Boon said again, “You do as you like,” and left the room, Angela thought peevishly, That’s just like you, unwilling to face problems. Always letting me deal with problems. She remembered something and shouted after him, “And do you know that the lifts in that wretched block of
flats keep breaking down? Your old mother will have to climb seven flights of steps as I once did!”
She took lots of delicious steaming hot food to Old Mother, she bought a mattress to replace the thin cotton stuffed one that Old Mother was sleeping on in the flat. She saw Old Mother washing some cups and glasses at the sink and promptly took over.
She asked Gek Choo, with pointed malice, “And when is your servant coming?”
“Kim Lan Soh is still looking,” said Gek Choo with quiet complacence. “I interviewed one yesterday, and she didn’t seem suitable. Old Mother herself didn’t find her suitable.” Fuming, Angela walked into the room where the baby lay in a cradle. He was slightly bigger, he looked better. Old Mother was all solicitousness as she rocked him in the cradle. Old Mother looked thinner and paler – who could wonder at that? – but she was all devotion to the puny little boy. She carried him up in her arms for Angela to see, but she was in no mood to hold the child, so full of resentment was she against the parents.
“I knew this kind of thing would happen – what can you expect from such a squalid environment?” was her response when she heard the story from Gek Choo. Gek Choo had related the incident reluctantly and only because Angela, having heard it from another quarter, was bent on eliciting the truth from her.
“Yes,” she had said. It was true that Old Mother had got robbed of her gold chain. She was in the market one Sunday morning with the idiot one. The idiot one had called and Old Mother wanted to take him to eat at one of the food stalls in the market. Two men had come along and struck up a conversation with Old Mother. Then they produced a round white stone which they claimed to be a magic stone, with extraordinary properties. They dropped the stone into a glass of water; nothing happened. They made Old Mother drop the stone into another glass of water; nothing happened. But when they made the idiot one drop the stone into his glass of water, the colour turned black. This, they explained, meant that the idiot one had a rare disease, which could only be cured by the magic stone. She was to say a prayer every morning and every night over the stone, and drop it into a glass of water for the idiot one to drink. He would be cured of his malady within three months.
Old Mother had no money to pay for the magic stone, but agreed to part with the gold chain around her neck. She did not tell anyone about the stone when she returned, but Wee Tiong saw her performing the rites and wormed the truth out of her. He took her down to the market place the next morning to see if she could identify the tricksters so that he could hand them over to the police, but they were either nowhere to be seen or Old Mother could not identify them.
“What do you expect from surroundings like that?” cried Angela angrily. “The market in that miserable housing estate teems with gangsters and confidence tricksters! One of these days, Old Mother is going to get robbed of her jade bangle, the diamond ear-studs we gave her for her birthday, and God knows what else. She puts all her jewellery in an old blue cloth bag which she leaves carelessly in a drawer or cupboard. If we, her sons and daughters-in-law, don’t protect her from these evil elements in society, who will?”
Angela suggested that Gek Choo keep all Old Mother’s jewellery in her safe deposit box in the bank. “I have no safe deposit box,” said Gek Choo and Angela thought, Of course, your Chinaman husband would
never allow you to buy jewellery. Every cent has to go into properties, and more properties.
The turn of events was unexpected. Angela received a call from Gek Choo. Old Mother had fallen and twisted her ankle. She had also gone down with fever. Would Angela come over and take her to see Boon?
Angela went immediately. That decides it, she thought, Old Mother comes to stay with us. It’s not a prospect I relish – the Lord knows I dread it – but I just can’t bear the thought of those mean vipers exploiting a poor old woman. If necessary, I shall get another servant to take care of her.
Old Mother wanted to return to her own house, but Angela said firmly, “Mother, you are not well. You need someone to take care of you. When you are well, you can return to your own house. But for the time being, you stay with Boon and me. Mooi Lan can cook for you. Ah Kum Soh and her son can continue staying in your house if they like, but you must get well. You’ve grown very thin and pale, and that’s not good for an old person. We’ll take good care of you.”
