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The uneasy lunch came to an end. The Camachos had felt it would never be over: they would eternally sit there, spooning food to their mouths while pondering what on earth to start talking about next. Actually — Edong Camacho informed his wife — the meal had lasted a bare forty minutes.

They had a moment to themselves now, their American guest having been shown to his room. They could breathe again.

Pepang Camacho said: “I could see those forty minutes were as funny for him as they were painful for us. What I fail to see is why, why.”

She and her mother were doing the dishes; Edong stood in the kitchen doorway, strapping on his watch.

He said: “We probably are being penalized for something some other people did. He may have been sold rotten liquor or rotten women. He holds that against us.”

“These Americans!” exclaimed Doña Concha. “Must they be such great innocents, even in their vices.”

“Tell us, mother,” said Pepang, “how was he when he arrived?”

“I was at the market,” she explained to her husband. “Oh, Ed, do you think he may have been offended because we were not here to receive him?”

“More likely, the door offended him,” said Doña Concha. “He was eyeing it with little affection when I opened it to him.”

“Whatever did they do to him? I feel so mean! Was I nice during lunch, Ed? Did I show I resented his not being pleasant?”

“Did you?”

“Resent the way he behaved? No. I was too busy keeping the talk going round. And most of the time I just felt baffled… Oh, come and get me out of this apron. My fingers won’t work. Look, they’re trembling… How about this afternoon?”

“I have to be at the office after all.”

“You won’t be able to take him to where this uncle of his is buried?”
“I was going to let you do it instead. But he has upset you enough already. Stop squirming, will you? How you’ve knotted yourself into this thing.”

“Oh, nonsense. Of course, I’ll take him.”

“Of course, you will not. Look at the way you are now.”

“But, Ed, that’s one reason we asked him to come down, no? One of us will have to take him to the place. Oh, don’t worry about me. I want to make it up to him, whatever was done to him that’s so nasty. Mother, will you come along too?”

“He would only regard me as the crowning insult, I fear. And he appears offended enough. Besides, how would my grey hairs look in a jeep? No, no; we will humor the boy. Since the American does not believe in the duenna, we will not afflict him with one.”

“Is that ours coming down now?” asked Edong.

The three of them stood still and listened. Noting how the footsteps lagged coming down the stairs, they glanced at one another.

Then: “Hurry, mother, hurry, Ed,” whispered Pepang. “It will not be nice for him to come down and not find us around.”

*  *  *  *  *

Doña Concha Galang, widow of Moreno, was a girl of fifteen when she first saw Americans. This was on an April morning in the first year of this century and she and her mother and sisters were on a small boat going down the Pasig. They were coming back to the City after almost a year in Laguna, where they had ‘evacuated.’ During the trip they had craned their necks and peered from bank to bank, hoping (though with no little terror) to catch sight of the strange and awful men from across the sea, the new lords now of the land.

The Galang house in Paco stood on the riverbank; its imposing azotea opened on a broad tiled stairway that swept right down to the water. As the boat approached, the Galang women marveled to see a brilliant gathering sporting on their azotea. All the primary colors were moving about on it, and up and down the steps. Then, the boat having glided nearer, they gasped collectively. For those masses of color, they now saw, were shawls and blouses and skirts; were, in fact, their very own shawls, their very own blouses, their very own skirts. And the creatures moving in those clothes — the monstrously huge men, fiery red of face and golden of hair, with cigars dangling from their mouths and big boots sticking out from under the delicately swelling rainbow skirts that hardly reached to their knees — those gorgeously colored and gorgeously appareled giants were, indubitably, the strangers they had so craved a terrified glimpse of.

Doña Concha was never quite to recover from the shock of that first encounter. All her life, she could not look on an American without catching her breath and warning herself not to stare; in her mind, she was busy rigging him up in the drooping laces and the vivid balloon skirts of her girlhood.

She had been delighted, however, when her son-in-law Edong announced that he had found the GI grandson of old Mr. Newman and had invited the boy down for the weekend. Old Andrew Newman was one of the few persons on earth of whom Doña Concha stood in awe; he was an old-timer who had come over early in American times to establish the firm in which her father and, afterwards, her husband had been manager. Edong, too would have been in line for that very desirable position if the firm had not been dissolved just before the war. But old Newman was still alive, over there in America, and had already expressed an intention of abandoning retirement and returning to business. It might pay, Edong had remarked, to be nice as possible to his grandson.

But what if the grandson will not let us, wondered Doña Concha, watching, later that afternoon, her daughter and the American drive away in the jeep. For young Newman had clearly come in a spirit of gay malice, as one comes to enjoy a highly unsuccessful pageant put on by one’s foes. He had better not push Pepang too far though, thought Doña Concha, turning away from the window.

The drinks were still set out on the parlor table. She poured herself a cup, took a long sip, pulled up an armchair and sank down in it, groaning with relief. And as she sipped the liquor she fell to pondering what made Americans so big. One would think old Newman huge enough, but his grandson was tremendous. A pity that they did not keep their figures. Narrow-waisted now, and wide-shouldered; the skin with the fire-glow; the hair a dull gold; the eyes like fresh violets; the thin straight line of the lips locking up the jaw into a triangle the austere nose soared away from — young Newman looked very much like his grandfather, before age, drink and success had polished the curls off his dome, multiplied his chins and inflated his waistline. A nice-looking boy really: the grandson. The nastiness was probably only his delightful way with strangers.

