Honor and Duty (4 page)

Toussaint had taught me to leave my new glasses be when
trouble called. I made my hands quiet, fingers itching as the glasses slid down the modest bridge of my nose.

“Aw. he’s cool. Boy thinks he’s colored,” said another.

“He don’
look
colored,” said Caboose. “He look
white
.”

“Ain’t white,” I said in my high voice. “See, I’m colored.”

“Bool-shit!” spat Caboose, frowning.

“He’s colored,” said Toos quietly. He had heart and knuckles. It looked like a lot of work to take on those fists, having that strong, high-cheekboned face bent on putting the hurt on you.

Caboose poked the insides of his mouth with his tongue, inventorying teeth and thinking, while Toos ran his cool icebox gaze around the challenger’s profile, getting ready for fate.

I hated those pulsing eternities before a fight, when breathing stopped and sparks and silence filled the air as the heart pounded in the anticipation of losing blood. I hated this more than I hated the tussles. Fear would put cotton in my brain and pump all my circulation into my ventricles and atria.

I remembered Toos’s advice. “Don’t jump to fist or to scat. Give words a chance. And don’t scream China stuff at ’em.” That was easy for him to say. When he spoke, talking came out and people nodded. “China, look ’em inna eyes and talk it real slow.”

Later, Coach Barraza trained me. The first round, when anxiety ruled, was my worst; in the third, when I was working too hard on saving my life to worry, I fought in accord with
ho
, sweet harmony, which drew left hooks and countering rights from me like long noodles from a good-fortune dish.

Please, I said to all the listening gods, let’s not fight Caboose and his brothers. He’s as big as a house, and it’ll be five to two on this here tin roof, and heights make me like to faint and I’m gonna fall for sure, way down there, where some train’ll flatten me and my glasses. I looked down, the bottom of my stomach dropping from me in anticipation, my gorge rising.

“Yeah, right,” sighed Caboose, peering through thin fog toward the downtown skyscrapers. “What I said—he’s jus’ light.”

I took a deep breath.

“But he surely do look like a damn China boy to
me
,” he added, to no one in particular.

The yards were Jump City for flight out. But Toos only joked about running, and I was never serious about my
chances on distant tracks without him. In my running fever, I did not know that leaving Egypt would be hard. Exodus meant making farewells, and this was not one of my skills. I wanted to belong, never to be separated, to be made to stand alone, isolated, hopelessly different, and required to act or to suffer—ever again.

I was fourteen when we moved out of the Negro Panhandle, where I had been born and the family had lived since fleeing China. I felt like I was already ten feet under quicksand, and said nothing to Toos, Alvin Sharpes, Titus McGovern, or Earline Ribbons, or to anyone. I denied the split. I’ll be back—soon, I said to myself.

“What’s happenin’?” asked Toos. He frowned at the truck while my father and friend Hector Pueblo moved our furniture out.

I shook my head, no words in my mouth. We spit in our hands and shook. I was weak, unable to take the comfort of his strength. I was losing my best friend. There would never be another like him. This was where
yeh
played its bitter hand. If I had been more deserving, I wouldn’t have had to leave him and my young heart.

Now, three long years later, at seventeen, I wanted to leave with the fervor of a Hebrew held in Egypt. I wanted to flee San Francisco, a city I loved, so I could escape my mother, whom I secretly disliked. My mother was Edna McGurk Ting, and to me she was Pharaoh, skilled in abuse and quick with the whip. I was seven when she had come into our family with a reign of cultural terror that ended the Chinese nature of our family. She was from Philadelphia society, and I was her hopeless social project.

“I hope you do well at the Point,” Edna said to me when I came home the day I was accepted. Her cool eyes were sharply observant. “Your chances are poor. Jim Latre, a very bright, handsome, ex-beau of mine, got shingles and failed that first summer, drawing our sympathy.” She smiled, remembering. Then the frown.

“Lift your drooping shoulder. West Point is the most difficult school in the world. What possessed us to send you? They will throw you out on your ear. You are so woeful in math, so lacking in ambition, your mind so pitifully
mediocre
, you cannot miss a
single
thing. There, you cannot succeed by laughing or going crazy.

“But it is that pitiful Negroid neighborhood background that
will always hold you back. You may not be sufficiently American. I have given you your best chance. But your affection for failure, your penchant for associating with those with no future, will haunt you all your days.” She was talking about Toos and Tony Barraza.

