The Binding Chair (25 page)

Alice looked out the window, thankful for any reason the driver might have avoided Bubbling Well Road and the ruined husk of her home, a few wet, charred furnishings on the same lawn where they’d been stacked for the great housecleaning. Now scavengers instead of amahs would preside over the display. “I think Ningpo has been cordoned off by the Red Cross,” Alice offered. “I’ve heard you feel better if you look forward, out the windscreen.”

May sat up straight.

“No good,” she said after a minute. “Doesn’t help a bit.”

“Does she speak English?” Alice asked. “Does she understand what the meeting’s about?”

“She’s literate. As well-spoken as you or I.”

The car came to a slow stop. “We’re here,” Alice said. “A good thing, too. You’ve gone quite green.” The driver came around to help them out.

“What’s her name?” Alice asked.

“She’s taken a western name,” May said. “A name she chose.”

“What is it?”

“Agnes.”

Alice frowned and smiled, both at once. “How odd. Sounds so Irish.”

“Catholic, you mean.”

“I suppose.” She slipped her hand into her aunt’s. “Come on then. We’ll get it over with. Aren’t you glad of my company?”

May kissed Alice’s cheek. “Of course I am!” she said. But her voice was brittle, drained of its usual melody.

T
HE SOLICITOR’S OFFICE
was furnished in heavy walnut furniture, the legs of the tables and chairs pressing down into the thick crimson carpet with what looked like uncomfortable force. When May tried to move her chair she found she couldn’t. The solicitor, Mr. Barrett, came in rubbing his hands as if they were cold. “They’re in the back room,” he said. “I’ll just bring them in, shall I?”

Alice looked at May, who nodded. “Please,” May said, icily. Though she had decided not to confront the solicitor for having betrayed what she had had every right to consider a confidence, she had changed in her manner toward him. She treated him with a punitive courtesy. But Mr. Barrett made no move toward the door.

“There’s no point in waiting, is there?” Alice asked.

“No,” the solicitor said. He sat in a chair opposite theirs, crossed his legs, uncrossed them, leaned forward with elbows on knees. “She’s … Miss Agnes is not willing to accept your offer,” he said to May.

May sucked her lips in, making her mouth into a taut line. She held them in that expression for a moment, then, slowly, she nodded. “She doesn’t have to have anything to do with me. Does she know that? Does she know I’m leaving? That I’ll be far from here, in another country?”

“Yes.”

“But,” Alice interrupted. “If she’s not willing, why did she agree to come here? To come to this meeting?”

“It seems,” Mr. Barrett said. Again he attempted a relaxed posture and failed. “It seems she decided she’d like to have a … a chance to see Mrs. Cohen.”

“Well,” said May, drawing herself up in her chair. She smoothed the slick black fabric of her trousers over her knees, folded her hands in her lap. “Here I am. We can proceed as planned. You outline the offer while we … while she looks at me.”

“Yes,” Mr. Barrett said. “Right. I’ll just bring them in then.”

He was gone for a few minutes. In his absence, neither May nor Alice spoke. The mantel clock ticked with surprising volume. When Mr. Barrett returned, he was followed by an old Chinese Catholic nun in a white habit that hung just to the tops of her tightly laced shoes.

“I’m Sister Elizabeth,” she said. “And this is Agnes.” She pulled the elbow of the young woman accompanying her, and Agnes stepped forward an inch.

Despite what May had said about her daughter’s atheism, Alice had formed the comforting expectation of a dowdy girl dressed as a postulant, a plump and possibly ugly, certainly very plain and downcast, young woman. But Agnes, wearing a long mauve skirt and blue blouse, was startlingly beautiful, as beautiful as her mother—or would have been if she had smiled or even scowled. As it was, she bore the look of a milliner’s window model. Her pale forehead seemed empty of thoughts, her bloodless cheeks erased of desire. She held her head at an angle that suggested arrogance; and, as if she were in fact above them, on a pedestal or dais, it was possible to see the delicate symmetry of her nostrils. Alice found herself thinking of the cast court, dragging Eleanor through aisles of serenely frozen white-lipped saints.

Her father must have been quite fair, Alice decided, for Agnes’s hair was not black but brown, her long eyes green. She was tall, too, taller than Sister Elizabeth, taller than the solicitor. Without success, Alice tried to connect the young woman’s surprising stature with her mother’s small frame, her wandlike bones.

