I cannot return to my bed. When a woman is widowed by death, does passion die? Or does the body live on, clamoring for what is buried in the grave? But Gerald is not dead. He lives in more than memory. He is there, in our house. He comes home at night, he eats and sleeps and wakes to rise again. He looks upon this same moon which shines outside my window now. The awareness of his body sets my blood mad. Desire reaches for him, claims him, for he is not dead but living. Surely, surely he knows. He knows that I stand here by the window, that I look out at the moon, rising above the mists of a spring night. I remember, I remember—
For it was in this house that we first consummated our eternal love. We were not yet married. I write it down. I have never told our heavenly secret, nor has he. I am sure he has not. He says he loves only me, whatever happens, and so he has not told. Say it may have been wrong, but I am glad now for what I chose to do. For Gerald, always too sensitive, was obsessed with a strange terror in those first days when he had barely spoken to me of love. He feared that I might be offended by his Chinese flesh. It is true that sometimes he looks more Chinese than American.
I cried out against him. “Oh darling, how silly you are!”
I was saying “darling” long before he could bring himself to speak the word. When he began to call me by endearing names, it was not easily at any time and in the presence of others, never.
I remember the look in his grave dark eyes. “I can live without your love,” he said, “but I could not live if, having had it, I should lose it. This is why I dare not ask you to marry me.”
It was true. He had not asked me, and he refused to let me say we were engaged.
“I shall always love you,” I cried, impetuous.
“You do not know,” he said. “You cannot be sure. The flesh has a will of its own.”
It was on such a night as this, a moonlight night, that we spoke. The spring was late that year and we had lingered under the birch trees to be alone and away from my mother, and I was cold and he opened his coat and put it about my shoulders and I walked in his shelter.
“It is you who are not sure,” I told him.
And then I pondered how to make him sure.
“If you think I shall not love you for some hidden reason I do not now know,” I told him, “then come to my room tonight. Let us hide nothing from each other. Let us make sure before we marry.”
I felt him quiver. I knew he was shocked and yet moved.
“No,” he said, “I cannot do that.”
It was June before he was willing. He had his degree then from Harvard. My mother came to Commencement and I was singing proud to hear the honors he received. “Summa cum laude—” the words were spoken again and yet again. My mother was warmer than I had ever seen her toward him when he came striding toward us, still in his cap and gown. There was no man there to equal him in beauty. For the moment his reserve was gone. He was triumphant and happy and he caught our hands, my mother’s and mine.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. “Without you, I should have had no family. I’d have been lonely.”
“Congratulations,” my mother said. She pressed his hand in both hers, but I stood tiptoe and kissed his cheek. It was the first time I had kissed him before my mother and he blushed and glanced at her and smiled when she did not reprove me.
We had dinner together that night, the three of us, at some Chinese restaurant in Boston, where he had already ordered our meal, and my mother condescended to taste one strange dish after another. But I ate everything, liking all, and Gerald laughed at me and loved me and I knew it, in spite of his careful reserve.
He came home with us the next day, and by evening we were in the house, the three of us. It was a clear night, I remember, the air cool and sweet as only the air of the mountains can be, and my mother said she was tired, and she went early to bed. Gerald and I sat late on the stone terrace my father had built the summer before he died, and somehow I fell to talking about him, and telling Gerald about him. “I wish he could know about you,” I said.
“What about me?” Gerald asked. He held my hand now, his hand cool and firm, and mine much warmer, always, and clinging to his.
“I wish, I wish my father could know the man who is to be my husband,” I said.
A bold thing I was, but I knew what I wanted and I knew that Gerald loved me. Why he had not asked me to marry him I did not know but there would be time enough to find out, for we were in love.
He sat silent for a time, holding my hand. Then he rose from the bench where we were sitting and he drew me up to him and kissed me as never before had he kissed me.
It was I who broke away from that long and penetrating kiss. “Now we are engaged,” I whispered.
He held me against him. “If only I could be sure—”
“Then let us be sure,” I said.
