They sped past the base of the drive to the vice chancellor’s house and he thought of the night he’d come up, able to grasp only motion, not a sense of the distance, and then standing still to feel space reexplode all around him. He tried to make conversation, telling Katherine about walking up that first night, and about the lamp Mrs. Reston had put in the living-room window. He had walked for twenty, maybe thirty minutes with only thin moonlight sifted onto the gravel, scared out of his mind, before he’d seen that small promising glow. Mrs. Reston hadn’t turned on the porch light in advance, not wanting to greet him with a big cloud of bugs, and so he had been greeted instead by that sudden shock of a spotlight on him, and when his sight came back, Mrs. Reston there smiling for all she was worth. He had been extremely grateful, he carefully explained, for the confidence of the promptly opened door, and the lack of locks. The windows were open to the night air, his bedroom door was open to the hallway, and although this had made sleep impossible for a long time it had also reached back to encompass his terrified toil up the hill, and now this trial seemed like a transforming and deliberate arrival. It was wonderful, he concluded, that it had never occurred to Americans to keep their doors locked.
“Not so wonderful,” she said. “People trust too much here. It’s not like this everywhere.”
“I like to learn to trust in outside,” he said.
She found this mistake evocative. “In outside?”
“Where I am living, before this, it is no any safe to walk.” He gestured outside the car. “Outside, in a countryside. I can’t do this there.”
“Because of the war?”
“Yes,” he said. His voice rose slightly at the end of the word, as if he meant to continue, but he didn’t say anything else. Just like that, he had remembered his dream. He could never understand what it was in the full light of day that lay across his path like a trip wire, waiting for the slightest touch to recall the night to him. He’d been having the dreams ever since he left Korea. All that had been needed was for that life to withdraw itself slightly, to give his mind space to restage things. The dreams were so frequent he’d begun to realize when he was inside them, and then he would fight to get out, the dream a clingy web that withstood every effort to tear it, every flinging of his limbs only sealing it more closely to him. Sometimes he woke with the disturbing sense that his own voice had just finished a long ricochet through the room. The dream flickered past his sights and was gone.
Katherine was saying, apologetically, “I don’t know anything about the war.”
He shook his head, a gesture that reminded her of someone flinging water from his ears. “There is not much to know.”
“I’m sure there must be.”
“No.”
After a moment she said, “I’ve always wondered what a war really looks like. There’s no way to tell, reading the papers.”
He shrugged, but said nothing. She was a little pleased at his brushing her off. “Perhaps it’s not too much trust,” she corrected herself. “Perhaps it’s more a sort of thoughtlessness. Sewanee is an island. Nothing new ever washes up here, and that makes people dull. They stop noticing things. You’re the first new thing here in a while.”
“I know islands,” he said. “This is no any island.”
“An island of the mind. Or an island of the soul.” She laughed briefly. “You’ll see.”
That fall he’d often walked in the woods. In some places white pine trees grew so tall that their trunks had lost their branches to a height of twenty, thirty, forty feet or more because they didn’t get light. The stumps descended down the trunks like thorns, and between the pines nothing else grew. The dim air seemed full of fine, plum-colored dust. He would feel as if he were homing in, the thick mat of needles crackling beneath his feet, toward a place where stillness was accumulating, and then suddenly the trees would give way and he was standing at the edge of a cliff, facing a bright void, looking down over farmland that stretched away into haze. People spoke of living on the mountain, but he saw they lived in it. There were many places like that, where the view was unutterably lovely, and at the best of these the university had erected a huge white crucifix. It was the first thing that anyone saw, coming up the long gradual road through the lesser mountains, that indicated the nearness of the mountain itself, in the same way that Mrs. Reston’s lamp had been the first thing Chuck saw as he climbed. Katherine always noticed the cross making its first appearance like a pale stitch in the green mountainside, even when she tried not to. It would vanish behind turns and then reappear, growing steadily larger. And when she was leaving she watched it in spite of herself, nearly running off the road, as it slowly diminished backwards in the frame of her rearview.
He spoke very little after they came down out of the mountains into open farmland. She watched him watching the road.
“Do you drive?” she asked.
“No.”
“I’ll teach you if you like.”
“Yes.” He nodded. “Yes I would.”
It occurred to her that she was taking him someplace specific, a place that had no significance apart from what pointless repeat visits can eventually bestow anywhere. This was the penultimate landmark in the drive up to Sewanee, a tiny oasis with a gas pump and a Coke machine where she habitually pulled over, even if she didn’t need anything, just for the sake of stopping short. She didn’t know why she did this. She always grew frustrated and impatient with the people who ran the place. As soon as she had turned off the engine she would suspect that the boy who pumped the gas was sullen, or even sadistic, in the way he slowly loped out to her car. The woman soda jerk in the cafe seemed reluctant to lift her arm, and the arm itself seemed to be made of lead. By the end of three minutes Katherine would be mad with impatience, and she would hop back into her car and gun the engine, and swear to herself, and scream her wheels in the dust. But she always inserted this hiatus into her drive. She couldn’t seem to do without it. Going in the other direction, away from Sewanee, she never thought to stop there. It was on the far side, and too near the foot of the mountains to be separate from her blurry sense of prologue, when she felt she wasn’t quite on the road. She would rarely perceive it had passed, and if she did, she would hardly think of it. Looking for it now, she nearly missed it.
