The Binding Chair (29 page)

P
ROMENADE

A
LICE HAD BELIEVED THAT SHOES WOULD HELP
. She’d crusaded for them, she’d nagged; she’d badgered. And now she was discouraged because May didn’t walk in them. Didn’t walk in any of the ways Alice had hoped. Not with energy or enthusiasm. Not with relief. Certainly not with gratitude. New shoes hadn’t changed May’s life. Or, if they had, it wasn’t that they’d made it easier, more comfortable.

She was wearing them when she came home from the final fitting, but as soon as she came in the door she unlaced them, she put them back in the box.

It took Alice a month to convince her aunt to wear them to the promenade, the setting Alice had chosen for the inaugural walk. The three of them went: Alice, May, Suzanne. It might have been a larger party, but Cecily and Fräulein were off touring in Italy, and Eleanor refused to accompany them.

“Alice, dear, I’m—I’ve little faith in rehabilitative devices. And you know I can’t bear family quarrels.”

“But Miss C., please! Shoes aren’t the same as dentures, and no one’s quarreling.”

“Not yet.” Eleanor, obdurate, held up a book in explanation of her afternoon’s plans—it was
Villette
, for the eleventh or the twelfth or the seventeenth time: the Brontës were her weakness—and retreated to the conservatory. Aside from Eleanor and the servants, the villa was nearly empty. In the past months, May had grown bored with entertaining, bored with houseguests, bored with menus, meals, and the flattery of candlelight. She hadn’t thrown a party all season, she seemed to care for nothing but swimming; and her only remaining project was a lingering Italian lieutenant suffering from battle fatigue. There was Alice’s father, of course, who never left the property. He had an armchair under the wisteria arbor and sat in it for hours, looking toward the sea, newspapers folded in his lap. By teatime, Alice knew, he and Eleanor would be together in the library, with their new toy, a telegraphic stock ticker, almost pulling the tape from its metal lips while arguing companionably about investments,
Villette
face down on the desk and the newspapers lying discarded on the floor.

For the occasion of the walk Alice asked the kitchen to prepare an exceptional picnic: sandwiches, cold salads, cheese, biscuits, grapes, lemonade, a cake; and they would have champagne as well. They would have had, but May saw the bottle and removed it from the hamper. “Have a little mercy,” she said. And Alice felt a wrench, one that she wouldn’t understand until later.

On the sunny promenade, the three women sat on a wrought-iron bench and ate under a cloudless sky. Suzanne opened her sandwich and aligned the slices of roast beef more evenly. As if they were strangers thrown together in a waiting room, none of them spoke. With the nail of her smallest finger, Alice removed a shred of meat from between her eyetooth and its neighbor.

May sat with her legs crossed, the toes of her new black shoes pointed toward the blue sea. She raised her glass of lemonade. “To the foot tax.”

“Now, that’s not fair,” Alice protested.

“I can’t help it if they remind me.” May turned to Suzanne. “My previous attempt at Western footwear,” she explained. She stuck out her feet and tapped the toes of her new shoes together.

“These aren’t
Western
exactly,” Alice said, remembering the masquerade of the big shoes laced tight over three pairs of Arthur’s wool socks. Surprising her aunt in the dressing room as she swayed toward her reflection in the mirror.

“No, not exactly.” May folded her napkin. “They are—what is that depressing word?—orthopedic. Curative. They will straighten me out.” The tone of her voice was one Alice didn’t know how to interpret. So rarely had she heard the sound of May grieving.

“Well,” May challenged, after no one had spoken for a few minutes. She used her cane to stand, and the others followed her lead. The three women silently circled the flowerbeds, blazing red and orange and pink. They did it twice, three times. They walked up and down the promenade, a mile or more, before they returned to their waiting car and went home.

Once inside the door, May took the shoes off. She left them on the end of the dining table, and no one removed them, not even at dinner time, when they sat at the far end like unwanted guests, tongues lolling.

“I’m not very hungry this evening,” Suzanne said, and she coughed. “Such a big lunch.” She excused herself in the middle of the meal. At its conclusion, Eleanor and Dick preferred cognac to dessert, the library to the dining room; after all, the library had the ticker spitting forth its endless and endlessly fascinating sentence of numbers. Then, as the shell-shocked Italian ate alone in his room, Alice and May were left alone, looking at each other across the uncleared table. Neither of them stood, and Alice wondered if they were about to have a fight.

