City of God

by Swerling, Beverly

  “Aye, right enough.”

  The man disappeared. Sam stood staring straight ahead, trying not to see the human misery that surrounded him. The smell, however, could not be ignored. He fished out a handkerchief and pressed it to his nose. Someone tugged at his trouser leg and he looked down, expecting to see a child. It was a man with no legs, supporting his torso on a wheeled wooden platform. His hands were shackled to the contraption with just enough length of chain to allow him to push himself about. “I am a king sir,” the man whispered. “Of a distant country. If you will take word of my imprisonment to my people, you will be handsomely rewarded.”

  “What? Yes, yes, of course. I’ll go right now.” Sam opened the door and stepped outside into the fresh air. He took a few deep breaths, but however welcome they were, he couldn’t remain out here. Turner would think he’d left. He pushed the door open again just as his cousin was coming down the stairs.

  “It is you,” Nick said. “I thought it must be some sort of mistake when I was handed your card.”

  “No mistake.” Sam kept his voice low. The legless man was trying again to get his attention, but Sam ignored him. “Look, I’m in desperate trouble and I don’t know where else to turn. My buggy’s just outside the gate. Will you come with me?”

  “Trouble? But I—”

  “You doctors take an oath, don’t you? Can’t refuse anyone who needs you.”

  “I don’t need an oath to tell me my duty. But surely you have your own doctor to call on.”

  “There isn’t time to explain. For the love of God, man. You can’t refuse me.”

  Nick hesitated then said, “Wait right here. I’ll get my bag.”

  When they were in Devrey’s buggy and heading south, he asked, “Is it your wife?” Cousin Manon had shared the details of Devrey’s domestic life. “I take it the midwife can’t cope.”

  “It’s not my wife. At least, not the way you mean.”

  Nick stared at him a moment, then looked away.

  “No come in. No come in.” Taste Bad stood at the door to Mei-hua’s apartment, resisting Ah Chee’s efforts to pull him inside. He had not wanted to come even this far; it had taken some time for Leper Face Lee to persuade him. “Do nothing for tai-tai unless Lord Samuel say. When the lord comes back, when his tongue say come in, Taste Bad come in.”

  “What kind of yi you are?” Ah Chee demanded. “Devil yi, just like they say. My lady sick, very too much yin. Needs yi. You come inside give her something make pain go away.” Mei-hua had expelled the bloody clotted mass that would have been a son in screaming agony minutes after the Lord Samuel left. Ah Chee had thrown the thing on the kitchen fire. Tomorrow she would light a dozen joss sticks to purify the room for Zao Shen, the kitchen god, whose picture hung above the hearth. Right now there were more pressing duties. “You come inside,” she insisted, tugging once more at Taste Bad’s arm. “Give tai-tai something make more yang. Make tai-tai feel better.”

  Leper Face, standing a few feet behind them on the stairs, was the first to hear the street door open and shut. He leaned over the bannister, peering down to the hall. “Lord Samuel come. Bring someone.”

  Taste Bad yanked himself away from Ah Chee and turned and fled down the stairs, disappearing into a doorway on the floor below just as Sam and Nick came into sight. Leper Face bowed repeatedly as the two men rushed by him. “How is she?” Sam demanded, pushing past Ah Chee in the doorway.

  “Tai-tai not good. Much pain.”

  Sam felt a rush of relief. She was still alive. “Then why in hell aren’t you with her instead of standing out here? I saw Taste Bad leave. Did he give her anything?”

  “No, No. Not without lord’s permission.”

  Nick, who understood nothing of what was said, stood just inside the door taking in the colorful, exotic furnishing of the extraordinary room. There couldn’t be another like it in all New York. “Where’s my patient?”

  “In here.” Samuel led him to the bedroom. Mei-hua lay on her side in the bed. Her skirt and jacket had been removed and she wore a loose silk robe. Her knees were folded up to her chest. She hugged them, moaning softly and rocking back and forth. Sam put his hand on her forehead; it was hot and dry. Dear God, if anything happened to her…“I’m here, my love. I’ve brought you a proper doctor. He’ll soon have you well.” He straightened and turned to Nick. “You’ll have seen this sort of thing before, I’m sure.”

