The Valley of Amazement (78 page)

“Did you open it?” I asked.

“I never tried until I read the letters from my father. And then I got this feeling there might be something in that locket. I had to work hard to pry it open, and then I finally got it apart. I saw the photos, you and my father, the two of you together. If you hadn’t soldered the damn thing shut, I might have known the truth a lot sooner.”

“I didn’t want the photos to accidentally fall out. You chewed on the locket all the time. Did you see those teeth marks?”

“So that’s what those dents are.” She put her palm over the necklace. “It’s always been special to me, even before I knew where it came from. It was like a little magic heart, and I could touch it and it could make me strong or invisible or able to read people’s minds. I sort of believed that when I was younger. I wasn’t crazy, though. It was just something I needed to believe.”

My eyes welled up yet again and I turned away, toward my mother.

“Did you lose the handkerchief I gave you?” I heard Flora say. I nodded. She put her hand on my arm. “It’s okay. You can cry if you want.”

In between my daughter and my mother, I sobbed.

On the way to our house, Loyalty pointed out a few sights. When he indicated we should look to the left, I took that opportunity to study Flora’s face. She glanced my way every now and then and smiled slightly.

“I can’t get over the fact that you speak Chinese,” she said, “and that I look like you.”

“Actually, you resemble your father more,” I said. She looked at me straight on, puzzled. “The shape of your eyes, the color of your irises, your eyebrows, your nose, and ears …”

Flora leaned over and looked at Mother. “Is she blind?”

Mother said to her: “I told you, Flora. You look like your mother.”

F
OR THE FIRST
two days, I said nothing about the past. The four of us took Flora on a tour of Shanghai—as much as we could see within the International Settlement. She was interested in the architecture, especially in the roofs with their curved eaves. “There’s something about a roof that’s like a head and a face tilted at the sky.” She practiced speaking simple Chinese words with Magic Gourd: “tree,” “flower,” “house,” “man,” “woman.” She could recall them an hour later.

On the third day, she said over breakfast: “I’m ready to hear about you and my father. Just tell me and don’t try to make it proper and all that. Don’t leave out the good stuff.”

“I met your father,” I said, “because Uncle Loyalty introduced him to me as someone he could have conversations with in English. Your father also thought I was a common prostitute in a cheap brothel. We did not get along at first.” She enjoyed hearing about the misunderstanding, and Loyalty’s role in that. When I described Edward, she listened, sitting perfectly still. I found it difficult to put into words all who Edward had been to me and who he was to her. I told her how beautiful his voice was, and I sang the morning song he made up. I told her he was serious, sometimes sad, gentle, and funny. I told her briefly about his despair over the death of a boy named Tom who fell because of a prank he committed. She was interested in knowing what her grandfather and grandmother thought about it. When I said they said he was not to blame, she sniffed and said, “I knew it.” As I related what more I remembered, I found Edward coming back in more detail, released from the photograph, the immobile memory, and back to life.

I went to a table where I had laid Edward’s journal. I put it in her hands, and she ran her fingers over the soft
brown cover. She opened it and read aloud the title that Edward had declared grandiose.

To THE FARTHEST OF THE FAR EAST

By B. Edward Ivory III

A Happy Wanderer in China

I showed her the passage Edward had written when we went to the countryside and he taught me to drive. As she read to herself, I was with him again. He urged me to go faster, to feel the speed of life, as we raced away from death spreading over the land, when he wanted to feel only happiness because he was with me, the woman he loved. I turned to him, and he saw that I loved him, too.

“That was the love we had and gave you. He made me pure. I was no longer the courtesan I had been forced to become. I was loved, and that was knowledge I would always have. When Mrs. Lamp called me a prostitute, she could not take his love away. Instead, they took my baby. They took you and made you forget who I was.”

Flora was somber. “In a way, I didn’t forget. That’s why I wouldn’t let anyone touch the locket. As long as I had it, I knew someone like you would come back. I waited for you. And every day, those awful people told me that you didn’t exist, that it was a bad dream. Every day they said this until you became a dream.” She looked at me with a desperate face. Her eyes were like Edward’s just before he confessed that terrible story of the boy who fell off the cliff.

