Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  The intensity of his gaze, his voice was like a promise. She realized she trusted him absolutely. Then he squeezed his eyes as if testing whether this could really be happening. It was this that lifted the last of her defenses and drove her to kiss him.

  Swift and breathless, she had to go up on her toes to reach his mouth, stayed barely long enough to register the surprised softness of his lips and their dark, salty flavor, but as she dropped back he bent forward, catching her up again. Suddenly she was breathing him, tasting and touching, her hands amazed at the smoothness of his cheeks and throat and hair, and she felt his desire so keenly that it became indistinguishable from her own.

  III

  WEDDING

  FROM BERKELEY TO EVANSTON, WYOMING

  (1906)

  1

  May 2, 1906

  c/o Mary Jane Lockyear

  57 Hawthorne

  Oakland

  Dearest Dad,

  I trust you received my telegram all right and are not sitting up there in Oregon—or racing down here!—full of worry about your daughter. The Quake was very dramatic, like some great bucking bronco had gotten underneath the earth’s skin. But Berkeley came through without a single fire and few injuries. I was shaken, but not harmed. As you can see by the return address, I’ve been staying with Mary Jane Lockyear since the disaster. Eleanor Layton needed the room for her homeless relatives from across the Bay. Yes, she does have some nerve but I prefer it here, truth be told, as the company is considerably more enlightened than Eleanor. Mary Jane has taken in several of us unmoored friends, and we’re all for the Vote and more humane treatment of the colored races, so conversation is not the chore it was with Eleanor.

  But here’s the big surprise. Are you sitting down?

  I’m getting married, and it’s not to Collis Chesterton. (I should never have led you on about him—I never loved him at all and would have been miserable married to him.) My future husband’s name is Paul. Paul Leon. He’s an educated man—a graduate student at Berkeley—and his family is enormously wealthy. They live abroad and will surely be as surprised as you when they learn of our plans. I know it’s sudden, but perhaps you’ll understand when I tell you Paul saved my life. That’s a bit dramatic, but if he hadn’t come along and gotten a ladder up, I might still be trapped on the third floor of Eleanor’s house! The staircase collapsed during the Quake, you see, and I had no way to get down on my own.

  Now, Dad, thanks to Paul, I am safe and healthy and happy and soon to be a married lady, and we fully intend to entertain you like royalty the next time you venture out of the mountains, but I would feel beastly to make you come all that way just to watch us tie the knot, and as none of his family will be on hand either, we have decided to join a group of chums for a quick and simple ceremony later this month. With the whole Bay Area still digging out, no one is in a mood for grand celebrations, so you mustn’t feel you’re missing much. By the time you read this, the deed will be done.

  By the time I next see you I hope to be ensconced in a lovely home of our own with room for you to visit.

  I do so miss you, Dad, but I know you will approve of Paul. Please wish us well.

  Your loving daughter,

  Hope

  She lied. Not just about Paul, but about Mary Jane. Those interim weeks were anything but rosy as Hopes dearest friend did all in her power to discourage this marriage, enlisting everyone else in the house to campaign against it as well. For one part of Hope’s letter to her father was accurate: she did have lively and unusual company in her temporary home. Dorothea Marr, the French literature scholar, had founded the Mills College suffrage group. Antonia Laws wore an eye patch and smoked a pipe, and Antonia’s younger sister Anne spent her youth as a rodeo rider. These were no more the primrose princesses of Berkeley society than was Mary Jane, but each in turn took Hope aside and appealed to her “horse sense,” her “superior feminine wisdom,” her “uncommon intellect,” her “independent nature,” her “able character,” and—Hope’s favorite, coming from the black-patched Antonia—her “impressive moral breeding.” They warned of irreversible consequences. Hope would be persecuted. Ridiculed. She would live in poverty. She would lose her country and her birthright. Paul will try to convert you, Mary Jane predicted. He’ll have you cooking eel and bear paw. He’ll put you in silk robes and expect you to follow five paces behind, or worse, keep you locked up for fear other men might see you.