“You are very kind,” murmured Old Mother. “When Ah Siong comes back, he can take care of me.”
You poor fool, thought Angela, and she was suddenly overcome with compassion for her old mother-in-law. It would not be long before the new house was ready. That was the best possible compromise. Meanwhile, she had to do her duty.
Chapter 13
Angela was profuse in her apologies for having dragged Mee Kin along to the house, to the old musty room, where upon entrance the two women, suitably attired in T-shirts and slacks and with their hair covered with headscarves for the task ahead, were hit in the faces by a cloud of dust and the smell of decay and death.
Mee Kin said, “You know I wanted to come along. I told you long ago that it would be foolish to leave these things to rot. A lot of them might be valuable.” It turned out that none was worth picking up, except the old carved bed with the four posts around which writhed the ferocious dragons or serpents; it was difficult to tell which.
“This is a treasure worth restoring,” said the knowledgeable Mee Kin. “Mine isn’t half as handsome. And this is even better than Dorothy’s. It may look ugly to you now, dear, but once it’s come back from the antique restorer’s shop – voilà! – you wouldn’t believe your eyes!”
“Our first task is to get rid of those dreadful layers of dust and cobwebs,” said Angela. She looked round the room with a shiver. “This room really gives me the creeps. We’ll have to spend the whole morning cleaning it up.”
Mee Kin had good-naturedly brought along her maidservant to help clear up the mess; Angela could not spare Mooi Lan who had to see about the children’s lunch as well as Boon’s lunch, if he came back from the clinic. “All these old chairs and things – we’ll have to get rid of them,” said Angela. “My God, who would believe that the old one could have accumulated so much rubbish? Look, even empty biscuit tins and paper bags. They’ll all have to go.”
Angela brought Mee Kin to have a good look at the altar cups and jars. Mee Kin’s eyes lit up with recognition.
“Yes, they’re genuine antiques,” she said with mounting excitement. “They’re worth keeping, Angie. Dorothy has a few pieces exactly like these and she keeps them in a special show-case.”
“I can easily replace them with the pretty tea-cups and jars being sold at S K Han’s,” said Angela, delighted by the new acquisition. “My mother-in-law won’t mind, as they’ll hold the tea offerings and whatnot just as well.”
The small piercing eyes in the framed photograph above the altar again compelled her to look up. She looked up quickly, then averted the gaze.
“Isn’t it creepy,” she later whispered to Mee Kin. “The old man’s eyes seem to follow me everywhere.”
“My father-in-law’s photo gave me the same eerie feelings,” confided Mee Kin. “My mother-in-law was, in many ways, more eccentric than yours. She talked to the photograph for hours, in the last months before her death.”
“If only these old ones were like your mother!” cried Angela, who really liked the easy-going affable old lady of 67. Mee Kin said she had just returned from a holiday in Australia to visit Mee Kin’s brother and wife there.
“Do you know,” said Mee Kin, “she came back and left off the old taboo of beef! Now she’s eating beef – even beef hamburgers – like any of us. ‘If you don’t eat beef, there’s nothing to eat in Australia,’ she said, and
proceeded to enjoy herself at those Sunday barbecues at the park that my brother and sister-in-law took her to.”
Angela marvelled at the contrast between Mee Kin’s mother and her mother-in-law. “The old one won’t even come near butter,” she said, “and is averse to leather goods like leather handbags and belts. Would you believe it? I daren’t imagine what it’s going to be like now that she’s coming to stay with us. Mark must have his steak a few times a week. Michelle adores Mooi Lan’s beef patties. We’ll just have to see how things go. What to do?”
