Ideas of Heaven Page 12

  IT TOOK two years until Ben resolved on doing this, and the night after he said to me, “Shall we go then, my girl? I think you must know we are going,” a kind of mental breathlessness came over me, a delight that floated on fear. My old life was opening into something quite other, which I could scarcely yet recognize as my own. And when my father wrote to me, “Oh, Lizzie, why are you setting off on this stony path? What have you to do with the Orient or the Orient with you? I had not thought two homebodies such as you would be so reckless,” his worries seemed to me part of a pettier, narrower, greedier world that I had already left behind.

  I was expecting our third child by the time we moved to Oliver, Ohio, where Ben entered the Congregationalist seminary at Oliver College and prepared for ordination. I had my most difficult birth in those rooms in Oliver, a wrenching labor that went on for two and a half days, but my husky, funny Douglas was a healthy boy from the first. At the christening Lucy asked me if babies in China cried in Chinese, and I told her all wailing was the same, like dogs howling at the moon in every part of the earth. Even at the baptism we had the thought of going abroad always with us, like a root fire underground, a radiant foreboding.

  WE WENT THROUGH all our savings, such as they were, in those five years in Ohio, and at the end Ben applied to the Board of Foreign Missions to be sent to China. We were older than many of the other mission volunteers, less fresh and blooming, and we were afraid that the Board might insist on a softer posting for us, but they did not.

  We were assigned to Shanxi, an inland province in the north, and asked to think of staying ten years. My parents came to say goodbye, before we took the train to California. My mother wanted to repack everything for me, while Douglas, who was only three, pulled out all the cups and saucers from the trunk and Lucy kept trying on my shirtwaists; the general family pandemonium distracted me most conveniently from the sorrow of leaving. My father gave me some seeds for pole beans and nasturtiums, and he waved his hat as the train pulled out of the station. He looked so glum to see me go.

  We were five days on the train to San Francisco, and then six weeks on the ship, where I was sick as a pup most of the way. But when we got to Yokohama, Japan, our first sight of Asia, I understood that facts are more solid than we can stand. Every particle of strangeness was perfectly real—the jinrickshas with men trotting in front of them like horses, the dead volcano with its snow-capped peak looming over the city, and the crooked streets with their rows of open-fronted shops. All of this had been here all along, the tree falling in the forest while I did not hear it.

  We were eight days in Yokohama and then we took a steamer to Kobe, and from there two weeks on a bigger ship. I woke all of us very early, so that we would be on deck to see the shores of China before we docked. The sky stayed white after the sun came up—I was told that the sky in China was always white—and the land coming into view was misted over so that it looked poetic and oddly inert. The children were quiet, for once, except for Douglas, who had to be fed sesame candy to keep him from restless agitation. A Mr. Thomas Comber, one of the returning missionaries, told the children to think of the horizon as the sky’s edge, which was how it was written in Chinese. Ben had to go ashore with Mr. Comber to buy provisions for the rest of the trip, and I could see that he wanted me to go with him, and I suppose I was eager.

  The men working on the docks turned to look at us, as well they might, and I guessed how unnaturally shaped we must appear, me in my long, stiff skirt and the men in their hats and buttoned jackets. Most of the Chinese workers were shirtless, wearing only loose trousers, their braided queues falling on their bare backs, a brevity of dress that would have startled me at home. In the harbor, and farther along the alleys of dark wooden houses, there was a terrible reek of human sewage and animal rot. The odors were no less as we moved closer to the main part of town, and although I was thrilled to see more people moving about, their faces full of their own unknown Chinese business, it was very hard to have the smell as my first great impression, although we managed better in the shops than I would have thought. Ben and I pointed at sacks of meal and beans and held up our fingers, with Mr. Comber helping a little, and the merchants grunted and weighed and wrapped, as if nothing surprised or much interested them.

