Songs of Willow Frost (12 page)

“But you have it all.” William gestured to the dressing room, the theater itself. “You are wealthy—famous! Everyone loves you. What don’t you have?”

“I don’t have what matters most.”

Your son
, William thought.
I’m right here
.

She whispered so softly he barely heard her. “Forgiveness.”

“What more is there to forgive?” William asked. Then he had a terrible realization, that maybe she was unable to forgive herself.

She motioned for him to come closer, and she took his hands. She slowly examined them. The years he’d spent working in the laundry or pushing a mop at Sacred Heart hadn’t smoothed his long, wrinkled fingers—they still had the same hands, old hands. But where his were warm, hers were cold, frozen. He felt her let go and then watched as she stared into her empty palms as though reading lines on a map, searching.

And then, while music began to play from somewhere upstairs, somewhere far away, she spoke to him of family and fathers.

Songs

(1921)

Liu Song Eng walked home from Butterfield’s, where she worked after school as a song plugger. Singing in front of the store wasn’t a bad job, per se. With her voice—her thunderous contralto—she managed to earn a nickel for every page of sheet music sold. But her looks drew unwanted attention from passersby, especially when she wore her mother’s chevron tabard dress. Matronly women squinted their eyes at Liu Song and pursed their bee-stung lips. Grown men stopped dead in their tracks when they heard a tearful Mamie Smith ballad coming from Liu Song’s seventeen-year-old body. They leered, looking her up and down, then slowly back up again. Even the prim Seattle beat cops seemed to linger nearby, palming their batons and making jokes about a stiff breeze as she fought to keep the chill wind from blowing up her slip. Meanwhile, Old Man Butterfield sat inside, where it was warm, smoking his pipe and flitting his long fingers across the chipped ivories of an old, upright piano, which, unlike the pianolas, wasn’t for sale. He could have let one of the new autopianos do all the work, but Liu Song suspected that he liked to play as much as she liked to sing. To Liu Song, the lonely old man seemed wedded to his music. He’d never married and rarely even talked about women, except to comment on their shoes.

“Don’t make the same mistakes, Liu Song. Don’t be alone with a
man—any man—not until you’re married.” Those were the last words her mother ever spoke to her.

Liu Song shrugged at the thought. She wasn’t afraid of being alone with her boss, but she dreaded the thought of being alone, without her true family. As she crossed the street she fastened her coat’s collar button. She tied her favorite scarf around her neck and wrinkled her nose because the wool smelled like cherry-vanilla tobacco. She longed for the comforting sound of her mother’s voice. Liu Song knew her mother had once performed onstage but couldn’t recall ever hearing her sing, not even a sad lullaby.

When Liu Song rounded the corner into Chinatown, she saw her stepfather and two other businessmen smoking and talking in front of the Quong Tuck Company. She recognized him from two blocks away by the expensive Oxford bags he wore. As she crossed the street she thought his stout frame and round belly looked ridiculous in those baggy English trousers, especially next to the businessmen in their three-piece suits.

“Hello, Uncle Leo,” she said cordially as she passed by.

Her stepfather didn’t fancy the idea of having a daughter and had insisted on being referred to as
uncle
. He flicked his cigarette butt into the gutter and spat on the sidewalk, then turned his back and continued talking.

You’re not my uncle
, Liu Song thought,
or my father. You’re just a laundryman
.

Liu Song’s real father had been a theater director and a Cantonese opera star, but his company in Seattle had foundered when the Spanish flu forced him into temporary retirement. Despite quarantines, he died from the Grippe—the same disease that took her brothers and crippled her mother.

She wished she could have seen him perform, just once, but girls were not allowed back then—not good girls, anyway. And she loved his stories.

“One time during the seventh month, when I was just a boy apprentice,
our troupe traveled to a remote village and gave a grand performance,” her father had often told her. “But when we woke in the morning, the village had completely vanished—we were standing in an empty meadow. We’d been entertaining ghosts!”

His story about the ghost village was her favorite, and sometimes when she sang, at home, at school, or in front of Butterfield’s, she imagined his ghost watching, nodding approval or offering instruction.

As Liu Song wandered down Canton Alley and into her family’s apartment in the East Kong Yick building, she was overwhelmed by the smell of camphor—a reminder that the only real ghost in her life was her bedridden mother. The beautiful woman Liu Song’s father had called My Joyful Goddess had lost her hearing when a fever ruptured her eardrums during the influenza epidemic. She couldn’t sing, could hardly speak, and rarely communicated now. It was a strange miracle that Uncle Leo had even married her, but she still had her looks, and Chinese women were few, so he took them in. Liu Song’s mother had cooked, cleaned, and done everything Uncle Leo expected from an obedient wife, except provide him with a son. As her health failed as well, Uncle Leo administered a variety of treatments, which only brought on a withering storm of seizures. Each time, a part of her mind faded—her memories disappeared. Her mother was a wildflower, transplanted into a bed of sand, losing her natural color and fragrance. Her vitality gone, she seemed to age rapidly, beyond her years.

“How are you today, Ah-ma?” Liu Song asked as she took off her coat and peeked into the bedroom her mother shared with Uncle Leo. It was a rhetorical question, for comfort—an aspiration of normalcy. Liu Song filled a teakettle and put it on the stove before returning to her mother, who was awake and struggling to sit up in bed. Liu Song watched as her mother looked around as though momentarily bewildered. Then she looked at Liu Song and smiled. She closed her eyes, puckering her lips emphatically.

