The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  It was why Ida was still with her even after three years’ time, sending letter after letter to her family in Virginia explaining Lucy’s continued state. It was why Alfred and Lucy remained in North Adams, though the cooperative, after three years of success, had been put up for rent over four months prior, advertising in the same issue of the Transcript that quoted Sampson as declaring that he was refurnishing his office “in a very elegant and tasty manner and putting in a new boiler.” Alfred had in that time been employed at nothing but odd jobs fewer and farther between. Success for a cooperative had not meant the same thing as it did for a private manufacturer. Those banded brothers did not have the liquid assets to weather dips and dives in the market. So it was as if not just Lucy’s life but also the lives of those who cared for her were on hold, each of them faced with a closed door, waiting for someone else to open it and usher them through.

  Until recently, however, Lucy would have said she was comforted and contained by her sense that Ida was standing beside her, and they were holding hands, each keeping the other from the unknown chambers ahead. So as she had begun to feel Ida’s grip loosening, she had been surprised and invigorated by the extremity of her entitlement. How dare you? she found herself thinking more and more often. How dare you?

  Indeed, tonight, Alfred full of delighted speculation about the sight he had witnessed at the depot, she found herself unable to focus on his energetic gossiping. Instead, she couldn’t help but feel that what was important about this news was Ida’s reaction to it. Her friend had stayed after dinner even though Lucy felt sure this was supposed to have been a lesson night with Mr. Sing. But having announced that she was staying, Ida then had nothing to say. She didn’t chide Alfred for his interest in things having nothing to do with him. She didn’t even appear to be listening. She’d eaten her food, downed her milk, wiped her mouth, and sat back, her knife and fork, like a long-married couple, placed across her plate.

  Alfred was asking them to comment on the baby. Didn’t they find it odd that Sampson’s wife had disappeared for months only to come back with a child? Didn’t that seem like a somewhat unusual way of going about the business of birth?

  The women’s responses had not seemed necessary to the progress of his talk, but he was growing impatient with the sound of his own voice. He was someone, after all, who wanted nothing more than to belong to a chorus.

  “Well?” he said, tapping at his tin plate with his knife.

  Lucy’s insides startled: even still, the sudden sound of any kind of knife going about any kind of business brought back those minutes in the alley.

  “I imagine,” she said, “that for Mrs. Sampson, the business of birth has long been unhappy and strange.”

  Everyone knew about the Sampsons’ trouble. It was why, it was said, they hadn’t moved into a grand house on a hill. Who could blame that poor woman? Who wanted to be surrounded by empty rooms meant for children healthy and alive?

  Alfred said, “I don’t know about that, but Sampson himself looked like I might knock him over with a spoon. There’s no way you’re telling me he knew.”

  “I’m not arguing with you,” Lucy said.

  “Well,” Alfred said, looking as if she had been doing just that.

  Ida stood with such force that the table shook. “Feather,” she said to Alfred. “Knock him over with a feather. Not a spoon.”

  Her two friends stared at her.

  “Does it seem to the two of you that we’ve been sitting at this table our whole lives?” she demanded, her voice louder than she’d anticipated.

  Brother and sister looked at each other, and then their plates, and then back at Ida.

  “Because it seems to me that we do nothing but eat meal after meal at this table.” She indicated the empty plates and cups, then shook her hands like a waterbird drying its wings. “Mercy,” she said. “At least someone is out there living.” She looked from one confounded friend to the other. They said nothing.

  The light was almost gone from the room. No one moved to the lamps.

  Ida felt as if she might strike something. She thought of Charlie’s kind, plain face and childlike hands. Her heart calmed. Staring at Lucy, she saw the infant’s black hair, its warm-toned skin against the white blanket. Charlie, she thought. Surprising her again.

  Lucy said softly, “I’m sorry if I’ve kept you from what you’ve wanted.”

  Ida took a step back, pushing her chair away from the table, and it tipped backward with a clatter. “Everyone keeps me from everything,” she said. And then she left before having to see the hurt she had caused spread across her best friend’s face.

