Thirteen Orphans (24 page)
“An’ Pearl?”
Pearl felt a tug on the edge of her skirt. Lani was standing there, looking up at her.
“When’s Mama going to be home from school?”
Nissa was actually in the house, but to Lani school was something that happened elsewhere.
“After lunch.”
“Oh.” There was a pause while Lani contemplated this. “Is she gon have lunch with us?”
“That depends on what her teacher says.”
“Des. Des is teacher.”
“That’s right.”
“Des is funny. He has a funny face.” Lani made a motion to indicate that what she meant was Des’s long mustache.
“It is funny,” Pearl agreed.
“Can I have juice?”
The word was pronounced more like “deuce,” but Pearl had been with Lani long enough to have had some practice with her version of English. Really, for two and a half, the child spoke very well, but only Nissa understood her all the time. Brenda had a worse time understanding Lani than did either Riprap or Pearl, but then Dylan and Tom were both a long way from the years of childish prattle.
Des managed fine. And Foster, well, he didn’t speak English at all, so Lani’s version wasn’t a problem.
Pearl put Foster from her mind. After her argument with Des, she didn’t want to think about him.
“An’ Pearl,” Lani said, her tone one of long suffering, “can I
please
have some juice.”
please
have some juice.”
There was a slight emphasis on “please,” and Pearl realized that the child had taken her lack of attention as a reprimand for not using the “magic word.”
“Of course, Lani,” Pearl said, getting to her feet. “Is your cup inside or out here?”
“By the ch’i-lin,” Lani said, and ran down the twisting path to retrieve the plastic cup from where it rested on the pedestal next to the horse-dragon creature sinologists usually referred to as the “Chinese unicorn.” She returned quickly. “I like the ch’i-lin.”
“So do I. I did when I was your age, too. That statue is from before I was born.”
“Wow!”
They went into the kitchen, and Lani was supplied with apple juice and a small container of unsweetened dry cereal. Nissa had filled everyone in on acceptable and unacceptable snacks, but overall she had a very reasonable attitude toward her daughter’s eating. As long as she ate something healthy, Lani could graze all day.
Pearl, remembering times when the demands of her profession had meant she went without eating anything for hours, thought this very reasonable.
“Where’s Foster?” Lani asked.
“In his room.”
“Has he been bad?”
Pearl considered this. “He needs to rest. Would you like a nap?”
Pearl’s question diverted Lani as she had hoped it would. The girl’s eyes widened with horror.
“Not now! Naps aren’t until after lunch.”
“Would you like to go out to the garden again?”
“I can feed the ch’i-lin and the phoenix cereal,” Lani said.
Probably because she thought Pearl might try and settle her down for an unscheduled nap, Lani vanished down one of the paths almost immediately. Pearl moved her chair to where she could keep an eye on the child without invading her sense of privacy. She was a firm believer in letting the imagination grow unhindered.
Lani’s voice, prattling—the word was all too appropriate—to the statues was as Proust’s madeleine to Pearl’s memory. Her own childhood had been filled with the sound of children, for, although she had later become a star, and taken part in movies where she was the only child player, her early roles had been in shows where there was a children’s chorus of some sort—often on the slimmest excuse.
Pearl had stood out from the start because of her attention to detail. She would remember her marks. If given a line or a bit of a solo, she didn’t forget it. Then, too, she had provided a fine contrast to the curly-haired, blue-eyed blond child who had frequently been her opposite.
Sometimes Pearl played the good child, while Shirley was the wild, mischievous one. Other times Shirley was the little angel, and Pearl the bad girl. Neither had minded, although there had been a bit of good-natured tussling over who got the better part. The thing that had made them both stand out was that they loved the profession. The other children were there because their parents wanted them to be. Shirley and Pearl were among the handful who had been seriously bitten by the acting bug.
Neither of them had done much acting as adults, although each had won adult roles. Shirley had finally taken another direction entirely, and Pearl didn’t blame her. Not only had her earnings not been well-managed, she must have gotten tired of always being cast as “Dimples,” even when she had ample talent to be more.
In contrast to the financial mess that awaited the grown Shirley Temple, Pearl’s parents had managed Pearl’s earnings very well. The Chinese were frugal people, on the whole, and both Pearl’s parents were immigrants. Her father’s early training had not prepared him to manage money, but he had learned the necessity during those early years in China, before the exodus to Japan, and then into the U.S.
Pearl remembered the stories. Her father hadn’t told her directly, but although the Thirteen had scattered after their arrival in the U.S., the Tiger, the Rooster, the Cat, and several others had remained in California. Even those who had moved elsewhere came out to visit. Traditional foods were easier to get in California, and were much more affordable, enough to make the journey and the expense worthwhile.
Then, too, when there were just over a dozen people in all the world who shared your heritage, the very natural desire to talk to people who sounded of home, who knew what you meant when you referred to the scent of the moonflowers that grew over the Pavilion of Milky Jade, was a tremendous lure.
Pearl let her mind drift back to those gatherings. Her father had been among the youngest of the Thirteen—only the young emperor had been younger—and had taken some time to marry. His reasons for the delay had not been romantic, but because of how seriously he took his role as Tiger. Tiger is among the most martial of the signs, and in those early decades when the exiles were still hunted by the wizards from their homeland, a warrior was needed.
Finally, Pearl’s father had given in to pressure to assure there would be someone to inherit his role and married. His first wife had been a Chinese immigrant. Based on stray comments Pearl had overheard, the marriage had been, if not happy, at least stable. However, in the ten years of its duration, it produced no children. Pearl had never been clear if the marriage had ended in divorce, that first wife’s death, or some less formal separation.
