Jewel of the East

by Ann Hood

  Walking back to the car, they ran into Jim Duncan and his grandparents, who were visiting from Saint Petersburg, Florida.

  “This is my dad,” Felix said, practically bursting with joy.

  Their father and Jim shook hands, and then he shook hands with Jim’s grandfather and grandmother, and they stood talking briefly about the weather in Florida compared to the weather here in Newport.

  As if on cue, big, fat snowflakes began to drift lazily down, landing in their hair and eyelashes and coats.

  Could today be any more perfect? Maisie thought, slipping her red, mittened hand into her father’s big, woolly gloved one.

  “I thought you were out of the picture,” Great-Aunt Maisie announced as she slid into the front seat of the rental car.

  “Only technically,” their father said.

  Great-Aunt Maisie adjusted her fur coat—this one silver and even fluffier than the other one—and harrumphed.

  “It was my impression you had moved to Arabia,” she said.

  “Qatar,” their father said.

  His eyes met Maisie’s and Felix’s in the rearview mirror, and they could see that he was amused by Great-Aunt Maisie, not offended.

  The nurse was still standing uncertainly by the car with the wheelchair that had delivered Great-Aunt Maisie to them.

  “What are you waiting for?” Great-Aunt Maisie said to their father.

  Their father shook his head and put the car in drive. Maisie was sure that the nurse looked relieved to see them leave.

  The snow fell heavier and faster as they drove down the dark Newport streets. When they turned onto Bellevue Avenue, Great-Aunt Maisie let out a little moan.

  “Home,” she said softly.

  Her face stayed turned to look out the window.

  “Penelope’s house,” she said, pointing to another mansion. “And Charles’s.” She pointed to another farther down the road.

  When they headed down the long tree-lined driveway that led to the front door of Elm Medona, Great-Aunt Maisie sat up straighter.

  “It always looks so beautiful in the snow,” she said.

  Their father let out an appreciative low whistle. “It’s some house,” he said.

  “Well, of course it is,” Great-Aunt Maisie said. “My father would only build a magnificent house. Phinneas Pickworth did nothing on a small scale.”

  “What does it mean?” their father said, entering the circular drive in front of the house. “Elm Medona.”

  Great-Aunt Maisie looked away from the window and at their father.

  “Why, it’s an anagram,” she said. “Ask the children how much Phinneas Pickworth loved anagrams.”

  Felix leaned forward.

  “You mean, it isn’t a tree of some kind?”

  Great-Aunt Maisie laughed. “You should know better than that by now,” she said.

  She opened the door and slowly stepped out into the snow. Maisie and Felix watched as she raised both of her arms upward toward the sky, threw her head back, and let loose a lovely, tinkling laugh of joy.

  “Five fifty-eight,” their father told their mother when they entered the house.

  Two maids, two butlers, and four security guards all hovered in the entrance.

  “Thank you,” their mother said.

  She had on a long, black velvet skirt and a white, satin blouse with small, satin-covered buttons down the front. The shirt was open enough to reveal a string of pearls resting at her collar.

  “You look pretty,” their father said softly.

  Their mother blushed and looked away from him. But Maisie and Felix sneaked smiles at each other.

  One of the butlers had taken Great-Aunt Maisie’s coat, and another had arrived with a silver tray with five champagne glasses.

  “Three of these have the real stuff,” their mother said. “And two have sparkling cider.”

  “Where’s Great-Aunt Maisie?” Felix asked.

  “Oh dear,” their mother said. “She’s wandered off.”

  They all set off in search of her, quickly locating her halfway up the Grand Staircase, staring at the picture of her younger self that hung there.

  “I remember this day,” she said, her gnarled finger tenderly touching the image. “It started out as such a good day. But then Thorne… well… it was the last time I spoke to my brother.”

  Her finger paused on Uncle Thorne’s face at the edge of the picture.

  “Darling,” their mother said, “we have oysters and pâté and—”

  Great-Aunt Maisie raised her hand and shushed her.

  “Who else is here?” she asked.

  Was it Maisie’s imagination or did the dark sky turn even darker and the wind begin to howl?

  “Just us,” their mother told her. “And the staff.”

  Great-Aunt Maisie cocked her head to one side.

  “The storm seems to be getting worse,” their father said.

  But Great-Aunt Maisie wasn’t listening to them. Instead, she slowly began to make her way up the Grand Staircase.

  Everyone rushed to follow her, their mother saying, “Darling, really, dinner is all ready.”

  At the top of the stairs, Great-Aunt Maisie did not even pause. She continued in her slow, regal manner down the hallway.

  To Maisie’s and Felix’s surprise, the wall that hid the secret staircase to The Treasure Chest gaped open.

  “What in the world?” their mother said.

  With determination, Great-Aunt Maisie kept moving, now heading up the stairway, Maisie and Felix and their parents close behind her.

  The red velvet rope that usually stretched across the door of The Treasure Chest lay unhooked and dangling.

  They all stopped in the doorway.

  Behind them, the wind howled still more.

