Peony: A Novel of China (3 page)

“Be still,” she commanded him. “This button is almost off. Come with me and I will sew it on.”

“Come to your room?”

She shook her head. “Your mother said that was to stop.”

“You come to my room,” he urged.

She shook her head, hesitated, and they heard a panel slide. Instantly he slipped into the twisting path behind a tall rock, and Peony stooped to pick up the peach blossoms. It was only Wang Ma, who came to sweep the threshold.

“I saw you,” she said to Peony.

“What of that?” Peony replied with impudence. She went into the huge shadowy hall and began to arrange the peach blossoms in two blue hawthorn-flowered vases that stood on the wall table. This morning the great hall was, to the casual eye, a Chinese family room. After last night’s feast the round table had been taken away and the other furniture had been placed again in the conventional Chinese way about the room. The long table was set against the wall facing the wide door into the garden, and against this table was set the square table of the same dark polished heavy wood. On either side of the square table were the two immense armchairs of the same wood. At intervals around the walls the small tables stood, each with a pair of chairs. Doorways were hung with red satin curtains and there were no windows except on the side toward the garden, which was set with sliding panels latticed with mother-of-pearl. Through the lattice the sunlight filtered, iridescent and pale upon the floor of smooth worn gray tile, on the white plastered walls, even on the high, beamed roof. Long ago the beams had been varnished an ox-blood red, and the color had grown rich and dark with age.

To the discerning eye the room was not purely Chinese even today. Above the long wall table in the place of honor there hung an enormous satin tapestry. Upon its dull blue, Hebrew letters were embroidered in gold. Beneath this tapestry stood the two seven-branched candlesticks of brass, and in one corner of the room was an ancient Jewish prayer ark.

Peony stepped back to see the effect of the blossoms. With her usual skill she had arranged them in the vases in such a manner that they formed a composite as lovely as a painting. She smiled, her head lifted slightly to one side. A look of sensuous pleasure came over her exquisite small face.

“When the peach trees bloom then it is spring,” she murmured to Wang Ma. “What a mercy of heaven that our spring festival comes after their sorrowful foreign feast!”

She shrugged, waved her little hands, and sat down on the edge of one of the great armchairs. “Wang Ma, I ask you, who have been in this house so long, what makes them love to grieve?”

Wang Ma pursed her full lips. “You’ll grieve if our old mistress comes in and sees you sitting in her chair,” she retorted. “Such impudence! I’ve never thought of sitting in one of those chairs. But then, I’ve only been here thirty years.”

“Do not be cross with me, Wang Ma.” Peony’s voice was soft, and she rose from the chair and opened the red lacquered sweet box that stood in the center of the square table. It was full of small sesame cakes. She took one and began to eat it.

“Nor would I help myself to their cakes,” Wang Ma said.

Peony went on eating.

“Those cakes smell of pigs’ fat,” Wang Ma said severely. She reached for one and smelled it. “Pigs’ fat, it’s certain! I told you all cakes must be bought at the Buddhist sweetshop!”

“I told your Old Wang so, too,” Peony replied. “He bought them, not I.”

“You!” Wang Ma cried. “Telling him!”

Peony smiled and did not answer. She opened the tea basket that stood beside the sweet box and felt the pot. It was hot and she poured tea into one of the rice-patterned bowls and sipped it, both hands cupped about its warmth.

“And I have never drunk from one of those bowls,” Wang Ma said. She nibbled a cake. “Yes, it’s pigs’ fat,” she murmured gloomily, and went on eating it.

“Why don’t they like pigs’ fat?” Peony inquired. “It’s odd that I’ve lived with all their superstitions and still I don’t know what they mean.”

“It’s their religion,” Wang Ma said. She reached for another cake. “People do strange things when they are religious. I had an old aunt who went to be a Buddhist nun when her betrothed died, and she never ate meat again and she shaved her head and she slept on a bamboo bed with no quilt underneath her so that when she got up in the morning she was all wealed. Why? Who knows? But it made her happy.”

“Yet our mistress is so sensible,” Peony said.

She poured a bowl of tea for Wang Ma, who shook her head. Peony took the bowl in both hands and presented it. “Drink, good mother,” she said. “You deserve it after all these years. Besides, they’ll never know.”

“Who knows what you’ll tell?” Wang Ma said severely.

“I never tell anything I know,” Peony said demurely.

Wang Ma put down the bowl. “What do you know?” she inquired.

