The Binding Chair (19 page)

D
OLLY
C
LEANS
H
OUSE

T
HE FIRST OF ITS KIND IN
S
HANGHAI, HAVING
been installed in 1915, the Otis escalator in Weeks and Company had become not so much a means of getting from one floor to another as a destination in itself. It was so crowded with onlookers, mostly foreigners or wealthy Chinese, that the department store had been forced to cordon off a path for those who wanted to actually step onto or dismount from the gnashing wood stairs.

Though she usually despised anything popular, May couldn’t help being fascinated by the escalator. The promise of anything modern that might deliver her swiftly, without her having to move her useless feet, beckoned; and like the superstitious rickshaw men, as she passed, she stroked her fingers over the brass nameplate on its paneled side. At dinner she entertained the family with stories about the Otis. On the third day after its installation, as the last stair disappeared into the floor, it drew the long hem of a woman’s dress down into the grinding machinery below. The woman’s skirt and even her petticoat had been torn from her body before store personnel could turn off the escalator. She’d fainted, of course, and now fainting was a routine occurrence on the ride from the street level up to the first floor, a kind of litmus test for feminine delicacy.

Then, even as ladies swooned, one of the city’s innumerable religious zealots seized upon the endless cycle of stairs as a perfect illustration for his hybrid creed of Taoist reincarnation. He stood on Nanking Road distributing pamphlets that included meticulous, annotated illustrations of the escalator, its illusory hierarchy of stairs going tirelessly around and around as the perfect representation of the karmic cycle of destiny. “The way that can be walked is not the eternal way!” he cried until he was hoarse. He was arrested routinely but always returned.

Alice and May stood in Comestibles and watched the stream of brave enthusiasts ascend to Millinery. “Let’s give it a go,” Alice said.

May clapped her hands together. And so they rode up and up and up, fourteen times from bonbons and lemon curd to spring hats trimmed with ribbons, descending each time in the old elevator, its rope pulleys manned by Chinese dressed like organ grinders’ monkeys, in red jackets and red pillbox hats. When at last they’d had enough, they joined Cecily and the sisters’ mother on the third floor, where they were shopping for a runner for the upstairs hallway.

It was late spring and everything in the house—everything except the windows and the mirrors—had been host to a delicate lilac-colored bloom of mildew. For days the amahs and coolies had been scrubbing. They’d pulled up the carpets, beat them and soaked the stains in lemon juice; they’d scrubbed the floors and all the woodwork with vinegar; they’d bleached the curtains and poured lye down the drains. Only the upstairs runner had stubbornly refused to come clean. In fact, immersed in lemon juice, the spots turned from lavender to purple to black.

“Why not a darker color?” May said, as the carpet salesman brought another stack of cream samples. “Much less trouble.” She fanned herself, perspiring from the excitement of the escalator rides.

“But, May, dear, how would I know if it was dirty?” Dolly protested.

“Exactly,” May said.

The two women looked at each other and, in a rare moment of sympathy, laughed. Cecily leaned against a stack of rolled Persian rugs and languidly turned the pages of her book.

“Let’s go,” Alice said, pacing among broadlooms and moquettes, rugs hooked, woven, and tapestried. “Can’t we go? It’s teatime.”

O
UTSIDE, ON THE
sidewalk, Alice had been looking at the leper for some time before she recognized him as a person. She wasn’t staring; she was too well-brought-up for that. Like all Shanghailanders, she’d long ago learned not to see bodies in the street. She was pondering what she thought was a heap of old carpets. Why, everyone in Shanghai must be house cleaning, she was thinking, when the ragged bundle suddenly stretched and stood and looked straight at her mother.

Quickly, Alice looked away, but then the leper was before her eyes again; he was lurching toward them, toward her mother. “Dollars,” he said, using a word that even the most illiterate Chinese knew. Her mother looked away. “No can do?” he said. “Touchee!” And he reached his terrible hand out from under the stained rug he had pulled around him. He had three lumpy fingers, no thumb. Dolly Benjamin walked backwards, silent, white-faced, fumbling with the catch of her purse. The leper advanced.

“Touchee,” he promised. “Touchee.” His voice—either it was very low or it was weak, almost a whisper.

