The Steps of the Sun

Chapter 15

The theater occupied the bottom floors of a hideous new office building—one of dozens along Chang An Avenue a mile east of Tien An Men Square. We drove up to it in a chauffeured limousine. It was I who arranged the demolition of Mitsubishi Tower in New York twenty years before; this Chinese abomination resembled that Japanese one, except for the statues. Flanking the doorway were massive bronzes of a peasant and a soldier, shirtsleeves rolled, staring tight-lipped toward the future. What in hell is so holy about the future? Anyone who feels that way about it should be forced to read history at gunpoint. The crowd was mostly young; they wore blue jeans or quilted Synlon pants, and bright foul-weather jackets. They were probably students from the Institute of Life Enrichment and Managerial Skills, a few blocks away. Some stared as the theater manager led us past the ticket queue and into the lobby. Conspicuous as I was with my height and blond beard, it was Mourning Dove who attracted the stares; she responded with a thoughtful frown.

A flunky had rushed ahead of us, and when we were ushered into our box he was hanging a painting of Chairwoman Chu, arms folded in her turn-of-the-century black jacket. He left the picture crooked for a moment, held Mourning Dove’s chair for her obsequiously, murmuring praises as she seated herself, then quickly straightened Madame Chu and left.

When we were alone I said, “Some of those looks downstairs were mean.”

She lit a Lucky Strike with a stainless-steel Zippo and held the closed lighter in her frail hand for a moment. I saw with surprise that the hand was trembling. She put the lighter in the pocket of her gown and said, “The accident near Wu has affected my standing with the people.”

I remembered my agitation at being hanged in effigy on Madison Avenue. “Are you in any danger, Mourning Dove?”

“I have enemies.”

“I bet you have.” I thought of White Heron.

The play had been running for two months; it would close in a week. We had been driven into Peking that afternoon, had gone to the People’s Hall of Records for a brief ceremony and then, at Mourning Dove’s instructions, were driven here.

While we waited for the curtain, people kept looking up at us from time to time. Some seemed only curious to see a Party official and her blond escort, but some showed open hostility. I settled back into my Victorian opera chair, rested my elbow on one of its little antimacassars, and lit a cigar. It was like a box in a movie Western: the chairs were upholstered in dark-purple velvet; the oil painting of China’s first Party Chairwoman hung over velvet draperies behind us; there was a brass railing in front of us with yet more purple velvet hanging from the rail to the floor. But it was comfortable and spacious. And I knew that what you pay for in China is privacy and space. China may be down to half a billion souls, but it still teems. I chewed nervously on my cigar and left Mourning Dove to her thoughts, almost bursting with impatience for the curtain to rise. By the time it went up I had cleaned my glasses twice and my cigar was a mess. I ground it out in the ashtray and leaned forward toward the stage below.

The witches were adequate but no thrill. They were got up as Japanese Shinto priests and their English was more comical than scary. But their old faces did look like something to be reckoned with, and the blasted heath they stood on made me think of those vast acres of obsidian I had lived on so long:

Macbeth was a big Australian named Wellfleet Close, with an Aussie’s red face and a bellowing voice; he looked as if he had the required gift for murder. Duncan and Banquo were Southeast Asians. I know the play pretty well, having a certain spiritual familiarity with that dangerous couple; I knew when to expect her first appearance. But when the scene abruptly cut to Lady Macbeth with a big letter in her hands, I was startled. There she was, and yet not really. She wore a long russet gown and no wig; the bright lights made her gray hair shine and her eyes seem large and commanding. I knew it was Isabel, yet it was Lady Macbeth too.

She began reading the letter aloud,

Even while pouring tea Isabel could dazzle with her voice. Here in Peking, after all the uncertain accents that preceded her entrance, the sound of her own Scottish speech, the real English language, was electrifying. Even these Chinese became hushed at the authentic ring of it. The play went on through its blood and dreams, and Isabel took every scene she was in, dominating the stage. She was a first-rate actress. I’d had no idea. When it ended with Macbeth’s head on the pole, I glanced over at Mourning Dove. She seemed lost in thought. Applause filled the theater.

During the curtain calls I stood and shouted, “Isabel!” and she looked up to stare at me a moment. I could have climbed down to the stage, but something in her look made me keep my distance. Maybe Lady Macbeth was still in there, and I didn’t want any part of that.

When she looked away from me I sat and leaned back in my seat, trying to calm myself. Mourning Dove was lighting a cigarette. The sound of the applause became fragmentary. Voices began calling out. Men and women in the front rows were standing, not facing the stage now but facing our box, staring up in anger, shouting, “Comrade Soong. Comrade Soong.”

Mourning Dove rose, stepped to the front of the box and held the rail with both hands. She looked very old and frail, but her voice was steady. She spoke in Chinese. “I am Mourning Dove Soong. What is wanted of me?”