But delightful or not, mused Doña Concha, closing her eyes and leaning back in the chair, he had better be careful about Pepang. And who knew? He might do Pepang good. And Edong too. Might shock them both back to life. Oh, they had been such a gay and active couple. Too gay and active, she had felt once. In the fighting to liberate the City they had lost everything — their home and their two small boys…

When Doña Concha opened her eyes again she was still holding the empty cup but she was not thinking of Pepang and Edong. She was thinking about the American. Not young Newman in particular; simply the American. He had been given her room, she remembered, and her clothes were in there. Before she quite realized why, she was hurrying up the stairs. Her heart pounded as she opened the door of the room; and it occurred to her, fleetingly, that all over the world where Americans were the women were surely up to some similar snooping.

Once inside the room, however, she felt disappointed. Nothing had happened here, everything was in its place. The late afternoon sunshine bristled in through the curtains. At the foot of the bed stood Newman’s bag and pair of slippers. She opened a couple of the drawers of her bureau: within lay her clothes, undisturbed.

She began to feel foolish, but still frightened too, the room being so quiet. She tiptoed to the door, paused there a moment and, holding her breath, took a quick last look around the room.

She was the young Concha for a moment, going down the Pasig on the small boat, craving (with desperate terror) to see an American.

*  *  *  *  *

At about that time, Pepang Camacho was standing before the end of the gravestones of that old walled cemetery just outside the City where, since Spanish times, white foreigners of the Protestant faiths have been buried.

The inscription on the gravestone proclaimed it sacred to the memory of Sergeant John Emmet Newman of the United States Army; born on May 4. 1877, in Temperance, New Hampshire: killed in action on December 2, 1899, in the Philippines.

Pepang glanced up at the American soldier standing at her side. The cool dim graveyard, more orchard than graveyard now, roofed over almost entirely by its trees, seemed to have subdued the rancor in him. He was polite now and looked deathly tired. She had begun to like him.

She said: “It was not here he was first buried. He died out in the provinces. When your grandfather came over he had the remains transferred here.”

“I know,” murmured Newman, staring down at the gravestone. Then, as if to bring himself to, he gave his head a shake, dug his hands into his pockets and brought out matches and a rather crumpled cigarette. And as he lighted it, speaking into his cupped hands, he mumbled:

“‘He rests, he is quiet, he sleeps in a strange land….’”

Pepang leaned forward.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, nothing. You know what? I’ve long dreamt of coming here, of making a sort of pilgrimage to this place.”

“Was he that real to you? Most grand-relatives aren’t, don’t you find?”

“This great-uncle and a certain unspeakable great-great-grand-father of mine I have found much too real,” boomed the American suddenly and unexpectedly grinned down at her.

Now what? wondered Pepang, grinning back at him, though she couldn’t for the life of her say what all the grinning was about; she thought the conversation solemn enough.

“Too real,” sighed the American, sucking at his cigarette. “And you know another thing? They were both over here.”

“The unspeakable great-great-grandfather too?”

“Him and me and this one. The three of us. One for all and all for one. I’m the third circumnavigator. Oh, grandfather Andrew was here too but he never left home. He doesn’t count. Just me and my great-uncle and my great-great-grandfather.”

Pepang began to feel all this was too much for her and decided to sit down. Young Newman promptly dropped down on the grass, too.

“I’m not kidding,” he went on. “Ever heard of the Clippers? The ones from New England, I mean. The ships. Loveliest that ever hit water. Well, my great-great-grandfather — he was captain of one of those. He was around these parts lots of times. Ceylon and Madagascar and the Indies. Came here to Manila to buy a cigar and stayed so long to smoke it the Spics had to call out the army to chase him away. Boy, was be mad! Told them he’d come back with a cannon and blow their walls down on them. He’d have done it too, you bet. Only he got mixed up in some other trouble down in Borneo. Went there to get the cannon and picked up the local princess for good measure. The natives chased him clear back to Salem harbor.”

“Quite a character, wasn’t he?” commented Pepang.

“Oh, he was a good guy. Only he didn’t like New England.”

“Funny way of showing his feelings.”

“This one didn’t, either.”

“Your great—uncle? Was he a character, too?”

“Oh, no. He was the romantic sort. Oh, I am too. But I try not to show it.”

“What was he romantic about?”

“Don’t laugh. The East.”

“And so he ran away on a Clipper ship and sailed off to the Orient —”
“Uh-uh. No more Clipper ships for him. Those days were over. The unspeakable captains were long dead. Ceylon and Madagascar and the Indies — they weren’t even names to Americans anymore. Nothing was left of the old days except a few shawls and fans and carved idols rotting away in the attics.”

“So, what did your uncle do?”

“Well, he’d go up there to the attic when he was a kid and bury his face in all that sweet-smelling stuff, whispering the names of the strange places they’d come from and trying to imagine Puritans among the islands and bazaars and temples of the East. They wouldn’t fit in somehow. And then he’d go down and out to the porch and look up Main Street and he’d see the Methodist church and Mr. Higgin’s General Store and Ed’s poolroom and a saloon, and then he’d look down Main Street and see the Baptist Church and Mr. Pelter’s General Store and Kelly’s poolroom and another saloon and then he’d run to his room and write down in his diary how lonely he was and practically dying of suffocation…”

“The poor kid… But I don’t understand. Your grandfathers didn’t need a map to tell them where Ceylon was. Or Manila. But for their grandchildren those places weren’t even names!”

“We were too busy,” replied the American, somewhat dryly. “We had a huge continent to tackle and a great many other things to do besides remembering what Manila was.”

“But to have forgotten at all!”

