My Last Empress (2 page)
One insipid Sunday afternoon after I had scorched my throat with much hymnal singing, Sam Polk strolled with me along a patch of lawn near the school chapel that afforded a slice of Mrs. D’s former garden. The dreary day produced a dreary chat, and soon the New York boy was regaling me with his ventures with Lower East Side foreign whores whom he described as not only good with their craft but with their tongues.
“Got it, Pickens?” He chuckled at his own wit. “But you know, Pickens. I had more fun and less trouble right there behind those hedges.” He pointed his toe at Mrs. D’s garden.
“You what?” I sputtered.
“I had my way three times with that barren Mrs. D. Only made two trips to her house; the other time, I had her behind the hedge before it was trimmed and the leaves cleared.”
I nearly choked the boy with my own hands.
I was let out of the jail of burden and breathed the fresh air of a sonless youth, but in that freedom I yearned for her—the hedge, the garden, the white house, the possibility that she would forever gaze at her child’s face and think of me.
After the Ds’ departure, Andover was as empty for me as the Forbidden City, under whose roof I now am penning this improbable diary. The colors were erased from autumn trees, and a certain buoyancy was amiss in the eyes of the young boys around me, mourning the fable that was Mrs. D. The vibrant PE teacher, Mr. Waldran, no longer sat on the short wall fencing off the Ds’ former house in between his classes—another suspect. Cricket balls, footballs, any balls seldom found their way to that haunted garden anymore.
That shrine of our hearts soon was spiderwebbed as snow whited its shingles and ice icicled its roof, but soon came spring, and all dread vaporized upon the lilting sound of an exotic mellow flute. It came from the window of that white house, the Ds’ former abode, hovering over the same garden.
Here and now I must pause. The hurried rustling of my brush must have awoken the demons of the night within the Forbidden City where I reside now: the footfalls of the night guards are nearing. You see, I am being watched constantly by the eyes in and beyond the walls. The flutist, creating the music that hung in the air over Andover that day, is the woman who links me to this fate within this red wall of the Forbidden City. She is the ebb and flow of my tide, the doing and undoing of it all.
She was conceived, as she would tell me in our initial shy encounter, on the Nile one rippleless night sailing through Egypt. She was born at dawn when the Qing Dynasty was dusking in the Manchurian port city of Dalien, where her father, and before that her grandfather, served as missionaries in the church of Jesus Christ, the northern division of their worldwide conference. The Hawthorns were a clan of proud missionaries with pious convictions and big-boned conventionality. Her father, Hawthorn IV, a blue-blooded Phillipian himself, had lost a leg to a striped tiger in the Changbai Mountain. A reassignment by the North American Conference, his employer, landed the man back on the campus of his alma mater and his only daughter on my cold lap.
The blond and blue-eyed whimsical Annabelle, after growing up in the Orient, liked to dress up as a Chinese empress in an ornate embroidered coat, a gift from a local warlord. The cross-Pacific voyage had left her melancholy and stricken with longing for the only land she had ever known. The bamboo flute was a gift from a Changbai Mountain monk, and this flute, upon which she blew her scented breath to stir the melodies of that yellow dirt land, was her only solace in her uprooted existence. That is, until I came along.
We chatted behind our hymnbooks about eloping—she nineteen, an unbridled bride, and I eighteen, a doomed groom—to the foggy kingdom of her Shangri-la. She was full of myth and mythology. Our temple floated in the clouds and spring tasted sweet; she dreamed of being a ghost, dead from the inferno of a love affair, living thinly between the wall and its wallpaper. I boasted of becoming a fearless explorer with the sunlight my only guide, the moonlight my bed.
Quickly and clumsily we fell in love. Ache of that nascent love and the pain of our monstrous desire to possess each other nearly destroyed us during the honeyed month of our affair. She would ricochet between the imaginary summit of elation and the abyss of low and dark moods, while I languished in a permanent state of tented agony, hungry for every glimpse of her: strolling down the wooded path, a white lily in her hair; in a tree, skirt afluff, a blond butterfly in greens; laughing on the swing, my heart in flight.
Compared to Mrs. D, Annabelle was a tadpole in a puddle, an apprentice in the witchcraft of womanhood, a girl in waiting—waiting for the hands of her fate to unpeel her petals. During sleepless nights, the ghost of Mrs. D, the married martyr, would still creep to the edge of my canvas, elbowing aside Annabelle to make it a portrait for three. Mrs. D’s sudden vulgarity shamed me—the rolling stomach, corrugated thighs, and copious breasts. Those signposts of age all burst into flames, and in its place rose the phoenix of Annabelle.
I still tremble at the thought of touching Annabelle’s budding chest for the first time under the May maple tree. The hedges formed our barricade beyond which her mother was having tea with summer friends. Tree leaves played peek-a-boo with tea leaves upon their white-clothed tea table. Her young breasts were taut under her plain dress. Her face twisted in agony, she pressed my palm into her chest, her hands over mine, then slowly pushed it down to bury between her legs. We both drew in a long breath, suspending the moment into an eternity. My fingers were about to wriggle for its prey when suddenly, a bark was yelped at her puppy. Her mother called to her errant daughter from her shaded alcove.
When we emerged, I was poured a cup of tea, which I shamelessly accepted.
The cravings germinated from that unfulfilled under-the-hedge hanky panky left our hearts sobbing with even more potent desire. Rubbing shoulders in the chapel’s narrow corridor induced dizzy spells; holding hands secretly generated electrifying lightning; drawing her name on the sandy ground rendered my knees weak and sword amast. We were stupefied by the storm of love ravaging our young bodies.
