10

Clothes were sunned every summer, put off this year because the family was about to be divided, servants were uneasy about their futures and there was more danger of losing things. As the new house had no balcony the old costumes blocked the windows in shifts, her share of the court gowns and women's mandarin coats stiff with massive gold embroidery and huge jackets like satin-banded silk tents in unlikely colour combinations, comical even when she was young. The fur linings smelled remote in the warm breeze. Some of it had belonged to Old Mistress though hard to imagine, most of it nobody knew any more whose it was. It gave her a queer feeling to have them herded at her window like so many curious country people not quite looking in while she lay on the forbidden couch with her lamp and tray.
Nothing could be done with them except to air them once a year and fold them back reverently. The men's gowns were almost as bright and elaborately trimmed but with a narrower cut. Some of Second Master's more recent clothes in sober blues and browns might be made over to fit her and Yensheng. For the first time in her life he seemed a cosy convenience like anybody else's husband. What with all the married couples quarrelling, the frenzied whoring and gambling and deserting the wife for the concubine, people told her, 'You're still better off,' and now they really meant it.
Lying across the width of the couch she found herself looking at two plain silk gowns hung side by side, of peacock blue and a pinkish red. They cut a figure against the blue sky with the graceful droop of the long sleeves and the hips swaying forward a little, borne on a light wind. Every now and then the blue sleeve slapped at the red sleeve guardedly without lifting itself as if afraid to be seen. After a while the red sleeve slapped back and it was the blue one's turn to seem indifferent. At times they appeared to join hands. She was somehow reminded of herself and Third Master. They had just happened to be near. He was always teasing her. She was fool enough to take him seriously and he got frightened, that was all. She was able to think of him without flinching now that they no longer had anything to do with each other and he had lost his fortune. Sunlight touched the corner of the red sleeve. It was all so long ago.
She was either on the couch or at the window, not hanging over it brazenly but standing over to one side ready to draw back if noticed. Around tea time the hawker of bean-curd flower came and parked his stove and cupboard in the alley. He dished out the amber soup clouded by pale watery bean-curd which he just called haw, flower.
'Haw 0! . . . Haw 0!' Faraway in the late sun it became 'Aw 0! . . . Aw 0!' a hollow-sounding echo straight down the passage of time.
The amahs collected the water-melon seeds and put them out to dry on basket lids on the window sill. Small red seeds, the store-bought ones were black. The red brick house opposite was still older than this one and just as hemmed in by the new little slum alley. A bee flew across the long row of upstairs windows, its body golden in the sun. That was where she had seen her reflection that night. One of the windows kept banging, a desolate sound in the silence.
`How is it everybody's out all day?' she said to an amah.
'They're people who live in little homes,' said the amah.
That was what they called lodgers. The house was sub-let to several families. At dusk the rooms remained dark. A bamboo pole came out of a window, clumsy in its length, groping uncertainly for a foothold on this side. A ghostly mauve blouse on the pole jerkily inched nearer, arms stiffly outspread and half tilted. She watched with some apprehension and craned her neck out to make sure that the sill it settled on was next door.
At night there was a game of mahjong in the golden room. Somehow the entire interior was open to view as in old paintings. The men stripped down to the waist looked as if they were painted on gilded paper. Those that looked on stood about or paced around with narrow golden backs above the white trousers.
She watched them as you watch birds and animals in a cage. Now that the world was rid of her enemies there were no people left. She had visitors only at the three main festivals. Relatives having ignored her all these years were embarrassed to see more of her suddenly and seem like snobs. She did not seek their company either not wishing to seem eager. There was only her brother's family. Bingfa's wife came by herself the next time, more convenient for borrowing money. She put her off. Each took turns at further confidences about her own difficulties. It was a relief when the amah came in.
'Mistress, Third Master is here.'
She was taken aback. 'Ask him to sit in the parlour. I'll be right down.'
'Now what did he come for?' she muttered to Bingfa's wife.
She came down prepared for trouble. She would like to see how he was going to blackmail her after so many years and no witness. A woman's reputation was important but so was his. He had to live off people's good will from now on. He couldn't risk such talk getting out. There was no telling what he had up his sleeve. There were still many things she didn't know in the outside world. It was bracing. Everybody likes things to happen after all. When it comes to a point when really nothing good can happen, then bad things will do. If a bad thing cannot happen to other people then let it happen to oneself.
'Why, Third Master, what made you think of coming today?' she said. 'How is Third Mistress?'
'She hasn't been so well. Better now.'
'You must have made her angry again. Now that there's nobody to control you I really worry for Third Mistress.'