“Now you want me to tell,” Peony said, smiling.

“I know some things myself,” Wang Ma retorted.

“What things?” Peony asked. Her innocence was flagrant in voice and wide black eyes.

“You and our young master,” Wang Ma said.

“I and our young master! Don’t think it’s with us as it was with you and the old master,” Peony said.

Wang Ma stared. Her neck grew red. “Dare to say it!” she cried.

Peony shrugged her pretty shoulders. “It’s not I who say anything,” she retorted.

Wang Ma pursed her lips and swept her eyelids downward. “
P’ei!
You ought to die!” she muttered.

Peony put her hand on Wang Ma’s sleeve. “If we are not friends to each other in this house, who will be friends to us?” She paused and went on, “Yet I am only a servant. Well, what then? It has been my duty to care for him, to play games with him; if he were restless, to sing to him; if he were sleepless, to read to him; if he were hungry, to feed him—to be his slave in everything. Yesterday—” She shrugged her shoulders again.

Wang Ma came close. “You know what is to happen?”

Peony shook her head. Then she looked sad. “No, I won’t lie. Of course I know. But he’ll never be happy with Leah.”

“He has to marry her, even as his father did before him marry one of their people,” Wang Ma insisted. “This betrothal was fixed when the children were in their cradles. I remember—it was before you were born.”

Peony said gently, “Do you think I have not been told that? Leah herself told me, when we were children playing together, David and she and I—‘I’m to marry David,’ that’s what she said. ‘Leah, stop talking about it’—that’s what he always said.”

“She’s eighteen now to his nineteen.” Wang Ma sighed. “It’s time—”

“Hush!” Peony whispered. They listened. Steady footsteps approached, measured and strong. Quickly they moved together to replace the teapot, cover the sweet box, brush away the crumbs, wipe out the tea bowls. In an instant Wang Ma was sweeping the floor again with her short-handled broom, and Peony, taking a silk kerchief from her bosom, was dusting the table and the carved chairs.

The red satin curtain at the east of the room was pushed back by a dark strong hand covered with rings, and Madame Ezra stood there. This morning she wore a strange combination of garments, a Chinese skirt and robe of gray silk, a Jewish headdress of striped taffeta. The two women, young and old, stood and gave greetings.

“Old Mistress,” their voices murmured. Both were careful, suspecting a tendency to temper after a feast.

“You two,” Madame Ezra replied in a firm voice, “make haste with your tasks. My son’s father will be here soon.”

She moved across the floor slowly, her long silver-gray skirt swaying, and she sat down on the chair to the left of the square table, facing the garden. “He ought indeed to be here now,” she went on. “But when was he ever on time?”

Wang Ma poured a bowl of tea and handed it to Madame Ezra with both hands. “Our master likes to linger in the teahouse over his early tea,” she said. Her voice was easygoing, her manner half intimate, as befitted those of an elderly serving woman who had been long with the family. “Besides that, Mistress, he is every day hoping to hear of the coming of the caravan.”

“That caravan!” Madame Ezra exclaimed. “It is made an excuse for everything.”

“We all long for its coming, Mistress,” Wang Ma said, laughing. “It is like a second New Year, bringing all these toys from foreign lands.”

The caravan of which she spoke was one that Ezra sent every year under his trusted partner, Kao Lien. Although the route by sea from Africa and Europe was quicker than the land route to the north, yet for the bringing of goods the land route by camel was less expensive and more sure. This year the caravan had been delayed for reasons that, Kao Lien had said in his letter, he could not explain until he arrived, and he had wintered abroad. As soon as the turn of the year came and the days began to lengthen, he had set out. Now for a month Ezra had no message from him, and this led him to believe that Kao Lien must be near, and with him the longest caravan and the richest goods that Ezra had yet received. To distribute these goods to the best advantage was the anxiety of his life, and he had been long in negotiation with the Chinese merchant Kung Chen, whose shops were in every large city in the province and who talked now of opening a shop in the northern capital itself, under the very eyes of the ladies of the palace.

Madame Ezra did not hear Wang Ma. She lifted her head and sniffed the air searchingly. “Do I smell—yes, I do.” She turned with determination. “Wang Ma, open the sweet box!”

But Wang Ma lifted the whole box and handed it to Peony, who stepped forward to receive it. “Now, Old Mistress,” Wang Ma said firmly, “I had only this moment told Peony that there was a mistake about these cakes. We tasted them—she and I.”

“Pigs’ fat!” Madame Ezra exclaimed.

