by Aimee Liu
“An inlaid chair.” I felt as if the pieces of an invisible puzzle were about to drop into place.
“I wanted to walk on, but she kept badgering me, and eventually the shopkeeper saw us and came out. He recognized me.”
“It was the same chair.”
“Yes. He’d been a friend of my father’s in Shanghai before the war. They both raised money for the Republic—pulled in something like ten million between them. Those were uncertain times, and they promised to look after each other’s business and personal affairs if the need should arise. After this fellow threw his support behind Chiang Kai-shek they became political adversaries, but he never forgot that promise. Personally I never wanted to see him or that hideous old chair again, but the next day he telephoned about the apartment on Mott Street. His association owned the building.”
I felt the words cutting into the sides of my mouth as I spoke them, clearly, slowly. “It was Li, wasn’t it? He was the reason we lived there.”
My father’s hands trembled as he fought with a match. I grabbed a massive desk lighter that he never used, held it for him.
“Yes.”
“But why? Why did you hate him so? Why wouldn’t you tell me when I asked you?”
“I told you about a boy I knew. Nigel Halliday.”
“Of course. The one that tried to drown you.”
He stared at a blank spot directly above the door for a good minute before he continued. “Li was an operator for Halliday’s father, the arms trader. He had the scruples of a gutter rat, but he covered it up with all that crap about Chinese tradition and face. He was a bloody liar, Maibelle.”
According to my father, Li had not left China after the Japanese invasion, but stayed on for years brokering munitions deals between the Hallidays, the Japanese, and the gangsters who ruled Shanghai in league with Chiang Kai-shek.
“He did it all under the guise of patriotism, but when the time came, it wasn’t the British or the Japanese or the Germans that made him grab his precious antiques and run, but his own countrymen. Men like my father.”
Dad’s cheeks pulled tight. “The reason I went back to China was to try to find my father. Instead I found Li. He lured me in. He promised to help me.”
“Did he?”
“I told you. Li was a bloody liar.”
But I couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe him.
“I loved Li, Dad. He treated me like his own daughter—friend. I felt safe with him.”
The light was too bright in my father’s workroom. It made my eyes do curious things. Like turn my father’s face gray and white. The switch was within reach. I could turn off the light and we’d be sitting together again in the dark. Instead I picked up a small brown box filled with air.
But when I let it go he was still there, still patched with gray and white, looking older than I remembered ever seeing him before. The sight of him filled my throat and squeezed and squeezed until I couldn’t bear it. I reached for the lock and tumbled it.
“He’s dead, Maibelle. We don’t have to worry about him anymore.”
Through the crack poured an old song, familiar and slow. Late sixties? Pulsing like a dirge and strangely cold, a Doors song. “Hello, I Love You.” The year after we moved out of Chinatown. Before Li died. “Hello, I Love You,” on the car radio for just a few seconds before Mum switched it off. We drove, surrounded by pine and peach trees, in a Connecticut wonderland. Another place and time.
With a savage blow I knew exactly who Nigel Halliday was. Not the boy but the man. I had met him.
I drew back from the door and lowered myself onto a stool.
“It’s all right. I’ll stay a while longer. Make another of those boxes, Dad. Show me how they work.”
The grayness lifted and he smiled a little, turned to his bench.
“So simple.” As he surgically cut through the paper, I slid back fourteen years.
* * *
A Sunday in late spring. I had just turned fourteen. Anna was off at college (or so we thought; actually she was doing “independent study” at a retreat founded by her comparative-religions professor somewhere near the Canadian border). Henry was spending the day at a workshop learning to be a conscientious objector. The previous summer Mum had signed me up for riding lessons in Central Park; now my parents were extending that education by taking me to a polo match in Connecticut.
I could sense Dad’s excitement as we left New York and he shoved the Rambler into high gear. He wore a pair of jodhpurs that must have been forty years old, and as he drove he talked about playing polo in Shanghai. They’d practiced in Jessfield Park, he said, by the university. “Some bloody good players in those days.”
