Skulduggery

by Carolyn Hart

  He looked past Mary and her mother and the three little children; looked at the windows that glistened and sparkled in the sunshine, clean windows in an immaculate room. Poverty here, yes, but pride and hope, too.

  Dan spoke softly now, to himself. “That’s why I don’t come to Chinatown. Almost never. I guess that’s why I was mad at Jimmy. His being here, working here, reminded me of how tough and grim and frightening a place it really is.

  “Yeah,” and Dan’s voice was suddenly angry, “the next time somebody raves about Chinatown’s restaurants and says, ‘It’s such good food and CHEAP, too’,” his voice rose in mimicry, “the next damn time, tell ’em why they’re so cheap.”

  Mrs. Chan frowned at Dan’s angry tone, whispered to Mary. Before Mary could finish her translation, Mrs. Chan spoke and the words flew out in a furious rush.

  Mary looked from her mother to Dan. “My mother say no, not to talk so, that it is not the fault of the restaurants, they must offer their food at less because there are so many, so very many places to eat, but, even so, everyone should be glad there are so many because it means many jobs, too. It is as a waiter that my father works now. Jimmy found the job for him. My father works hard, very hard, but it is a job, you understand, and, if a man can work, he can live, and here in this so great country my brother and sisters and I can go to school and grow up and have opportunities, many more than in Hong Kong and you should come to Chinatown to eat, come often, and not be unhappy that people work for so little but be happy that . . .”

  “I know,” Dan interrupted gently. “Tell your mother I understand. What she says, that is the Chinese litany.”

  “Litany?” Mary repeated. A faint blush spread in her cheeks. “I didn’t know a word of English when we came five years ago. So there are some words, a lot of words . . .”

  “A prayer,” Dan explained. “A kind of prayer.” He smiled. “My parents had faith, too, Mary. They grew up in Chinatown and they had a little grocery, the mom-and-pop kind of thing, a little grocery and six kids and all of those kids finished college . . . except one . . . and all of them left Chinatown and they have good lives, Mary, so tell your mother I believe, too. It’s just . . . sometimes you hate to see people have to struggle so hard. But tell your mother, I understand.”

  Mrs. Chan was smiling by the time Mary finished her translation. Smiling and nodding. Then, jumping to her feet and gesturing, she began to move toward the tiny kitchen.

  We had tea then, pale green tea with a delicate flavor and Mrs. Chan told us, through Mary, of their decision to come to the United States and the feeling of panic when they first arrived, Mary just a little girl and Ruthie a baby in arms, and walked away from the ship and they could not understand a word of English. The Chinese Newcomers’ Service had helped them then. The good times and the bad and now—she spread open her arms—the wonderful space and happiness in Ping Yuen, Mary going to school a half-day, working a half-day, oh, everything was working out.

  And nothing in any of her recital seemed remotely connected to Peking Man.

  “Did you and Mr. Chan come from Peking?” I asked.

  But Dan was shaking his head. Later, he reminded me that all Cantonese-speaking Chinese are from southern China.

  Mary told us that her mother’s family had lived at Toishan, a village not far from Canton until after World War II, leaving for Hong Kong just before the Communist victory in the Civil War. Mr. Chan’s family had fled from Luchow to Hong Kong in 1947 when Mr. Chan was ten. He and Mrs. Chan had met in Hong Kong.

  “Do you keep in touch with your families?”

  Mrs. Chan had shrugged. For so many years, it had not been possible to communicate with the mainland. She had heard recently from a Hong Kong cousin who had visited Canton. This cousin wrote that things were better, so much better than they had been before in China. Mrs. Chan broke off, hesitated, than Mary translated her hasty addition. “But not, of course, as good as things in the United States.”

  I understood that swift addition. The fear of offending, of saying the wrong thing, that was the great gulf between Mrs. Chan and someone like Dan or me, American-born, sure of our place. Could he and I ever quite understand an immigrant’s uncertainty?

  And could we ever be quite sure of our perceptions? Walking down Pacific, turning back onto Grant, we agreed the Chans certainly didn’t seem likely to have Peking Man. Would they even have any inkling of such fossils’ worth?