“How dare you!” May stepped between the leper and Alice’s mother. “I’ll call a constable. You’ll be arrested immediately.” Her Chinese, which she translated for them afterward, was louder than her English. Alice rarely heard May speak her native tongue. Loud and hard and heavy, like a heap of stones falling off the back of a wheelbarrow, the words seemed to come from a source other than her delicate, silk-clad aunt. The leper dropped his hand.

“How dare you!” she said again, and she threw a handful of coins onto the pavement, so that he was forced to crawl in order to pick them up.

Alice held her breath, waiting for her mother’s hysterics, and saw with surprise that Dolly, smiling pleasantly, had turned to the white-gloved doorman of Weeks and Company to ask him to hail a rickshaw. On the ride home she said nothing of the incident, but returned to the subject of the hall carpet. “You don’t think it was rather too yellow a beige?” she asked.

“Not at all,” May said.

“No.” Alice and her aunt looked at each other, raised their eyebrows, shrugged.

“Well, I suppose the wallpaper does have some yellow in it. I wish I’d had a bit of it to take and compare, though. I can’t imagine what did happen to that extra roll.” Dolly fidgeted against the seat back.

Once they were home, the evening proceeded smoothly, without any mention of the afternoon’s incidents.

The following night, however, during dinner, Dolly asked, “What is that dreadful smell?”

“What smell?” Cecily said.

“Surely you smell it?” her mother asked.

“No.”

Dolly looked at the rest of them sitting around the table: Dick, Alice, Arthur, May, Eleanor. “I’ve smelled it all day,” she said.

“What’s it like?” Alice pulled the steamy, moist middle out of a second roll, ate it, and left the husk on the edge of her plate.

“Nasty. Like something rotting, but not exactly. More like something … I don’t know.”

“Dead mouse in the heat duct?” said Arthur.

“Much nastier than that.”

“Oh, how shall I put this?… A plumbing smell?” May tried.

“No.”

“Dolly.” Dick sighed as he buttered Alice’s discarded crusts.

“I’m telling you!” Dolly stood. “I’ve smelled it all day. It’s worse in certain spots—the upstairs library and the hall outside the water closet, but not the closet itself,” she added, looking at May. “The telephone room, quite distinctly. And it was strongest at teatime, but then it got better, and now it’s worse. You must have noticed it, all of you? One of you!”

She picked up the bell and rang for Number Four, who came in expecting to clear the table. “No,” she said, and Number Four put down the plate he had picked up.

“Big Missy?” he said.

“Number Four, do you smell a bad smell?”

He looked at her silently, then said, “Big Missy smell bad?”

“Yes,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, nodding in relief, having discovered the right answer.

“Obviously he’s only saying so because he thinks he’s supposed to!” said Dick. “Aren’t you?”

The man looked uncertainly back and forth between his employers.

“Get Amah and Dah Su. Get all the boys and all the amahs,” Dolly said.

By dessert, the whole staff was crowded around the table, Dah Su and Cook Boy and Second Cook Boy, houseboys numbers one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, amahs and under-amahs, even the little nightsoil boy, whose job it was to empty the chamber pots from the servants’ quarters, separate from the main house. Dick and Arthur drank their port, Eleanor folded her blue-veined hands in front of her coffee, which was growing cold, and May held her head as if she couldn’t wait a minute longer to have her pipe. Cecily and Alice watched their mother.

Dolly went from servant to servant. “Do you smell a bad smell?” she asked, pantomiming a deep intake of breath through her nose, followed by a grimace of disgust. And each of them, once he or she understood that she wanted them to agree, nodded. “Yes, Big Missy. Yes.”

“See!” she said.

The next day, Dolly began her campaign to eradicate the smell. She forbade May to smoke, saying that the smell of opium confused matters; it masked “the offending—” She stopped midsentence, searching for a word.

“Effluvia?” May suggested.

“Yes. The, the whatever it is. It stinks like a
kong
. It’s getting worse every hour.”

“But, Dolly—” May said.

“Don’t tell me there is no smell! How can you, when your nose is ruined with drugs!”

“Dear, my nose is not ruined. Now—”

“I’m telling you, May. If you want to smoke, you’ll have to go out.”

“She’s wild on the topic!” May complained to Arthur that night. “She told me, well, what she said—she might as well have—was that I should smoke in a den! Can you believe it? Throwing me out into the street!”

