The Red Chamber (16 page)

“Tell me about your mother,” she says. “I’ve never heard anything about her.”

“She died more than seven years ago. Sometimes, I’m afraid I am starting to forget what she looked like. I remember how soft and dry her hands were, without the tiniest trace of oil or sweat on them. They smelled of jasmine. When I was upset, all I wanted to do was hold her hands, and then I would feel better.”

She laughs to hide the tears that come to her eyes. “Yes, that was how it was with my mother. When I was little and couldn’t fall asleep, she would make up stories, about my favorite toys, or people we knew, like the tofu seller, or a spirit who lived in the well …”

“Just like you made up a story about the jade.”

“Her stories were far better. She was usually so gentle and patient, but she had a hot temper, too. There was a bully on our street who terrorized all the smaller children. Once, she caught him dangling me by the ankles over the canal. She was so livid that she dragged him by the ear all the way back to his house. She told his parents that if they didn’t beat him, she would.”

She laughs, but the memory makes it even harder for her to keep back her tears. He pulls his arm out from under the quilt, grimacing a little at the movement, and takes her hand.

“You miss her terribly,” he says.

She nods, stifling a sob. “You must miss your mother, too.”

“Mine died much longer ago. Besides, she was different after my brother died.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s hard to explain. She seemed to stop caring about anything. She stopped running the household, or paying much attention to Tanchun or Huan or me. It was as if she had no interest in living anymore.”

“My parents had a son, four years younger than me, but he died when he was three years old. After he died, it was the same way with my mother, but she came to herself after a year or two.”

“It was different with Zhu. Both my parents thought he was absolutely perfect. They worshipped him. He was hardworking, and respectful, and
well-mannered, and he passed the Exams.” She thinks she can hear the faintest note of derision in his voice. Then he falls silent, his eyes slipping away from hers.

“Didn’t you love him, then?” Having lost her younger brother, she was always jealous of people with brothers and sisters, and assumed that siblings loved and cherished each other. At Rongguo she has seen that it is far otherwise.

“Of course I loved him.” He raises his eyes to hers again. “But when he died, I was just reaching the age when I was starting to go out in society more, and I saw that he wasn’t exactly how he presented himself to our parents. He was intelligent, and it was true that he studied hard. Because he had passed the Exams, my parents never paid any attention to what he did outside the house. Actually, he gambled and drank, and kept a mistress. Not that those things are so terrible, but it was important to him to maintain his perfect image before our parents.

“Lian knew. His friend Feng Ziying’s older brother was one of Zhu’s cronies. He never told, either. After Zhu died, Lian scraped together some money to pay off his gambling debts and give his mistress something.”

She is shocked, recalling the reverent tone in which Zhu’s name is always mentioned. “This household is filled with secrets.”

“I hate it,” he says, turning his face away from her towards the wall. She has never heard him speak so bitterly. “You know, that’s why I don’t mind Huan. He hates me, but at least he makes no pretense about it. Everyone else …”

He is silent for a long time. Daiyu says, “Do you remember my mother at all from when you were a little boy?”

He turns back to look at her. “How could I? I’m only a few years older than you. I was probably barely two when she went south with Uncle Lin. I remember our great-aunt the Imperial Concubine, though. The last time she came to visit before she died I must have been around ten.”

“What was she like?”

“I remember we were up at dawn waiting for her, and then it turned out that she wasn’t supposed to come till evening, only no one had bothered to tell us. Then, just as the sun was setting, she arrived with an army of eunuchs. We weren’t allowed to be alone with her for a minute. Even when she was supposed to be allowed an ‘informal chat’ with Granny, there were three or four eunuchs in the room, and she didn’t dare speak freely in front of them.

“I had the impression that she was trying not to cry. She was only allowed to stay a few hours. And then when she was being carried off in
her golden palanquin, I was standing on my tiptoes to get a last glimpse of her. There were two tracks of tears, one beneath each eye, through the powder on her face. She didn’t seem to dare to wipe them for fear of drawing attention to them …”

“Why was she so unhappy at the Palace?”

“I can only guess—but imagine how restricted and confined her life must have been, a hundred times worse than it is for you girls here. And then to be kept away from everyone she trusted and cared about—”

Pearl comes in. “Master Baoyu, it’s time for your medicine.” She does not attempt to disguise her displeasure at how long Daiyu has stayed. “You really must rest now. Remember the doctor told you not to overtire yourself.”