“Oh, we Americans have a genius for forgetting. Especially things that don’t pay anymore. It’ll be harder now, I suppose. The world has become so small. But for our primitives, it wasn’t only easy, it was required. Those old Yankees weren’t going to let the world upset them: they like themselves too much as they were. The East was only a market, was only where they bought and sold and let out steam. They took care not to become a part of anything they saw. That was easy too. Their Puritan flesh was their armor. They suffered no sea change. Or we might have been spared the reformers and the realtors. Venice became what it was because the East came to the Adriatic. But the Indies gathered at Salem harbor, and Salem remained — Salem. Boston sailed to India, and came back — Boston.”

And all the Bostonians will be going back Bostonians this time too, mused Pepang.

She said aloud: “You make America sound like a sort of nunnery.”

“America is a sort of nunnery.”

She could not help laughing at that, and the American was presently laughing with her.

He said: “You mean, because we don’t behave like nuns?”

She shook her head, giggling. “But, then, I don’t know how Americans behave when there isn’t a war around. How do they?”

“Well, we — we behave.”

“Boston back as Boston, eh?”

“Exactly. And that’s what worried this great-uncle of mine. He thought there was something wrong about how we were built. That we didn’t have pores or something. Jesus, was he glad when the war with Spain finally —”

“That comic-opera war?”

“Oh, he knew it was comic-opera all right. But for a million boys like him, it was an escape at last, a release from the boredom and the tyranny of the small towns. You should read his letters. Coming over, he could hardly sleep, he was so excited. He was sailing east at last. He’d sit around on the deck watching the skies and he thought the stars looked larger and that there were more of them.”

“Took a war to make him really see them, didn’t it?”

“Him and a million other boys. And he thought the war might do more. Might help make America become a part of the world instead of being a world to itself. That all those astonished American boys that sailed out to discover the Orient afresh might discover it for good, and that the blood they spilled here might help fix the Orient in the American imagination.”

“And he was wrong?”

“Completely. He came here, he fought here, he died here, and some thirty years afterwards Manilla was again an unknown quantity for Americans. Though, of course, they were quite sure it wasn’t canned goods.”

“How about now? Would you remember now?”

“No helping it that I can see. We went the hard way to discover the world and America is wherever we’ve made ourselves part of the earth. You can’t look along Main Street now without seeing Tarawa at one end and Anzio at the other.”

“You never thought, did you,” smiled Pepang, “that the pilgrimage you dreamt of making to this grave would turn out so grim and so expensive?”

“Expensive is right,” chuckled the American, looking rueful, “though I guess every pilgrimage is, to be worth making.” And turning towards the gravestone, leaning forward and clapping his knees in his arms: “Oh, it was quite a voyage, his and mine, from that attic where the shawls and fans are. I used to go up there myself. I’d bury my face in the silks, too, and roll the strange names around on my tongue. Now, when I go home, the names won’t be strange anymore; they’ll be American. I suppose that’s what the War was about.”

Rather an American assumption, thought Pepang. But she was not at all annoyed. She was sure now she liked this boy. Not only liked him, respected him. But it was getting late. And her companion seemed to have gone off into a trance, staring at the gravestone. He looks cute, really. All those blond curls. But my behind is sore from all this sitting. And why ever didn’t I think to bring a coat? Oh, no — not the navy blue one with the fur, Josie. Not that one ever again. It’s perished. Burned…

And instantly, she was seeing — and hearing — their house explode into flames. That first explosion, like all the world splitting apart… The minor explosions afterwards, so rapidly continuous she heard them as one roar… And then from among the flames — loudest, clearest, keenest of all —— the sound of her children’s voices, the sound of her children screaming in vain…

Pepang abruptly rose to her feet and the American, startled, glanced up.

For a moment she could only stare back at him, biting her lips. Then: “It’s late, isn’t it?” she said quietly. “Shall we be going?”

The American stood up and side by side they walked slowly across the graveyard.

I’m a fake. Pepang was telling herself. I’m just acting. No one can suffer like this and live. I must be making up the pain. It was all right to feel guilty once but you can’t go on feeling guilty forever or you start enjoying feeling guilty. I must stop it, stop it. God doesn’t let your children die a horrible death just because you play mah-jong for three years.

“Anything the matter?” inquired the American.

She smiled up at him and shook her head. “I was just having a little talk with myself,” she said.

“Gave yourself a spanking, didn’t you?”

“Why, yes. However did you know?”

“Oh, I could see you were pretty disappointed,” replied the American.

Pepang stopped short and stared at him.

“Disappointed? What do you mean?”

“Oh, come now. I’m a disappointment, ain’t I? I did none of the things you expected me to do, did I? I snatched no kisses, made no passes. You’ve been waiting all afternoon for me to love you up. Now, you’re bawling yourself out because I didn’t, aren’t you?”

Pepang Camacho felt herself go rigid, her hands arrested at her breast, the blood burning slowly up to her lifted face. All the world had suddenly become so quiet she could hear her heart beating.

When the seventh extremely loaded bus refused to stop for him, Edong Camacho decided to walk home. It was dusk by then and getting chilly. He rolled down his shirt-sleeves and turned up the collar. Impossible to hurry through those teeming sidewalks. The pavement was intermittent; the street, plowed rubble. And how limply the City sprawled under the night; propped up with sticks and tin-sheets; gaudy with fresh paint; festooned with colored lights; and screaming hysterically.

But his flesh thrilled, his eyes blurred to see all these people — crowding home, or to the shows and night clubs, or just ambling around; the soldiers and sailors bumping past in twos and threes linked arm in arm and roaring out a song — or boozing in the bars, or packed in front of shop windows, or dancing boisterously in the cabarets, or seated comatose on the curb; while the army cars thundered down the street, the MPs waving and whistling, and the shrill street boys combing through the crowd hawking eggs, cigarettes, beer, combs, watches, K-rations, Vick’s pomade, GI clothes, fountain pens, mentholatum, matches, magazines, and all of post-war Manila’s confusion of newspapers.