“Darling,” said Arthur. “She didn’t throw you out. She asked that you stop smoking in the house, just until the smell is cured.”

“Arthur! There is no smell! Have you left your sense as well?”

“Taken leave of.”

“What!” May’s usually faultless grammar broke down, as it did only during moments of extreme agitation.

“The expression is to take leave of one’s senses.”

“I’m not having one of your syntax lessons. Your sister has lost her tiles.”

“Marbles.”

“Arthur!”

“Be logical, love.” Arthur came up behind May and put his arms around her; he pressed his lips into the nape of her neck as he spoke. “Why would an English idiom make reference to mah-jongg? Dolly has always been like this. She’ll get over it.”

“I’m sure she will, but what about us!” May pulled out of his embrace, refusing to be cajoled out of her temper.

Happy to be elsewhere, Dick moved himself to the Astor House, just three blocks from his office. Alice and Cecily went to stay with friends in the neighborhood. And as for Arthur, May, and Eleanor, they were left at home with Dolly and the servants, unwillingly drafted into the war against the smell.

“Did you know,” said Arthur, sitting in the garden in his overcoat and drinking tea, “that the drivers of
kongs
from the Settlement charge farmers twice as much for their, uh, cargo?”

“Why?” asked Alice, who had come to see what progress had been made in her absence.

On the damp lawn, which was spread with oilcloths, stood the contents of the house. Seventeen rooms’ worth of furniture, all being rubbed with lemon oil and buffed with flannel. Stacks of dishes, trays of glassware, racks of dresses, pairs of shoes set side by side, as if a chorus line, invisible except for its footwear, stood waiting to perform.

Inside, carpets, newly washed, were taken up and washed again. Scrubbed floors were being swabbed with cologne, cabinets scoured with soda, washed walls repapered.

“Because farmers consider that our waste makes for premium fertilizer. Owing to our rich diet.”

“Arthur, please!” Dolly bustled out onto the lawn with a line of amahs in her wake. She directed them as they stacked books from the empty library shelves.

“Well, it’s all this talk of sewer gases and muddy river smells that puts me in mind of such things,” said Arthur. “I was speaking with a gentleman who works for the—”

“Once a smell gets inside a book, can it be aired out, do you think?” Dolly asked, fanning the leaves of a collection of essays under her nose. “This one decidedly stinks.” She looked at Arthur, who didn’t answer, and at Alice, who shrugged. “Oh, well.” She set the book apart from the rest and sat down to preside over tea, laid on the displaced dining table.

“We’ll throw away the ones that won’t air out. Or donate them to the library at the club. Eventually all those cigars will fumigate them.”

“So, Mother,” said Alice, opening a cress sandwich to see how thickly the butter had been spread, “is it gone now, do you think?”

Dolly looked up from the sugar bowl. She held a pair of silver sugar tongs in her hand; they gleamed dully in the cloudy afternoon’s light. Over her head, the wisteria was in full bloom. “No,” she said. “It isn’t. But do you know, I dined with your father and Eleanor at the hotel and I couldn’t eat, I smelled it so clearly. And it was in Weeks and Company, and yesterday I noticed it’s in the synagogue as well.”

Alice looked away from her mother. With her fingers she withdrew one lump of sugar from the bowl and held it just at the surface of her tea, watching as the liquid reached up into the cube and dissolved it.

…   

“I
T’S
S
HANGHAI
,” D
OLLY
said at last, defeated.

The family were all assembled in the parlor of the disinfected house, a room that smelled to everyone but Dolly of soaps and lemon oil and cologne. “It’s Shanghai that smells. The city or the earth underneath it. The river. I can’t think why I never noticed before, it’s so strong.” No one said anything. Dolly fell heavily into her chair.

“Australia is clean. And dry. Everything is lovely and dry. Australia smells of eucalyptus.” She began to weep. “A eucalyptus would never grow in a dirty place like this. They don’t like dirty, damp places. This—Shanghai is nothing but a moldy, wet, filthy marsh. A swamp. And the floors are all crooked! Slanted, I mean. The house is sinking into the ground. I dropped my ring and it rolled and rolled. In the kitchen an egg will gather enough speed to break against the opposite wall.” She looked around at all of them.