The Binding Chair (14 page)

“Oh,” Alice said, immediately conflating the image with one of May, seeing her aunt as she reclined on her dressing-room chaise, languid, lids half-closed, the musk of her pipe lingering. “Thank you!”

The next day, she was on the local train to Moscow, which departed at two from the station at Kuybyshev. It picked up speed and went around a bend, and Alice watched everything disappear: the station, the town, the women selling boiled potatoes and onions. She ran her thumb over the icon in her pocket. Probably there were no berths on a local train. No berths and no porters to turn down the covers.

Staring out the compartment window, Alice found she didn’t mind being in disgrace. After so much talking, it was restful.

A S
EARCH
U
NDERTAKEN

T
HE SOLICITOR’S OFFICE WAS ON
M
USEUM
R
OAD
, just off the corner of Peking. Outside the black door with its polished brass knocker and name plate, May sat in her sedan chair without moving. “You want me to wait?” one of the boys asked, and she spoke back sharply.

She had a headache and the indigestion to which she was prey; it radiated into her chest and sent sharp pains under her right shoulder blade. All of Shanghai was limp under an oppressive autumn heat wave. May felt as if she couldn’t draw a breath. The previous night she and Arthur had sat nearly undressed on the verandah outside their bedroom, but the air was without a breeze. They kept their eyes on the drooping branches of the plane tree; not one leaf moved.

“What is it?” he’d said at last.

“What is what?”

“Why are you so glum? Is it because Alice is off to boarding school?”

“I’m not glum. It’s the weather.”

He looked at her. It was impossible to lie to him successfully.

And now, here she was at the solicitor’s. On a fool’s errand. How often had she asserted to Arthur, and to herself, that mistakes—those of any import—could not be undone; the past could not be revised. At breakfast, when she’d told Arthur she was going out shopping, he’d lifted his eyebrows suspiciously. “In this heat?” he asked.

May called to the boy. “I’ll be here an hour at least,” she said. “You needn’t wait. Come back at four.” He nodded. She gave him a little money. “Get something to drink. For your brother, too.”

A secretary greeted her inside the office door. Clearly May was not who the name “Mrs. Cohen” had suggested to him over the telephone.

“Won’t you please sit down?” he said, speaking slowly and loudly, succumbing to the temptation to stare. May was wearing one of her favorite jackets, of red silk brocade. It was fabric underneath which a person felt substantial, even brave, and she wore the jacket over silk trousers of a matching red. Her shoes were red and black, her hair lacquered and high.

“Mr. Barrett will be with you in a moment,” the secretary said to her. “May I offer you tea?”

“No, thank you.” May sat.

Mr. Barrett, when he appeared, was a man of fifty, not more. His thick gray hair, parted in the center, was held in place with fragrant pomade. The rich smell of it struck May as somewhat unlawyerly, but she liked his face. The mouth was businesslike, the eyes kind.

“How old would the girl be?” he asked, after they were seated behind the closed door to his office.

“Sixteen,” May said.

“And it was through the Door of Hope? You are sure?”

“No, not sure at all. I was not … I wasn’t able … I didn’t pay adequate attention at the time.”

Mr. Barrett nodded.

The Door of Hope was a charity organized by European and American missionary ladies. Its objective was the reform of young prostitutes, the rescue of the unfortunate children they bore. May cleared her throat. On the solicitor’s desk was a photograph of his family, himself posed in the midst of a wife, a son, three daughters.

“I think I have the correct date,” May said. “I’ve … I contacted a person I used to know. A woman who kept … it was a kind of journal. The child would have been picked up, well, it would have been in March, the second week of March.”

“In ninety-five?”

“No. Ninety-six.”

“She was how old?” Mr. Barrett put his elbows on his desk and brought his hands together, fingertips touching like a peaked roof. He peered at her over them.

“Not quite two.”

“I see.” Mr. Barrett sighed. “Some organizations keep meticulous records,” he said. “Some not so meticulous. The Door of Hope works closely with a number of mission homes. Holy Trinity, the American Church Mission—that’s the Protestant asylum out at Jessfield. And Siccawei, of course.” He picked up his pen, tapped it on the blotter, a thoughtful rather than nervous gesture. “Her age does complicate matters,” he said. “What was her name?”

“She didn’t have one.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean a surname.”

May looked at him. “She didn’t have a given name, either.”

“She was almost two years old and had no given name?”

May nodded.

“Well, Mrs. Cohen,” said Mr. Barrett. “You need a detective, not a solicitor.”

“I see,” May said. “Can you recommend one?”