  But lack of facility in English doesn’t mean someone is stupid. And we had no way of knowing where Mr. and Mrs. Chan’s fathers had been during World War II. Had either perhaps served with the northern guerillas who harassed the Japanese and fought so many battles not far from Peking?

  We could be sure of one thing only. The Chans had especially invited Jimmy to their apartment on Wednesday. Jimmy was their friend. They would trust him.

  TEN

  The Chans were making it. Just barely, perhaps. Poor as government figures count poverty, but, in their own judgment, making it; secure in a bare but comfortable apartment, earning enough to eat tolerably, the children in school.

  Yuan Lee’s family wasn’t making it.

  I wondered, as we climbed the narrow dirty stairs of the tenement, why it was so cold and dank in a tenement. My own apartment was unheated. I did have a little electric heater to chase away the early morning chill, but it was never this cold in the stairwell of my apartment house, not even on the chilliest and foggiest July night.

  Despair is the death of hope, an old emotion, a cold emotion. This building stank of urine and dirt and despair. It was as palpable as the stickiness of the stair rail, the squashed cups and cans underfoot.

  The metal number, 3, on the Lees’ door hung by only one nail, had slipped down to dangle, an odd metal curlicue, upside down, meaningless.

  Dan knocked and the sound was loud in the somber quiet of the narrow hallway.

  The door opened slowly. The light in the hall was so dim that it took a moment to see her in the doorway, young and thin, dressed in a too-tight red blouse and dirty gray slacks. From behind her, somewhere in the dimness of a small cramped room, came a low cry, a moan of anguish.

  There was such a wave of sorrow and pain spreading out from that shadowy room that I knew, for an instant made my own, the grief and horror that must have swept Pandora when she lifted that lid on darkness.

  The girl in the doorway, near in age to Mary Chan, stared wordlessly at us. Mary had smiled, her mouth curving in welcome. This girl’s face was rigid, her lips clamped tightly shut.

  “We came about Yuan,” Dan began, then his confident voice fell away as the girl pressed the back of a balled fist against that rigid mouth. She stared at us with huge dark strained eyes.

  “About Yuan?” Her voice was thin, almost expressionless. Her mouth stretched in a travesty of a smile. “Oh, that’s good of you.” Her words minced now, mocking the empty meaningless phrases of a world that does not really give a damn. “Are you from welfare? Or the truancy office? Or . . .” She began to laugh, a high shrill angry laugh. “You’re too late. Did you know that? Too damn late. You wouldn’t help him when he needed it. No. What difference did it make what happened to one more lousy no-good Chink street kid? You didn’t care.”

  Tears furrowed down through too-thick makeup. Hands still closed in tight angry fists, she rubbed at her eyes.

  I reached out, touched her arm. “Please, tell us . . .”

  “Oh, Yuan, Yuan,” and she cried, great wrenching sobs that shook her frail shoulders. In gasps and broken phrases, she grieved for her brother. “. . . never had a chance . . . never . . . the kids laughed at him, laughed at the way he talked so he quit school . . . lousy jobs . . . sweeping up in a fish market but no chance to do better . . . no money . . . and he never could get English, couldn’t get it . . . oh, Yuan . . . he was mad at me because I learned . . . yeah, I could speak it and once he cried because he couldn’t say it, couldn’t . . .”

  She quieted finally, leane
d against the dirty cracked plaster wall, rested and caught her breath. She didn’t look at us. She looked down a grimy hall at darkness.

  When she did look at us, there was fear in her eyes. “You know about the gangs?” It was almost a whisper.

  I looked at Dan, who nodded, so I said nothing.

  “Guys over here from Hong Kong, out on the streets,” she said tiredly. “But Yuan wasn’t like that, not really. It was just that there wasn’t any place for Yuan, no place to go but nothing to come home to. See, he quit school and the rest of us,” she tossed her head toward the room behind her, “we were all in school and Momma at the garment factory and Daddy at the fish market. And, at nights, when everybody was home, well, there isn’t any room and everybody’s tired . . . and kinda hungry . . . so Yuan started hanging out with these guys.”