'As a matter of fact she's having an easier time now shedoesn't have to account for me to Old Mistress.'
'At last a conscientious word from you.'
Once they sat down and looked at each other smiling there was a feeling of security. Time had petrified their relationship so it stood between them, a prison wall and shelter.
'Second Sister-in-law has a nice house here.'
'The main thing is it's cheap. You saw how it was that day. A woman like me with a child in tow, how can I help getting frantic? Not like you, Third Master, you're used to a big coming and going of money.'
'With me it wouldn't help anyway.' He smoked a cigarette with a long holder.
'Money is a small matter; what made me angry is they don't treat people like people. All three of you crawled out of the same mother's belly, how is it the minute the mother died it's one man's world and none of the elders will say a word.'
'They'd never bother.'
'All bend with the wind.'
'Second Sister-in-law is more than a match for them, made Ninth Old Master jump up to the roof. So far there was just our Old Mistress with her chatter, he was a bit afraid of this Sister-in-law. Now there's just Second Sister-in-law who at least dares answer back.'
She knew this was meant to please her and was still duly pleased, murmuring, 'I was just too outspoken and what good did it do?'
'This is one more joke on him. There was that time when he started a newspaper to boost an actor. They ran down the rival female impersonator who had a war lord backing him. The newspaper got smashed up from top to bottom and the editor beaten up and the old master didn't dare go out for months.'
'Yes, I seem to have heard that Ninth Old Master likes to boost actors. One of the four great female impersonators was boosted up by him.'
'He only likes rabbits.' She never knew why northerners call professional homosexuals rabbits. Tzuming isn't his son.'
'Oh?' she said smiling. He had sounded so casual. Tzuming was Ninth Old Master's only son, already married. 'This I haven't heard,' she admitted. The women gossiped when they got together but never anything like this. Perhaps it was because she had no real friends among them. But she felt she was stepping into the men's world for the first time.
'He told a manservant to go in. Let him loose on the wife.' 'And the wife went along with it?'
'There must have been some understanding between husband and wife, otherwise the servant wouldn't have been so bold.'
'What happened to this man?'
'Later they let him go. It was said that when Tzuming was little he used to yell around the gatehouse, Young Master is my son.'
She half gasped laughing. To think that she herself nearly died for her guilty secret, nothing compared to this. Of course incest is something else again but it seemed to her that dallying with a servant was not much better. If that had been her they would say she was born cheap.
'And nobody said anything,' she said. He himself now, wouldn't he want to claim his uncle's fortune? Ninth Old Master was frugal apart from the promotion of actors and very strict with his son, so his inheritance was still intact. Having been a high official himself he had presumably added to it. With his prestige she supposed nobody dared sue him for a thing like this. It would only drag the family name through the mud and earn the hatred of all the relatives.
'Oh, this is an old story,' he said carelessly.
'Come to think of it, Ninth Old Master is a bit strange. . . .' Shadowy and chilly. She never could make him out except that one time he lost his temper at the family conference. Such fire, a small man like him kicking over the heavy chair, yet such a pimp and cuckold—imagine keeping that man around all those years after the son was born─why? Hoping for another heir for safety's sake? Certainly not to keep his wife occupied?
'It was the fashion among mandarins. There was this law against their going to singsong houses so they had boys to sing at their parties. But there were very few like him who couldn't stand women.'
'Ninth Old Mistress was said to have been a beauty too.'
`He made it up to her. What it comes to was adopting his wife's son.'
She laughed. 'That's you Yaos for you.'
'Well, you can't generalize. Like me for instance, I'm no use. They're the bold ones. Compared to them I the Third Yao did nothing except spend a little more money. The fact is I was a fool,' he said smiling with no change of expression. But something in the pause that followed showed he was speaking of that time with her in the temple. He was sorry now to have held back for the family's sake. Of course he was feeling bitter. It would seem to him that he had been treated shabbily at the division of property.
She put an end to the silence returning to the subject, `No wonder they all say Tzuming is stupid.' She had never noticed before that it was invariably said in a furtive tone with a reflective smile. She now understood it to mean that he was not a 'seed with the fragrance of books', a son of literate people. He didn't do well at his studies, nor did Big Master and Third Master for that matter.
'Does he himself know?' she whispered.
He shook his head slightly with a half-wink that dismissed a forbidden topic, as if Tzuming was within earshot. 'That fellow, there's a lot of jokes about him too.' Tzuming was strangely terrified of his father─not so strange in the light of what she now knew. But timid as he was he got into quite a few scrapes.
