The Binding Chair (17 page)

In response to a letter from her father’s solicitor, threatening a suit, she received from Dr. Boylan a single porcelain tooth on a gold post—nothing to hold it in place, as impressions had not been made. With her aunt she took the tooth to a London dentist, who fitted her for a vulcanite plate of a livid gingival red.

She never married; she had no children. After her father’s bankruptcy (the result of answering, alas, another notice placed by a businessman no more scrupulous than Drs. Scott and Boylan), she accepted a position at Robeson Academy. There she willed herself deaf to insult, to hearing “Thmellinor” whispered after her in the halls. When Isaac Clusburtson died, she inherited nothing, as their house was owned by creditors; so she moved to the school, into a room half the size of Ma Robey’s.

D
ISCIPLINE FOR
G
IRLS

“T
HERE’S THAT SOMEONE HERE TO VISIT YOU,”
said the nurse. “That very peculiar crippled female someone being pushed in a bath chair. And it’s yellow trousers on her this time. You should see the looks she gets in the corridor.”

“Who?” Alice asked. But of course she knew. So it hadn’t been a dream. Her aunt
was
here, in London.

“I’ve told her she can only look through the glass, no sneaking past like yesterday, but she says she absolutely will come in. She’s with the director of the hospital, and what he’ll think of her I couldn’t say.”

And then, suddenly, May was there, in the isolation ward with her lacquered hair, her jade bracelets, and her silk jacket decorated all over with birds. And she was wearing silk trousers, beautiful, shiny, slippery, yellow silk trousers, and all of her smelled strongly of jasmine. Her tiny embroidered slippers were propped on the footrest of a bath chair. And Boy’s brother was pushing her.

“Aunt May?” Alice reached out to touch the apparition.

“Alice,” May said, smiling her red, red smile and getting out of the chair to kiss her.

“Oh!” Alice held tight to May’s neck. “You’re like a nice dream instead of a nasty one. Except I knew it wasn’t a dream. You were here before. And you look so beautiful!” she added, rapturous. “Your hair is new. It’s all up like a present in fancy paper.”

May laughed. “Oh, dear, Alice. How we miss you! And Cecily, too, of course. It’s terribly dull at home. No constables calling. No one running off with old soldiers.”

Alice sat up. “Are you here, really?” she asked. “Are you real? What are you doing in that chair? You’re not ill, are you, Aunt May?”

“Lie down,” said the nurse, and Alice did. “Is this person a … a … I didn’t think it was possible, when she said so yesterday. Surely you are not the relation of a Chinese!”

“Yes,” said Alice. “I am. This is my aunt, Mrs. Arthur Cohen.”

“I am absolutely well,” said May, ignoring the nurse, whose mouth remained open in astonishment. “But London is a wasteland of no sedan chairs, not one truly, so I am having one assembled. Not so nice as home, but I won’t be here forever, and meanwhile Boy or Brother Boy must push me on wheels. Nice for them as one can rest while the other works.”

“You brought both boys with you? Are Mother and Daddy here, too?” Alice asked. “Where is Uncle Arthur?”

“Everyone is home in Shanghai. Arthur has given up on the wheelbarrow tax and is now attempting to prevent the transport of chickens by their wings.” May rolled her eyes and flipped open a red silk fan. “A cook was had up last month in the mixed court for cruelly mistreating chickens—you smile but it is true. It was observed that the fowl were greatly distressed by inhumane transportation, and so now Arthur is afoot with chicken petitions. He means to re-educate all the cooks in China.

“Now, let me see if I can remember.” May looked at the ceiling. “A chicken going to market must have its legs tied together, not too tightly, and be carried under the arm.” She mimed the correct hold and laughed. “So now you know how to carry a chicken, Alice. I can’t think why your father sends you to school when he could just set up Arthur with a pointer and a slate.

“I only just arrived and got settled in the hotel when up comes a boy with a tray and an envelope and inside a cable from your father saying you are ill and wouldn’t I please see that you were convalescing properly. You can imagine the hysterics at home. They’ve probably had to pack poor Dolly in smelling salts.

“How are you? And who has made off with your hair, Alice? They say this fever is something to which children are subject.”

“All right,” Alice said. “They thought I might die but I haven’t. I am bored, though.”

“What? No mischief? You
must
be ill.” May kissed Alice’s hot forehead.

“Having you here, I feel fine. Do say you’ll stay for a long visit!”

