The Valley of Amazement (32 page)

The smaller box contained a gold bracelet with rubies and diamonds, an extravagant gift from someone who might not ever see the recipient again. I read the note.

Dear Miss Minturn, I am deeply ashamed of my unintentional crude behavior. I cannot expect forgiveness, but I hope you believe the sincerity of my apology. Yours, B. Edward Ivory III

Magic Gourd went with Madam Li to Mr. Gao’s jewelry store, where they learned that Edward had paid two thousand yuan. Mr. Gao said it would have been half that price if the foreigner had known to bargain him down. Nonetheless, we should still consider that Edward Ivory had paid us that higher amount of respect.

“The bracelet is worth forgiveness,” Magic Gourd said, “especially since it was Loyalty’s fault to begin with. Madam Li and I agreed.” She added: “The foreigner should not expect anything to go further than that—unless you want it to, of course, in which case, this bracelet is a nice start.”

Loyalty rang two days later and asked if he might host a small dinner and bring Edward as one of his guests. “I must be honest, Violet, he asked if I would do this. He received your note of forgiveness, but he is still in a terrible state. He has not slept or eaten. He spouted nonsense about wounding everyone he meets. I told him it was my fault, not his. That did nothing to put his mind at ease. Maybe all Americans who suffer from melancholy act as if they have gone mad. But I truly thought he might throw himself in the river, and I don’t want his ghost visiting to keep telling me he’s sorry.”

His reasoning was always exasperating. “So instead, you’re making me responsible for whether a crazy man kills himself, is that it? Why did you tell me this? Host your party. I’ll be there to accept his apologies in person. If he drowns himself afterward, I can’t be blamed. As for you, you should have taken English lessons from me when you had the chance.”

Loyalty brought Edward and four other guests, enough people for a noisy party of drinking and games. Edward
was quiet and did not speak to me at first, except to say “please,” “thank you,” and “you’re very kind.” He stayed his distance, as if I were a scorpion. But I felt him watching me. He was solicitous toward Madam, Vermillion, and Magic Gourd, and was excessively polite to the other beauties. They smiled as if they had understood all his English words. At the end of the evening, he gave Magic Gourd and the maids generous tips and then placed another gift before me, wrapped in green silk. He bowed gravely and left. I opened the gift in private, without Magic Gourd’s prying eyes. This time, it was an emerald-and-diamond bracelet. The card said:

Dear Miss Minturn, I am grateful to be allowed in your company again. Yours, B. Edward Ivory III

I had not received such an extravagant gift in nearly two years. The next night I wore the bracelets to three party calls. When I went on my afternoon carriage ride with Shining and Serene, I pointed out beautiful birds and clouds so that those on the sidewalks could see the brilliant conquest I wore on my wrist.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
Madam said I had a phone call from the American. Edward apologized for the intrusion, as well as for presuming I might talk to him. His host, Mr. Shing, had said invitations should be written by letter a week in advance. But he hoped I would understand his haste. The manager of the shipping company had reserved two seats in his box at the Shanghai Race Club, and because he had fallen ill with influenza, he could not go. He had offered them to Edward. As it happened, Sir Francis May, the governor of Hong Kong, would also be present and seated two boxes away. “I thought I might press my luck to see if I could persuade you …”

A chance to meet the governor! I immediately regretted my meanness to Edward from the day before. “I would be also pleased to see you again,” I said, “so I can personally thank you for your lovely gifts.”

Since Chinese people were not allowed at the race club, Magic Gourd said we had to ensure there was no doubt about my right to be there. She brought out the lilac dress my mother had worn at the Shanghai Club. The dress still looked new and fashionable. I pictured my mother the last time she wore it. The old heartsickness remained and it could fan quickly into anger. I told Magic Gourd the weather was too cold. I found another that I had worn with success to a Western restaurant, an excursion costume in cerulean-blue velvet. It had a capelet and narrow skirt with a provocative cascade of folds at the back. I tried on a brimmed hat with a few modest feathers. But when I thought of sitting among foreigners vying for the attention of the governor, I exchanged modesty for plumage that would give me confidence. I wore my hair loosely bound and I fastened a strand of pearls Loyalty had given me the night of my defloration. An hour later, Edward arrived driving a long-nosed automobile—a sharp contrast to the boxy black cars that sputtered and wheezed. He said, almost apologetically, that his father had sent the Pierce-Arrow town car on one of his ships as a gift for his twenty-fourth birthday. He was twenty-four, four years older than I was. As we drove to the race club, I realized I did not need to do anything to attract envy and attention. The car brought people on the streets to a standstill as they watched us go by.

