The Celestials (14 page)

“You are too hard on each other,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand like a child. Speaking her mind seemed to make her crying more vigorous.

Alfred had one arm around her; Ida another.

“We have only each other,” she said. She was willing to receive their embraces, but she kept her own hands to herself.

“I'm sorry,” Alfred said. What he meant was he would cease from making the Celestial boys his targets and would encourage others to do the same. He would turn his attention to his sister and he would keep it there. It was the thing his family and their friends had expected him to be unable to maintain—close and careful watch over his sister. Kneeling there uncomfortably, he swore to himself that this time he would not live up to their diminished expectations. Yet even as he took his oath, he knew that he took it for Ida.

As for Ida, she said nothing, only thought that what her friend had said wasn't true, at least not for her. Lucy and Alfred had each other. What Ida had was a picnic blanket that might as well have been an ocean, Ida on one far shore, Lucy on another.

Chapter Seven

By the eighteenth of August 1870, the thermometer in North Adams had been averaging for the prior four weeks upward of eighty degrees. The cooperative shoe company had orders for over three hundred cases ahead, and over one hundred seventy hands more than had worked at Sampson's were now employed at the Crispins' venture. That morning's
Transcript
published the text of the contract between Sampson and the Chinamen in full, and in the same issue, Julia read of the suicide of a Mr. Adolphus Wells, a man of intelligence and industry, exemplary in all his life. A carpenter of superlative workmanship, he had been in poor health for several years, and after losing a job the previous spring, he feared that he should never work again. His domestic relations had been happy, and to all appearance, his life had seemed more free from trouble than the lives of others. How dreadful were appearances,
thought Julia. How little we know of the hidden lives of those about us. She winced at the public display of a situation so private.

The prior Sunday, a meteor had passed over the village. It had been nearly midnight and she had been awake and at the bedroom window. The meteor was sufficiently brilliant to light up the landscape despite the moon being at its height. She had wanted to wake Sampson, but not turn from the window. She had thought of calling out, but had not wanted to disturb the night, and so she let him sleep on, pretending in the morning that she, too, had missed the thing entire. But now, the image of Mr. Wells facedown in river water shared her mind's space with the meteor's flash, skyrocket without the noise.

On August 18, she accompanied the initial group of Celestials to the first of their photographic sittings. Standing there in William P. Hurd's studio, the August air as thick outside as in, Charlie hushed and herded the first group of five boys. It had not been difficult to persuade them, though he had been able to offer no clear explanation of their employer's motivations. No one could say why husband and wife Sampson wanted all seventy-five of them to sit for individual
cartes de visite
. It was impossible to imagine to whom they could conceivably offer such cards. But once they'd been assured that the almost two-dollar sitting fee—more than twice their daily earnings—would be paid by the Sampsons, they had agreed that it seemed prudent to give the man upon whom their livelihoods depended what he seemed to want.

There was no distinguishing between Sampson's desires and those of his wife. Mrs. Sampson had been in the last week more and more of a presence, insisting that Charlie impress upon the boys that they were to dress in their favorite clothes and bring with them an assortment of their possessions. Perhaps a favorite book or keepsake. She had seemed to have not the slightest idea what those things might be. Charlie concluded that although it had been Mrs. Sampson who had come to the factory to make the request, she was acting as an emissary for her husband, who perhaps hadn't had the time to do so himself. The notion that the photographs were an idea hatched from her own mind was an even more baffling one and Charlie naturally turned away from the complicated, choosing, if he could, the path of least confusion, although he found himself unable to ignore all consideration of her. She was, he was coming to feel, a bewildering figure. Why had she appeared in his sickroom to read to him? Why had she continued to do so? Why had she not introduced herself as Mrs. Sampson? And why, perhaps most confusing to him, did these uncertainties not make him retreat to a self-protective distance?

