As Max Saw It by Louis Begley Read Free Book Online

imagined her wonderfully thin, but not bony, with only dark aureoles where her breasts should be, and no hips at all. Her legs, I hoped, would be shapely, worthy of the pretty, black-slippered feet on which she trotted beside me. Quite short—her head arrived just above my elbow—she had the unspoiled face of a child caught midway between a smile and a pout. At times, when I wanted her to look at some gargoyle on a palace roof, I could not resist tugging on her pigtails. I thought at first it was imprudent of the ministry to give me an interpreter-guide such as she, and wondered whether it was not, in fact, a conscious experimental provocation, undertaken with the thought that if I succumbed to her charms the incident could be stored away for some possible future use. Gradually, I came to the conclusion it was absurd to suspect it could be in anyone’s interest to embarrass me while I was performing services China urgently wanted. In any case, I was determined to remain on the ground of good comradeship with Miss Wang, saving the intimacies I urgently desired and imagined for solitary meditation in my hotel room, and the time when her dream of coming to study law in America might be miraculously realized.
    We parted in the drive of the Beijing Hotel. She said she would come back in the morning for our usual palace visit. This time, I did not object.
    Thanks to Mr. Dou’s fortuitous family tie with the manager of the hotel, I was living in the fortress-like centralbuilding, constructed long before World War II, and not in one of the dreadful additions, the earlier of which was built with Russian assistance and on a Soviet model, and the later, even more tawdry, by Canadian interests. Accordingly, I had a room of bourgeois proportions and a bathroom equipped with large, old-fashioned fixtures. Many of the other rooms and suites in this part of the hotel were used as representative offices of Swiss and German banks and well-known industrial corporations; on my own floor were located the combination sleeping quarters and offices of several American law firms waiting for clients to sprout from the soil of new capitalism. But, as an initial matter, my presence in the Beijing Hotel—instead of the squalid Friendship establishment, where I might have been together with other visiting professors, Eastern European engineers, and Japanese businessmen—was due to the change in my personal circumstances, which had enabled me to say to the foreign ministry that I needed no stipend and would, moreover, pay all my travel and living expenses if only I was given a car and driver and the opportunity to rent a decent place to stay. My cousin Emma had died the previous year, carried away by a stroke and not, as she had feared, by cancer. Against all reasonable expectations, without ever having uttered a word about it—the thought that I might inherit from her more than a few thousand dollars or a piece of Hafter furniture had never entered my mind—she left me the use of her very large fortune. From a how-to-make-ends-meet law professor I was magically transformed into a man who was potentially rich. Potentially, because the charity that would have received this ton of money had my cousin not chosen to surprise it andme decided to contest the validity of her bequest. I was convinced that the challenge was frivolous, an opinion shared by the trustees, who, without awaiting the outcome of the litigation, had begun to pay me an allowance that lifted me many stories above my old existence.
    T HE NEXT MORNING , in one of the deserted eastern courtyards of the Forbidden City—where grass advancing timidly across the glazed tile roofs of detached palaces bears witness to decades of neglect—I was in fact discussing with Miss Wang, quite seriously this time, what needed to be done to get her into a Law School program at Harvard. Paradoxically, it was best to apply for a year of graduate work, on the basis of not much more than her good