  Inside The Treasure Chest, a man stepped out of the shadows. He had a head full of stark-white hair, small, round wire-rimmed glasses, and the biggest, droopiest snow-white mustache that any of them had ever seen. He wore an all-white suit with a vivid red silk ascot and matching pocket square. In one hand, he held a walking stick, ebony black with a climbing snake carved into it. At the top of the stick, where his hand rested on the snake’s head, two emerald eyes gleamed from it and a gold tongue protruded.

  Great-Aunt Maisie gasped.

  The man grinned.

  “Well, well,” he said.

  Great-Aunt Maisie uttered just one word: “Thorne.”

  Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892. Although she became famous for writing about rural life in China, Pearl was actually born in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Her parents, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, Southern Presbyterian missionaries, were stationed in China when three of their four eldest children died in a very short span of time. Pearl’s mother insisted on returning to the United States to recover from her grief. Pearl was born there, but at the age of three months, the family returned to China. She is also known by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhu.

  The Sydenstrickers lived in Zhenjiang, a small city on the Yangtze River. Pearl’s father spent most of his time away from home, trying to convert people to Christianity in the northern Chinese countryside. Pearl grew up in a household with her mother, her younger sister, Grace, and her nanny, Wang Amah. She spoke both English and Chinese fluently and was taught by a Chinese tutor, Mr. Kung. This combination of Eastern and Western beliefs and cultures influenced her for her entire life.

  In 1900, during the Boxer Rebellion, Pearl, her mother, Grace, and Wang Amah fled to Shanghai. Her father stayed behind, intent on continuing his missionary work despite the danger to Westerners. However, later that year, out of fear for their safety in China, the family went back to the United States, where they lived with her mother’s family in West Virginia for almost two years. They returned to China in 1902, and Pearl spent most of the next thirty years of her life there, leaving to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and later to get her MA from Cornell University.

  Sh
ortly after graduation, Pearl went home to China. In 1917, she married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural economist. They moved to Nanxuzhou, a poor, rural town that inspired the stories that she would later write about life in China. A few years later, both Pearl and her husband began teaching at Nanking University in Nanking. Their first child, Carol, was born in 1921 with PKU, a genetic disorder that left her severely mentally disabled. They adopted a baby girl, Janice, four years later.

  Like her mother, Pearl suffered many tragedies as an adult. She had to place her daughter Carol in an institution in New Jersey. Her mother died. And in 1927, a violent attack on Westerners known as the Nanking Incident forced the Bucks to go into hiding before they fled to Shanghai and then to Japan. This was very similar to the time when Pearl was a child and her family had to evacuate to Shanghai during the Boxer Rebellion. Shortly after the Bucks returned to China, they got divorced. But during the same time, Pearl had begun to publish stories and essays in magazines such as The Nation, The Chinese Recorder, Asia, and Atlantic Monthly. In 1930, her first novel, East Wind, West Wind was published.

  In 1931, Pearl’s second novel, The Good Earth, became the best-selling book of both 1931 and 1932. The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize, the William Dean Howells Medal, and was adapted into a major film. Her other books include Sons, A House Divided, The First Wife and Other Stories, All Men are Brothers, The Mother, This Proud Heart, and biographies of her mother and father, The Exile and Fighting Angel. In 1938, Pearl won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first American woman to ever do so. At the time, the Nobel Committee said she won “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.”

  In 1934, conditions in China had worsened so much that Pearl decided to leave her beloved homeland and move back to the United States. To be closer to Carol, Pearl bought an old farmhouse, Green Hills Farm, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. To her, the house’s solid stone and century-old history symbolized strength and durability. She remarried and went on to adopt six more children. She and her husband founded the East and West Association, dedicated to cultural exchange and understanding between Asia and the West. During the 1930s and ’40s, Asian and mixed-race children were considered unadoptable. As a response to this prejudice, Pearl established Welcome House, the first international, interracial adoption agency. Today, Welcome House has placed over five thousand children. Pearl continued her work helping with international adoptions when she founded the Pearl S. Buck Foundation in 1964. It provides sponsorship funding for thousands of Amerasian children in Asia.

  Pearl Buck died in March 1973. She is buried at Green Hills Farm, which is used as the center for the Pearl S. Buck Foundation.

  Even though Felix landed hard, his back crashing onto a wooden floor, he oddly still had the sensation of moving. Moving slowly. Upward.

  He opened his eyes and saw a sea of high-button boots, long skirts, and stiff trousers.

  “Little boy,” a woman with a feathered hat scolded. “Get back up here or you’ll fly off.”

  Felix pulled his aching self up to a sitting position. He was facing about a dozen people sitting on a wooden bench, staring down at him.

  He grinned up at them and took the hand of a man with a mustache even bigger than Great-Uncle Thorne’s, letting the man help him to his feet. Everyone scrunched over so that he could squeeze in.

  In the distance, Felix saw the ocean glittering bright blue. That combined with the sky, equally as blue and sprinkled with perfect white, fluffy clouds, made him feel as if he had landed smack into the middle of a postcard. A postcard that was definitely going up a hill along a creaky track. The people around him looked like they had stepped out of a postcard, too, with their big hats and suits and funny shoes.

  A few of the women were holding hands tight and staring all wide-eyed and scared.