May dipped her head, slightly, a nod rather than a bow. Agnes remained motionless. At the solicitor’s urging they all took seats and listened as he explained the trust May had established for her daughter.

“It will pay a quarterly dividend,” he was saying. “You may use this income as you see fit. Certainly, it is sufficient to guarantee your independence indefinitely. Your independence is not, however, a condition for receipt. You may remain in the community of Siccawei, reinvest the income, donate it to the mission, or—” Mr. Barrett had been pacing off his little speech, hands in pockets, moving between desk and mantel, but now he stood still; he stopped speaking.

Agnes had risen from her seat and was walking across the carpet toward May. It was apparent, as it had not been before, that she limped; her left foot found its stride with a hesitation that suggested pain. She stopped just inches from her mother’s knees and looked May up and down, carefully, thoroughly, as if having been given the chance to observe an alien form of life. An opportunity at once distasteful and irresistible.

“What has—” May began by addressing the question to her daughter, then turned to Sister Elizabeth. “Was she—was Agnes hurt?”

“When she came to us, Agnes had been injured. Her left foot was infected. Gangrenous, actually. The doctor couldn’t save—she lost three toes.” The nun spoke in a low, disciplined voice, the voice of the early canonical hours, of matins or lauds, a voice that betrayed exhaustion. “It appeared as though she’d been bitten,” she added, as if this were an afterthought. A minute passed, and another, before anyone responded.

Then, “Bitten?” Alice asked. “Mauled, you mean? By an animal?” Sister Elizabeth didn’t answer.

May looked at Alice, at the nun, the solicitor, Agnes. As her eyes passed over each face, her lips moved, soundlessly. She seemed to be saying a secret spell or prayer over them all.

Sister Elizabeth kept her eyes on her hands, which lay folded in her lap. “Agnes was bitten all over,” she said, her tone abruptly vehement, shocking for its contrast to her previously calm report. “But only her feet were …” She didn’t finish the sentence. She looked up at all of them and then at the solicitor; her expression appealed to Mr. Barrett as if he embodied justice, the laws he had studied. When she continued, she held her hands out, beseeching.

“She never played with the other children. She couldn’t run. She didn’t speak until she was four.”

While the nun talked, May watched Agnes, who remained standing before her. May searched every feature of Agnes’s lovely face and then, at last, she lingered on her daughter’s long green eyes. Alice watched her aunt watching and couldn’t help but feel that what May was looking for was a chance, a reason to hope.

May had already concluded there was none; she understood that what she was doing was memorizing this young woman, whom she would never see again, when Agnes spat. The saliva arced out of her mouth and left a trembling strand, still fixed to her lower lip, which broke only after the rest had landed on May’s breast.

“Agnes!” Sister Elizabeth jumped up from her chair. “I’m terribly sorry. This is most unlike her. It’s, oh, dear … it’s testimony, I’m afraid, to the strain this whole, this development has—I’m so sorry—introduced.”

“No.” May pushed away the nun’s hand with its white handkerchief. “Please. Don’t apologize for Agnes.”

“We have to go,” Alice said, and she stood up. “We have another appointment,” she lied.

“No.” May turned back to Sister Elizabeth. “I’m giving my daughter the money. It doesn’t make up for anything, but I’m leaving, you understand, and I have money. It’s for her. There isn’t—I don’t have anyone else. As Mr. Barrett explained, Agnes doesn’t have to take the money. She can give it to you. To the mission, I mean. Or she can leave it in the bank. It’s … you see, it belongs to her.”

Sister Elizabeth nodded.

“Please.” May looked at Agnes. “Feel free to leave.” The girl stared back. Her eyes were as hard and dry as glass; they betrayed no remorse, no embarrassment. Nothing. Saliva still glistened on her lip.

…   

“I’
M SORRY
,” THE solicitor said, as he saw the women to their automobile. He didn’t look at May’s face or at the stain on her black silk tunic but at his own shoes.

“Why are you sorry?” May said brusquely. “What have you done?”

“What I meant—”

“What I have, I deserve.” Oddly—and this was something Alice had never seen before—May began to bow, but then she caught herself, she held out her hand, Western style. The solicitor took it.

“I’ll forward my address,” she said.

