The Shanghai Moon (18 page)

“Now you, on the other hand . . .” She turned to Bill, but still with a smile.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll keep him in line.”

We came to a glassed-in porch, where Lily leaned against the knee of an old man in a wheelchair. He was smiling at her, smoothing her hair.

“He’s usually not sure who she is,” Anita Horowitz whispered. “He’s always asking her if anyone’s taking care of her. He’s relieved to see me with her, though half the time he doesn’t know who I am either. Wait here a minute.” She crossed the room and crouched next to him. “Zayde, some people are here to see you.” He looked up with interest, and she gestured us in.

“Dr. Gilder,” I said, pulling over a chair, “I’m so pleased to meet you.”

He peered through thick glasses. I tried to match his crumpled face to the photo of the young boy grinning next to Rosalie, but I had trouble. He looked up at Bill, then back to me, frowned, and leaned forward. A slow, marveling smile lit his face. “Mei-lin!”

I glanced at Anita, then back as Paul Gilder’s stiff fingers grasped my hand. “I’m so glad to see you, Mei-lin! Oh, my goodness, so glad! Why has it been so long?” His voice was weak, his English German-accented: “gled” and “vhy.” “And who is this? Ah, I know. An American, a soldier.”

“Navy, sir,” said Bill.

Paul Gilder shrugged. “Soldier, sailor. You’re very welcome in Shanghai, my friend. Mei-lin.” He searched my face. “You’re all right?”

“I—I’m fine.”

“When we didn’t hear, we feared . . . It was said the general . . . but enough! Rumors, all rumors. Such a relief!
Where is Rosalie? Does she know you’re back? Have you seen your little Li? What a handful he is! Oh, he’ll be so happy to see you!”

“I . . .”

“Zayde,” Anita said, leaning toward him, “this is Lydia Chin. From New York. She wants to ask you some questions.”

Paul smiled. “Anita, my dear. Have you met . . .” Confusion seeped into his face. He looked from her to me. “Mei-lin? How is it . . . Anita . . .” He trailed off.

“This is Lydia Chin,” Anita patiently repeated. “She wants you to tell her about Shanghai.”

“Shanghai, yes, Mei-lin has come back to Shanghai.” But his voice was uncertain, and his gaze wandered into the garden.

Anita stood and spoke softly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think he’d be able to help you. I don’t want him getting upset.”

“I understand.” I squeezed Paul’s hand. “I’m happy to have seen you. I’m sorry, but we have to go now.”

He turned and met my eyes. “Mei-lin. Wait.”

“Zayde, they have to go,” Anita said.

“But Mei-lin’s book. Haven’t you come for your book?”

“What book, Zayde?”

“In the chest. With . . . with the letters.” His brow furrowed. “Rosalie kept it safe for you, as you asked. And I . . . after Rosalie . . .” He set his chin, determined to go on. In a firm voice he spoke to Anita. “In the chest.”

“The red chest?”

“Of course.”

“All right. I’ll get it.”

She left the porch, Lily thumping after her. I stayed sitting by Paul. I didn’t intend to ask him anything, just to be companionable. But he suddenly spoke. “Have you seen Kai-rong since you’ve come back? I don’t know where he’s gone . . . he wasn’t hurt badly, you know. They hadn’t had time.” He smiled at me. “You saved his life. You were very brave.”

I said, “I’ve never been brave.”

He laughed, and suddenly I could see the fourteen-year-old in the garden. “Mei-lin, when did you learn modesty? How will we get used to such a change? Never mind. Kai-rong and I are lucky to have such sisters.”

Anita came back with a shoebox-sized chest of lacquered wood. A lock clinked against a bronze disk. “He brought this from Shanghai,” she whispered. “He never opens it.”

My breath caught. A box from Shanghai, that Rosalie Gilder’s brother has had all this time and never opens—could it be?
No, Lydia, that would be too easy
.

“Where is the key?” Paul asked Anita.

“You have it, Zayde.”

“I have? Ah.” His stiff fingers worked into a pocket and brought out a key ring. He carefully separated keys, until he found the smallest. “This,” he told Anita. “It sticks,” he added. With a little jiggling—it did stick—Anita opened the box, releasing a swirl of rosewood and age.

Inside, a string-bound bundle of letters nestled on a small book, but the box held nothing else. I caught Bill’s eye; his shrug told me we’d been thinking the same thing. Paul lifted out the book and shut the box. No one spoke while he gazed at the book’s once-rich leather
cover, now mildew-spotted and flaking. Then he presented it to me with both hands, the formal Chinese way.