She ran a green dust rag from a pocket in her peach-toned sweater across the bindings of my beloved books.
Ben Hur
,
Beau Geste
,
Captains Courageous
,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
,
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
,
Pride and Prejudice.
She had taught me English, and I had quickly grasped paradox and irony.

She sighed. “I had to cleanse you of singing ‘Jesus Loves Me’ in
Chinese.
Then you employed that horrid Negro speech. Now your English is quite correct, thank you, but you still hesitate, your mouth filled with marbles and confusion. He who hesitates is lost. You hesitate.” She sighed, burdened by my shortcomings. “Your father and I have savings, enough for one of us to attend your graduation from West Point.”

In Philadelphia, silent table manners justified continued life. My family was from Shanghai, where the roar of omnivorous consumption shook seaports around the world. I was from San Francisco, rocked by sharp earthquakes, soothed by mournful foghorns, surrounded by Dungeness crabs, blessed with modest weather, and populated by citizens of the world. I was packing to leave the City, which to me had become the Pyramids.

I did not know what to say to her, and was experiencing the normal reactions of a boy whose brain was being flogged. It was a cool and foggy day, but I perspired, back aching. I wondered if I had polio from the polio god who had taken my friend Connie Dureaux. I must have done something very bad in my earlier life to have deserved these talks with my mother.

I was a teenager, tormented by profound doubt. I wore an unwanted Chinese face in Negro streets and white avenues. I was cursed by a tongue that misspoke to elders and was handicapped by an endless host of cultural stupidities. I secretly answered to every god known. To my credit, I had friends, got good grades, could box, and play basketball, but because I was not a genius, and I was not handsome, I knew I was on a karmic roller coaster that was headed, with all deliberate speed, down, and south.

“Pack your school clothes,” she said.

In the Sunset, boys wore Keds, tight, peg-legged jeans, and plaid shirts. I wore black baggy wool slacks, black shoes, and
a white shirt. School clothes, Edna said. To me, they were for funerals—Chinese wore white, and Negroes wore black.

Jack Peeve, my friend in this new neighborhood, gave me his cast-offs. At his house, on the way to school, I’d change into an outfit that wouldn’t suggest suicide.

Jack, like Toos, had all the freedoms and skills I envied. He could talk without making his mother scream, use the telephone, be cool in front of a girl he liked, swat curveballs out of the park, recover instantly from gruesome, mind-weakening injuries, and lick nearly any comer in arm wrestling. Jack could beat most men, except for Uncle Yorchich Votan and his dad.

Jack’s dad was short, thin haired, and broad shouldered. He smiled a lot, and he and Jack used to clap each other on the back every few minutes, making the same kind of sound that a house must make when it falls on a car. I did that once to Mr. Peeve, and it was like hitting the lumber in the basement.

Uncle Yorch lived in the Peeves’ dark garage. He displayed shark jaws, deer antlers, ram horns, assorted truck parts, and bullet-punctured German Wehrmacht helmets on the walls. He liked to play catch with a car tire with the wheel still in it. His head was as big as a medicine ball, and he used to punch Jack with a massive fist to keep him alert. “Hurtcha?” he’d ask.

“No way!” Jack would shout, rising at the opposite end of the garage, the debris from his collision with the memorabilia from his uncle’s campaigns against all animals and Nazis still jangling onto the oil-stained concrete of his living room floor. Being with them was like watching an unchoreographed John Ford western bar brawl. I knew how to box, but hated to fight.

“Ouch,” I would say in sympathy.

“Arm-wrestle?” Uncle Yorch asked me, eyes bright with hope.

I shook my head. Not with my hand.

I think Jack awakened one morning at the age of twelve with whiskers and the musculature of an adult. I thought this was because Mr. Peeve was a chef, with lots of food at home. Jack said it was because he was Bulgarian. With the Germans so close, they couldn’t mess around with growing up, so they did it overnight.

I had been walking to Lincoln when he had said, “Nice clothes.”

I sized him up and knew, with a sinking heart, that even
with all my years in the ring, this guy could pound me. He had a toughness that did not come from effort, but from the gods.

“I’m Jack. Want some a my old clothes?”