It was dull outside the somber office, the sky a gray-yellow. A storm was arriving, and clouds blew quickly past. Looking up, Alice had the impression that the sun was in transit, hurrying backward, toward the east. She fell into the car’s wide back seat and immediately doubled over, as if ill. “What a horrible, horrible girl!” she said into her lap. “I don’t care if she is yours—She’s not! She’s a … a … No wonder something bit her!”

“Shut up!” May said. Alice, astonished, sat up and stared at her aunt. May sat with her eyes closed, her hands in fists at her sides. “Please,” May said. “Please. Just please don’t say any more.”

H
OSPITALITY

T
HE GENDARME ESCORTED
S
UZANNE
P
ETROVNA
to a villa whose pink stuccoed walls and orange-tiled roof were flooded with light, its source hidden by the foliage of grand and trembling acacia trees. It was increasingly windy; the mistral gathered force at night, blowing dry leaves and dust through the street.

Suzanne looked at the black iron bars of the locked gate. She matched the number to that on the card in her hand.

May-li Cohen
A
VENUE DES
F
LEURS
, 72

The name of the street was well chosen: cineraria, lavender, jasmine, salvia, convolvulus, bougainvillea, espaliered apples in blossom—a confusion of colors and scents.

“Ici? C’est là?” Suzanne said to the gendarme.
This is the place?

“
Oui.
” He set her bag down on the ground and pointed his finger—a surprisingly slender and white finger, more like a magician’s than a police officer’s—at a black button in a ring of highly polished brass: the bell. “Shall I ring?” he asked.

“It’s so late. Won’t we disturb them?”

“Oh, they’re up all night here.” The gendarme waved his arm in an expansive gesture at the villa, all its brightly lit windows. Suzanne watched as two slender silhouettes passed from one second floor window to another. The glass panes, curtained with fabric as sheer as a silk stocking, extended from floor to ceiling. She could see the outline of the women’s high-heeled feet as they walked though one luminous badge of light and into the next. As she stared—she was tired, the scene before her transfixing—the wind moved through the acacia leaves; they made an eager sound like that of dry hands chafing together, one palm stroking its mate.

“
Alors?
” said the gendarme.
Well?

Suzanne nodded. With thirty-seven francs in her pocket, all that remained of what she’d received when she pawned her mother’s necklace, what choice did she have?

The gendarme reached forward and pushed the black button. A Chinese houseboy, dressed in blue and wearing black felt slippers, emerged from the front door and walked briskly down the path to the gate. “
Bon soir,
” he said, bowing. His jacket was so perfectly pressed, the trousers bore such precise creases, Suzanne found herself wondering if he ever sat down.

“
Une amie de Madame Cohen,
” the gendarme explained, and in hopes of furnishing what might be understood as an invitation, Suzanne held out May’s calling card.

“
Oui,
” the houseboy said, and he bowed again. From his pocket he withdrew a key to the black iron gate.

“
Bon,
” said the gendarme.
All right, then
. He tipped his hat to Suzanne, who gave him an anguished, panicked look.

He smiled. “Oh,” he said, “you’ve nothing to worry about now. That”—he gestured at the calling card in Suzanne’s clenched hand—“that’s money in the bank.” He tipped his hat again, tapped his heels together in a jaunty military farewell.

“
Merci,
” she said, and again the gendarme threw his arm open in a gesture that seemed to sweep Suzanne forward through the gate. The houseboy picked up her battered, grimy tapestry bag. “
Merci,
” she said again, nodding, her mouth so dry that it was difficult to say even the one word. And the officer left; she followed the houseboy up the path, noting how neatly the crushed white quartz had been raked around the trunk of each rose tree that formed its border.

When they reached the front door, Suzanne saw that the villa was, in fact, filled with people who were not only up late on an unremarkable Tuesday in April but dressed as if for a holiday party, in evening clothes and jewels, talking animatedly, some dancing, others dining, and still others, given sounds of water splashing, swimming. Through the crowded salon’s windows Suzanne saw flashes of blue from a long, illuminated pool in the back garden.

“
Restez ici, s’il vous plaît,
” said the houseboy, and Suzanne sat where directed, on a Chinese red lacquer chair in the hall.

When the houseboy returned, he was followed by the extraordinary Oriental who earlier that day had leaned out of a sedan chair to give Suzanne her calling card—or was that yesterday? Surely it was past midnight.