The night turned suddenly grave. We were both silent. We sat down again and in the deepening darkness he talked to me of Peking and his childhood home there, and for the first time he spoke of his mother. She had not been a beautiful woman, he said. Her face was plain, but she had extraordinary grace of carriage and manner. Her hands were delicate and always fragrant. He remembered their scent when she smoothed his cheeks.
“Chinese women do not kiss their children as western women do,” he said. “They nuzzle them and smell them when they are babies. When I grew out of babyhood she smoothed my cheeks with both her hands. Her palms were soft and sweet.”
“Who was she,” I asked, “and how did she come to marry your father?”
“I think, but I do not know,” he said, “that my father was disappointed in love. The American woman he wanted to marry would not go to China with him, or was forbidden to go by her parents. She was not strong enough to disobey them, I suppose, and so she refused my father. In pride he went to China alone and he lived alone for ten years of his life. And then, you know how the Chinese are—” He caught himself. “No, how can you know how the Chinese are? Well, they think every man and woman must marry for it is what Heaven ordains, and there can be no health in a people unless there is health in the individual man and woman. So Chinese friends besought my father to marry, and his best friend, who is my foster father, my uncle Han Yu-ren, offered him his sister. Thus she became my mother. She was not young. She was, in a way, a widow. The man to whom she had been betrothed as a child, by her parents, died a week before the wedding. Had she been less independent, I suppose she would have followed tradition and never married. She might even have become a nun.”
“She was willing to marry an American?” I asked.
“That is what drew my father to her,” Gerald said. “Most young Chinese women would not have accepted a foreign man. They would have cried out that foreigners are hairy and have a smell and are altogether repulsive in—in—intimacy.” He stumbled over the word.
“Had she seen your father?” I asked. I was fascinated by the Chinese woman who was Gerald’s mother.
“Once,” he said, “when my father visited his friend’s house, she was in the main hall and though she left immediately, she saw him. He did not notice her.”
“Your father is very handsome,” I reminded him. He had once shown me his father’s picture.
“Yes.”
“Were they happy?” I persisted.
He considered the question. “They had a measured happiness. It was impossible to be altogether unhappy with my mother. She was never gay but never sad, and she created order wherever she was.”
“Is order so important?” I cried. For I am not orderly by nature. There is always something more important than putting things in place.
“There is no dignity to life except with order,” Gerald said.
We talked thus slowly and thoughtfully, our hands clasped. The moon was high and the mountains were clear against the sky. And while our minds ranged across the seas, we knew what the night held. It is Gerald’s way not to speak when he feels most deeply, but the quality of his silence, the luminous look
of his eyes, the controlled gentleness of his voice, all betray the depths.
We heard the grandfather clock in the hall strike twelve and we rose together and went into the house and up the stairs. The guestroom is at the head of the stairs and we paused. The house was still, and the door to my mother’s room was closed. The night had come.
“I will leave my door open,” I said softly.
He took me in his arms and kissed me again, not passionately but gently and with deep tenderness. Then he went into the guestroom and shut the door.
And I went to my own room and closed the door behind me while I prepared myself. A calm happiness pervaded me. I understood now why marriage is a sacrament. In this mood I bathed my body and brushed my long hair and put on a fresh white nightgown. Then I opened my door. His was still closed. While I waited I sat on the deep window seat beside the window and gazed over the mountains that surrounded us. In an hour, less or more, I heard his footstep. I turned and saw him in the doorway. He stood there, wrapped in his dressing gown of blue Chinese silk. We looked at each other. Then he held out his arms and I went into them.