  “It’s my first time,” one of them said. She had hair in big, bouncy banana curls, and the tip of her nose was sunburned.

  “Mine too,” the dark-haired one beside her said in a quivering voice.

  Felix nodded at them as if he understood. Shifting his gaze in the other direction, away from the ocean, he saw a giant, fake elephant. There appeared to be people standing on top of it.

  The car reached the top, paused, then coasted down the track.

  Everyone, except Felix, screamed or gasped or laughed nervously.

  Felix smiled. Wherever he had landed, this was a roller coaster. The slowest roller coaster he’d ever been on.

  Maisie’s head popped out from between the legs of the banana-curled girl and the dark-haired girl.

  “What was that?” she said, laughing.

  The man with the giant mustache glared at her.

  “Young lady,” he said. “You have just taken a ride on the Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railroad.”

  “I have?” she said, scrambling to her feet.

  The roller coaster had come to a stop, and everyone was getting out. But instead of leaving the ride, they were getting into another car.

  The girl with the banana curls fanned herself wildly. “I thought I was going to faint,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

  Her dark-haired friend nodded and wiped her forehead with a small, white handkerchief.

  Maisie and Felix tried not to laugh as they followed them out of the car and onto another one.

  “Now what?” Maisie asked.

  “We’re switching tracks,” a woman explained. “So that we can go up that hill.”

  Once again, the car crept up a hill along a wooden track, going slower than the speed limit on Thames Street back in Newport. Once again, it paused at the top and then made its rickety way down. As the people around them screamed and closed their eyes, Maisie and Felix laughed.

  A few summers ago, their father had taken them to Coney Island, where they’d ridden an old wooden roller coaster called The Cyclone. Felix, terrified, could only do it once. But Maisie and their father rode it over and over again, her squeals filling the salty amusement park air. Their father had told them that at the turn of the twentieth century, amusement parks were built at seaside resorts, like Coney Island and Atlantic City and all along the coast of New England. Most of those parks were long gone now, he’d said. A lot of them were destroyed by fires because everything in them was made of wood. Others had closed due to neglect. Surely they were in one of them right now.

  Felix studied the clothes of the people sitting on the bench with them. Yes, they looked like people from the turn of the century. And there was the ocean in the distance. He even heard the sound of music that played on merry-go-rounds.

  The car came to a halt, and everyone stood to disembark.

  Maisie grabbed Felix’s arm and pointed to the words written in lights across an arch.

  “How did we get so lucky?” she said.

  Felix read the words out loud.

  “Coney Island,” he said.

  To time travel and land in an amusement park—and not just any amusement park but an amusement park in New York—made Maisie about as happy as she could be. Not only could they ride rides all day (although she hoped the other rides were better than that lame roller coaster), eat hot dogs, and walk on the beach, but she could pretend she lived back here and at the end of the day get on the J train and head home. Almost a perfect day. Except for one thing: Where were Great-Aunt Maisie and Great-Uncle Thorne?

  If she asked Felix, he would get all worried, and there would go their day of fun. He would want to find them, and instead of getting on—Maisie tried to take in everything she was seeing and decide what to do next—there! That Ferris wheel over there. Instead of riding that, they would have to walk up and down looking for two cranky, old people.

  “Look!” she said to her brother. “Let’s go on the Ferris wheel.”

  The sign in front of it said: WORLD’S LARGEST FERRIS WHEEL. Which it wasn’t. The thing had only twelve cars and moved excruciatingly slow.

  Still, she grabbed Fe
lix’s arm and pulled him toward it. Her plan, she decided, was to keep him too busy to wonder about Great-Aunt Maisie and Great-Uncle Thorne. Eventually, they would find whomever they needed to find, give him or her the handcuffs, then go back home. For all they knew, Great-Aunt Maisie and Great-Uncle Thorne were still standing in the auditorium at Anne Hutchinson Middle School fighting over the handcuffs.

  Maisie stopped suddenly.

  The handcuffs. Who had the handcuffs? She didn’t. She lifted her hands in front of her face just to be sure. Her black, tulle, magician’s assistant skirt didn’t have any pockets, and neither did the old leotard she had on from her misguided efforts at a ballet class last year. The thing had small pills all over it and was just tight enough to be uncomfortable and ride up her butt. No pockets there.

  She glanced at Felix who was staring at The Roundabout with a worried expression. Maybe he had the handcuffs in his pocket. But if she asked him that, and he didn’t have them, then he would get worried about how they were ever going to get home and their day would be ruined. Maisie sighed over all the things she had to keep quiet about so that Felix would stay calm.

  “World’s largest Ferris wheel!” she said, continuing toward it.

  This time, Felix took her arm and stopped her.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “We have to pay for a ride.”

  He pointed to a sign.

  “Five cents, to be exact,” he said.

  Of course they had to pay, Maisie scolded herself. How could she be so dumb? Somehow they had to find some money. She wasn’t going to be at Coney Island on a beautiful day and not ride the rides.

  Maisie’s face brightened.

  “Uh-oh,” Felix said. Clearly she’d come up with a scheme that he would no doubt not want to be part of.

  “Do you have your cards with you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said carefully.