The Eternal Wonder (29 page)

“It doesn’t seem to me that I can expand his basic ideas any further than he has already done. I think he has made his point. I am glad to have it, however, and I’ll read it again and try to figure some way in which it could be useful in publication. I think it should be published if possible because it is a beautiful piece of work and it represents a great deal of my father’s time and study. Also, as you know, I agree so completely with his theories regarding art and science.”

“And I too, as you also know.” Donald Sharpe rose and placed the manuscript in the center of the large green blotter on the desk under the window, where Rann had moved it so that he could look out when he glanced up from his work. It was among the few changes Rann had made in the apartment since the death of his grandfather.

He enjoyed the visit from his mother and Donald Sharpe. Donald Sharpe returned to Ohio after one week but before he left Rann arranged a dinner party so that his mother could meet George Pearce and Margie and so they could both meet Rita Benson. They were impressed with Rita and George, as everyone was, but both appreciated Margie’s down-to-earth approach to Rann and his career. After Donald Sharpe left, Rann and his mother had luncheon with George and Margie, then had dinner and went to the theatre with Rita.

“I like your friends, Rann,” his mother said to him. They were in the drawing room, where Sung had served them a late drink when they arrived home after the theatre.

Rann smiled at her. “Even Rita Benson, Mother?”

His mother sensed his teasing. “Yes, perhaps particularly Mrs. Benson, after Margie, of course. She is not at all the way the newspapers make her out to be.”

“People are rarely what newspapers make them out to be. I’m glad that you approve of my friends, Mother.” Rann spoke the truth. He knew he would continue as he was even if she disapproved, but it was good to have her approval.

“THERE IS NOTHING MORE
I
can do for you,” his mother said.

Her eyes were soft and brown, her smile was wistful. She was still a pretty woman.

“Had you planned to do something for me, Mother?”

He made his voice playful, although he perfectly understood what she meant. Obviously, he knew after a few days that she had come with the vague idea that he might want her to keep house for him. She had not said so, nor had he said he did not, but Sung had made it clear by perfect service, always silent, that he needed no help in the keeping of the house and the tending of its young master, the grandson of the old man who had saved him from the unknown terrors of the American immigration officers. The house for years had been his island of safety. He knew little more of America than if he had stayed in his native village outside Nanking, China. It did not occur to him to seek other Chinese since those outside in this foreign island spoke their own Cantonese dialect, which he did not understand any more than they could understand him. He had never trusted anyone in America except his old master. Especially he did not trust women, not since he had been cheated by his own sister.

Long ago, Sung had bought with his savings a small business in China, a wayside tea shop, and he had put his own older sister in charge while he continued his work as a waiter in a hotel in Shanghai. She told him every month that there were no profits. Then through a neighbor he heard that there were profits but she used them for her husband, an idle opium smoker, and their children. He said nothing to her, since she was his elder, but he decided at that time to leave his country forever and go to America, where he had no relatives. No one had told him about immigration laws. What would have happened to him if he had not found a haven in this house, he could not imagine. But here he was, with a young master to serve forever. He was perfectly courteous to the mother but by his very perfection he conveyed to her exactly what he intended, which was that there was no need for her—indeed, no place for her—in this house.

“No,” she was saying, “I hadn’t planned my life at all, Rann, until you returned home from Korea. I didn’t know how it might change you.”

“It was an interruption,” he said, reflecting. “It did not change me. Only people can change me, I think, and that takes time. There was no time for anyone—foolish routines, and the official Americans were—”

He shrugged and pushed away the distasteful memory in silence.

“So, what next for you, Rann?” his mother asked.

Rann put down his coffee cup. “I shall sort myself out,” he said.

“Shall you go back to college?”

“I can’t see any reason for it. I know where to look for the knowledge I need.”

“In books?”

“Everywhere.”

“Then I’ll be going home, I think, Rann.”

“Only when you like, Mother.”

