The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

by Paula Champa

  “Okay, you’ll get up to third gear on this last stretch. Keep your foot down! Don’t brake. Don’t brake . . . Okay—brake!!! Shift into second!”

  I watched the taxi driver making complex maneuvers with the simple gear shifter on the steering column. Emerson appeared to be going off-duty now, satisfied that his intense tutelage had achieved its goal. He was rocking and bouncing in his seat, a frail body connecting ecstatically with the force of speed. I couldn’t help wondering what was running through his mind. I understood some of the thrill, the rush, I felt it myself, but I could see it held a stronger power over him.

  We passed the old stables again, from the other direction, and then the vast roof of a house came into view. At the sight of it, Emerson drooped in his seat. “So yeah, cool, okay,” he murmured. “Please turn in up there.”

  The taxi rolled to a stop before the architectural oddity Emerson had warned me about: what had once been the home of his ancestors. In the three hundred years since his branch of the family had broken away from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, various descendants had undertaken extensions and updates to the core structure. Finally, Lynford Webster had remade the whole exterior in imitation of the Robie House in Chicago. Frank Lloyd Wright’s original design occupied a city street corner—what had once been an open plain. Out of context here, in a wooded landscape, even in crude facsimile form, it didn’t look like a house so much as an Asian temple: a system of wide horizontal brick bands stacked and coupled in striking proportions.

  Compared to the photo of the original house in Emerson’s collection, Mr. Webster’s copy may have succeeded as a gesture, but it abandoned all pretense on the inside. Inexplicably, we were greeted by the architectural remnants of a Georgian entry hall—and by Laurel, the housekeeper, a squat woman with a reddish buzz cut and a ruddy face, who I guessed to be in her mid-fifties.

  “Hello,” I said, silently admiring the pristine white T-shirt tucked into her khakis.

  She was busy taking in the camouflage outfit that Emerson had put together with Brian that morning. They had piled him up with baggy sweatpants, the leather jacket and his backpack, but the fine silver frames of his glasses did nothing to hide his sunken eye sockets.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I said to Laurel, extending my hand. I explained that I was taking the taxi to visit my parents a few miles away, and I would not be gone for long.

  She ignored my outstretched hand and instead gestured down one of the hallways for Emerson’s benefit.

  “Check out the grounds, or whatever, if you get back before I’m done,” he called to me as he loped off, baseball cap in hand, in the direction of Laurel’s weathervane arm.

  Duty is a robotic emotion. In order to initiate it, the mind perceives the existing elements—place, time, persons, historical variables, intention—and the course of action emerges like the sum on a calculator. In the case of that visit to Connecticut, the elements had come together to produce a vision of my parents’ faces, having heard from a mysterious source that I had been in town and not gone to see them—an unwelcome vision, augmented by the creak in my father’s voice, dry with disappointment if I gave him any cause to worry. Or any more cause to worry. After what I had put him and my mother through at the time of my childhood death, I saw it as my duty not to unnerve them again.

  I found my father at the kitchen stove, reheating some soup. He was a short, slender man—as slight as I was—the result of a strict diet after being informed by a specialist at Webster Memorial that he suffered from an enlarged heart. When I was a child, he had seemed so much bigger: Garrett and I had once made a tent out of his trousers.

  “Your visit is short, so we’re having a simple lunch,” he announced, giving the soup a gentle stir. “Even you won’t have time to take a nap.”

  “I hardly sleep anymore,” I protested. I refrained from mentioning that this was because Emerson woke up every two hours.

  “Not sleeping can’t be healthy either,” he said.

  “Maybe.” I glanced around for evidence of his latest model-plane project, which I knew would never be far out of reach. There: On one of the TV trays next to the dining room table sat a pile of colored plastic racks with little pieces clinging to them like seeds—the components of what were no doubt World War Two aircraft waiting to be snapped off and filed down, then painted and glued together. Garrett and I had long ago formulated the hypothesis that, because he had been too young to fight in the war, the period had taken on a mythic immensity in his imagination. I scanned the room for the model-plane boxes with their crazy-looking airbrushed fight scenes, but he must have left them behind on one of the card tables in his workspace upstairs.

  “What are you making this time?” I asked him. “Allied? Nazi?”

  “A little of both,” he said, enthusiastically waving me into the dining room.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “On the way.” He urgently directed my attention to a thriving spider plant suspended from a metal bracket over the dining room window. “Now, imagine each one of these babies is a Messerschmitt 109 on wires—well, a little higher.”

  He gestured to the legion of baby spider plants rappelling down from the mother on a series of thin green shoots. As instructed, I tried to picture them as German fighter planes, well aware that this was only the preliminary staging area; after he’d worked out the latest air fight tableau—this time depicting a scene from the Battle of Britain, he informed me—it would be installed in his workspace up in the attic, where the ceiling was painted sky blue and the assembled wings would hang, frantic and frozen, from lengths of fishing line.

  The baby spider plants swung back and forth as he brushed them with his fingers. “See, the RAF pilots are going to have all these Messerschmitts in their face before they can get to the Nazi bombers.” He pointed to the opposite wall, where a sun-bleached portrait of my parents, my brother and myself stared back at me from the 1970s through a frame of cracked gold leaf.