The Thundering Heaven’s second marriage had been to Pearl’s mother, and had been fruitful. Pearl had preceded her younger brothers by some years, enough time for her to realize that having an heir apparent to train was essential for each of the Thirteen, enough time to also realize that although she was her father’s heir apparent, he was not happy to have her as such.
By the time Pearl was born, the first anxiety over how to direct the passage of the Earthly Branch powers the Twelve controlled had been addressed. Of the Thirteen Orphans, six were women, and not all of those six were of an age that they could hope to conceive and bear a child. Ox had faced this first. She was a woman of some sixty years when exile was forced upon them, already into menopause. However, she was also a steady and resourceful person.
“So,” she had said, “what if I cannot bear a child? In our homeland the talent often is not passed within families. Very often the one who is best suited comes from another line entirely. I will find my heir among these people in this new place.”
The second Ox had been realized in a Chinese foundling, one of those unlucky little girls whose parents did not want her, but who were not quite cruel enough to either kill her or sell her into direct slavery. She had been working as a bond servant, paying off her parents’ debts to a landlord with her labor, when Ox’s divinations had located her.
Ox promptly bought the girl, ignoring the protest of some of her associates, who thought that the talents should be kept within the family, so to speak. After all, some of them might have more than one child, and how nice if the Ox’s powers could be passed to one of them.
Ox had ignored them. The new girl was named Hua, which can mean “flower,” although the girl was far from flowerlike by the standards of the time and place. The same character can also mean “China,” and thus was a tribute to her birthplace. Hua’s brown, flat peasant face was sun-browned, and she had big hands and even bigger feet. But under Ox’s loving care, the flower that was Hua had blossomed. After some training, the child had shown such a gift for magical working that from being criticized for her impulsiveness, Ox had been highly praised for her sagacity.
Pearl’s first memories of Hua were as a kind young goddess of supreme elegance and adulthood, although she probably had not been much older than Nissa was now. Hua had tended to her adoptive mother, now well into her eighties, with a loving devotion that held no trace of servility. This had been Pearl’s ideal model of how the relationship between senior and junior representatives of the Earthly Branches should be. Pearl had tried to treat her father as Hua had treated the Ox, only to realize with burning shame that not only didn’t he want her attentions, he didn’t want her.
That had hurt, for Pearl was a child quite accustomed to being wanted. Her mother was very proud of her, driving her to auditions and rehearsals with endless patience. Pearl didn’t win all her auditions for lead roles, but if she didn’t get the lead, she usually got a bit part, sometimes even an understudy. When Mrs. Bright entertained, her lady friends were delighted to hear Pearl sing and dance. Her Hungarian Jewish grandparents, formerly less than happy with their daughter’s marriage to a Chinese, softened as they grew to dote on their talented granddaughter.
At first, Pearl had thought that if she worked as hard to learn what her father valued as she did her lines, she could win his approval. She had seen Thundering Heaven brooding over the Tiger mah-jong set, so she memorized all the tiles. She learned to speak Chinese flawlessly, not only Mandarin and Cantonese, but the strange dialect her father spoke only with his friends.
Thundering Heaven practiced with various weapons, so Pearl would stand in the background, out of his direct line of sight, miming his moves with sword or spear as she had learned to mime complex dance steps at the various studios. He never seemed to notice.
Later, when her father had begun to teach Pearl the lore he had brought from his homeland—a place she had gathered was not quite the same as the China of which the people she met in Chinatown spoke—Pearl was thrilled. She memorized dynasties—which were not, after a point, anything like the dynasties she encountered in history books. She learned the contents of heavy bestiaries, always with an emphasis on what made a certain beast dangerous, and what made even the most dangerous beast vulnerable.
Finding that Pearl had the talent, her father also taught her how to work magic. The early lessons were not unlike those Des was giving to the three now inside her house, but for Pearl there had been no polymer clay to make shaping tiles easy. She had to learn to etch in ivory and bone, and if she spoiled a piece, her allowance would be cut—a thing she thought dreadfully unfair, because even then she had begun to realize that she was the one who earned most of the money that came into the house.
Mrs. Bright was paid something for acting as Pearl’s handler and dresser, but as far as Pearl could tell, her father earned nothing, and seemed to think that his endless sword practice and research into Chinese history and legend were far more important than making sure the family had rice to eat and a roof over their heads.
Pearl’s training as an actress had made her quick in body and mind, and had given her both stamina and attentiveness far beyond that usual in a child of her age. She learned her lessons quickly and well, and by the time she was eleven or twelve, she knew enough that she imagined her father approved of her. This was good, because she was beginning to find winning movie roles harder.
By this time, Pearl had been prominent long enough that even the studio’s judicious editing of her age couldn’t represent her as a little girl anymore. She’d remained petite, and that helped, but the gangly years are rarely kind to a girl, and her half-Hungarian, half-Oriental looks were not what the studios wanted for “cute kid” roles. She was several years from where she’d have a chance to try for roles as a romantic lead.
Waiting for auditions, for callbacks that didn’t come, Pearl concentrated on her father’s lessons, as well as on the schoolwork her mother gave her. She practiced shaping summonings in her mind, learning the elemental tang that accompanied contact with various creatures that almost everyone she knew thought were imaginary.
One day, out shopping for groceries, Pearl saw an old woman step out in front of an oncoming bus. She summoned an invisible Dragon’s Tail to protect her. When the bus stopped short of hitting her, the woman claimed her guardian angel must have stepped between herself and the vehicle. Everyone cried out that this was a miracle. No one but Pearl’s father, who had been walking with his daughter, his arms full of library books as hers were filled with bags of groceries, knew that the source of the miracle was Pearl.
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