The Daughters of Henry Wong

by Harrison Young

  “It would have to be a meeting of Chao Yinhang’s shareholders,” said Sam. “Do you own any of their shares?”

  “Buy me some.”

  “Have you got twenty million U.S. of spare change? The person or group calling the meeting needs to own one percent of the company.” I knew this but I pretended I didn’t. “My personal fortune only runs to about four million U.S. I expect Henry has some securities we could sell.”

  “It ought to be your money, Wendy. Using the power of attorney Henry gave you would require involving so many people it would be bound to get out. And that wouldn’t look good. You’d lose votes over it.”

  “Maybe Julia would lend it to me.”

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t think of that.”

  “Do the paperwork, Sam. I’ll talk to her.”

  There was nothing else to do. I pretended to read Credit Committee memoranda for a couple of hours and went back to the Castle for lunch, this time calling for Henry’s car. I played with Philip and Tommy. Or at least I tried to. I felt pretty superfluous.

  Tommy turned out to be the one who could draw. He portrayed me as a gecko with red braces. Philip had a talent for movement. He imitated a gecko hiding under his bed. They both were pretty good with Lego – or at least I was impressed. I have no recollection of being three, so I am not a good judge.

  They spoke to each other in Mandarin. When they discovered I also spoke this language they were fascinated. They had evidently categorized me as an English-speaker. From time to time, one of them would address me, to see if I knew how to respond, and they both would clap when I did. I was a new toy.

  Mostly, I just watched them. They accepted having me in their room the way birds accept an ornithologist in their woods, so long as he is motionless. Periodically, one of them would bring some treasured object up – a feather, a crust of bread with interestingly colored mold – and place it in my lap, as if I were a god to be propitiated.

  Song brought in a packet of letters, tied up with a light blue ribbon. She’d found them in one of Amanda’s dresser drawers. I knew from the moment she produced the bundle that they must be from Mercury. I was pleased to discover how prosaic they were: the condition of a favorite racehorse, having to change the location of an upcoming lunch, the amount of money raised at a particular charity ball. No one could be blackmailed with these letters.

  I paged through them slowly, stopping to study and compliment Tommy’s drawings, answering Philip’s questions. I imagined my sons looking up at me and saying in their cheerful voices, “You must kill Mr. Mercury, Daddy.” The company of three-year-olds does simplify things.

  Gradually, no matter how I avoided it, the thought emerged that Amanda had essentially been in love with Mercury all her life. She’d married me because he wouldn’t have her. He couldn’t marry her because she wasn’t from a grand family, but he’d let her flirt with him, taken her to lunch for years, written her letters that were perfectly correct, and very occasionally, I suspected, spent an afternoon with her. He’d done it for the intelligence she could give him about her father’s business, but also for the pleasure of watching her want him. An on-and-off affair intensified her hopeless infatuation, which was just another proof of his superiority. It may even have given him sexual pleasure. He was probably that sort of man.

  Julia called. She was angry. She had wanted to get out of the hotel for a while, so she’d called the dressmakers and said she’d come to them to get fitted for her “funeral costume.” When she’d come out of the elevator, there had been sleep-deprived Helen Fong and the cameraman.

  “‘Miss Wong,’ she says to me. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. Have you got just a minute? Mr. Lee said I might get to talk to you now.’”

  I told Julia that I had indeed run into Helen the night before, and had tried to persuade her to leave.

  Julia wasn’t appeased. “Do you know what I was wearing?” she almost screamed. “That bright yellow pajama suit. I’ll be all over the evening news.”

  “Why the yellow ones?”

  “I puked on the other pair, if you remember. And I’d sent the dress I had on when Amanda died to the hotel laundry.” She began to cry. “I was going to the dressmakers so I could wear an appropriate black dress to my sister’s funeral, and now all Hong Kong will believe I am dancing on her grave.”

  I composed myself. “I would come right away, darling, but I think I should spend more time with the little boys.”