He loved it all — all the people and all the noise they made. He felt exultant. Be happy! He cried to them in his heart. We have come through! We are alive! We live!

Oh, nothing should mar, nothing spoil this fresh beginning, this new life, he thought, bumping now against a pavement stall. For this was a new life, wasn‘t it? Not just a taking up where we left off when the Japanese came?

The shameful and shameless greed, frivolity. and hard-heartedness of the war years — people turned their eyes away from all that now, piously shuddering. Shocking, they agreed. But what could you expect? The War was to blame. The War and the Japanese. Everything — and everybody — had been so good before. But you know what war does to people, tch, tch. And so it’s always because the war this and because the war that; because the Japanese this and because the Japanese that.

Oh. willfully blind, blind. blind!

As if the War had brought up anything new. As if the War had taught us anything we weren’t past masters in. As if the War hadn’t merely swollen to insanity the feverish, ferocious, fear-haunted, hate-breeding money worship of the years before the War; the criminal greeds and cynical grafts that fester when the spirit rots. The War had merely bloated corruption that was already there.

I should know, he thought grimly, turning now into his own street. I was at all the wrong shrines, wasn’t I? And seeing Newman’s jeep parked at the curb, he thought of Pepang, of their marriage, of all the bitter brawls before the War, when they would come home in the small hours dead-tired, drunk and savagely disgusted with everything. They had become practically strangers to each other during the war years; himself off all day to all the big buy-and-sell sprees where the big money you made vanished quicker than you could count it, herself off to all the big mah-jong sprees where the big money you won melted faster than you could stack it.

And going up the garden-path, he thought of their children, their two boys, dead among the debris of that world. We made a wrong start, he thought, Pepang and l, and our children paid for it. An overwhelming sense of guilt had brought them together again, kept them together now. Not a very healthy emotion maybe. But we can start from there, can’t we? Had already started, rather, he amended, going up the porch stairs. For they were living very carefully now. Keeping away from the old crowd, renouncing the old frivolities. Not stepping out except to early Mass daily; and in the evenings, to take the air, the two of them, hand in hand and not talking much. Himself in denim pants, now, and walking home from a small steady job; Pepang washing dishes and not wearing her nails red like before… Oh-God in heaven, keep us trying! He prayed as he reached for the door knob. But the door opened and Doña Concha came out and closed the door behind her. “Has something happened, mother?” he asked, startled by the look on her face.

“Nothing. Except that our American is leaving.”

“Oh, why?”

“I know nothing. Pepang came home alone. Something wrong with the jeep, she told me. The American has just arrived. How he frightened me, Eduardo. ‘I’m getting the hell out of here!’ he shouted at me when I opened the door to him. Then he stormed upstairs to get his clothes.”
They heard the American coming down the stairs and lowered their voices.

“What does Pepang say?” asked Edong.

“To let him go at once and with no fuss. She does not intend to be present.”

They heard the American inside put down his bag and strike a match.

“You need not see him either,” said Doña Concha, worried. “I will say you have not arrived.”

But her son-in-law had already pushed the door and entered.

Young Newman, freshly capped and uniformed, was standing at the foot of the stairs, lighting a cigarette. He did not look up as Edong approached.

“Leaving, Newman? Weren’t you staying for the weekend?”

“Hi there, chap. No, I’m afraid I can’t. One or two things I forgot about. Sorry. ”

He picked up his bag.

“But must you go at once? You haven’t had supper, have you?”

“Skip it. I’m not hungry. ”

“Okay, Newman, I won’t press you. But drop in again soon, will you? The house is yours anytime you’re in town. Of course, you write your grandfather?”

“Sometimes,” replied the American, smiling at his cigarette.

“Well, give him my best wishes. Do you think he’ll be coming here soon?”

“I don’t know,” said the American, still pondering his cigarette, his eyes hooded. “I don’t know really. I’m not even sure he’s coming back at all. But look here, guy, you shouldn’t have gone through all this trouble of being so nice to me just so I’d be sure to mention your name next time I wrote him.”

Edong’s face went blank.

“Because,” continued the American, looking up, his voice curt, his eyes frosty. “I don’t write my grandfather very often anyway, and next time I do, I’ll be extra careful not to mention your name.”

He flung the cigarette to the floor, trod on it, and moved to the door.

“That was pretty low, though,” he added, pausing at the door, his hand on the knob, “throwing your wife at me like that. You don’t want the job that bad, do you?”

He opened the door and stepped out.

Doña Concha, who was standing at the top of the porch stairs, looking out at the street, wheeled around.

“And you, señora,” said the American, pausing to doff his cap, “you had no objections to having your daughter thus employed. Yours is a delightful family! How I regret I must leave so soon.” When she turned her back on him, he cocked an eyebrow, shrugged and pulled on his cap. He said: “Adios, señora, and next time don’t pick a New England Yankee. They’ve got the damnedest nose for a rat.”

He strode down the porch stairs and up the garden-path, hopped into his jeep, and drove away.

Doña Concha hurried inside. Edong was still standing at the foot of the stairs. She started to say something nasty, changed her mind on seeing his face, and walked off to the kitchen.

Pepang was sitting on a stool beside the sink, peeling potatoes.

“Has he gone?” she asked as her mother entered.

Doña Concha was feeling furious but she noticed just the same that, since arriving, her daughter had brushed and rolled up her hair and that her lips and eyebrows were crisply and vividly defined.

“Perhaps,” began the old woman, “You are now in the mood, Josefa, to explain what the devil that man was so offended about?”

