The Oriental Wife (27 page)

But finally, well satisfied, she stood. Goodness, how she had been going on, she said as she gathered up their cups; she guessed Emma hadn’t come there to listen to her; she knew how precious their time together was.

“So what have you been reading?” Emma asked, in an unnatural voice, when Mrs. Rafferty had gone. She had forgotten to prepare any stories for her mother, those humorous little anecdotes, tinged with absurdity, with which she usually set the tone on these visits.

Louisa gave her an uneasy look. But she told Emma about her latest find at the Goodwill store, a historical novel about the mother of Richard III. “She was a very nice woman,” she said firmly, as though Emma might argue with that. When she was a child, Emma used to read such novels herself, on her visits to her mother; sometimes they would sit next to each other in the room upstairs, both of them with fat, slightly mildewed hardbacks on their laps. Emma had found the look of those yellowing pages, covered in dense print, soothing in themselves, even when she couldn’t keep track of who was intriguing against whom.

“Is there news of your father?” Louisa asked now, in a frightened voice. She must have interpreted Emma’s odd demeanor as a sign that something bad had happened.

No, no, Emma told her, he was fine, doing very well; he was going to be fitted for a prosthesis that week. After that she rose and said they might as well go upstairs.

This was the room where Emma had been happiest as a child—where, in the days when Aunt May used to drop her off, she had sung at the top of her voice and whirled around and around and clutched her mother’s knees to steady herself. Then, when she was three, came the next phase, the era of Connie, when Aunt May was sent packing (Emma was forbidden further contact with her, because, Connie said, she had been rude and disrespectful to her, and dirty besides). After that it was her grandfather who fetched her and brought her to Mrs.
Rafferty’s. By the time of the move to Connecticut, some years later, Emma was deemed old enough to take the train into New York by herself to spend the day with her mother.

When she was ten, eleven, twelve, she used to plunder all Louisa’s treasures—her old dresses, her bits of jewelry, her shoes—in the sure knowledge that however she behaved, however bossy or disobedient or willful she was, her mother would do whatever she wanted. She would take Louisa’s green silk dress out of the closet and teeter around in the satin sandals she’d found in a box under the bed, while Louisa pleaded with her to be careful and she tossed her head to show she wasn’t scared; she would go into the tiny bathroom and smear her mother’s Woolworth’s lipstick all over her cheeks. Then, having tied an old silk scarf around her waist, she would fetch the photograph album from the cupboard and demand that her mother tell her stories about the people in its pages: there was the frail little boy she had taught in England, and his distinguished-looking parents, sitting on a sloping lawn with statues, rimmed by thick hedges. On another, flatter lawn young men in baggy trousers and girls in sleek belted dresses lolled beneath a rose-covered trellis. All of them, in those black-and-white photos, looked startlingly pale, while the bushes were dark and luxuriant; she’d had a sense, when she was a child, that in England the foliage was more vibrant than the people.

But the stories she liked best were the ones from later on, when her father appeared, rescuing Louisa from mishaps involving overdrawn bank accounts, unwanted suitors, picnics drowned in muddy water. The man in those stories was ready to be coaxed into laughter, infinitely teasable, tolerant of others’ mistakes. She had sensed that her mother had not been so
powerless back then as she was to become, that she had not been afraid of him, not at all.

That afternoon she did not feel like mending the broken cup that stood on the little table, she did not feel like dusting the collection of objects on top of the dresser (despite her admiration for the Swiss, Mrs. Rafferty had never paid much attention to housekeeping). It was then that Emma remembered the photographs, which she hadn’t seen in fifteen years. “Let’s look at your pictures,” she said in a sprightly voice, going to the rickety pine cupboard in the corner. The album was on the bottom shelf, still in its peeling white-and-gold box with one broken corner. Some of the glue had gone brittle, and the tiny snapshots on the first few pages were loose. But there they all were, the young man named Julian featuring in the first four pictures, her mother’s blond, solemn young charge standing very upright next to a carved chair, in short pants and a sailor blouse. And there was Louisa herself, her hair tucked behind her ear on one side, her Botticelli mouth split wide into a tomboy’s grin, holding up her glass to the camera. She seemed, in retrospect, to have been courting disaster with that smile of hers—flaunting herself heedlessly before fate, unmindful of the dangers ahead.