  Julia was immediately a different person – canary pajamas forgotten. “Are they all right? Can I help? No, of course I can’t.”

  “You should come here,” I said. “I’ve blown it with the press. And the little boys have asked for you.”

  “Tomorrow?” she said, joy back in her voice.

  “Tonight,” I said. “There’s something we need to talk about, but not on the phone.” For a moment she resisted. “It would be better if we all went to the funeral together,” I said.

  In the event, she came just before dinner, bringing a new black dress. The Gurkhas carried it up the path, along with a few other packages. Song nodded to her, giving no ground. The little boys ran up and down the hall between their own room and Julia’s, and had to have extra stories read to them before they would agree to go to sleep.

  When the house was finally quiet, I crept into her room and let her be nice to me. And told her what I had in mind. It all seemed dreadfully easy.

  20

  The dead are public property. Anyone who wants to come to a funeral may. Amanda had perhaps two dozen friends and an equal number of acquaintances I would have expected to make the effort. But when I arrived at St. John’s Cathedral on Friday morning, there were already more than three hundred mourners. Some were bank employees, which was nice. Henry had few real friends, to be honest. I spotted all of them I could think of. Most of those sitting in the cane-seated pews, looking up at the whitewashed gothic arches and the slowly rotating ceiling fans, were simply spectators.

  It wasn’t a funeral, technically, but a memorial service. There was this matter of suicide, which used to send you to Hell. But the Church of England is nothing if not flexible. Elizabeth designed it that way in order to stop burning people at the stake. If she’d gotten it well enough launched, there wouldn’t have been Puritans, I suppose, or a Harvard, or an American Revolution. America would be part of Canada, and the Iroquois would be members of the United Nations.

  The Wong family put on a good show. The little boys sat between Julia and me in the front row – with Song somewhere in the background in case they began to squirm. They wore white shirts and behaved impeccably. The newspapers must have smuggled a photographer into the choir, because afterwards they all had a picture of Tommy holding my hand and Philip looking up at the stained-glass windows in the north transept, with their depictions of junks and cargo vessels, a barefoot fisherwoman and a merchant seaman.

  We sang the hymns Amanda had selected, listened to the prayers I’ve known all my life. I’d asked Orchid Tang to speak. She read a poem – not one I would have chosen, but safer than a eulogy.

  Going out of the church, I thought I caught sight of Serena in a perfect suit, but I must have been mistaken – Simon was there, and he didn’t mention her. Sam Canadian was also there, and he had retrieved Sam the girl. She was wearing black pearls.

  Mercury and Lillian extended their hands as we passed them. “We should talk,” Mercury said quietly, looking genuinely upset. I didn’t respond.

  If you leave the Cathedral by its main door, stepping over the mosaic of a Nestorian cross, you find yourself in a small courtyard, hemmed in by the parish hall and a bank of foliage. The most natural direction to go is to the right, where the space opens out toward a stone cross and beyond it to an attractive brick building. The first time I saw it, I assumed the bishop had his office there, but it turned out to be the Court of Final Appeal. You see the Hong Kong crest over the door when you get close enough, and a sign in English, “Judges Only.” There is
no demarcation between the religious and judicial precincts. Just past the Court building is gently sloping Battery Path, which runs parallel to Queens Road, down past tall palms and the impassioned roots of strangler figs, gradually reintroducing you to the traffic sounds, until it deposits you on the sidewalk. Perhaps Hong Kong is not exclusively a collision.

  Or perhaps life is a collision – of wild nature and conscientious cultivation, of lust and boredom – and the only issue is what grace, or grease, can be brought to it. Perhaps the melodrama of that week, and all that followed, will in due course acquire Aristotelian elegance. The passage of sixteen years has done a little of that already.

  I had correctly reckoned that the press would be allowed to gather in the government car park in the opposite direction. So we hadn’t had the Rolls wait for us there, but instead slipped past the Court building and were collected on Queens Road.

