The Distant Land of My Father (17 page)

My grandmother unlocked the front door and pushed it open, and I followed her and my mother inside. The interior of the house was all wood. Redwood bookshelves lined the living-room walls, which were also redwood, as were the exposed ceiling beams overhead. The wall nearest to the front door had a window seat, where the leaded glass window looked out on the small front yard, and covering the wooden plank floor was an Oriental rug. The room was sparsely furnished, just a pair of Morris chairs and a small table between them. The fireplace was what I liked most. It was bordered with dark red tiles, each with a small scene on it, and it reminded me of the scenes of coolies and sedan chairs on the carved desk in my father’s office, a good sign, I thought. Over the center of the mantel, two larger tiles portrayed facing peacocks, another piece of luck. Chu Shih had told me since I was small that birds brought good fortune.

The far end of the living room opened onto the dining room, where a wrought-iron chandelier whose lamp bulbs were shaped like candle flames hung above an oval oak table and chairs. A built-in sideboard and buffet with leaded glass cabinets covered one wall, and French doors opened out onto a small garden filled with wisteria and jasmine and climbing roses. The kitchen was next to the dining room, and there everything seemed to be built in: the wooden table, which folded up against the wall; bins for flour and sugar; the bread board, the cupboards, spice racks, even the ironing board. The kitchen walls were bright white, and the room smelled of fresh paint.

My grandmother opened windows as she led us from room to room, and a cool breeze let itself in. From the kitchen, we walked down a short hallway to the bedrooms, which were painted white. In my room were a wrought-iron scroll bed, a dresser, and a cheval mirror. White lace curtains framed my window, and next to the bed was a small bookcase, already filled with books.

“Those are mine,” my mother said when she saw me eyeing them. “Or they were. They’re yours now.”

When we had walked through the small house and stood in the living room again, I felt my mother and my grandmother watching me.

“Well,” my mother said, “what do you think?”

“It’s nice,” I said, the only thing I could, for it was all too much to take in. I stared hard at my leather Oxfords and remembered my mother buying them for me in Shanghai, and suddenly I just wanted to be away from here, where everything was new. I wanted to go home, to Shanghai, where everything was familiar, even if it was dirty and crowded and freezing right now. I wanted to be where my father was.
Just say something nice,
I thought, but I couldn’t, and as my mother and grandmother waited for me to say more, I burst into tears.

During the next week, my mother worked at getting us settled. She enrolled me in school, she introduced us to the neighbors, she cabled my father’s business agent in New York in order to obtain funds, and she relearned her way around the town she’d grown up in. She didn’t drive, but there really wasn’t much need to. The Big Red Cars were electric streetcars that ran right along Huntington Drive only two blocks south of our house. From the Oneonta Park station, we could go just about anywhere in Los Angeles, from Santa Monica beach to downtown, to Colorado Street and Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena.

I started school at Oneonta Grammar School, where I was stared at for a week by the children in my first-grade class—California kids, my grandmother called them, who were rough-and-tumble and adept at things like the Pledge of Allegiance and roller skating. On my first day, the teacher, Miss McGrath, explained to everyone that they were very lucky to have me in Room 3, because I had lived far, far away, and could tell them firsthand what China was like. I froze inside as twenty-three strange children stared hard and evaluated me from head to toe. Word spread quickly. At recess, a boy named Tom Crosby asked me what language they spoke in Africa, and on my way home from school, a girl whose name I didn’t know because she wasn’t even in my class asked me if it was always hot in India. She spoke slowly, with exaggerated enunciation, and it was clear that she did not think I spoke English. I was tired and unhappy and I snapped, “How would
I
know?,” then walked quickly ahead of her, my nose in the air.

But within a few weeks, I was more or less forgotten, which was fine by me. I felt as though I’d come from a secret land, and when Miss McGrath took the globe from the highest shelf and showed me that Los Angeles was on the same parallel as Shanghai, I stared in disbelief. It was not possible, I thought; the places were too different to have anything in common.