When the governor of Hong Kong arrived, a hubbub arose, and people followed him like an unloosened hive of bees. We watched from our seats, and when the governor turned in my direction, he nodded and smiled. “How nice to see you, Miss Minturn.” This led to a buzz of questions. “Who is she?” “Is she his secret lover?” I was baffled that he knew my name and was immediately light-headed with happiness in attracting temporary fame among the foreigners. Edward was impressed as well and poured me glass after glass of delicious cold wine, enough for me to become giddy, and I soon found special beauty in everything around us: the muscles of the horses, the brilliant blue sky, the sea of hats, of which mine was the loveliest. In my state of tipsy exhilaration, I could have smelled manure and thought it was perfume. After the third race, the governor stood, and again glanced my way, smiled, and tipped his hat. “Good afternoon, Miss Minturn.” This time I knew who he was. He had been one of my mother’s favorite clients, a kind man who greeted me warmly whenever I wandered through the parties. He had a daughter, my mother later told me, who died when she was my age. I had not been pleased to hear that. But the unpleasantness of his remark then was worth his acknowledgment of me at the race club. I had been elevated to a person of importance. Edward slyly passed along a rumor to a few people nearby that he had heard that the governor was a friend of the family. “She won’t confirm it. But I believe her father was the governor before Sir May.”

Edward asked that day if he and I could be friends. He said he would be pleased to serve as my companion, an escort to the places an American girl might want to see and could not unless accompanied by a maiden aunt. I assumed he was asking to be my suitor. If he was, he would be my first foreigner.

I
SOON DISCOVERED
that Edward’s offer to be my companion meant exactly that and nothing more. During the first week, we walked through the Public Park, dined at a restaurant, and visited American bookshops. I knew he was fond of me, but he did not hint that he would like to become more than a friend. I guessed he was afraid to press further, given our disastrous beginning. Or perhaps he knew I had other suitors and thought it was unseemly to compete. Maybe he thought one of them was Loyalty.

During the second week, he took me to see a temple, but as soon as we arrived, he developed a crushing headache and had to quickly return home. He told me he had suffered from migraines since childhood. But I worried that he had caught the new Spanish influenza. The Ivory Shipping Company had been secretive in
reporting the arrival of three sick men from the United States. Almost immediately, the manager in the Shanghai office also fell ill. They recovered, and no one knew for certain if it had been the deadly influenza, but during the scare, the Ivory Shipping Company had put all its employees under quarantine—all but Edward, who was not, strictly speaking, an employee. If Edward was indeed infected, he might infect me, and then everyone in the House of Vermillion would be imperiled and the doors would be closed. Each day we read terrible stories of the number of people in other countries who had died. Even the Spanish king had nearly died of it. We expected the wave of death to arrive in Shanghai any day. Thus far, except for families in poor sections of the city, few people we knew had taken ill with it. At our house, we drank bowls of bitter herbs, and we noted whether any guests were flushed or dizzy, a symptom that was easily confused with drunkenness. If a man coughed, Madam Li was quick to rise with a kerchief over her nose and ask the guest to return another time. Those asked did not take offense. The streetcars were washed down each night with limewater, and Madam Li followed that precaution and had the servants wash the courtyard leading to the house with a strong dose each morning.

Edward recovered from his migraine headache, only to fall victim to another a few days later. He said it felt as if poison had entered his brain. It began like a pin poking into his eye. It then went into his skull and the poison spread like fire. His mood was always dark just before an attack, and that was how I could predict when one was about to occur. I would not hear from him for days, and then he would return in a bright mood. He told me that he was forced to stay in a darkened room. He could do almost nothing, not even think. But he knew he was getting better when he could sit up. He took that time to write in his travelogue and it helped alleviate his malaise, as if the written words had purged the last of the poison in his brain.

