The Binding Chair (24 page)

T
HE
H
EAD OF THE
F
AMILY

I
NSTALLED ONCE AGAIN IN THE
A
STOR
H
OUSE
Hotel, May found it difficult not to think of her first stay there, a time when, like now, there was no Arthur, and the past lay silent, obliterated. She remembered ruining the contents of the drawer in her grandmother’s bedroom. Now Dolly had done the same. Not intentionally, perhaps. But she had destroyed what she could not bear. May felt an unanticipated sympathy for her sister-in-law. The heat of the fire had been so intense that it melted the ice on the drive. From the road, it looked to May like the one brave thing her sister-in-law had ever done.

Smoke had accomplished Arthur’s suffocation a little more quickly, that was all. The doctor said as much; she couldn’t blame Dolly. Hadn’t she always expected to lose him? Now, at last, circumstances had aligned to return her to the self she had been before she met Arthur: a woman who had endured humiliations and hardships and who would, if fate required it, continue to endure. May, too, could be a locked drawer. And besides, perhaps there was comfort to be drawn from the hopelessness of the situation. What loss, she wondered, could be more painful than this?

In the weeks that had elapsed since the fire, Alice had not yet cried. She slept many hours each day, rising at eleven, going to bed by nine. “I can’t be bothered,” she said to every suggestion. “It’s odd,” she told May, “but I feel nothing. Absolutely not anything.” They were sitting together on the small, unyielding sofa in the suite of rooms they had taken on the north side of the hotel, where the windows overlooked treetops rather than the river. “I worry that I’m wronging Mother. As if I can’t give her what I want to, some evidence of … of grief. But when I look for it, it’s not there.” She sighed, a deep, yawning sigh. “No, that’s not right,” she said. “It’s that she left me—us—so long ago, so very long ago. When David died.”

Alice sighed and May kissed her cheek. “I’m leaving you here at the hotel this afternoon. I have a piece of business to address before we sail. You’ll look in on Cecily and Eleanor, won’t you?”

“What about Daddy? Is he going out, too?”

“Yes. Your father and I are going out together. Just a little tying up of …”

“What?”

“Nothing. Business. I’ll bring you back some books, shall I?”

May went into her room. She took off her yellow cheongsam and put on a blue. Then she took that off and tried the mauve, the gray, the red, and finally settled on a plain black silk tunic and matching trousers. She considered herself in the mirror. She was forty-three years old, and in black she looked it. It didn’t bother her that her face was aging. Her vanity, she’d discovered, was invested in her neck. Just under her jaw the skin had slackened; it made a little dimple when she swallowed, and two haggard cords stood out. Could it be possible that already her once smooth neck was beginning to look as her grandmother’s had, the last time she’d seen Yu-ying?

May scrubbed off the red lipstick she’d carefully applied; she washed the rouge from her cheeks, the powder from her nose and chin and forehead. Watching her reflection, she removed the pins from her elaborately arranged hair, combed it out and pulled it back in a plain, tight chignon.

“You’re not going out like that!” Alice said when she emerged. “I’ve never seen you look like that in my life. Even at Uncle … Why, even at Mother’s and Uncle Arthur’s funeral you didn’t look like, like that!”

“No,” May said. “But today I am not dressing for Arthur.”

Alice followed her to the door. “Who? Who then?”

“No one,” May said. “Myself.”

“But—”

“Your father is waiting downstairs. We’ll be back before tea.”

Alice watched May as she walked down the hall to the lift, then went to her sister’s door and knocked. When there was no answer, she pushed it open slowly. “Ces?” she said.

“What do you want?” Cecily was sitting on the floor, leaning against the unmade bed, arms hugging her bent legs.

“You can’t cry all day,” Alice said. “Not day after day.”

“I didn’t think so, either.”

Alice felt a mean relief in seeing that Cecily could not grieve picturesquely, without red-rimmed eyes and a shiny, swollen red nose.

“It’s unfair of me,” Alice confessed, sitting down on the bed, “but I feel angry with you, as if you’ve stolen my feelings. As if you’re showing off, one person’s tears inadequate to your misery.” She sighed, stood, and walked to the window, looking at but not seeing the street, the traffic. “May has gone out wearing a severe costume, all black, without any paint on.”

