Inheritance Read online

  “No.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  Hu Mudan shook her head.

  “Please stay here with us,” Chanyi said, and closed her eyes.

  Hu Mudan stayed there, in the garden, breathing the smell of autumn chrysanthemums and the sweet, worn scent of roses faint amid the odor of burning. The woman’s heavy head dropped into her lap. A thick braid slid against her calf, but otherwise she lay still, the head flung back over Hu Mudan’s knees. A jade pendant lay in the hollow of her throat, and the pockets of her robe were embroidered with dragons. Examining the pale green robe that washed and flickered in the flames, Hu Mudan noticed the slight bulge of the belly beneath, and understood that the robe was a gift from someone who very much desired this daughter-in-law to give birth to a boy.

  The fire burned. All over China, houses were flaming up in a splendid light before they settled ghostlike into embers and ashes. Hu Mudan sat in the garden with the young daughter-in-law from the Wang family. She felt a sense of peace and determination rise through her like an answering flame. She had found someone on whom to focus her care. She had been with many men, but she had never felt trust before, and now she instinctively knew that to trust someone meant to be responsible for that person. Hu Mudan tipped her palm to the marbled glow of the fire, and she saw the path of her life run before her, like lightning branching in her hand.

  SHE HAD BEEN HUNGRY. She had been alone. In that time of trouble, Chanyi had made room for her. Hu Mudan believed in the old loyalties, and she immediately began to serve as Chanyi’s maid. Only she knew how to comb Chanyi’s knee-length hair, beginning at the ends and moving gently to her scalp. Only she understood how to keep her mistress safe from the despondency that haunted her. After Chanyi bore two daughters and her hair grew light and thin, Hu Mudan did not comment but continued to comb carefully, gently. When it became apparent that Chanyi had lost her beauty, Hu Mudan did not offer flattery or false hope. For this, her mistress loved her more. She gave Hu Mudan her pendant of green jade. She begged Hu Mudan to take care of her daughters if anything might happen to her.

  When Chanyi died, Hu Mudan vowed never to marry. Instead, she would watch over the two girls.

  For more than five years afterward, Hu Mudan immersed herself in the household whose master had stolen Chanyi’s beauty, serving the mother-in-law who had broken Chanyi’s spirit. She sat old Mma on her chamber pot and helped to pull her up. She watched over my grand-father and tried, with limited success, to keep him out of the paigao games. Most importantly, she looked after my mother and aunt. She watched the girls as tenderly as she had watched Chanyi. She monitored their manners, appetite, and growth. She checked their stools, fingernails, their palms, the scent of their breath, all with a dry, clear expression, as if she waited for the worst but would not flinch from it.

  She worried that they would suffer from the melancholia that had overtaken their mother. But the sisters showed no sign of it. Junan had faith in justice and in the order of things. She read Confucius, with his strict hierarchy of obedience within family walls: wife to husband, daughter to father, younger to elder. According to these laws, she was responsible for Yinan, and Yinan must obey her. She would in turn obey her father, who would in turn respect and cherish old Mma. This system guaranteed that when she grew old, her own grandchildren would tend to her.

  Two more different sisters could not have been imagined. While Junan’s white skin and studied calm foretold her beauty and poise, Yinan’s narrow face and tadpole eyes predicted nothing. While Junan held her temper, showing only cool propriety, Yinan had no propriety to speak of. She favored roots and secrets, buried treasures. She liked to dig in the earth, arranging mud and stones into imaginary courtyards. When told to come indoors, she sat for hours in the kitchen, drinking rice porridge mixed with sugar and listening to the cook’s outlandish stories. She listened carefully and rarely laughed. It was as if she sensed that veil, thin as rice paper, which divided the living world from what had passed away.

  And yet, with all their differences, the sisters loved each other with a ferocity that soothed Hu Mudan. It comforted and haunted her to see the way they loved each other. The two girls had always been close, but after Chanyi’s death, they grew inseparable. They did everything together and they never fought. In the afternoons, when Junan studied her characters, Yinan sat drawing at her side. On some nights when Hu Mudan could not sleep, she left the pallet in her room behind the kitchen and crossed the courtyard to the sisters’ quarters. She often found them together, in one of their bedrooms, with their dark heads close and their hair strewn across the pillows like lines of ink.