“They took me away from you and tried to make me someone else. I’m not them. I hate them. And I’m not you either. I don’t know you anymore. I don’t know who I am. People see me and they think I look so sure of myself. Hey, lucky girl, you’re rich and have no worries. But I’m not who they think. I’m wearing an expensive dress. I’m walking with my shoulders back like a confident girl who knows where she’s going. But I don’t know what I want to do in my life. I’m not talking about the future after I finish college—if I finish. I don’t know what I want to do day after day. There’s nothing that strings the days together. They’re all separate days, and each day, I have to decide what I want to do and who I will be.

“Minerva tried to make up who I was. Her daughter. But she knew I didn’t love her, and she didn’t love me. I used to try to believe she did. But somehow I knew love was not what I felt from her. I thought there was something wrong with me. I was a girl who was unlovable, who could not love. I saw the girls at school with their mothers. They decorated Easter baskets and they’d say, ‘Blue is my mother’s favorite color.’ I had to pretend that I was as excited as those other girls. And then I grew tired of pretending. Who was I pretending for? Who was I if I didn’t pretend?

“Like father, like daughter, I was raised in the good ol’ Ivory family tradition. You can do no wrong. You’re always right. You can lie through your teeth and make people do what you want because you have enough money to buy your way clean. You can buy admiration, buy appreciation, buy respect—all of it fake, of course. To them, flimsy cardboard facades were good enough. And I did my best to prove they weren’t.

“I stopped studying when I was a kid and flunked my tests. If I knew the right answer, I wrote down the wrong one. My family accused the teachers of treating me unfairly and they bullied them into letting me take the tests again at home. They hired someone to fill in the answers. I became a stellar pupil!

“I started shoplifting when I was eleven. It was exciting because it was dangerous and I could get caught. I had never had such strong emotions—not that I could remember—and I felt I needed to do it. I stole a little tin soldier from a toy store. It wasn’t anything I really wanted. But when I took it home, I suddenly felt it belonged to me and I had a right to take it. My right. I stole things that were valuable and other things that were not: a silver baby cup, an apple, shiny buttons, a thimble, a silver dog that fit in the thimble, a pencil. The more I stole, the more I felt I had to steal. It was like having a huge Santa Claus bag inside me that I had to fill and I didn’t know why. I figured I wouldn’t know why until I filled it. Finally, I got caught, and my erstwhile fake mother sat me down and asked if I lacked for anything. I said nothing because I couldn’t tell her I had the empty Santa bag inside me. She said I only needed to tell her what I wished for and she would provide it. She gave me ten dollars. I threw the money away when I went outside. It made me mad that she thought she could pay to make the bad part of me go away. I went back to stealing. I wanted to be caught again right away. But no one noticed. So I stole bigger things and in plain sight—a doll, a piggy bank, a wooden puzzle. I knew the shopkeepers saw me, but they said nothing. My erstwhile mother, I later found out, had set up an account with the shopkeepers, and they would mark down the cost of what I had stolen. The amount of money would be paid from the account. It was like a joke to them.

“I didn’t want to be bad. That wasn’t who I was. It just felt closer to who I might be, because I wasn’t like them. Being like them meant I had to feel nothing was wrong with them, with the world, with those who rubbed their hands and pretended to respect them, when it was really their money. Being them was believing love was a kiss on the cheek. Love was supposed to make you feel happy and that you weren’t alone. You could feel something you didn’t feel with anyone else. And your heart would squeeze when there was love. That’s what I had with my dog. People say true love is constant. Well, no love is constant, too.

“When I was older, I took up with the kind of friends the Ivorys thought were the scum of the earth, and especially a boy named Pen. I know Mrs. Danner saw him when she was spying on me. He and I smoked
cigarettes. We drank booze. I did all the things I shouldn’t do, and then I got pregnant. When I realized I was going to have a baby, I felt like I had finally done it. I had changed myself. I was now different. My body was different. The way people would see me was different. Girls who got pregnant were immoral and stupid. But now I didn’t like the change. I wasn’t immoral and stupid. I got into a
situation
and with a boy I didn’t love. I used to think he was different, because he didn’t care what people thought. He was fun and dangerous. But I knew I didn’t love him. I wanted to, but he was not that smart. The cream didn’t rise to the top, if you know what I mean. And now he wanted to make me an honest woman, he said. He said he loved me and asked if his love was reciprocated. Reciprocated! That was the biggest word he had ever used. He had a chance to marry Little Miss Moneybags and he had gone to the dictionary to figure out how he could do it. Even he had become fake. The baby was the only one who wasn’t.

