The Oriental Wife

by Evelyn Toynton

  Still, he seemed intent on sticking by her, afraid, perhaps, that the alternatives might be even worse. Just behind him, on the blue satin couch, Connie was sobbing into the shoulder of the mayor’s suit, while the mayor patted her hand; two of Connie’s brothers were leaning on the bar, arguing in low voices that occasionally rose on a single word. The director of development for the hospital was deep in conversation with the superintendant of schools; everyone else was milling around uncertainly, eating canapés with a slightly furtive air, as though ashamed of displaying a normal appetite. The small contingent of elderly German Jews who’d attended the funeral had not been invited to this gathering, and perhaps they were relieved. They had looked dazed by the sheer volume of human traffic in the synagogue vestibule, the mourners surging toward Connie in twos, crowding around her, pressing her hand.

  “Of course the Orientals have a very different view of women,” the Brazilian said genially, watching her. “You don’t find that presents any problems, working with them?”

  No, she said, startled, and then added lamely that her boss had been educated at the Sorbonne.

  “Excellent. So he won’t demand perfect deference.” He laughed, flashing very white teeth. “I’m sure you’re a great help to them all.” Over his shoulder, she could see that another of Connie’s brothers had joined the two at the bar and seemed to be acting out a scene involving a homosexual; he was running his fingers pettishly through his thinning hair and turning his head from side to side, batting his eyelashes. When one of the company’s vice presidents crossed the room to ask the Brazilian how long he would be in town, she excused herself and left, turning right in the hallway and heading for her father’s study. Stealthily, she opened the door, closing it as stealthily behind her; she turned the little knob that would lock her in.

  This was the room where in her adolescence she had been summoned to be lectured; here judgment had been handed down, her probable future in a correctional institution laid out before her. This was where the bad reports from school were handed to her across the desk, her stepmother’s version of their latest skirmish recounted to her; here she was warned what happened to children who did not do their homework, lied to their teachers about it, could not control their tempers. Who lies will steal. Who steals will kill. She would sit there, heart pounding with rage at the unfairness of it: why should Connie not be told to control her temper? He, who cared so much about justice when it came to the NAACP and the rights of defendants, was condemning her without benefit of a trial. And yet she could hardly bear that he should be angry at her, she had to dig her nails into her palms to keep from bursting into tears.

  But it was also the one place where, just possibly, she might feel her father’s presence. There were so few objects she could associate with him, so little of himself was imprinted on that house; everything in it spoke of Connie. Even here, the mock-wood paneling, the red-and-green plaid curtains, the Barcalounger where nobody had ever lounged, had no connection to her memories of him. But there were two faded prints on the walls, of Nuremberg; there were two rows of green and brown and maroon leather books on the fake-veneer bookshelf. She used to sit there, on the upright chair opposite the desk, and keep her eyes fixed on those books while her father was cataloging her sins.

  She went and pulled one of the green volumes from the shelf; the cramped German print, full of capitals and curlicues, looked dense and somber, like the forest in a German fairy tale. All the green volumes, numbered through XXI, were Goethe, the brown ones were Schiller. She slipped out a maroon volume—Heine—and as she was replacing it felt it meet with some resistance.

  A small padded envelope stood upright on the shelf; when she withdrew it—the label, from a mail-order company, bore Connie’s name—she saw inside it a jumble of letters and one small square envelope with scalloped edges, like the stationery her mother had given her for her birthday when she was a child. She spilled out the contents on the desk: photographs that had been made up like postcards, on stiff board. Haher and Kirchgang, they said on the back, Freytag und Sohn, Nürnberg; while on the front, stout, bald, bulging-eyed men in pince-nez and stiff collars looked out mournfully. She stared at their faces, all unknown to her, feeling how final the gulf was between herself and them. Not one of the pictures bore the sitter’s name on the back. She wondered if her grandfather was among them; she wondered if her mother would know. There was no telling what her mother would remember and what she would not.

  She riffled through the letters, looking for one in English, but there was nothing. Then she replaced them in the padded envelope, and as she did so saw that there was something at the bottom, something small and hard, wrapped in blue tissue paper. When she fished it out, her own name stared back at her, in faded blue-black ink; the handwriting was like her father’s, but smaller, spikier; ancient, yellowed Scotch tape had been neatly wound around the back. She turned the thing over, about to open it, when someone rattled the doorknob.

  “What are you doing in there?” Connie hissed through the crack.

  She clutched the parcel in one hand and gripped the edge of the desk with the other.

  “You come out of there right now, you hear me?”

  “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  For a moment there was silence; it seemed possible that Connie would start shouting, or go fetch the key and storm in. Instead, she only said, “You better be,” trying to pack the old menace into her voice but failing. Already Emma had forgotten about her; she was tearing the tape carefully off the little package.

  A small cameo, edged in dull gold, a woman carved in ivory on its surface. Her hair was piled on her head in elaborate swirls, with long ringlets trailing along her neck. Her expression was serene to the point of blankness, her nose curved a little at the tip, her mouth distended in a semismile. Emma stared at it, turned it over, tested the sharpness of the pin on the back; then she looked again at the writing on the tissue paper: just the one word, her name.