  *

  The following morning was the first of a new month, and the work at the pegging berths couldn’t have been going any slower, and there was no foreman to make it otherwise. He had not come home until dawn, and more alarming than that, Ley My had told the others he was sure Charlie’s queue was missing.

  The white workers, recently recruited to mix in with the Chinese on the bottoming floor, kept at their berths, though their hands remained idle.

  From the back, Quan Tuch announced that yesterday had been payday, and he had seen Mr. Chase hand the bundle of gold coins to Charlie, but was it necessary to note that none of them had seen any coins since?

  In this room, where the sound of the machines was usually as relentless as a hard rain, the muffled sounds of work elsewhere came through the floor and wallboards. Vibrations made their way through the men’s shoes. The room was already warmed by the growing heat of the day. They had spent years in this room, and now they were ready to think the worst of this man who seemed to sacrifice the least but reap the most. Change was coming, and they welcomed it, the way some villagers in their hometowns welcomed demons. The terrible might result in advantage or its opposite, but either way you wanted to be there to see it.

  None of the white men could understand Chinese, but just the sight of the Celestials clumped at one end of the room was enough. Their work together these last few weeks had been excessively polite, the civility of executioner and condemned, and neither group had been as yet able to determine which was which.

  It seemed to the white men that the tenor of the conversation at the other end of the room was shifting into something more worrisome. Had they had grasp of the language, they would have heard a litany of complaints against the foreman: He made more money, yet worked less. He had total acquaintance with and power over their bills. He determined what they needed from the market and when they needed it. He read and wrote their mail. He received and distributed their pay, deducting what they owed without offering an accounting. He was their hands and eyes in dealing with the town, and for years had persuaded them to pool extra money that none of them could afford and buy Thanksgiving turkeys for key figures, a list of whom he himself drew up. And only he seemed to be singled out as worthy of the town’s gratitude and good wishes.

  This last spring, they felt he had capitulated too quickly when renegotiating their contract with Sampson. They were now receiving less pay. They were now required to pay part of their heating costs. They understood times were hard, but at whose doorstep did he lay his loyalty?

  And most disturbingly, he seemed to be bent on burying their dead in the local cemetery with Methodist ritual. It had become clear that the dead were not likely to be exhumed and their remains sent back to China.

  This was the worst thing. Without attention to rituals, there was no way to resolve what was doubtful, receive the spirits, or distinguish humanness from righteousness.

  Their foreman was a spirit of disorder. He stood for anarchy and individual gain.

  There was silence again when the group came to the end of its complaints.

  Ah Chung glanced at the berths of white workers. Homer Handley smiled and held his cutters up in a wave as if interrupting his usual work. Ah Chung gave him a small nod without gathering the attention of his fellow workers, and then both men dropped their eyes back to their previous concer
ns.

  When Lucius Hurd arrived at his South Adams studio to open up shop on that overcast August 1, the Chinese foreman was standing by the door, waiting. Mr. Hurd had on one or two occasions been visited by the Chinese, but his studio was smaller and less convenient than that of his older brother, William, and situated in the decidedly more rural South Adams, and Lucius Hurd prided himself on what he would describe as a more dignified approach to promoting his work. His wife found this streak of passivity to be his tragic flaw, the source of all their unhappiness and continued struggle. Too good for his own good, she told their eldest daughter. Certainly for mine, she often added.

  And so the sight of the Chinaman, worn and bedraggled as he was, was a welcome one, and Lucius attempted to convey as much in his cheerful greeting.