  We had more traveling to do, on the river for five days in narrow houseboats. There was no wind to fill the sails, and the boatmen had to pole us forward in the muddy, sluggish water. Their bodies seemed frail and skeletal to me, and yet their efforts moved us along the banks, hour after hour. Any man who was relieved of his shift fell asleep at once, sitting on deck with his head thrown back.

  James kept hoping to see water snakes and insisting to Lucy that every motion in the water was one. I dreaded the next two weeks with the children, overland on pack-mules across rocky terrain. But as it happened, the freshness of the mountains did all of us good, and Douglas, who had fussed quite a lot on the boat, sat nicely with me in a litter that was like a big basket strung between two mules, whom we named Mister Lovely and Mister Snort.

  I HAD TO wait until we reached Fenzhou, the end of our journey, to be alone with Ben. It was a small city, old and dirty and poor-looking. The mules stopped before a street entirely fronted by a high brick wall, and it was not until a guard unlocked a massive gate for us that I understood this was the missionaries’ compound.

  A couple who introduced themselves as the Rexroths and who looked very young came out to greet us and Mr. Comber, their old friend, and we were very glad to see them. But I was sorry to find there were no other children here. The outer door was locked behind us at once, and I supposed we were safe, though I did not like being shut in.

  There were inner gates as well, with horrid stone dogs guarding them. No one had told me that our “house” was to be, not a house at all, but a group of cell-like buildings lined up around a gray brick courtyard. Only the moon-white windows, dark-paned in cunning geometries, saved these from utter bleakness. Our rooms were dusty and long neglected, and I had a good deal of work setting out linens and bedding, our own dear things from home. One of the kitchen boys tried to help me, and I almost wept from trying to make him understand what I wanted; he would not beat the dust out of the pillows for me and he would not go away either. I put Douglas to sleep first; he was tired, as we all were, but he would not lie still until I told him the mules were tucked in too and Mr. Snort was snoring like a trumpet.

  I should have known that when I was alone with Ben, he would want to keep talking, as he did when he was stirred with excitement. “Women xiang yao liang bei cha,” he said, one of the first phrases he had learned in Chinese. “We would like two cups of tea.” Already it seemed to me that the language itself, spoken so rapidly around us with all the words run together, was a vast sea, a froth of tides we could only drown in. No wonder the work here went so slowly. It was truly a sign of special power that any Chinese at all had taken in the teachings of Jesus and not assumed they were nonsensical rantings. “Women xiang yao,” Ben said again, moving the pitches up and down in the second word and barking the last in an exaggerated way. “Liang bei cha, Liz.”

  “You sound very fine,” I said, as if I had any way to know.

  “They say it takes a year,” Ben said. “To learn enough to go out and preach to people. But I can go with the others to hand out pamphlets.”

  It hurt my heart to think we had come this far just so that Ben might ply people with papers he could not even read himself, hawking his broadsheets like any pesky newsboy at home.

  “I cannot like living inside a fifteen-foot wall. What are we locked in against?” I said.

  “I suppose there are bandits,” Ben said. “And beggars and wild dogs. Everyone has a wall here. Any house in the town bigger than a shack has a high gate around it. Edward Rexroth said two bandits were caught last month and beheaded in the town.”

  How had he become the expert so quickly, and I the student?

  “When you go out to the villages,” I said, “how w
ill you keep yourselves safe on the roads?”

  “No one thinks it’s dangerous. And the others have been going out in Chinese dress, to show we don’t set ourselves off from anyone here.”

  I did not see that any outfits would make them safer. “Who will make a Chinese gown for you?” I said. “Am I to do it?”

  “Only you,” he said. “A long gown with two cups of tea stitched on it, please. Liang bei cha, my girl.”

  Being happy sometimes made him silly and effusive like this. He kept me up a long time with his talking, though I could not be cross with him on this our first night. It was very late when he stopped, and after he led our prayers, we had our time together as man and wife, which we had not had on the road. And then I was glad to sleep, with the feather bed from Ben’s mother’s house laid out beneath us. I was going to be in this room for the next ten years. My bones were very heavy to me and I hated to think of ever getting up out of this bed.