How slowly—with what mesmerizing, hypnotically slow grace—the woman moved. She walked, yes, but not like anyone else Suzanne had ever seen, the smallest slowest steps. Beyond regal. Otherworldly. A lifetime elapsed between hall and front door: trains arrived and departed; storms broke, the pavement dried; wedding bouquets wilted and were discarded, a few were pressed as mementos; children were born, old people died.

And the voice—musical, lilting, not at all slow. A current of nervous excitability, but modulated, graceful.

Suzanne stood and, catching herself in the ridiculous urge to curtsy, was relieved to have gotten only as far as twitching the hem of her skirt.

“I am glad you’ve come!” May said in impeccable French, and she seemed not only to remember Suzanne from their encounter that afternoon but to be genuinely pleased to see her. She held her hand out, a narrow, smooth, boneless-looking hand, perfumed, manicured. Suzanne took it with some embarrassment, her own fingers roughened and cracked, her nails unkempt.

“What would you like?” May asked. “You can stay up, have dinner with the rest. We’re having a bit of a party tonight. It’s Dick’s sixtieth birthday. But we’re not sitting at table, it’s buffet. Boy will make you a plate. Or you can have dinner in your room. You could have a swim. Or sleep.” She counted off possibilities on her fingers.

Suzanne, bewildered by what seemed the assumption of familiarity—her hostess spoke as if it were obvious who Dick was—looked at the white skin of May’s hands, how intensely it contrasted with the dark blue silk of her gown, the red varnish on her nails. Impossible to look at a hand like that without thinking of fairy tales, of blood on snow, on sheets. She raised her eyes to the face of their owner, who smiled and lifted her eyebrows in a gentle prod of inquiry, at which point Suzanne, for the second time that day, began to cry.

“Oh, dear.” May’s face reflected sorrow as immediately as a looking glass, but with warmth, not a mirror’s cold mimicry. She turned to the houseboy. “Please show Madame …” She paused, waiting for a name.

“Mademoiselle,” Suzanne said, after a moment and in a low, embarrassed voice. How unfortunate to have to announce oneself as a spinster. “Mademoiselle Petrovna.”

“Please show Mademoiselle Petrovna to her room. And after you’ve settled her in, a bit of dinner.
Consommé
, I think.
Toast. Thé—camomille. Non, gingembre.
” She turned and looked assessingly at Suzanne. “You’re wheezing,” she said. “Have you a chest complaint?”

Suzanne stared at her, her cheeks wet, so unexpected was the pain occasioned by a stranger’s solicitude. Before the enchanted progress of the past hours—her afternoon encounter with May on the promenade, her rescue by the policeman, and her arrival at Avenue des Fleurs, 72—it had been a very long time since anyone had shown her so much as a flicker of kindness. Even the cat, whom for years Suzanne had considered her own, had recently forsaken her for a neighbor with a better larder.

“Well,” May said, “I’ve asked for ginger tea. It will help if you do, and if you don’t it can’t hurt you.”

Suzanne, still weeping, was led away, up a long, carpeted stairway to a room with a blue-and-crimson Persian rug, a high four-poster bed, a chaise upholstered in slippery chintz, a writing desk with a blue blotter and, standing on it, a clock and a lamp with a cut-glass base; there was also a round table with a lace cloth and a tall vase of tuberoses, and two chairs. The houseboy opened the wardrobe, put her bag inside, and withdrew silently.

“Oh,” Suzanne said aloud, and she sank to her knees before the bed as if at an altar. She laid her cheek on the blue counterpane. How was it that she had never before recognized, never really admitted, her terrible tiredness? She was still kneeling with eyes closed when the houseboy returned with a tray, which he set soundlessly on the table. She wasn’t asleep but was watching a series of lacquered, jeweled boxes opening up against a black backdrop. The sides of each came apart at the seams to reveal another that was both smaller and more complex and ornate. “Chinese boxes. Of course, Chinese boxes,” Suzanne was commenting to herself, in an attempt to explain the curious, almost hallucinatory quality of her vision, when the houseboy, having unfolded her napkin and pulled out her chair, cleared his throat. She started and struggled to her feet, bowing awkwardly in response to his bow. It wasn’t until she was sitting at the table, drinking ginger tea, that she realized a fire was burning beneath the white marble mantle. What dissolute madness could explain a fire burning in April, on the warm sunny coast of the Riviera? Suzanne watched the flames. She sipped her tea, chewed one triangle of toast, swallowed two spoonfuls of soup, and when her eyes began to close, went to bed, sleeping, as usual, on her side, with knees bent, arms folded.

