The Binding Chair (15 page)

“No,” May said. “Not that.”

“What then! What!” He shook her shoulders.

May looked at Arthur. She opened her mouth but said nothing. The delicate skin under her eyes trembled and contracted, as if in a wince of fear.

“What!” Arthur cried.

“I’m not talking about anything,” she said at last.

“You are,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “But not anything that has anything to do with … anything.” And she began to cry. He’d seen her cry before, of course, but never as she did on that day. Before, May had always cried silently, but this time she made an awful, low moaning that he tried not to hear, a sound that defied his deafness, penetrated tinnitus, a sound that opened a hole beneath his feet, the boat, the water. He resisted putting his hands over his ears. The boy, afraid, hid himself in the boat’s little galley.

Rose washed up, five days later, on the south shore of the creek, just a mile upriver from Shanghai. Her body was perhaps hastened toward land by the activity of the Dragon Boat Festival, just coming to a close. Their daughter was pulled onto the bank by a leek farmer who had seen her necklace glint from the mud and recognized by the color of her hair that she wasn’t Chinese—at least not all Chinese. She wore a gold lock on a chain around her neck, in accordance with a native superstition which held that they bound the wearer to life. Although May was embarrassed by quaint Chinese customs, Arthur had prevailed upon her to accept this gift from Rose’s amah. If only it had worked a little better, Arthur sometimes found himself thinking; for it did call attention to her body, it had returned Rose to them. But too late.

Out of respect for the dead, especially the wealthy dead, the farmer left the necklace on the corpse and took it to the police, who restored Rose to her parents, so water-logged that were it not for her untarnished hair, her dress and necklace, she would have been unrecognizable. Dick rewarded the farmer’s self-interested honesty with enough money to afford him the kind of coffin of which he’d long dreamed, and which he could be sure his lazy sons would never provide.

So it was upon two very different households that Dick Benjamin bestowed a white lacquer casket with brass hinges and handles, silk pillow and fringe: one six feet long—it would remain empty for many years; the other only three, filled and closed within an hour of its delivery.

I
T MUST HAVE
been Rose’s riverine destiny that provoked Arthur’s obsession with charting the flow of Soochow Creek. While May descended into one and then two and sometimes even three pipes of opium a day—whatever it took to blunt the memory of little fingers swelled almost as wide as they were long—he sent the empty houseboat up-country, with only the boy on board, and cases of empty Aquarius table-water bottles. He gave the boy his own pocket watch, taught him how to read it and transcribe what he’d read, and then had him drop a bottle each hour from the side of the houseboat, moored in the same lazy eddy where they’d anchored when Rose went overboard. Inside each bottle was a slip of paper on which the hour had been inscribed by the boy’s graceful hand. Arthur waited on the bank where Rose was found to catch them, however many made the five-mile journey. It worked out to about 28 percent, but it wasn’t a consistent 28. Almost three-fourths of the bottles dropped between midnight and dawn traveled the five miles, whereas far fewer survived the daytime traffic.

“How can you!” Dolly said. “How can you spend even a minute on that lugubrious stretch of horrible, dirty water!”

But Arthur just shook his head. He couldn’t explain his need to observe flow and flux and current, crossflow and crosscurrent, conflux and drift—a dreary, diverting obsession punctuated by exhausted, helpless dreams that visited him as he slept on the greasy lip of the creek, dreams of fairy-tale rescues of Rose, of savior fishermen with enchanted nets, of frog princes, and of oystermen whose knives cut out not pearls but little girls who lay sleeping on the salty, pale, labial flesh of the plundered shells.

As for May, his beautiful May, she spoke hardly at all. Mute, she appeared blind as well; opium made her pupils disappear into the deep brown irises around them. By nightfall, the eyes he loved were rendered as soulless, as flat and desperate as a shark’s.

Based on the results of his research, Arthur wrote a report, which he donated to the Siccawei meteorological society, one which he felt the missionaries at the observatory underappreciated, but they did publish it in their year-end report of local phenomena. Seeing the result of his labors—a year of grief-soaked pilgrimages—reduced to three cramped pages rife with typographical errors cured Arthur’s romance with Soochow. He forsook the creek for a plan to regulate the treatment of corpses at the Ningpo Joss House (insufficiently limed), a cause that provided him an education in Chinese bureaucracy before it gave way to a campaign to replace Settlement water closets with “earth closets.” These, Arthur assured anyone who would listen, “return excrement to the soil, where it belongs, by means of coal ash,” and thus would protect the waterways and the population’s health. To promote more responsible waste management, Arthur wrote a tract explaining in detail how to construct an earth closet, and convinced his sister’s long-suffering husband to pay for a thousand copies to be printed. But he gave away less than half before he took up the anti-streetside-cauterization banner and stood on the corner of Peking and Kiangse roads collecting signatures on a petition to prevent Chinese doctors from performing minor surgeries outside.