The pages that followed showed the apartment on Bogardus Place, some of its furniture familiar to her from her mother’s room at Mrs. Rafferty’s. Here there were more pictures of Louisa, less blurry than the English ones, as though they might have been taken with a better camera, and several of Otto, who still came from California once a year to visit her mother. But although the hallway of the apartment and the boxy kitchen and the cupboard from which she had just fetched the album
were all carefully recorded in black and white, as though someone had wanted to document them for posterity, her father was absent, appearing only after several pages showing the living room from various angles. It was her parents’ wedding photograph; she could not remember ever seeing her father smile like that, as though about to levitate from sheer giddy happiness. Quickly, she turned the page to see what came next, but there was no next. The rest of the album was empty.

Mr. Seng was waiting for her outside the building on Monday morning, a thickset, grizzled-looking man in a woman’s pink polyester blouse and baggy khaki trousers that didn’t quite cover his ankles. “I’m so sorry,” she said, holding out her hand. “Have you been waiting long?”

He glared and told her yes, he had. Together they went upstairs, she in front, he following closely behind. This is the last time I will climb these stairs, she thought. I’ll never see the Giotto print again, or the velvet sofa.

Then she remembered the piece of paper in the top drawer, the one with the beautiful calligraphy. As soon as she opened the door she went to fetch it from Khim’s office. Meanwhile Mr. Seng was standing by her desk in the alcove, scowling at the bookshelves, with their neat rows of the press’s English books, all bound in blue and white. He took down a volume on the Cambodian legal system, the first manuscript she had worked on for the press, and made a disgusted face as he read the name of the author. “Who getting this man write such book?”

“I really don’t know. I suppose it was Mr. Eath.” She thrust the heavy sheet of paper at him. “Can you tell me what this says?”

He took it from her and began reading. Then he looked up. “Where you find this?” he asked sternly.

“In Mr. Eath’s desk. I thought maybe it would explain things.”

Without a word, he carried it into Khim’s office, replacing it in the top drawer and slamming it shut. Then he returned to the alcove. “Private. No should reading.”

“But if it’s private, mightn’t it tell us something about where Mr. Eath has gone? That’s why I wanted you to read it.”

He shook his head decisively. “Nothing where gone. Private.” Before she could stop herself, she seized him by the wrist, shouting at him that he had to tell her, she had to know.

He shook her off, and for one strangely intimate moment they stood glaring at each other, until understanding dawned in his face. She could feel herself blushing; it seemed the final humiliation that Mr. Seng should pity her. “I’d better check the files,” she muttered, turning away and opening the cabinet in the corner. A little later Mr. Johnston arrived.

He was trim and tan and imperturbable, keeping up a constant flow of talk that allowed for no interruption: about his journey, about the heat, the government, what a pleasure it had been to read the press’s publication. Of course he remembered Mr. Seng, he had read his work with great interest, and as for Emma, he had heard excellent reports of her, clearly she had been an invaluable contributor to the important work they were doing. But unfortunately he was in something of a rush; he would have liked to spend more time with them, but he had an eleven o’clock appointment uptown—“Fellow I’m going to see will chew my ear off, but he’s a fine man, a little lonely, I’m afraid, retired now and not much to occupy him.
Used to be quite a muck-a-muck.” So if she’d turn over the keys, he’d just lock up and be on his way.

Meanwhile he was looking around Khim’s office, nodding to himself. Didn’t he want the files? she asked, and he told her a colleague of his would probably be coming in the next week or so to clear things out. “I’m just what you might call the advance man,” he said genially. He looked at his watch. “I’m afraid I really must get going.”

But Mr. Seng was not so easily deterred. He blocked Mr. Johnston’s path. “Must be paying me,” he said. “I coming here to get what earned for books.”

Mr. Johnston looked from him to Emma and back again. “Now, I’m really not the fellow you need to talk to,” he said, slightly less genially. “I’m not the man who signs the checks.” Mr. Seng began talking again, loudly and indignantly, and Mr. Johnston held up his hand. “If you’ll just give me your details, I’ll make sure you’re paid whatever you’re owed. The last thing we want to do is cheat anyone.”