“A month at least,” said May. “Your father gave me ship’s passage to Europe, as I have never seen it.” She looked at Alice and leaned forward, whispered conspiratorially. “I think he and Arthur think that away from home I will stop smoking.” She laughed at the apparent absurdity of this; and even to Alice’s stuffed nose she smelled as muskily of stale opium as ever. Although now, in the morning, her eyes were bright and mischievous. She must have gone back to taking only a bowl after dinner.

I
N
S
HANGHAI, WHERE
it was a challenge to find work for the abundance of servants, May kept an amah whose sole function was to procure and prepare her opium, to stoke her pipe with its long, ivory stem, to light it—to do everything in fact except smoke the drug and feel its effects, not all of which were pleasant. May suffered headaches and palpitations, irritability, nausea. She had a cough and was constipated and was in daily consultation with a Chinese apothecary, who supplied her with mysterious powders folded into colored papers, all of which May unfolded, sniffed at, and discarded without testing their efficacy.

In fact, after discussing the matter with Arthur, Dick Benjamin had booked May a first-class passage to London, but this was not to curb her use of opium. Having received word from Miss Robeson that Alice was ill, he didn’t share the news with Dolly. Why, that was just the kind of thing to drive her mad. May would go to London in Dolly’s stead, and perhaps the trip would do her good. Rescuing Alice might rouse her from the depression into which she had fallen: refusing food, lying curled on her chaise in her perpetually twilit sitting room, the drapes drawn until evening, sighing and sighing until he thought he’d go mad. Since his daughters’ departure, Dick could hear May sigh through a brick wall. Two brick walls. It made no sense, but there it was, and to get her out of the house for a while would relieve his nerves of the sight of her moving through the halls with wan, arrested steps, and he’d get a break from the smell of her pipe. He wished he’d been able to send his brother-in-law, as well, but Arthur had himself been exhausted and bewildered by May’s collapse. He worried that he was the cause of it—she’d been so impatient with him, and those clandestine trips to the solicitor. Dick had taken him aside; he had informed him—regretfully, he said—that May was looking for a child she had lost. He’d said this as if it might change things. Alter Arthur’s feelings. But how? Why? May had a past. Dick might think him a fool, but of course Arthur knew his wife had a past. She never spoke of it, and he never asked. This was their tacit and affectionate, their respectful, understanding. Not that the news hadn’t alarmed him—it had. Alarmed and injured. But that was him—not his feelings for May. His love remained intact, unassailable. Arthur thought the best thing for May might be to travel on her own. Surely he could survive two or three months of loneliness. They could write each other; they could cable.

Without his wife, however (this their first separation in all the years of their marriage), Arthur discovered he was useless: to himself, to chickens, to whatever or whomever he might think to rescue. If only he could think. But he couldn’t concentrate on anything. Desperate for the cheap comfort of association, Arthur carried a pair of May’s sleeping shoes with him. He kept an unlaundered binding cloth in his pocket so that he could bring it to his face like an immensely long handkerchief and inhale the smell of her.

“
Please,
” Dolly would moan. “Must you?”

Dick would wave his hand as he would to disperse fumes. “Get hold of yourself. You look so disreputable, like a squalid conjurer, with that … that dirty thing coming endlessly out of your coat!”

“O
H
, I
DO
miss everyone,” Alice said. “It’s wretched here! I want to go home!”

“Perhaps I shall take you back with me,” May said, her voice placating. “I don’t see the purpose of a school one detests, although your sister seems less miserable than you. You know, Alice, they are still worrying at home about the bad reports. I’m afraid your adventure on the train—well,
off
the train, to be more accurate—has thrown you under suspicion as a wild and unnatural child. And bad reports don’t help.”

Alice’s eyebrows came together in one recalcitrant black line. “
They
worry, but you don’t.”

“Not at all.” May smiled. “Quite the contrary. I’d worry if you liked boarding school. And of course, a bit of money does seem to have solved everything. Money is not the root of all evil. The English are so ridiculous in saying so. It fixes any number of unpleasantnesses.”

I
LLOGICAL
. G
ARRULOUS
. I
MMODEST
.
Clumsy. Giddy. Disruptive. Slovenly. Excitable. Unladylike. Unpunctual. Forgetful. Vulgar. Unreliable. Rude. Lazy. Impertinent. Careless. Dishonest. Nonsensical
.

The placards were kept in a box in Miss Robeson’s study, each one clearly lettered in black and attached to a loop of string. Every Saturday, after tea, as the forty-six girls stood at attention, Miss Robeson reviewed the week’s misbehaviors recorded in the black-bound book. On her left sat her mother, Ma Robey; on her right, Lovebird, her flatulent Pekingese, who accompanied her everywhere.