There was a filling station and a café, yoked together because the town they were attached to—the town itself was nowhere in sight, and must have lain far inland from the road, tucked between sheets of farmland—was too sparsely populated to spare more than a few sets of hands to run both places: the boy, and the woman, and an occasional old man who fixed strangers’ cars that washed up. The three didn’t seem to be related. There were always other people hanging around in the café, or leaning against the front of the garage, and as she and Chuck came out of the car and walked to the café together, these began to emerge. They must have known her as well as they knew the distant streamer of smoke from the train or the mud puddle that formed in the dust every time that it rained—she was an unremarkable, semiregular feature of the landscape, something which excited little speculation and which vanished from memory the moment it vanished from sight. But now they noticed her. She bought Chuck and herself a pair of sodas and as they stood wordlessly drinking them, in front of the café doorway, and watching the boy slowly, with many looks over his shoulder, handle the gas pump into the tank’s mouth, the people, all ten or twelve of them, gathered to watch, also—to watch her and Chuck, standing there, watching her car.
She was afraid for a moment, and sensed that he was also. They slurped their drinks, staring ahead. The boy looked back at her uncertainly, and she nodded, and so he looked down at the nozzle again until a spurt of gas leaked down the side of the car and then he snatched the nozzle out. As the boy wiped down the side of the car and washed the windscreen, lifting each wiper blade with an excess of care and restrained admiration—it was a very nice car—there was a waiting that they all shared in, and the mass of it gathered around them. But it did not tip or tremble; it kept steady. They might have been watching a ship come in, Katherine thought. For a moment she could feel it. The arrival in a strange land, and stepping onto the gangplank as the whole harbor paused in its work and turned a single gaze toward you. She stood there with him in a half circle of constant, unshy observation until she had paid the boy and they had emptied their glasses and slowly walked back to her car.
“They don’t know what to make me,” Chuck said, as they were driving away.
“Don’t know what to make of you.”
“Yes. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Your English is much better than I’d thought. It’s much better than you led me to believe, the first time we met.”
He didn’t think he had led her to believe this at all. “I read, write—fine. Speaking, it takes slower.”
“You mean it takes longer, or that you are slow.”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“I wish you wouldn’t apologize. Please don’t.” When he was silent she said, “Does Bill Crane treat you well? Does he make conversation with you? That’s very important if you’re going to learn.”
He was surprised that she knew who Crane was. “He is very good.”
“A good friend? A good conversationalist?”
“Both.”
“He’s a fine example of his type, that’s certain. I’m glad he’s nice to you.”
“Everyone is kind here. It really is. You are,” he added shyly. “To take me to drive.”
“I wanted you to see the country around here, before the leaves went away. You’ve been up on the mountain ever since you arrived.”
“I have been to places. Last month I go to Mobile, Laurel, and Augusta,” he said, enunciating each name with great precision.
“Really?” she exclaimed. She had hoped she was taking him on his first exploration of America. “What for?”
“There is something, the Episcopal Church Council. I go to churches belonging in this, and talk on Korea.”
“Just for your own amusement?”
“No, I do it for the council, when they ask me. But I like to give a talk. I have a projector, and I show some slide.”
“Of the war?”
“Not so many.” Most of his pictures were from a set of National Archive photographs of Korea, in which it looked dim, impoverished, and unredeemable, in contrast with his presentation, which sought to be generic and not surprising or unpleasant. He generally explained that Koreans were farmers, that they enjoyed celebrating their holidays clad in bright costumes, that they were fond of flowers and children—that they were unremarkable, hardly worth the trouble of a lecture. The slides were never quite appropriate. Like his remarks, he kept them as generic as he could, and changed them often. He understood that people liked something to look at, and that even the least seasoned audience eventually lost interest in looking at him. He also gave a potted history of the war, and answered questions. “What kind?” said Katherine. “You must have found it annoying, when I asked you to describe what a war looked like.”
“No. This isn’t annoying.”
“I didn’t realize you had to answer people’s stupid questions all the time.”
“Your questions is not stupid. Nothing you say would be stupid.”
She looked at him, surprised.
He blushed. “I tell you a very, really stupid one.”
“All right.”
“In Mobile, a man asks me if Koreans live in trees.”
“Like monkeys!”
“In a tree house,” he clarified.
“Like monkeys in tree houses! What did you say?”
“I say no, but maybe he’s thinking of the kind of a house we do have, near the water. The kind of a house up on legs, like this.”
“On stilts. You were too polite.”
He smiled. “That was okay.”
“You’re polite to say yes to the church council.”
“I don’t mind it. They give Sewanee, for my tuition.”
Katherine was embarrassed. The arrangement embarrassed her, but also the fact that it hadn’t occurred to her that such an arrangement must exist. She was silent a moment.
“How do you get there?” she asked finally. “How do you reach these little towns?”
“I take Grey-Hound bus.”
“That’s terrible!”
He actually enjoyed it a great deal, but instead he said, noncommittally, “No.”
“I’ll drive you the next time you go. How far in advance do you get your marching orders?”
“It depends. Sometimes a lot of time, sometimes just a few, one or two days. I like this bus, though. It’s a very quiet time.”
“I won’t hear of it.”
“I do really,” he laughed. “I sit, I watch this go by. Like going to the movies.”
“Do you like the movies?”
“Yes. Very much.”
“We must go sometime.”
“Okay.”
“But I still won’t hear of your taking the bus. I’m going to drive you the next time. That’s settled,” she said, holding up a hand. He watched her eyes calmly scanning the road, until she glanced at him. “Do you give up?”
“I do,” he said.
“You’ll call me when you have a new assignment?”
“You make it sound like—you make it sound like I’m a spy,” he said, smiling.
After she’d dropped him off he went upstairs to his room and sat on his bed. It was late. He’d missed supper. He wondered if Mrs. Wade had set aside something for him, but he couldn’t get up.
Crane must have heard him come in. He came and hung off the door frame, the frame groaning in protest. Crane seemed morose and self-absorbed, as usual. After some time he said, “You want to come home for Thanksgiving with me? Where the hell are you going to go, right? I guess that you’ll have to.” Crane said this gloomily, as if it were a judgment on himself.