In the afternoons, if my mother was going to be busy, I was told to walk to my grandmother’s house after school, rather than home. On those days, my grandmother always greeted me in the same way—“
There
she is!”—and seemed so genuinely glad to see me that I felt better as soon as I saw her open the front door. As I ate a snack, she would ask me about my day, and if I was making friends, and whether I liked school. Because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, I said as little as I could and didn’t tell her the truth, which was that I wasn’t making friends, that no one talked to me, that school was the loneliest place in the world. She only nodded, but the way that she looked at me made me think she knew how unhappy I was. “Things will get better,” she said when I’d finished, and she squeezed my hand across the kitchen table. “Just give it time, Anna. All will be well.” I nodded, and although I wasn’t completely convinced, her words made me feel hopeful, and the next day wouldn’t seem so bad. And I did know that things would get better eventually. Everything would be fine once my father arrived. It was only a matter of time.

My grandmother had not known much about me when we lived in Shanghai. My mother was a faithful correspondent but not a frequent one, and my grandmother heard news of me only a few times a year at best, especially since the Japanese occupation, when the mail to and from Shanghai had slowed to a near halt. At the start, I could see from her expression when she looked at me that I was not what she had expected. Maybe she’d wanted someone taller, or prettier, or smarter. But before long, she seemed to decide that I was all right, and she set out to claim me as her own.

I liked her immediately. She was the most down-to-earth, matter-of-fact person I’d ever been around, but she was also elegant, even formal. She was never in a hurry, never raised her voice, never short with anyone. She always looked me in the eye, and she wore practical clothes and comfortable shoes made of soft leather or even suede. She smelled of peppermint and Yardley English Lavender, which she had worn all of her married and widowed life.

She rose at six each morning and walked from her house on Chelten to early Mass at Holy Family Church a mile away. She came home and ate fresh fruit for breakfast—half a grapefruit sprinkled with brown sugar and put under the broiler for half a minute, sliced peaches or berries in cream, oranges in sections, whatever was in season. During the morning she answered letters. She maintained a huge correspondence with old friends and business associates of my grandfather’s, and was always prompt in her replies.

In the afternoon she worked. After my grandfather’s death, she had taken a correspondence course in bookkeeping, and now she kept the books for two small businesses in downtown Los Angeles, the Typewriter Shop and Foreman & Clark Men’s Store. When she finished work, she gardened, and at five o’clock, she sat in an old wicker chair under the eaves on her patio, rain or shine, warm weather or cold, and watched the light begin to fade. A sky-blue tile set into the outside stucco wall of her patio said,
The lands of the sun expand the soul.
It was an old Spanish proverb, she told me, and she added that it was true, and that this place would do me good. If there was a chill in the air, she draped a red wool Pendleton shirt over her shoulders. It had been my grandfather’s, one of the few articles of his clothing she hadn’t given to the poor, because, she said, it still harbored his scent of Blackstone cigars, and she could not part with that remnant of him. It hung by the door to the patio. The only other obvious trace of him was his Gruen watch, which she was never without.

Each night with dinner she drank one glass of red wine, and after dinner she listened to opera or to one of the musical variety radio shows she liked, usually
The Bob Hope Show
or
The Chase and Sanborn Hour,
hosted by Edgar Bergen. Before she went to sleep, she read. Her favorite magazines were
Westways
and
Sunset
and
Life.
As for books, she read everything: biographies, novels, gardening books, the lives of the saints and the early fathers of the Church. By the end of each week, she always finished her book, and the pine bookshelves that lined the walls of her house were filled. On her bedside table were her missal, whatever book she was reading that week, and books that dealt with the soul, she said. Her favorites were
Revelation of Love
by Julian of Norwich and
Introduction to the Devout Life
by Francis de Sales. When she went to bed, usually around ten, she read until she was certain she could sleep, and then put out the light. She hated lying awake in the dark. She said it prompted bad thoughts.

