The Binding Chair (18 page)

“How?”

“Because of your adventures.”

Alice looked at her. “Getting off the train, you mean? The cast court?”

May nodded. Gently, she pulled her finger from the abbreviated corkscrew of hair, and it fell against Alice’s cheek. She patted the ringlet. “How unlike Dolly you are,” she said softly. “You’re not your mother’s daughter, you know. There’s nothing of her in you.” May began another curl, this one from the damp hair over Alice’s forehead. “I think you’re
mine
. You’re the girl Rose would have been.”

Alice looked at her aunt. Under the blanket she had Litovsky’s coin, the little icon with her enigmatic, disappearing features. Alice had spent bored feverish hours rubbing her fingers over its surface, trying to discern the tiny convexities of the Virgin’s face.

“Say the words,” May said. “Say the words,
I’m yours.
”

Alice hesitated. Then, “I’m yours,” she whispered.

“As if you meant it.”

“I’m yours,” she said, more firmly.

May kissed her forehead, leaving the print of her painted red lips. “Of course you are, darling one. And not to worry—no one’s feelings will be hurt. It’s our secret, and no one will tell Dolly.” She looked at Alice’s overly bright eyes. “Why are you about to cry?”

Alice shook her head. “Nothing. Tired,” she managed to say. Was she always going to be someone’s dead daughter? But this was different, wasn’t it? May was different. Different from the captain. From anyone. Still, a prickle of hurt indignation rubbed up against Alice’s pleasure at being so wanted, and deflated it, a little.

“P
LEASE COME BACK
soon,” said Alice, as May prepared to leave. “Promise you will.”

“Yes,” May said. “Tomorrow.”

But as it happened, May did not return the next day or the one after that. Every hour Alice asked, “Has she come? Has my aunt come to see me? Did she leave word?”

And each time the nurse said, “No.” She shook her head and pursed her lips. “She’s the flighty type, that one. I could see right away. By the hair. The fingernails. And those trousers!”

Alice had fretted herself into a relapse before Miss Clusburtson came to deliver a note written in May’s spiky, black, calligraphic hand. It was short, it said only that Alice shouldn’t worry. Everything would be all right in a matter of days and then she would return.

“What does she mean?” Alice wrote on the reverse side of the page, and the nurse grudgingly took it to Miss Clusburtson waiting on the other side of the glass.

“A bit of trouble with the courts,” Miss Clusburtson wrote back. “Your aunt is not familiar with London.”

I
NSIDE
F
ORTNUM AND
Mason’s, from the vantage of her newly built temporary London sedan chair, May had been selecting sweets to bring to Alice. The transportation was not so elegant as that to which she was accustomed; it was a walnut desk chair nailed to a ladder. The boys had constructed it themselves in the hotel, removing rungs from either end of the ladder to provide makeshift shafts for carrying the chair.

May had amassed three pounds of assorted sweets: marrons glacés, pralines, and nonpareils; marzipan in various shapes and colors, blue birds, yellow bunnies, pink flowers; toffees and brittles and divinities; Italian nougat with pistachios. Absorbed in picking out the candy, May had been oblivious to the crowd that had gathered around the shocking spectacle of an extravagantly dressed and exotically coifed Chinese woman perched on an astonishing conveyance carried by two small men wearing blue jackets and long pigtails. Now what was the world coming to when such a creature could be found in London’s finest store!

“Hey!” called out a man in a black homburg.

May looked up from the glass display cases of sweets. “I beg your pardon?” she said.

“She’s—She speaks English,” spluttered a woman, and dropped her packages.

“Yes!” someone else cried, as if her fluency was not only unexpected but criminal.

The crowd, only momentarily curious and inclined toward indulgence, turned nasty and indignant. Why, wasn’t May’s face itself a kind of insolence? How dare she be so much more beautiful than English ladies!

“What d’you think you’re doing!” demanded the man in the homburg.

“I am buying some sweets for my niece, who is in hospital. But I can’t see that it’s any business of yours.”