  “So the German bombers will be over there?”

  “Right! They’re coming to attack, with their fighters out in front to protect them. Over here, the British pilots are going to be picking them off—shooting the fighter planes down so they can get to the Nazi bombers over the English Channel, before they reach London.”

  I nodded approvingly at the invisible scenario, pretending to understand it.

  My father looked over at me.

  “You’re early,” he said, as if suddenly aware of my presence. “Everything all right?”

  I shook my head.

  He took a seat at the dining room table, and I dropped into a chair opposite him.

  “Beth, have you thought about what you’re going to do when this is over—job-wise?” He searched my face. “I’m concerned.”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer him. “Why are you concerned about me? I’m not the one who’s dying.”

  We sat in silence.

  He turned to the tray full of plastic pieces but restrained himself from reaching for them.

  Was there ever a time when we had been close?

  He readjusted his chair away from the temptation of the TV tray. “I’m trying to understand,” he said. “You got a good education. That job at the agency. Now it’s . . . Are you switching to the health field?” He was evidently speaking to himself, or to my absent mother, when he added, “Even before this, she hasn’t shown much interest in getting on with her game plan.”

  I sensed that he and my mother expected my life to have goals or a more developed plot, but I was borrowing one from Emerson. I had no idea what I was going to do when it ended, either.

  “What do you mean, ‘game plan’?”

  “You know, what’s your strategy, Beth? What’s your plan? Living is a process you can manage. The question is, how are you going to manage it?”

  “Right now, I don’t know.”

  Why did it always feel like glass? Like the domed canopy on one of his fighter planes, sealing me off.

 
; “I’m really confused. About a lot of things.” I was unsure how to explain that I had been thinking about my own childhood death more often as Emerson’s health declined. I shifted in my seat and bumped my elbow into a partially assembled plane.

  “Lancaster bomber,” he informed me good-naturedly. “That’s for the next project.” He reached over and set the model right again. “It needs some work before it’s ready to—well . . .”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine. It’s—”

  “I feel really flat. Blank.”

  “You’re helping someone who’s very sick. You can’t save everything, honey.”

  I wanted to unburden myself. “But, I mean, even before this. I don’t feel right in myself. I never feel right.”

  “Are you sick?”

  I was only worrying him.

  “No, no.” I smiled a little, hoping to reassure him. “Forget it.”

  He pulled his jaw to one side, contemplating my predicament no more successfully than I had.

  “I don’t know what to tell you.” He looked down miserably at another half-painted airplane on the sideboard, then seized it. “Say you’re the pilot of this Spitfire. It’s Britain in the summer of 1940. Your allies have all been defeated or occupied, and you’re alone against the enemy. Your country is under deadly attack from squadrons of Nazi fighters and bombers, and you are the only force capable of stopping them.”

  He swept his hand across the dining room. “Up in the air”—he indicated the baby spider plants—“it’s dogfighting, one on one, mano a mano. You’re up there alone, and it’s your skill versus the enemy’s. Your own thoughts can be the enemy. If thoughts of defeat were to overtake you—no way.”

  “What am I fighting for?”

  “For everything.” He tapped the tiny fuselage with one of his glue-capped fingers. “The future is in your hands. You have to stop the enemy at this critical point in the war. You’ve got the tools, Beth. Your engine is—incomparable. Like the Merlin engines that powered these Spitfires.” He shook the plane at me. “If it wasn’t for these engines and the skill of the RAF pilots, the world would be a very different place today.” He nodded forcefully, as if confirming the truth of this to himself. “And not a good one.”

  He brought the model plane in for a landing on the TV tray.

  “What are you saying?” I asked.

  “Where’s my Beth?” I heard my mother calling from the front hall. “Is she here yet?”

  His eyes bored through me. “They fought.”

  “Beth?”

  “They didn’t give up. Like—”

  My mother entered the dining room and leaned down to give me a hug. She was pixie-sized as well, standing slightly taller than me in a pair of the low-heeled pumps she wore to her volunteer job at the Webster Memorial Library.

  “What are we talking about?” she asked, pulling out a chair at the dining table.

  My father smiled. “I was just telling Beth how proud I am of her.”

  I looked to him in confusion.

  “What happened at the Websters’?” asked my mother.

  “Nothing—I don’t know. I just dropped him off and came here. He’s talking with his father about . . . you know.”

  At this, she became somber: “I hate to think what that man must be going through.”

  “Not to mention what his son is going through,” I pointed out.

  “Of course, Beth, that goes without saying.” She frowned. “But . . . to lose your child, and that man lost his parents, too, when he was young. Then his wife.”

  “Do you know anything about her?” I asked.

  At this, my mother unfolded a memory from the sewing box in her mind, a sighting she’d had of Mrs. Webster one Christmas at Kennedy airport, when everyone still called it Idlewild. The previous spring, the news had gone around that the woman was showing a pregnancy. “I hoped she’d be in the maternity ward with me,” my mother said. “Then we heard she had a boy, before Garrett was born. I missed her by a few weeks.”