  “An abortion gone bad? Yes, plenty of times.” Nick took off his coat and began rolling up his sleeves. “Is there water here? And some soap?”

  Sam shouted to Ah Chee to bring both. Nick stood waiting. “Aren’t you going to examine her? I can leave if you…”

  “Stay or go. Please yourself. I shall not examine the lady until I’ve washed my hands.”

  Sam started to protest, but Ah Chee arrived with the soap and a basin of water. Nick washed his hands carefully, then went to his patient. Mei-hua moaned in pain when he touched her, and Sam hastily backed out of the room.

  “She miscarried very recently,” Nick said. “Not long before we arrived, I warrant, though I saw no sign of the fetus.” He cast a quick look at the old servant woman, wondering if she’d performed the abortion, but he knew better than to ask. “I took care of the afterbirth, cleaned her up, and stopped the bleeding. There’s every reason to believe she will be fine. Incidentally, the uterus seems intact. It frequently is not after these procedures, but in this case”—he shrugged—“she can probably have more children. If that’s of any importance to you.”

  “Look, none of this is what it seems. I care deeply for Mei-hua. I was in China for years, you know, and—”

  “It’s no business of mine,” Nick interrupted. “Though aborting a pregnancy is illegal now. You must know, since you sit on the council.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And?”

  Sam shrugged.

  “You won’t be reporting the abortionist to the authorities, then?” Nick asked.

  “I can’t—” Samuel broke off and looked toward the bedroom. “And you…The law is fairly recent, you know. But she hadn’t quickened. I’m sure of that. You need not—”

  “No, I need not.”

  “Thank you.” If Turner had stood on the legalities and demanded to know the abortionist’s name, there would have been a scandal and hell to pay. It might even have made the papers. Carolina…Christ, what a mess. “Thank you very much.”

  “No need.” Nick pulled on his coat and hefted his bag. “Go in and see her if you like. I’ll find my own way uptown.”

  Chapter Six

  THE BAMBOO ROD broke at the twelfth blow. It was only the third to land on Ah Chee’s bent shoulders. She was an easy target, kneeling alone in the center of the room, accepting the punishment as her due, but Mei-hua had flailed at nearly everything else. The floor was littered with splintered china and shattered glass. Now, holding the stub of bamboo, she stopped cursing and broke into tears. “Promise. Promise. I fix. I fix. You said. Now my belly is empty and my son is dead. Useless old woman.” She flung what was left of the rod across the room. It bounced off a large jade statue of Fu Xing the god of happiness and landed on the floor among the other remains of her rage.

  Ah Chee, who had been expecting this tantrum for the three weeks since the plum blossom’s son was taken from her belly, got to her feet and went to the kitchen, returning with a small corn husk broom and a big pail. “Yang gwei zih yi, doctor with hair the color of first-part-of-the-flow-blood say you will have another son. I heard him.”

  “He does not speak any civilized words. I tried and he did not understand me.” Mei-hua sat in the lacquered throne chair and lifted her legs so that Ah Chee could sweep beneath them.

  Ah Chee giggled. “Old useless woman speaks the yang gwei zih words.” She shook her head over the broken bits of a particularly pretty lapis lazuli vase and dumped them into the pail.

  It was one of the things Mei-hua had puzzled about all the while she lay abed reco
vering. “I saw you give devil woman money, but words too. Why did she take your money and stab my son to death anyway? Why?”

  “Who knows why foreign devil woman does things? I have burned twenty joss sticks that she may have boils in twenty places. All over her privates.” Every time she lit incense on behalf of the plum blossom’s healing, she added a stick for vengeance.

  Mei-hua looked thoughtful. “You can really understand the foreign devil words?”

  “Only some of them,” Ah Chee admitted. “Always when I go to the market, I practice. Learn to say more. Sometimes easier to say than to hear.”

