Night in Shanghai

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Night in Shanghai Page 5

by Nicole Mones


  As translator and arm-piece, she had tasks and obligations, but at least she was not one of his women. He had taken her twice that way, shortly after she entered his service at eighteen, and after, never touched her again. This was a blessing to her, and also a constant reminder of a failure she barely understood. Sometimes she watched the wives, and wondered what they knew about the house thing that she did not. Fourth Wife talked with her on occasion, and more than once Song had helped her look after the children, but though Fourth Wife was the youngest of the wives and closest to Song in age, they never spoke of private things.

  Still, she was worlds away from the submissive girl she had been when she arrived in Shanghai. She had her own loyalties now. And this was where being out with Du had its advantages, for he was master of Shanghai, the fulcrum for all agreements legal or illegal, so she was positioned to overhear things. As she ascended the stairs at the Royal, last in line as always, she scanned the bubbles of conversation that floated out between the tied-back curtains of each box. Understanding English was her great advantage; foreigners babbled like fools in front of her.

  Ahead of her Du paused at a box, and stepped inside to trade greetings. Flowery and Fiery assumed their positions. As she entered, she recognized the rotund form of H. H. Kung, and next to him a dissipated older Englishman she had seen in the papers—Sir Frederick Leith-Ross, sent by England to help China control its economy. Bloodsucking ghost capitalist. She looked with disdain at his few remaining white hairs combed over his bald head, at his face pouched and ruddy from drink.

  Leith-Ross, meanwhile, was making little effort to conceal his distaste at the sight of Du’s trademark large ears, bald head, and long gown. “Shocking that they let him in here! And in a box! It’s a disgrace.”

  “Of course he is a blackmailer or murderer or worse,” Duke Kung replied in his smooth English, “but my dear sir, one hundred thousand men in Shanghai obey his orders.” That was an exaggeration, Song knew—the number was closer to ten thousand—but Kung was rolling, and his eyes gleamed behind his round tortoiseshell glasses. “The only reason the Nationalists can even hold Shanghai is because of Du and his men. Why, what choice do we have? He could create a disturbance at any moment!” Switching to Shanghainese, he turned to address Du. Called “Duke” because of his direct descent from Confucius, he lowered his eyes respectfully. “Teacher. I am always and ever will be your servant.”

  “Where? Where?” said Du, chiding him affectionately for his flattery, as was proper.

  Kung switched back to English. “May I introduce Sir Frederick Leith-Ross?”

  They both turned to the Englishman, who had now trained his rheumy eyes on Song. “Good God, his tart is young enough to be his daughter!”

  Turtle egg. Stinking son of a slave girl. She stretched out a hand and spoke in English. “Forgive me, but I do not believe we have been introduced. I am Song Yuhua. You are . . . ?”

  He choked on his spittle. “Sir Frederick Leith-Ross.”

  “Enchanted.” She turned to Kung, who kept the play going by raising the back of her hand to his mouth for a pretend European-style kiss. “Duke Kung,” she continued in English, “it is always a pleasure to see you.” And then she smiled sweetly and stepped back as Teacher made his magisterial Chinese farewells and swept out, surrounded by his men.

  What she’d said had been flawlessly polite, yet the man’s choleric face showed that her arrow had found its mark, and Duke Kung was fighting down his laughter. Good; the foreigner was a toad, a parasite.

  She settled into her chair in their box, and scanned the crowd as she always did, to settle the fear that she might see someone from her native place, where no one knew she had been sold to Du in payment for her father’s debts. That night she saw no one from Anhui, but she did notice quite a few Shanghai luminaries, bankers and shipping magnates and real estate barons—even Ah Fu, the Russian Jewish composer. Everyone on the dance floor below had their eyes on this new ghost pianist, who did not, despite the Chinese-language advertisements that had been trumpeting the club’s reopening for the past week, look like a man who had come straight from the cotton fields.

  His playing had an upright feel that sounded familiar to her, carrying her back to when she was a child, and her Western tutor gave her piano lessons. Yet it was a dance orchestra too. She decided this was a fresh hybrid from America, and she liked it.

