The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (49 page)

Duff
finally cracks a small smile, and Daniel knows he’s in. “Let us find the
gentlemen’s facilities, Mr. Watkins.”

Duff
leads the way, Daniel follows, and Zhu dogs his heels again. He turns and
whispers, “You cannot come in with us.”

“I
follow master,” she protests in a low voice.

By
God, he could throttle her!

Duff
turns in midstride. “Oh, your manservant may attend us. Indeed, he should learn
how this is done, Mr. Watkins. Like I said, he may prove very useful to you.
And to me.”

They
find the gentlemen’s urinal on the far side of the ballroom. Not too many
fellows in here yet. The serious drinking has only just begun. They tour the
gilt and scarlet antechamber set with spotless mirrors, marble tables, and
upholstered chairs, porcelain sinks and pitchers of water, trays with brushes
and combs designed for a gentleman’s special needs, freshly laundered towels,
smelling salts, pots of mustache wax and hair tonics, tapers burning in
candelabra, and colognes in cut-crystal flasks.

Negro
attendants in scarlet uniforms swarm around them, politely offering various
hygienic services. Duff dismisses them, takes a pitcher of water, and finds a
table and a mirror on the far side of the chamber. “Now look here, Mr. Watkins.”
He takes out a leather case from a pocket inside his tuxedo jacket, unsnaps the
top. Inside nestle several vials of powders, a large steel spoon, a thick white
rubber thong rather like an oversized rubber band, and a hypodermic needle.

Zhu
expels a soft breath. Daniel knows that breath. The sound of her perpetual
exasperation.

“Your
manservant is impressed, eh?” Duff says, casting a keen look at his mistress
who, despite her attempt at this manservant’s masquerade, cannot completely
conceal her delicate feminine charms.

But
if Duff is distressed by her charade, he gives no indication and promptly sets
about tapping a quantity of powder into the spoon. He carefully pours drops of
water from the pitcher and stirs the concoction with a silver toothpick over
the hot tongue of a burning candle. Like an alchemist he sits, intently
stirring, and says at last, “It is done. Take off your coat, Mr. Watkins and
roll up your sleeve. Lay your arm down on the table, like this.” He proceeds to
roll the thong up Daniel’s arm. “You must cook the medicine as a chef cooks a
fine sauce. Like a fine sauce, it requires the right ingredients and attentive
care.” Duff draws the liquid in the spoon into the hypodermic needle in one
neat suction.

Daniel
watches, enthralled. “This will help me sleep without the drink?”

“Has
the drink ever helped you sleep?”

“Not
really, now that you mention it, Mr. Duff.” He asks again, his hope soaring
higher. “And this will calm my nerves from the dipsomaniac cure?” So tired, so
overwrought, what he would give for relief! “I will rest?’

“You
will rest,” Duff says and, tapping the inner aspect of Daniel’s elbow, promptly
jabs the needle into his arm and pushes in the plunger.

Pain!
But not so much, Daniel can take a bit of pain, and then—

--then
he’s torn from his body, this pale wriggling worm, flung like a stone into the
sea, waves of pleasure, sheer pleasure, pressing his very soul into oblivion. Flat
as death, dying without dying. A rush—by God!—the most incredible. . . .pleasure,
pressure, pain so vast he is transformed into. . . .sensation itself, mindless,
nerveless pleasure like the moment of sexual release but wrought a hundredfold,
a thousandfold, tongues of pleasure caressing him all over his body, and his
brain, his poor sleepless harried haggard brain—

Rest,
my son,
says a voice in his head, and a chorus of voices sing,
discordant yet beautiful, the way the sea smashing into rocks on the shore is
beautiful.

Like
in a dream, a distant dream, hazy and meaningless, he hears his lunatic
mistress shouting at Duff, “What did you just shoot him up with, you bastard?”

“Ah,
I’m a bastard now,” Duff murmurs. “You will be very, very useful to him. And to
me.”

“I
asked you what?”

“I
hope you followed how to do the procedure. What, you ask? Only one of the most
beneficent medicines God has ever granted to us poor mortals exceeding, in my
estimation, the gift of the Incas.”