“Have you ever heard such cheek!”

“Preposterous!”

“Get down off of there!”

“I don’t know what heathen hell you’ve come from, but you can’t go about on a contraption like that with, with slaves to carry you!”

“No, she cannot! She certainly cannot!”

In the midst of the growing discord, someone jostled Brother Boy, who stumbled sideways into a display of Walker’s shortbread. The pyramid of red tins went over with a clatter.

“Call a constable, someone!”

“Quick! Don’t let her escape!”

“Now that’s enough!” the shopgirl wailed. “Every last piece will be crumbs!”

“Well, whose fault is that! Carried into a respectable establishment on a ladder!”

Then, someone pushed Boy, a tower of jars of lemon curd went over, a shard of glass stuck in Boy’s shin, and a constable did come. He took May, her chair, and both boys away.

“She’s not in any trouble, is she?” Alice wrote to Miss Clusburtson.

“Not exactly,” Miss Clusburtson replied. “But she’s having a bit of inconvenience. Her chair’s been impounded and she’s not allowed to have her boys carry her. She’s not allowed to leave her hotel.”

T
EN-IN
-O
NE

O
NE HUNDRED THOUSAND AND SIXTEEN PEOPLE
read the
Daily Mail
on 10 February 1914, and had she cared, May would have had the satisfaction of knowing that after only a week in the most important city in the world she was already famous to many of its inhabitants as an “exotic singsong girl,” and a “celestial slave-owner.” As it happened, though, Alice’s aunt did not buy the paper, and as the staff of Claridge’s was professionally uninterested in all of the hotel’s guests, only two representatives of May’s new public announced themselves to her.

The first was an American named Terrence Lown, whose outsized calling card included the title Theatrical Producer. He left this card with the hotel concierge, along with an invitation for May to meet him that afternoon at four in the hotel’s ground-floor tearoom.

“Where are the boys?” he asked, looking disappointed as May approached the table alone and slowly, on her own feet.

“I beg your pardon?” she answered, standing, waiting for him to pull out her chair. It took a moment before he understood, and then he jumped quickly to his feet.

“I guess they’re just for outdoors? Shopping, et cetera.” He pushed in her chair, a little too tightly, she had to wriggle it backwards from the table.

“Ah, the Fortnum Mason
débâcle,
” May said.

“Do you speak French?”

“
Naturellement.
” May felt that already she disliked this man. Well, what can you have been thinking, she chided herself,
theatrical producer
, and an American! “How did you hear about the riot?” she asked coolly.

Mr. Lown looked astonished. “Didn’t you see the papers?”

“No.”

Mr. Lown moved aside the tiered tray of sandwiches so that he could look directly into May’s eyes as he offered to take her back with him to the United States. In New York she would complete his Ten-in-One, comprising (1) a fat lady, (2) a bearded lady, (3) the Living Skeleton, (4) Hortence, the three-legged, fifteen-toed woman, (5) Alligator Boy, (6) a midget, (7) Celine, the sword swallower, (8) a snake charmer, and (9) Jaganathan, an Indian Hindu born without hands or feet and aged thirty-five years who spoke and wrote seventeen foreign languages. Lown wanted both May and her boys; he would build a golden chair for them to carry her in.

“I’ll give you a title. Royalty, whatever you like. Princess. Queen. Queen Consort—is that one? Empress of Asia—”

“But what do I want with snake charmers and handless polyglots?” May interrupted. “I have a home. I have a husband.”

“What’s he like?” Lown asked.

“I beg your pardon. What can you mean?”

“Is he like you? Are his feet like yours?”

“Certainly not. He’s … He has big feet.”

“He’s not Caucasian, is he?” said Lown.

“Yes,” May said. “He is.”

“Oh.” Mr. Lown sighed. “We don’t need that. People won’t like that.”

“No,” May agreed. “They often don’t. But, truly, Mr. Lown, this is not the sort of offer I’d be likely to—”

“Will you excuse me a moment?” Mr. Lown said, and he retreated in the direction of the water closet.

