Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (4 page)

That was the dream. I shared it with no one. Once when I woke, crying out, my brother turned on the light. He wanted to know what I’d been dreaming but I pretended I didn’t remember. The dream made me feel guilty. I felt guilty
in
the dream too because my enraged father knew we didn’t want to live with him. The dream represented us taking him
home, or trying to, but it was nevertheless understood by all of us that he was to live alone. He was this derelict back from death, but what we were doing was taking him to some place where he would live by himself without help from anyone until he died again.

At one point I became so fearful of this dream that I tried not to go to sleep. I tried to think of good things about my father and to remember him before his illness. He used to call me “matey.” “Hello, matey,” he would say when he came home from work. He always wanted us to go someplace—to the store, to the park, to a ball game. He loved to walk. When I went walking with him he would say: “Hold your shoulders back, don’t slump. Hold your head up and look at the world. Walk as if you meant it!” As he strode down the street his shoulders moved from side to side, as if he was hearing some kind of cakewalk. He moved with a bounce. He was always eager to see what was around the corner.

The next request for a letter coincided with a special occasion in the house. My brother Harold had met a girl he liked and had gone out with her several times. Now she was coming to our house for dinner.

We had prepared for this for days, cleaning everything in sight, giving the house a going-over, washing the dust of disuse from the glasses and good dishes. My mother came home early from work to get the dinner going. We opened the gateleg table in the living room and brought in the kitchen chairs. My mother spread the table with a laundered white cloth and put out her silver. It was the first family occasion since my father’s illness.

I liked my brother’s girlfriend a lot. She was a thin girl with very straight hair and she had a terrific smile. Her presence seemed to excite the air. It was amazing to have a living
breathing girl in our house. She looked around and what she said was: “Oh, I’ve never seen so many books!” While she and my brother sat at the table my mother was in the kitchen putting the food into serving bowls and I was going from the kitchen to the living room, kidding around like a waiter, with a white cloth over my arm and a high style of service, placing the serving dish of green beans on the table with a flourish. In the kitchen my mother’s eyes were sparkling. She looked at me and nodded and mimed the words: “She’s adorable!”

My brother suffered himself to be waited on. He was wary of what we might say. He kept glancing at the girl—her name was Susan—to see if we met with her approval. She worked in an insurance office and was taking courses in accounting at City College. Harold was under a terrible strain but he was excited and happy too. He had bought a bottle of Concord grape wine to go with the roast chicken. He held up his glass and proposed a toast. My mother said: “To good health and happiness,” and we all drank, even I. At that moment the phone rang and I went into the bedroom to get it.

“Jonathan? This is your Aunt Frances. How is everyone?”

“Fine, thank you.”

“I want to ask one last favor of you. I need a letter from Jack. Your grandma’s very ill. Do you think you can?”

“Who is it?” my mother called from the living room.

“OK, Aunt Frances,” I said quickly. “I have to go now, we’re eating dinner.” And I hung up the phone.

“It was my friend Louie,” I said, sitting back down. “He didn’t know the math pages to review.”

The dinner was very fine. Harold and Susan washed the dishes and by the time they were done my mother and I had folded up the gateleg table and put it back against the wall and I had swept the crumbs up with the carpet sweeper. We all sat
and talked and listened to records for a while and then my brother took Susan home. The evening had gone very well.

Once when my mother wasn’t home my brother had pointed out something: the letters from Jack weren’t really necessary. “What is this ritual?” he said, holding his palms up. “Grandma is almost totally blind, she’s half deaf and crippled. Does the situation really call for a literary composition? Does it need verisimilitude? Would the old lady know the difference if she was read the phone book?”

“Then why did Aunt Frances ask me?”

“That is the question, Jonathan. Why did she? After all, she could write the letter herself—what difference would it make? And if not Frances, why not Frances’s sons, the Amherst students? They should have learned by now to write.”

“But they’re not Jack’s sons,” I said.

“That’s exactly the point,” my brother said. “The idea is
service.
Dad used to bust his balls getting them things wholesale, getting them deals on things. Frances of Westchester really needed things at cost. And Aunt Molly. And Aunt Molly’s husband, and Aunt Molly’s ex-husband. Grandma, if she needed an errand done. He was always on the hook for something. They never thought his time was important. They never thought every favor he got was one he had to pay back. Appliances, records, watches, china, opera tickets, any goddamn thing. Call Jack.”

“It was a matter of pride to him to be able to do things for them,” I said. “To have connections.”

“Yeah, I wonder why,” my brother said. He looked out the window.

Then suddently it dawned on me that I was being implicated.

“You should use your head more,” my brother said.

Yet I had agreed once again to write a letter from the desert and so I did. I mailed it off to Aunt Frances. A few days later, when I came home from school, I thought I saw her sitting in her car in front of our house. She drove a black Buick Road-master, a very large clean car with whitewall tires. It was Aunt Frances all right. She blew the horn when she saw me. I went over and leaned in at the window.

“Hello, Jonathan,” she said. “I haven’t long. Can you get in the car?”

“Mom’s not home,” I said. “She’s working.”

“I know that. I came to talk to you.”

“Would you like to come upstairs?”

“I can’t, I have to get back to Larchmont. Can you get in for a moment, please?”

I got in the car. My Aunt Frances was a very pretty white-haired woman, very elegant, and she wore tasteful clothes. I had always liked her and from the time I was a child she had enjoyed pointing out to everyone that I looked more like her son than Jack’s. She wore white gloves and held the steering wheel and looked straight ahead as she talked, as if the car was in traffic and not sitting at the curb.