When he suggested we take a long excursion in the car, I asked if it was wise. If he suffered from an attack, how would we return? That was when he decided to teach me to drive.

During my first lesson, I drove slowly, and he told me how happy he was to have the opportunity to admire the passing landscape. To me, it looked monotonous. There was not a spot of flat land that had not been tilled and planted. He had me practice making turns at every intersection. He tossed a coin, and if it showed heads, I turned right, and if it showed tails, I turned left. Edward took the wheel when we had to go in reverse where the road was blocked by buffalo cows or a pile of rocks set there for whatever odd reason farmers set rocks on roads. Wherever we went, we attracted the attention of peasants bent over in the fields. Edward honked and waved. They stopped work, stood up, and stared solemnly at us, never waving back. Here and there, we saw walls of houses whitewashed with lime. We passed villages where men were hewing logs into coffins. We watched a line of people dressed in white treading over the narrow paths between rice fields, headed up to a cemetery on the hillock. As I became a more competent chauffeur, I drove faster. The pages of his book flapped open, and a letter fluttered out and was gone before he could catch it. I asked if we should turn the car around, and he said we did not need to retrieve the letter. He knew the contents well enough. It was from his wife, telling him that his father’s health was poor.

I was disappointed to learn he was married. But I was not much surprised. Most of my suitors had wives, at least one, and whenever a man mentioned the fact, I was reminded of my standing as a momentary diversion, a pastime for now and not necessarily the future. To many men, I was a woman who existed only in a particular place, like a singing sparrow in a cage.

“Is your father’s condition serious?” I asked.

“Minerva always makes it seem so. She uses my father’s health to lure me home, and I don’t appreciate being baited. I know that sounds unfeeling. But I know the lengths to which Minerva will go. Our marriage has never been a happy one. It was a mistake and I’ll tell you why.”

He spoke frankly. Many men did, assuming that courtesans would not be shocked, given what they had done. But I also felt he confided in me as a friend, someone he hoped would understand. When he was eighteen, he said, he was walking alongside a fence outside of a horse pasture. A blond-haired girl in the pasture waved and ran up to him. She was plain-looking and stared with open infatuation. She knew his name and who his family was, which was odd. “That was Minerva,” he said, “and her father was the horse doctor who treated our horses. She had accompanied him twice to our house.” Edward told her to hop over the fence and he took her into the nearby woods, not sure what they would do. She lifted her skirts and said she knew how. Without a word more between them, they had sex. He stopped before he finished so she would not get pregnant, and she told him to go ahead because she would later wash herself out. Her uncle had taught her how to do this. She said that so breezily, as if it were normal. For two years, they met in the woods. She always brought along a spout and a jar of quinine solution, what her father used to treat horses with staggers. As soon as they finished, she poured this into her vagina while lying down, then stood and jumped up and down for half a minute to wash away his semen. She didn’t think it was embarrassing, but he usually turned away. They hardly ever spoke except to say when they would next meet.

One day, the horse doctor, his wife, and Minerva were seated in the Ivory family’s parlor, demanding that Edward marry their pregnant daughter. Edward was stunned because Minerva had always used the quinine. Mr. Ivory declared his son could not possibly be the father. He tried to bully Minerva into admitting she had been
promiscuous with others. Out of defiance of his father—and not in defense of Minerva—Edward said it was indeed his child. His father then offered the family a large sum of money to be rid of them, and that moved Edward to say he would marry Minerva. The girl cried in disbelief, as did Edward’s mother, and Edward was proud that he had stood up to his father—until the wedding night a week later. He was appalled to find this idolizing girl lying on her back in his bed and not in the woods, with no jar of quinine necessary. Soon after the wedding, Minerva told her mother she had never been pregnant and feared what Edward would do when no baby came. Her mother said to wait another month and tell him she had a miscarriage. So she did, with tears and sobs, and he was compassionate and managed to get himself to say “love” to assuage her grief. She mistook it for actual love that had finally blossomed in him. She then confessed she had never been pregnant, thinking he would now be grateful for the subterfuge. He asked her if anyone else knew and she said that only her mother did.