“You can have some later, after the guests. Is your father back yet?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Why isn’t he here? I’d have him help put this house in good order. We can’t have the farangs think Thais an unkempt people.”
Even back then, he’d intuited that his mother’s self-regard had been conditionally staked to the success of these evenings. In preparing for them, she had very high expectations for cleanliness, particular placements in mind for their belongings, and little patience for deviation, which was usually either his father’s doing or his own.
On this night, by the time his father arrived, an hour later than expected, all was ready.
“My colleagues told me of a library not far from the Legation, and I went to see it. I’ll be able to stop there after work.”
“I’d have appreciated some help with the preparations. These are your friends and colleagues who are coming.”
“Pehn, I never asked for this party.”
“You can thank me when they pass up someone else more deserving to give you a promotion.”
His father said no more and retreated upstairs to put on a dinner jacket. It might have been the first and only time Sammy felt sympathy at the sight of him, rather than fear of his displeasure.
The guests arrived. After being paraded for the usual cursory greetings and ruffling of his hair by strangers, he was sent up to his room, where, after seeing that the housekeeper had neglected to include the trifle on his exile’s plate, he patiently schemed. He pressed an ear against the floor and listened to whatever pierced through—the chortling and silverware scraping and occasional names being called across a table.
When he was sure his parents and the guests had progressed to the back room, he crept downstairs to the kitchen. He found a long spoon in the silverware drawer and held it like an assassin’s dagger as he approached the trifle dish. He dug in and excavated the half that was left, in small proper morsels as his mother had taught him.
“How is it?” a voice asked.
He turned to see his father, leaning on his elbow at the doorway, an empty wineglass on the counter next to him.
“Sweet,” Sammy said, which was all he could manage without losing his thoughts to his certain punishment.
“Perhaps too sweet, I’d say, like pouring sugar into one’s mouth. The British are fond of such peculiar flavors, don’t you think?”
Sammy nodded, even though he’d quite liked it. From the front of the house, someone’s shrieking laughter went off like a rocket, followed by an eruption of cheers. His father didn’t give any indication that he heard any of it.
“Aren’t you supposed to be with the guests?” Sammy asked.
“I was there long enough.” His father’s breath was piney and sour. “Did I ever tell you about when I first heard of this post?”
“Yes.”
“The vice minister’s secretary came into the clerks’ room and said that I was needed, and so I buttoned up and followed him across the courtyard to the upstairs office, and there I listened to the new position assigned me as I looked out the window onto Sanam Chai Road and all the peddlers and wagons whizzing about. The vice minister said, ‘Apirak, it’s not a leisurely role, but I trust a young man from a family like yours will make our nation proud. The food you’ll get over.’ And that was it. When I saw your mother at home I said, ‘Something happened at work today,’ and she said, ‘We’re going to London. Everyone knows.’ She showed me the congratulatory gift baskets that had already arrived from your grandfather’s friends. Do you remember that?”
“No.”
“Very well. I don’t think you were there, now that I think about it.”
“I’m not sure.”
“What you probably don’t know is that your mother cried the entire night. She thought she was never going to see her parents again. I scolded her. I said, ‘Pehn, my duty to my country is paramount. What’s wrong with you?’ and went to sleep. Look at her now, won’t you? That’s what I want you to learn from us: one must always honor one’s duty above one’s self-concern. Can you understand me?”
He knew his father wanted him to answer, but he stayed mum. They stared at each other.
“Go back up to your room. What’s a boy doing down here this late?” his father said finally, and then he reached for his glass and left Sammy in the kitchen with a white-streaked spoon in hand.
In the morning, he considered what his father had said—it was the most his father had spoken to him since they’d arrived in London—and he understood it as his father demanding some improvement that could be achieved by striving for his father’s dutiful example. For a long time, he did try.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
It was morning in Bangkok when he called. A maid answered and put down the handset. He heard the sharp yelping of the Pomeranians, Kuhn Chang and Khun Paenpradit, and music on the wireless, perhaps a Suntharaporn number. Three minutes must have passed. She picked up when she liked.
“You’re there.”
“Got in a few hours ago.”
“How is he?”
“He’s fine, just another scare.”
“So he made you fly over for nothing.”