“An accounting,” someone shouted, “an accounting of the Death Tax for Electricity. An explanation of Wu.” More shouts repeated this. I came over beside her for moral support, but she seemed not to need any. I was in more need of help than she, with emotions flying around in my stomach like leaves in a monsoon.

“I will come to the stage,” Mourning Dove said. I stared at her, shocked. She put her hand on my arm and said, “One is accountable to the People.”

“Let me go down there with you, Mourning Dove,” I said.

“If you wish.” We left the box, went down a staircase and through a small door that led backstage. I looked around for Isabel. She was not in sight.

Then suddenly I was onstage with the curtain up, blinking out across bright lights at a bunch of angry Chinese, most of them standing. Beside me stood Mourning Dove, only as high as the middle of my chest, with a cigarette in her hand and her eyes straight ahead.

“Nine hundred seventy died at Wu,” Mourning Dove said. “Another thousand will die before this winter is a memory. It was I who ordered the reactor built.”

They were silent for a moment. Then someone shouted out, “Murderess.” And someone else shouted, “Lady Macbeth! Bloody hands!” I began to be afraid for her.

“This theater is well-lighted and warm,” Mourning Dove said. “China has power everywhere because of uranium. You do not labor on foot in rice paddies, nor do your mothers or fathers. You study at universities and attend the theater. Your homes are warm. A price is paid for this.”

“Too high,” someone shouted—a young woman with traditional bangs and an army jacket. “It is too high a price.”

“Have you considered the alternative?” Mourning Dove said.

There was silence for a moment, and then a lean young man in the third row shouted, “China has coal, and wind, and tides.”

Mourning Dove was lighting another cigarette. When she closed her Zippo she looked at the man who had spoken and said, “Coal blackens the skies and the lungs. It is dangerous to mine. The wind and tides are a perpetual delight, but they will not power the factories of Hangchow nor warm the hearths of Shanghai. That is a dream.”

The young man only looked more furious. “Coal may be burned with precision and the skies made safe from its breath. One must take pains.”

Before Mourning Dove could speak I said, in English, “Coal has its own tax of death, its own blight. I am a merchant of coal and speak from experience.”

A heavy man with a Charlie Chan mustache sat in the second row, wearing a business suit. “Who speaks?” he said loudly. “Who is this pale devil with the voice of a bear?”

“I’m Benjamin Belson,” I said. “I do not endorse Mourning Dove’s decision to build reactors. I cannot speak for the dead. But the decision was not a foolish one and Madame Soong has taken responsibility for it.”

Several voices cried out, “Foreign devil!” And then Charlie Chan stood and said, “Your English tongue is that of the killer Macbeth. Take your English and go home.”

I remembered those student rioters who had burned my effigy and told me to go home. I am proud of my Chinese; it was a thrill to use it. “I am home” I said in Chinese. “I am a citizen of the People’s Republic, and Mourning Dove Soong is my foster mother. I bring a new uranium, star-born, that will not destroy life.”

At my first words in their own language, many of them were clearly shocked. Several seated themselves, as if mulling it over. But the older man was relentless. “I cannot accept your professed gift to China. China has been promised gifts from white devils before. Opium was such a gift.”

“I am not British,” I said angrily. “I love China. I am dismayed to see its ancient culture discarded and its men become soft. But China’s greatness is everywhere manifest, as was that of America in the time of my grandfathers. I too mourn the accident at Wu and know the cost of China’s wealth is incalculable. In this case the dead speak.”

The old man was adamant. “Only the devil calculates with lives.”

Mourning Dove was watching his face. She spoke directly to him. “Someone must,” she said.

They stared at each other for a long moment. Finally he said, between his teeth, “Murderess,” and sat down. Another voice, from the back, picked up the cry of “Murderess” and then another. I heard a man shout, “Capitalist!”

And then a voice rang out from behind me and I turned to see Isabel standing by me with her hands on her hips, facing the audience. The part in the curtain was still moving from where she had just stepped through. She was in Lady Macbeth’s russet gown, but the stage makeup was gone from her face and it looked pale under the lights.

“What kind of Communists are you?” she said.

“English,” someone hissed.

Isabel’s voice could have waked the dead. “I am not English,” she said, spacing the words out. “And you are hypocrites. You make me ashamed for the great Mao and for his discipline.” She pointed at the old man. “Your jacket is from Saks. Solar power cannot make such jackets.”

Several of the more thoughtful ones had become quietly attentive. Finally a young woman who had been silent spoke up from about twenty rows back. “Yes, we live well. Must others die for that?”

Mourning Dove answered. “Yes.”

And immediately I said, “Not anymore.”