  Sometime after two in the morning Lin Ming appeared in the box, his sleeves rolled up, exhausted, dazed. “Mou qu bao li,” he said, treasure and exuberant profit.

  Du made a curt nod of acknowledgment, which was a lot for him, and Lin discreetly patted the sheen off his brow as he heard the first tinkly piano notes of the band’s signature song, “Exactly Like You.” They played it as an instrumental, with Charles and Ernest trading off voices, a two-saxophone duet of the melody Benny Goodman had made famous on the clarinet.

  I know why I’ve waited, know why I’ve been blue,

  Prayed each night for someone

  Exactly like you.

  The song’s end brought a cascade of applause and cheers, during which Lin Ming touched Song’s elbow in good-bye and slipped out. Then the house quieted, and even the air hung still, suspended, as everyone held their breath for the encore.

  The piano player lifted his hands. A spotlight circled him, as all else went black.

  A rising cry from the clarinet sailed out of the darkness behind him and resolved itself into the famous first notes of Rhapsody in Blue. Song recognized it from the radio, though she had never expected to hear it in a ballroom.

  The clarinet walked atop the melody and the piano’s first chords rained down. For a while she listened, her eyes half-closed, and when she opened them and looked down, she beheld something she had not seen before, ever: a dance floor full of people in expensive evening clothes, perfectly still, all quiet as shafts of light, listening, all under the spell. She too sat motionless, suspended. To think of the hardship he had come from . . . and now he raised a tapered, aristocratic-looking hand to bring in the horns.

  She noticed that the musicians were staring at him too, surprised, almost awestruck. A few stumbled slightly, before finding their way into the rhythm, which the pianist, in this piece at least, had in his keeping. A few seconds later, they were in his time, following him. She could feel the shift.

  Too soon it was over, and applause exploded through the ballroom for the last time that night. Song turned to Du and said, feigning modesty, “Not bad. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  He gave her a cold look. She should have expected it; jazz, like all Western music, was only noise to him. He wanted everything Chinese, and nothing foreign; everything old, nothing new. He was a gangster, a criminal, but in his mind he belonged to some lost aristocracy. He and his fellows hoped to silence composers, declare jazz dangerous, ban new plays, and remove dissenting editors from their posts. She hated him.

  Most of the young people like her in Shanghai who joined the Communist underground felt as she did; they were struggling writers, actors, journalists, and musicians, living for the future. Whether they were of humble origins, or were the children of well-fed families who were leaning down to the workers’ cause, they were idealistic, typical of young “urban path” Communists, as opposed to those who found their way to the movement along the “rural path,” in the provinces. They were smart and passionate and sophisticated; they believed. That Song was one of them, secretly, made every day of her life worth living.

  Du stood to go, and she rose with him, her lies contained and her surfaces flawless.

  Two floors below, Thomas Greene stood by the brass-trimmed door. His head was spinning with relief as he thanked people and wished them well. The whole theater seemed to be surging toward him with compliments and congratulations.

  “Happy New Year! Yes, thank you,” he said. “So kind of you. Don’t forget the rest of the Kansas City Kings, fine musicians, every one. Yes, thank you. The best for nineteen thirty-seven. Come ag
ain.” Lin stood next to him saying the same things in Chinese, and everyone in the theater had to squeeze past them.

  Atop the sea of heads Thomas saw one man taller than the others, tall as Lin Ming, but older, and he knew at once it was the father, the crime lord, Du Yuesheng. Should he greet him? But people said he spoke no English.

  Du did not give him the chance. Refusing to look at him, he stared straight ahead as he passed.

  But behind him, trailing in the wake of his bodyguards, floated a woman with the most brilliantly intelligent eyes, and gardenias fixed at the back of her neck.

  Thomas watched as she was carried toward him on the tide, forced ahead, laughing. When she came abreast, he held her eyes, just for a second, and then the crowd bore her away. After one last moment of clinging to her with his gaze, he turned back to the line of people.

  Lin saw him staring. “Don’t look at her.”

  “Why not?”

  “You deaf in your dog’s ears? She belongs to him.” And he slid back into Chinese with the next man in line.

  “Is she his wife?”