One of those players ran into us at the polo grounds. He was about my father’s age but taller, massive. His jodhpurs stood out from his hips like cardboard. His helmet sat squarely atop his blond head. I thought he must be some kind of royalty. He was that handsome.
My father grabbed the man’s hand and pumped it up and down. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Nigel Halliday. Twenty years if it’s been a day. Burma, wasn’t it?”
“Right you are! Caught you photographing one of General Chennault’s shipments of silk stockings or toothbrushes or some such thing, eh what?”
“Oh, Christ, don’t remind me.” My father laughed and shook his head. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I live just down the road a bit.” Halliday turned to my mother and me. As the introductions were made, he brushed a kiss across Mum’s hand and held onto it until she began to blush. She tipped her head back, smiling, breathless.
He invited us back to his house after the game. “You live nearby, too, old boy?”
My father placed his hand lightly on my mother’s shoulder as they began to walk. “We have a penthouse on Central Park West.”
“Doing well for yourself, are you?”
“Can’t complain.”
It all sounded so glib and easy, but as I trailed after the grown-ups I caught Mum shooting Dad eager glances. I also became conscious of the sweat wrinkles on the back of my father’s shirt, the way his old jodhpurs sagged in the seat, and I wondered why he was suddenly talking in this emphatic British accent.
A small perfumed crowd coiled around the spectators’ area talking and smoking and sipping from lavender paper cups. Nigel led us through to the front row of chairs, where a young Chinese woman with waist-length hair sat alone reading a paperback Bible. She was dressed in a crimson silk blouse and a tight black side-slit skirt, her hair twisted into an ornate gold lacquer comb designed like a peacock’s father. Halliday introduced her as his wife, Lydia.
The adults went through the usual back-and-forth about whether our visit would be an inconvenience. As if there were any question. Mum was about to expire from curiosity. Dad was like a dog on a leash. And Halliday had issued the invitation as if it were an imperial edict. Lydia quietly assured my parents that we would be no trouble at all.
It was a fast-paced game and by the fifth chukker the horses’ flanks were steaming and most of the riders were swinging wild. Only Nigel was able to sustain the tight grip of horse and mallet that guaranteed control of the ball—and his team’s victory.
Afterward, we followed Halliday’s silver Mercedes through a fieldstone archway and on past a small lake dotted with swans, on between wildly blooming fruit trees to a country palace that belonged on the cover of House Beautiful. After some discussion, it was agreed that Mum and Lydia would tour the house, “the riders” head to the stable. I chose to be a rider.
On one side of the path a squadron of black-faced jockeys stood holding lanterns, on the other a cluster of cherubs peed into an enormous swimming pool. In the stable yard wing-footed huntsmen shot water into a fountain. Frozen midget slaves seemed a recurring motif.
Fortunately Halliday’s stable boy was full-scale and alive, and in minutes I was astride a white filly named Lotus, my father and Nigel on stallions. As Nigel led the way down a steep bank and
across a narrow stream, I concentrated, kept my back straight, thighs tight, reins loose under my thumbs as I’d learned from my lessons.
We reached a glen where the trail was wide and flat, and Nigel nudged his mount to a trot. Our horses quickly followed suit, and I fought the impulse to flop back in the saddle. Though my rhythm was uneven, I managed to get enough control to convince myself I was posting.
At the edge of a freshly mowed meadow, Nigel upped the ante again, and the three of us took off in a canter that sent me lurching forward with one hand clutching the pommel, the other Lotus’s mane. I inhaled the horse’s warm, musty odor, the surrounding scent of cut grass.
Dad glanced back and smiled. “Keep it up!”
Nigel heard and misunderstood—or else understood all too well. He dug in his heels and took off at a gallop. My father and I followed suit, Dad’s shouts to slow down unheeded.