  Maybe I inherited my archival instincts from my mother, who proceeded to give an account of Mrs. Webster at the airport in 1962 that was as precise as any Accession Register. I can picture it as if I were floating there beside them: my mother, seated in the smoky lounge, waiting for my father to tire of watching the airplanes take off and land outside, and—from among the clusters of businessmen murmuring over glasses of scotch and beer—an Asian woman materializing out of the cigarette haze, accompanied by a nanny in uniform. The nanny, a redhead, was holding what my mother could only assume was a baby wrapped in a blanket, a parcel nearly identical to Garrett, in her lap.

  Immediately, the possibility occurred to her. But this was New York City, with a substantial Asian population, versus Burring Port’s near-total void. (Note that the racial data from the U.S. Census of 2010 show only a slight change in the makeup of Burring Port, CT, after more than forty years: 95.16% White, 2.43% Asian, 1.13% African American, 0.47% Native American, and 0.81% from two or more races.) All uncertainty dissolved a short time later, however, at the sight of Betty and Stewart Cutler, the professionally inquisitive proprietors of the pharmacy in Burring Port, stopping to greet the Asian woman on their way into the lounge.

  My mother had imagined Mrs. Webster would have red-lacquered lips and be costumed in a skin-tight dress splashed with plum blossoms, or perhaps a dragon phoenix, but what she observed was even more exquisite. The woman was turned out in Yves Saint Laurent—the designer’s first collection since leaving Dior. My mother aimed her baby son’s eyes to behold what she had admired in magazines: the drop-waist dress in pale gray, its skirt flaring softly like a tulip. The woman’s dark hair was tucked loosely into a turban, and draped over narrow shoulders, the unmistakable coat of ornamented silk brocade.

  Then the turban whipped around, and all at once Mrs. Webster was speeding toward my mother.

  She stopped abruptly before the plate-glass windows a few feet away. At such close range, my mother was free to admire the fawn-colored gloves bunched elegantly around the woman’s tiny wrists. Her gaze followed the gloved hands to a purse, then to a camera, then out the window. There, across a wet stretch of pavement, my mother was astonished to see a set of monumental wings poised for flight: the roof of Eero Saarinen’s new TWA terminal, its soaring curves hard against the flat winter sky. She traced the lines with her eyes.

  “It looks like . . . a concrete dove,” my mother said, reenacting the scene for us at the dining room table.

  She let her face go blank and mumbled the words, then showed us how startled she’d been when they were overheard. For Mrs. Webster had turned to her and, as if the two had been conversing about that extraordinary building for hours, said in a tense English accent, “But the architect—the one who created it—didn’t live to see it.”

  My mother regretted the fact that she didn’t get to say another word, for, before she knew it, Mrs. Webster was sliding to the floor with her camera. She’d thrown her coat down and was following with her body, twisting to the floor like an apple peel as she shot the building from increasingly lower angles.

  Emerson might have become fixated on the architecture of the period then and there. I imagined his infant eyes following her antics with fascination, immobilized on the nanny’s lap as his mother fell into a delirious trance. Even when the buildings that were so pristine in Emerson’s photos would grow old and dated, when the concrete would be stained and the joints would leak, they would always be a vision of the new, a promise for the future. And his mother would always be present there.

  “The mood was primal,” my mother went on. “Without that coat covering her, it was shocking.” She held her hand to her chest. “All bones. So thin.”

  She’d feared Mrs. Webster would crawl on her belly across the floor, until the nanny intervened with a few words. Back in her seat, Mrs. Webster planted her elbows on her knees to form a tripod and continued to shoot until her film ran out: a barrage of snapping soun
ds that fanned across the lounge, suggesting to my mother that Mrs. Webster had caught her in some of the frames. She never saw Mrs. Webster again.

  She looked at my father across the table. “It couldn’t have been easy where she came from. There were hard conditions then, I think. People were hungry.”

  “They were trying to catch up with the developed world all at once,” my father said. “It’s only now that historians are uncovering the extent of it. Mao was setting impossible targets for grain, steel, and these people were being pushed. When you’re overworked, when there are food shortages, malnutrition . . . It’s the law of survival when you have a situation like that.”

  “She was a survivor, then,” I concluded, until I remembered that she’d only lived to twenty-four. “For a while, anyway.”

  My mother said, “When she came here—they do say you binge after hunger—she had everything new. She brought him along in that way, Mr. Webster. Did you see the house?” she asked, suddenly curious.

  “I wasn’t inside for long.”

  This seemed to remind her of the meeting that was taking place there. “To lose your child—I hope you never know, Beth.”

  “Well, soup’s on!” said my father, springing to his feet.

  My mother stared somberly after him, exiting the room. “And your spouse. To lose both. I couldn’t bear—”

  “The thing is,” my father called back, “you’d be surprised what you can handle when you have to.”

  On my return to Gray Hill, Laurel showed me through the main hall into the study to wait for Emerson. Instead of Wright’s open floor plan and built-in furniture, I found myself surrounded by all the unsurprising things we found in one another’s homes in Burring Port: nautical objects, colonial sofas and Impressionist paintings (except Mr. Webster’s were real). It occurred to me that Wright would have torched the place in a second.