I read novels sometimes in the winter evenings while Rennie studies his books for school. The novels describe again and again the act of physical love between man and woman. I read these descriptions, wondering at their monotony and their dullness. The act of love can, then, be meaningless! I wonder at such degradation. And then I realize that it is degraded because the two who perform it are degraded, and I wonder if I had not married Gerald whether I, too, might have been caught in that prison of stupid repetition until what was designed as the supreme act of communion and creation becomes merely a physical function. I thank the beloved who saved me from such desecration. I understand now the desolate look in women’s eyes that often I see. For it is the man and not the woman who is the more responsible for the beauty or the horror of the moment when the two meet. When a woman receives in exaltation and is given in haste and selfishness she is desecrated. She has been used as a clay pot may be used, and she is more than clay. She is spirit.
I do not know who taught Gerald this high truth, but he knew it when he came to me. Perhaps his mother told him. There was something clear and free between them, something that he has not shared with me because it belongs to her. There has never been any confusion in Gerald’s mind between wife and mother. He wished no mothering from me and he made no Freudian connection between me and his mother. There were no repressions in him. He created the physical relationship between us with delicate artistry, satisfying himself in so doing and me. How he did it is not something to be described. It is to be remembered by him and by me. It will be my duty to explain to Rennie, when he marries, his responsibility to beauty.
That night, so long ago now, when Gerald entered my room for the first time, he came in beauty and what he conveyed to me was the beauty which is the stuff of true romance. And so it continued through the years of our life together. Never in haste and always with tenderness, he made me his love. Now, without him, I have this, my memory.
I find I must not dwell upon memory or it becomes unbearable. If Gerald were dead, then memory would be all that I have. The gift would be completed, the life finished. But he lives. Because he lives I too must live, though memory remains between us like a cord, so that I cannot be separated from him. Yet we are apart in time and space, and time must be filled and space occupied.
I am thankful that the sap has begun to run in the sugar bush for I have no choice now but to be busy. Rennie has permission to stay out of school for a few days. His grades are high and his teacher says it will give her a chance to help some of the dull ones. The three of us, Matt, Rennie and I, work from dawn to dark and at night I am too tired to dream. I think of cutting off my long hair but today when I was impatient because it fell down my back, the hairpins failing to hold in the wind, Rennie protested.
“I shall certainly cut this off,” I cried, seizing the long tail of sand-blond hair and twisting it hard against my head.
The wind carried my words to Rennie and he cupped his hands and called to me. “You shall not, either!”
Later when we were eating our luncheon I asked him why he would not let me cut my hair and he said because he did not like a short-haired woman.
“I am not a woman,” I said. “I am only your mother.”
“Short-haired mother, then,” he retorted and laughed at me.
I wonder if Gerald laughed as easily when he was a boy. There is no one to tell me. I shall never know.
It is strange how devious is the human heart. I had no sooner written those words than I thought, there is Gerald’s father. He will remember. Out of that chance thought there grew a plan and so quickly that it mast have lain ready to be discovered. As soon as this sugaring is finished, Rennie and I will go and find Gerald’s father. When we were carrying the buckets to the trees on the north side of the sugar bush, where they are always late, with all the wile of a serpent I said to Rennie the next day.
“Rennie, how would you like to have your MacLeod grandfather come and live with us? Another man in the house—”
“I think I remember him,” Rennie said.
Gerald’s father left Peking before the Japanese entered. He said quite simply that he could not bear to see it, and he bought a steamship ticket for San Francisco. From there he went to a small town in Kansas, Little Springs. I have no idea how he lives now. He has written to us once, soon after we came to Vermont, and wanted news of Gerald, which I gave, telling him all I could. He has not replied.
“Well?” I said to Rennie.
“I shall have to think about it,” Rennie said. He is prudent, this boy, and to that extent is not my son. Perhaps my mother has given him prudence. If so, it is not the niggardly prudence she had. Rennie is cautious and careful. He thinks, but when he has decided he is generous.