  MY GRANDFATHER HAD indeed taken a mistress, although not a mortal woman. He had always had a thirst for games, and in the time Hu Mudan had known him he’d gradually become insatiable for paigao. All other pastimes grew pedestrian and dull. Cards could be counted and chess strategized. Only in paigao did he find what he desired: the dedication to uncertainty, the fellow players who shared his own need to extinguish themselves in the wild and bitter hopefulness of chance.

  He explained to Hu Mudan that she must keep the household expenses to a minimum. Only his daughters and old Mma must be spared. “Don’t say anything to anyone,” he said. “The trouble won’t last for long.” But the trouble lingered and of course the servants were the first to notice. The cook remarked upon the poor quality of the vegetables; the errand boy was not happy with the smaller pot of rice. Hu Mudan ate less. By day, she monitored the gossip of the neighborhood servants—the most reliable way to learn how much my grandfather had lost. On the nights when he played host, she would convince the girls that he was only having fun; after they had gone to bed, she would eavesdrop on the front room. She learned which players were cowards and cheats and which were bluffers.

  Toward midsummer, the doorman took to wandering off for hours at a time. My grandfather didn’t notice and so Hu Mudan herself stood at the front doors, waiting. The mud from the spring rains had dried into a cracked visage. She stood shivering in the slanting sun. Something hung over the house, a shadow with black wings.

  FROM HER POSITION at the doors, Hu Mudan could detect the smell of horse mixed with the closer odor of ammonia. On her left, she could plainly hear the spattering sound of the errand boy relieving himself. From the kitchen came the sounds of china spoons scraping on china bowls.

  For a half hour, nothing happened. Then she heard someone coming up the road. She peered between the doors and saw a man walking up the Haizi Street from the center of town. Clearly a countryman, a stranger, and no friend of the family. Despite the heat, he wore a bulky cotton jacket that made it impossible to see the shape of his body. But he seemed familiar to Hu Mudan. Perhaps it was his walk. She watched as he approached until she could almost make out the features under the brim of his straw hat: strong and sun-stained features with eyes hidden in shadow. It was the chicken seller from the neighborhood market. She knew little about him except that he came in twice a week from a large farm owned by his wife’s family outside the city.

  Hu Mudan possessed a hunger unforgivable in a respectable housekeeper. The hunger showed in her small almond eyes, slanted a bit too high, and unusually bright; it showed in her shrewd mouth, which could soften into an enticing pout. She had a smooth neck and high breasts, neat arms and legs, and unblemished skin the color of sand. Moreover, she had never been pregnant. Long ago, she had suspected she was barren, and this brought her a freedom that lasted into her thirties.

  She had noticed him earlier that morning, a warm morning when even sounds took on the vividness of impending summer. The sun already burned upon the merchants and their goods, brightening the flock of chickens and strengthening their smell. Hu Mudan recalled better times, not long past, when Mma had ordered a bird slaughtered for a single pot of soup. It was while contemplating this that Hu Mudan became aware of the man watching her.

 
He was a strong man, with ruddy cheeks and muscled shoulders, whose vitality stood out in each gesture. He saw that she was looking. He revealed a line of strong, white teeth. Then he produced a long reed flute and raised it to his mouth. His generous lips puckered around the flute. A cascade of small, bright notes flew out, not put together in the way of any tune that Hu Mudan could recognize. The chickens strutted toward him and gathered at his feet.

  For a moment Hu Mudan stood captivated by the gathering birds, by the chicken man’s music, by his quick, long-fingered hands. But when he stopped and smiled at her, she remembered the family. Since Chanyi’s death, she had been like a nun, watching over her two charges, afraid to let them out of her sight. She had no money to buy chickens and no energy to deal with his entreaties. She turned and walked away, considering it ended.

  Now as she peered between the doors, she realized that he had found her house. He stood outside the doors, bashfully, his hands hidden inside his coat. She felt herself redden with this flattering surprise. She knew that he could see her peering through the hole. Slowly he brought out his hands and held up an offering: a plump brown cochin hen, with pretty black spots and a little green hood tied over her eyes to prevent her from fussing.