“He didn’t make me do anything.”
“Have you told him about the house?”
“I’m not sure if I should, considering his condition.”
“He’ll find out eventually.”
“Why don’t you tell him yourself?”
“Sammy, don’t be so foolish. Be a good boy.”
“I have to go. It’s late here.”
After the call, he lay down again, awake in the dark. It was still barely evening in Los Angeles, and the time he’d normally have been sorting contact sheets, or marking notes for the printer, or, likeliest, at his usual watering hole, arguing with Carlo or Henrietta or whoever was keeping bar about some six o’clock news story flickering on the Zenith portable.
His mother wanted his father to know her plans for the old house. His great-great-grandfather, the son of a rice mill laborer, had built it after enriching himself by helping to found a trading company with American and Chinese partners. His father had let her have the deed when they divorced, with the intention that the house would eventually become Sammy’s. Now she was fielding inquiries from interested buyers through her society women’s circles. Most of their land in the provinces had already been sold for his sake, as money became tighter each year. The proceeds from this sale should be more than sufficient to support her attendance at the galas of her many charities, the kind so dutifully noted in Sakul Thai magazine with a photographic record of the sculpted hairdos and shimmery, high-necked dresses in attendance.
He’d met his mother’s’ friends any number of times on his visits to Bangkok, when they came over to play cards. He’d clasp his hands and do his wai and give an embarrassed laugh and bow to their comments on his handsome looks and prized status as a foreign-educated deg nog. He’d turn down offers of cocktails and use the pack of cigarettes in his hand as a way to escape, even though he didn’t smoke much. Out the back door and then around the roofed terrace he went, seeking the afternoon shadow.
It was underneath the banyan tree in Bangkok, with the sound of quarreling sparrows drifting through the canopy, that he fell asleep in London.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
By the time he came out for breakfast, his father was already awake. Helen made him eggs, having prepped bowls of yogurt and fruit for herself and his father. Children’s footsteps drummed the ceiling above.
“You thought you were going to visit me at my deathbed, didn’t you? Are you disappointed?”
“Please don’t confuse me with your first wife.”
“It’s good to see you’ve retained your bristles.”
“Don’t mind him,
” Helen said. “He’s very glad you’re here. Would you like some more eggs?”
“I’d like some,” said his father.
“You know you shouldn’t.”
“These could be the last eggs I’ll ever have.”
She divided one and slid half onto his plate.
“So what are we doing today?” his father asked him. “Where are we going?”
“You were let out of hospital two days ago.”
“Yes, but I’m not dead yet, am I?”
“The doctors said to be careful about exertion,” Helen said. “Can you give that some thought?”
“My son’s here. I haven’t the slightest worry, and neither should you.”
“Tomorrow, dear. Today, you’ll rest,” Helen said with cheery authority to his father, and then turned to him. “Have you seen what he’s done with the photos you sent him? It’s like a museum.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. It’s only pictures on a wall.”
“Why don’t you go show your son?”
His father groaned, if only to protest Helen’s insistence, and then motioned him to follow. They made their way to his father’s room, where Sammy saw what he hadn’t noticed last night. Opposite the bed, where an unremarkable landscape print had hung on last visit, were a cluster of his photos, of a rain forest preserve up in Phrae Province. He’d forgotten he’d sent them and hadn’t thought of the trip itself for years.
Now he remembered the telephoto lens he’d fitted on his camera, waiting for the dawn to spread across a green valley veiled by morning mist. When it did, the mountains appeared like islands in a sea of flames. He visited again the screaming white waters of falls too high and hidden to be crowded with sightseers and was reminded of how, descending through a bamboo forest trail later that day, he’d hoped that the photos had somehow captured as well the syncopated howls of monkeys out of sight in the thick growths.
The photos weren’t for an assignment. His marriage had faltered and he had left Sweden, telling everyone that he was stopping in Thailand to focus on his art. He had paid for the forest guide and camping gear rental himself. He wanted to trace the path from which his family’s earliest fortunes had come: ventures into the teak trade with the northern mueangs. When he was a boy, his father had told him of visiting the same mountains with his own father to see how parceled growths were being felled and floated to sawmills downriver and eventually to feed Bangkok’s hunger. Some of the wood in the old house in Bangkok came from those very mountains. In the oldest parts of that house—what had become the Buddha room and the music room—an ancient beam still trickled dark, gummy sap.