“Thank you. I think so.”
Crane did a pull-up, and thrust his legs into the room. He hung there like a pendulum. “My folks don’t know you’re an Oriental,” he puffed, swinging hard back and forth. “My folks are cracked.” It was clear that the two statements had nothing to do with each other.
“Okay.” He was not paying much more attention to Crane than Crane was paying to him. He no longer wondered at Crane’s unlikely, unflagging attachment. He knew that for Crane he was an easy and dependable possession, as if at any time Crane might announce to someone, “My man Chuck.” But he liked Crane. Crane was his only real friend, his only possible confidant.
“Where’d you say you were all day?” Crane asked. Without any hesitation whatsoever he lied, “At the library.”
He was used to the constant pressure of the future, a dark hive of possibility that he had never learned how to ignore, until now. Now he ignored it completely. The outer limit of his vision sprang up right before his face and he refocused. He didn’t think about his next church council lecture, or how he would arrive there, hoping the event, when it came, would escape his attention. It had taken days for him to realize that Katherine had offered to drive him in the way that he heard people say, when they met by accident, “We must see each other soon!” Hearing these exchanges it was never any problem for him to understand that the insistence was insincere, but talking with her, sitting right alongside her—he’d had difficulty judging her meaning. He would walk the paths of the campus with his head bowed, his algebra equations radiating in every direction, his latest dictionary words floating past like bits of floss on a fine summer day, lost in the landscape of his thoughts, but with the problem of her looming throughout, like a hill in the distance. It became clear that her offer of a ride had been no more than kind conversation. He blushed slightly to think it. He was embarrassed not only by his mistake, but by his sudden disappointment.
Dean Bower sent him a note saying that he had been invited to speak to the congregation of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Jackson, Tennessee. He accepted ten dollars’ pocket money for a round-trip bus ticket, a lunch, and some small improvement for himself he was left to decide on, like a new pair of socks. The first move was made, and nothing intervened to correct him, and so he went on, each elapsed day eroding the likelihood of his conversation with Katherine a little more, until he might have actually forgotten, because there no longer seemed to be anything to remember. Then she called him, on the telephone that sat on a glossy round vase-table out in the hall of Strake House. “I don’t think I gave you my phone number,” she began. “I’m sorry about that. I don’t even think I gave you my name. My last name is Monroe.” Hearing nothing but silence from him, she felt newly uncertain. But she said aloud, soldiering forth, “Of course, Mrs. Reston knows how to find me. Almost anyone does. But I should have made that simpler. In any case, I hear you’re invited to give your talk in Jackson. That’s lucky for me. It’s a place I’d like to know.” She listened carefully for possible signs. Until now she’d assumed he was afraid of imposing on her, but now it seemed she was imposing on him. When she hadn’t heard anything from him for days she’d given way to curiosity and gone to ask the dean’s secretary about the foreign student’s lecture. “I thought that I might send my aunt to see him. Is he asked to speak anywhere lately? I have an aunt almost everywhere.”
“He’s going to go down to Jackson, Tennessee, next week,” the secretary had said. “Have you got an aunt there?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“That’s too bad. Have you met Mr. Ahn?”
“I met him with Mrs. Reston when he had just gotten here.”
“He’s a long way from home.” She sounded vaguely critical saying it. “If you tell me where your aunt lives I’ll let you know if he’s going there, Katherine.”
“That’s all right,” she’d said. She’d decided to wait and see if he would phone. But then he hadn’t.
He had managed to locate his voice. “I just find out myself.”
“You just found out.”
“Yes. I just found out myself.”
“I just heard, too, I’m sure not long after you did. In any case, I’d still like to drive you. I like to drive. I’d still teach you, if you still want to learn.”
“I go Thursday. Not this one, the next one.”
“If I teach you to drive, you won’t need a ride anymore.”
“I have no any car.”
“Perhaps someone will give you one.”
“Yeah!” he said, laughing.
“That would be fine, wouldn’t it?” Her voice sounded so reduced. He was standing hunched over because the dried-out rubber coil of the phone cord refused to stretch straight, and his face brushed near the bush of fake flowers sticking out of the vase. He smelled dust.
In the week before their appointment she went to the library and looked for a book on Korea. All she found was a copy of Terry on the Japanese Empire, thirty years out of date. She remembered her father having Terry on everything, when she was a girl. All the flawlessly knife-scored, fragile colored maps, and ads for ancient travelers in the back: Nippon Cruise Lines, Bank of Taiwan, Southern Manchuria Railway. The Yamatoya Shirt Manufacturers, specializing in silk, linen, and cotton crape. Grimy photos of thin rigged canoes, with a sail like a sheet of notepaper impaled on a stick. She flipped to the part on Korea: Korean ideas of hygiene are almost as negligible as those of a Hottentot. The average Korean well is little short of a pest-hole. The average Korean man is 5 ft. 4 in. tall, of good physique, well formed, with not unhandsome Mongoloid features, oblique dark-brown eyes, high cheek-bones, and non-curling hair that shades from a russet to a sloe black. The olive bronze complexions in certain instances show a tint as light as that of a quadroon, and under “Seoul Entertainments,” Korean Dances (insipid and wearisome)—
“Christ!” she burst out, tossing it aside.
Katherine came to pick him up early in the morning, with the giddy whirr of the engine floating far ahead through the still air and her scarf and a ribbon of car exhaust streaming behind. It was unusually warm for November in the mountains, and she was driving with the top down and no hat. When she arrived at Strake House he was waiting for her on the front steps in a thin-looking suit. He was holding a cardboard box that had the slide projector in it, with a brown bag on top. Mrs. Wade had made him a lunch, which saved him some money. Added to what he had saved in not buying a bus ticket and in deciding to stick with old socks, he had the whole ten dollars left over, the bill still folded in half in the envelope that had come from Dean Bower. It was in his power to make some kind of gesture. He wasn’t nervous anymore when she pulled up.