“No, no.” He shook his head. “What I mean is, there isn’t anyone who does this kind of work.”

“No one? No one at all?”

“Look,” he said. “I’m not trying to discourage you. I’ll do what I can. I was just expressing my, my feeling that this will be, well, a bit of a challenge. I don’t have much to go on.”

“Yes. I know.”

“If the child went to mission school, then she learned a trade. Needlework, most likely. Spinning. Sewing. How to use an industrial loom. That way, she could find work at a cotton filature. She probably learned English. She may—” Mr. Barrett interrupted himself.

“If I find her.” He paused to look pointedly at May. “What is it that you want?” He raised his hands in a gesture of inquiry, palms up and empty, then dropped them. “With regard to domestic situations,” he explained, “it’s always for the best if all parties are clear about what it is they want.”

“Yes,” May said. “Of course. For now, what I want is just to know.”

“To know?”

“Yes. Where she is. How she is. That’s all.”

B
RIGHT
, W
ORTHLESS
C
OINS

J
ULY OF 1898,
AND THE SUMMER SKY OVER
Shanghai glowed yellow, as it did nowhere else. The Whangpoo slopped and simmered around the jutting breast of Pootung; among the hulls of steamers slipped crowds of junks, their prows painted with vigilant, unblinking black eyes. The river stank of birth and death and every seething stage between. Sun gilded the cornices of the buildings along the Bund and made the spire of the German Club into a bright needle. Bolts in the girders of the Garden Bridge glittered seductively, like the earrings of a harlot, under the fierce midsummer heat, the famous
fu-tiens
, which sent the English running to the mountain resorts of Japan.

On the sweltering July morning when he disembarked from the
Mathilda
, Arthur Cohen thought he had never seen any place so lovely. Even the destitute river families, eight or ten people living aboard each narrow boat, even this floating slum seemed to him exotic rather than debased. His visit to his sister, Dolly, and her wealthy new husband had rescued him from their neurasthenic second cousin, Amelia, and her mute, pathetically patient expectation of his never-coming proposal. The Monday he departed, in exchange for his cowardly lie, a promise to return soon, Amelia had given him a locket bearing one of her lusterless curls; and although en route he was filled with rueful self-recriminations, upon arrival all unpleasant feelings were burned away by the heat, pushed aside by the smell, drowned out by the noise. He leaned over the rail and dropped the locket into the harbor.

It was the fourteenth of July, 1898, and the French Concession was preparing for its grandest Bastille Day celebration yet. On the south end of the Bund, members of a marching band had assembled, their horns and cymbals glowing in the haze, all of them adjusting their costumes, oblivious to a black cart pulled by a skeletal ox, its legs splattered with filth. The driver turned off the Bund onto a dilapidated jetty from which he dumped the previous night’s dead or comatose opium addicts collected from the gutters. As the bodies fell, the player holding the cymbals brought them together with a crash, and then did it again, over and over, as if to test their timbre.

Was there any place as loud as Shanghai? Frenetic native weddings. Cacophonous funeral processions. Markets. Military parades. Holidays. Fire brigades. The clanging of the post office clock. The unnervingly human-sounding scream of a pony burned by lamp oil. The dull, tuneless voices of wharf coolies, singing as they staggered under crates. Arthur heard all of these within hours of his arrival; that night there was a display in which firecrackers discharged thousands of pieces of colored paper that floated down onto his head like blossoms. Never had he felt happier, more alive. He decided he would make himself indispensable to Dolly’s husband. Dick Benjamin would have to keep him forever.

B
UT
“G
OD IN HEAVEN!”
Dick was yelling fifteen years later. “Arthur, Arthur, Arthur,” he was saying, and while he said it he held his head in his hands. Unfair as this was, irrational as it was—a matter of coincidence, of having received the cable from Kuybyshev only minutes before coming upon evidence of Arthur’s most recent lapse in judgment—it seemed to Dick that of course Arthur was to blame for Alice’s having gotten off a train with a deranged captain. Because Arthur had allowed himself to be seduced by May, and May had corrupted Alice, which was, after all, why his wife and daughters were on a train to London in the first place. Though Arthur had not proven himself indispensable, certainly he was ineradicable, as permanently fixed in the household as any successful parasite, as the gall worm that had gnarled up the tree in the back garden, twisting and swelling its limbs.

“I know,” said Arthur. “I know, I know, I know.”

“What do you know!”

“I know that this is … that I am … insupportable. But it’s only until next week. Next week they’ll be gone,” he promised, referring to the undernourished rickshaw boy whose infected leg he was treating with mercury salve in Dolly’s dressing room and the boy’s half-dead addict of a sister, both of them eaten alive by syphilis.