  She put it carefully in the pocket of her black silk jacket, along with the photographs; the letters she stuffed in her other pocket, patting down the bulge as best as she could. Then she deposited the padded envelope in the empty wastepaper basket and unlocked the door.

  The guests were thinning out; the mayor was gone, and the head of the hospital board, and the Brazilian. There was a place vacant on the plaid couch, next to Connie’s unmarried sister Maria, who had hugged Emma at the synagogue. “How are you doing, baby?” she asked, as Emma sat down. “You know how sorry I am about your dad. He was a real gentleman. You should be proud to have a father like that.”

  “I know,” Emma said, and Maria took her hand and squeezed it. One Christmas when Emma was young, Maria had gotten a little drunk and said to her, “I bet your life is no picnic, huh? She was a real devil to me when we were kids.”

  Now one of Connie’s brothers approached them. He sat down heavily on the couch, where there wasn’t room for him. Emma wriggled closer to Maria. “I’m real sorry about your dad,” he said then, breathing whiskey in Emma’s face. “Always treated me right. Never made me feel like I wasn’t good enough.” Emma tried to smile. He took a gulp of his drink. “Not like you.”

  “Leave the kid alone,” Maria said. “She doesn’t need that kind of talk right now.”

  But he ignored this. “You always thought you were better than us.” It wasn’t even true. When she was ten she had had a crush on him; he had a little black mustache then, and an air of dangerous maleness that her father lacked; he looked like the dashing heroes of the movies her mother took her to at the Loews on Dyckman Street, during her Saturday visits. Once Connie had mortified her by yanking up her pajama top to show him how skinny she was.

  He put his arm around her. “That’s okay. You’ve turned into a real pretty girl, you know that? And you was such an ugly little kid.” He was squeezed up very close to her, pressing against the pocket with the photographs of the sad-eyed men. As she sat there, trying to smile, she suddenly
remembered the portrait of her grandmother’s brother that had hung in Jeannette’s living room on Park Terrace West. What had happened to it when her grandmother died? It had vanished, along with the dark mahogany wardrobes, the embroidered dish towels, the pearl-handled fish knives and fish forks in their plush-lined leather cases. She had been at college then, and her mother had sold the whole contents of the apartment to a local junk dealer. The portrait must have been included; she hadn’t thought of it until now. There had also been a painted photograph, in an oval frame, of Louisa as a child. She was wearing a cloche hat, a polka-dot dress with a lace collar, and a pin at the front—a cameo. Suddenly she sat up, and Charlie’s hand was dislodged from her shoulder.

  “What’s up now?” he asked sharply.

  “Sorry. I just remembered something.”

  More people were taking their leave, kissing Connie on both cheeks, hugging her, telling her she should phone them if there was anything she needed. She had begun crying again; she clung to them, sobbing. “Take some of this food … take the salami, go on, that was Rolf’s favorite, just the sight of it makes me cry.” Emma sat watching her, outside the circle of sympathy.

  A fat man who had worked for her father for years, before going to Union Carbide, was walking toward the door in his raincoat, his wife in tow. “Excuse me,” she said to Charlie, and stood to intercept them. The man pressed her hand, his wife said how very sorry they were, what a fine man her father had been.

  “Do you think you could possibly give me a ride to the train station?” she asked. “I need to get back to the city, I have to work tomorrow.”

  He would be glad to, the man said, though his wife looked a little wary.

  “I’ll just get my bag.”

  When she returned, Connie, still surrounded by middle-aged women, glared at her accusingly, with that mix of belligerence and affronted neediness that had always been impossible to allay. Reluctantly, Emma walked toward her.

  “So you’re leaving us, are you?” Connie asked.

  Emma nodded.

  “You planning to leave without even kissing me good-bye?”

  Emma felt the eyes of the other women upon her; she put her dry mouth against Connie’s cheek, still damp from tears.

  “I’ll call you,” she said, although until that moment she had meant never to talk to her again.

  “You better, you little brat,” Connie said. “You better, you hear me?”

  Emma smiled stiffly. “Of course.”

  “Okay then.” She gave Emma’s shoulder a push, tantamount, in her private language of blows and slaps, to a caress. “Go on, get out of here before I sock you one.”

  Emma went to say good-bye to Maria, who told her not to be a stranger; she smiled apologetically at Charlie, who turned away. Then she followed the couple out the door and into their car, which was parked at the bottom of the hilly driveway.

  Once she was safely in the back seat, she worked the fingers of her hand into her pocket, down past the photographs, to make sure the cameo was still there, bundled in its blue tissue paper, and the pin pricked her finger. When she drew her hand out, she saw a small bright spot of blood.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  There was a new bag lady in her neighborhood, tall and skinny, where the others had all been squat and misshapen. It was impossible to guess her age; she had large, milky-blue eyes in a bashed-in face and walked very upright, her shoulders thrown back, as though she might have been a model once, or a debutante; she shouted out commands in a hoarse, defiant voice—Right turn! Halt! March!—her clogs making hard decisive noises on the pavement.