  Mei-hua nodded. When she still lived on the sampan of her father, she had been tutored in English. It had proved impossible to learn. Sometimes she could make her tongue form the strange sounds, but she could almost never make her ears hear them; always they were noise without meaning. No matter, the Lord Samuel had said. It is not important. You are my princess, whether or not you learn the words of my kingdom. No matter. No matter. But it did matter. Only now was she learning how much. “I should go to the market with you,” she said. “Learn to speak foreign devil language.”

  Ah Chee nodded toward the plum blossom’s three-inch golden lilies. “How you walk on these rock streets? Besides, tai-tai does not go to market.”

  “Rock streets.” That was another of the things she had been thinking of in these three weeks of misery. “When Lord Samuel took us to that place. The houses we saw all nicer than this house. Why tai-tai not in best house? Lord Samuel gives you half a string of copper cash every week to buy food. Very rich man. Why tai-tai not have best house in city?”

  Ah Chee’s heart fell into her belly, just as it used to do when the plum blossom was a child and demanded to know if she was to be sent away from the sampans of her father and everything familiar to her, as the other women said she would be. How to answer? Ah Chee’s own mother had told her that when she did not tell the truth her tongue got shorter. Enough lies and she would have no tongue at all and be silent forever. Maybe go, maybe stay, she had told the girl back then. Who knows anything for sure? “You think any house more beautiful inside than this one? Have pretty things. Now you break them all. Stupid girl. Stupid.” She swept up the last of the mess and dumped it in the bucket, then picked it up and started to go.

  “Wait. You are not speaking true words, old woman. I am not a child to tell maybe this, maybe that. Now I am tai-tai. Why I am not in most beautiful house in this New York place? Why?”

  Ah Chee shook her head and grumbled something under her breath. In the kitchen she dumped the pail of shards into an even bigger pail of rubbish. When that was full, she would pull it as far as the front hall and the man they called Empty Buckets would come and take it away. In the big house far away in the part of the city the foreign devils called up the town—even further than the house of the devil woman whose privates must now be so full of boils she could neither sit nor stand—would there be civilized people to do such things as take away full buckets of rubbish? People who would understand who was the plum blossom tai-tai and how much respect she deserved? Probably not. That must be why the tai-tai was here and the giant size yellow hair concubine was in a far up the town house. One made of stone not wood, with a tree in front whose waving branches kept away evil spirits, so the feng shui would be perfect and evil devil woman not break her promise and steal the child out of her belly. Very bad if concubine have son before tai-tai. Very bad.

  Ah Chee gazed up at the picture of the kitchen god and reached for a joss stick. Then, on second thought, two more.

  “Thank you for meeting me here,” Sam said.

  “No trouble at all.” The boat yard was on Thirty-fourth Street and the East River. Nick could look downstream a short way and see the Bellevue dock. According to Cousin Manon, in the summer of ’32, when the cholera was raging and the streets were thick with the smoke of bonfires burning everything the sick had touched, victims were ferried upriver and simply dumped in a heap on that dock. New York Hospital flatly refused to admit cholera patients. Bellevue took in two thousand, warding them in tents pitched on the shoreline. The dead house sometimes held as many as forty bodies at a time because no one was available to bury them.

  It was May, and spring was in full bud and blossom. If this summer of ’34 was to bring another feverish misery, Nick knew, it would soon be upon them. Maybe he should be thinking of a secondary off-loading place. “Is this yard new?” he asked, looking around.

  “Sort of. It belongs to Danny Parker. He and his father and grandfather before him have looked after Devrey ships for eighty years. Their big yard is south of here on Montgomery Street. This up-the-island location is an extension.”

  A few cows grazed peacefully in a nearby pasture, otherwise the landscape was empty. “Thirty-fourth Street’s pretty isolated,” Nick said. “Seems a fine place for a shipyard.”

  “Yes,” Sam agreed, “and the river’s deep here. Parker plans to put the ways just there in that cove.”

  “To build steamships, I imagine.”

  “Maybe,” Sam said softly. “Maybe not. We’ll see.”

