Night Angels(100)

“What about Monto? Will he leave with you?” I asked, wiping my eyes.

“Of course.” Fengshan was looking out the window.

I said carefully, “China is warring with the Japanese. It’s not suitable for a child to grow up there. How would he receive his education?”

Fengshan was always concerned about education.

He rubbed his face, looking tormented. He had only thought of his future, not Monto’s needs. He knew Monto would be much better off in bustling Brooklyn, not war-torn China.

“If he stays here with me, he’ll still be able to attend school. And I’ll take care of him.”

“He’s my son, Grace.”

“But I love him too. He’s only fourteen. He needs a home, a mother, and a future. In China, how can you keep him safe? Where will he go to school?”

Fengshan rubbed his face again. He knew I was right.

“Perhaps you might want to ask him? He has the right to decide.”

“I’ll ask him,” he said.



That evening we sat at the table, Monto in the middle. He listened, looking distressed, weighing his father and China on one side and me and America and a good education on the other. In the end, Monto gave me a firm hug and said he would go to China with his father. I stood on tiptoe and kissed his forehead—he was taller than me. How fast he had grown.

A few days later, Fengshan and Monto sailed to Hong Kong, since the port of Shanghai was closed, and I waved them goodbye. After a year of seeing it coming, I still couldn’t believe that our marriage had indeed ended. Maybe my reluctance to stop Lola from carrying out her mission had made Fengshan see me in a different light, or maybe his devotion to visas and his mission had made me see him in a different light—I had been so lonely and depressed after the surgery. It didn’t matter anymore. We had lost the belief in each other, in marriage. It was impossible to move forward in Brooklyn.

Start anew.

I called my mother in Chicago, hoping to visit her. A man answered and said she had moved back to Boston after she’d divorced again, and he gave me her address. So I went to Boston and discovered she was in the hospital for a slipped disk. She was not a cooperative patient, complaining and yelling as she crawled on the floor under the doctor’s order to strengthen her joints; she also refused the nurses’ care. So I brushed her teeth, changed her bedpans, gave her a bath, and kept her company while she napped. When she was awake, she frowned at me, saying I was all skin and bones and looked like a woman in my fifties. I didn’t take offense. Mother hadn’t changed.

To take better care of her, I rented an apartment with the money Fengshan gave me and found a waitressing job at a café nearby. During the day, I worked; after work, I went to see Mother. Life was quiet. I took the cues of my body, grew accustomed to rising early, watched the sunrise at four o’clock in the morning, and indulged in freshly brewed coffee and fresh seafood at the market. Sometimes I chatted with the fishermen.

Boston was different from the city I remembered. It was beautiful, with the quiet brilliance of summer where the air was clear like a diamond, with alluring tall red poppies and yellow colonial buildings that stood like a revolution. I was glad I had returned.

Dickinson was still my companion, and now that Lola was part of my poet, I read Lola’s messages at the margin and then Dickinson’s. They calmed me. And sometimes, when thoughts infused my mind like the summer sun, I jotted them down to compose something here and there.

Sometimes I went to the library and bookstores, looking for information on Viennese Jews, Eichmann, the Nazis, and the war in Europe. There were few mentions of Jews or Eichmann, but the war in Europe was all over the papers.

When my mother was discharged, I invited her to stay with me. All day long, she talked about the pains that plagued her, the confinement after the surgery, and the cold weather that made her bones stiff. I did my best to soothe her. She still drank, and when she passed out on the sofa, I put a blanket on her. One day, she wanted to go visit my father’s grave. We took a bus, me drinking a thermos of tea and her a bottle of gin. When we reached our stop, she appeared to be sleeping. But I was wrong. She had stopped breathing.

She had a simple burial, without the presence of her beloved priest or Irish clam-digger or domestic-helper friends. She left me fifteen dollars, all her hard-earned money.



I wrote a letter to Fengshan in his hometown in the Hunan province, informing him of my mother’s passing—he had said to keep in touch. He never replied.

It was possible that with the Japanese controlling the majority of China, the letter never reached him. But it was also likely that keeping in touch with me was no longer in Fengshan’s mind, and he didn’t have the desire to remember our marriage or me.

I still thought of him, sitting at his desk, a ray of sunlight scribbling on his shoulder like a silver pen, how he had rushed to his friend on that night of shattered glass, and how he had watched the shells strike the consulate. And I knew that even though our love had been buried in the dust of Vienna, my admiration for him would always remain. He was stronger than me, indeed a man destined to carry his melody. He had been a man who was wed to an idea, to a dangerous hope, to the soul of a future for thousands of men. In the hour of a violent storm, he had held on to his idea, carrying a torch of faith, trudged on, and delivered it to those in need.

The memories. His ideals. The gift he had instilled in me.