The days passed while he thought, and a day at sugaring is long and short at the same time. It is hard work but we are fortunate. My father tapped the trees and laid pipes throughout the bush, and those pipes run into three main large pipes. By force of gravity the sap is conveyed to a small but fairly modern sugar house in the valley and near our house. All the years I was growing up and going to college, my father’s ingenuity went into such matters and now Rennie and I, with Mart’s help, make sugar with twice the ease that our neighbors do. They see and wonder and sometimes give spare praise to my father, but none of them do likewise. They continue to carry buckets as they have always done and as their ancestors did. I used to be impatient with them until I lived in Peking and learned the value of ancestors to a family. I am glad that through his Chinese grandmother Rennie has ancestors for a thousand years behind him. I have been able to give him only a scant two hundred years of English men and women.
Sap runs fast in the warm sunlit days into the sugar house. When that begins then Rennie and Matt do the outside work and I stay in the sugar house. The milking gets done anyhow and we eat from our stores of food, cooking no more than to heat what is already prepared in the glass jars of summertime and harvest.
We had no time to talk, for we dropped into sleep immediately after supper, Rennie’s cheeks burned with wind and snow and mine with fire, and while we rubbed them with oil we all but fell asleep. Today, however, winter has returned. The pipes are frozen and the roads are drifting with deepening snow. We can rest, Rennie and I, and Matt has taken over the sugar house for the time being. We dallied over our kitchen breakfast and Rennie picked up his first book in days, for it is a Saturday. I interrupted him.
“Rennie, have you thought about your grandfather coming to live with us?”
He looked up from the window seat where he was lying, feet against the wall, and the book propped on his breast.
“I have thought,” he said. “I’d like it.” And he went back to his book.
Son of Gerald! He has thought, in silence he has decided, and it is as good as done. When the dishes were washed I went upstairs to consider the room t
he grandfather would have. The house is too big for us. My father had a mania for space. He wanted many rooms, and none small. The house he left behind him could house a dozen children. Half stone, half timber, it stands facing the south and the valley. Every summer someone from New York or Chicago wants to buy it from me. I am offered a fortune large enough so that we need never sugar again. And I always refuse.
So now I walk the wide upstairs hall and reflect upon the rooms. I choose the corner at south and east. Rennie has the southwest room, because he likes to sleep on holidays and does not want the wakening sun. But an old man will not sleep late and this is the room. It is square, as all the bedrooms are, it has four windows, weather-stripped for winter, and a fireplace stands between the two to the east. Deep window sills and seats beneath them, a floor of wide pine planks, walls papered a faded pink, and there it is. My mother chose this room when she was old and her furniture is here, Victorian walnut, and the white ruffled curtains that she made and hung. The bed is absurdly large, the headboard high and scrolled and the footboard solid. It is a good room for an old gentleman. There is even a desk. My mother had my father’s small rolltop brought here when he died, and I can see still her sitting before it and writing letters, everything in order in the pigeonholes. My father kept it filled to overflowing and never tidied. It will be pleasant to see someone sitting there again.
And then I face myself. I want Gerald’s father here so that I can talk about his son. I need to know much I do not know. I thought I knew Gerald, my husband—heart, mind and body—and so I did in the days when I saw him with my living eyes. But now I have only the eyes of memory and there is much I cannot see because I do not know. And somebody must tell me, lest my life be stopped at the heart.
We could not go until the sugaring was over. It was interrupted by an ice storm! In March, mid-season, a warm rain poured upon us from a low grey sky. We were frightened lest the sap cease to flow, the trees deceived by seeming spring. Then sudden winds blew gusts of cold southward from Canada, and the rain froze upon the trees. Sap was assured, but alas, winds crashed the big trees. Sleepless in the night I heard the crack of breaking branches, sharp as gun shots, and almost as dreadful. In the morning the sun shone again and Rennie and I walked through the sugar bush to see what we had lost. Icicles of frozen sap hung from the ends of the broken branches and melting in the sun they dripped their sweetness upon the earth below. I detest waste and here was waste not only for us now but for the trees which had during the summer stored sunshine through their leaves. The hot summer sunshine creates starch in the leaf cells, and the cool spring sunshine changes the starch to sugar, to be used by trees and by us. Then Rennie reminded me that a tree is prudent and never gives up all its sugar.