“
What
is it?”

“Calm
down, boy, or whatever you are, and hold your tongue,” Duff commands. He packs
up his leather bag and strides out of the gentlemen’s facilities, heading out
to the Artists’ Ball. “I merely graced Mr. Watkins with God’s great gift of morphine.”

*  
*   *

Daniel
is sick, then, of course. Somehow that seems inevitable. The price of
admission. He retches, clutching his gut, retches over and over till there’s
nothing left inside, nothing but his gut. And it feels as if the gut itself
will come up, too.

His
face is filmed with tears and sweat and bile. By God, he looks like hell in the
spotless mirror confronting him. “My poor mistress,” he says as she leans over
him with a basin, a washcloth, a pitcher of water, ice cubes. The sound of her
breath, quick and close, thunders in his ears. She does not weep, but he can
see the sorrow molding her face like the carved grief of an icon. “What I make
you endure.”

“There’s
nothing I can do for you, Daniel,” she says over and over. A catechism of
despair. “I’m not supposed to. I’m not allowed to. I can’t save you.”

Bloody
sleeve, bloody face—his nose is going out on him, again. “Save me? You silly
goose. Save me from what? You’re not responsible for me.”

“No,
I’m not,” she says miserably.

“I
mean, you’re not my mother,” he clarifies, and as soon as he says that word—
mother
—a
cold draft blows over him like an exhalation of the dead. Shivering, teeth
chattering.

Zhu
summons an attendant, a handsome black fellow, all high cheekbones and dark
glancing eyes, who sets down a pot of steaming hot tea.

“She
had a lover,” Daniel says.

“Who?”
Zhu says and directs the attendant to wrap a blanket over his shoulders. The
attendant pours out tea. Daniel can smell the bitter steam, waves the cup away.

“I
know that now, though I didn’t understand it at the time. I cast the memory
from my mind. I was a boy of seven. I didn’t understand that the lovely proper lady,
my mother, had taken a lover.”

The
incipient summer, the heat fecund and poisonous, winding like a serpent through
the blackness of his heart. The river black beneath the bending hickory trees,
the cypress sighing, and the beautiful girl with deep sea eyes who had married
a cold, scowling man found herself in love with a man who conducted a gambling
business up and down the river. A quadroon. Daniel saw him perhaps once or
twice. One of those quick-eyed men with charm, even little Daniel could see his
charm.
Mama crying, always crying, slap of flesh on flesh.
That would be
Daniel’s father. But she couldn’t—wouldn’t—give up her quadroon, her quick-eyed
man with his high cheeks and crinkled hair, his laugh like the crack of a
branch breaking. Like a woman’s heart breaking.

Her
quadroon left her. Montgomery Ward iron tonic after that. And then Daniel
watched his slender mother grow fat and luminous as the moon waxing full.

“I
don’t know when Father realized she was carrying the quadroon’s child.” Daniel
suddenly feels much better and the gentlemen’s antechamber hums with new
activity. The pharaoh stumbles into the urinals and Louis XIV reels in, too. “God
knows she tried to hide it. But there was no hiding a child coming by the time
she was well along.”

Zhu
tenderly wipes his face with a cool, damp washcloth. “And what did he do, your
father?”

“Oh,
he beat her. What else could he do? He had social position, a business,
political pull, money, property. He had his pride. And his own child. A son.
Me. When I think of it now, miss, I can comprehend it. What else, what else
could he do?”

“Ah,”
Zhu whispers. “And what else did he do?”

“One
night he beat her, kicked her, and kicked her again when she fell down, kicked
her in the belly, over and over.”
Slap of flesh on flesh.
Daniel
crouching in a corner of Mama’s dressing room, watching as Father beat her. Daniel
at Mama’s bedside when she lay bleeding into the bedpan.
Haven’t I been good
to you, Danny?

“She
lost the quadroon’s baby,” Daniel says. “Lost her capacity ever to conceive
again. I suppose Father could have killed her that night. Perhaps he should
have. Instead, he only damaged her for the rest of her life. It must have been
on that night when Dr. Dubose came. He was the one who gave her the iron tonic,
but now she needed something stronger. He was the one who first administered
morphine to my mother. She was in a lot of pain.”

