out with the biggest contracts in the history of the company.
I predict that the post-war boom will exceed anything yet. . . ."
Pat chomped on his cigar. "You've been home nearly two months and you've
been flopping around like a chicken with its head cut off. I'm pretty
damned disappointed. What's eating you?"