After twenty minutes, during which he had not returned and May had overseen the replacement of the sandwiches by a platter of petits fours, she asked the waiter to please charge the tea to her account and to be so kind as to provide her with pen and paper. He peered with suspicion at the black characters flowing up and down from the nib, then picked up the missive gingerly, as if it might be instructions for assembling explosives.

“Please.” May smiled. “If you would ask the concierge to deliver this to my suite of rooms.”

He bowed, the concierge complied, and within minutes Boy and his sweet-toothed brother had come down for cake, their long braids swaying behind them, reaching to the backs of their blue-trousered knees.

T
HE OTHER READER
of the
Daily Mail
was Miss Robeson, who, alerted to the article by a complaint from a parent, discussed the matter of the Benjamin girls with her mother. She paced five times around her parlor, her Pekingese trotting nervously after, getting underfoot and tearing the lace on her petticoat.

The Fortnum and Mason incident, it was the last straw, it confirmed every fear she had about the Benjamin sisters, especially the younger one. Hot baths, Alice’s inability to remain in her own bed—these had proved rather lucrative concessions, occasions for delicate extortion—but riots caused by foreign women dressed as courtesans were another matter entirely. If other parents heard of the wanton Oriental aunt (and they would, they would, it was not a matter of if but
when
), they would withdraw their daughters from Robeson Academy. Miss Robeson and her aging mother would be left in the lurch: high, dry, and penniless.

She promised the distraught parent that the situation would be rectified immediately and instructed Miss Clusburtson to pack the sisters’ belongings back into their two blue steamer trunks and deliver them, along with Cecily, to the impossible aunt at Claridge’s, where both of them could await Alice’s convalescence. Or they could go up hill and down dale in a wheelbarrow, for all she cared.

She wrote a diplomatic letter (such communications were one of her talents) to Mr. Dick Benjamin, who received it two and a half weeks later in Shanghai and held his head in his hands.

“Now, I ask you, who besides Arthur’s wife could cause such a scandal!” He refolded the newspaper clipping that accompanied his daughters’ expulsion from Robeson Academy and passed it across the table to Dolly, who read it and lapsed into a long silence.

“Well,” she said at last, “you had better cable May to bring the girls home posthaste. It’s a shame she can’t be trusted to engage a good governess as long as she’s there.”

J
USTICE
S
ERVED

T
HE JUDGE, IN HIS SWEEPING BLACK ROBE AND
white wig, looked as exotic to the defendant as she did to him. It was cold in the London courthouse. May had unfastened but not removed her fuchsia coat lined with white fur. Beneath it she wore a silk jacket and trousers of emerald green. Jeweled combs glinted from her shining black hair. Standing in the somber room, she gave the impression of a riotous flower that had magically sprung up between paving stones.

Mr. Justice Burns-Barrow cleared his throat. “This is a country, Madame May—”

“My name is Mrs. Arthur Cohen.”

“—a country, Mrs. Arthur Cohen, in which there is no enforced servitude.”

May nodded soberly. “I think that is well,” she said.

“How, then, do you explain these young men?”

Boy and Brother Boy, their braids hanging limp below the hems of their jackets like the tails of reprimanded dogs, stood before the bench. One on either side of May, they sneezed: first Boy, then Brother Boy, back and forth with a regularity that seemed suspect, intentionally disrespectful.

“They carry my chair,” May said.

“Why? Why do they carry you?”

“Because I cannot walk on feet like these.” May slid one toe forward and lifted her trouser leg enough to reveal a pointed, fuchsia silk shoe. “My feet are—well, they are quite impractical for walking. Especially in so big a city as London.”

“But you don’t pay them,” the judge said. “According to the report of the constable, Mr. Barrington, they are not hired but
owned
. Beyond that offense, with the help of these slaves you incited a brawl in Fortnum and Mason’s department store on Knightsbridge Road—”

“I did no such thing.” May’s voice took on a falsely sweet, unmistakable edge of anger. “I was shopping when a crowd of rude, staring, uncivilized louts converged on my chair. They shoved the boys. They toppled a tower of biscuits and preserves, and I’ve had to pay the bill. As well as seek medical attention for Boy, whose leg was lacerated by a shard of jam pot. It all came to seventy-three pounds, two shillings, and some pence.”