  Just as I was falling out of consciousness, a live thing whirred and streaked through the dark air of the room. It slapped against the windows. “It could be a bird,” Ben said, “but I think it’s probably a bat.”

  I knew it was a bat, and I was not afraid of bats either, although I had never met a Chinese bat. We listened to it beating itself against the wall and then it swooped and dove too close to the bed. “Get away,” I said, as if it obeyed any language.

  “It only wants to leave,” Ben said. He got up to open the door for it and I heard him mutter when he bumped against one of the spindly little tables. Something crashed and shattered on the brick floor—I knew it must be the hand-mirror with roses painted on its porcelain back, a gift from Maude when I was fifteen, but still I hoped it was something else. The bat seemed to hate the sudden noise and in its flailing agitation it brushed against my cheek—this was like being smacked with a leather glove, and I cried out. Ben got the lantern lit at last, and the two of us ran about trying to trap the frantic body of the bat in a quilt. We pitched it out into the courtyard. Lucy began calling from her room—“Why are you shrieking? Who has come for you?”—and I let her stay with us awhile to calm her, while I swept up the glass and tried not to think how long our time here was.

  THE REXROTHS gave us breakfast the next morning; their Chinese cook made a perfectly decent millet porridge. When we told the bat story, the incident turned quite comic, with Ben the blundering hunter.

  “A broken mirror is seven years’ bad luck,” Jamie said, being a boy who relished dark matters.

  “Not in China,” Thomas Comber said. “Surely not. And a bat is a happy sign here, don’t you know?”

  “Please don’t make fun of us,” Lucy said.

  “It’s true,” Susan Rexroth said. “Because the word for good fortune is said exactly the same way as the word for bat, though it’s written differently. So you often see bats depicted in the most splendid embroideries of gardens. The Chinese are very fond of that sort of pun.”

  We all felt better for this information, though we had heard time and again how badly encrusted with superstition the Chinese nation was, how its progress was hampered by old beliefs. I think if there had been a way to set out a dish of milk for bats, we would have done so at once.

  ON SUNDAY MORNING I had the experience of hearing Thomas Comber preach in Chinese. The other congregants were three workmen from the town plus the kitchen boys from the mission households and the Rexroths’ cook and her lively four-year-old daughter. And our own family—the service took place in the dark sitting room I had hung with curtains of blue-and-white toile. Thomas wore a skullcap and what I called a “Chinese gown,” like a cassock, with a long brocade vest over it, and he did not look laughable in this outfit so much as patient and put-upon. I was suddenly and stupidly amazed, like some rustic booby, to hear him rasping and piping syllables in Chinese and know they signified the news about Jesus. When he used a name or phrase I recognized—Galilee, baptism—it was very moving to me. I could not tell if any of the Chinese were much affected or could even follow him. I thought how badly God wanted them. How mangled and crimped their lives were. And how if they understood Him, they might spring free, just like that, from the pride and greed that knotted them now in humiliation.

  Douglas was fidgeting during the service, and the cook’s daughter began to prattle out loud. So before the final hymns I had Lucy take them both out to the courtyard, where the cook and I came down afterwards to see them chasing each other like romping dogs. The cook hobbled on her bound feet, but when she laughed at the children, she had a pretty smile, with one chipped white tooth. Later I said to Ben that I thought her walk was an emblem of this place, the tread of a woman unjustly crippled and laboring onward, in ignorant forbearance. “Well put,” Ben said.

  “You might wait to form impressions,” Edward Rexroth said. “Placid is not any way I would describe the national character.”