“It was that old man of mine,” Wang Ma urged. “Lazy—too lazy to walk across another street to the Buddhist shop! But Mistress, you married me to him yourself with all his faults. What I’ve put up with all these years!”

“But to put them in the sweet box,” Madame Ezra said reproachfully. “Take them away.”

Peony took up the box and slipped silently toward a doorway, retreating gracefully and almost imperceptibly. With a sweet quick smile she disappeared altogether. Outside the door in the wide corridor she paused and looked behind the curtain and met Old Wang, a small gray-haired man, flattened against the wall. He put his finger to his lips and tiptoed after her down the passage and into the library. There she handed him the box of cakes.

“You heard?” she asked.

He nodded. “I was about to enter and say that Old Master is on his way when I heard her blaming me, and so I waited.”

“You see what trouble you bring on your old woman and me,” Peony went on gently, but her great eyes were dancing and her red lips quivering with a smile.

He answered this mischief, wagging his head from side to side. “Someone always eats the cakes. Before Heaven, does it matter who, so long as it is a human being?” He held out the box to her and she pushed back her satin sleeve and delicately took a cake.

“Eat one, Old Wang,” Peony commanded him. “You too are a human being.”

They ate the cakes with a sort of solemnity, in common communion, and when she had finished she drew her silk kerchief from her sleeve and wiped her fingers. “After all, there is no sin among our people in eating cakes made with pigs’ fat,” she remarked. “Why do these foreigners refuse good meat and good fat from a pig?”

“How do I know?” Old Wang replied. “Believing in gods always causes confusion.”

A door opened and they turned their heads.

“Old Master!” Old Wang cried.

Peony bent her head gracefully and Ezra came in. He looked handsome this morning even in his middle age, and as Peony discerned from under her smiling lashes, he was cheerful. She understood this very well. As each feast day approached he grew short-tempered and gloomy, and went half sulkily through all the rites upon which Madame Ezra insisted. The day after the feast was over, he was buoyant again, eager to be about his prospering business.

“Ah, Peony,” Ezra said pleasantly. He stroked his beard. “You’re looking very pretty, my child. Have you cut fresh peach blossoms this morning?”

“They are there in the vases, Old Master,” Peony replied in a docile voice. “The forced ones faded after the feast.”

“And where is my son?” Ezra went on.

“I have not seen him, Old Master,” she replied.

“If you do, keep him away—there’s a good child,” Ezra said. He tightened the silk girdle about his substantial waist, fixed his turban on his head as though preparing himself for something to come. “I don’t want David to overhear us this morning,” he said to Peony in a low voice. “His mother wants me to agree to the marriage. David doesn’t want to get married, does he?”

“I don’t know, Old Master,” Peony said faintly.

“Ha, no—why should you? How long has it been since he has seen Leah—until yesterday?”

Peony lifted fringed eyelids. “He sees her in the synagogue, Old Master.”

“They don’t talk together alone?”

“Not since she was sixteen.”

“That’s—ah—”

“Over two years, Old Master,” Peony reminded him.

“Does he ever speak of her?”

“Not to me, Old Master.”

“There is no letter writing?”

“No, Old Master.”

Ezra’s rolling eyes fell on the box of cakes Old Wang held as he stood, listening to all that was said. “What’s this, eh? Cakes?”

Peony explained. “Old Wang is taking them away—they have pigs’ fat in them.”

“It’s a pity,” Ezra said absently. “Pigs’ fat, eh? Of course I’m not orthodox—hmm—” He took a cake and ate it quickly. “Very good, too. Pity! Well, yes, it won’t do in this house.”

He hastened on and Peony and Old Wang looked at each other and broke into laughter. They parted, Old Wang to go to the kitchen and Peony to return to the great hall. She followed just behind Ezra and her entrance was not noticed.

“I have been waiting for you, Ezra,” Madame Ezra said somewhat irritably.

“So have I been waiting for you, my dear,” Ezra replied calmly. He sat down in the large chair opposite her and sipped the tea that Wang Ma offered him and then allowed her to light his pipe. She took a brown paper spill from a holder, blew the smoldering end into flame, and held it to the tobacco. A water pipe was a great resource in such a conversation as he knew waited for him now. It was necessary to fill and refill the tiny bowl of the pipe, to light the tobacco, to take two puffs or so, and then to blow out the ash and begin all over again. There was plenty of excuse for delay in answers, for pauses and repetitions.