The bed again took up their attention. “I think it was their marital bed,” said Angela. “My mother-in-law was married at the age of 18, though she didn’t have children till she was in her 20s. She was virtually raped on her wedding night. You know what it was like in those days.” She looked at the bed and laughed. “This bed probably has a rich and colourful history of rape, incest, debauchery! I read somewhere – was it in Pearl S. Buck? – about the rich lords of mansions and their young sons taking turns to carry young bondmaids to their beds to deflower! My mother-in-law once told me of a grand-uncle who was like that. My Mark is too young. If he were older, he would probably write a colourful history of this bed!”
The history was less enchanting than the tangible reality. Angela paid a visit out of curiosity to the antique restorer while he was still in the process of restoration and gasped in pleased astonishment at the transformation taking place before her very eyes. They were serpents, not dragons; the original splendour of their superbly carved scales, the open mouths with the long protruding tongues, the expressive eyes were coaxed out by the patient skilful hands of the restorer.
“How marvellous, how simply marvellous,” breathed Angela, already seeing it in the master bedroom in her house. It would have pride of place in the new house. She thought of suitable silken drapes for this magnificent bed. “And to think,” she said, “it could have rotted away, have become a heap of dust!”
Old Mother had handed over her jewellery in the old blue cloth bag for safe-keeping. Angela had bought a pretty lacquer box from S K Han’s to replace the ugly old blue cloth bag. In the privacy of her room she emptied the contents of the cloth bag on to her bed, wanting to see if the foolish old one had lost any of her jewellery besides the gold chain.
It gave her a deep sense of satisfaction to identify many pieces of jewellery as gifts from her and Boon over the years. The diamond ear-studs, a gold ring with an oval piece of jade, a gold bracelet with a row of six round pieces of jade, a gold bar. The worth of these items must have tripled, quadrupled. She saw the gold ring given by Wee Tiong and Gek Choo; she studied it closely, convinced it was not gold. There was a long thin gold chain, which she could not remember having previously seen. She had never seen Old Mother wear it. Then she recollected: it had belonged to her late father-in-law; the old man had worn it right to the moment of his death.
There were four small metal cylinders, like the one that the idiot wore round his neck, containing the charm bought for $200 from the swindling temple priests. Why were there so many charms among the jewellery? Or perhaps each contained a small piece of jewellery? Angela took one up, pulled it apart easily. Something fell out, a rolled-up piece of yellow paper with Chinese words on it. There was something inside the little roll of paper; Angela unrolled it carefully, afraid to tear the frail paper. A small withered coil, as of dried skin or flesh fell out, tied round in the middle by a piece of red string.
Angela stared, not knowing what it was; moments later, she walked rapidly to the bathroom to retch for she felt quite ill.
The umbilical cord – now she remembered. Boon had once told her that his mother kept the umbilical cords of all her children, as was the custom among superstitious Chinese, as a symbol of the bond between parent and child.
So the four little metal cylinders carried within them the umbilical cords of the four sons. Angela wondered with a tremor of terror, whose umbilical cord she had inadvertently unrolled, and which was now lying on her bed?
She pulled out a piece of tissue paper from the box of Kleenex in the bathroom, strode with grim determination to the bed, threw it on the dried, shrivelled little coil of flesh, hastily picked it up and put it back with the roll of yellow paper into the cylinder. She would never touch these things again. She would return them to the old one, and keep the jewellery in the lacquer box for her in a safe place. And she would never tell Mark. It would be unfair to add to the burden that the boy already carried, of the dreadful irrationalities and weirdnesses of his forbears.
Angela went to the bathroom a second time, to wash her hands and rinse her mouth. There was a horrible taste in it.
Chapter 14
The inevitable first visit of courtesy by the two brothers-in-law and their wives was made shortly after the old one had settled in. Angela, dreading the prospect of two separate visits, two separate lunches, two afternoons of tedium, had manipulated for the two sons and their wives to come on the same day. “Like this,” she explained to Mee Kin, “there will be less strain on Mooi Lan. The poor girl is already quite terrified of the prospect of having to attend to the difficult old one in addition to her other work. She hasn’t said anything but I must try to get another servant. That miserable Aminah has gone on maternity leave again, and I’ve got someone to take her place for the time being. Mooi Lan has to keep an eye on this one all the time; one morning she caught her taking home some eggs and tinned stuff in a paper bag! Poor Mooi Lan, she’s cook, housekeeper, watchdog, all rolled into one.”