“Jonathan,” she said, “there is your letter on the seat. Needless to say I didn’t read it to Grandma. I’m giving it back to you and I won’t ever say a word to anyone. This is just between us. I never expected cruelty from you. I never thought you were capable of doing something so deliberately cruel and perverse.”

I said nothing.

“Your mother has very bitter feelings and now I see she has poisoned you with them. She has always resented the family. She is a very strong-willed, selfish person.”

“No she isn’t,” I said.

“I wouldn’t expect you to agree. She drove poor Jack crazy
with her demands. She always had the highest aspirations and he could never fulfill them to her satisfaction. When he still had his store he kept your mother’s brother, who drank, on salary. After the war when he began to make a little money he had to buy Ruth a mink jacket because she was so desperate to have one. He had debts to pay but she wanted a mink. He was a very special person, my brother, he should have accomplished something special, but he loved your mother and devoted his life to her. And all she ever thought about was keeping up with the Joneses.”

I watched the traffic going up the Grand Concourse. A bunch of kids were waiting at the bus stop at the corner. They had put their books on the ground and were horsing around.

“I’m sorry I have to descend to this,” Aunt Frances said. “I don’t like talking about people this way. If I have nothing good to say about someone, I’d rather not say anything. How is Harold?”

“Fine.”

“Did he help you write this marvelous letter?”

“No.”

After a moment she said more softly: “How are you all getting along?”

“Fine.”

“I would invite you up for Passover if I thought your mother would accept.”

I didn’t answer.

She turned on the engine. “I’ll say good-bye now, Jonathan. Take your letter. I hope you give some time to thinking about what you’ve done.”

That evening when my mother came home from work I saw that she wasn’t as pretty as my Aunt Frances. I usually thought my mother was a good-looking woman, but I saw now that she was too heavy and that her hair was undistinguished.

“
Why are you looking at me?” she said.

“I’m not.”

“I learned something interesting today,” my mother said. “We may be eligible for a VA pension because of the time your father spent in the Navy.”

That took me by surprise. Nobody had ever told me my father was in the Navy.

“In World War I,” she said, “he went to Webb’s Naval Academy on the Harlem River. He was training to be an ensign. But the war ended and he never got his commission.”

After dinner the three of us went through the closets looking for my father’s papers, hoping to find some proof that could be filed with the Veterans Administration. We came up with two things, a Victory medal, which my brother said everyone got for being in the service during the Great War, and an astounding sepia photograph of my father and his shipmates on the deck of a ship. They were dressed in bell-bottoms and T-shirts and armed with mops and pails, brooms and brushes.

“I never knew this,” I found myself saying. “I never knew this.”

“You just don’t remember,” my brother said.

I was able to pick out my father. He stood at the end of the row, a thin, handsome boy with a full head of hair, a mustache, and an intelligent smiling countenance.

“He had a joke,” my mother said. “They called their training ship the S.S.
Constipation
because it never moved.”

Neither the picture nor the medal was proof of anything, but my brother thought a duplicate of my father’s service record had to be in Washington somewhere and that it was just a matter of learning how to go about finding it.

“The pension wouldn’t amount to much,” my mother said. “Twenty or thirty dollars. But it would certainly help.”

I took the picture of my father and his shipmates and
propped it against the lamp at my bedside. I looked into his youthful face and tried to relate it to the Father I knew. I looked at the picture a long time. Only gradually did my eye connect it to the set of Great Sea Novels in the bottom shelf of the bookcase a few feet away. My father had given that set to me: it was uniformly bound in green with gilt lettering and it included works by Melville, Conrad, Victor Hugo, and Captain Marryat. And lying across the top of the books, jammed in under the sagging shelf above, was his old ship’s telescope in its wooden case with the brass snap.

I thought how stupid, and imperceptive, and self-centered I had been never to have understood while he was alive what my father’s dream for his life had been.

On the other hand, I had written in my last letter from Arizona—the one that had so angered Aunt Frances—something that might allow me, the writer in the family, to soften my judgment of myself. I will conclude by giving the letter here in its entirety.

Dear Mama,

This will be my final letter to you since I have been told by the doctors that I am dying.

I have sold my store at a very fine profit and am sending Frances a check for five thousand dollars to be deposited in your account. My present to you, Mamaleh. Let Frances show you the passbook.

As for the nature of my ailment, the doctors haven’t told me what it is, but I know that I am simply dying of the wrong life. I should never have come to the desert. It wasn’t the place for me.

I have asked Ruth and the boys to have my body cremated and the ashes scattered in the ocean.

Your loving son,

Jack

AMY TAN

I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect from others, and eventually, though neither of us knew it at the time, chess games.

“Bite back your tongue,” scolded my mother when I cried loudly, yanking her hand toward the store that sold bags of salted plums. At home, she said, “Wise guy, he not go against wind. In Chinese we say, Come from South, blow with wind—poom!—North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen.”

The next week I bit back my tongue as we entered the store with the forbidden candies. When my mother finished her shopping, she quietly plucked a small bag of plums from the rack and put it on the counter with the rest of the items.

My mother imparted her daily truths so she could help my older brothers and me rise above our circumstances. We lived in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Like most of the other Chinese children who played in the back alleys of restaurants and curio shops, I didn’t think we were poor. My bowl was always full, three five-course meals every day, beginning with a soup full of mysterious things I didn’t want to know the names of.