But in Mr. Hurd's studio, he noted that Sampson in no way seemed to be part of the endeavor. Mrs. Sampson expressed an enthusiasm for the objects the Chinese had brought that he found startling. She picked up Ah Har's rice paper letter and asked Charlie if it was a letter from the boy's family. She wanted to know if Chung Him Teak had carried the scarf with him on this whole long journey
from home. If Sam Toy had carved the dragon himself. If many of them were talented in this way.

Charlie shrugged politely. Usually, this kind of hysteria made him shut down, close as many of his watertight doors as possible, but in Mrs. Sampson, he realized with some mystification, it made him want to coo at her until she stilled and calmed.

She teased him gently about falling short of his responsibilities. “Do you know them not at all, Mr. Foreman?” she asked, turning back to the treasures before her.

He had grasped enough of overheard conversations at church and Sunday school and the factory to know that the town's opinion was that Mrs. Sampson was delicate and shy, so he remained without speech, set off-balance by her apparent self-confidence. He would never know anyone to go from anxiety to sureness as quickly and as often as he would come to learn that she did.

Even then, he was beginning to understand that she was, as he was, willing to offer others what they most wanted to see. He would never fully grasp that this was not something held in common only between them, but a trait shared the world over.

She was right, he thought on that August afternoon. He knew none of the boys' stories. He was not even confident of all their names. He could not have listed their home villages. Was this something he should be working to remedy? It had never occurred to him. Because, of course, Charlie shared the guilt of everyone who had ever referred to the boys as Sampson's workers, the Boys, the Chinese,
the Celestials. How wrongheaded to think that seventy-five individuals could be defined by one or two words. And how much of that wrongheadedness had been encouraged by that first stereograph Sampson had commissioned. Every visitor to the factory who passed by the outer wall to Sampson's office also passed by that stereograph: a mass of dark-haired boys dressed in dark clothing and topped by dark hats. Perhaps Charlie was thinking of that image and feeling the wince of self-recrimination as he recalled his role in arranging the boys into their lines and in reassuring them that nothing of note would come from this. For whatever reason, as Hurd welcomed him into the portrait chair and gave him simple instructions, Charlie glanced up at Julia standing with the five boys behind the camera, not smiling, simply watching, and as he met her eyes with his own, he had the terrifying impulse to tell her about himself. Not the version he had given to the Methodist congregation, or to Mr. Chase, or to the immigration officer years and years prior, but everything he knew about himself and his life thus far, everything he understood, as plainly and clearly as he knew how to tell it.

As Hurd finished his instructions, and the small sounds of the Celestial boys around her ceased, their attentions turned to their foreman in these peculiar circumstances, Julia felt an unfamiliar anticipation. It suddenly seemed to her the most intimate of situations, to be here on one side of the camera viewing someone on the other. She felt as if she and Charlie were sitting for some larger portrait, as if they occupied an upstairs room of an intricate dollhouse
and an unseen camera peered at them through the tiniest of windows. A small tremor passed beneath her skin.

Hurd told Charlie to hold still and assume a pleasant expression. Julia noted his attempts to follow these instructions, and for the six seconds that Hurd removed the cap from the lens, she and Charlie held each other's gaze, neither of them feeling as if they should look away.

As it turned out, that first excursion to Hurd's studio would prove to be the lip of the gorge over which Charlie and Julia would allow themselves to fall. In the following weeks, as the rest of the boys were photographed, Julia and the foreman became more and more at ease with each other, and although it was she who made it her duty to educate him, it was he who made it his duty to receive those lessons. It was she who first led him to the Natural Bridge, reading Hawthorne's description of the place as they strolled, and it was she who demonstrated how one was meant to walk backward up Bethel Street to avoid infection of the lungs, or so said the town's widows, with no argument from its physicians or pharmacists.