The girl had helped Angela get ready Old Mother’s room. It was the guest-room handsomely done up (“But you mark my words,” Angela said sadly to Mee Kin, “she is going to turn it into a pig-sty soon, what with her mania for collecting old paper bags and biscuit tins and bottles. You mark my words.”) with a colour television set as the old one sometimes liked to watch the Cantonese serials.
“I really don’t know what will happen when SBC dubs all dialect serials in Mandarin,” said Angela to her visitors, as she took them to see Old Mother’s room, to point out the new colour television set, neatly atop a lace-covered table, a comfortable distance from the bed, covered by a crisp blue and green bedspread. “I suppose she won’t want to watch TV any more then, and then this set will be redundant.”
Wee Tiong and Gek Choo looked better; much of the strain of the earlier weeks had left their faces. The baby boy was better and was being cared for by the elderly Kim Lan Soh. Chwee Hwa was big enough for play school now and no longer needed her. Angela had heard rumours from Ah Kum Soh that Gek Choo’s mother had consulted a temple medium about their sickly son, and the medium had said that the boy’s destiny and his grandmother’s did not match. They had to be kept apart.
So this was why the old one was quickly evicted, thought Angela, her earlier revulsion of her brother-in-law and his wife returning. All this anxiety about the old woman falling down and twisting her ankle and needing a place to rest was pure bullshit. They got her quickly enough when they needed her to take care of the child; they got rid of her as quickly when they found she was of no use! Those vipers. How can they treat a poor old woman in this way?
There was something else that rankled. Ah Kum Soh had told her that Wee Tiong and Gek Choo had hinted, had actually stated, that Angela had manipulated to get the old one to stay with her because she could then lay hands on the heap of antiques in the old one’s house, antiques worth thousands of dollars. This could not be allowed to pass. “Ah Tiong, Gek Choo, come and look at the antique bed I rescued from the old dark room in the wooden house, remember?” she said brightly, leading them upstairs to the master bedroom where the bed, fully restored, with maroon bed curtains, stood in all its splendour. “I had it assessed. It is said to be worth about $4,000. I thought it only proper to pay Old Mother the amount, minus the cost of the restoration. The money has been banked in for her, I thought it only proper.” She went on to say that the other things were quite useless, except for a few altar cup
s and jars. Mee Kin’s servant girl had kindly cleaned the furniture and things, as well as the old dark room. It was very clean now, properly fumigated and the things were neatly stacked in a corner. Wee Tiong and Gek Choo, if they were interested, could have them; they had only to tell Ah Kum Soh who was managing the house now.
Gek Choo said, “No, thank you. We have hardly enough room in our flat as it is,” and the subject of the so-called treasure trove in Old Mother’s house was never referred to again.
Gloria admired the bed, feeling the richness of the silken maroon bed curtains, but recoiled at the four serpents’ heads on the bed-posts.
Angela led them to see the altar for the old man; it was in a neat little corner at the back, hidden from sight by a pretty Chinese screen of four folding panels. Mooi Lan wiped off the joss-stick ash from the altar table every day and removed withered petals that had fallen off the flower jars. Old Mother tended to be careless sometimes. The oranges on the plates would be soft and rotting before she realised it, the little cups of tea stale and murky.
Gloria looked away from the framed photograph of the old man. She was sure to have another frightful dream of him; he persisted in coming out of photographs, out of graves and coffins to pursue her. She was never without her rosary at night, each rosary bead filled with the holy water of Lourdes, kept under her pillow or tightly gripped in her hand.
It was the presence of the holy water-filled beads that had dispelled those frightful dreams and allowed her, instead, to see herself with her sisters, amidst laughing summer roses and fruit, in faraway happier lands.
The Catherine Lim Collection Page 8