“I’ve waited . . .” Again, the confusion. “I’ve waited a long time to return this, Mei-lin.” Briefly, his eyes closed.

“I’m very grateful.” I glanced at Anita, who was looking worried. “You’re tired,” I said to Paul. “We’ll go now. Thank you very much.”

“I am tired. Lately I’m often tired. But Mei-lin. You’ll come back?”

“Yes, of course.”

“It was an honor to meet you, sir,” Bill said.

Paul Gilder, his arm wrapped around the box, looked at Bill. “Mr. American Sailor.”

“Yes, sir?”

“If you’re keeping company with Mei-lin, be careful of the general.”

“The general, sir?”

“He’s a dangerous man. We thought . . . After Mei-lin went to Number 76 . . . Just keep an eye out.”

“Sir? Number 76?”

“Very brave. Mei-lin, you were very brave.” Paul nodded. Lily ran over and leaned into his knee. He looked at her in surprise, then smiled. “Lily.”

“Please,” Anita whispered.

Leaving Paul cradling the rosewood box, Bill and I followed Anita to the living room. She said, “I’m sorry. I was afraid he wouldn’t be much help.”

“He thought I was Mei-lin. Kai-rong’s sister. Do you know what he meant about her being brave?”

“I barely know her name. I told you on the phone, he’s never talked much about Shanghai.”

“Or the Shanghai Moon?”

“That, never. The first I heard of it, I was eleven. My Hebrew School teacher invited Zayde to come talk about the Shanghai ghetto. He said he would if I did research and could give the facts—how many refugees, from where, things like that.” She smiled. “I wasn’t very bookish, and he was trying to help. Anyway, I found a reference to the Shanghai Moon, and that it had been Great-Aunt Rosalie’s. I was a little girl with my head full of princesses, so I loved the idea of a romantic lost gem, but when I asked Zayde he just said it was gone.” She looked through the doorway at her grandfather and her daughter. “He said wherever it was, it was cursed, and he wished it had never existed. He said the important things about Shanghai were the Yiddish theaters and the coffeehouses, that people had bar mitzvahs and seders and lit Shabbos candles for ten years on the coast of China, and I should remember that and forget this nonsense about gems. That he didn’t want to hear about it again.” She paused. “It was the only time he was ever short-tempered with me.”

“So you don’t know what happened when it disappeared?”

“No. The only times I heard it mentioned were when Cousin Lao-li visited. Rosalie’s son. Even then they hardly ever spoke about it.”

“Do you see him often, Chen Lao-li?”

“More often now, since we moved here. He comes for holidays and the kids’ birthdays, things like that. I grew
up in California, so when I was little I didn’t see him much. I wasn’t born yet when they came here, he and his cousin, but my big brother used to tease Zayde about how excited he’d been when he got the letter that they were coming. He flew to New York three days early, so if he got delayed he’d still be there to meet them.”

“I wonder why they didn’t ask him to sponsor them?” Bill said. “Instead of C. D. Zhang, whom one of them didn’t know and the other didn’t like.”

“They did, and he tried. But he wasn’t a close enough relative for the INS. So Zayde tracked down C. D. Zhang. I have the feeling they might not have contacted him at all if they didn’t have to.”

I asked, “When did Dr. Gilder come to this country?”

“In 1949. He was one of the last refugees to leave. Very few stayed, but Zayde had been planning to. My father used to say we all could have been Chinese.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Stay on? Well, I suppose he had less reason to, after Rosalie died.”

I stood in Anita’s living room stunned, as though I’d gotten a phone call full of bad news. Not my Rosalie!
Oh, Lydia, get a grip!
I demanded.
You already knew she was gone
.

Yes, but not so young!
I found myself negotiating.
Not so soon! Couldn’t she have had a life of happiness with Kai-rong first, and died a contented old lady?

“Are you all right?” Anita eyed me with concern.

“Yes, I’m sorry.” I drew a breath. “It’s just, I’ve been reading Rosalie’s letters at the Jewish Museum and I got very fond of her. I didn’t know she died so young.”

“I read the letters, too. Zayde donated them around the time Lao-li and Li came to this country. I think I would have liked her.”

“Do you—can you tell me what happened?”

“How she died? I just know it was near the end of the civil war. Those last days are something Zayde absolutely never talked about. Do you think it’s important?”

“I don’t know.”
Maybe not to the case,
I was thinking.
But to me. It is to me.

For a moment, we were all silent. I looked at the book Paul Gilder had handed me. “Do you know what this is?”