SHE LINGERED A FEW DAYS LONGER
and he devoted himself to her. She was a dear person but it was true he no longer needed her. Nevertheless, he was not impatient. He took her to museums and theatres and to a symphony concert. These were pleasant hours but noncommunicative. When they came home again, Sung met them at the door and served them their nightcap drink in the library or drawing room. Once, when they were alone, she tried to talk about Lady Mary.

“Is there anything you want to tell me about Lady Mary?”

“Oh—no, that’s all over.”

“With no regrets?”

“No regrets on either side, Mother.”

“An experience for you,” she suggested.

“Yes—I learned something about myself, at least.”

“No more?”

“No more.”

It was impossible, indeed unnecessary, to explain to her. He needed hours alone, hours and days, weeks and months, in which to begin again his work.

She rose. “I think I’ll go home tomorrow, darling.”

He got to his feet and, putting his arms gently about her, he kissed her cheek. No, he would not tell her any more about Stephanie, either. There was perhaps nothing more to tell. Whatever might be he wanted to keep to himself, to live it before he spoke of it.

“As you wish, Mother. But you’ll come whenever you like?”

“Next time you come to me, darling.”

“As you wish, Mother,” he said again.

The distance between them was composed of time. She belonged to his past and even to his present but his future was as yet his own.

THERE WAS NO NEED
TO
hurry that future—yet the length of his own youth pressed upon him. Whatever he was to do next he wanted to begin now. But how to begin and on what? Sung served him with a silent devotion that provided an environment of ordered peace in his home. His social life had worked into a routine requiring three evenings a week divided between George Pearce, Margie, and Rita Benson. He worked with the scriptwriters to write the role required into his book, and the script, complete and ready for casting, no longer demanded his time and energy. He thought often of Stephanie. They corresponded, useless letters, filled with trivial information, and he had several times considered going to Paris to see her but each time he decided it best to wait until she came to New York. He could not decide how important she was to be in his life, or if, indeed, she was to be very important. He dreamed, he read the leather-bound volumes in the library his grandfather had accumulated over half a century, he walked the streets, he was occupied but preoccupied, not knowing where or how to begin his next work or even what to begin. His brief military experience faded into nothing, a few memories of Korean countryside, of crowded streets and narrow alleys, of barracks and the isolated American compound where officers and their families lived and that so faithfully reproduced the suburb of any small American city.

He was glad that he had not really been a part of that life in Korea. His book was of the life of the Korean people, and while it dealt with American involvement it portrayed it from the Korean viewpoint. Of any experience he had in that small, sad country, one memory emerged cruelly sharp and balefully clear. It was the face of the North Korean Communist soldier marching a few feet from the border, eternally marching, night and day. There, across an invisible line, was the enemy. And yet even he was not so much the enemy as the unknown. Unknown—that was the word and the meaning, even of life itself. He had no hold upon life. He did not know where to begin. Here upon this crowded American island, he, Rann, had no hold, no grip, no niche, no entrance to life.

Crowds moved wherever he went, across the bridge to Manhattan, in New York, wherever he went, life flowed and eddied, but he was not part of it. The newspapers continued to report all that he did in inaccurate detail, but this no longer perturbed him. He did not even read them anymore, for each article was only more nonsense like the one before it. His book remained in the number-one position on the bestseller list, and perhaps after all that was the only important aspect of it all, and the only thing to be considered. He was glad if people read his book, but the money really meant nothing to him, as he did not need it.

George Pearce and his agent and even Rita were inclined to think in terms of money and this was natural to them, he supposed, but in a way this separated him even from them, his closest friends. Only with Margie did he have a feeling that he was always a person and never an object, and they were together often for luncheon or dinner—but even she played a role of minor importance in his real life, his inner life, that part of himself that he had never shared with another person. His friends urged him to redecorate his apartment more to his own taste, but it remained as his grandfather had left it. He took little interest in such things. He could have been lonely except that he was never lonely, since he had always been alone.

Perhaps when Stephanie came—and suddenly one winter’s day, she was there. Snow fell thickly that day upon the deserted streets. He sat looking at it from the tall window of the library, watching it festoon roof lines and telegraph wires and doorways, fascinated by its beauty as he could always be fascinated by beauty. The telephone rang on the desk before him, his grandfather’s leather-covered desk here in his grandfather’s library. He took up the receiver.