Aside from his being pursued by the specter of a child with sparkling brown eyes and bright curls—for, after all, ghosts prey on all of us—what made people regard Arthur as peculiar among Settlement residents was his assumption that the graceless, money-mad city was worth improving not only for Westerners but for the indigenous population. For five years now, he had agitated while May smoked. His nephew David’s death had the effect of increasing the speed with which Arthur tired of causes, and in one season he had supported the registration, taxation, and periodic examination of prostitutes; crusaded against the installation of pornographic Western picture boxes in the old city; demonstrated in favor of weekly moxibustion clinics to combat tuberculosis (coolies laid out like cadavers, with smoking brown lumps on the ends of long, dirty needles projecting from their limbs and chests and ears); and exhorted the English to give up cured tea leaves in favor of green.

Since he’d arrived, Dick liked to point out, the one job for which Arthur had been paid was coffin-counting, a service he undertook for the municipal council’s native census efforts; the number of living Chinese was extrapolated from the rate of their death, a tally that had formerly been calculated incorrectly (owing to graft) by the number of gate passes issued to funeral processions, and even less correctly by means of a mathematical formula based on the number of bodies of addicts, drunks, and suicides found floating each March off the Bund.

The only thing that might save them—not just him, but all of them, May and Dolly and Dick and his nieces and their friends, and everyone, everyone, all the world mysteriously and irrefutably bound together in Arthur’s mind, his soul, his grief—was another Rose, another child. But May was not as young as she had been, or perhaps organs other than her heart had been damaged, for although she became pregnant, she lost each baby in the fourth or fifth month, always trying to hide the fetus from Arthur, to protect him from seeing it where it lay vividly red in a basin—hopeless, raw, curled in silent accusation.

T
HE
Y
EAR OF THE
F
OOT
T
AX

W
HITE ICE CAME APART LIKE UNDERCLOTHES
ripping. Slips and underskirts ripping from the hem upwards to the bodice. Alice closed her eyes and saw it like that. Black and dark beneath the white. And cold. She didn’t know why, but every time she thought of the ice she saw undergarments tearing, she saw the dark place between her aunt’s legs.

She saw what she wasn’t supposed to have seen. Amah caught her but said nothing. Her aunt sat at her vanity table. On the outside Aunt May was white, not pink like red-haired Uncle Arthur, not dark like her father or creamy like her mother, but white, as white as ice, but then she cracked wide open and inside she was dark.

Every night, in her bed in the dormitory at Robeson Academy, Alice thought of the train going through the ice on top of Lake Baikal.
Think of something pleasant
, May used to say when Alice couldn’t sleep,
Think of something you like
, and while the idea of a train wreck wasn’t pleasant—no more than May’s own recipe for calm, the vision of a knife rending red slippers—it had become the surest vehicle toward sleep. The locomotive plunged, the ice opened like her aunt’s underclothes, and after it came all the cars full of people.

She never imagined them dying.

Some had been in their berths and had to wake up to change out of their nightgowns. They had to brush their long hair, which had tangled among the bed linens; they had to put it up again with combs and pins. They had to look among all the bottles and jars in their train cases to find their headache powders, their complexion creams, their nail buffers and corn plasters. Only when they were dressed and had had their good breakfasts, their cups of tea, their coffees and
pain au chocolat
, all warm and sweet and sticky in the middle, only then did she give them last embraces and farewell speeches.

Those who had quarreled she reunited. Those who traveled by themselves she allowed to write letters home, to say good-bye to family and friends left above, in the world. She allowed them to tidy their compartments, to set their belongings in order, to fold their clothes and to tuck their jewels away.

All of this took a long time, of course. Now thirteen years old, Alice was not so young that she imagined resolution to be uncomplicated. The train would have been resting at the bottom for hours before she was ready to let them go, and by that time there seemed little point in killing them—not when they’d survived the wreck, not when they’d learned how to live in the cold, dark water.

They didn’t breathe. How could they? But they spoke; they mouthed the words. They sat in the dining car, now rinsed clean of smoke from cigars that could no longer be lit. They played cards and charades; they read books and bought bicarbonate from the concession car, and they looked out the window at nothing. At the dark water pressing on the glass. They slept in their berths under sodden blankets, and the smell of wet wool didn’t bother them. Not underwater. Not when they were holding their breath for the rest of their lives.

…   

O
N THE SISTERS’
first night in the dormitory, Alice had felt her way to the room where the older girls slept, gently touching each curtain drawn around each bed, counting seventeen of them, just as she’d counted carefully when the lights were on. At the eighteenth curtain she’d run her hand over the linen until she found the opening, then pushed her head through.

“Ces?” she said.

“Mmm?”