They slid down off the mountain and found the road that would carry them west to Jackson, which lay five hours away on the highway from Nashville to Memphis. Autumn had left the hills not so much bare as rubbed dull, like an old sofa’s cushions. The road surged and stuttered, unrolling with growing momentum and then braking hard against towns where a post office and drugstore would spring up across from each other, with one traffic light strung between them. The wind roared too loudly to talk. At first they worried that perhaps they should shout to each other, but eventually this worry was gone, as if the wind peeled it away. One hour passed, and then another, until their wordless cocoon of loud wind in the midst of dull hills pouring past seemed ancient and permanent, and not requiring anything more. Around noon they had to change roads and he leaned toward her with a finger on the map. She hardly glanced at it, taking the sharp right without slowing down, and they slammed hard together against her door, and then slowly came upright again as the car headed north.
Jackson was a considerable small city of six churches, but they were all close together on the neat grid of main street and side streets that made up downtown. They wound through these, their eyes trained together on steeples and signs. Now, in the drowsy noontime hush that they moved through, the silence between them seemed huge. They found St. Paul’s and pulled into the white gravel lot alongside it. They had arrived very early. Katherine turned off the engine and they sat listening to its reluctant rattles and clunks as it spun to a halt, and when these were finished, they listened to the birds.
“You must want lunch,” she said at last. “You’d better have eaten before you give your talk.”
He understood now that he had been expecting the drive to transport him to a place in which he would find himself very calmly buying Katherine lunch with his ten-dollar bill. The simple and absolute logic of such a plan almost guaranteed that it would take place. He fingered the envelope in his pocket.
“Maybe we go find something,” he said, accidentally sounding reluctant.
“Mrs. Wade is too good a friend of mine for me to let you waste your lunch. It would break my heart. And I’m not hungry.”
“But it must be.”
“I’m not.” She took her case from her pocketbook and lit herself a cigarette. “I’m going to stretch my legs and take a look around. That’s what I need most.” She got out of the car, lifted her arms above her head for a moment, and then strode away.
He watched her recede. She crossed the lawn to the front steps, craned her head to look up at the steeple, and then vanished around the side of the building. She had left a thin ghost of smoke near the car. He got the lunch bag from between his feet and unrolled it. The crackling of the paper seemed deafening. He glanced around, but there was no one outside on this street, which was lined with old spreading oaks, stripped bare, reaching sideways for each other. Then he peered into the bag and caught his breath. It held two sandwiches carefully folded in wax paper, two red pears, two slices of cake, and a thermos of water.
They ate sitting together in the small churchyard. “Mrs. Wade is an artist of sandwiches,” Katherine said. The churchyard was only half full of grave markers, most of them of the sturdy, prosperous-looking kind, shaped like fat slices of bread, although some were badly leaning and no longer legible. “I never used to notice a church,” she went on, balling up the wax paper that had contained her sandwich. She produced a pocket knife from her bag and cut up her pear; if there was a seed she nicked it out and sent it flying. “Churches used to seem like part of the landscape, like rocks or trees. It never occurred to me that there was any difference between them. Not just differences in appearance, but differences in faith. I never gave it any thought at all.”
“You do now?”
“I guess I give it a little more thought. For example, this is a plain white shingled church and there’s nothing very surprising about the proportions of the steeple. And it’s Episcopal, but I don’t know what that means from Methodist, or Baptist, or any of the others.”
“My mother,” he said, surprised to hear himself saying it, “becomes Episcopal some years ago.”
“My father was a Catholic. That meant he didn’t want any religion in the house at all. I think my mother might have been a Lutheran, but she had to please my father, which was wonderful for her because I’m sure she never wanted to bother with religion in the first place. When I was twelve years old I had a great longing for God. I prayed and mooned about the house and threatened to become a nun. I thought my situation was very tragic. But I outgrew that. You know, when you’re a child you want so badly to set yourself apart, and you imagine you’re something you’re not. Other things came along that I was better at.”
“What things?”
“It sounds like you don’t think I’m good at anything.”
“No!” He flushed. “No.”
“I don’t know. Other things. In any case, I was thinking that it’s strange, because now I’m older and I seem to have come full circle, and started noticing churches. Why did your mother become an Episcopalian?”
“A missionary.”
“Are there many Episcopal missionaries in Korea?”
“And Catholic.”
“And she didn’t want to be Catholic? Or did the Episcopals get to her first?”
“I don’t know.”
When he didn’t elaborate she said, “And your father?”
“No.”
“And you?”
“No.” She had handed him part of the pear and its scent filled his nostrils. Flowers’ perfume, he remembered, is their prayer to God. Where had he read that? He prayed sometimes, but mostly as a reflex. He might be struck, and then it would fly out of him: please God.
They saw the priest coming across the yard, frowning and nodding in welcome. “I’m Katherine Monroe,” she announced when he’d drawn near, rising to offer her hand. He was looking at Chuck as he groped for it. “I didn’t realize Mr. Ahn would be accompanied.”
“I’m Sewanee’s most famous idler, Father, so I’m always trying to be useful. I thought it would be nice if Mr. Ahn didn’t have to take the bus. Shall we get your machine from the car?” she asked, turning back to him.
He followed them, half hearing Katherine’s elaborate replies to the priest’s inquiries about Sewanee. The hem of her skirt snapped around her knees as she walked. At the car she lifted his box to him and set about raising the top; the priest helped her. “Can you suggest any interesting places in town, Father? I thought I’d take a walk. I’ve never been in Jackson before.”
“You’re not going to listen to Mr. Ahn’s talk?”