“Has she.” Cecily sounded entirely uninterested.

“Yes. Do you know why?”

Cecily shook her head.

“She said she was going somewhere with Daddy. That they had some business to settle.”

Her sister said nothing.

“Well, don’t you think it’s odd?” Alice asked. “What business could it be? The brokerage has never involved May. They’ve never had … business.”

Cecily looked at Alice. “I wish anyone had died except Mother. I wish May had. Or you. Why didn’t you?”

Alice stood before Cecily, unmoving.

“To think of you having intercourse—Yes! How can you think I don’t know!—with a … Chinese, while she—”

“But—” Alice interrupted.

“Will you get out of my room?” Cecily scrambled to her feet with uncharacteristic haste. “Get out! You make me ill.”

D
OWNSTAIRS, IN THE
cool lobby, Dick sat in a leather armchair. He was drinking a cup of coffee when May joined him, walking slowly as she always did.

“Why, May,” he said, startled by the austerity of her dress. He set his cup in its saucer. May sat on the edge of the leather sofa opposite his chair.

For the first time since its construction, footsteps echoed in the empty halls of the Astor House, announcing infrequent visitors to the hair salon, the tea room and bar attended by silent Chinese, uneasy in idleness, standing at attention as if it might be the Fever God himself arriving in his noisy shoes.

“You’ll come?” Dick asked, as he had already several times before. “You’ll come with the girls? With me?”

May put her hand out, patted his knee as she might a child’s. “Yes,” she said, “I’ve told you I will.”

She hadn’t spoken to Alice about Tsung. Whenever she considered what needed to be understood—that such an adventure could never be repeated—and how she might illustrate this injunction against entanglements with natives, May found herself overcome by anger. What further illustration could be necessary? What had been the point of the stories she’d already told Alice, stories about her first husband, her father? Alice was headstrong, she was curious, she enjoyed transgressing; and May was too livid for any delicate, considered examination of the topic of Chinese men. The family would leave Shanghai, and that would be the end of it.

“I can’t handle them myself,” Dick was saying, as if eavesdropping on May’s thoughts. Especially—Well, especially Alice. She’s … I … It was Dolly who knew the girls, really.”

The waiter came with a little tray bearing the coffee chit and set it silently on the table beside Dick’s chair. “You promise you’ll come,” he said again. All his bluster, his humor, had died with his wife.

“Yes,” she said. Understanding that now it was she who was head of the family. “Yes.”

Dick looked at his shoes. With an elderly sounding grunt, he bent down to polish the toe of one with his napkin. “Coffee before we go?” he asked.

“No, Dick. You know I don’t like it.”

“Oh. Right.” He looked around the room vaguely. Frowned as if trying to understand how he’d come to be there. “Tea?” he said, after a moment.

“No. Thank you. Is the car waiting?”

Dick blinked. “I don’t know,” he said.

“I thought you’d asked for one.”

“Oh. Yes, of course. I must have.” He went to the concierge’s desk, moving stiffly, as though suddenly arthritic. Watching him, May was distracted by the abrupt appearance of Alice, coming down the stairs two at a time, awake as she hadn’t been in weeks. She’d brushed her hair; she was pulling on her coat.

“Are you going out as well?” May said to her. “Where?”

“With you. You said you were shopping for books.”

May reached into her bag; she took out a jade bracelet, put it on her wrist, considered it, and then took it off and replaced it in her purse. “What I said was that I had a piece of business to address.” She turned back to check on Dick, still standing meekly at the desk. A woman in a blue dress stepped between him and the concierge and began talking rapidly. Dick did nothing; he made no attempt to redirect the concierge’s attention. Perhaps he hadn’t even ordered the car.

“Please!” Alice said.

“All right,” May said, and sighed. “Your father could use a quiet afternoon.”

…   

“T
ELL ME
,” A
LICE
said, when they were finally en route. “Why? Why haven’t you mentioned her before?” She tugged on her aunt’s sleeve, jealous at the revelation that May had a child, a secret daughter, all grown up.

“Why are you crying?” May said, not asking the more pointed, pertinent question: Why, when the death of her mother and uncle and the destruction of her home had left her dry-eyed, was Alice crying over this news?