Daiyu scrambles off the
kang
. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention to the time.”

“Nonsense. It did me good to have you talk to me,” Baoyu says.

Daiyu slips out of the room, chilled by Baoyu’s account of the Imperial Concubine. Entering the Palace and being elevated was the highest honor a woman could aspire to. She had never dreamed that it might offer so little happiness. As she turns onto the path along the lake, she sees Jia Huan skipping stones from the bank.

He turns at the sound of her steps.

“What are you doing here?” she says. “I thought you weren’t allowed in here anymore.”

“I snuck in,” he says, with his queer mixture of sulkiness and vulnerability. He shies a stone at the water. Instead of skipping, it sinks into the dark water with a plop. “What are you doing on this side of the lake? Visiting Baoyu, I suppose.”

She catches the note of malice in his voice. “You should be happy. Your father nearly beat Baoyu to a pulp.”

“What makes you think it had anything to do with me?”

“What did you tell him about Silver?”

Huan’s eyes shift away from hers.

“And what you told your father wasn’t even true,” she adds.

“Who knows what really happened? Silver wouldn’t say anything. So I guessed,” he admits sullenly.

“Why do you want to get him in trouble anyway? He hasn’t done you any wrong—”

“What do you mean?” Huan bursts out. “You see the way that everyone treats me, and the way they treat him—”

“That isn’t his fault.”

“Isn’t it? When he’s always showing off, and trying to make me look bad—”

“That isn’t true at all,” she cries. “He protects you and stands up for you even when you injure him! He knew that you dropped that candle on his face on purpose. And still he defended you and insisted it was an accident.”

Huan’s face looks startled. “What do you mean?” He catches himself. “It was an accident.”

“I saw the look on your face. I knew that you did it on purpose.”

He stares at her. “Why didn’t you say anything?” he asks after a moment.

“I don’t know.” She tries to think back to the incident, just a few weeks after her arrival at Rongguo. “I was too flustered. And then I was going to say something, but Baoyu insisted it was an accident. Later, when I said you’d done it on purpose, all he said was not to tell anyone, so you wouldn’t get in trouble.”

Again, he stares at her wordlessly. She can tell how struck he is; maybe he even regrets the way he had slandered Baoyu. She turns away.

“Wait a minute.”

“Yes?”

“Thank you—for not tattling on me.” His face is flushed, and he is biting his lower lip.

“It’s nothing. Baoyu is the one you should thank.”

He looks as if he would like to say more, but she continues down the path towards Lady Jia’s. Her mind is filled with her encounters with the two half brothers, and she wants to talk to Snowgoose. She could tell Baochai, of course, but it would not be as satisfying. Baochai is too diplomatic to ever speak ill of anyone in the household. Baochai has been so kind to her that Daiyu feels guilty that the two of them have not become better friends. That night she had comforted Baochai from her nightmare, she was sure they would become close; but with daylight, Baochai’s old reserve had returned.

No one is in the front room when she arrives at Lady Jia’s apartments. She tiptoes down the hall to Lady Jia’s bedroom and pokes her head through the door curtain.

“Who’s there?” She hears Lady Jia’s voice, sharp and suspicious, from the dimness of the
kang
.

Wishing she could run away, she says, “It’s me, Daiyu.”

“What do you want?”

“I was looking for Snowgoose.” All of a sudden, she feels shy and awkward.
She realizes that since coming to Rongguo this is the first time she has been alone with Granny, without any of the maids around.

“What do you need from her?”

“I—I just wanted to talk to her.”

There is a silence. “Peculiar taste for a young girl, wanting to spend time with a maid, when she has her cousins to play with,” Lady Jia mutters at last.

“I like to spend time with my cousins, too,” Daiyu stammers.

“Well, don’t just stand there. Come massage my legs. I’m aching all over. I was up half the night worrying about Baoyu. I sent Snowgoose to get a tisane, but she must be dawdling somewhere.”

Daiyu advances reluctantly. The few times she has entered the room, she has always hated how dark and stuffy it is. No matter how often the maids scrub and sweep, they can never get rid of the smell of dust and decay that seems to emanate from the old trunks and wardrobes. She kneels on the
kang
beside Granny and tentatively rubs her legs.

“Harder!”

She applies more pressure to the loose flesh of Granny’s calves.

“Now pound them.”