  The Chinaman seemed not to notice, and Lucius had the distinct sense that if he had never succeeded in unlocking the door, the man would’ve expressed nothing but contentment at standing outside the building for the rest of the day. About this, Lucius Hurd would have been wrong. Charlie’s insides were at war. His only chance at not falling to the ground in pieces was to make his outer body a lacquered shell within which the inner tumult could be contained. He knew this photographer not at all, yet he’d seen the portraiture he had made of a few of the boys. He knew of what kinds of transformations the photographer was capable with what had seemed to Charlie nothing more than the turn of two ankles, the confident spread of knees, a hymnal, and a silk fan. One or two of the boys, Charlie knew, had given copies of the photographs to their Sunday school teachers. Charlie had teased one boy about the gift, but the boy would not be teased. With an utter seriousness, he had said, “I give her a ghost image of myself so that she can remember the form from which the ghost comes.” He had indicated his body with a gesture of such fluidity that Charlie had been seized with shame and had teased him no more.

  Lucius kept the curtains drawn and lit the lamp on his front counter. The Chinaman looked as if he’d slept outside, and clearly his hair had had an unsuccessful encounter with dull blades.

  Charlie noticed him regarding his hair. “You can shave and trim?” he asked, pulling from beneath his tunic a small towel, which he opened on the counter, revealing a razor, some soap, a comb, and a pair of work scissors.

  For Lucius Hurd this was proving to be a most remarkable day. He told the Chinaman that it wasn’t his usual trade, but he didn’t see why he couldn’t offer him a decent shave and cut. As long as the man wanted nothing fancy.

  Charlie frowned. “Nothing fancy,” he repeated. He reached under his tunic and produced a small money bag from which he pulled one gold coin. “Best American portrait,” he said, putting the coin on the counter between them.

  So Lucius Hurd would give this man a shave and a haircut. He would dress him in his finest costume suit. Perhaps even a hat. He would take the portrait. And then he would pass the rest of the day as he had expected to pass it. In the evening, he would close up shop and retrace his morning steps back to his home and his family, where he was sure that not even his wife could object to a hard gold coin placed in her small, beautiful hand.

  Almost as alarming to Homer Handley as the strange behavior of the Chinese was the fact that Mr. Sampson seemed not to have made an appearance at the factory that day. Midmorning, an errand boy had found his way to the bottoming room after having had no success in locating Mr. Sampson downstairs. And sometime after the midday meal, Mr. Chase had leaned into the room, scanned it, and gone out again.

  Homer knew what his Crispin friends said about Sampson—that he made a lot of promises and never kept them, that he told everyone what they wanted to hear, that his interests were only for himself and his wife. That he was so selfish that he didn’t even want to share his fortune with offspring. But to him Sampson had been nothing but fair, and what Homer admired the most about the man was his dogged discipline. His sense of responsibility to this world he had built for himself. Homer, too, believed that if you built something, you took care of it. Weekly oilings of woodwork; periodic tightening of table joints; cleaning windows with strong vinegar; repainting house and barn.

  Someone whom Homer had come to admire for his consistency of purpose acting in unfamiliar ways was distracting enough that once they had recommenced work, he made several careless errors that afternoon about which Emmett Fletcher, usually the one to make mistakes, teased him with much gratitude and little mercy.

  Had Homer learned, as Mr. Chase had upon inquiring at the Wilson House’s front desk, that Mr. Sampson was indeed in his apartment, but had left instructions not to be disturbed, he would have assumed, as Mr. Chase did, illness. For what else could keep a man such as Mr. Sampson at home on a workday?

  The imagination of neither man was broad enough to include a romantic reunion with Mrs. Sampson. Though both men would’ve said that the marriage was a strong one, the best example of what marriage ought to be, neither would’ve thought it a place of romance. Formidable, fair, and upright were the words that came to mind when the Sampson union was discussed, if it was discussed at all.

  Sampson had spent the day, as many people do when they believe themselves betrayed by loved ones, feeling hurt and inflicting hurt. He had not been able to move his wife from her insistence that the child was his. He had spent the morning trying to catalog the one hundred fifty boys in the factory and realizing that he was acquainted with their faces almost not at all and their names even less. He found himself by the late afternoon a creature pacing a wall of bars.