Mr. Seng looked at Emma, who told him, “He wants your address. He’s going to send you money.” She went to the battered Rolodex on her desk. “I’ve got it here,” she said, and flipped through the cards until she found it. Then she removed it and handed it to Mr. Johnston, who put it in his pocket without looking at it. “How will you know how much he’s owed, if you don’t take the files?”

“I’ll ask my colleague to look into it.” He went to the door and stood back, waiting for them. Silently, they left the office and waited as he locked up. Only then did it occur to Emma that this was the one person who might know where Khim had gone.

When they reached the street door, he went ahead and opened it, stepping aside to let her go through. But she didn’t move.

“Can you tell me where Mr. Eath is now?”

He shook his head, not as Mr. Seng had done, but lightly, dismissively.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Because you won’t? Or you don’t know?”

“I really have no idea where he is at the moment.”

“If you did know, would you tell me?”

Now he smiled at her, a richly good-humored smile. “I’m sure you’ll be hearing from Mr. Eath yourself very soon.” She went on standing in the doorway, blocking his path. “But right now, I really must be going.”

Then they were all outside; he shook their hands again, more swiftly this time, and stepped into the back of a gray car that was parked at the curb. The driver pulled smoothly away into the traffic, leaving Mr. Seng and Emma standing forlornly on the pavement, staring after it.

I
n the hospital room, Connie kept up a frantic stream of wisecracks, hurling herself at the unbroken silence like an animal scrabbling at bare earth. Every day, when Emma arrived, her stepmother’s chair was drawn up close to the bed, her voice shrill with fear. “Look, hon, look what came in the mail yesterday, it says you’re a million-dollar winner. You don’t want to miss out on your million dollars, do you? Come on, wake up … I saw your friend Dr. Pappas in the elevator this morning. You don’t believe he takes the elevator like the rest of us, right? You probably think he sprouts wings when he needs to go upstairs. I’m going to say that to him, he’ll probably bust a gut laughing. And then he’ll have to operate on himself, right? Serve him right … You know what you should do, you should write a letter to the board complaining about the crappy flowers the Garden Club put in the lobby, you wouldn’t believe it, those ugly orange lilies like on the roadside, and cheap crummy little pansies someone must have wanted to get rid of. They ought to be ashamed of themselves, I swear to God it’s enough to make the people sicker than they are already … Come on, honey, say something to this nice nurse here. She probably thinks you’re a son of a bitch, not even thanking her after everything she’s done for you. Toiling away. Double bubble toil and trouble, right? And you thought I wasn’t cultured.” And
then, when the nurse was gone, “I bet half these birdbrains think you’re a Nazi. What do they know, it’s the only time they ever heard a German accent, in some war film.
The Great Escape
was on TV the other night. I was going to stay up and watch it, but I fell asleep before it started, and then I woke up all stiff from sleeping on the couch and it’d been over for hours. Just my luck. But that’s okay, you’re going to get a million dollars, right?”

She read him the advice columns in the local paper, and the recipe for pumpkin cheesecake, and even the fine print on the coupons for Grandma’s Apple Pie ice cream. She waved get-well cards from the people at the office under his nose and told him about the multifloor shopping mall planned for the site of the old fairgrounds. Some hippies had tried to disrupt the groundbreaking ceremony, would you believe it? “They’re going to have a Macy’s and a Caldor’s and a luggage store and every other goddamn thing. If you start behaving your-a-self I even a-take you to the opening.” Emma, her teeth clenched together, her eyes fixed on her father’s face, thought she saw him grimace in protest.

“What the hell are
you
looking at?” Connie snapped at her. For just a moment, things were back to normal: this was the old, authentic note of venom, unnervingly absent for the past few weeks. It was almost a relief to have it back. It meant they knew where they stood, they could look each other in the face.

“Nothing,” Emma answered, as she had a thousand times in her childhood. “What are
you
looking at?” “Nothing.” “I’ll give you something to look at. I’ll give you a black eye if you don’t watch out.” But now Connie seemed to have forgotten her lines; she only snorted ambiguously and turned back to the bed.