by Aimee E. Liu
The landlady told them she’d just returned from the wharf where the Salvation Army was setting up a tent city. The refugees already numbered in the thousands. She made no comment when Paul informed her that another guest would be staying overnight.
“These is strange times,” she said, turning away. “Worrisome times. Can’t nothing be the same after a day like today.”
A few minutes later they heard Miss Bertha’s voice rise up out of her bedroom like a long streak of coal dust singing sharp and deep with the love of her Christian lord. Ma and Ho demanded information about Po-yu’s guest. Assuming they would see her eventually, he told the truth.
They both sucked air between their teeth. “Chipa jen!” You are a crazy man.
“Doomed!”
“She can’t stay here—they will chop our cocks off.”
“If you cannot contain your appetites, Liang, you know there are slave girls in Chinatown!”
“I hear Chinatown is burning now.”
“No!”
“I hear everybody has run away.”
At the medical shelter Paul had heard no mention of Chinatown, but Ma claimed the destruction was total: not one block had survived. That meant the offices of the Chinese newspapers, including the Free Press, must also have been destroyed. The loss of the newspapers would cripple the republicans’ political activities. Dr. Sun’s followers would need to work double time to reclaim whatever equipment was salvageable, find a new location, reconstruct a press. As editor, Paul thought, this should be my first concern. And yet…
No water can be pulled from a dry spring. Chinatown’s rebuilding of homes and businesses would drain money and attention away from the revolution in China for weeks, perhaps months to come. People helped only themselves in such times.
3
Paul woke at dawn after a night filled with enough wheezing and moaning to sound a Peking opera. From the small dormer window he could see the continuing climb of smoke, pale gray and black, above San Francisco, blotting the early light. The street in front of the house had come alive with makeshift fires and encampments.
Families in odd combinations of dress clutched whatever they had managed to salvage: tattered pillows, jewelry boxes, one-eyed toys, mewling cats, and caged canaries. They wore nightmare masks, which Paul had seen so often on refugees in China, though he had not thought he would see them here.
Taking care not to rouse the other men, he dressed in the vested herringbone suit he had gathered up after delivering Hope’s supper last night. But when he checked his room now it was empty, and when he got downstairs he found Hope already at the front door, pulling on her gloves. “I’m going back,” she said without looking up. “If Eleanor survived, she’d come home. I should be there.”
A pink crease notched her cheek where it had rested all night against his pillow. Her packed belongings lay at her feet. He took them wordlessly and followed her out.
They could see the transformation all the way from the corner of Telegraph Avenue. Mrs. Layton’s lawn had sprouted mushroom tents. Cooking smoke spiraled up from the side yard, and the verandah was walled with paper bags, boxes, valises, and crates. Babies shrieked from one side of the house. Men wielding tools attacked the other. Women in tarnished evening gowns chattered, while children dressed for a beggars’ banquet ran races back and forth. In an upholstered armchair just inside the front gate sat a woman with matted green hair underneath what appeared to be a dead bird in a nest of shriveled straw. She wore a curious, mawkish smile and wave the singed remains of a Chinese fan back and forth below her chin.
The thought came to Paul of reproductions he had once seen of paintings by the Flemish artist Hieronymus Bosch. Strange images in which humans appeared as small and numerous as insects in a landscape of yawning wounds. The paintings had seemed unlike anything in life, until today.
Only when Hope cried out her name and hurried through the gate did Paul recognize the green-haired woman. He immediately pulled back. Eleanor Layton had no use for him, nor he for her.
“I’m so relieved you’re safe, Eleanor,” said Hope, “but who are all these people?”
“We’re the wedding!” A small, sharp-voiced girl glared at Hope.
“The Mackays,” Mrs. Layton nodded toward the gathering by the house, “and the Breckinridges.”
“They made everybody leave the hotel when the fires came,” the girl started up again, whirling as she talked. “We had to walk and walk to get away and then we had to wait forever before Papa could find a boat to take us. It stank of dirty fish and it was after midnight when we came here. I had to sleep on the grass with my cousin Delbert snoring in my ear. Uh oh. Dizzy!” She fell dramatically, arms overhead.
“My great-niece Jennifer.” Mrs. Layton shook her head at the prostrate child. “So now that you know our story, Hope, tell me where have you been, leaving my house in such a shambles?”
Hope shrugged, speaking into the wind. “With a friend.”
But looking back now, she saw no sign of him. There was a team of shirt-sleeved men at the gate, hauling lumber. Nearby, two little boys tore up tufts of grass and threw them at each other. Hammering poured from the house, women’s voices from the side yard. Hope scanned up and down the street, to the edges of the garden, among more clusters of children playing marbles and jumping rope. There must be twenty people here, or more. But Paul had disappeared.
She told herself it was for the best. She had not intended for him to come in the first place. It was quite disturbing enough to have slept in his scent all night, and there was no reason for him to be here. But this way he had of appearing and vanishing made her fitful. And he had her clothes—that journal, which she should have burned as soon as she wrote his name. How could he have left!
“Yes, I saw your Rapunzel rope and ladder.” Eleanor grinned. “You’re a wicked one, you are, but I’m glad you’ve come to your senses.”