“I don’t want to make him nervous. I think it’s easier to speak in front of people you don’t know. That’s all right, isn’t it, Chuck?”
He didn’t know whether he was relieved or disappointed. He and the priest stood watching as she resecured her scarf around her neck and stowed her gloves in the glove box. Neither of them seemed able to proceed while she was still there. She popped open a compact and glanced at herself, and as quickly shut it again.
“I’m all set. Did you think of anything I should see, Father?”
“Our town hall is a pretty impressive building. If you follow this street to the corner and go left, you’ll find some shopping.”
“That would be lethal,” she laughed.
“If you were a southerner I could think you’d take an interest in our monument square, but you might find it interesting anyway.”
Katherine laughed again. “I am a southerner, Father.”
“I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have guessed it.”
“What would you have guessed?”
“Oh, no. It was my mistake to assume in the first place.”
“I lived up East awhile. I think I must have lost my accent there.”
“My goodness,” said the priest. She knew they were watching her all the way to the corner, where she turned left as he had suggested. Then she’d moved out of sight.
Inside the church the priest showed him a screen he had brought from the Sunday-school room, and together they dragged out a table to set the projector on. Chuck brought an extension cord out of the box and the priest complimented him on how prepared he was. Until now his compact self-sufficiency on these journeys was the one thing that he could rely on to steady his nerves. He liked to board the bus, in his thin suit, with his round-trip ticket, directions he’d made for himself from the library’s atlas, a sum of money too small to seem unearned in his pocket, and the box in his arms that contained the projector and all of its needs: extension cord, slides, a spare bulb. All he required was electricity and a blank wall. He was an itinerant, as solitary as a country doctor, or the missionary who had converted his mother. He hadn’t realized how much it gratified him to be independent this way until today.
He turned the projector on and a weak square of light swung around the room and fell short of the screen. He pushed a psalm book under the projector’s front and glanced apologetically at the priest, but the priest was nodding and waving a hand. “That’s just fine. I can tell that you’ve done this before.”
“A few, two-three times.” He put the slides in order and dropped them one by one into the carousel, checking that each had gone in right side up. Number one was the map: Korea After 1945. Number two was The U.S. Infantry Coming out of the Seoul Railway Station. He put his thumb on the slide-changer button and fired the carousel through the full rotation. Then he fiddled for a while with the focus. His palms were sweating. He asked the priest to show him to the men’s room and once alone rinsed his face and scrubbed it dry with a coarse paper towel. He bent over to touch his toes, and dragged his knuckles back and forth on the floor. Then the door swung open and he sprang upright in embarrassment.
“We’re ready for you,” the priest said.
The audience was mostly older, charity and book-circle women, and a few intent men. “Hi,” he croaked, and they all smiled at once, in response. “I am Chang Ahn. I study at Sewanee, University of the South, but before this I live in Korea.”
“How old are you?” a woman interrupted.
“Now I am twenty-five years old.”
“You look so young,” she said sadly.
He usually began his address by saying that his presence before them was the direct result of MacArthur’s Inchon landing. “I’m not here, if this doesn’t happen,” he said, feeling melancholy suddenly. The faces in the audience blinked at him. He turned on the projector and Korea After 1945 appeared on the wall. He ducked through the beam apologetically. “Here it is,” he said, letting the shadow from his forearm mar the picture. “I am sorry the map is not more big.”
He explained the positions of Japan, China, and the Soviet Union, around the edges of the fuzzy square of light. “This is makes the fate of Korea. The Japanese colonize, at the beginning of this twentieth century, so when the Second World War is beginning, they are already there.”
He paused and looked around. “Okay?” he asked anxiously. A few people nodded.
“You remember,” he went on, “in the Second World War it is United States and Soviets together, Japanese with the Italians and Germans. The Japanese are in Korea, this is a terrible time,” he sighed. “Okay. The Soviets, in the Second World War, fight against the Japanese, and they fight in Korea.” He threw his arms wide.
When the Japanese surrendered at the end of the war, the Soviets and the Americans split the job of overseeing the Japanese withdrawal from the Korean peninsula. A line was drawn at the thirty-eighth parallel, which split the country roughly in half. The Soviet military would administer the northern half, the Americans the southern. This was, in theory, a temporary arrangement. Provisional governments were set up on each side for the duration of Korea’s reconstruction. The Soviets, on their side, enabled the return from exile of a great people’s hero, a revolutionary who had fought the Japanese throughout the thirties. Chuck cut himself short. “This man become the leader of Communist North Korea,” he concluded. The Americans, for their part, imported a committed anti-Communist expatriate named Syngman Rhee, who had graduated Princeton and lived in the U.S. for the preceding forty years. Rhee was put in charge of South Korea. Over time the rival governments dug in, and in June of 1950, went to war.
He always felt hopeless, called upon to deliver a clear explanation of the war. It defied explanation. Sometimes he simply skipped over causes, and began, “Korea is a shape just like Florida. Yes? The top half is a Communist state, and the bottom half are fighting for democracy!” He would groundlessly compare the parallel to the Mason-Dixon line, and see every head nod excitedly. “In June 1950, the Communist army comes over the parallel and invades the South. They come by surprise, and get almost all to the sea.” His hands swept: an amazing advance. The UN made a force to fight back, of the South’s Republic of Korea army, ROKA, and the United States army, and some other armies, like Britain’s.
The particularities of the UN force never interested anyone, and he quickly skipped ahead. “The Communists go fast, until the UN force is crowded into a very little space at the bottom of Korea, around the city Pusan.” He pronounced it for them loudly: Poos-ahn. “This is like, if the war is all over Florida, and our side are trapped in Miami.” Now MacArthur’s genius showed itself: instead of trying to push back, over the land, he took his army to the sea, and sailed up the coast, to Inchon. He landed there and cut the Communists in half, off from themselves. Seoul was liberated, and the tide turned around.
