Read Online The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee - Free Book Online

didn’t worry that she might be somehow depriving him. Like other mothers and sons, they had plenty of good times, for example when she brought him along on a furniture-buying trip when he was eleven and they stopped in Colonial Williamsburg. They churned butter together and made a long swath of rainbow-striped fabric on an old-fashioned loom, and one of the photographs in Clines’s hands was of the two of them locked up in the stocks, both of them beaming with goofy grins, and that evening instead of driving home she decided to spend money she shouldn’t have to stay at a decent motel with an indoor pool, so Nicholas could enjoy a swim before they ate their takeout dinner of burgers and fries. The next spring his class took a trip to Washington, D.C., and he had made her cry when he brought home a large vegetable-and-dip platter with seven interlocking porcelain trays illustrated with famous monuments. He’d bought it with the spending money she had given him, rather than buying his own souvenirs or snacks.
    “But we don’t throw parties,” she said, her heart rent in her chest.
    “Now we can!” he said.
    She used the platter for his next few birthday parties, filling the trays with hard candies and chocolates and bubble gum. Every holiday saw it on their kitchen table. One by one the trays got broken, eventually only the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument remaining intact, and he finally told her he wouldn’t be upset if she threw the platter away, as it looked silly with most of its trays missing.
    Though she couldn’t recall now, at some point she did.
    “It seems your son liked the Roman times,” Clines said, flipping through some pictures from various Halloweens.
    “Yes, he always did,” she said. “But he was drawn to Italy in general.”
    Clines showed her what he was looking at: there were shots of Nicholas, second grade, costumed in a centurion’s outfit, complete with a plastic bronze breastplate and broom-top helmet. Another shot, a year older, had him as a gladiator, with a dirty, ripped shirt and a sword. Though there weren’t pictures, she remembered him dressing up in middle school as a senator, in toga and sandals, a laurel on his head, and then one year in a beret and the loose, swarthy garb of a nineteenth-century bohemian. She’d asked him who he was and he told her, quite proudly, that he was Camille Corot. In her shop there was a shelf of old art books and one was full of color plates of the artist’s Italian landscape paintings, which Nicholas often leafed through after school. He simply said he liked the soft colors of the houses and trees, so different from the city, but she wondered if it was because she had once falsely and stupidly suggested, after one of his random, out-of-the-blue queries, that she met and briefly lived with his father in Italy.
    “Where exactly?” Nicholas asked. He was perhaps ten at the time.
    “In the northern part.”
    “Show me,” he said, quickly retrieving a large world atlas she also had on the shelf, and which he was always poring over. He certainly knew all of the national capitals, and most of the major cities.
    “Here,” she said, her finger tapping on a spot, with conviction. “Here, near Mantova.”
    She found that concrete facts would put him off for a while, even as she knew that such loose improvisations could only lead to trouble. So why had she persisted? She had wanted to keep their world as small as possible, for them to be simply a mother and son, as well as to circumscribe time, make only the present the time that was real. But of course Nicholas, an imaginative and artistic young boy, had begun to reconstruct what he wanted from whatever she said, to build up his own mythologies, until an irresistible mystery had naturally emerged.
    During his senior year Nicholas told her that he would like to defer his college acceptance and go traveling, and at that point June had no objections, if that’s what he desired. He had