  “Pardon?” Emma said, when anyone spoke to her on the street. “Excuse me?” when the woman sitting next to her in the typing pool asked her if she wanted anything from downstairs. She had not gone to the interview at the textbook publisher. Instead she had signed up with a temp agency; she was typing lists of chassis numbers for a trucking company on Tenth Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street.

  Her father’s death seemed unfinished, something that was still happening to her. Her father himself was present at all times, a distillation in the air around her, the feel of his sorrow distinct from her own grief. Everywhere she went that week, she moved in a cloud of him. But it was Khim she thought about in the dark, remembering the smell of his skin, the curve of his mouth on a glass, the exact rough breath with which he’d said her name. He at least was still alive somewhere; in a year, or a hundred years, he might come back to her.

  And then it was Saturday again, and she was mounting the steps of Mrs. Rafferty’s orange brick house. The wind was surprisingly gusty; it blew grit in her face while she waited for Mrs. Rafferty to answer the door; it ruffled Louisa’s gray hair when they headed out on their walk. Louisa’s shoes—cracked brown leather with a bow at the front—had higher heels than usual, as though in tribute to her glamorous youth. Their progress through the park was slowed; at one point, on the uneven slope leading to the water’s edge, Louisa stumbled and almost fell. Before Emma managed to haul her to her feet again, it seemed as though they might go down together.

  But finally they reached their bench, and she lowered Louisa onto it. It was not clear to her whether her mother was crying. There seemed to be tears on her face, but maybe that was just the wind, maybe Louisa had a cold. She very often had colds, which was why her person seemed so hedged about with crumpled tissues; she had a habit of using not only her pockets and her handbag and her sleeve but her bad hand as a repository for them, closing her useless fingers around them with her other hand and then prying them open when she needed to blow her nose.

  Still, Emma could not remember seeing tears on her cheeks before. Silently, she put her hand in Louisa’s pocket and drew out the inevitable disintegrating Kleenex. But instead of using it on her mother, she dabbed at a spot of what looked like dried blood on the bench between them. On closer inspection, it proved to be ketchup, still wet, as though it had been spilled just a moment before. “Be careful not to sit in that,” she said. Louisa nodded. There were definitely tears on her face.

  “Are you crying for him?” She had meant to sound kind, but blood was rushing to her head; her voice came out harsh and angry. “You shouldn’t cry for him. You shouldn’t. He didn’t cry for you.” Louisa stared at her, her mouth a round O. “Never mind,” Emma said. “Never mind.” And then, squeezing shut her eyes, “He wasn’t happy.”

  “No?” Louisa asked, bewildered. For a moment Emma hesitated. It was too late to tell her mother what had gone on for all those years in the house in Connecticut. Back when she used to phone Connie to make arrangements about Emma, Louisa had always spoken admiringly of Connie’s energy, her efficiency, her outgoing nature. In the dream that was her mother’s substitute for a life, other people were happy, other people were good.

  “How could he be happy,” she asked furiously, “after what he did to you? How could he?”

  But Louisa only shook her head. “The poor man … the poor man.”

  The wind was rising on the water; papers rustled along the path. Emma’s breath came faster and faster. “Why do you always see it from his side? What about you?”

  “It was so long ago,” her mother said mournfully, her head still turned away. “Years and years. You shouldn’t think about it any more.”

  “He should have asked your forgiveness. He should have come to you and said he was sorry, he could have done that much, just once.” She did not like the sound of her own voice, shrill and childish; she wished that her mother would stop her, but still she went on. “I hope he rots in hell,” she said then, even as the image came to her of her father in the hospital, the sweat pouring down his face, trying to pretend for her sake that he wasn’t in pain.

  Her mother was struggling to stand, pushing herself up off the bench with her good hand; it took three tries, but then she was on her feet, walking away.

  And in that moment Emma saw the two boys walking across the grass in their shiny orange jackets, their sunglasses push
ed up onto their heads. One of them was carrying a radio and snapping the fingers of his free hand; the other was doing an exaggerated, mocking jive walk, almost a dance, as they veered toward Louisa, shambling along the path. Their eyes scanned the horizon briefly, as though to ensure there was nobody around.

  Emma got to her feet, running, her shoulder bag knocking against her hip; she arrived, breathless, at her mother’s side just as the two boys stepped onto the path. The radio was blaring out a harsh staccato music; they stood there grinning. “Leave her alone,” Emma screamed, “you leave her alone.” The boy with the radio reached into his pocket, laughing; the knife in his hand flashed in the sun as he cut the strap of Emma’s bag, in one graceful slash; the other one caught it as gracefully, and off they ran, yodeling in triumph, leaping into the air. “Come back,” Emma sobbed, racing after them but falling farther and farther behind. “Come back here, I’ll get the police, you bring that back.” The boy holding her bag turned for a moment and said without malice, almost kindly, “Fuck you, lady.”

  She stumbled back along the path, gasping, to where her mother stood, with that stricken look Emma knew so well. “It’s all right,” Emma said, out of long habit, “it doesn’t matter,” her breath coming in ragged sobs. “I’ll just have to change the locks, that’s all. It doesn’t matter.” For her mother had suffered enough; she had to pretend, for Louisa, that all was well. Only she could not seem to stop crying.