Hope only half heard her. She was remembering Paul’s face leaning over her last night, the dazzle of heat that shot through her when he stroked her upturned wrist. She shuddered, forced her attention back to the situation at hand. Yesterday she had heard reports of flames tall as Russian Hill, buildings exploding from the heat, streets melting into rivers of liquid macadam. Trampled children. Police shooting to kill anyone who crossed them. She looked at her landlady’s tattered clothing—that mangled hat!
“I shouldn’t have pushed you to go into the city, Eleanor. It must have been an agony over there.”
“Agh! We were lucky. An adventure I’ll never forget. Excitement’s grand when you’ve come out of it alive. Besides, my house will soon be good as new, and I’ll have a family to fill it at last.”
“What do you mean?”
Eleanor waved her fan toward the group by the verandah. “You see that broad-shouldered man up there and the tall, pretty woman beside him. That’s Reggie and Stella Mackay, and eight of these children are theirs. They barely got out of their house on Dupont, poor things, and Reggie’s saying he’ll never go back, so I told him, why not live here with me?” She smiled at Hope. “You know I always wanted children.”
“But where will we put them all?”
The landlady winked. “Good you’re moving out, dear.”
Hope struggled to reconstruct the day before the quake. Eleanor had left a good half-hour before Collis arrived, so she couldn’t possibly be referring to Hope’s engagement…
At the other end of the house the bride wailed and broke free from a man who had been trying to embrace her. She tripped on her long train and sank to the ground shuddering like a crippled moth. Eleanor said, “That’s Prudence and Robert. Poor thing insists it’s bad luck to change out of that gown—however soiled—until they’ve seen this wedding through. As if she could have any more bad luck.”
Hope looked away. She had read in National Geographic that Chinese brides always dressed in red, with one notable exception. If the groom died before his wedding, the bride was still expected to become
his widow and his parents’ obedient daughter-in-law, so a spirit wedding was held. Only on this occasion, when a girl was marrying a dead man, would the wedding garments be white.
“Hope!”
It was Collis, coming across the street.
“There’s your shining knight. Could be a double wedding, Hope,” Eleanor suggested. “Preacher’s on his way.”
“Double wedding!” That annoying little girl clapped and spun toward the house.
Hope opened her mouth, but the wind silenced her. The same wind that was driving the fires, leveling the city.
The widow rolled her eyes. “Already one night into it. Tongues’ll wag if you don’t tie the knot now.”
Finally it dawned on her. No wonder Eleanor had received her with such relish.
Collis rushed through the gate. His trousers were spattered with mud, his shirt collar half out of his jacket, and he’d misbuttoned himself so one lapel flopped over his hastily knotted tie, but he had that tie on and, as he neared them, he straightened his gray Dunlap derby as if making a formal call.
Hope cast one last glance down the street, though she could not have said whether she was dreading or praying Paul would be there. It didn’t matter. He was gone.
“Where in hell have you been, Hope? I spent all night searching, out of my mind with worry.”
She moved away from Eleanor to meet him. “Collis, I’m sorry—”
“Took hours to get here, and no sign of you.” He put his hand on her shoulder, and she flinched. His tone altered. “It’ll be all right, Hope. You’re safe now—”
The width and height of him closed around her like the walls of a tomb. Safe. She was anything but safe. She pressed her cheek into the gray of his shoulder as he talked on in that possessive tone and held her, and she said nothing. But around them the wind continued to blow, whipping at the treetops, lashing the long green branches of the willow outside the gate. And suddenly, from beneath those branches, Paul appeared. He had been watching her all along.
She tried to shake her head, to signal him that what he saw had nothing to do with her, that it was another girl in Chesterton’s embrace, but Paul made no further movement or gesture. Do what you will, he seemed to say. What you have to.
No one can make you do anything you don’t choose for yourself.
She brought her hands up flat against Collis’s chest and roughly pushed him away. His eyes gave off a brief, injured spark, then retreated to their persistent dullness as he mistook her rejection for spunkiness. “There’s my girl,” he coaxed.
She quickly scanned the yard and saw that no one else had noticed Paul, though she and Collis had everyone’s attention. A line of women near the pump were shading their eyes for a better view, the children were loudly smacking their lips, and Eleanor was clucking like a matron of honor. Only the man they did not see understood the true meaning of Hope’s withdrawal. He revealed this understanding through the slow shift of her belongings in the crook of his arm, the quiet parting of his lips. He never took his eyes off her.
She drew her purse from her cloak pocket. “I’ve made a mistake,” she said.
Collis gave her a benevolent smile. “Mistake?”
“I can’t marry you.”
Collis watched her as if he hadn’t heard. “What are you doing?”
“Here.” Hope reached for his hand and pushed into it the ring she had found in her stocking that morning.
“She’s mad,” shrilled Eleanor, starting forward. “Don’t believe a word she says, Professor.”
“Mrs. Layton, please!” Collis bellowed and lifted the back of his hand, stopping himself within inches of her face. Eleanor shook all over like a dog and grabbed her great-niece as if to shield herself against further insult.