Zhu
is pale, like pale gold marble, her strange green eyes dark with horror behind
her tinted spectacles. For once she, who spouts off about everything, has
nothing to say.

“And
here I am, my mother’s son. Sins of the mother, eh?”

And
there, Jeremiah Duff comes striding back into the gentlemen’s facilities. Dour
old Duff is positively jovial.

“Now,
Mr. Watkins,” Duff says, sitting down before him and taking his arm, tapping
the inner aspect of his elbow. “Now that you’ve recovered from your first taste
of God’s greatest gift, let us try another shot, shall we?”

February
22, 1896

Chinese New Year

11

Kelly’s
Shanghai Special

Clash
of cymbals, brass on brass, and the high, thin wail of a moon fiddle, an odd
sound like some tortured creature crying.
Bang, bang, bang!
Zhu dashes
to her bedroom window to witness quite a hustle-bustle on Dupont Street. It’s the
twilight of New Year’s Eve—Chinese New Year’s Eve. Those are fireworks, of
course.
Combustible explosives, not projectiles aimed at you,
that’s
what Muse said nine months ago. Was it really nine months ago that she stepped
across the bridge over the brook in the Japanese Tea Garden? Nine months ago
when she last heard fireworks? What a thin, nervous woman she’d been, dropping
to her knees, a Daughter of Compassion dodging an imagined bullet.

Nine
months, and it is not her wishful thinking—she is
not
pregnant with
Daniel’s child. Muse has run a diagnostic, confirmed this fact.  She’s merely grown
stouter from the bounty of Jessie Malone’s table, suffers from dyspepsia
because butter disagrees with her. She’s lethargic because she’s started
drinking and champagne makes her drowsy. She doesn’t get her monthly menses
because the contraceptive patch--the bright red square hidden behind her right
knee next to the spot where the black patch used to be--halts her cycle
completely.

That’s
all.

Bang
of explosives, stink of gunpowder, clamor of street skirmishes—she remembers
street skirmishes nearly every night in Changchi during the last days of the
campaign. Remembers? But how can she remember the future? She struggles to sort
out the paradoxes in her troubled mind. Because it is her
personal
past,
even though the events she remembers take place six centuries in the future.

Are
you telling me I’ve lived six centuries in the past? Then why don’t I remember
it?

So
familiar this smoke, this clamor. Like a premonition.
A premonition is just
a memory.
A memory of what?
A memory of the future
.

Early
spring has brought other scents to the alleys of Tangrenbu—blooming lilies,
quince, almond and cherry branches heavy with aromatic spring flowers. The
shops have set up stalls for the New Year celebration displaying a surprising
bounty—platters of oranges and kumquats, bags of salted plums, trays of bean-paste
pastries, sugared coconut slices, litchi nuts, portly figs, candied strips of
winter melon. Strings of gaudy paper flowers festoon the balconies and the balustrades.

Yet
Zhu senses a dark sorrow beneath the festive atmosphere whenever she strides
down the streets in her Western lady’s disguise, a wicker shopping bag on her
arm. Another year has come and gone, and the bachelors of Tangrenbu still long
for their families forbidden to immigrate to Gold Mountain. There won’t be a
solution for them, not anytime soon.

Space
and time have plunged forward and crossed over an imaginary boundary. According
to the modern Western calendar, on January first the New Year turned into 1896.
But with the first new moon of the ancient lunar year, all the revelers of San
Francisco join Tangrenbu in observing Tong Yan Sun Neen, the Chinese New Year. To
the Chinese, space and time don’t simply plunge forward, the year changes into
something new. When Zhu first t-ported to 1895, it was the Year of the Ram when
ego, will, and domination prevailed.  A year for Daniel J. Watkins. Now the
cycle has changed into the Year of the Monkey, the Year of the Trickster, he
whose wily intelligence is not to be trusted.

Zhu doesn’t
trust the Trickster. Her skipparents abandoned her in the Year of the Monkey,
the Trickster. Deep foreboding threads her waking moments, her dreams.