He genuinely liked talking about the landing, and MacArthur. It all made for such an exciting, simple minded, morally unambiguous story. Each time he told it, the plot was reduced and the number of details increased, and the whole claimed more of his memory for itself and left less room for everything else. He punched the slide-changer now, and Korea After 1945 was replaced by The U.S. Infantry Coming out of the Seoul Railway Station, a soap-scrubbed and smiling platoon marching into the clean, level street. This image made a much better illustration of the idea of MacArthur than any actual picture of the Korean war could have. People were often surprised by the vaulted dome of the train station, and the European-looking avenue of trees. “That’s Seoul?” a woman asked, vaguely disappointed. The file of troops looked confident and happy, because the picture had not been taken during the Korean conflict at all, but in September 1945, after the Japanese defeat. The photo’s original caption had read, “Liberation feels fine! U.S. and their Soviet allies arrive to clean house in Korea.” No one was dreaming there would be a civil war.
He followed the U.S. Infantry slide with Water Buffalo in a Rice Paddy, and then Village Farmers Squatting Down to Smoke, which satisfied the skepticism of the woman who had asked about the Seoul railway station. Everyone murmured with pleasure at the image of the farmers, in their year-round pajamas and inscrutable Eskimos’ faces, and then the double doors at the back of the sanctuary creaked loudly and Katherine was standing there, with her pocketbook held to her chin, looking lost.
Each of the twelve or so heads clustered in the front pews turned to look at her. She let the door fall shut and slipped into the rearmost pew. “I’m sorry,” she said. A flush appeared on her cheeks to match his.
He couldn’t remember where he’d left off. The awareness that he was blushing made him blush even more deeply. He wondered if anyone could see it. Often the darkness of his skin seemed to guard his emotions from notice, as if the fact of the color blotted out all that happened within it. He fingered the slide-changer nervously, and the carousel shot ahead, throwing a new picture onto the screen. For a terrifying eternity he stared at this without recognizing what it was. The rough grain of the image, fine rubble, a burial mound…. His gaze crisscrossed it wildly, searching for something that might help him locate himself.
When he remembered why the image was there, it was like remembering the plot of a childhood fable. Although the remembrance was deeply familiar, it wasn’t convincing, because it didn’t seem to make sense. The priest was in the front row, his eyebrows straining upward with encouragement. Chuck took a deep breath, and began again. “You maybe don’t believe it, but Korea, the land, looks very much like Tennessee.” He gestured at the picture of hills. So much, sometimes he woke in the morning and just for an instant was sure he was home. The mist coming out from the mountains. The soft shapes of hills. His hands formed them. At last he stopped seeing her.
Afterward, as everyone moved in awkward clusters to the yard, he said, “I thought you aren’t coming.”
“I didn’t think I was. I was nervous for you. I thought my coming would make things worse.” When they had gotten a good distance from the church building she lit a cigarette. “I didn’t want to throw you.”
He looked back. They were all conversing in small groups now, slightly exaggerating their gestures and their absorption in each other. He knew that they were watching him and Katherine. He shook his head at her. “Throw me,” he repeated.
“Startle you. I didn’t want to make you falter.”
“But you throw me,” he said at last, simply.
“I’m sorry. You did very well.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, you did. Come on,” and she turned back, cheerfully calling out, “Father! Did you see, I wasn’t tempted by the shopping at all.”
They were invited back to the priest’s home, with some of the most interested women parishioners. He was relieved that they all seemed too old to have had sons drafted into the war. They were only fascinated by Oriental things. For him this was the easiest sort of conversation, with people who knew nothing and liked everything. He was asked, with much embarrassed laughter, to describe a Korean wedding dress. He stood up to do this, his hands palm down, shelving briskly against his ribs to emphasize the high waist, then flying apart and returning, as if he were outlining a heart in the air: a very—how do you say it? he pointed at someone’s waist. This here. Waist? the woman suggested. “Sash,” Katherine called out. “Yes. A very”—his hands outlined capaciousness—“sash,” and as he did this he saw Katherine watching, suppressing a smile.
It was nearly five o’clock before they left, full of coffee and chocolate-caramels and a subtle, unremitting scrutiny, disguised as politeness. It followed him everywhere in America, varying in tone or intensity but always bringing with it the same slight electrification, as if he weren’t just caught in a narrow beam of light but somehow animated by it. The priest took both of his hands. “I’m so pleased you could come. I wish you the best of luck, the very best of luck,” and then, “Well, Miss Monroe! I hope you enjoyed your visit with us, because I know that we did. You’re going to disappoint a whole bunch of people if you don’t come back.” She laughed. Chuck thought the priest kept her hands for too long.
They returned to the silence of the car. The sun was low as they left Jackson, and by the time they reached the open highway it was pulling the last, strangely attenuated fraction of itself beneath the western line of hills, and the shadow from the hills was spreading across the road and already fading as dusk set in. It had grown much too cold to take the top down again. Katherine turned on the headlights and all the mysterious, iridescent jewels of the dashboard appeared. The night turned black fast. Clouds had sealed off the sky that afternoon and so there were no stars, only the nebulous light that the car pushed in front of them. He could see her face in the dashboard’s glow, lunar and remote.
After some time she said, “I almost always drive alone. I used to drive to be alone, and then later I just was alone, so I drove. To solace myself. It feels very private. I’m only trying to say that sometimes I don’t talk when I’m driving.”
“You don’t have to talk.”
“I don’t want you to think I mind having you here. I like it. It isn’t an intrusion.”