When she woke, her room was filled with light, and she sat up suddenly in apprehension and looked around her. On the table was her dinner, almost untouched. Outside, beyond the pool, she could see citrus trees, their trunks painted white with lime. She sat in the chair by the glass door to the balcony—the room’s private balcony—and drank the cold tea left in her cup.

Now what, she thought. The house was silent. The hands of the desk clock pointed to twenty minutes past noon. Still wearing the clothes she had worn the day before, and the day before that, Suzanne sat for an hour sipping cold ginger tea, her mind empty, as silent as the hall beyond her door. Her only thought was to note with surprise that she was thinking of nothing. A square of sunlight slid slowly across the blue-and-crimson carpet.

At half past one there was a knock at the door, a fast delicate rapping, so light that for a moment Suzanne thought the sound came from within her, a palpitation of the heart, perhaps. She stood from her chair by the balcony. “
Oui,
” she said, not very audibly.

The door opened. It was the Oriental woman, in silk again, red silk. Her hair was again dressed high, but differently from the previous evening. “
Bonjour
, Mademoiselle Petrovna,” May said. “Did you sleep?”

“Yes. Yes.” Suzanne nodded. She made an embarrassed, clumsy gesture with her hands, something between wringing them and indicating the rumpled bedclothes, but May didn’t give any appearance of having noticed her awkwardness.

“I thought perhaps you’d like to join us at table?”

“Ah. Oh,” Suzanne faltered. “Yes, of course.”

May nodded. “When you’re ready, just come down the stairs. Turn left at the big pot of flowers.” She withdrew from the threshold of the room and closed the door softly.

Suzanne washed her face in the blue-tiled bathroom adjoining her room. Then, deciding that even if she would be late, she must take the time to bathe thoroughly, she filled the tub and sat in the warm water, regretting that she had no really clean clothes and would have to choose among her few wrinkled blouses. But when she went to her closet and opened it, she found the clothes that had been packed in her bag hanging freshly laundered and ironed.

Please, she thought, oh, please just let me enjoy this without growing accustomed to it. Without learning to expect it
.

As a person whose optimistic periods were marked by a shift from atheism to agnosticism, Suzanne couldn’t have said to whom, other than her own force of will, such a plea might be addressed. She knew only that all of her life thus far had been a grinding effort, and that from this light-filled, fragrant house of servants and soft mattresses she would inevitably have to return to her gray room in Paris’s gray fifteenth arrondissement.

Suzanne looked in the mirror and twisted her hair into a tight, tidy knot at the nape of her neck. She put on her best blouse, with buttons that matched and a placket and collar that were not yet frayed, slipped her feet into her shoes and laced them with attention, finishing with neat bows whose loops were of equal length. From the pocket of her bag she withdrew a pair of gold-and-amethyst earrings (they matched the necklace she had pawned) and clipped them to her earlobes, wincing at the pinch. Then she stepped back from the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. All of her appeared ready, except for her face, wearing its customary expression of anxious woe. Suzanne practiced a few smiles.

The staircase she descended seemed impossibly long, the flowerpot at which she turned obscenely large. A geranium of immense, almost rude, proportion held up blooms of the same vivid, bloody hue that colored her mysterious hostess’s fingernails. Suzanne hesitated at the door to the dining room and looked at the long lacquer table it contained, an expanse so shining and so red, set with the whitest plates and napkins, that her eyes were drawn first to it and only then strayed to the people assembled around it.

“
Entrez.
” May was sitting at its head. “Do come in.”

Suzanne took an empty chair at the far end. Like the others, it was of red lacquer with a white cushion. Next to the Oriental sat a man with dark skin and nearly white hair, beside him a young woman, not yet thirty, who resembled him, except that she was beautiful and he was quite ugly, although not at all mean- or unpleasant-looking. Across from the man, next to the Oriental woman, one place remained empty, as if waiting for a latecomer.

“That’s the family,” said a nervous-looking man on Suzanne’s left. “The rest of us are just, um, visiting.” He reached for his coffee cup, revealing a hand that shook. “Who are you?” he said.

“I … well, I suppose I am a visitor, too.”

“I know
that,
” the man said. “But where did she find you?”

“She? You mean Madame—”