“Yes?”

“Yes,” Stephanie’s voice replied. “Yes, it is I.”

“Paris?”

“Not Paris. Here—in New York.”

“You didn’t tell me you were coming now. I had a letter from you only yesterday. I was planning to write to you today. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I am telling you, am I not?”

“But such a surprise!”

“I am always surprising, is it not so?”

“Then where are you?”

“Fifth Avenue, between Fifty-Sixth and Fifty-Seventh, where my father’s new shop is located.”

“When did you come?”

“Last night, too late to call. It was a bad flight. There were very rough winds tossing us up and down. It was terrible! I could have been frightened if I had allowed myself to be. But the servants came one week ahead of us, and all was ready for us. We fell asleep. Now my father is already inspecting the shop. I have finished breakfast. Will you come here?”

“Of course. I may be delayed by this snowstorm. But I will leave at once.”

“Is it far?”

“Depends—the traffic will be slow.”

“Are you not walking?”

“I may have to walk.”

“Then I accustom myself here, waiting.”

“And I will hurry.”

“Only being careful meanwhile.”

He laughed. Her English was so perfect, each word perfectly articulated and yet so charmingly imperfect. The idiom was a mixture of Chinese and French expressed in English.

“Why are you now laughing?” she demanded.

“Because now I am happy!”

“You are not happy before?”

“I realize I was not, just as now I realize I am.”

“How are you not coming immediately, then?”

“But I am—I am! I leave this instant, not another word!”

He laughed, again, put the receiver in its cradle, dashed to his rooms to get into proper clothes—he’d been lazy when he woke to see the snow flying across the windows and after showering and shaving he had put on one of his grandfather’s luxurious brocaded satin dressing gowns, a wine red with a gold silk lining. Shaving! He had been growing a young mustache, but would she like it? It made him look older and that was an advantage. Sung heard him scurrying about and knocked on the door and came in.

“Excusing me, sir, it is too bad snowing. You going somewhere?”

“A friend from Paris.”

He was knotting his tie—a blue suit, a striped tie of wine and blue, then suddenly he remembered.

“By the way, she’s half-Chinese!”

“She? Which half, sir?” Sung smiled a small prim smile, suitable to his small size. “Father Chinese is good, sir. Never mind Mother.”

Rann laughed. “Always a Chinese!”

“Mother dead?” Sung asked hopefully.

“Damned if I know,” Rann said, staring at himself in the glass.

Sung was taking an overcoat out of a closet. “Please, you wear this, sir. Inside is very warm fur.”

“I don’t think I shall be very cold but I’ll take it along anyway.”

“If no taxi,” Sung said, concerned.

“I’ll walk!” he retorted.

Rann found a taxi nevertheless, covered with snow but cruising along slowly and he leaped into it.

“Fifth Avenue—between Fifty-Sixth and Fifty-Seventh. I’ll tell you where to stop.”

The ride would be endless but the snow was magnificent, floating down in the clouds of white through which small black figures, bent to the wind, labored their way. He was in haste yet as ever he was diverted by all he saw, his restless mind storing every sight, every sound, against an unknown future. This was his mind, a storehouse, a computer programmed to life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day and night. He forgot nothing, useless and useful. Useful! But for what? Never mind the question, never mind the answer. It was enough to be as he was, himself, every instant alive to everyone and everything. Time never crawled, not even now, as the cab lumbered through drifts and lurched over frozen ruts.

Nevertheless, when he reached the house on Fifth Avenue, the great shop, its windows curtained with snow, he made haste to ring the bell on the door of the adjoining house, a red door on which he saw in brass Chinese characters her father’s name. He had learned to write that name with a rabbit’s-hair brush and dense black Chinese ink—all that in Paris, before ever he went to Asia himself. The door opened immediately and he went in on a gust of snow-laden wind. Rann recognized the manservant, a Chinese, and was recognized by him with a wide and welcoming grin.