And who could Dick blame but himself, his own indulgent nature? “No,” he used to tell the gardener, “don’t cut so many branches.” And “What can we do?” he would answer Dolly’s complaints about her brother.

“I’ll give you the money.” Already Dick was reaching into pockets, patting his trouser legs to locate his billfold. “I’ll pay to keep them in a suite at, at the Astor House. If Dolly ever knows—” he broke off, shaking his head. That awful, grating Australian accent. So harsh on his ears. Could his wife ever have sounded like that? All day he endured the shrill cries of native brokers, the endless clacking of their abacuses. The rise and the fall of the tael, the dollar, the pound. The strange febrile jumps and dips of the yen. The collapse of rice, the resurgence of tea. And then to leave his office and make his way home through the clamorous streets to news of Alice’s adventure, followed by Arthur: Arthur and his latest project.

Dick rang the bell for the boy. “Brandy and soda,” he said, and the boy bowed. “And try to find a bit of that Stilton cheese, if there’s any, with toast. A biscuit. Something. Anything. Dash it all, I’ve missed tea again.”

He sat in one of his study’s two dark-green leather chairs and stared at Arthur, who nervously pulled at his earlobe. Any kind of strain was likely to drive the volume up inside his head.

“D’you, um …,” Arthur said. “What I mean is, shall I have a drink with you, or do you want me to work on this, uh, problem now?”

Dick glared at his brother-in-law.

“Of course,” Arthur said. “I’ll just call Boy and have him, or Amah, yes, Amah, get them dressed and then take them myself to the, uh, somewhere.”

Dick counted out a few notes and handed them over without speaking. He had transcended his volatile ancestry. He had cultivated a stiff upper lip. Born in Baghdad, raised in Bombay, schooled in England: by sheer force of will, Dick Benjamin had made himself as British as a person could. Being British meant being stoic, of course, as well as rational, condescending, civilized. It meant regarding the Chinese with contempt. Not disliking them, exactly, but counting them of little value.

The capacity of his wife’s brother to love the Chinese, to find them mysterious and exciting and redeemable—no, not redeemable, but worthy, not needing redemption!—astonished Dick Benjamin, who cringed each day en route to Jinkee Road, his pony cart threading its way through filth and misery of every description. The Chinese were a people—well, it wasn’t just that they were heathens, and not kosher. It was fair, yes, it was fair to say that they were aggressively anti-kosher. They would put anything,
anything
, into their mouths. Considered the hairless bodies of newly born mice a delicacy. Dropped them in sauce and ate them still wriggling. Ate monkey brains and pigs’ ears. Ate eels and leeches. Drank the blood of dogs and heaven knew what else. Dick Benjamin may not have remained orthodox, as his mother would have wished, but the idea of clean and unclean retained a firm hold on his head and his heart, and the Chinese—the Chinese were emphatically not a clean people.

Naturally, Dick understood that on some people the forbidden exerts an irresistible pull. Arthur’s problem was one of erotic fixation. Dick would not say this to his wife about her brother, but it is what he had concluded. Arthur was … he seemed simple, but he might be complicated. Almost as soon as he’d arrived, fifteen years ago, he’d fallen in love with a famously dexterous prostitute who had, beneath a banquet table at a singsong house, removed Arthur’s penis from his trousers with a set of priceless jade chopsticks. Or so gossip went. It was the kind of story you heard from someone else, not your suspect brother-in-law. Of course Dolly and the girls knew nothing of this, and they never would. Not about the chopsticks, nor about the new disaster, of which Dick had only just that morning learned, from a solicitor friend of a friend. Before she met Arthur, May had apparently had a child, a girl, who got lost and whom she was now trying surreptitiously to find. Well, even a hyena would make a better mother than May. Less dangerous. And who on earth could have predicted that the extraordinary denouement of the jade chopsticks would be that Arthur would marry the woman who wielded them and father a child by her? Another doomed child.

Not that everyone in the family hadn’t pointed out to Arthur that he was mad, and asked for the millionth time why it was he hadn’t kept his promise to that poor Amelia, who had wasted away out of despair. Her death was on his head, wrote Amelia’s mother to Dick Benjamin, as if he’d had any influence in the matter. Why, any idiot knows there’s no point in trying to talk sense into a lovesick fool. Not that Dick had replied so rudely; he was, after all, a gentleman. But really.