  Riding back to the Castle, I was feeling pretty bad. Glancing at the rear-vision mirror I caught sight of Song in the back seat – she and Julia were flanking Philip and Tommy – and the thought came to me that she was staring into the future, not the past. No time for regrets, I told myself. Easier said than done.

  Two of the letters in the pile Song had found were addressed to me, but never sent, never tucked under my pillow. I cannot bear to tell you what they said. Raw need. Love letters from a girl who is frightened by what she has done to herself, but even more afraid of the monster in red suspenders she has done it with. Presumably she saved the letters to excuse herself for her dalliance with Mercury. Or perhaps, and this is worse, she’d hoped one day to show them to me.

  My answer to Henry’s question, “Do you want to be a banker?” should have been “no.” I wanted to be what? A professor? A son? As far from my family as possible? Why had I done this to myself – and to Amanda ?

  She actually, you see, expected us to fall in love, as people in arranged marriages do. She had mistaken the pretentious lectures I had given her during our courtship as regard for her innate intelligence. But since I had entered into a relationship that from my perspective was false, there was nothing for her to take hold of. Being human, that hurt her. Being Chinese, she accepted it. And Henry was engaged in such a resolute ceremony of self-torture, presumably because of “Su Ling,” that Amanda was unimportant to him. He had found me at an opportune moment and seized the opportunity to anchor Amanda out of Mercury’s reach.

  To outside observers, including me, Mercury’s dynastic marriage to Lillian seemed inevitable. But he looked devastated at the memorial service.

  Amanda may have been his pawn, but she was also his true love. The Chinese do that sort of thing well. The blandness of Mercury’s letters told you nothing. They were reassurance. I have taken the trouble to write, my darling. That was all they said, and all they needed to say. In this light, Mercury was neither a monster nor an ass.

  Not a useful way to see one’s enemy, so I buried the thought. But a couple of years later, when I’d gotten some way to becoming a human being, I let myself imagine Amanda and Mercury embracing, and cried a little.

  All of us had gone to the service, even the Gurkhas, and someone had taken advantage of that oversight to tie “big character” posters to the terrace railings alongside the entire Castle. I saw Song shiver. When she was a child in the mainland, these had been a sign of political upheaval. She immediately had the Gurkhas pull them down, but it was clear enough what they conveyed.

  “American Pig Wendy and Sister Go Home” said one. Some of the others were less restrained. I was glad Philip and Tommy couldn’t read. I refused to translate them for Julia, which made them more ominous and more exciting.

  After dinner Friday – and in fact for much of the weekend – Julia and I played with Philip and Tommy’s absurdly expensive wooden train set. Henry had bought it for them when they were far too young. Julia had found it in a box in their room. Our objective seemed to be creating a figure-eight of track. Julia brought books from Henry’s library to create an overpass and a tunnel. The little boys preferred collisions – as I suppose little boys are supposed to.

  When I went into her room later, Julia unusually had the lights turned down and was naked under the sheets. “Now that I’m your banker, what else can I be?” she said brightly on Friday.

  “Whatever you want,” I said.

  “It may involve physical contact.”

  “I was counting on that,” I said.

  She was almost insatiable, but when she fell asleep I was wakeful, so I carried my clothes back to my own room, put on a long Chinese robe and went into the library.

  There had been something wrong with the posters. Thinking about it, I came to the answer: they used traditional characters, not the simplified versions the Communists had invented. Whoever was trying to shame or frighten me by invoking Beijing had connections in Taiwan, where the continued use of traditional characters was a sort of political statement.

  Song appeared with a whiskey and soda on a tray. I hadn’t asked for it but it suddenly seemed like a very good idea. She was a mind-reader that way.

  Uncharacteristically, she stumbled while putting down the drink, and some of it spilled on my robe.

  “Meiyou wenti,” I said. No problem.

  She seemed unusually tired, or troubled. I offered her my chair. She didn’t argue. “Wendy scale,” she said, imitating Henry’s English accent. She moved around a bit, trying to find a comfortable position, her silk uniform sliding over the leather upholstery. She finally settled, sitting well back, with her feet sticking straight out in front of her. Once more I had the sense of an awestruck child looking out through the eyeholes of an adult mask. She rested her arms on the arms of the big chair for a bit, then dropped them to her lap.