  Hu Mudan cracked open the doors.

  She first defended herself. She pointed out that she was in charge of the two daughters since her master had lost his wife. As their caregiver, she should uphold the good values of the household. When he rebutted her with rumors—that her late mistress had killed herself and her master was a hopeless gambler—Hu Mudan said the stories were false. She placed value in the old ideal of xingyi: faithfulness and loyalty. Cheerfully, he heard her out. He replied that this was the kind of word the emperors had once used to control naïve and hopeful people. Meeting his eyes, she felt a sudden pounding in her chest, as if a stranger had spoken her childhood name.

  For years she had sealed herself away from the delight of touch. And now, when she had forgotten herself in sorrow and worry, it came knocking at her door. Here was pleasure, as troubling and undeniable as the scent of summer. She had raised my mother and aunt with care, remembering what Chanyi would have wanted. But she suspected that dear, lost Chanyi, who had been her friend, would not have minded this one man.

  “Go to the pump and wash,” she said. “Then come around to the kitchen door.”

  She closed the door and leaned against it with the hen under her arm, her brown face blank in the sun.

  If it hadn’t been for the weather, so fragrant and so warm; if she hadn’t stopped to listen to his bird-charming music; if he hadn’t tied that little green scarf over the hen, would Hu Mudan have left the house untended and brought upon us the story that would define our lives? I wonder if there was anything she could have done to protect us from the fate that had been knocking, waiting for this small, unguarded moment to enter.

  Hu Mudan and the chicken peddler entered her small room behind the pantry. It was swept absolutely clean. The shelf held only her straw hat and a glass jar with holes punched in the lid, where Yinan’s pet silkworms were growing fat upon the leaves from the mulberry tree. The two of them lay down together. The man looked into her with his strange eyes and gently touched her face. Hu Mudan felt her skin pull tight and her face began to glow, felt all of her—her fingertips, her nostrils, her pupils sensing light—grow charged with pleasure. She took a deep breath; she was acutely aware of the scent of the man, and her own scent rising to meet his. Very close to her face, he smiled. She smiled into his eyes, the wet color of earth on the bottom of a pond. She did not hear her master’s evening guests entering the gate, did not hear them greeting him in their bright, expectant voices.

  Later, in the courtyard, Junan called her name. “Hu Mudan?” She raised her voice. “Hu Mudan!” But Hu Mudan didn’t hear a thing.

  AT SEVENTEEN, JUNAN LET VERY LITTLE ESCAPE HER NOTICE. She had seen the skimpy meals and had caught on to the way the pretty maid, Weiwei, eyed with anticipation what she and her sister left in the serving dishes. She had noted that the doorman wandered off. Of all these troubling changes, the most disturbing was the way her father had faded to a kind of daylight sleep, with his energies held back, waiting for the games, when he would leave the house for days or stay holed up in the front room with his friends.

  He had big plans, her father did: only a few nights of lucky tiles must come his way, and he would realize them. He would finance an expansion to the north, using the Grand Canal to send cotton to a lucrative new market. She had overheard him describing this expansion to his cousin Baoding—omitting, of course, the necessity of the lucky tiles. But she knew the tiles’ significance. She was his daughter and she understood, even approved of, his big plans. What made Junan uncomfortable were his plans for her. He had none. That is, she knew that when the subject of her marriage grew unavoidable, he would send her to the household of his friend and neighbor, Chen, as a suitable bride for young Chen Da-Huan.

  There was nothing in Chen Da-Huan that Junan could object to. He was a quiet boy, idealistic and round-shouldered, who, whenever she saw him, looked right past her and into his vision for China’s future. He would wave his soft hands and speak about the perils of imperialism, set forth his belief that China must be freed from the oppression of all foreigners and returned to the glory of her past. He had such idealism because his family was rich, far removed from the worrying about the yuan that could be made through dealing with foreigners.