“So,” she began, feeling for a topic that was neutral without appearing too obviously diplomatic. Not swimming, not shoes. Not the past, nor the future. Not books. And no new guests about whom to speculate. No gossip. “We could—” play mah-jongg, she was going to say, when May interrupted her.

“Do you know me?” she asked.

“What?”

“I asked,
Do you know me?
Do you think you know who I am?”

Alice hesitated. She drew her dark eyebrows together. “Yes,” she said, after looking into her lap for a minute.

“Why haven’t you ever asked me about Agnes?”

“I …” Alice was too startled to think. “I’m not sure. I don’t know.” It was a topic they hadn’t approached for many years, not since they’d left Shanghai.

“Why?” May asked again. She folded her hands on the table.

“I suppose I didn’t want to. And I …” Alice surprised herself by blushing. “There was no reason to think you’d want to speak of her.”

The houseboy came through the dining room’s swinging door, but before he had even reached the table, May stopped him. “Go away,” she ordered in Chinese, and he bowed silently and backed out of the room. May turned back to Alice.

“It’s been so long.” Alice stood from the table. The boy having retreated, she began to collect the silverware that hadn’t been used. “It’s been … it seems a lifetime since that afternoon at the solicitor’s. Can’t we—”

“No!” May said, and Alice looked up from the table, the dishes of half-eaten food. Surprised by the anger on May’s face, she dropped a spoon, bent down to retrieve it.

“I didn’t want to know any more than … than what I knew already,” she said. She stood up, her face even redder.

“Because you preferred to go on loving me?”

Alice blew the air out of her nose in an exasperated gust. “I’ve never been able to help loving you,” she said. “Not then any more than now.”

May crossed her arms. “You don’t seem to. Lately.”

“That’s because you insist on making it a contest. Between you and Ev. As if I were incapable of loving two people at once.”

May ignored this. “Admit something,” she said. “I shouldn’t have taken you with me to the solicitor’s. I should never … I should …” She shook her head. “It … it must have been Arthur’s death that did it.”

“Did what?”

“Unbalanced my—I usually have a good sense of what can be shared. Of what I could share with you.” She pressed her lips together, paused. Then: “I gave in to loneliness. I don’t usually, but on that day I did.”

“Uncle Arthur,” Alice asked. “Did he know?”

“What do you think?” May said.

“I think he didn’t.”

May shook her head. “You’re wrong.”

“Well, he would have—”

“Forgiven me? Yes. Of course. He forgave everything. But I didn’t—I don’t—want absolution.” Alice remained standing. She held the silverware before her in both hands, a bright, awkward bouquet. “Do you understand me?” May asked. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“That you’re not expecting—asking—forgiveness?”

“Yes.”

“I do. Yes.” Alice transferred the cutlery to one hand, wiped the other sweat-slippery palm on her skirt.

“All that crying,” May said. “Back at the hotel, when we returned. It wasn’t, as you said, pent-up tears, your finally breaking down about your mother. Was it?”

Alice shook her head. “No. I don’t know. It was all—so much happened. All at once.” Her voice was low. She dropped another spoon but didn’t bother to retrieve it.

“It was what you’d seen at the solicitor’s. What you’d understood. About me. Am I right?”

Alice didn’t answer. May took her wrists. She emptied Alice’s hands of forks and knives and spoons and pulled her back down into the chair next to her own. For a moment she was still, then she picked up a handful of silverware and threw it so it hit the opposite wall. A knife struck a framed picture, a triangle of glass dropped to the floor.

“I bit the child,” May said. “I crippled her.”

“No!” Alice put her hands over her ears, but it didn’t work, it didn’t prevent her from hearing what May said.

“She was in the laundress’s quarters, in the basement, four flights down. Clutter. Broken furniture. I would go there at night. Because I wanted … I had to touch her. I was going to …” The words came slowly, as if May had forgotten the language she knew so well.

“I was going to kiss her, and I went down the stairs slowly to avoid making noise.” May snorted. “Because I can’t walk any way other than slowly,” she corrected. A single fork remained on the table, and she snatched it up, hurled it against the wall. It hummed after it dropped, like a tuning fork.