  THE FIRST MONTHS were lived almost entirely within the compound. I did not like to think I was afraid to go out, but I was. When Lucy and James were done with their lessons and Douglas was napping, I often went up a set of stone stairs that led to the roof, and I took in the view of the ancient, miserable town, with the gray mountains hovering over it. According to Susan, the cook thought we had all come here because it was so much more pleasant than our home. The streets were lined with high brick walls of a grim gray color. From the roof I could see now and then a bit of traffic in the road: an old woman with an enormous basket of squash strapped to her like a rucksack, a child bent under a stack of firewood, a man trudging behind a wheelbarrow of bricks. A city of hunched backs and no prospects of better.

  Ben spent many hours of the day studying Chinese, and a boys’ teacher from the town came in to tutor him. Thomas Comber warned against going too fast; there was a famous case of a missionary in the early days who lost his reason from too many concentrated hours of study, though I myself thought it must have been a wider frustration that tormented his mind. Our own mission had been here for three years, with only two reliable converts in a city of thousands. I studied too, but I learned the most from our kitchen boys and from the cook’s daughter, Chunhua, who played with Douglas every day. The two of them got along very well, though I worried at how dirty she was.

  China was hardest on Lucy, I thought. James played tennis at the net Ben set up in the courtyard and he went out to villages with his father, but Lucy had a dull existence. It was autumn when we came, and through the winter, I would talk to her about the garden we were going to set up in pots in one of the courtyards. She helped me make a list of the seeds we wanted sent from the U.S.—zinnia, morning glory, bachelor button—and we kept my father’s nasturtium seeds away from Chinese mice. “Is heaven full of flowers then?” Lucy said. “Or is that only an idea people have?” I thought this was said from longing, since we were in such a bare and leafless spot.

  “Heaven is the answer to longing,” I said. “All our hungers are met with the love that we’re too hardened to do more than taste fleetingly now.” I thought this was not too difficult for an eleven-year-old.

  “Then flowers are my own sign of heaven,” Lucy said. “James can have goats for his heaven.”

  We had just gotten a pet nanny goat, whom James was very taken with. After this I had Ben buy a finch at the bird market for Lucy, yellow and brown with a black beak, and he bought a rabbit for Douglas.

  WHEN THE WEATHER grew milder, I took Lucy for outings. We went with Susan Rexroth to visit some women in a house in a neighboring street. They were a merchant’s wife and her sister and elderly mother, and they had come unannounced to see us the week before, in long cloaks and flowing trousers, their faces dusted with white powder. They had been very eager to see our sewing machine—I sewed a pocket on an apron to amaze them—and they opened all our cupboards and looked into the drawers of my desk. Their faces crumpled and smoothed in different expressions, but I could not tell what they thought.

  When we went to visit them in their house, with it
s elegant square-cut furniture, they gave us tea, and asked us our ages, a question we had enough language to answer (I had not known Susan was ershi, only twenty). They showed us how their hair was done, pulled and twisted and fastened with hairpins as long as chopsticks, and wondered that we did not fix ours that way. Lucy asked, mostly in pantomime, if they would put hers up like that, and for a little while we were like schoolgirls anywhere, fussing and tittering. Who would guess that our vanity would bring us close? I wondered if they loved their men, to primp for them so, though I could not ask them that. (Best not to ask anyone, for that matter.) All their marriages were arranged, and yet people told us the country’s literature was full of love poems. I thought their feelings must drift in two streams, the unfed ideal and the cruel usual. Though they seemed the most practical and hardheaded people. Just before we left, the old woman brought in a tray of magnolia blossoms, and we bent our heads while she pinned them to our hair, so much wispier and weaker in color than theirs.

  Lucy looked like a beautiful toy, with her freshly lacquered hair and her flower. On the walk home, a group of young boys passed, and I thought one was staring at Lucy in impudent admiration, until I heard him say, “Yang guizi. Foreign devils.” The other boys took it up, jeering and making rude faces, though they did not chase us. I would not let us walk faster, because I did not want us to look cowardly, but I was grateful to reach our walls. Ben said later that they treated us better than Chinamen were often treated at home. This was true but not what I wanted him to say just then.