  Perhaps young Chen Da-Huan would be a decent husband. And yet, whenever she spoke to him, she could not shake the sense that Chanyi would have been saddened by the match. Her mother had never mentioned the subject, and yet she knew this. Whenever Junan considered marrying him, her lips pressed tight against the thought.

  Junan approached her father’s office with her lips set in a line. She could hear the scraping, banging sounds of men bringing more chairs into the adjacent room. The lights were on, and Junan saw her father gesture to the errand boy. As she stood listening and watching, the sound of moving furniture grew so loud her bones hurt, so loud it seemed the house would rattle apart.

  “Where is Hu Mudan?” she asked. But in the kitchen they didn’t know. Perhaps she had run out on an errand.

  Junan decided to sit near the door and wait. She knew she shouldn’t be seeking Hu Mudan as if the housekeeper were a blood relative, but no one noticed. She sat on the stool where the cook sometimes snapped the beans. The dusk thickened in the courtyard. From somewhere in the house came the faint sound of a flute. Then she heard the slap of the white tablecloth and the spilling of the little bone chips, followed by a brief silence and the click of tiles, broken by shouts and laughter.

  It was almost dark when Junan heard a knock. Could it be Hu Mudan? She slid off her stool and went to open the door.

  In front of her stood two young men. One wore a faded tunic and the other an Army uniform short in the sleeves. They were too young and poor to be her father’s friends and yet she recognized, in the expression of the taller one, a familiar aura of anticipation. Parasite, she thought. She noticed something careless in his face and did not like it. He was handsome. The other was younger, tight-lipped and angular, with bad posture and little round eyeglasses.

  “We are here for Wang Daming,” said the handsome one. He had a country accent. “Will you let us in?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Ah, come on,” he said lightheartedly. “We won’t eat you up.” He glanced over her shoulder. They all could hear the men plainly, laughing in the office.

  “Let’s go, Li Ang,” said the younger one. “She doesn’t want us here.”

  “Let me handle this,” said Li Ang.

  “I’m leaving,” said the other.

  Li Ang set his jaw. In that moment Junan understood the visitors were brothers. Li Ang did not turn around. “You go home and read,” he said, and shrugged. “
In the morning, you’ll see how much you’ve missed.”

  The younger brother vanished into the dusk.

  Li Ang remained, expectantly. Junan thought of closing the doors in his face, but she did not. He took her silence as encouragement. “Well?” he asked.

  She raised her eyes up briefly to his face and then down.

  Although she had only flicked her eyelids, although she had barely glanced at him in the thickening dusk, she had taken him in as completely as a breath. She saw a young man, really a boy, dressed in a handed-down second lieutenant’s uniform but with no hat, revealing stand-up hair and features stained from the outdoors. He was only a little older than she, long-legged and not quite grown. She sensed that he was hungry. She could also sense in him the effect she had on people, one of widening distance. She could already feel a vague hostility toward herself, a cool, pretty girl, indifferent to handsome strangers. This did not trouble her. She held herself as carefully as if her spine had been painted with a brushstroke, and traced her finger in a circle on the doorframe.

  He took refuge in the personal. “Is Wang Daming your baba?” His voice was deep and surprisingly rich; his smallest phrases hinted melody. Such a voice could summon even a woman bent on coldness. She lifted up her gaze to him. His eyes were bright, remote. He stepped closer to her, close enough to touch her.

  Junan watched him through her eyelashes. “My father’s busy. You can’t come in.”

  “I am here to play paigao, not to obey you.” He smiled. What made him do this? How did he know, immediately, that teasing was the one thing that she could not bear?

  It was something gentle in his voice that broke her control. She reached out and grabbed his sleeve. “I didn’t say you could!”

  They stared at one another. Her arm was long, her grip fierce. If he pulled away she would rip a piece out of his only uniform. Surely he must have been alarmed, faced with such fierce passion in a strange girl. Certainly he must have seen and been warned. How could he not have been aware of it? But he was not. He merely smiled again and waited for things to change. A long moment passed. Eventually he saw what he was waiting for, a softening of the brow, a yielding of the mouth. Her shoulders dropped. His smile had done its work. She did not invite him, did not lead him, but she allowed him to pass, to enter the room where the players had gathered.