  “Nothing like that,” said Lin.

  Then like what? Thomas wanted to know, but he said no more, because playing his part properly meant giving in sometimes, as he had been taught from the beginning of his life. But that had always been irrelevant to what he thought, felt, and planned inside—and now he had noticed her, and he would be watching for her in the future. In his own time.

  When at last the crowd thinned, he stepped outside, where musicians and well-wishers were still gathered. Among them he noticed a man Alonzo had pointed out across the ballroom, a slight, blue-eyed Russian Jew in a Chinese gown. Greene crossed to him and extended a hand. “Happy New Year. Thomas Greene.”

  They grasped warmly. “Delighted, and the same to you.” The older man’s accent was a mash of European tones. “Aaron Avshalomov. The evening was most wonderful. I always say one should go to the classics first. Your Rhapsody was resplendent! The essence of America, with all its brashness. I conducted it in Tianjin a few years ago with a Russian cabaret pianist, but to you he did not compare! You were marvelous. We should meet again. We must, I insist. May we please? Let us agree to it for the new year.”

  “I’d like that,” Thomas said, riding the sudden swell of acceptance, wanting the same thing he had always wanted, the respect of serious musicians like Avshalomov, who, after a quick good night, was borne away in a rickshaw, his light, unruly cloud of hair bouncing above the folded-back awning.

  Thomas turned to see the two reed players beside him, Charles and Ernest. “Come on, Tails,” said Ernest—the nickname having arisen earlier that night on account of the cutaway coat he wore as bandleader—“You promised us on the night we opened, you’d go celebrate.”

  “You’re right, I did.” He ruffled the young head, grinning at the fact that all the doors seemed wide open to him, for the first time ever; he could drink, dance, and sample women, for he had money, and here, where all men were at last created equal, that was the only thing that mattered. “Let’s go.”

  3

  BY EARLY SPRING, Thomas was keeping up on piano, though hardly delivering the irresistibly danceable keyboard lines the Kings required. This was overlooked partly because he was skilled at arranging and leading, and partly because the classical flights of fancy he delivered onstage brought such responses from the audience that even the brass section dared not raise a voice.

  But he could feel things simmering, and one day in March, at the weekly rehearsal, brass player Lester Cole let it out. “When are you going to take a solo, Tails?”

  “Well—”

  “’Cause we’re getting tired of the Uncle Tom business.”

  Thomas heard nothing for an instant save the buzzing in his head and his own sharp intake of breath, but then Charles filled the emptiness by speaking up. “That’s not fair,” he said.

  “I agree,” his brother Ernest put in. “I like the new sound.”

  Cole bristled. “What do you two know?”

  “They know what we all know,” Alonzo said, his sonorous voice drawing everyone’s attention. “You got no call to say that. Whatever you think of the sound, I think we all know we have never had so many people on the dance floor. Not even close. Am I right?”

  This brought a mumble of assent, and the logjam loosened enough for Thomas to push ahead, but the vibrato of anxiety stayed in his gut through the whole rehearsal. He called out the changes in the new arrangements, and played a minimally credible piano line beneath the Kings’ bluesy surge, but everything was teetering. He was bringing too much of himself to the role. Back in America, he could never be light enough, never fully pass for European. He had always had to work extra hard on his precision and the subtlety of his touch to compensate, just as he had chosen his clothes and cultivated his manners in the same fashion. He had formed himself prophylactically, creating almost an exact shadow of his obstacles in the persona he presented. But to pass as a jazz musician, he was going to have to drop that, and be someone different.

  To start, he had to offer something that sounded like solos, so using scores his new copyist Mr. Hsu had written out, he devised a series of elegant and unexpected elaborations. These impressed the crowd readily enough, but not his musicians.

  He envied the way the other Kings could just take off and play, as if inspired to sing a line or two. It was the Kansas City sound, to have solos riffing above a driving, danceable bedrock in flat-four time. All of them could solo, except him. Even after he understood that it was part of the Kansas City sound itself, the way it allowed each man to stand up and stretch out and tell a story, horizontally, melodically, with the steady beat behind him, he remained jealous of what they could do.

