Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

In a country of slender, soft-voiced beauties with creamy skin, the loveliest smiles, and the gentlest manner, the rest of the Bernard brothers had remained stubbornly single. This baffled me. Apart from Margaret, the sisters, too, had chosen spinsterhood. The better I got to know them, the more I felt that this was a comment on their happy household, the mutually supportive family Mr. Bernard had fathered, and maybe an indication of how they had lived in Upper Burma, in a closed culture, Catholics of Indian descent among Buddhist Burmans. Pictures of Jesus, of Mary, of saints, were hung on the walls of the parlor. On the mantelpiece a gold chalice glittered among devotional tokens.

Their mother, Theresa Bernard, had been beloved and doted on; she'd died only a few years before, also at the age of ninety. It was as though they were all so content they couldn't bear to leave the serenity of the homestead. Margaret had left the country. Jane had recently visited her in Germany, and reported that she was happy in Berlin. Of the others, none had left Myanmar. They continued to live the provincial life of the small town, with occasional visits to Mandalay.

"I'm still waiting for my lucky day," Vincent said of his marriage prospects. He was a powerfully built man who, with a Dutch partner, managed two thousand acres of maize some distance from Pyin-Oo-Lwin.

John, whose nickname was Sunny, was a thin, watchful man. He sat sideways on a straight-backed chair, tremulous in the early stages of Parkinson's disease. He said, "I remember you so well, Mr. Paul. You were in the corner room. You talked to us."

"Your father was proud of you," I said.

"You wrote our names in your book!" Vincent said.

"Was your father strict?"

"He beat me twice a week," Sunny said without rancor, smiling, widening his eyes.

Peter agreed: I had described their father's interesting career as a colonial servant, but I hadn't mentioned his severity. Well, how was I to know? Their father had been punctual, methodical, demanding, an early riser. Candacraig had been his entire responsibility, and the burden had come at the end of his career. He had supervised the place until his retirement. And, though it had been owned by the government, he had turned it into a family enterprise: all the children had worked here at one time or another.

Vincent said, "People came holding your book, wanting to meet my father. Tourists from Britain. From America. Aussies, too. My father met them and talked to them and told them his stories."

"He was eighty-one when he retired," Peter said.

"Later, when they came, we informed them he was dead," Sunny said. "Some of them cried. They went away sad."

They showed me family albums, memorabilia, a large studio portrait of their father, looking owlish in horn-rimmed glasses. And so I sat there, and drank tea, and was happy. It was a homecoming I had not expected, like a visit to generous grateful relatives I had not seen in decades. Nothing like this had ever happened to me among my own family. Was this a motivation, the embrace of strangers, in my becoming a traveler? It was all positive and pleasurable, the men I had remembered as eager polite boys; the women who'd just been names. The wonderful part was the continuity of it all, that life had gone on. Without daring to anticipate such an event, it was the sort of reunion I had hoped for when I set out to repeat my trip.

I looked at the bazaar and the Christian churches—Gothic in red brick—and spent a day at Kandawgyi, botanical gardens that dated from the first serious settlement of the town, when the railway had been finished in 1900. It was a beautifully landscaped area of more than four hundred acres, with a pond and bamboo groves and endangered deer and a research center devoted to growing mulberry trees for silkworms, as well as the raising of silkworms themselves. Walking along the flower-bordered paths I was reminded that at an earlier time I would have directed the rickshaw driver to pass the Kandawgyi Gardens and asked him to stop at the Kandawgyi Bar, if such a place could be found, and I would have stayed there, getting half drunk and homesick.

The night before I left, I did get half drunk at the Aung Padamyar, an Indian restaurant that Vincent recommended. It was run by one of his female cousins, for Mr. Bernard's brother was also an old-time resident of Maymyo.

Dennis Bernard, another cousin, introduced himself. Another genial wraith from the distant past, he said, "Remember me? I set the table for you at Candacraig."

He was also in his fifties, semi-retired. He said that he had worked for Mr. Bernard as a waiter and a cleaner.