I had too loose a grip on the reins to pull back on the bridle, and without that cue to stop, Lotus instinctively began to race, running downhill back into the forest, then onto a wide dirt lane, closing the stallion’s lead.
I let my upper body go flat and reached for a hold along the bulging muscles of the filly’s neck. My feet had lifted out of the stirrups on the first leap forward and though I felt around to reseat them, the stirrups were flapping too wildly and so I was left with my feet dangling free, clenching the horse with my knees.
The foliage blurred, then spun and blended into a tunnel of green that made me feel as if I were suspended inside a mammoth wave. The movement seemed to spiral outward, leaving my body and mind quite still and replacing my initial terror with a strange ethereal joy. I gulped the wind and breathed the fluid movements, surging up and forward with each clap of hooves. It was a paradise of motion.
Like flying.
The road curled up a long hill that wore Lotus down to a slower pace, still galloping but relenting. Now I dared to lift my head and saw at the end of this tunnel of trees the shadow of a horse and rider, black against the light beyond. And my exhilaration gave way once more to terror.
It was Glabber coming out of the woods.
The demon in the basement.
I wanted to scream, to wake up, but there was no escape. And so, instead, I shut my eyes and hugged Lotus even tighter.
She must have picked up the tension in my body, because just as we reached the edge of the forest she did a nervous two-step and came to an abrupt stop. I would have hurtled straight to the ground, but my fingers were so deeply entwined in her mane that, when my hips launched into space, my hands were held in place. I was drawn into a smooth rotating slide, my body falling right around until I hung like a human kerchief under the animal’s throat. Whether out of fear or relief I’m not sure, but I started giggling as I hung and soon was laughing uncontrollably.
I suppose the sight of me was pretty funny, and Halliday began laughing, too. Then my father, who’d been thrown while giving chase, came straggling up the hill on foot just ahead of his horse.
He was not amused.
I dropped to my feet and ducked out from under the horse’s cheek. “I’m okay,” I said.
Dad gripped my shoulders as he checked me over.
“Really, I’m fine.” But I was actually shaking, and so was he. I squeezed his hand to reassure him.
“Hell of a rider, you have there.” Nigel joined us on the ground. “Now, you, old man, I’m not so sure of. Made a bit of a side trip there, eh what?”
“I see you haven’t lost your touch.” But to my surprise Dad didn’t sound angry. No, his voice was flat, stunned, the same as it had been on the night the Chinatown chicken died.
“I’m all right!” I insisted.
“Well, Mei Mei,” my father said quietly, “enough riding. We’ll walk the horses back from here.”
A few steps on he whispered in my ear. “Let’s not tell Mum you fell off the horse.”
I smiled. “You fell offyour horse, you mean.”
“That either.”
Back at the house, Nigel led us through an immaculate parlor to a solarium where the women sat chatting. Dad and I took chairs next to Mum. Nigel seated himself on an overstuffed sofa across from his wife and extended one leg in midair.
Lydia knelt before him. Her skirt pulled tight, the slit falling open along her thigh. She took her husband’s heel in one hand and grasped the toe with the other. He thrust his foot toward her face, and with a quick jerk and a stifled gasp she fell back clutching the boot. Then she returned to a squat and did the other foot. The job done, Lydia fetched Nigel his slippers from a closet in the corner and placed them on his feet.
“You can bring the tea now,” said Nigel, and Lydia, lowering her eyes to avoid my mother’s appalled expression, scurried from the room.
By the time she returned, Halliday was telling stories about Dad. My father, he said, had stood up well to the ribbing he got as a Chinese boy in an English school.
“It was you, wasn’t it, who coined the nickname Doughboy for that poor Italian slug in fourth form?”
“Manetti,” said Dad.
“If you say so. I only remember Doughboy. Doughy for short. Ha!”
“Please,” said Lydia. “Would you like some tea?”
“Or a Scotch?” said Halliday. “Darling, get me a real drink.”
Lydia handed my mother her tea, then stepped to the bar at the back of the room.
“Joe?” said Halliday.