She’d crawled into bed with her sister, fit herself exactly against her sister’s back the way she had on the train, her arms around Cecily, her knees bent into the backs of Cecily’s knees. They were lying together when the curtain parted and faces peered in: one, two, three of them, stacked like a totem and all talking at once.

“You don’t look Chinese. Are you sure you’re from China?”

“What’s it like?”

“Does your father have a pigtail? Is he yellow?”

“Let’s see your feet. Why, they’re not small at all! I thought they’d be pinched off, you know, like hounds’ tails.”

“What’s an S.T.? D’you know? Stands for sanitary towel. Well, do you or don’t you know?”

“If you’re not Chinese, what are you then? You don’t look English.”

“D’you sleep together in China, too? The whole lot of you in bed together? Your mother and father, as well?”

Alice said nothing in response. She sat silently up on her elbows, looking at the round pink faces.

As for Cecily, “How dare you even think we might be Chinese!” she’d said, and she leaned forward and twitched the curtains shut.

“T
HE
L
AKE OF
Baikal is as deep as the deepest ocean.” Alice said this to the nurse, and the nurse said, “You’re studying geography, then?”

“No,” Alice said. “I’m not talking about that.”

“What, no geography?” said the nurse.

“No,” said Alice. “I mean yes. Yes.”

Geography, maths, spelling, general knowledge, deportment. And something else. What? She couldn’t think properly. Oh, French with Mlle. Vailard.

There was something the matter with her head, and she had to go over and over the things she knew. What were they? She knew that at home in China Mah Foo was taking care of her dapple pony, thirteen hands high and a cross between the native Mongol and a Shetland, pouring potassium permanganate into the crack of his right forehoof so that it hissed and produced a wisp of purple smoke (a pretty trick but one with limited curative properties, just the kind of thing to which the Chinese were prey). She knew that even though the climate in China was considered unhealthful for children, it was all right for horses and for Tony, her dog, a Boston bull bred in Seattle, Washington, purchased in Banff, Canada, and shipped on the
Princess Christina
from San Francisco to Hong Kong and on to Shanghai in time for her birthday. She was resigned to Tony’s staying home in Shanghai because, as everyone knew, England had no rabies and a six-month quarantine for all pets made sure she never would. Ireland had no snakes because Saint Patrick drove them over a cliff into the sea, but that was a fairy story for Catholics, and she was a Jew. Chinese children had their own stories. Aunt May said that once the rivers of Fukien were filled with crocodiles, but Han Yü wrote them an obituary so convincing that when the literate reptiles encountered his words they rolled over onto their green backs and stopped breathing.

She had been carried from the dormitory rolled up in her mattress. Someone had come into the room. She was hot and thirsty and thought Ma Robey was bringing the water she’d wanted. Miss Robeson’s mother had been in and out of the little infirmary on the top floor. She’d tied up Alice’s throat in cheese cloth wrapped around a sachet of asafetida, so vile-smelling that even though she couldn’t get any air up her nose, the foulness of it penetrated her consciousness; it went right through her skull and into her head and made her retch violently.

“I’d call the doctor tonight, if I were you,” someone said, and someone else sighed loudly in exasperation and said, “Yes, I’d better.” And then they’d made an astonishing noise on the stairs, as if they were jumping down in hobnailed boots.

And Arthur, her uncle Arthur, he was on the other side of the wall washing his coins. On the advice of his sister, Dolly, he disinfected his money with carbolic soap; through the wall she could her them clinking against the enamel basin. In the morning they would be stacked, bright and shining, and there would be wet bills pinned to a string drawn across his dressing room. It was so humid in Shanghai that it took days for them to dry sufficiently to use.

But the doctor didn’t come. Another man came instead, and he leaned down and she could see only his eyes because a cloth was tied around his nose and mouth, and
Well, he’s a bandit
, she’d thought, banditry being a commonplace in Shanghai. Words came out of the criminal-looking cloth: “Easy now, miss.” And then the bandit had bundled her up and she’d kicked and cried and called for her father.

Alone in the Fever Hospital’s children’s ward, Alice knew that already the school had burned her clothes, her dolls, her books. The linens on her dormitory bed and the white curtain pulled around it would have been stripped off by the charwoman, just as they were when Elizabeth fell ill, the woman’s mouth and nose protected by a handkerchief knotted at the back of her neck. Everything was stuffed into the furnace; the mattress, too expensive to discard, dragged onto the roof to air. But if Elizabeth’s mattress had been taken to the roof, why was hers taken with her to the hospital?

“Is this my mattress?” she asked the nurse.

“Well, who else’s, I’d like to know.”

“I only meant was it the school’s or the hospital’s.”

“It’s the fever talking now, is it?” said the nurse. She dipped the flannel into the bowl, then wrung it out and sponged Alice’s other arm.