  “I can see how much you love him, Hope,” she said when all other arguments failed. “That’s none of my business, and I heartily apologize if I ever said anything mean in that regard. But it’ll take more than love if you marry this man. The world’s not going to change just because you’ve decided it should. And it could be brutal in its refusal.”

  Hope stayed with Mary Jane for want of anywhere else to go. Paul’s boarding house was now filled with Miss Miles’s San Francisco friends and relatives, and Paul no longer had his own room. Besides, she dreaded being seen with him. Chaos had buffered them the day of the Quake, but order had been restored now, and the tedium of relocation and rebuilding only made people greedy for gossip. Talk in the markets was full of scandals about adulterers caught with their mistresses in the Quake, or prominent citizens seen fleeing bordellos, or the haste of certain marriages among refugees in the tent cities. But the talk had a darker edge, as well. People were worried about all those thousands of Chinatown Chinese who would relocate in Oakland if no one stopped them.

  More than that, said a puffy-faced woman in the grocer’s one day, since the immigration files had burned in the fires, all the Chinamen were now claiming they’d been born here, that they were American citizens. Who could tell which ones were lying? There’d be no way to get rid of the yellows now.

  Sure enough, answered her companion, her husband had the way to get rid of ’em, and it stood loaded with the trigger cocked next to his bed.

  The Yellow Peril was glowering again, as it had twenty years earlier at the height of the anti-Chinese fever. Hope knew that if she and Paul ventured out together now, their feelings for each other would be visible to everyone they passed. Even when out on her own she felt as if she were wearing a scarlet letter. M for miscegenist.

  She told herself none of this would matter once she and Paul were wed, that the legal and religious institution of marriage would be their shield. In the meantime, they visited privately, with restraint, in the small enclosed sun room behind Mary Jane’s parlor. The oak settee would creak, the golden dust motes fly, and the world’s disapproval settle between them like a cold snap. Paul kept his hat in his lap and his boot heels clamped together, the rimless glasses on the tip of his nose aging him by decades. Hope occupied her hands packing charity baskets for the refugees, and they would talk, not of love—never love—or intention or the craving for each other’s skin that underscored everything, but of their future as the logistical enterprise it had become. Eight hundred miles was no mere possibility but the actual distance between this room and the line that would set them free. The multifaceted problem of crossing that line only made it seem more tangible, the ultimate goal of marrying more real. And every new difficulty that presented itself served to drive Hope more stubbornly to Paul’s side.

  They had between them barely one hundred dollars, not including the value of Collis’s ring, which Hope insisted Paul keep in his possession. If and when the San Francisco bank where Paul did his business rebuilt itself and honored past accounts, he would have access to another fifty or so, and in mid-June he would receive his quarterly stipend of two hundred dollars from home. He could wire his family for emergency support, but there were complications there. Although he was reluctant to state the problem directly, Hope understood that the Chinese could be every bit as racist, particularly when it came to white women marrying their sons, as Americans were toward Chinese. Paul was convinced his mother would do everything in her power to block their marriage, and since his father had died and she held the family purse strings,
her first recourse would be to cut him off financially.

  Having supported herself since she was eighteen, Hope encouraged Paul to write the truth and let his mother do her worst. They were so many thousands of miles away, and there were plenty of students for Hope to tutor, even without Collis Chesterton’s referral, and once the Free Press resumed publication, Paul would have his salary.

  “We’ll manage,” she assured him.

  “You do not understand,” he said.

  That first of so many times he spoke those words he was standing in a flood of late afternoon sun with his hands clasped behind him as if manacled. He had his back to her. There was no anger in his voice, never anger, but such sadness, a resignation that rose like a thick pane of glass between them. She wanted to hurl herself at it, smash it with promises of freedom and love. She wanted to bury her face in his shoulder.

  “No,” she said, keeping her distance. “I don’t suppose I do.”

