The Vagrants

Mrs. Hua wondered if Peony's birth mother would have acknowledged and honored the marriage arrangement had she found the girl. Different scenes played out often in her imagination. Sometimes it was the boy and his parents who were greatly dismayed when Peony decided to leave them for a life she had always dreamed of going back to; at other times the mother was hurt when Peony turned her back as a punishment for the abandonment. Mrs. Hua talked about these worries now to her husband, and he stopped his hammering for a beat. Once a mother, always a mother, he said, his voice reproachful, but Mrs. Hua, knowing the same could be said of him as a father, only sighed in agreement. A child losing her parents became an orphan, a woman losing her husband a widow, but there was not a term for the lesser parents that those who had lost their children became. Once parents, they would remain parents for the rest of their lives.

Neither talked for a moment. Old Hua laid the pickax aside and began to work on the dulled edge of a shovel.

When Mrs. Hua broke the silence she said that they should go to the city square the next morning.

Old Hua looked up at her and did not reply.

She felt responsible for Teacher Gu, Mrs. Hua said. It had been on her mind since she had learned of Teacher Gu's illness. They should go there and apologize to Mrs. Gu.

Old Hua said that they were hired for a burial.

They could go early, before they went out to the burial, Mrs. Hua said. Bashi had come earlier in the evening and said that he had a bad cold, and asked the couple to bury his grandmother themselves. Neither Old Hua nor Mrs. Hua had pointed out the lie to the boy's face; he had paid them generously.

Old Hua nodded. So they would go, he said, as she had known that he would.

NINE

         Teacher Gu pretended to be asleep while his wife moved quietly in and out of the bedroom on the morning of Ching Ming. He ignored the small noises and tried to focus his memory on another morning, the distant day of his first honeymoon, when his wife had slipped away from the wedding bed and made tea for him. He had willed himself not to hear the small clicking of teacups and saucers, but when he had opened his eyes with feigned surprise at the tea, she had smiled and scolded him lovingly for his playacting. Didn't he know his quivering eyelashes had betrayed him, she said, and he said that he did not, because he had never had to feign sleep for anyone before.

“I'm going out for a few hours,” Mrs. Gu said to him, by the bedside. “Here's your breakfast, in the thermos. I'll be back soon.”

Teacher Gu did not answer. He willed her to disappear so he could go back to that other morning.

“If you need to use the chamber pot, I've put it here behind the chair.”

Teacher Gu thought about the things that he had not known on that newlywed morning, of the intimacies one would never wish to share with anyone but oneself, the vulnerability one was forced into in old age. He thought about secrets too, of sleeping in the same bed with one woman and dreaming about the other, of his wife hiding a social life from a sick husband half dying in the hospital. Such deceptions must take place under every roof, some more hurtful than others. His first wife must often have thought about other men during their honeymoon, thoughts without romantic desire but nameless strangers occupying her mind nonetheless; she had arranged the honeymoon in that specific sea resort so that, with a husband who served at the National Congress as a cover, she could work as a secret messenger for the underground Communist Party. These stories, hidden from him for the duration of their marriage, had been revealed after they signed their divorce papers. He had not doubted her love then, even after she showed him the divorce application, but now, thirty years and the death of a daughter later, he wondered if he had been too naïve to see the truth. Perhaps his first marriage had been based, from the very beginning, on the merit of his serving the government that she and her comrades were fighting to overthrow. He provided cover for her, and brought home government papers not meant for her to peruse; had she ever considered him an exit plan, in case her side failed to win?

Teacher Gu struggled out of bed. Mrs. Gu entered the bedroom, already dressed up to venture into the early April morning, a black mourning band on her arm. “Do you need something?” she said, coming over and helping him into his shoes. “I didn't hear what you said.”

“I said nothing,” he said. “You were hallucinating.”

“Are you all right? Do you need me to find someone to sit with you while I'm away?”

“What's the good in sitting with a half-dead man?”

“Let's not argue.”