“About nothing that is true,” replied her daughter, dropping the last peeled potato into the bowl on the sink. Smiling smugly to herself, she laid down the knife and began gathering in a heap the peelings on her lap. “You see, mother —” she began, but, seeing her husband enter she sprang up, scattering the peelings to the floor, ran to him and twined her arms around his neck. “Ed, darling,” she whispered, brushing her lips along his cheek, “let’s step out tonight”

“Step out? Where?”

“Anywhere. Night club or something.”

“But what on earth for?”

She burst into laughter.

“Oh, Ed. Ed! We have changed!” And tweaking his nose: “Imagine you asking such a question! I want to go dancing, darling. Boy, do I feel like painting the town this red!” she cried, flaunting her fingernails before his eyes.

*  *  *  *  *

Within a month, Pepang and Edong Camacho were looking, talking and behaving so much like their old pre-war selves that one might wonder, as Doña Concha found herself almost wondering, if there had really been a war to interrupt them. It was presently even harder to recall the interlude of spiritual nakedness, of tears and heart-searching, when they had desired to hide themselves, inarticulate for once, and avoiding each other’s eyes. Doña Concha could only conclude that the times discouraged normality. One had to be either in sackcloth and ashes, or painting the town red. And the lives of the many people who were soon infesting the house at all hours seemed to her a continual and violent propulsion between the extremes, equally hysterical, of penitence and whoopee. She could now ruefully recall having once hoped young Newman might shock Pepang and Edong back to life: he had proved too effective. And he had done something else. He had made Doña Concha feel old.

Upon being explained his behavior, she had felt incredulous; then, amused; then, rather touched; and finally, old.

That a total stranger should expect to be welcomed and loved strictly for himself alone — that was incredible. And funny. But, apparently, young Newman had so expected, and had held out against them from the first, suspecting beforehand that their welcome of him was not disinterested. But what welcome, what affection in this world is entirely disinterested? The most immolated nun still thinks of heaven when she thinks of God. Was this the absurdum of Yankee innocence? Certainly the rest of the world had long learned to take for granted that no prayer is pure piety, no kiss pure affection, no alms pure benevolence, and that even the noblest act of sacrifice is selfish somewhere.

Edong did say — and all of them did hope, being realists — that it might pay to be as nice as possible to old Newman’s grandson. But that was not the sole reason, not even a principal one. They had tried to be as nice as possible chiefly because he was the grandson of an old friend of the family; and because he was a stranger in the land; and because he was an American; and because he was a soldier in the army that had liberated them and they wished to express their gratitude; and because they had become thoughtful through suffering and were feeling profoundly human for the first time in their lives.

That was not enough, of course. She had had experience of innocence and knew how stubbornly it refuses to bargain, to compromise, or (when the rest of us wink and bear it) to be cheated of a grain. And in her heart she knew it to be right. Impossible, yes, its dreams of perfect charity; impossible the people who measure reality by the dream. Impossible but not mistaken, though the reality of human relationships be a shameful traffic in profits. The realists took what they could get; the dreamers, demanding the true measure or nothing, the ‘realists’ always ended up with — the dropped crumbs of love that so quickly became ashes in the mouth…To be loved of the grown-up heart. And surely she had seen everything when a big full-grown man demanded to be accepted as one accepts a child!

All this made Doña Concha feel — for the first time in her sixty years — old.

Not as old, however, as her son-in-law often felt now.

Edong Camacho had found easy the abrupt emotional about-face. It had only proved something he was always forgetting and learning afresh: that it was Pepang who set the pace of their lives and that he could stay sincere in a certain emotion only as long as she chose to share it with him. The moment she refused to feel guilty anymore, the weight of the past vanished. Since there was no more past, you could do as you pleased. To do as you pleased, you had to know as many clever people as possible.

And yet, while acting the ‘live wire’ for all he was worth, he felt old. Though the past no longer weighed on the shoulders it was still around somewhere — outside peering in at windows; or lurking in corners and in the pauses of talk; or, in the morning when you first opened your eyes, leaning over you, staring, and swiftly disappearing. And when people said how nice that they had started going around again and how brave they were and showed the right spirit not allowing what those monkeys did to ruin their lives but getting right up again to do business as usual and not moping at home with the blinds down and that private grief is rather selfish at times like these, don‘t you think? — or when he heard them say that yes, those were Pepang and Edong Camacho who lost both their children; and yes, thank God, they’re back to normal now and have learned to be plucky about what happened like all of us and looking very much like their old selves, don’t you think? — he felt violently nauseated and had to dig his fists into his pockets to keep from bashing their faces.

For these people meant by grief, mere vindictiveness; by courage, callousness; by business as usual, dirty business; and it was now they had gone mad. Pepang and himself, who recently were so sane and healthy, or, anyway, had had a chance to be really sad and healthy but had thrown the chance away and now were indeed ‘back to normal’.

And he understood now the cold shock of guilt and shame that had paralyzed him on hearing young Newman’s words of contempt and accusation. Hearing those words and knowing them to be false; knowing Newman to be wrong, to have misunderstood, and that they had welcomed him because they felt it their duty and not because they had an axe to grind; knowing his conscience clear and his intentions innocent, he had yet known, at the same moment, with the same sureness, and with a paralyzing immediacy of guilt and shame, that the American spoke right and that somehow in some deep and obscure manner — simply by existing, perhaps, simply by being the sort of people they were — they had injured, they had insulted young Newman.

He did not tell Pepang this. He was afraid she would laugh and not understand. He was wrong. Pepang would have completely understood. And she would not have laughed. For this was how she had felt herself that afternoon in the graveyard. But where Edong had been paralyzed cold, she had felt stung alive, blazing.

