This Old Man (11 page)

“Not that I can recall.” Who was he fooling? He certainly would have remembered a whole battalion entrenched at his table, practically spoon-feeding him. Besides, he couldn't afford such places on what the county paid him.

“Then after lunch Chen and I take a stroll through Montgomery Street and visit our stockbroker. We check on the London gold market. We drop in at Gumps to buy a few
très, très
expensive gifts.”

He let me go on like that for a while, and just when I was really flowing with it and about to tell him we had gin-and-tonics at the top of the Hyatt Regency, in the bar that spins around, he broke in with, “You are wasting your own time, but you don't care. However, you are also wasting my time, and I can't allow that. Tell me about Chen.”

“Okay, I will. I tried to get him a job the other day.”

Mr. Saxe found this amusing. He cut his laughter short, though, after his earnest lecture on wasting time.

“I was terrific. I got him the job, but Chen turned it down flat. Two dollars an hour in a fish market. How could he pass that up?” I thought I'd go for another laugh. I wanted to use up the hour watching him try to regain control after each of my classic punch lines.

He cleared his throat, tapped his pen. “All right now, let's sober up. Chen is not a good influence on you. In a word, he's poison. I know he's a mugger and a pickpocket, but I tell you, he's just warming up to bigger and better things. Some of his buddies have been picked up for extortion, burglary, assault—not petty stuff, big stuff.”

“How come you know all this?”

“Never mind. You know where all these guys come from? Half the time they're recruited from Hong Kong by organized crime in Chinatown.”

“Chen? That just proves that you don't know a thing. Chen came for Old Man. He came as a dying wish.”

“Sure, sure. Let me tell you what goes on out there. You've got your Hua Ching, a gang of immigrant kids after money and power. They terrorize merchants and peddle their services to protect shop owners from violence. Guess who causes the violence? Hua Ching.”

“Do you watch TV a lot? This sounds like an old Kojak show.”

“To you, everything's a joke. How splendid for you.” He got up and walked over to the small square of a window he has, which faces a decayed brick wall. “Do you ever read the papers?”

“Sure I do, every day.”

“A few years back there was a story in the papers about the Golden Dragon Restaurant in Chinatown, remember it?”

I shook my head. He couldn't see me, peering out the grimy window at the wall. “No,” I said.

He turned around. “Then I'll tell you about it. Three kids came into the restaurant and fired away with a .38 pistol and an automatic rifle. Five innocent bystanders were killed. You think I'm making this up? Go to the library and look it up in the Reader's Guide.”

“Five people died?”

“Five innocent people. Want to hear more? There are rival gangs. You've got the American-born Chung Ching Yee, also called the Joe Boys, and Suey Sing, and Yu Li, and other gang names I don't even remember. I tell you, Chinatown is seething, and I want you to be careful.”

“What does that have to do with poor Chen?” I asked. I wished Mr. Saxe would sit down. He was making me nervous hovering over me that way. He'd never done that before.

“Chen is rotten. The police are watching him. They've got their eyes on all these immigrant kids in Chinatown. Don't give me that pained sigh, Greta. This is fact. Listen up: if you hang out with these kids, the cops will get you, too. If the guys don't get you first. They think nothing of putting a bullet through white flesh.”

“What are you, some kind of racist?”

“Not a racist, a realist.”

“Well, I don't believe you,” I said pouting, even while I thought of Chen's cold, defiant eyes, dark and hard as raisins.

“Just stay away from the kid,” Mr. Saxe shouted. He sat down at last with his hands on his hips, like a mad coach.

Wasn't he the one who said he never got mad? What a score for me! I kept running with the ball. “Stay away from Hackey, stay away from my mother, stay away from the hospital, stay away from Old Man, and now stay away from Chen. I might as well join a monastery in Tibet.”

Mr. Saxe threw down his arms and leaned way back in his swivel chair, with his eyes closed. We sat that way, silently, while ten minutes lugged themselves by on the clock. I didn't shift positions or even move a finger, for fear he'd interpret my movement as giving in first. I concentrated on being absolutely still. The monks in Tibet were probably masters at that.