“Why, all right. Scotch and water, please. Light on the Scotch.”
“Ah, yes. Chinese temperance. Does the booze make you go all rosy, too? If Lydia drinks a drop, she turns red as a bloody fire engine. Damned unsightly. But amusing.”
My father didn’t answer. Lydia gave the men their drinks, then seated herself next to her husband and passed me a plate of cookies. Her face was like a mask. A flawless white mask.
Halliday continued. “It was remarkable, really, the way you fit in, old boy. Turned the other cheek even when the boys called your mother—what was it?—oh, yes, a Chinaman’s whore.”
My mother, whose enchanted smile had stiffened considerably by this point, gave a cry that sounded as if she were being strangled underwater.
Halliday tut-tutted her. “Oh, don’t be shocked or think me a boor, my dear. There were so few white women in those days who would even consider marrying yellow.” He rolled his arm around behind Lydia, who appeared engrossed in her tea. “Communist to boot, wasn’t that true? Did you ever discover what became of the old boy?”
“It wasn’t the others. You called her that.” Dad was sitting as straight as a bayonet. He set his untouched drink on the table beside him.
“Yes, well. She didn’t survive the war, as I recall. The Japanese, wasn’t it?”
“She died in the Idzumo bombing.”
“Ach. Nasty business, that.”
Halliday sipped his drink and played with the ornament in Lydia’s hair. Lydia didn’t move a muscle.
“And what of the lover?” asked Halliday, not looking at Dad.
There was a long pause. My mother stared at my father. My father glared at Halliday, who continued to fiddle with Lydia.
“Well, really, old boy,” said Halliday. “It was common knowledge.”
Suddenly my father was on his feet. “We’ve imposed on you for too long.”
Halliday lifted his face and grinned. “So good of you to come, old man. We must do this again sometime.”
As we passed through the foyer Lydia stopped me. She put a finger to her lips, smiled, and passed me a small wrapped candy. In the car I undid the paper and found a piece of crystallized melon, pale and round as a pearl.
A pearl as pale and round as the moon outside my father’s window. The night sky was clear, the incoming breeze edged with a promise of fall. Then winter and snow. That bastard!
I breathed hard and deep, the memory of my mother’s unwitting complicity angering me as much as Halliday’s torment. It was her social climbing that had driven t
hem to accept his invitation. The same grasping ambition that made her hoard Dad’s pictures, tell lies, keep secrets. She could excuse anything in the name of money or Art!
The stink of Dad’s smoldering ashes was making my stomach cramp. He bent over his folded paper, not seeing the night, not hearing my thoughts.
That cigarette. The tall blond man. I shut my eyes and tried to see them again. Halliday with his helmet and crop, dashing, impervious, sneering. The man smirking in Dad’s photograph.
“You saw him in China! You photographed him.”
My father opened his finished box with a snap. “Who?”
“Halliday. Nigel Halliday. That creep in Connecticut. He was in one of your photographs.”
“What photographs?”
It was the puzzle. The sense that I had the invisible pieces in my clutches. I was close to the solution and had blurted it out without thinking. What photographs?
“I saw some of your work.”
“Where?” He put down his paper construction. His glasses obscured any expression of his eyes. His voice could mean anything.
“One of my college teachers.” I wasn’t lying. Strictly speaking, I wasn’t lying. “She had copies from old magazines. Life.”
He pulled his lips in until his mouth was just a thin flat line.
“It was him, wasn’t it? A picture of him in China with some people pushing a body on a wheelbarrow, and him looking as if he could give a shit. That was Halliday.”
“What does it matter?”
“What matters is that you knew. You knew how cruel he was. Why did we go to his house? Why let him treat you like he did?”
He saw then where my thoughts had been for the past half hour. He saw what I remembered.
“Sometimes there are things you spend your whole life wanting to make right, Maibelle. Lies you tell yourself about people to make the things they do more bearable. To make yourself feel less responsible. But eventually the people die.”