My hand is shaking now as I prepare myself to compose that fateful night when we met again. Even my palace ink boy, In-In, frowns with concern. Grind on, my boy, make it dark, make it silky, make it last longer than the etchings on my tombstone. I desire the world to know that truth—yes, the truth that begets no explanations.
It was love. It was the moon. It was fragrant June. All was quiet, a New England summer night, when I followed Annabelle’s instructions left in a coded note slipped into my Bible. A trail of yellowed leaves waited for me from the shadow of my window. A blithe jump landed me out the dorm, and I tiptoed along her Silk Road, my heart in my throat. Our tryst was a narrow isle between two looming haystacks reeking of stale autumn.
Annabelle sat on the hay, her hair tossed over her shoulder, smoking a slender bamboo pipe tipped with a bubbling holder. The air was tinctured with the heady scent. “Smoke it.” She puffed. “It’s opium.”
I took a long draw, swallowed it with a gag, then kissed her parted lips. Pain creased her forehead and pleasure quivered
her lower lip. Weakened by desire, I lifted the hem of her skirt. She drew another puff, blowing it into me, and we fed on each other’s hungry mouths. I thrust my hand up her skirt, sailing for my dark destiny, her scented Shangri-la, and she slackened her legs with a small cry. Heaven was near. Oh, that sweet, sweet spring. In an outburst of tenderest love, I let loose my painful sword. She took me in her slender hand, making it quiver, and opened her castle gate. I marched forward with stars blinking over my shoulders and was on the verge of possessing her, my darling, darling Annabelle, when the sparks from her damned opium pipe leaped into life. The flames, like a gale on a stormy sea, swallowed the haystacks.
All my feeble mind can recall is that she pushed me away as a bale of hay, aflame, fell hard on us. My foot caught on fire and a certain stench overwhelmed me. I remember pulling her slender arm, her bare feet; then another haystack toppled against my shoulder and I lost her hand. I was found unconscious, slightly burned and bruised, fifteen feet from her incinerated remains with my right hand reaching for her. From that cursed moment on, I have been living only to regret every second of life without her, my Annabelle.
When the authorities questioned me about the fire and my burned clothing, I was told not to mention our tryst. There were numerous clues linking me to that fateful night, but the tentacles of the elder Pickens made them all vanish. I was repulsed by the cover-up, and I wrote a moving confession of all the ins and outs of our affair leading to the climax of the fire. Upon reading the report, Annabelle’s father and the principal not only burned it in my presence
but also threatened prosecution with the possible charge of involuntary manslaughter and possible expulsion if any word of it got out.
In Andover’s official record, the death of Annabelle was omitted altogether. The flames of 1891 warranted only a footnote as being the first fire on the famed campus.
In the aftermath of her death, my moods swung wildly, and an escalating depression plunged me into bouts of harrowing head pains, leaving me a gaunt ghost of my former self. Speaking of ghosts, I made love to Annabelle’s ghost every night, sometimes twice or even thrice, my headaches permitting. She might be dead to the world—her tombstone said so—but under my quilt, in my arms, she was always my living bride, my virginal wife. When I began my first year at Yale, my headaches miraculously subsided, and musical studies began to interest me. I found the combination of pipe organ and stained glass particularly soothing. Bach was a forest of solitude echoing with Annabelle’s angelic laughter, Beethoven an islet of nostalgia, lush with her sashaying shadows. Stained glass was my darkened sun, freckled with pigeon poop.
Even though the organ stopped, the music lived on in my head with gnawing reprisals, keeping me starkly awake all night, though never away from my Annabelle. Insomnia only made a Hercules out of me and a Joan of Arc out of her. What a honeymoon it was, though it did bring back my headaches with shocking ferocity, which at various intervals pushed me as far as wanting to kill myself, but I never did.
The night always came in time, and I simply could not unlove my Annabelle.
I dabbled in poetry writing, first as a sonneteer, then as a balladeer. The narrow wards of rhymes and meters left me smothered with claustrophobic gloom. It was in prose that I blossomed. I envisioned myself a nervous diver standing atop a roaring cascade. Once letting go, I soared like an eagle. The soaring, not of me but of my poisoned pen, proliferated an enviable body of work: forty-three essays and two eclectic tragicomedies. But the gem amidst the roughs was the twelve bound volumes of letters to my Annabelle: four hundred and twenty-one letters in all. They were burned to ashes on Annabelle’s twentieth birthday in a fire aiming to end it all, yet narrowly I escaped, a sobbing arsonist.
The flirt with fire was cathartic, though it did leave a scar around my waist where the letters had been tied. The windows of my heart suddenly opened; desire stirred from the base of my spine, and thoughts of infidelity tortured me. I wrote copious confessions to my Annabelle, and she wept with me under our quivering quilt. The glory of our subsequent lovemaking was worth all my penitent penmanship and conniving contrition.
Annabelle reigned over me like the empress she had yearned to be in life. She was formless, airlike, ubiquitous, and pervasive. She lived in the light, in the air. She was all the colors of a rainbow, all cycles of a season, and I, her lone subject, surrendered on the shrine of her glory. In my head, I could trace her thoughts forming, dissolving, re-forming, and vanishing again. In my heart a sadness lingered, not of mine but of her origin. She mourned her own death, and I mourned her grief.