“Yeah,” I said. Then I smiled, although Toos was the only one who could tell when I did. He said something happened in my eyes.

“Burt Lancaster would wear clothes like this,” I said. He was my number-one cinema hero. I liked his smile. Jack looked like him.

I hoped the clothes would make me look white. They didn’t—any more than I had turned Negro from hanging with Toos. But the clothes helped; I didn’t look like the sad, lame, emasculated Chinese in American movies, bound for Chinese and Negro funerals, dressed by a mother who saw life as more than a challenge.

After school I took the L car downtown to my YMCA job in the Tenderloin, then returned the clothes to the Peeves’ on the way home, racing through the clothing change. “Fast, huh?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Jack. “Get moolah for changing clothes fast.”

“You
do?
” I asked, excited about my skills.

Jack shook his head, grinning. “Nope. Just kidding,” he said, clapping me thunderously on the back.

“Wish Jack would dress up like that,” said Mrs. Peeve, appraising me in the formality of Edna’s school clothes.

“No thanks, Ma,” said Jack. “I’d rather go to school naked.”

“I’m done with school clothes,” I said now as I packed, my heart in my throat, feeling like Oliver asking for more porridge. I finally had gotten up the nerve to bring Jack’s cast-offs home. I did it the way our cat, Silly Dilly, used to bring in birds, worried about the reaction of the home folk.

“What do
you
know about
anything?
” Edna asked through closed teeth. “Where did you get these?”

“Jack Peeve’s give-aways.” I felt anticipatory fear. Now would come woe and the return of the garments to Jack under scrutiny of press, cops, and neighbors. I awaited the conventional destruction of my spirit or of my model planes that hung from the ceiling. She would claw them out of the sky with her antiaircraft broom and then jump on them with a vehemence that arrested breath. Four planes had survived her blitz. Silence. I prepared for sadness.

“Predictably, Christine has not thanked you,” she said. “She should send flowers to
us
, for our appointment to West Point.”

I slammed the suitcase lid on my fingers.
Our
appointment. My heart slugged, vision blurred, stomach soured, back ached, polio bloomed. I could not argue or raise my voice to her.

I had asked Dear Abby if it was correct for me to send flowers to a girl I loved who did not love me. Edna was aware of the flowers and knew that I had received no answer from Christine. An old and familiar anger surged through me. “You can’t read my mail! It’s against the law!” I had yelled when I discovered she had been reading my letters for years. I had made the claim hysterically, without thought, as if I were worthy of having an opinion.

“I AM YOUR
MOTHER!
” she screamed. “There are bad influences in this world—much of it in the mail! DON’T YOU
DARE
RAISE YOUR VOICE TO ME! How dare you toss the law at me as if you were a
lawyer? DO YOU WANT YOUR FATHER TO FIND ME WITH A STROKE?!
”

I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been. Of course, she had read my Dear Abby correspondence. She was my mother.

I had not always kowtowed to her. I was almost nine when I had held my fists up to her, left foot and left profile leading in accord with the Marquis of Queensberry and the teachings of Tony the Tiger Barraza. I didn’t want her to hit me anymore. She took to her bed in a dignified retreat that probably made the funeral procession for Queen Victoria look like the drunken 49er riots at Kezar after another bitter loss to Detroit.

One morning, after breakfast, she called me to their room. “You gave me a stroke,” she said calmly, her voice brimming with ancient pains. Her careful articulation was a weapon against my imprecise speech. Weak sunlight fell on the bed, leaving her face in shadow. I stood at near attention, facing the rope, the consequences of my prior bad lives, of standing up for myself.

“I am your mother.
Not
your stepmother. Give the picture of the Other Woman to your sister.
Never, ever
make a fist or
raise your voice to me!
” she cried. “Refer to me as ‘my mother,’ or ‘my real mother.’ Obey and I will not hit you. Stand straighter, you
pitiful
wretched, ugly, fat-lipped thing. Wipe that expression from your face
this moment.
” Megan, middle of my three
tsiatsia
, older sisters, had given me Mahmee’s photo only weeks earlier. Edna was offering a trade. If I gave it to Janie, the youngest of my sisters, she wouldn’t hit me anymore. I didn’t know that raising my guard to her had
already accomplished what she now offered. All I knew was that she hated me, and it was my
yeh
to live with it.