  She looked uneasily up and down the hall, leaned closer to us, whispered. “It’s dangerous, see, to know too much about the gangs. They get guys who don’t pay when they gamble, they make sure everybody pays up. They sell . . . they sell anything you want. And they fight. Somebody steals somebody’s girl, something like that.”

  She had begged Yuan to stay out of the streets.

  “He got a job last week.” She said it proudly, almost forgetting for a moment. Then her face crumpled again, a woman’s face behind a child’s. “He was going to be all right. I was going to help him with his English.” Tears still glistened on her face but her eyes were dark and empty when she looked up at us. “It doesn’t make any difference now that he couldn’t speak English. It doesn’t matter at all.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said helplessly, “so sorry.”

  But that didn’t make any difference either. That I was sorry. Or not sorry. No difference to Yuan Lee.

  “He was just going out for a little while Tuesday night. Just because he’d promised some guys. But he wasn’t going to stay with them. It was Momma’s birthday and he was going to get home by the time she got off work. He promised.”

  She looked at me. “Yuan always did what he promised,” she said simply. “So when he didn’t come . . . I think I knew then. That’s why I called the police Wednesday.” She was bitter now. “They didn’t care. So what’s new? Some Chink kid, a gang kid, doesn’t come home. So what?”

  Tears edged from the corners of her eyes again. “They don’t know who killed him. Somebody from the Jade Dragon gang, the policeman said. He said it was just another gang fight. He said . . .” her young mouth quivered and we had to lean close to hear the pain-filled words, “. . . people get what they deserve.”

  Yuan Lee died at nineteen. Of massive hemorrhaging. Three stab wounds in his back. One had punctured his heart. He had been stuffed into a black plastic lawn bag and hidden in the deep shadows behind one of the massive fir trees in the square across from the Old St Mary’s Church. Not far from the stainless steel statue of Sun Yat-sen. It was a church caretaker who noticed the awkwardly-shaped bundle where no bundle should have been.

  Yuan must have died Tuesday night. He wasn’t found until late Thursday afternoon.

  That couldn’t matter to Yuan Lee now, either.

  Dan asked how we could help. Was the funeral planned? Was there anything we could do?

  She shook her head. Her father was gone now to see about the funeral. He had taken the day off from work.

  There was nothing we could do. Nothing anyone could do. Dan took out his billfold, pulled out a twenty and a five. She stepped back, shaking her head again, but he tucked the bills in her hand.

  “I’m Dan Lee, Jimmy Lee’s brother. This is from Jimmy. He wants you to have it.”

  We left her then, standing in that dingy narrow hallway, the bills crumpled in her hand, her face heavy with pain.

  We were almost back to Grant Avenue, on our way to the East Wind Restaurant, before I could manage a word. And then it was just a bleat. “I don’t see how Jimmy stands it!”

  Dan didn’t answer immediately. We skirted our way around crates of produce being unloaded on the sidewalk, squeezed by a knot of shoppers fingering vegetables in an outside display, then brought up at a red light.

  “We grew up going to old St Mary’s,” Dan said quietly. “We were all altar boys.” The light changed. He took my elbow. “This way,” he directed and we walked down the hill.

  “Jimmy was always . . . well, he listened better, I guess. You know that passage in the Bible, the one about, ‘I was hungry and you fed me, sick and you ministered unto me, in prison and you visited me’?”

  I nodded.

  “You remember Jesus’ listeners were puzzled and asked when had they done these things and Jesus explained . . .”

  I finished it for him, “‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.'"

  “Yeah. Well, Jimmy listened a little harder than some of the rest of us.”

  We were passing a meat market now. Barbecued chickens and Peking ducks hung by their necks in the window, fresh, plump, succulent. A well-dressed thirtyish woman stood by the counter, pointing at one duck, another, and the rings on her fingers shone in the bright overhead lighting. A suburban Chinese housewife shopping for the weekend, plump, prosperous, cheerful.

  Dan paused to wave at the stooped old man behind the cash register.