Besides, she was the sort of person who, on being accused of anything nasty, justly or not, promptly and gaily goes forth to provide the accusation with all the grounds it needed. If she was the scheming harlot the American thought her, then she was also a big hypocrite. The American had been wrong in his assumptions. But by the time she had finished making herself over to prove those assumptions correct she could no longer determine whether she had ever been sincere in her period of penitence.

Anyway, she had ceased to care. She had often been described as shallow, as liking only shallow people; an appraisal that succeeded in worrying her other days. Not now; not anymore. This first experience with a ‘deep one’ was enough. She would never again care to go below. Now, as before, she would deal with people only on the surface, giving of herself and asking of them only the self we wear at parties, take to the movies, and generally offer to the public, because it is worthless, easy to please, impossible to insult and completely superficial.

She was especially cautious with Americans, though the post-Newman varieties relieved her mind by being precisely what they looked like: desperately tired and homesick boys wanting to be amused. Still, she was taking no chances, and with even the most apparently inarticulate prepared herself against the possibility of a chasm exploding suddenly wide open where gun had stood before. Newman and herself were quits now, she would think at such moments, for as she feared, in each American, a lurking Newman, so he must have feared, in each Filipino, even before the dismal weekend, the Camachos lurking in ambush. And, she would mentally hoot, I bet he now keeps his wallet in an iron pouch — along with his virginity!

Which is unjust!

Newman’s increased mail home, mostly because of the Camachos, can prove that their effect on him was not so elementary; was, possibly as racking as his effect on them.

There were (he wrote, in a letter to his mother) no signs they felt revolted by what they were doing. They were perfectly at ease. If I hadn’t been so mean as to spoil their game, they would probably have patted themselves on the back afterwards for having been so hospitable and at the same time so provident.

And yet I keep feeling I was wrong somewhere. Maybe their ideas about honesty are not the same as ours, and how judge them at all in that case? Or maybe it’s just because I’m an American. You can’t imagine, Mom, how hard it is for Americans over here to get themselves taken for human beings. We’re not just Tom, Dick, and Harry to them. We’re the richest nation in the world. We’re Packards, and Hollywood, and Camel cigarettes, and Harvard, and B-29’s, and Sunkist oranges, and the Empire State Building. But we’re not people. We’re the happy hunting ground. We’re the dollar sign made flesh. And they can’t think of us except in terms of the profits we mean to them. Maybe they’re not really mercenary. But our being this rich and this lavish makes them so. We’re afflicted with something like that curse on Midas: we corrupt what we touch.

Look how far I’ve traveled again from the Camachos. Trouble is whenever I start on that family I find myself digging up everything I ever thought and everything that ever happened to me as if to justify how I acted. I feel there was something about them I missed. I was too busy at the time playing detective and looking sardonic. But I surely figured them wrong somewhere because now when I try to put them together the way they should if I was right, the pieces don’t fit It worries me…

Newman had evidently gone on worrying: a month later he was writing his mother again on the subject.

I can’t sleep (he wrote). I keep seeing that girl’s face, and her husband’s. I can’t begin to imagine the enormity of what I did, supposing I was wrong. And something tells me I was. Those people did want to be nice. And simply because they were nice people. They wanted to like me, wanted me to like them. And I brushed off their attempts at friendship. I flung their hospitality in their faces. I messed up everything with all my damnable suspicions, dratted cuss that I am. And it’s such a hopeless circle, Mom. First you botch all relations with other people by being so difficult and wary, then you worry yourself to death wondering if you hurt somebody. Yes, I know. I wouldn’t have all those Puritan ancestors if I didn’t worry. But remember how I boasted it would be me riding them and not them riding me? I was so confident, wasn’t I? I could make fun of all the Yankee Marco Poles that went everywhere, saw nothing, and understood less. I laughed at you when you told me about your running away to New York and Art, and then to Paris and more Art, and finally giving up and coming back to Temperance, New Hampshire, because anyway that was where you had always been. Well, it’s your turn to laugh now, Mom. I’m coming home on the same boat myself. I never left home, either. And me telling that girl about the attic and how when I came home the things won’t be strange anymore. No wonder she called me batty. But now that we’re back to those people, what do I do about them? For either I do something — and quick — or I burst. No use warning me to think it over some more, I’II have to see them again soon. And crawl…

*  *  *  *  *

So, about four months after his first encounter with the Camachos, Doña Concha burst into her daughter’s room and announced that ‘the American’ had come back.

“Which one?” asked Pepang. She was sitting on the bed in her chemise, polishing her nails, and she went right on polishing them.

“Which one?” echoed Doña Concha, blankly. “Why, the first one of course. The Newman. Old Andrew’s grandson.”

Pepang looked up, her mouth open.

“Newman!” And her husband coming in from the bathroom at that moment, rubbing his hair in a towel: “Do you hear that, Ed? Young Newman has come back… Where is he, mother? What did he say?”

“I have not yet talked with him. He is waiting downstairs. The maid let him in and told me. But I saw him arrive. I was in my room looking out the window.”

“My God!” moaned Edong, collapsing on a chair. “But why has he come again?”

Doña Concha threw him and her daughter a scornful glance. She said: “The man has, of course, come back to apologize.”

“Apologize!” gasped Pepang and Edong together.

“Naturally,” said Doña Concha, “having realized his offense. He brings flowers and a box. Of candy, perhaps. Oh, the boy shows himself of a good heart. He is not above confessing an error and begging for pardon.”

“But he must not do any such thing!” cried Pepang, rising, trembling slightly, brush in hand.