“But you don’t pay your, your
bearers
. Is that what they are?”

“I beg your pardon,” May said haughtily. “I am keeping my sedan chair boys at Claridge’s Hotel in a well-appointed room—nothing so vulgar as a bridal suite but accommodations whose tariff, I can assure you, is not inconsiderable. Two beds and two desks they won’t use. Boy sleeps in the bath tub and Brother Boy on the floor beside the heating contraption. And I feed them, of course, whatever they like. Breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, and I’m sure you’d be astonished by the quantities of ginger biscuits and toffees between times.

“I’d come straight to Fortnum and Mason’s from Liberty’s, where I’d purchased wadding and wool. It is very cold here; the boys aren’t used to this weather and if they get ill, I am immobilized. You hear for yourself what the chill does to them.” She paused. The sneezing continued. The judge’s mouth remained open, as if he might suffer from adenoids and have trouble drawing air in through his nostrils.

“I thought about marten and went to a furrier on Bond Street, but I discussed the matter with another lady shopping there, a Mrs. Tidwell or Tidbit, something to that effect. She was very kind and said fur was not in the best of taste for servants. It is awfully dear and maybe not appropriate. Claridge’s has been helpful in recommending a seamstress to make up the wadding and wool into heavy jackets. This trip is turning out to be much more costly than I anticipated and my brother-in-law—”

“All of this is entirely beside the point!” The judge felt for his gavel, lost under papers, and, impatient, ended by pounding his fist on the bench.

“Excuse me,” May said, managing to look genuinely contrite. “I’m not sure what the point is.” She smiled with an innocence so dazzling, so seemingly genuine and absolute, it couldn’t have failed to strike the judge as practiced, insolent.

“None of this has to do with your enslaving two men!”

“Of course it doesn’t,” May said. “And that is because I am doing no such thing.”

“They are carrying you in a chair and all of you are going about inciting unrest and outrage. And this”—the judge had grown quite red under his white wig—“
is because England has no slave class.
”

“There are many failings of which I may be justly accused.” May paused here; she frowned a slightly theatrical frown that suggested she might be privately tallying her past crimes. “But slave owning is not one of those. I am a woman with feet too small to walk about on. And”—May drew a deep breath. Was this to be a long speech?—“let me say that England may have no slave class, but I have lived in her treaty port of Shanghai for all of my life as a grown woman, and slavery would be far more kind than—”

“Mrs. Cohen! You have been brought before the court of assizes, the Crown against Mrs. Arthur Cohen, because—”

“So it isn’t only the populace that is against me but the Crown as well? I have to say—”

But the judge had risen, he was shaking his head, he was waving his gavel, he was holding his side as if he had a sudden pain. “Case dismissed,” he bellowed.

“I
FEEL RATHER
sorry for that Miss Cuthburtson,” May said to Cecily and Alice, all of them living at Claridge’s in the remaining weeks before they embarked on the passage home. “Clus—, Cuth—, what is her name?”

“Clus-burt-son,” Cecily said. “But she can’t pronounce it.”

“I do, too,” Alice said. “Feel sorry. She’s sad. And she hasn’t any family at all.”

“And so ugly.” Cecily shook her head.

“She can’t help her looks,” said May. “A new hairstyle would help.”

“Not enough.”

“Cecily,” May said. “Your challenge in life will be to learn charity.”

“What about me?” Alice asked. “What’s mine?”

“To sit still,” May answered. “Thirteen is too old to fidget. Why don’t we take her home with us?” she said, returning to the subject of Miss Clusburtson.

“What? To Shanghai?” Cecily, sitting cross-legged on the vanity to get as close as she could to the mirror, stopped what she was doing—applying cream bleach to the almost invisible down over her pretty lip—and turned around to stare at May.