The anger was still in the air, but less powerfully. For a long minute everyone was silent, wondering if it would start up again. Then a couple in the back row got up and left the theater. More followed, and after a while the three of us were alone onstage with the footlights still blazing on us.

“Mother,” I said, “I’d like you to meet Isabel.”

In the gutters of Chang An Avenue lay occasional clumps of leftover red confetti, from some parade or other that afternoon. It was bitterly cold and halos of frozen mist surrounded the streetlamps. An occasional official car droned by under electric power, its red fender flags flapping. Party officials were on their way to meet sweethearts or were coming back from gambling clubs. A sleek electric bus hummed past us, with most of its seats empty.

“Did you mean that, Ben? That China was wise to use nuclear power?” Isabel said.

“I did at the time,” I said. “But I was defending Mourning Dove. God knows how many have died of leukemia alone.”

“I’ve thought of that.”

“Isabel,” I said, “I’m not impotent anymore.”

“That should ease your temper.”

“Yes.” There was a lighted skyscraper between us and Tien An Men Square and we were heading toward it. It looked a bit like the Empire State Building. “They’ve lost a quarter million people,” I said. “Maybe twice that. If they’d burned it right, coal would have been more humane. But they were in a hurry, and they had all that uranium at Sinkiang and Kiangsi…” I felt a sudden wave of sadness.

“Mourning Dove didn’t need your help,” Isabel said.

Two Mercedes limousines hummed past us, down the middle of the broad old avenue. From one of them came the muffled sound of Broadway music, a new musical called Oriental Blues. What strange transactions the modern world conducted!

“Anyway, it’s over. I’ll have my ship back in three weeks, and they’ll start changing cores.”

Isabel was wearing an enormous down-filled coat and a black watchcap pulled over her ears. I had my hands jammed in my pockets against the cold. Expert opinion said it was not an ice age, but here we were in another horror of a winter. “You were magnificent in the play,” I said, for the second time. “I’ve never seen a Lady Macbeth like you.”

“Ben,” she said, “it’s a fine play, but sometimes it felt like Fifty-first Street, with you.”

That annoyed me. “I’m no murderer.”

“That’s not what I mean. You can be awfully bombastic.”

“I’ve changed,” I said.

“I hope you have,” she said, a bit grimly. We walked in silence for a while. Abruptly she stopped and turned to me. “Ben,” she said, “I don’t want to be a supporting actress in your melodrama.”

That hit home, and I said nothing. We were coming up to the skyscraper. There were ideographs incised on an arch over its entrance. We stopped and looked at them.

“I can’t read Chinese,” Isabel said.

“It Says INSTITUTE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF HAPPINESS BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN.”

She hesitated. “You weren’t the only cause of those fights,” she said. “When I let you move in, my life felt empty and I expected you to fill it.”

“And did I?”

“With a vengeance.”

“Look,” I said, “that’s all past. You’ve got a career that’s clearly taking off. Fieler wants you to do Ibsen in New York. I have to buy into Con Ed or start up my own company. I’ve got to mount another voyage for endolin and uranium. We won’t be focusing on each other all the time. Besides, I can get it up now. Sometimes I can’t get it down.”

She looked at me closely. Under the lights by the building I could see the redness of her cheeks and the red tip of her nose. “I gave up my apartment in New York,” she said, “and my sister has Amagansett and William.” She hesitated. “You won’t be going after the uranium yourself?”

I shook my head. “There’s a new captain.” She hesitated and I said, “I’ll be moving back into my mansion and I want you with me. I want the cats too. I’d like you to marry me.”

“Things have gone very well since you left,” she said. “The Times ran my picture during Hamlet and I did television here in Peking before Macbeth…” She stopped. “Ben, you require more attention than I want to give.”

“Honey,” I said, “don’t forget the good times. We used to take walks and eat in restaurants and go to concerts. We really enjoyed each other.”

“Sometimes.”

I shrugged.” I’ll take you home,” I said. “Where are you staying?”

“I have an apartment near Tien An Men. We can walk.”

I started walking and suddenly I felt Isabel’s arm interlink itself with mine. I remembered how we used to hold each other on those cold nights in her apartment, sleeping wrapped up with one another.

She must have been thinking of the same thing because she said, “You can spend the night with me, if you’d like.”

The apartment was quiet and warm. There were no cats. We made love easily, in silence, and then lay on Isabel’s blue Chinese bed holding each other as tightly as yang and yin. Gradually we separated enough that we could lie on our backs with our feet touching.

I lit a cigar. “How long does the play run?” I said, breathing easily and as relaxed in the body as on Belson grass.

“Eight more performances.” She rolled over and kissed my neck. “Oh my, Ben,” she said. “It was about time.”

“We could get married in Peking,” I said.

She rolled over, stretched her arms out and yawned. “New York, Ben. We ought to get married in New York.”