Daiyu chops the edges of her hands against Lady Jia’s shins.

“The thighs, too. Harder!”

She moves up and down Lady Jia’s legs, pounding as hard as she can, certain that she will hurt the old lady. However, the blows seem to please Lady Jia. She shuts her eyes with a sigh. The exertion soon tires Daiyu, and she starts to lose her breath. She forces herself to continue, but her breath catches raggedly in her throat and she coughs so hard that she doubles over, covering her mouth with her hands.

“I didn’t know you were sick,” Lady Jia says disapprovingly.

“I’m not,” Daiyu says, panting. “I usually get a cough in the fall. It will go away in a few weeks. It’s worse this year because I’m not used to the climate here. Should I keep rubbing your legs?”

“No. You can’t do it properly anyway. And I should think that anything would be better than the climate down there, like a swampy jungle—”

“It’s beautiful—lush and green …”

Granny makes a skeptical sound. After a brief silence, she asks, almost grudgingly, “How did Min like it down there?”

“She loved it.” Daiyu peers at Lady Jia’s face, unable to see her expression in the gloom. “You never talk about my mother. What was she like when she was a little girl?”

There is a long pause. At last Lady Jia says, “She was the merriest
child, always chattering and laughing. She was headstrong, like Baoyu, but so sweet and pretty that no one could resist her.”

Daiyu listens eagerly, but then the incongruity strikes her: If Granny had been so fond of her mother, why hadn’t her mother remained close to her family?

“She was so stubborn,” Lady Jia continues. “Once she threw a tantrum because she wanted to wear the same red shoes every day. How she kicked and screamed!” There is another pause. “You remind me of her.”

“I’m glad. How do you mean?”

Instead of answering, Lady Jia says, “What did Min like about the south?”

“She loved the weather, the scenery. She liked being able to see the places she’d read about in ancient poems. She loved it when my father would take us boating on Tai Lake, because it reminded her of that poem by—”

“How like her!” Granny Jia bursts out. “Always caring more about some old poem, instead of what was right before her eyes. That was the only reason she wanted to marry your father in the first place. Do you think he was the only one who wanted to marry her? She could have married General Xue Ke, the Area Commandant for Chang’an!”

She hears the sarcasm in Granny’s voice, but does not understand it. “Xue? Is he related to Baochai?”

“All the powerful families are related to each other. I was so pleased when he sent a matchmaker. She would have married him, but then your father had the nerve to send a matchmaker. He placed third in the whole country in the Triennial Exams; but he had no money, and the Lins were all but dying out. On top of that, he was posted to go south.”

“Then what happened?”

“She wouldn’t have Xue Ke. She wanted to marry Lin Ruhai! Why?” Lady Jia answers her own question. “His poems! It was Zheng’s fault. Some of Lin’s poems were enjoying a little vogue. Zheng had copied them onto a fan, and Min had read them.”

“His poems,” Daiyu echoes, glad that the darkness hides her smile. So her parents, without meeting, had recognized each other through the medium of poetry. She had always known that what was between her father and mother was something sweeter and more intimate than the sense of duty and shared interests that seemed to unite other married couples.

“I swore that if she disobeyed me and married Lin, I would never
speak to her again.” Granny’s words strike Daiyu like stones. “I kept my word. I didn’t go to the wedding feast. And I never wrote a word to her in twenty years.

“Oh, I knew that she wrote to her father when he was alive. That was how I knew she had you, and a little boy, who died. But until she wrote Zheng, to tell him that she was dying, I never wrote a word to her. Then I wrote to tell her to send you up here, so I could see you.”

Daiyu suddenly feels that she is in the presence of an enemy, this woman who forced her mother to choose between marrying the man she loved and her own family. She remembers what her mother had said before she died. Had she come to regret her choice, the long estrangement? She pictures her mother as a young woman, in silks like the ones Daiyu now wears, with her phoenix tiara on her sleek hair. That young woman had never swept a floor, never washed a dish. How could being with Daiyu’s father have made up for the life of ease she had lost? Then, with a desperate effort, her mind leaps back beyond her mother’s illness to recall the unshadowed period before: Her mother holding on to the side of a punt as the wind whipped her hair out of its knot, laughing as Daiyu’s father boosted her to reach a high-hanging peach. Even if she had felt a twinge of regret at the end, Daiyu cannot believe that she wasn’t happy for all those years.