“I … It’s a bit of a shock, that’s all.”

“I can see how it might be.” May revealed no more emotion than she might if discussing dinner plans that had gone awry. “I didn’t mention her because I never knew where she was. She … as it turns out, she went to Siccawei.”

Alice tried to put the information together. “She lives in the convent? She’s a nun?”

“No, a … an orphan.”

“So you had her before? Before … She’s not Arthur’s?”

“No.”

“Just one, right? Not more?”

May gave Alice an aggrieved look.

“Well, I never know with you. You could do anything.” Alice nuzzled her aunt’s cheek. “You know I don’t mean that unkindly. How did you find her? Or did she find you?”

May drew a deep breath, as if preparing for a dive, a lengthy submersion. “She—she wasn’t looking for me. And there are a limited number of places that take such children.”

“But she’s … you said she was … Twenty-four is too old to be an orphan. Why is she still at Siccawei? Why hasn’t she left?”

May closed her eyes; she leaned her head against the seat cushion. “She didn’t want to live outside. The nuns allow her to remain.”

“So she did convert? Profess, I mean.”

“No,” May said. “She did not.”

“Why?”

May opened her eyes and looked at Alice. “She refused. She’s an atheist. Doesn’t believe any of it. That’s what the nuns told the solicitor.”

“Really,” Alice said. “Well.” The two were silent as the car proceeded slowly through the empty streets and then came to a stop before the tram tracks.

May had imagined, in the weeks after Arthur’s death, that she might remain in Shanghai. After Dolly burned down the house, she fantasized about reunion with her lost daughter, her
found
daughter, one in which May would—she didn’t know how but somehow—make the girl understand that she’d been young, little more than a girl herself when she’d given her child up. When her child was taken from her.

The two of them could live together; they wouldn’t need a man. No, they’d be better off without one. She imagined the businesses with which they might occupy and support themselves. According to the missionaries, her daughter was a skilled seamstress, and May pictured them in one of the shops on Ningpo Road, yards of unblemished silk spread under their hands. Or they could start a language school. Apparently, Agnes had inherited May’s ability. They could teach French, English, German. A future could be written in other tongues.

But twice May had come to the mission and the girl—
the girl? her daughter
—had refused to see her. Just the previous week, on May’s second visit, she’d sent the message that she considered her mother lower than a turtle. She’d written the words in English on a clean white page, each letter formed with savage perfection. Formed with what May’s eye recognized as controlled rage: a cold impossible anger, not a hot one that offered hope. The nun who’d handed her the note looked embarrassed.

“Seven years older than I,” Alice mused and was silent, calculating further. “So it was some time before you were married that …” She didn’t finish, and May, absorbed in her own thoughts, didn’t answer. A laundry room as a nursery, a laundress for a nurse. May remembered the baby sleeping on bundles of sheets waiting to be washed.

“Why do they keep her at that age?” Alice asked. “Especially if she refuses to be religious.”

May looked out the window at the shops sliding past. Used as she was to a sedan chair, she felt sick riding in an automobile. Unmoored and disoriented without the slapping of feet on pavement, the jog of human steps.

Fear of contagion had emptied the streets. The few pedestrians wore masks tied over their noses and mouths. They hurried on their errands, heads bent down. May pulled a small looking glass from her bag, considered her neck in the daylight before answering Alice’s question.

“She works hard, they say. She’s a member of their community. Acts in charity to others. Since the influenza epidemic she’s helped care for the sick.” May paused. “What’s the expression? Actions count louder than words? Sound louder?”

“Speak.”

“Yes. The sisters pray for her. For her to … They pray for her happiness, is how the nun put it.”

The car rolled to a halt on the corner of Kiangse and Tientsin, just a few blocks from Madame Grace’s, where one wet spring night May’s first daughter had been born. Outside, in the street, a tiny native woman sat with a child next to her, a child of three or four in blue jacket and pants and still nursing, the woman’s nipple clamped in his mouth, her brown breast pulled as long and flat as Arthur’s razor strop.

“Why has he taken this route? It’s not at all direct.” May closed her eyes. “Another minute and I am going to be ill.”