  Could he interview the boys one by one? Could he look at them and know? He examined the infant girl in her various states of quietude and squall. Would her features be apparent in her maker’s?

  He had, by the time Homer was pegging the same shoe for the third time, struck upon an idea that he felt held promise, and he spread before Julia the photo albums of Sampson’s Boys on the card table, eliminating the twenty-two boys who had arrived most recently.

  He realized with embarrassment that he disguised as anger that he had not a clue which of these boys were her students. And that her teaching of them had been his idea in the first place. He insisted that it was her duty to him and to God to tell him all that she knew.

  The more her husband spoke, the more Julia wept.

  She held the baby up to him. “She’s my child,” she said. “After all these years, my child.”

  He could barely understand her, her crying was so violent.

  She pressed the infant bundle against his belly. “Please,” she said again. “Can’t you love her for that?”

  It seemed to him that no matter how he answered, there would be his life before this day and his life after, and he knew not how to reconcile the two.

  Old and in need of the support of two grandsons, who were youthful and impatient on each side of their fragile grandfather, Homer Handley would be one of the many attendees at the Sampson funeral on a Sunday afternoon in October 1893, though he would not attend the reception. He had not, of course, been invited, but even if he had, he would have instructed his grandsons to take him home. His purpose was to honor the man by seeing him laid to rest, not to share the passing with others. Who knew why he’d felt so attached to this man for so long? And when his grandsons had delivered him home, and his wife teased him gently by asking if all had gone well at the funeral of his dear friend, all he would say in response was that he had thought it pleasing to see so many folks of so many stripes. His wife would cup his cheek as she had been doing for some thirty-plus years, and he would reach up to return the gesture.

  But by the end of that working day, the thunder and lightning had begun and Emmett Fletcher was predicting hail. It had been a long and anxious day, and the hot storm wind, the flip-flopping of the leaves, revealing their silvery undersides like thrashing fish, and the smell of water in the air made Homer long for home and his wife. They would drink cold lemonade and watch the storm from their porch, counting the seconds from lightning to thunder to know how far t
hey were from the eye.

  And then he glanced to the Chinamen’s side of the room and noted that the foreman was back, wearing Western work clothes and sporting a new haircut of the oddest design. The other workers were gathered around him in a mass alive with fear and ignorance, righteousness and anger. Homer felt as he imagined his terrier to feel on the days when the dog watched the humans pack up for an outing: Who knows how long this may last, but nothing good can come of it.

  Chapter Eleven

  It seemed to Charlie that he did nothing in the days following Julia’s return home but negotiate and mollify. Even for a man with his abilities, the demands he encountered were a challenge. When had he ever imagined himself having to explain a situation such as this one? He professed ignorance. He promised investigation. He counseled patience and loyalty and suggested that idle speculation could do no good. On his return from the South Adams studio he had had to field dismay and upset about his haircut, and to put an end to their sense of betrayal, he had doled out their salaries, adding a little extra for each man from his own share, telling them it was a bonus from Sampson himself. He had charged them with living up to the high regard in which their employer held them.

  Sampson didn’t return to the factory for the remainder of that week, and Charlie was glad of it. His growing intimacy with Julia had not meant a change in the opinions he held of Sampson. He never spoke ill of the man to others, never thought ill of him in his own mind. In fact, it was rare for him to think of Julia as another man’s wife; she seemed so much her own person, and his relationship with her so much its own place, inhabited only by the two of them. He had felt, falling in love with her, as if they had discovered a door in the familiar earth leading to another country where nothing was anything they knew.

  She, he knew, did not always feel this way. And it was by way of her sadness at her betrayal of her husband that Charlie found his own guilt. Her heavy heart filled his with the same weight. He came to think of it as more evidence of their love. Now he saw Sampson not just as a model for his aspirations, but as Julia’s husband, someone who would care a great deal about Charlie’s feelings for his wife. He understood this so acutely that he marveled that he had not felt it before. He hadn’t even seen with any clarity the sort of future they might have together.