Liu Song kissed both her mother’s cheeks, then licked her thumbs and rubbed in the residual lipstick, rouging her mother’s sallow complexion.

“Did you eat?” Liu Song asked. She motioned as though scooping imaginary rice from an imaginary bowl with a pair of imaginary chopsticks.

Her mother shook her head slowly, then nodded, wide-eyed.

Liu Song went to the kitchen and returned with a bowl of cold rice and a spoon. She struggled to smile when her mother’s hands shook violently as she reached for the dish. Despite her relatively young age, and as much as she wanted to try, her ah-ma was well past the point of being able to properly feed herself.

“I’ll do it, Ah-ma. It’s okay, I’ll do it.”

As her mother crossed her arms and gripped her nightgown to control her spasms, Liu Song saw red welts and bruising—fresh rope burns. Liu Song lifted the stained sheets at the foot of the bed and saw that her mother’s ankles had been tied as well. And the brass around the bedposts looked polished.

“Who did this to you?”

Liu Song had offered to—no, she’d insisted she would—quit school and stay home to be her ah-ma’s full-time caregiver, but Uncle Leo had said no. He said
he
would take care of her, as he always had, with a strange brew of herbal remedies, which failed. When Dr. Luke was finally called, he diagnosed Liu Song’s mother with Saint Vitus’ dance—a rare affliction for a woman her age. But her peculiar convulsions, her jerking and twitching, never went away—her health grew worse until there was little anyone could do. A nurse who used to come by to check on her condition had eventually stopped coming.

“Did Uncle Leo do this?”

Liu Song gently touched her mother’s wrists as she jerked them away.

“Did he do this to you?” she pleaded, her words falling on scared,
deaf ears as she found a jar of Pond’s cold cream and gently rubbed the salve, which smelled of witch hazel, onto her mother’s bruises. Liu Song asked again, pointing to a framed photo of her stepfather that hung on the wall. Years ago her real father’s portrait had occupied that space. Her mother stared blankly at the photo, and then looked toward the door, blinking, and she smiled with trembling, cracked lips. She made a sound that was lost somewhere between a laugh and a cry.

“Get out,” Uncle Leo said, as he appeared in the doorway, holding a bottle of camphor oil. “I need to give your mother her medicine.”

“She hasn’t eaten,” Liu Song said, pointing to her mother’s body, which must have weighed less than ninety pounds. “Can’t you see she’s starving?”

“Leave the food. I’ll take care of it.”

Liu Song stared at Uncle Leo. This was the same man who had helped sponsor the local Go-Hing festival—a carnival to raise money for famine relief in China.

“Make me some tea.” He glared back, unblinking, as the kettle whistled in the kitchen. “Do as I say, Liu Song
Eng
.” He emphasized his last name, which she was now burdened with, like an animal branded for life.

Liu Song turned to her mother, who was nodding slowly as she reached up and wrapped her bruised, trembling arms around her, pulling her close, whispering in her ear.

“I’m s-s-s-so … sorry,” her mother said.

The teakettle blared.

Liu Song felt her ah-ma release her and exhale slowly, raggedly. She watched as her mother sank into her pillow and closed her eyelids tightly, as though shutting out the world. When Liu Song stood to leave, her stepfather was still staring at her body, appraising her appearance in her mother’s chevron tabard dress. He grunted and then stepped aside, closing the bedroom door behind her.

Flower Girls

(1921)

After school, Liu Song rode the streetcar from Franklin High over to Butterfield’s, where she stood beneath a leaking umbrella and tried to sing, “Blue days, all of them gone …”

She forgot the rest of the lyrics when she caught her reflection in the rain-streaked storefront window. She looked so much like her mother, especially in the dress. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother had worn it. All she could think of now was her wisp of a parent, tied to her bed, mute, delirious, and slowly starving.

Mr. Butterfield continued playing the chorus to “Blue Skies,” then the bridge, then back to the chorus as Liu Song struggled to sing, “Never saw the sun shining so bright …” She lowered the umbrella and felt the rain on her face.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Butterfield.”

The old man stood up from his piano just inside the front of the store, tucked away behind the red-velvet curtains of the window displays, which Liu Song had helped arrange—Leedy drums, polished brass instruments, and a life-size statue of Nipper, the Victor Talking Machine Company’s canine mascot. The ceramic dog stared with his head tilted, one ear perpetually cocked, toward a new Victrola in an expensive Chippendale cabinet. Mr. Butterfield cracked
his knuckles, then patted his pocket, looking for his three-finger cigar case. “Take a break, sweetheart,” he said. “It’s a slow afternoon anyway.”

Liu Song stood in the doorway, where the air was fresh, watching flivvers and Model Ts roll by. She counted scores of cars. Their noisy, clattering engines and blaring horns scared a team of horses pulling an old carriage in need of fresh paint. The coachman steered to the side of the street to let them pass.

Liu Song felt a dizzying wave of melancholy because her father had once owned a tree-green landaulet—an old model, with gas-powered headlights. Liu Song remembered going for bumpy, wild rides on Sunday afternoons to Green Lake and Ballard, sitting on the fender and eating ice-cream floats. Now Uncle Leo owned her father’s motorcar. He rarely drove it and, when he did, he never put the rear top down, not even on sunny afternoons when the weather was perfect. As Liu Song lingered in the past, she felt as though her memories were quicksand and she was sinking deeper and deeper.

“There’s fresh coffee,” Mr. Butterfield interrupted, yelling from the back room. “And a flask of cognac, if you need something a bit warmer.”