“What is it, Aunt,” said the oblivious child as she was being steered away. “Double wedding?”
“Not on my property, it’s not,” muttered Eleanor. “Come away, all you children. Let them clean up their own mess.”
“What’s happened to you, Hope?” said Collis when the landlady was out of earshot. “Where were you last night?”
“Don’t use that condescending tone. I didn’t suffer a blow to the head, and I have not taken leave of my senses.”
“You were perfectly happy to marry me the day before yesterday.”
“Was I?” She didn’t dare look at Paul for fear that Collis would follow her eyes, but she could feel him tensed and waiting, measuring every move.
“So you led me to believe.”
“You’ve been too good, Collis.” She swallowed. “It’s no fault of yours.”
“Well that makes all the difference, doesn’t it?”
She glared at him. “You force me to say I don’t love you!”
He laughed. Fat tears glistened in the corners of his eyes. He brushed them away with the back of his wrist and looked down at the ring he was still holding, as if mystified by its presence. “I never said love was a condition.”
For the first time it occurred to Hope that Collis would have been as miserable with her as she would have been with him.
From the corner of the yard a lilting, little boy’s voice started up the old nursery chant—“Chinky chinky Chinaman! Yellow-face, pigtail rat-eater!”—but Collis, already turning away, paid no attention. He batted his arms back in Hope’s direction. When she failed to stop him, he kept walking. Only when he turned outside the gate did he notice Paul standing before him.
“You might have known there’d be no lesson today, Liang.” Collis went on a few paces, then paused and looked at his hand, glanced back, and tossed the ring into the dirt at Paul’s feet.
4
They walked quickly, urgently uphill, kicking dust and sending gravel skittering from beneath their heels, and were soon breathing hard with exertion at the steep incline. Had she been with a different man, in other circumstances, Hope might have reached for his elbow or hand, leaned against him to ease the climb. But even when they had passed well beyond the last house into the higher pastures where their sole witnesses were grazing cattle, she kept her hands to herself and maintained a distance of several feet. Occasionally they would glance at each other, sparking mutual confusion. Hope would blush violently and yank the brim of her fedora back down. Paul would tip his face to the clouds. Neither spoke.
After twenty minutes without crossing another human being, they arrived at the skirt of forest below Grizzly Peak. Here the canopy of cypress and eucalyptus formed a shady den where Hope had often come to write in her journal or simply admire the view, which stretched all the way across the Bay. Today it was a view of disasters. The sunken rooftops of their own broken city. The harbor clotted with boats. The remains of San Francisco crouching beneath a mountain of smoke so enormous and black that by rights it should swallow the entire sky. But it didn’t. Here, where they stood, the morning sun shone hard and polished as silver, and shade fell clean as rain.
Hope scooted herself up onto the flat of a boulder and drew her knees to her chin. Paul laid the bundle he had been carrying beside her. For a moment he stood near enough that she imagined she could feel the heat from his body, but then he stepped back.
He held up the ring that Collis had thrown at his feet. “What do you call this?”
She tugged off her gloves with fierce attention. “Collis called it an engagement ring. You may call it whatever you like. It’s yours now.”
“Why do you decide this way?”
“Not to marry him, you mean?”
He nodded.
“I don’t love him.” She yanked a handful of the tall grass growing beside the boulder. “I tried to, but I couldn’t.”
Paul slid the ring back into his pocket. “But first you agree?”
“Yes.”
“Your family will be displeased?”
“My family!”
“In China, when a man wish to marry, he will ask go-between to make arrangement with family. Your family …?”
“There’s on
ly my father.” She chewed on her lower lip, considering. “He’s never met Collis, but he’s a romantic at heart. He’ll understand.”
“Romantic.”
She ripped apart the grass she’d been braiding. “He wouldn’t really want me to marry someone like Collis.”
“Why do you choose this day to say no?”
“I—” She winced. “You know why.”
“I see my name in your notebook.”
“You did read it, then.”
“I see my name. The rest—your markings are like knots.”
A wave of relief swept through her. She laughed. “Yes, you’re right, they are.”
“If a man does not ask father, then how it is done?”
“What do you mean, Paul?”
“I wish to marry you.”
The combination of this proposal’s bluntness and its impossibility caused her to pull away, but he reached up and caught her wrists, drew her down toward him. His arms went around her back, and she was surrounded again by the warmth of his body, inhaled the same sweet spice that had disturbed her sleep all night.
“No!” she cried. “Paul, we mustn’t.”
“Why no?” he said softly.
But his closeness crippled her powers of reason, and for a second, two, she was so lost in the sensation of his breath on her ear that she could not imagine an answer. Then he started to pull her nearer, and she blurted out, “It’s against the law!”
“Pu,” he whispered. “Not in Wyoming.”
She arched her back, abruptly rational, and stared at his long boyish lashes, that confident gaze. “What are you saying?”
He stroked her eyelids. Her nose. Her lips. She waited.
He slipped off her hat, touched her hair. “In Wyoming is allowed. We go there, marry.”
“But marriage … children—”
“We will have beautiful children,” he murmured.
And suddenly she was crying. He took her face between his hands. “Do not be afraid, Hsin-hsin.”