“He’s never mentioned it. I didn’t even know the box
existed while I was growing up. My father brought it with Zayde’s things when Zayde came to live here, but all he knew was it had papers in it.”

“May I look at this?”

Anita nodded. Carefully, I opened the cover. Flakes of leather drifted off the spine. On thick paper flowed column after column of beautiful calligraphy. The first characters on the first page, twice the size of the others, read, “Kairong is back!”

Back
, I thought.
From England? Just off the
Conte Biancamano?

“Can you read that? What is it?” Anita asked.

“I think it’s a diary. The pages are dated. This first one’s May eighth, 1938. That’s the day their ship docked in Shanghai—Rosalie, Paul, and Chen Kai-rong. Anita, what are the letters in the box?”

“I don’t know. I could try to take a look, but not right now, I don’t think.” Paul, with the box on his lap, was running his hand through a set of bamboo chimes. When he stopped, Lily pointed; when he clattered them again, she laughed.

“If you could, it might help. Anything from that time. And I’d like to try to translate this.”

“I don’t know . . . What if he asks for it? Now that he’s been reminded.”

“We’ll Xerox it,” Bill suggested. “Then you can put it back. It won’t take long.”

“Well.” Anita smiled. “All right. After all, that he gave to you.”

* * *

“Can you really read that?” Bill asked as I got back into the car. We’d spent twenty minutes at the Kinko’s in the mall, and then I’d returned the book to Anita, thanking her profusely and trying not to look like I was running out the door.

“Why wouldn’t I be able to?” I airily traced my finger down a column of Chinese characters.

“Because if it was written in Shanghai while Paul Gilder was there, it’s probably in the Shanghainese dialect, which, though Chinese characters carry no phonetic information and therefore can be read by anyone literate, still may be different enough in the vocabulary formed by those characters to baffle a speaker of one of the other Chinese dialects, say for example Cantonese.”

I stared at him. “What are you, Wikipedia?”

“What’s that?”

“Never mind. How do you know all that, what you just said?”

“Anybody trying to impress his Chinese
associate
into thinking he wasn’t a total loser would have gone out of his way to know that. So can you read it?”

“Anyone trying to impress her
lo faan
associate into thinking she was a genius wouldn’t admit it if she couldn’t.”

“I already know you’re a genius.”

“Oh. Okay, then, I can read it, but I have to guess at some words. But there’s no question it’s Mei-lin’s diary. Listen how it starts: ‘
Kai-rong is back!!!’
That’s written extra big, with emphasis. Then it goes,
‘What—’
uproar, I think that’s the word.
‘The houseboys airing his rooms, Cook racing to market, the kitchen maids peeling and chopping. I wanted
to go meet his ship but of course Father and Amah said no.’
Doesn’t that sound like family?”

“Not my family, but I see what you mean.”

I scanned the page. Modern Chinese is written in simplified characters, but at the Mott Street Chinese school my brothers and I had (with varying degress of grumpiness) gone to Saturday mornings, the teachers had been educated before Mao’s reforms. They’d proudly taught us the old ways. And these strokes—made with a pen, I thought, not a brush—were particularly crisp. “Okay,” I said, “now listen.”

“You’re about to show off?”

“I am. Any objection?”

“None.”

So as we drove toward and over the gleaming Hudson, I read the entry out loud. I stumbled occasionally, but generally, I think I did my Chinese teachers proud.

“ ‘Father sent bodyguards, so I’d have been perfectly safe, but it’s not the danger, I know it’s not! The docks are like every place I want to go: A decent young lady can’t be seen there.
SO old-fashioned!!!
A decent young lady can’t go
anywhere
except the homes of other decent young ladies. Even then her amah goes with her! A decent young lady is the same as a prisoner!

“ ‘So I’m sitting, waiting. Sitting, waiting!! Amah sent me to work on my embroidery—an ancient, useless art! Though I am rather good at it. But I stuck myself twice when I thought I heard the car. So I threw that aside to start this book.

“ ‘I haven’t put a stroke in it since Kai-rong sent it from Italy. Father wanted me to fill it with calligraphy—another useless art I’m good at! Copies of famous poems. Amah thought that was a lovely idea. I didn’t! I know why Kai-rong sent it:
So I could keep a journal the way European women do. Until now it’s been empty, because what could I write about? Whatever happens behind these walls? But now that Kai-rong’s back, things will change! Father and Amah listen to him. He’ll tell them I’m grown up! He’ll make them let me go out! I’ll finally, finally,
finally
get out from behind these walls! Kai-rong’s come back to rescue me!!!’ ”