“Oh, God, no!” groaned Edong, rising too, and flinging the towel away.

“But why not?” demanded Doña Concha. “Why not, if he wants to, if he feels a need for it? It would make him feel good.”

“Only for the moment,” said Pepang bitterly, dropping the brush on the bed and pressing her palms against her cheeks. “It would only make him hate us more.”

“But this is your own heart that you let speak for him!” taunted her mother.

“You assume too much, Josefa, that the man would react as you would. But perhaps he possesses a conscience. Perhaps he understands the dignity of penitence and of the desire to be forgiven. And you yourself, a few months ago, when you were still in your senses, even you would have understood such a desire; you would have respected it; you would not have babbled all this about hate and shame and disgust.”

Pepang listened, quite still, her palms pressed against her cheeks, her eyelids faintly flickering. Then, she looked at her husband. Edong was standing still too, staring at his feet. She knew he could feel her looking at him but would not lift his eyes. She smiled — her smug, crafty smile — picked up the brush, sat down on the bed, and, briskly resuming the polishing of her nails said:

“Listen mother; you too, Ed. Why all this holy solemnity? This boy, when he first came here, had a very unpleasant time. Through no fault of ours, yes. But still he suffered. We are all agreed, I suppose, that he is to suffer no further unpleasantness in this house if we can prevent it. And whatever you say, mother, having to apologize is a highly unpleasant business. Just because we bear him a grudge is no —”

“I bear him no grudge!” interrupted her mother.

“Very well, you hear him no grudge. All of us bear him no grudge. Then, why make him go through such a painful comedy at all?”

“Certain formalities,” promptly answered her mother, “are established and must be respected. Oh, we made a grave mistake the first time in not standing fast by convention. You went out alone with him and what conclusion did he draw? Now, we must stand rigid. He is in Rome, he must do as the Romans.”

“We are to butcher him then,” smiled Pepang, “to provide Rome a holiday? I thought you bore him no grudge, mother! No, no. The tactful, the truly polite thing to do is to ignore what happened previously and —”

“You do not cancel the past,” broke in her mother, “simply by ignoring it.”

“Perhaps not. But, anyway, we can pretend to ourselves that if we are meeting him for the —”

“If he is not to aplologize to me,” again interrupted Doña Concha, “I will not see him.”

Rising to put an end to all this nonsense, and crossing to her dressing table, Pepang said, firmly: “He is not to apologize to anybody and you need not see him, mother.”

“I refuse to see him!” the old woman corrected her, sweeping furiously out of the room.

“And now to get dressed,” breathed Pepang, springing to action; and as she hurried into her frock: “Whatever are you waiting for Ed? That boy has been sweating it out, you know, while we blabbed… Come on, get up; you’re sitting on my stockings. And will you please omit the misery from your face? You’re not going to be difficult, too, are you?”

“I only want to know,” said her husband, rising reluctantly, “how we are to act towards him if he is not to apologize.”

Pepang groaned.

“We act,” she patiently explained, as she pulled on the stockings, “exactly as if he were any other American”. You should know the routine by now. Only, we talk louder, funnier, and we hog the conversation. Give him as few openings as possible. Especially when it looks as if he wanted to bring up what happened. That’s absolutely taboo. So, clap down quick. As far as we’re concerned we are seeing him for the first time. Though heaven save me from anything like that first one!… Funny how long ago it seems now. Ages, really… Oh, well, I guess it’s all part of one’s education. Throw me my shoes, will you?”

*  *  *  *  *

When Pepang came down, young Newman was sitting in the parlor, holding a bunch of flowers and a box on his lap. He stood up to greet her and she immediately asked him to sit down again; told him how nice he was looking; asked him, as she sat down beside him on the sofa, if he didn’t find this sudden heat spell killing; laughingly deplored how she looked and hoped he would excuse her and said she practically lived in the bathroom these days; which reminded her of Bouganville and all those places and was it true they did nothing but take showers out in the rain and how about the women there and how awful and did he know a certain McCoy, a Jimmy McCoy of the 37th, and she began to tell him a very funny story about this guy when he was still in Brooklyn.

When Edong came in bearing a tray of drinks, Newman stood up again but they made him sit down and Edong said didn’t he find it a hell of a climate and that he had the medicine for that right here and what poison did Newman prefer and Pepang laughed and hoped he wasn’t on any sort of wagon and Edong passed the glasses around and declared that no wagons of any sort were allowed in the City because of the military traffic. Then they spent four minutes arguing whom to toast and Pepang said Yamashita certainly deserved toasting but Edong said the devil was going to take care of that and they finally just tossed down the drinks without toasting anybody and Edong filled the glasses again and lighted cigarettes for everybody while Pepang resumed her story about Jimmy McCoy and somehow managed to get Newman to rid his lap of the embarrassingly conspicuous box and flowers without mentioning them.

Before this combined onslaught of the Camachos, Newman at first seemed rather startled; then, increasingly mystified. He strove, now and then, to break through the barrage, but the Camachos were vigilant on all sides, blocking him in. He seemed to give up finally; his wondering face went blank. When, after a while, that blankness twisted itself into the sardonic expression he had worn with such relish the first time, Pepang, honestly surprised (she had not expected to produce this particular effect), stumbled for a moment and floundered about in her talk. The next moment, however, she was up and herself again. The hell with it. Why should she worry? It was a relief rather. And she signalled Edong that the point of greater danger was past; they could relax.

Edong promptly slumped in his chair, glass in hand, and grinned savagely. Each time his eyes chanced to meet the American’s, his belly heaved and water sourly swelled in his mouth.