“Miss Benjamin.”

“Yes, Miss Robeson.”

“Immodest. Careless. Excitable. Disobedient. Disruptive. Giddy. Impertinent.” Alice came forward and the headmistress hung the seven cards around her neck. “Most of our girls are specialists, Miss Benjamin. You seem to be a generalist. In the history of Robeson Academy no one has simultaneously cultivated so many forms of misconduct.” The headmistress paused to stare.

“No, Miss Robeson,” Alice said. Had Claire not been expelled so speedily, she might have accompanied Alice in disgrace. As it was, only her trunk remained, waiting in the hall for the address of the next school to which it would be shipped.

“Do you have nothing to say for yourself, Miss Benjamin?”

“No, Miss Robeson.”

“An explanation, perhaps, for this unprecedented bestowing of placards?”

“I imagine, Miss Robeson, that it—that they all must have to do with the cast courts, ma’am.”

“Do you, Miss Benjamin? What happened there? Tell us all, so that the few who missed out on the fun can share in it now.”

“I left the group of girls, Miss Robeson.”

“Why did you, Miss Benjamin?”

“To visit the water closet.”

“Don’t all the girls have that opportunity before leaving the school?”

“Yes, Miss Robeson.”

“Were you taken suddenly ill, Miss Benjamin?”

“Uh, not exactly. I was … I was … It was a matter of laws of hygiene. Lower ab-dome-in-al.” At the laughter of the other girls, Miss Robeson brought her hand down bang on the desk. Lovebird startled and farted.

The one thing Alice was learning at school was that her popularity increased in direct relation to her sins.

“Thank you, Miss Benjamin. That will be sufficient. You know your misbehavior has endangered the security of a person less fortunate than you. A person alone in the world, without a rich father.”

“Yes, Miss Robeson.” Alice flushed. She hadn’t seen Miss Clusburtson since the museum trip, and this was because she had been suspended from her teaching position, demoted until the end of the term to tidying the schoolrooms and erasing equations chalked up by Mr. Samuels, who was teaching maths now, as well as music. It was he who’d come to the cast courts to collect the girls after they had been rounded up by a guard.

Miss Clusburtson retained her room and board but received no wages. As for the proof she said Miss Robeson would require, she’d been wrong; the question had never come up.

“Well, Miss Benjamin,” Miss Robeson demanded, “what are you doing to reform your conduct?”

“I am wearing the placards my failings have earned me, and while I am wearing them I am thinking of ways to improve myself.”

“And what might those ways be, Miss Benjamin?”

“I … I need more time to think, Miss Robeson.”

“Well, Miss Benjamin, you shall have it.”

Alice curtsied and stepped back from Miss Robeson’s desk. “Thank you, ma’am.”

All the following week, Alice wore the placards. All through breakfast, lessons, tea, and supper their cords chafed at her skin, and by the time she bent her head over her desk to write her weekly letter home—a missive both mandatory and censored, offering no chance to complain—the nape of her neck was raw and burning.

Ma Robey dictated sentences to include at the end of the letter: I am afraid that I ran away this week, causing my headmistress much anxiety and trouble. I came to breakfast with a hole in my stocking and a stained collar. I lost my French text. I was rude to Mr. Samuels. But I will improve. Love, Alice
.

“O
H
,” M
AY SAID
. “Before I forget, did you get your baths? Your father asked me to inquire about that as well.”

Alice nodded. A warm bath every evening, for which Dick Benjamin had paid a surcharge, to ensure not only that she and Cecily got hot water, but that they shared it with no one but each other. The rest of the girls used the same cold water, and for the unlucky last girl it had turned gray and was scummed with soap and hairs. However, having been warmed by the bodies it had held, it was no longer so frigid.

May put her cool hands on Alice’s hot cheeks. “Dearest, dearest,” she said, “you’re just not well. But you’ll be better.”

Alice slid half out of bed and onto May’s lap. “What difference will that make! I’ll always be myself! I’ll always be restless and I’ll always hate school! Everlasting rules and bells. I hate being told what to do every minute!”

May laughed. “You? You’re going to be fine.” She tried to pull Alice off her silk knees. “Now do as
I
say—you’ve never minded that. Lie down, and get stronger. I’ll come back tomorrow with something nice from Fortnum and Mason. I saw towers of sweets in the window, a mountain of brown buns stuck together with gold syrup, little marzipan birds perched all over. Boy rolled me right past, but I was on my way here, so we had no time to stop.” She stroked Alice’s head, wound what remained of one curl around her white finger. “Do you know how I know you’ll be fine?”