  He sent no news to China; their one hundred dollars was more than enough to pay for their journey to Wyoming. But there were further considerations besides money. The permissiveness of Wyoming law toward mixed marriage was at odds with the state’s history toward Chinese. Some twenty years earlier the white miners in a town called Rock Springs had, in broad daylight, attacked their Celestial counterparts, burning down their tents, shooting dozens in the back, and running hundreds out of town. It seemed to Hope that, rather than simply set off blind, she and Paul had better first locate a minister of the peace who recognized the current latitude of the law and agreed in advance to uphold it. Through his network of Chinese Freemasons, fellow revolutionists, students, and journalists, Paul learned of two other mixed couples in the area, and a plan quickly unfolded for this “group of chums” to make the expedition as a single wedding party. A Berkeley law graduate named Donald Lim, engaged to a young Irish dressmaker, had already contacted a Presbyterian minister who would marry them in Evanston, the first stop on the Union Pacific over the Wyoming border. Reverend Leander C. Hills had written that he held no grudges against the Orientals or against couples in love, and since Wyoming required none of the standard waiting periods other states required, Donald and his friends could be married and back on the train in a matter of hours. It was decided that the wedding should take place on the last Tuesday in May.

  2

  Hope and Paul arrived at the Oakland terminal at six on the morning of their departure, though the dense fog made it feel more like evening. The surrounding ships, ferries, and trains were visible only as looming shadows, and the figures of porters and dockworkers appeared and faded like ghosts. Hope half wished the fog would swallow her and Paul as well, at least until they were boarded and underway. As it was, they skirted the passenger waiting rooms and went directly to the platform nearest the train, where they found the rest of their “wedding party” also just arriving.

  Paul and the other two men exchanged broad smiles and greeted each other with energetic nods. They all wore similar dark Western suits and carefully brushed and banded black derbies over cropped haircuts. At a glance, they might have been brothers. The women, however, eyed each other with reserve and waited to be introduced.

  “Please, ladies,” Paul said, “I am—” He hesitated, glancing to Hope, then straightened his shoulders. “I am Paul Liang. And my—This Hope Newfield.”

  Hope smiled inwardly at Paul’s struggle over the appropriate graces, language, and role description, but she maintained her surface composure. Here, then, was the law student Donald Lim, a skinny, tense boy-man, and his Irish dressmaker, Sarah. She was beautiful, in an edgy way, with hard green eyes and bright auburn hair, and a smile that Hope didn’t trust. She laughed as Donald introduced her and insisted on shaking everyone’s hand. This befuddled the third couple, a barrel-chested dry goods merchant named Ong Ben Joe and his Kathe, a round and ruddy Scandinavian who spoke English even more haltingly than Ong. These two, Hope recalled Paul telling her, had met while trudging toward the Presidio to escape the Great Fire. Ong had won Kathe’s confidence by standing guard outside her tent and by carrying wherever they went the big oil painting of swans that was her prized possession.

  Now, as the men drifted off, Hope recounted the story and asked Kathe who had painted the picture. She was only asking for the sake of conversation, but Kathe frowned in all seriousness and answered, “I do not know.”

  Sarah wondered aloud, “Why go to such lengths to save it, then?”

  Hope said, “Maybe she likes swans.”

  “Risk her neck and marry a Chinaman all because she fancies the pretty white birds!” Sarah whooped at the thought.

  Hope looked to Paul for moral support and found him leaning against a lamp post. They had agreed to maintain a certain distance, there was to be no touching, no display, no public evidence of their intentions. But he was watching her. Go on, he seemed to say, bite back.

  “And how did you and Donald meet?” Hope asked Sarah as Paul turned back to the men.

  Sarah replied curtly, “Donald and I met five years ago on the sailboat of a mutual friend. We disliked each other on sight, but our paths kept crossing until we had no choice but to marry.”

  The train whistle blew. Across the platform a cluster of squatting, queued coolie miners wolfed down the last of their breakfast. Surely no white woman would marry a Chinese if she felt she had a choice, thought Hope, but Sarah spoke as though someone were forcing her. Between this Irishwoman’s coarseness and Kathe’s limited English, there seemed little chance of friendship, which was a pity considering all they had—or would have—in common. As Hope gathered up her valises and handed the hamper of food and water to Paul, she felt a stab of loneliness. The conductors’ swinging arms were directing them toward the second-class Pullmans at the middle of the train. For reasons of economy and propriety, Paul would leave her there and go on with the other men to the coach section. She was to travel alone with these two strangers. On her wedding journey.