“Each time,” May said, “I thought—I was sure—it would turn out differently. The last clients had left. Laundress asleep. Baby quiet.” May paused. She looked around the dining room, its walls and ceiling, all the elegant appointments she had chosen. Were a stranger to see her, that person might conclude that May wasn’t in her own home, that this was an unfamiliar house. A place, perhaps, whose purchase she was considering.

When she continued, her voice was no longer halting. “As soon as I touched the baby, she cried, the laundress woke. But I’d threatened her before.” May laughed, a mirthless noise. “I’d told her I’d killed my own grandmother. After that, she lay still on her pallet, she let me do what I would.”

“You, you didn’t, did you?” Alice stammered, her hands still uselessly clapped over her ears.

“Didn’t what?”

“Kill your—”

“No.” May smiled. She closed her eyes, just for a moment, then opened them. “I bit Agnes’s arms and feet until she screamed,” she said.

“No. No, you didn’t!” Alice shook her head. “You didn’t ever—”

“Yes!” May slapped her open palm on the table. She did it over and over, ten times or more before she stopped.

“As soon as I … as soon as I held the baby I felt the claim she had on me. That having escaped one kind of servitude, here was another.” May stopped speaking. After a minute, Alice took her hands from her ears.

“The most terrible feeling,” May murmured. “I can’t begin to reconcile myself to it. Her feet were … They were soft. Like butter against my lips. Teeth. Afterwards, I’d push Agnes into the laundress’s arms, then hurry upstairs.” Alice stared at May.

“Her feet. Her
feet
. I keep asking myself—does that make it better or worse? More understandable, or less?” May shook her head. “Less shameful, or more?” She kept shaking her head.

“If I gave her what I owed her—everything—then … Then it would all be ruined. All my … my … plans.” May looked at her palm, red where it had repeatedly struck the table. “In the basement, I’d hold my breath, I’d try to think. Hadn’t I, by force of will, invented a future different from the one for which I was made? Denied my fate? The baby was a mistake, a miscalculation. She was an error in timing. The daughter of my dead self.

“So,” May’s voice was even now, calm. “They took her away.

“No one spoke to me,” May went on, having given Alice the chance to respond. But Alice sat silently. She ran her tongue over her teeth, said nothing. “
About
me, yes. I overheard Madame Grace speaking with the doctor. I’d had … I was pregnant once before, and a doctor had come, they called a doctor and he—” May shook her head, shut her eyes. “I couldn’t bear for that to happen again.”

“What?” Alice prompted, when she didn’t say. “You don’t mean a …”

“He ended it. So the next time I. I ignored it. Pretended I wasn’t. Pregnant. Until it was too late to do anything. Then, after, when Agnes was … she was downstairs, and I overheard Grace talking to him, the same doctor. I was on the landing outside Grace’s sitting room, I was eavesdropping. ‘Do you think the Chinese girl might be dangerous?’ Grace said to the doctor. And he laughed. ‘If she bites your clients,’ he said, ‘you can charge them more.’ ”

May made a noise, a noise like a moan. “Strange words to have heard inside my head so many times:
If she bites your clients, you can charge them more.
” May looked at Alice. “When I was having the shoes made—the impressions, and then later when I returned for fittings, adjustments—the same words would repeat, over and over.
If she bites your clients, you can charge them more.
” She continued to search Alice’s face. “I don’t know why,” she said, as if expecting Alice to explain it.

“Both,” Alice said.

“Both?”

“Both more and less shameful. Understandable.”

“Her feet? That I hurt her feet?”

“Yes.”

May dropped her head. She let the silence grow before she spoke. “I went down one night, the baby was gone. I looked through the basement, among piles of rubbish, broken things. No one. The missionary ladies had come, they had taken her to Siccawei.

“The next day I woke at noon, the light shining bright on my face. I got up. Sat at my table, drank my tea. Opened my books to study. The previous night, the dark stairs—I put it out of my head. I could do that. I could do it then, but not now.” She looked at Alice. “Why is that, do you think?”

Alice shook her head.

“Because I was young?” May shrugged. “My body carried no mark to remind me. Having a child was—it was something I could put away. As if in a drawer I never opened, a place out of sight. It interrupted work for no more than a season. And I suppose if Grace hadn’t been a, a Christian, then Agnes would have been …”