Extended Sunday school hours meant that many teachers and students were spending Sunday and Wednesday evenings after lessons engaged in informal activities, and on several occasions, Charlie and Julia's excursions were joined by other Celestials and their teachers, Fannie Burlingame and her by-then-favorite student, Lue Gim Gong, among them. Charlie served as translator, though Fannie had learned a few Chinese words. “Tell them,” Julia would
instruct, “that here is where the settlers held their own against the Indians.” “Tell them that this is a parsnip; this a beet.” And if he had had any hopes as to the focus of her attentions being particular in any way, they were stilled. Fannie often teased Julia, telling her that if her lessons were to be this dull, she would drive these boys back across the ocean. She should, Fannie advised, let the boys do some of the talking. They had remarkable talents and stories to share, she assured her cousin. All one needed to do was ask and listen. And Charlie began lining up possible talents and stories in his mind so as not to be caught unawares if Julia's inquiries commenced.

Four months after his arrival, on a mild fall day, they were a group of a half dozen when they sojourned to the Mohawk Trail, winding its way over Hoosac Mountain, and Charlie had a most difficult time with the signs at the foot and summit.
WALK UP
,
IF YOU PLEASE
, read the first.
RIDE DOWN
,
IF YOU DARE
, the second. Julia laughed like a girl at his stuttering attempts at translation and explanation, and when she quieted he noted with some surprise that he wished for her laughter to return. And the next time he saw her, when they had finished their reading, he pulled from the pocket of his smock his mother's hairpin. She felt it too large a gift. He insisted, and told her that if she liked, he could demonstrate how one was to maneuver the pin so that it would not fall out. She held it in her lap and looked down at it, assuring him that if she could not manage it herself, she would be sure to avail herself of his offer. She told him it was a most beautiful object. He said that it was the woman who gave the object
its beauty. She stood and tilted her head slightly as if to get a better view of him. She told him that his mother must, then, be a beautiful woman, and then she took her leave.

But by the following spring, despite the time spent in each other's company and their enjoyment taken with that company, they would share equal surprise when, on an excursion to the Notch Brook and the Cascade, the brook's marvelous descent to the river, she took his hand to aid his crossing of water infamous for its peculiar coldness, and found herself reluctant to release it. As they stood on the brook's banks, shadowed by baby Christmas trees, a blanket of the tiniest of wildflowers soft and crushed beneath their wet and chilled feet, they both felt as though they had made the difficult ascent only to pour over the precipice like the water itself, descending a thousand feet in one liquid rush.

Sampson was quite delighted with the assortment of
cartes de visite
and tintype portraits with which his wife presented him on a warm night in October of 1870. Of the seven copies of each printed by Hurd, she gave each Chinaman six and then, knowing it would please her husband, collected one copy each in the most expensive album Mr. Hurd had in his display. It was of handsome burgundy leather with relief work of a pattern of fleur-de-lis on front and back, the edges of the pages embossed in gold, the spine hinged in brass, the whole treasure box snapped shut with an elaborate and fussy lock.

Sampson would tend to leaf through that album much less than would his wife. Perhaps because Julia's own world
was so inward-turned, she found herself much more interested than her husband in the world outside their own. But that night he set aside his after-dinner cup of hot milk to further examine her gift. No matter the weather or his physical condition, Sampson finished each evening with a cup of hot milk. It was a habit that Julia had initially found charming but now, standing by the chair in which he sat, watching the milk's surface cool into a gray skin, her stomach turned and she removed the cup and saucer to the mantle, out of her line of vision.

Thankful joined her at his chair and the two women watched him browse the album. Julia reached down to demonstrate how the cards could be removed from the heavy card stock leaves. In this way, she explained, her husband could order and reorder the pictures at his whim.

All of the prints were of head and shoulders circled in an oval window. Most of the boys wore traditional Chinese clothing, the same nankeen blouses from their first day in town. One, whom Sampson did not recognize, wore a quilted jacket with brass frog buttons at the throat and collarbone. The boys seemed to be sharing the same mandarin hat. With a small exclamation of surprise, he noted that several of them had signed Sampson beneath their images. Julia told him that the boys had agreed it was a sign of necessary respect.