Finally, he said, “Our time's up.” He didn't get up to walk me to the door as he usually did. Instead he motioned for me to leave, to get out of his sight. I groped for my purse under my chair and left without a word. I wondered if he was angry with me over Chen, or angry with himself for losing control. Or maybe he was mad about having such a rotten, crummy job that made him see the world as bleak and futile all the time, and never paid him enough to compensate, or to get him a lunch at the Blue Fox.

He was wrong about Chinatown, wrong about Chen, and I thought I had a way to prove it. I took the bus to the main library to gather the evidence against him. I'd check the old newspapers, and my faithful bible,
Newsweek
, and I'd show Mr. Saxe that he was getting hysterical over nothing.

The library had terrible acoustics. Every whisper in the reading room bounced off the walls, so I soundproofed my table with a stack of bound magazines piled three and four deep around me. I read through dinner, and through the buffer time, which was the leeway Elizabeth gave us—I read till one hour past deadline, after which we'd better either be dead or have an airtight excuse for not phoning. I knew I could be in serious trouble, but I couldn't stop yet.

Finally, with my head beating like an angry tom-tom, I'd read enough to realize that Mr. Saxe had spared me the real horrors. I rubbed my eyes until my vision blurred, pushed away the stack of books, and left the library. A man with stubble on his chin and a Goodwill-type coat lay sprawled on the bottom step of the library, and I stepped around him. Lights were coming on along Market Street as I walked—in the opposite direction from everyone else, it seemed—to catch my bus home.

But I couldn't go home to the other misfits. Wasn't there anyone in the entire city of San Francisco who was normal? Who came from a regular middle-class family that decorated their Christmas tree with popcorn and cranberry strings? That owned a station wagon and camped at Yellowstone and Grand Canyon in the summer? Whatever happened to the average two-story home with the white priscilla curtains on the second-floor bedroom windows?

I used to study the Sears catalogues that came in the mail. I used to look at the ruffled curtains and knobby maple tables and the flowery-print sofas that opened into double beds, and the toilet-tank covers in blue fluff to match the bath mats. Then I would wonder who bought such things, who lived in homes where the toilets were decorated? Now I thought I'd finally found the secret of Sears, Roebuck, and Co.: no one. The catalogues were pictures to illustrate fairy tales, the big headliner fairy tale being the Great American Dream.

Wasn't it the Great American Dream that brought Old Man to San Francisco? Look at him now—dying in a hospital surrounded by a family two generations deep into American soil, and still poorer than ever, crowded into a shabby apartment. No wonder Old Man refused to learn English. No wonder Wing's father refused to speak it after he learned it.

I did not take the bus home. I went instead to Chinese Hospital. It was well past Old Man's dinner hour, so I knew I wouldn't run into Wing. I walked up the three flights of stairs and reached Old Man's door, out of breath. I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but I felt content just being there.

I heard voices inside the room. Old Man's I recognized. The other? Was it the foreign doctor? Would he be speaking so loud? He wouldn't be speaking in Chinese. It was Chen. They were in a heated argument, neither waiting for the other to finish a sentence. Chen could easily outshout Old Man, but Old Man's voice rose to a frantic pitch to compete.

The voices stopped abruptly, and Chen burst out of the room, bumping right into me. He acted as though he didn't recognize me. All Caucasians must look alike to him.

Two things struck me about Chen. One, he didn't close the door behind him the way Wing did, as though a baby were asleep on the other side. And two, he kept his arms pressed to his sides and his fists clenched, looking as tight as a Chinese tailor with pins in his mouth.

I waited until I was sure Chen would be out of the hospital. I left then, too, and went home to find Pammy lying on the floor, in labor.

12

Just when we needed her most, Elizabeth was over at San Francisco State, for a special social work seminar. Jo kneeled on the floor beside Pammy, with a stopwatch in her hands. Sylvia huddled in her corner of the ring.

“Her water broke,” Jo said, shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders. This must have been significant, but none of us knew why.

“There's a bloody mess on the bathroom floor,” said Sylvia.

“I'm sorry,” Pammy said, as she motioned to Jo.