“So what was I going to do? I had not plotted it out yet, but I would. I knew I would soon have to leave home. I would not let my baby grow up to be like the erstwhile family. And they would be glad that I left. They could not pile on enough lies to cover up a belly that was going to grow bigger and bigger. It took Minerva two months to notice something was wrong with me. I was vomiting every morning in my room. One day, I got sick at dinner. She was about to call the doctor, thinking I had a stomach ailment. I told her, ‘Don’t bother. I’m pregnant.’ She closed the dining room doors, so it was just the two of us. I told her I didn’t know who the father was, just to further upset her. It could be any of a half dozen boys, I said. She said the strangest thing: ‘I knew this would happen. You were born without morals, and for all I tried I couldn’t change that.’ I didn’t know she was referring to you. She told me I had ruined the family reputation, the Ivory family’s social standing, and that I would be the source of a lot of gossip. It was thrilling to hear her say this. ‘Young lady,’ she said in a shrill voice, ‘you’ve crossed the threshold into the devil’s playground.’

“I burst into laughter. She shouted for me to stop. Her command made me laugh even harder. I was laughing hysterically. And then I realized I couldn’t stop, and it was frightening. How could laughing be frightening? She kept shouting and I kept laughing. She said that if I went off with this dirty boy, I would be living in a slum with the baby. I laughed and laughed, until all I could do was wheeze because I could hardly catch my breath. I was suffocating on my own laughter. And then she shouted that if I ran off and had this baby, I would receive no money from her ever again. And suddenly, I was able to stop laughing. I said, ‘I’m the one who is going to inherit the money, not you. You’re the one who will get
no
money.’ She got quiet.

“I told her that, like it or not, I would live in the house and have the baby, and if we were the pariahs of the town, I would at least be honest about it. She immediately changed her tune and said in a fake soothing voice that I should put my mind at rest about the baby and my future. Everything would be fine, she said in her phony voice of concern. ‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ she said. ‘I’ll call the doctor now to prescribe something to help with your nausea.’ She called me ‘my dear.’ My inheritance had bought those words and made her choke them out. I was grateful when the doctor came. I was sitting on the side of the bed, doubled over. He set down a bottle of medicine on the nightstand and told Minerva to give me a pill three times a day. And then he said he would give me a shot to help me feel better right away. The needle went in, I said, ‘Ow,’ and I remembered nothing else until I woke and was in terrible pain. Minerva said that this was normal with nausea and gave me a pill. I fell asleep. I awoke again, and she gave me another pill.

“Three days went by before I knocked away Minerva’s hand as she brought the pill toward my mouth. I knew the dull ache in my womb was not nausea. They had gutted me. They had taken out what they felt was wrong, what had embarrassed her and would have ruined her social standing. Minerva wore her phony kind face and said through lying teeth that I had had a miscarriage. She said it so sincerely. She said I didn’t remember it, because I had been in such pain it knocked me out cold. I cursed her with every name I could think of. I was screaming, and Minerva said I would be just fine and it was natural to suffer melancholy after what I had been through. And then I was quiet. Why was I screaming? What would change? I couldn’t win against her, because there was nothing to win. I was an orphan. I belonged to no one. I had nothing and nobody to hang on to. The only person I could trust and rely on was me. But I was helpless and wanted to give up, because I didn’t want to be strong anymore. What was the point?

“I felt like I was dying and I would never know the difference between who I was and who I did not want to be. I ran away as soon as I was able to get out of bed. The police found me and brought me back. I ran away again. I was caught again. Every time they caught me, something else died in me. I slashed off my hair. I cut my wrists and ran through the house letting the blood spurt everywhere. I guess you would say I had a nervous breakdown. The doctor was called again. Instead of taking me to an asylum, Minerva hired nurses to watch me until I felt better. They slipped medicines into my food or drink to make me docile. I stopped eating and flushed the food down the toilet. I grew weaker and weaker. And then I thought it was stupid that I would let myself die just because I hated them. I knew what I had to do to escape. I would be the good girl who lived a false life. I would smile at the table and say what a nice day it was. How lucky we were not to be starving like some people. How lucky we weren’t Jews in Poland. How lucky we were not like other people who lived on the other side of the river. I studied, passed
my exams without any help from paid tutors, and I was accepted by a school in New Hampshire that took hours to get to and on winding roads, which I knew made Minerva throw up.