On the afternoons I spent with her, she simply went about her business with me in tow, happy to tag along. Much of our time was spent in her car. As we drove, she would rattle off statistics about Los Angeles, which she always pronounced with a hard G—
Los AHN-gay-les.
It was the largest city in California, she said, home to all kinds of people, from all kinds of places. There were eighty-six Indian tribes here. It was the largest Japanese city except Tokyo, the largest Mexican city outside of Mexico City. No place outside China had more Buddhist temples, and no place outside the old Portuguese empire had more Portuguese.

We went downtown, and she taught me the names of the streets. Those running east-west were numbered, from First Street up. For the north-south streets, she taught me the mnemonic my grandfather had made up: From
Main
I
Spring
to
Broadway,
then climb the
Hill
to
Olive.
Wouldn’t it be
Grand
if I could
Hope
to pick a
Flower
on
Figueroa
? She took me to the building where his office had been. He had died of a heart attack ten years earlier; until then, he’d been a lawyer for the oil companies, with an office on the sixth floor of the Bradbury Building on South Broadway. When my grandmother and I went inside, she leaned close to me and whispered, “Look up,” and I caught my breath as I gazed up at the skylight and the ornate iron staircase and the open-air elevator above us. We rode the elevator to the top of the building, and as we descended, I looked down at a white marble floor that looked like ice.

She took me to Olvera Street, the oldest street in the city, and we ate taquitos and held Mexican jumping beans in our palms. We shopped at Woolworth’s and at the Broadway department store, where she bought me Bass Weejun loafers and Keds sneakers. We walked through Pershing Square and listened to soapbox preachers and browsed through the books at the Parasol Library. We bought strawberries and watermelon and just-baked peach pie at Grand Central Market, then rode Angels Flight, a small funicular railway that went up and down Bunker Hill. We went to Germain’s Nursery on Hill Street and bought packets of California poppy seeds that Gran said we would plant in the back corner of her yard. We stopped at Van de Kamp’s Holland Dutch Bakers and bought Dutch Girl cookies and coconut macaroons and Saratoga potato chips that tumbled out of a metal shoot as they were cooked. We ate lunch at Clifton’s Cafeteria, or went to Philippe’s for French dips and lemonade, where I drew patterns in the sawdust on the floor with the toe of my shoe. And then, if it was Friday, we stopped in at the Typewriter Shop and Foreman & Clark’s, where everyone knew my grandmother. Before long, they knew me, too.

When we’d finished downtown, she headed back to Pasadena, which she said was eminently civilized. In a study of 295 American cities, she said proudly, Pasadena had been ranked as America’s most desirable city, based on its high ratio of radios, telephones, bathtubs, and dentists to residents. She believed it to be the most beautiful, healthful, cultured, and intelligent community in the West. “There are certain types of pneumonia so rare as to be almost nonexistent in Southern California,” she said. I nodded, pretending I understood. We drove down Colorado Street, the street of a thousand palms, where she said I would see the Rose Parade on January first, maybe even wave to the Rose Queen. She drove across the Colorado Street Bridge, a beautiful curved structure that spanned the Arroyo Seco, and then up the canyon to Brookside Park. And she took me to Mass at Holy Family Church, where I knelt next to her and prayed for my father to come soon.

But my favorite stop was Vroman’s Bookstore on Colorado Street, for I was finally starting to read, and books were something I could not have enough of. We stopped there once a week, and I was always allowed to choose a book, with the understanding that I promised to finish it within a week, and that I could not choose another book unless I did. It was a promise I never broke, and soon the small bookcase in my room was filled not only with my mother’s copies of Louisa May Alcott and Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain, but with my purchases as well, some of which I could read myself:
Millions of Cats, The Story About Ping, The Velveteen Rabbit.