Click. The stopwatch signaled something, either the beginning or the end of a contraction. Pammy seemed to be in another world. She was cross-eyed, gazing at the ceiling. I looked up to see what she found so fascinating up there. There was some irregular speckle of a gray spot. Was that it?

“You're coming down now,” Jo said in a very soothing tone. “Fifteen seconds, ten, five. You should be feeling it pass by now.” I wondered how she knew all this.

“Hi, Greta,” Pammy said brightly. “Guess what's happening.”

“She can't guess,” Jo said. She kept pulling at a piece of hair and winding it around her finger.

“How far apart was that one?” Pammy asked.

Jo replied, “Just under nine minutes.” She was taking Business Math at school. Was timing contractions part of it?

Pammy wore a thin, pink flannel gown, which stretched tight over her belly. When I picked up the nerve to look at her closely, I could actually see the baby move, squirming around in there, or trying to elbow its way out.

“This is holy, this is so spiritual. This is so much a part of nature,” Sylvia rhapsodized. She tiptoed forward to peek at the wrestling match that was going on inside Pammy. “I'm going to make us some popcorn. I won't butter it or salt it, so it won't be too bad.” She tiptoed off to the kitchen. We had hardwood floors, and they squeaked under her feet. Poor Sylvia, I thought. She was trying so hard to be quiet.

“It sort of hurts,” Pammy said.

Jo moaned, “Oh, Jesus, I'm not up to this.”

I wasn't much good either, but I thought about our exercises on this floor. “How about doing the pelvic rock?” I suggested. It sounded constructive.

Pammy obediently rolled over like a hippo and got on her hands and knees. Her belly hung to the floor as she rocked back and forth. “Actually,” she said, a little out of breath, “my back doesn't hurt.”

“It doesn't hurt now, because you're doing the pelvic rock. But it might, later. This way you'll be prepared.”

Pammy sat up on her knees and signaled Jo. She clicked the stopwatch. Pammy had to bend her head way back to find her favorite speckle on the ceiling. This time I noticed she was taking small, shallow breaths that got faster after a while, then slowed down again. When Jo told her she was down to five seconds, she took two deep breaths, and everything sagged a little.

“Jesus, it's only been about seven minutes,” Jo announced. This must have been a hot news flash, because Pammy nodded soberly and Jo was all red and sweaty. She wiped her sleeve across her forehead. Sylvia and I stood there staring like idiots. I thought about our pioneer sisters who sprang into action when someone took to her childbed. Were we supposed to tear up sheets? Were we supposed to tell her to pull on the spokes of the headboard? What headboard? What bed? She was sprawled on the gold shag rug. What
were
we supposed to do? I flashed on Dan Ackroyd saying, “How many times has this happened to you? You come home after a hard day's work and find a friend having a baby on your living room floor, and there's not a midwife anywhere in sight.”

“All right,” Jo said, “we're going to call Kaiser Hospital to tell them we're on our way.”

“
NO!!
” It was a piercing shriek of a sound. I thought Pammy was having a violent contraction, the kind where you'd pull on the bedposts for dear life until your nails dug into the wood. Jo turned away and bit her nails and pulled at her cuticles. Pammy wasn't yelling with pain, though. She was simply announcing to the world and those outside the known universe that she was
not
going to the hospital to have this baby.

“This is too much,” Jo cried. “This is
too
much.” She grabbed a raincoat out of the front closet. “It's not in my contract to deliver kids, you got it?” She flew out the front door.

“Looks like it's up to you,” Pammy said sweetly. She slid the stopwatch across the floor.

Sylvia returned with a vat of popcorn and four satellite bowls. She pushed popcorn into her mouth by the handful. “Want some?” She offered a bowl to Pammy on the floor.

“No, thanks. I'm just not hungry.”

“Let me have some.” My mouth was full of popcorn, and I thought Pammy wouldn't understand me. “We'd better get her to the hospital.”

Pammy geared up for another howl. I put my hand on her stomach and gently pushed her down. “Don't yell, don't yell.”

“I won't, Greta. But you know how I feel about hospitals. I'm not having this baby in any hospital.”

“I wish Elizabeth were here.” Were social workers trained midwives? I was clearly out of my league. I wasn't even sure how to work a stopwatch.