  As we walked on, he told me, “That’s Tom Fong. He and his oldest son, Al, run the market. Al and I played basketball together at the Y, worked in our folks’ shops after school. That’s how almost everybody I knew grew up, working, living in a couple of rooms above the shop. That’s the way it was in the forties and fifties; little stores, big families, everybody working. We were all poor, if you want to count the money, but we were together. That was when everybody marveled at the Chinese family, at the total lack of juvenile delinquency among Chinese.” He laughed and, for the first time in hours, I heard that infectious rollicking laughter that I knew instinctively was so much a part of him, the way he looked at life, laughed at it. “Whites believe the damndest things about Chinese—we never smile, we never cry, we’re wily, devious, untrustworthy, we’re always honorable, we nod and bow when we say hello, our kids never get in trouble, we gamble in smoke-filled opium dens.”

  “I did think,” I said in a small voice, “that I’d read somewhere that Chinese teenagers were almost never in trouble.”

  “You read it,” he agreed. “You read it and it used to be true. That was when families worked together and lived together. Mom worked, all right, from early morning until after dark, but it was right there in the store and the six of us were always with Mom or Dad. Those were the days that when your parents told you to smile, you smiled. If they told you to shut up, you shut up. Same thing at school. And every day, a thousand times, they told us that all we had to do was go to school and work hard and everything was possible.”

  We stopped for a red light. “I guess,” and his voice was soft now, the laughter gone, “they weren’t wrong, huh? I’m a lawyer, Pete’s an engineer, Janet’s a teacher, Eddie’s a medical technician, Ruth’s a pharmacist.” He shook his head. “Jimmy was working on a degree in Asian studies. But no matter how you cut it, it was mostly okay because Mom and Dad were there, we had each other, all the damn time. These kids today, hell, they come over here, most of them from Hong Kong, they can’t speak English and suddenly everything’s tough, but, worse than that, nobody’s home to care or to help. The dad works eight, ten hours a day unloading vegetables, sweeping out a fish market, the mother’s gone all day to the garment factory, home maybe to cook lunch and dinner. And what’s home? A stinking crowded tenement, a john a floor, quarrels over who can use the kitchen when—everything goes sour, the family, then the kid.”

  He glanced sideways at me. “I don’t believe in mothers working outside the home.”

  I didn’t bristle, which surprised me a little. Instead, I thought for a moment then asked slyly, “Do your sisters work?”

  For a moment his face was immobile then a tiny smile t
ouched his lips. “Touché. Ruth and her husband, Ted, have a drug store in Richmond and Janet teaches.”

  “And their kids are okay?”

  He was looking across the street. “There’s the East Wind. Upstairs, just past the bank.”

  “Janet’s and Ruth’s kids?”

  “Janet’s Eddie has a four-year scholarship to Yale and her daughter, Pam, is a nurse. Ruth’s Bobby is an Eagle Scout, Millie’s in the high school choir, Bill makes straight A’s.” His mouth spread. “They have a little trouble with one of them.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, Ruth called me the other night, wanted me to come out and have a talk with Danny.”

  “Danny? Your namesake?”

  He nodded. “Ruth said that was her first mistake. Well, if not the first, then . . . Anyway, Danny played hooky from Chinese school twice last week.”

  “Chinese school?”

  “Oh, I forgot for a minute.” He had forgotten that I was new to Chinese and Chinatown—and I was absurdly pleased. “Chinese school is the little extra, like two hours every evening that Chinese kids go to after regular school. They study Cantonese, Chinese history, calligraphy. It’s tough, tough stuff to study and tough to sit inside and work when your bottom aches from being behind a desk all day already. And, you see, a couple of weeks ago, I was out to Ruthie’s for dinner and I got started on how I had hated Chinese school when I was kid and how lousy I did. And how I would cut out in the spring for baseball. Danny, of course, was drinking in every word. When they caught up with him, he said it was just what Uncle Dan had done!”

  We waited for a car to pass then cut across Grant. A silken golden flag rippled from the second floor front of the East Wind Restaurant. Bright red wooden shutters masked the windows. Dragons curved and curled around the sign, EAST WIND.

  Dan held the door for me and we started up thickly carpeted steps. Satin wallpaper glistened golden and green and the air smelled faintly of sandalwood and cedar.