'Here I am laughing at others,' he said, 'I'm in a terrible plight myself. Can you lend me eight hundred dollars, Second Sister-in-law? I'll give it back as soon as the money comes from Wuhu.'
Although fully expecting this she was just as riled. She was talking and laughing with him out of good manners and sophistication. Did he think she still felt the same about him after the way he had treated her? He took it for granted just because there was no possibility of her meeting any other man. She said smiling with scarcely a moment's pause, 'Ai-yo, Third Master, after all my complaints, don't you know Second Sister-in-law is poor? And you with a rich brother and sister-in-law right there.'
'To tell you the truth, some I just don't care to ask.'
'I realize it's an honour, only it pats me in a dilemma, just when I'm short from moving house.'
'Lend a hand, Second Sister-in-law! I the Third Yao may owe money all over, this is the first time yet that I opened my mouth to my own people.'
'If only it weren't just now. I'm waiting for the money from the land myself.'
'Lend a hand, lend a hand. Second Sister-in-law has always been good to me.'
Is this blackmail? 'And got dog bites in return,' she said.
He grinned. 'That's why I'd rather come to Second Sister-in-law; if I get turned down I deserve it. I wouldn't take it from, the others.'
Still he would not have come to her unless he was really desperate. Of course what he got at the dividing would not last him long and his creditors must be closing in on him. The end was near then and this time there was no front-row seat for her as at the family conference. In her backwaters it would take her a long time even to hear of it. Closing the door on him was no revenge. There's power in money only when it's used, given or withheld unexpectedly, never taken for granted. She had surprised herself with the sudden decision and knew at the back of her mind it was all excuses. 'I'll never learn to be like you Yaos,' she shook her head smiling. 'As long as I have a mouthful of rice to eat it will embarrass me not to help the family.'
'As I said, Second Sister-in-law is good.'
She glared at him. 'How much did you say?'
'Eight hundred.'
'Who'd have so much in the house?'
'Come, come, Second Sister-in-law, you have enough silver dollars holding down your trunks.'
'I'll see if I can scrape together five hundred.'
'Seven hundred, seven hundred,' he said placatingly. 'Maybe I can get by with seven.'
'You'll be lucky if I can find five.'
Half-way up the stairs she remembered Bingfa's wife was still here. It was going to be embarrassing to get the money out in front of her when she had just been refused a loan and after complaining to her all along about the Yaos, especially the third branch, ever since the trouble over the pearl flower when she the sister-in-law had suffered just as much. Besides a woman giving a man money─without sufficient reason, which still did not make it any better. There was nothing to do but harden her heart and keep walking up. At least that will show her nobody has first claim on me, she said to herself.
Bingfa's wife was sitting by the window playing 'catch the tortoise' with dominoes.
'This Third Master is really in a fix, with his black rice and white rice and three households,' she said as she turned away to find the key for the cabinet. Opium is black rice because it becomes just as much a staff of life. 'What can I do? I have to make a gesture for this once.'
She counted the banknotes with her back to her sister-in-law who was trying not to watch her openly. She counted too fast. One cannot short-change a debtor. Her ears burned as she riffled through the roll a second time, knowing this would make it sound even more.
'He'll come again,' Bingfa's wife said.
`There'll be no next time. Who can afford to keep this up?'
She was fifty dollars short. She turned to the stack of trunks at the foot of the bed, carved with gold dragons and red lacquer and sheathed in padded blue jackets fastened with frogs. She opened the top one to get the packs of silver dollars which 'pinned down' the corners of the trunk Gold and silver have powers. With four tall stacks standing here like pillars no witch could use the Five Demon Movers Method to steal anything. It took for ever to unfasten the row of frogs. Bingfa's wife had gone back to her dominoes.
She gave a little cry when the trunk lid slammed down on her hand. Bingfa's wife made as if to get up and help hold the lid, then went on rearranging her dominoes into the shape of a tortoise.
The coins packed in mulberry bark paper were so bulky she had to hold them in her pocket as she went downstairs, so that the weight would not tear her blouse. He stayed a little longer, then started up, mumbling half laughing, `Going, got to be going,' one of his well-practised smooth exits. She could be just another aunt to elude. Everybody said the ladies were easy to cheat and even if not deceived they were too embarrassed to say no when he made a nuisance of himself. Somehow she felt easier at this familiar little scene. According to the Confucian clan law he was family while her brother was just a relative. She leaned heavily on this. Otherwise she would really feel bad about her brother. The wife was different. When he came to fetch his wife after supper she mentioned Third Master being here but would not say why. His wife said nothing. He would hear of it soon enough when they got home.