“I don’t think, I mean, I’m glad you don’t feel no any trouble—”
“It’s no trouble at all for me. I find it easy to be quiet with you. If I was uncomfortable I wouldn’t feel I could have any privacy in front of you and I’d talk all the time. If I’m quiet it’s a friendly kind of quiet. Does that make sense?”
“Yes. I like this idea.”
“That’s good. You can go to sleep if you want. Don’t worry about me, I’m used to long drives.”
Because he thought it would make her more comfortable he closed his eyes, but he never slept. Hours later, as they began the slow climb up the mountain, straining around the turns, sometimes gliding on a brief level patch, and then straining again, he kept them closed, playing the old game, gathering what he could remember of the landscape into his mind. The nearer they grew, the more there was—he was surprised by how much there was—until he felt the slight dip, and knew they’d reached the last turn, and then his eyes were open, and she left him at his door.
That day marked the outermost limit of autumn. The fallen leaves shriveled and faded to a uniform dull shade of brown and lay everywhere, many inches deep, washing back and forth despondently. The daylight was a dead shade of gray too weak to cast a shadow, and although it never grew severely cold, the wind bit. He wished for a bright snowfall to transform the landscape, but even this high in the mountains snow was rare, and if it came it would come late and be thin. The winter mostly made itself felt as a yearning for the nearing holiday.
His trip home with Crane was approaching. The nearer it grew, the more Crane deprecated his family. Finally Crane declared he didn’t want to go home at all. “You’re a fool for agreeing to this,” he told Chuck. “Oh boy, you wait.” Crane began talking incessantly about his family’s bigotedness, their old-fashionedness, and the overall, staggering impossibilities posed by his mother. He made alarming predictions about his parents’ probable behavior toward Chuck which would have seemed cruel, if it hadn’t been obvious that Crane needed a companion in dread. “They don’t hang Orientals,” Crane now said, coming into the room. Crane never knocked. “There aren’t any down there to hang. I don’t think they’d know one if they saw him. I wonder if they would hang him. They might mistake him for a nigger and hang him, or have the sense to see he’s not a nigger and not hang him just because of that.” If Crane had shown concern for Chuck, or indications of some noble aim like the creation of peace and understanding between a Grand Dragon of the Klan and a young Oriental, Chuck might have been frightened or angry, but Crane’s only aim was to further a general atmosphere of crisis, and Chuck grew calmer in proportion to Crane’s efforts. He wouldn’t give Crane the comfort of unnerving him.
By the time they were finally in the car, though, Crane was quiet and content. The anticipation of going home was what he found upsetting: the promising, and the arranging, but mostly the continued possibility of not going home. So long as that option remained he felt cornered and panicky. Then he got on the road, and the space between himself and his home began diminishing. His driving was reckless, and they made quick time. It was only ten o’clock in the morning when the occasional shack or motel began to give way to legitimate-looking buildings assembling themselves by the side of the road. Atlanta was a big, flat, poorly organized city and it gave very little warning before suddenly enfolding them and extending in every direction.
They were met at the door by a butler who must have heard them drive up, because he was already there, smile unfurling, as they mounted the steps. “Well, well,” he intoned. “We never do believe it till we see it. Your mama’s going to feel more restful now, I hope. I guess I’ll go and tell her you’re arrived.”
“This is Chuck, all the way from the South Seas,” Crane said. Chuck didn’t correct him. Crane gave him a slap between the shoulder blades, pushing him closer to the butler, who stepped back and smiled icily. “This is Driggsie, Chuck. Don’t listen to him because he doesn’t know anything.” The butler laughed a long time at this observation, making clear his appreciation for its depth and originality, as they followed him down the front hall.
In the parlor Crane stood at the window, staring out at the damp Atlanta winter. Chuck walked along the bookshelves, hands held carefully behind him, reading the spines. Now that Crane was placid, he felt his own nervousness stirring. Then he heard a woman saying, “Billy, there, sweetheart,” and Crane’s mother had run into the room and taken Crane by the shoulders, bent him to her, and pressed her lips to his cheek. An ecstatic stillness came over her face. When Crane tried to introduce Chuck she looked briefly confused. Then she disengaged herself and held out an arm to him, smiling.
The three of them sat together in the front room and had coffee. “Do you know what Chuck used to do in Korea, before he came to Sewanee? Can you even guess? Of course not. He translated the American papers into Korean, so that the Koreans could read them. Isn’t that something else?”
“Not all papers, just some stories I choose for putting in Seoul papers,” he began, before Crane cut him off.
“What they did, Mother, is they had an outfit for getting American stuff out to the Koreans, you know, who’ve never even seen a movie or drunk a soda pop, and part of it is getting the news from America into the Korean papers, so they know what’s going on. And Chuck knew English, better than anyone there, anyway.”
“How did you learn English, Chuck?” Crane’s mother asked. She was holding one of Crane’s hands, and beaming quietly at him. Crane shifted and huffed in his chair, inconveniencing her. Although he was careful to look beleaguered in her presence, it was clear that her absorption in him was something he not only enjoyed but expected. Crane and his mother were tranquilized now, not by the fact of being together so much as by the end of the period of waiting.
“My father,” Chuck started to tell her, leaning forward slightly. She was a beautiful woman, with a coil of blond hair at the nape of her neck that showed no signs of gray.
“He learned it in school, Mother,” Crane burst out impatiently.