Alice felt on the pillow for her hair, but it was gone. Someone had cut off her braid and sent it to be incinerated as well.
In-cin-er-a-ted
. The sounds added up to something hotter than a regular fire.

The first Friday of every month, the hairdresser came to wash their hair. He started with the youngest girl and worked his way up to the eldest, and after all their hair was dry, he brushed it out and sometimes then he singed the ends with a red iron. He never used scissors. He said it was bad for a girl’s hair, to cut it with a blade. In the winter, when the windows stayed shut, the smell of burned hair lingered for days.

At home, just the previous summer, Alice had measured her braid against that of one of the boys who carried May’s chair. “Velly velly long!” he’d said. “Just as!” But he wouldn’t leave his braid down; he’d rolled it back up and tucked it under his hat so that when he went out revolutionaries wouldn’t harangue him. Along with bound feet, the queue, as it was called, was regarded as a sign of oppression and backwardness.

“Look here,” Alice remembered Aunt May saying to her uncle at the breakfast table. She pushed the paper toward Arthur. “I’m everything that’s wrong with China.”

“What is it?” Alice had said, reading the editorial over her uncle’s shoulder as he kissed her aunt’s white knuckles. Another diatribe from K’ang, the reformer, against opium and foot binding, against sedan chairs carried by boys with long braids.

“Oh, dear,” Arthur sighed. “They’ll bring the foot tax back, it looks like.”

And in August May had bought herself a pair of Western women’s shoes in which she might disguise her suddenly illegal feet, and so avoid being forced to provide revenues to maintain the empress dowager’s flower gardens—an aesthetic that had fallen into disfavor supporting sanctioned beauty.

“So, so unfortunate and infelicitous!” May tried them on before the family, laughing and crying at once. “Have you ever seen anything to beat them for ugliness!”

“I rather like them,” Dick said carefully.

“Yes.” Dolly’s voice went up in enthusiasm. “Elegant!”

“You’ll have to stuff the toes with cotton wool.” Arthur shook his head with distaste at the shiny, dark leather laced up over his wife’s ankles.

Alice had seen May put on the Western shoes at times other than when she was going out. She caught her when her only witness was herself, or so May thought. Alice found her aunt in her dressing room, taking off her tiny Chinese slippers. She pulled on one and then another layer of Arthur’s thickest wool socks and slipped her feet into the high-lacing leather. Stood for whole minutes before the mirror, turning first to the left, then to the right. Looking glass in hand, May turned her back to the full-length mirror and walked two wobbling steps to see what she might look like from behind.

“Insufferable,” she whispered, “insufferable.” She could still hear Yu-ying:
We will tell them that you never cried out. Say the words: I never cried out
.

“What are you doing!” May gasped, her voice strangled, so startled to see Alice that she almost fell.

“Nothing,” Alice said. “What are
you
doing?”

May dropped the hand mirror to her side. “Practicing.” How could a person compose herself so quickly? If anything, her voice was even more lilting than usual. “Pretending to be modern in readiness for the foot tax.” May smiled. “You know how I feel about the empress dowager—you don’t think I intend to buy even one daisy for that old bitch!”

S
CARLET FEVER WITH
rheumatic complications. Alice’s knees and elbows and finger joints throbbed. Her dreams tried to explain the terrible burning of her hands and included upset kettles and overturned spirit lamps. A birthday cake ignited by candles so the icing melted and poured off. Reaching for a piece, she caught her white gloves on fire.

Then suddenly Alice was walking down a road and her aunt was walking before her, walking swiftly, walking as she never did in life. It was foggy, dusk. A black dog pursued May, its head down, its tail down as well. The fur on its neck bristled. Alice was frightened by the look of it. When the dog sprang at her aunt’s back, May turned her head in surprise. The dog plunged its teeth into May’s throat, she sank to her knees.

Rabid
, Alice thought, a rabid dog. But her aunt wasn’t dead, she was weeping. She was holding a curtain that hung magically in the road, hung from nothing: no pole, no rings. The curtain was red velvet, as red as blood, and then blood was dripping onto May’s hands, her clothes, her shoes. Alice screamed and screamed, and when the nurse came, she caught her hand and cried, “I know why she wears so many underclothes! So many slips and skirts and garters. The layers of white bindings!”

“Who?” said the nurse. “What?”

“They’re bandages! Don’t you see? Real bandages! To stop the blood!”

“Who?”

“Why, May, of course, Aunt May.”

The nurse was angry because she’d cried out, she would wake the other sick children. But she was the only one there, the other beds were empty, they’d all gone home, they were dead or recovered. The ward was hot, or was it cold? Wrapped in a wet linen sheet, she shivered and her hands itched.
Crying only makes it worse
, the nurse said, and the obedient tears began to burn as they fell.