  “I came down from Providence on a Black Ball steam packet,” Nick said. “Bellowed black smoke all the way and did the entire journey in fourteen hours. Under sail it used to take twenty-six in a stiff breeze. More if you weren’t lucky with the wind.”

  “Do you have any idea how much coal that required?” Devrey asked. “Or how many men to keep stoking the boilers? I know everyone says the future is in steam, but I’m not so sure. In theory, if you could raise enough canvas, clean, sweet wind would beat coal any day of the week.”

  Nick shrugged. Sam Devrey hadn’t asked him up here to talk about shipping. “Possibly. More your line of country than mine.”

  “That’s not why we’re here. I expect you know that.”

  “It occurred to me.”

  “Mei-hua—her name means plum blossom—is doing remarkably well. No ill effects at all that I can see.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  Both men stared out at the empty river. It seemed to Nick that he was the more uncomfortable, as if he were the one who had been caught letting his appetites disorder his life. “Look here, Cousin Samuel, I’m not in the judgement business. It’s none of my affair what you do.”

  “But I involved you,” Sam said. “And Mei-hua is under my protection. She understands nothing of our ways, of life here in America.”

  “She has nothing to fear from me.”

  “I didn’t for a moment think she had.” That was not entirely true. It was one of the reasons he’d asked Turner to meet him here. If the man said something to the wrong person, the scandal could be ruinous. “I was in China for many years. I learned to appreciate their customs, how they do things.”

  The way Nick heard it from Cousin Manon, what Sam learned was how much opium Devrey Shipping could smuggle into China and how fast, and that ever since, he had been Astor’s creature. “Yes, I understand.”

  “No, I don’t think you do. In China—in all of Asia in fact—few men have only one wife.”

  “Good God. Are you implying…” One saw and heard a great deal in the practice of medicine, but a confession of bigamy was novel in his experience.

  “As far as Mei-hua knows,” Sam said, “she is married to me. Of course it’s not a Christian marriage. But—”

  “And she knows you have an American wife?”

  “No,” Sam said. “She does not. And Mrs. Devrey does not know about Mei-hua.”

  “Yet you’re telling me the whole story.”

  “As much of it as I think you need to know, Cousin Nicholas.”

  “Which makes me wonder why you believe I need to know any of it.”

  “So you will understand the need to be discreet. Why else?”

  “I’m not sure, since being discreet is part of the practice of medicine.”

  A man wearing a carpenter’s apron walked past them, tipped his cap, and went as far as
the inlet where the ways were to be built. After a minute they could hear the sound of his hammer.

  “Conditions seem quite terrible at your Bellevue,” Sam remarked. “I was appalled at what I saw.”

  If anything the place was worse now that warmer weather had arrived. To make more room on the wards, the insane, still in their shackles and straitjackets, were transferred to outdoor cages at sunup. They were supposed to be brought inside to sleep, but they seldom were. Nick had an almighty row with Grant about it. That didn’t change anything. “I told you how bad things were when I came to see you the first time, Cousin Samuel. It’s why I want the council to look into the matter. Tobias Grant is stealing from the poor and the indigent, not to mention the New York taxpayers.”

  “Look, I’m in your debt and I know it. But I have very little influence on the council. And if what you say is true, increasing the hospital’s budget would just mean more for Grant to skim.”

  “He serves at the council’s pleasure. They can be rid of him whenever they like.”

  “And give the job to you, perhaps?”

  “I wouldn’t take Grant’s job if anyone were daft enough to offer it to me. I’m no administrator. And contrary to what you seem to think, I’m not ambitious. I’m interested in medical research, Cousin Samuel.”

  “So you say. Look, Tobias Grant has powerful friends on the council. He couldn’t get away with his activities otherwise. It’s far more likely you’d be the one to go if questions about his practices were raised.”

  Nick shrugged. “I’m a decent enough doctor. I’ll always find work.”

  “You’re better than decent on my evidence. I wasn’t threatening you, Cousin. Simply telling you how the land lies.” Sam reached into the breast pocket of his coat. “This is for the hospital, but I’ve made it out to you. Do with it what you will.”