For the rest of the afternoon Crane was an expert on Chuck’s history, relating it with a mixture of pride and incredulity, only occasionally referring to Chuck for confirmation. “Isn’t that right? You see, Mother, it’s complicated. You can’t even half understand.” In the early evening the three of them went for a wet, chilly walk through the neighborhood. Prosperity in Atlanta seemed to find privacy undesirable, as if exposure were a necessary component of success. The houses were tremendous and too close together. Each might have concealed another wing extending as far back as the façade went across. Crane’s mother had a shawl around her shoulders and held Crane’s arm tightly in both her own, squeezing confidentially. Chuck kept falling back a few paces, but each time he drifted completely from her orbit Crane’s mother would pause, to point out something to him, or ask him a question, so that he would be drawn close again. He would have been more comfortable had she neglected him. He was surprised by her kindness, and more touched by it than he wanted to be. He couldn’t help valuing kindness more, the less it was expected. When they got back they had drinks, and Chuck told Mrs. Crane about his father’s library. Something in her excessively attentive listening posture made him feel that she didn’t believe him.
Crane’s father came home and they dined. The senior Crane was regal and suspicious. His suspicion extended to his wife and seemed to find its culmination in his son. “What have you brought us?” he said, shaking out his coat, and then shifting his examination to Chuck, “Mr. Ahn,” he said. “Welcome to my home.” He had the air of a man accustomed to, but not necessarily interested in, frightening people. “You are an emissary from a distant land. I hope we can make you feel welcome.”
At the table he carved and interrogated simultaneously. “You’ve been at Sewanee three months?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I see you haven’t starved to death in that time.”
“No, sir.”
“But you have never had turkey. I see from your eyes you have not. That we can claim. When you look back, Mr. Ahn, on your first years in America, on your first lessons in things American, you will think of the Cranes. I am giving you white meat and dark. You will develop a preference in time. You may develop a preference right away. If you do, exercise it.” The plate made its way down the table to him.
“I do eat a bird like this once,” he said. He had been on the plane from Seattle. Seoul to Tokyo, Tokyo to Juneau. All the way across the ocean he had kept his cheek pressed to the porthole until he finally glimpsed, straining his eyes forward, in the plane’s direction, the outer edge of the sunrise. They were flying straight into the dawn, cheating the advancing cusp of it. The light had run first in a line along the horizon, like water sluicing through a groove, tracing a slight curve, less pronounced than the surface of a lens, and he had realized that it was not something wrong in the glass of the window or an optical illusion but the shape of the world he saw. It had thrilled and desolated him. He had wanted someone’s sleeve to catch, someone to show. He had felt then that he was as far away as he could ever be from anywhere. Landing in Alaska, and then continuing his journey, was in some way a return, after where he had been.
But he didn’t tell them this. He told them about the chicken. The plane had refueled in Juneau and gone on to Seattle, where he changed planes for the third time. On this plane a lunch had been served, of fried chicken and a scoop of mashed potatoes, with a well of melted butter in the center. He hadn’t known how to eat the chicken. It sat tensely on his plate, like a bundle of elbows, wobbling with the movements of the plane. He barely recognized that it was chicken. He sat staring at it in dismay, lifting his knife and fork several times before finally deciding to steal a glance at the other passengers, to see what they did, and then he saw they were all watching him. For a long moment no one moved. No one gave him their example. He braced the chicken between his knife and fork and pressed down, and the chicken scooted to the left, off the plate. His knife struck porcelain.
“You are trying to make us ashamed of our countrymen,” Mr. Crane declared.
“No,” Chuck said. This was a compliment, a lengthy one. He wasn’t being clear. There had been a man sitting across the aisle from him, a large man in a beige and white suit. And when he had tried to cut the chicken with his knife, this man had burst out laughing. “No, boy,” he had said. “You eat it like this.” And he picked the chicken up in his hands, and tore at it with his teeth, still laughing to himself, never giving Chuck a second glance. Everyone else picked up their chicken then, and Chuck picked up his, and a buzz of voices and activity rose in which he was ignored. The chicken became a strange, private pleasure. He ate it savagely. The man had been southern. When he’d started to speak Chuck had only meant to say something, to make a friendly remark, but the longer the story grew the more it seemed to lash about on its own, in unintended directions. He went silent and there was an uncertain pause. He thought, Someone pick up their chicken. Someone—
“I know what it’s like to get out of a scrape. I was figuring on failing algebra,” Crane began. Then they talked about other things, and the buzz between parents and son rose and covered him over.
They were going to stay the night there, and drive back the next morning. “Early,” Crane told his mother. He was being severe—distinctly, recognizably severe. Chuck thought Crane had transformed in his father’s presence, striving to evoke his father in his manner, but the manner was strained, and when his mother came to embrace him, Crane’s head tilted back slightly as if he was enduring pain. He closed his eyes.
At the door to the room where Chuck would sleep, Crane stopped him. The hallway had been lit when they came up, but Crane put the lights out as they walked. Now there was only the light that filtered up from the staircase, and the indistinct voices of Crane’s mother, instructing the maids, and the maids’ brief assents. “Was it all right?” Crane asked. He spoke softly, out of caution, or tiredness. “The old man isn’t so bad, really. He’s got a bum heart. It will give out one day. That makes my mother nervous all the time. I think she’d like me to come home and live forever. You could tell she was nervous, I guess.”
“Yes,” he said. A loneliness, seeming to dictate no response, to contain no possibility of removal, had opened within him. “Your mother is kind. Gentle.”
“She’s a good old girl. The old man, that thing with the Klan, it’s just like a club, really. A brotherhood. It’s all wound up in the politics here. He liked you, don’t you think? I think he did.”
“I hope so,” he heard himself saying. He did not want Crane to know what he thought of his father.
After Crane left him he sank down on the bed, gazing blankly at the room, and then he got up and began moving through it, with silent caution but voracious, like a thief. He wanted to find something that made an intimate disclosure: a personal object, or the trace of a private decision, but the room was for guests, like a room in a hotel. The drawers were empty. There was nothing stored under the bed. He pulled the curtains aside and stared across the lawn at the great dark mass of a neighboring house, its windows gleaming gold through the trees. Everything here was an obstacle, showing him what he wanted by keeping him from it.