“Why not? I know you don’t want to go back to the Shanghai Jewish school, and all the girls from the public school are such prigs. I can manage languages and history. Piano and dance from that ridiculous woman around the corner, on Weihaiwei, and there are always advertisements for instruction in deportment and elocution. But you will need a teacher of mathematics. No one except your father is any good with sums, and he works all day.” May smiled. She clasped her hands together in a gesture of self-congratulation. “Yes,” she said, “I think I’ll invite her. If I come home with a teacher, then Dick won’t be so angry. Don’t you think?”

Alice and Cecily said nothing. The idea of Miss Clusburtson in China was too revolutionary to respond to as anything other than a joke. The sisters began to laugh, one’s mirth inciting the other’s, until even Cecily was gasping and rolling on the bed.

“Stop! Stop!” Alice panted. “Look what you’ve done!” For there were white spots on her blue jumper, and on the coverlet as well, where the usually immaculate Cecily had splattered bleach from the open jar still clutched in her hand.

The next day, a Sunday, May left the sisters with Boy and Brother Boy and went to see Miss Clusburtson, in her little room at the top of the school. The ceiling sloped steeply, and the window looked out on broken chimney pots.

“Tea?” Miss Clusburtson offered. She wrung her hands in anxiety at the idea of having so inopportune a guest. Miss Robeson didn’t allow teachers to entertain, except on Saturday afternoons, and only downstairs in the parlor. And no one had ever had a visitor of such a criminally colorful and exotic demeanor.

May looked around the dingy, dispiriting room and at its pale occupant. Eleanor’s hair was down, her collar unfastened. She looked a good deal less unattractive than usual. “So,” May began. “I am taking the girls home to China, and I’m thinking that perhaps you will come with us.”

“I’m sorry?” Miss Clusburtson said. “I don’t understand.”

“Are you happy?” May asked.

“Am I— I don’t—I must have misheard you.”

“Are you happy? Here, I mean, at this, this school.”

“Well, I am—I’m afraid I still don’t understand.” Eleanor Clusburtson sat suddenly down on her tightly tucked bed, her eyes brimming.

May shook her head. “I don’t think you are,” she said.

“I’m not … I’ve never put too high a premium on happiness.” Eleanor held her head straight to prevent what happened anyway, the spill of tears.

“That’s wise, of course. In the Orient you could smoke opium.”

“Oh, no. I don’t think so.” Miss Clusburtson wiped her cheek with the back of her hand.

“Certainly you could. I do.” May reached out and patted Eleanor’s shoulder. “It doesn’t make one happy, but it makes unhappiness irrelevant. How old are you?” she asked.

“I … I was born in eighteen sixty-seven.”

“Oh, dear. Forty-seven. You’ve wasted far too much time already.”

“I … I …” Eleanor didn’t finish, alarmed by a sudden knocking. The door knob rattled.

“Miss Clusburtson!” came an angry voice. “Have you—I cannot believe you have the impertinence to lock your door!”

“Dear God,” Eleanor gasped. “Miss Robeson.”

“Really?” May said. “I am curious to see her.”

“If she catches you here, she’ll dismiss me. I’m already in trouble with her.” Eleanor clasped her thin hands before her chest as if in supplication.

“Do you think she would?”

Eleanor nodded vehemently. “Without pay,” she whispered.

The door rattled violently against the jamb. “Miss Clusburtson!” boomed the voice of Miss Robeson.

“Yes?” Eleanor said, weakly.

“I want a word with you.”

“Now?”

“Immediately! If it’s not
too
inconvenient.” The voice exuded ominous sarcasm, and the door shook again in its frame. “You know that locking the rooms is not allowed!”

Eleanor opened the door and stepped back.

“Well!” said Miss Robeson, staring at May. “I am shocked, I am dismayed. I am, I am very nearly speechless.” And Lovebird, his watery, protuberant eyes rolling in sympathetic astonishment, whined and trolled around the indignantly swaying circumference of his mistress’s long skirt.