  Before they could reach the Pullmans, however, crowds of passengers swarmed out of the depot and, for the first time, Hope experienced the attention she had been dreading all this past month. Eyes screwed open and closed like jar lids, chins swerved and dove back toward them. Women wagged their heads in disbelief, and Hope steeled herself against the same unabashed stares she had seen on Kansas cowboys, the same filthy sneers the Beasley brothers flashed when they rolled her into the dirt.

  She whirled, pretending to shield her eyes from a flying cinder. Paul had fallen behind, or she would have scorned them all by grabbing his arm. Instead she plowed into Kathe, sent the heavy blond sprawling headlong into the squatting coolies.

  What happened next Hope saw as a series of images stacked like segments of a dream. There were the stricken, invaded expressions on the journeymen’s faces, Donald and Ben Joe reaching among them, Kathe like a tumbled ninepin. Then a conductor materialized out of the mist. He had feral eyes and grimaced as he shoved the scholar and merchant away. The men bent together, all those hairless, unshaven cheeks conferring, the crude sling of their language. And Paul… Where was Paul? Behind her somewhere, she couldn’t see him, only Kathe now leaning against Ben Joe and the dawning revulsion on the conductor’s mouth, the peasants with their rope-belted pants hastily packing bowls and chopsticks into baskets, as appalled as the conductor by the sight of a white woman on a Chinaman’s arm.

  Hope wavered. She started to back away, but Sarah caught her, turned her, green eyes blazing. “Get used to it,” she said. “Or quit now.”

  Hope let Sarah’s unexpected heat whip her. Not another word was uttered. By the time Paul caught up with them, her pulse was no longer pounding in her ears.

  “I—” She fumbled for some explanation to ease the concern in his eyes. “I thought I heard the whistle blow, and—” Sarah rolled her eyes and marched back to Donald. Hope began again, “I’m nervous, Paul. I panicked. I’m sorry.”

  He studied her. “I am sorry. You should have true wedding. Friend
s. Family—”

  “I wish I could kiss you. Or just hold your hand.”

  “I know.”

  “But it’s forbidden.”

  “Three days, Hope.” He smiled.

  “Three long days.”

  He looked down at the ticket in his hand. “This your car.”

  Their fingers brushed in the transfer of her bags, and then she was standing between Sarah and Kathe, watching from their compartment window as Paul and Ben Joe and Donald waved and walked away. She thought of how Paul had persuaded her that he and his friends had chosen to ride third class. The women should be comfortable, he had said, but the men had no difficulty sleeping in their seats. When she had tried to discuss it, he provoked a quarrel about the color of her wedding gown that ended with his making her a gift of the ruby peach silk she had fashioned into matching waist and skirt now packed in their own special carpetbag. She hadn’t given the rail accommodations another thought until this moment.

  This moment when she realized, leaning from her window and squinting against the fog, that that snarling conductor was automatically shunting all Chinese together, from her future husband and his friends right down to the last of those pantalooned laborers, to the same third-class car at the end of the line.

  The women settled into the narrow wood-paneled confines of their compartment with few words among them. Kathe pressed her nose into a Swedish dime novel. Sarah flipped through the pages of Vogue. You would think, Hope thought as she rocked from side to side, that they made this trip all the time.

  She took out the new Moroccan-bound journal bought especially to record her wedding journey, but after several false starts, she laid down her pencil and felt inside her hidden belt pouch for the gold band her father had given her on her sixteenth birthday. “If you take this as your wedding ring when the time comes,” he told her, “I guarantee your marriage will be blessed.” There had been tears in his eyes. The ring was inscribed To my beloved Jennie. Always. And yet, Hope thought darkly, in spite of this ring, in spite of a husband’s eternal love, her mother had died at the age of twenty-one, her marriage not two years old. There were no guarantees.