  And most of his bandmates had something else he was lacking—a girlfriend. Not that he was chaste; girls of every nationality were available, and some of those he sampled had pleased him. He took delight at first in being offered lovely bodies of every shade, in kissing mouths that spoke Russian and French and Hindi and Tonkinese and three or four different Chinese dialects, but in the end, he found it a lonely business, paying for a woman. On the other hand, he was always treated like a gentleman, which he loved, for respect was headier to him than sex, even the sex they had here—more affirming, more restorative, the root note that had been missing from his chord all his life. He made sense in Shanghai.

  He had grown to envy the other Kings their women. Some of them were Chinese, two were Russian, one was Malaysian, and Alonzo even lived with Keiko, a Japanese woman he’d met through one of the guys in Buck Clayton’s Harlem Gentlemen. He wanted a special someone too.

  Yet it was hard to go out on the town when he got off work at two A.M., so most nights he went home and spent an hour shedding his life completely, no posing, no passing, just paging through the sheets of concertos and sonatas he used to play, and wearing his soft old union suits instead of the silk dressing gowns the tailor had provided. It was ninety days now, and he still did not miss America. He did miss the feel of Creel Street though, and one thing that took him back there was to sit in the concentrated, benevolent light of an oil lamp late at night. In their leanest years, after the War, his widowed mother had used a single hurricane lamp every evening when the power was off, carrying it with them from room to room. Thomas had used it in the last days in the apartment as well, after the electricity went off, and left it behind in the cupboard when he departed. Here in Shanghai, to his joy, he found one like it in a used-goods shop over by Suzhou Creek. Uncle Hua disapproved of the thing, calling it a fire hazard, but Thomas used it in the dead of night anyway, and was comforted by its glow.

  He took stock of himself, those nights, and realized he could court a respectable girl, if he could find one. He had money to spend on a woman. Even with all he had dropped on ladies of the night in his first months, he still made more than he could spend, and he kept the excess neatly folded in his wardrobe, underneath his shirts, which were laundered, pr
essed, and folded to knife creases by Chen Ma. One March day when he was taking some cash out, Uncle Hua materialized in the doorway.

  Hua watched for a moment, and said, “Pay my look see, Master.”

  “I think you already had a look see,” Thomas answered. It had not taken long for him to understand that he had no privacy at all, a fact to which he was already resigned as he put the little money package back in its not-so-secret spot.

  “Master. You give one hundred, bye-bye make pay one oh seven.”

  Seven percent? This caught Thomas’s attention. “How?”

  Hua’s creased face went stubborn. “That b’long my pidgin.”

  “It belong my pidgin if my money’s in it,” Thomas retorted. “How?”

  Hua’s eyes narrowed. “Gamble place, my house.”

  “Is that so! You must do well, to offer seven.”

  “Can do.”

  “I see.” Thomas thought, and pulled another hundred from the pouch. “We’ll start small,” he said, holding it out. “One ten, in a month.”

  “One month no can do. Three months. One seven five.”

  “Two months. One eight five.”

  “One eight.”

  Thomas considered.

  “One eight five?” Hua repeated, and Thomas nodded. “Can puttee book?” he said, barely able to contain his glee.

  “Puttee book,” said Greene. “It’s a deal.” He handed him the money and closed the cupboard. “And you stay out of my things, Uncle Hua.” He faked sternness and his majordomo pretended to quail in response, but Thomas understood by now that this was theater, that people were playing their roles, just as he played his. He was getting the hang of it.

  Or so he thought.

  Every Saturday, Song Yuhua went downtown to collect Du Taitai’s medicine. Seeing to the health needs of the supreme wife and matriarch was a task of importance, even if the old lady was an opium addict who had not left her room in years. The task fell to Song partly because no one else wanted to do it, but she always looked forward to her weekly afternoon abroad in the city, stretching an errand that could be done fairly quickly into several hours of doing what she wanted. She was in no way imprisoned in Du’s mansion on Rue Wagner, for though always on call, she was able to come and go more or less as she wanted. But on Saturdays, Teacher knew she took care of his first wife’s medicines, and so on that day, he never requested her services before evening fell.

 

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