  I sat down on a low footstool in front of her, took off her kung-fu slippers and began rubbing her feet. “Thank you,” she said. I kept it up, trying by instinct to find the right amount of pressure for arch and instep.

  “Hong Kong,” she continued. “Rich people.” For a while that seemed to be her entire analysis. The Castle creaked and sighed around us. “Some people think they can take advantage. Once it was rich people. Then the Communists. Now it is rich people again – like Chao Mu Bai. Chao Mu Bai not Chinese.” She looked sharply at me. “No one is Chinese who has not tasted bitterness.”

  She pushed her hands down into the cushion, raised her body off of the chair like a gymnast, and, thrusting herself forward, encircled my arms and chest with her legs. I didn’t resist. She was quite strong. “You must destroy Chao Mu Bai,” she said.

  “How?”

  “Read Bing Fa,” she said. “Always surprise.”

  I waited for her to continue, but she evidently had nothing specific in mind. It was almost as if she was giving me stylistic advice: be unexpected, Wendy. Be different. Be tough.

  “You will like what is about to happen, Song,” I said.

  She let go of me. I let her talk some more. Finally I stood up and went to my room, wondering at my self-confidence – and also, of course, about Song.

  On Monday morning we went to Sam’s office and signed the papers. Being a private banker, Julia understood how everything should be done. She used Hong Kong lawyers her lawyers in New York approved of. Brokers friendly to Psmith & Graves would buy the shares in my name but they would go into custody at JP Morgan Chase, as her employer had become, to secure her loan to me.

  Sam said it could all be done in a few days. “The arbs are a bit schizophrenic about this deal,” he said, “so there are plenty of Chao Yinhang shares washing around in the market as one gets nervous and another gets greedy.”

  “I’m happy to hear that the market is confused,” said Julia, sounding professional and competent, “but I thought risk arbitrageurs only bet on reasonably sure things.”

  “And all brides are virgins,” said Sam.

  “Excuse me for being stupid,” said Julia.

  I was pleased that I understood what Sam was talking ab
out. Arbitrageurs, a.k.a. “arbs,” are traders who buy and sell in related markets that have gotten out of line. For example, it is sometimes briefly possible to sell a commodity in London for more than it costs in Singapore, even after you add the cost of shipment and insurance. When shares are traded on two exchanges, with settlement in different currencies, there will also be times when they can be bought and sold simultaneously, and the necessary foreign exchange transactions executed, all at a net gain. Arbitrageurs profit from spotting inconsistencies and moving fast. (I put this mini-tutorial in for the benefit of readers – hopefully including my sons – who are not investment bankers.)

  “Risk arbitrage” is the term for traders who buy shares that are being bid for in a takeover, and sell short any shares that are part of the bid. The “risk” they take is that the deal collapses. They typically earn returns in excess of 25 percent per annum for bearing that risk for the several months it takes for a takeover to be completed. They bear the risk in place of ordinary shareholders who sell the shares that are being bid for at a discount from the bid price. Because of the amount of time that elapses between a bid and the closing, risk arbitrage is a nervous business: part sharp pencil, part gut feeling.

  Julia was putting up three-quarters of the money: 15 million US dollars. She had “heaps of cash and government bonds,” she said, in addition to her Pearl River shares. “It’s all dividends from Henry.” The idea was that if the takeover failed, and Chao Yinhang’s price dropped, the shares I’d bought would still be worth more than the loan. It was quite unlikely Chao Yinhang’s shares would fall. They were already trading below their pre-announcement price because of the prospective dilution in Chao Yinhang’s earnings per share and because the arbitrageurs had been shorting Chao’s shares in the expectation of receiving them in exchange for the Pearl River shares they had bought and planned to tender. But bankers have to build in a margin of safety when they make loans. There may even have been a regulation.