And Arthur’s marrying May was just the beginning of the trouble. After relentless, and useless, weeping from Dolly, who couldn’t see how the little brother she’d helped to raise could lose his reason and marry a Chinese, the newlyweds had moved into the west wing of the house.

“They have no money,” Dick had said to his wife. “Not a sou.” For ironically—that was the meaning of
irony
, wasn’t it?—it was he who’d argued for their living all together. “What
are
we to do?” he’d said to Dolly. “Turn them out into the street? That would be even more of a scandal.”

Predictably, Arthur had long ago abandoned all pretense of ever returning home. The notion of a creature like May in the outback was hardly more absurd than the idea of her in Sydney. Australia was an outpost and always would be. Not that China was any great shakes. Although Arthur seemed genuinely not to share the European regard of Shanghai as a way station; he remained untroubled by the conceit that civilization was necessarily West, even for those who’d been born in the East.

No one knew better than Dick Benjamin that Settlement life was one of comfort and complaint. Disappointment in the present. Enduring the minutes and the days and the weeks in anticipation of the future—which most Shanghailanders imagined as a resort: Biarritz, Monte Carlo, Lake Como. Dick planned to take his family to Nice. Another ten years and they’d be basking in the Mediterranean sun. Already he had a French agent investigating available waterfront properties. It was a disease of empire—this plundering the present to favor other tenses: future, future perfect. It afflicted all colonials, Australians as well. But Arthur—who could avoid concluding that Arthur was different? He was immune, a free spirit. He took a Mandarin tutor, espoused Buddhism, and followed this conversion with a series of intensely unfashionable interests, studying local arts, visiting pestilential temples, as large and conspicuously red-haired a pilgrim as could be imagined. At five feet eleven inches, Arthur towered above diminutive May, so besotted with his Chinese wife that he’d been seen more than once on Stone Bridge Road, cold sober and sweeping the ground before her sedan chair.

It wasn’t that May was a bad sort. She didn’t speak pidgin; no, she was far too proud for that. (A prostitute and a polyglot! What next!) Not that anyone asked him, but May’s clear, eccentrically accented queen’s English was a little oddly musical for Dick’s taste. It rose and fell in pitch like Mandarin, with an occasional syntactical slip, which she managed to make charming. And everything would be fine if ever one could get used to the unremitting sound of her long jade-sheathed nails at table, against tea cups, on mah-jongg tiles—which of course one couldn’t if one had even one nerve in one’s body—but then they had to go and have a baby. Now Dick admitted that Rose, even if a half-caste, had been the most beguiling and delightful of children. Her eyes sparkled, her cheeks were pink and round, her surprisingly fair hair was as shiny as that of a polished brass god. But, being the sort of people who suffered a propensity for mishaps and tragedies—this was what came of bohemianism; free spirits did have a way of colliding with hard truths—Arthur and May had to go off on a houseboat and somehow manage to let the child drown, so that he went mad and she went madder.

I
N HIS MIND
, Arthur had returned to the river countless times. He saw them all onboard the boat, May reclining by the tea tray and, to amuse him, drinking from the spout of the green porcelain pot. “What a vulgar girl you are,” he’d said, laughing, and he’d kissed her on her painted red lips, still wet with tea. Beyond the river, rice was just sprouting in the paddies; a delicate green haze shimmered over the surface of the water. Rose, four years old, squatted at her mother’s feet, playing with the silk cherries dangling from May’s absurdly tiny shoes. Arthur read aloud from a guide to Soochow’s Garden of the Humble Administrator. It was nearly dusk; the boat passed under a stone bridge whose span, a perfect semicircle, met its reflection to form a luminous whole. Inside the boat, the boy was preparing a turtle to stew over the brazier.

The picture Arthur held in memory was useless, though, because Rose was suddenly, silently, and inexplicably gone. Arthur, May, and the boy searched all night and all day and then all night again. Round, white lantern circles reflected by the bobbing mirror of the water burned into Arthur’s head, so that forever after when he closed his eyes he would see them, like bright, worthless coins scattered at his feet.

May sat on the boat, shivering. The blanket Arthur had wrapped around her shoulders lay crumpled at her feet. She didn’t eat or sleep; she didn’t move except to shake. “I didn’t deserve her. I didn’t deserve her,” she said over and over, her voice low and entirely without inflection.

“Stop it!” Arthur yelled. “Who deserves anything! None of us!”

She turned to him. “You don’t understand,” she said. “You don’t know. You don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“What! What are you taking about! Because of your past? Because you weren’t a … a chaste mother?” Arthur felt he could dash his ringing head on the deck, stop its noise like that of an alarm clock.