When Newman finally rose to leave, Edong noticed that he did not offer to shake hands, and thought: I’ll be damned if I get up. He contented himself with merely bobbing his head and grinning. But the box and the flowers still lay on the sofa and Newman seemed unable to go without disposing of them. Pepang solved that one by picking up the flowers herself.

“For me? How nice of you, Joe. They’re lovely, what’s in the box?”

“Candy,” replied Newman; and as they moved to the door: “But why Joe? You know my name.”

“All Americans are Joe to me,” drawled Pepang as they stepped out to the porch.

“Don’t you try to distinguish?”

“Uh-uh. I stopped trying, long ago… Well, goodby again — Joe. Take extra good care of yourself. You’re going home, you know. No more boozing, no more late hours. Have a pleasant voyage. And try not to think evil of us.”

The American hesitated on the porch stairs.

“I did, you know, the first time,” he finally blurted out.

Pepang felt her heart lose a beat but managed to say at once, lightly: “And now you’ve found out you were mistaken?”

“I’ve found out,” said the American, looking her in the eye. “that I was not mistaken after all.”

And that, mused Pepang when the jeep had driven away, is what I get for being so damn considerate.

She marched into the house, dumped the flowers in one chair and herself on another, and asked Edong to pour her a stiff one.

“That was the cruelest thing I ever did,” he moaned as he handed her the glass.

She said: “Please. Nobody found it a picnic,” and gulped down the drink.

“Your mother was right,” pursued Edong, looking miserable. “We should have let him apologize.”

“Okay, okay! We were wrong again. But we were only trying to spare him a lousy time, weren’t we? What’s wrong about that, I’d like to know.”

“Us!” cried Edong savagely. “Ourselves! What we are!”

“Oh, you make me sick. You and your eternal breast-beating.”

“We weren’t trying to save him a lousy time. We were trying to save ourselves a lousy time. We knew we would have suffered like hell to have him apologize to us. And why, sweetheart, why? Because we know we’re worthless; because we know we’re corrupt; because we know we’re —”

“I do not!” snapped Pepang. “Will you stop howling nonsense?”

“What do you want me to do? Sing the praises of what we are? Extol my cowardice? Extol your bitchiness?”

“You can stop screaming, that’s what you can do!” screamed Pepang, rising and hurling the glass in his face.

And Doña Concha, upstairs in her room saying her beads, jumped up to hear the screams and the glass breaking. It has happened at last, she told herself. This was the couple’s first fight since their resumption of the normal life. She had felt it coming a long time. And the American who had marked off one phase in their lives now marked the end of another. The period of readjustment was over. Pepang and Edong were now completely back to normal.

And if to be mad was not to be normal, thought Doña Concha, sitting down and resuming her beads, then it was futile indeed to preach moderation, and too late for moderate cures. The pattern of society, mutilated by war as it was, had better be pulled loose altogether. How now invoke the ties that bind men when all human intercourse was an infection? A plague was abroad and a plague calls for quarantine. Herded together men rotted each other; apart, their own loneliness might heal and purify them. It was time again, thought Doña Concha, for the call of the ascetic and the cave of the anchorite. Time again for harsh hermits to lead the populace out of the cities and to disperse them among the wastes of the desert. Thus had the world saved itself once from the violence of its own disgust with itself. Disciplined and rejuvenated by solitude, tears, fasting, silence and wrestling with devils, it had emerged to discover, with awkward awe and astonishment, the green of the leaves and the joy of human companionship. Had emerged to discover and to adore salvation as a Woman (whether virgin or mother) and, enthroned in her arms, Deity as a child. How long before the world would be fit again to make that discovery? wondered Doña Concha, hearing another glass break, downstairs, and Pepang shrieking. It would take a long time, she feared, considering that the world had fallen so low there were no more women these days. No more women and no more children, grimly concluded Doña Concha, rising and going off to fetch ammonia and mercurochrome.

As for young Andrew Newman, one would have thought this final encounter would mean something really final. But, with a New England Yankee, one apparently never touches bottom. For, in the last letter he was to write his mother before embarking, and in the middle of such an important announcement as the precise date on which he expected to arrive in Temperance, New Hampshire, he was to jolt that former Paris expatriate by abruptly breaking off and resuming on the Camachos.

You never know (he wrote ) just what you expect people to do a certain moment until the moment occurs and they don’t do it. I think it funny now to have brought along candy and flowers but only because I have realized that, after how I acted the other time, if I ever dared show up again they would naturally (if they were really in innocent) and promptly have done certain things — like slapping my face, breaking my neck, and throwing me out the window. When they came down instead with grins a mile wide and started trying to get me all hot and confused by giving me the 50-caliber talk stuff and winking at each other all the time — why, I started smelling that rat again, all the way from Denmark…

It’s a strange thing all right, to be an American. But maybe it’s just as strange and difficult to be other people. Trouble is we Americans act as if we owned a patent on strangeness. We sow any number of things that must annoy and flabbergast other people and we do them as if it were our duty to annoy and flabbergast others. But we don’t like to find other people’s actions annoying or flabbergasting in any way. We take for granted that anybody that’s civilized at all and smart acts like an American. It will surely take a lot of time, goodwill and labor before no people are strange to other peoples and nobody’s a foreigner anywhere. We Americans don’t exactly hasten the process by being so awe-struck by the strangeness of us.

You will gather from all this that my mind’s not yet at ease about the Camachos. It isn’t. I still think I was wrong somewhere, that there was some vital item I missed. I feel now that they were struggling to reach over to where I was but had to grope and grope because, as usual, I had sullenly turned off the lights too soon. And yes, Mom, it worries me…