“What a glorious view to look on from my bed,” his father said now. “Can’t believe places like that are still around.”
He had not told his father how the view had shifted after the sun rose higher and the morning fog lifted. Through his long lenses, he could see that parts of mountainsides had been stripped bare of trees. To his question about whether the logging was legal, his guide had quickly changed the subject.
“Mother was very upset about that trip. She thought that I was going to either get kidnapped by communists or eaten by a ghost tiger.”
“Speaking of my wives, how is your dear mother Pehn?”
“Fine. Radiant, as she might describe herself.”
“You visited the old house lately?”
At the mention, he considered bringing up his mother’s plans to sell the house. But why upset his father so early in the morning and have to deal with the fallout for the rest of the day?
“It was fine when I saw it last year. The roof was leaking a bit where termites had nested, that’s all.”
“Have you been following the news over there? What a fine mess. This was not what we had in mind at all. Power was supposed to be for the people, and now those dead students, did you see?”
He nodded, even though he wasn’t sure. He didn’t have a TV, but he vaguely remembered reading about the protests in a blip of a paragraph in the Los Angeles Times, somewhere in the pages he’d thumbed through to check on his Lakers bets. He wasn’t surprised that his father still paid attention to events in his former country, but he didn’t expect to hear such pained frustration and pity in his father’s voice. It seemed that his father expected him to feel the same.
“Yes, those dead students,” he said to his father, shaking his head. “A tragic day for Bangkok.”
“I still find it strange to hear it called Bangkok,” said his father. “It’s still Krungthep to me. Are you still able to say the full city name, like when you were a boy?”
“Krungthepmahanakhon . . . Amon . . . rattanakosin . . . Mahinthar . . . ayutthaya . . . ,” he said, before stopping. The next parts hung aloft in his mind, just out of reach. He hoped his father would help say them for him.
“It’s a shame,” his father said. “I think I’ve forgotten the rest, as well.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
In the evening, Freddie’s entire family came downstairs for dinner. Emily introduced him to his niece and nephew before herself. The children were about seven or eight years old, and Emily was in her early thirties, a fair bit younger than Freddie, with a friendly, wide-eyed countenance that made her appear perpetually startled. They seemed to Sammy like the families he sometimes dined with in LA. Those occasions always made him feel compelled to be at his most entertaining, as if to convince his hosts that he was worth interrupting their usual domestic routine—an adequate substitute for the TV show they perhaps would have put on had he not come. Tonight, he was at a loss as to whether he should perform as guest or family.
Helen seated his father at the head of the table, and Sammy sat where he intuited he had been assigned, the honored chair next to his father.
“Is it true that when Grandfather lived in Bangkok he lived in a manor with golden pagodas and giants guarding the gates?” asked Alder. “That’s what Grandfather says, and we don’t know if we should believe him.”
“Giants I can’t vouch for, but we do often hire seven-headed serpents. Maybe you can see them for yourself someday.”
“We’ve asked Grandfather to take us, but he always says next year,” said Lilith.
“Next year,” said his father. “Now eat your vegetables.”
Helen had made fish—poached turbot with diced bell peppers and a sprig of wilted basil on top.
“I thought I’d give it a hint of Thai,” she said, pride hedged by a note of apology.
He had seen right away that, along with the out-of-place bell peppers, it wasn’t the right basil, and that the fish, perhaps a bit overcooked, wouldn’t have been out of place in an Italian cookbook. A younger version of himself would have outright declared something to that effect. How he used to hate this woman. He’d barely spoken to her when he spent a dutiful week or two here on break from boarding school in Surrey. Her efforts to make him feel welcome had only infuriated him further.
“It’s delicious,” he said, and took another bite with gusto made apparent.
After dinner, Emily retreated upstairs with the children, and Helen took his father for a bath. Sammy helped Freddie gather and take the soiled dishes to the kitchen, where a dishwasher had recently been installed. For a long moment they stood marveling at it—a white enameled box with shiny chrome buttons now parked between the cramped cupboards.
“Before I had children, they had me do all the washing,” said Freddie. “I thought I’d finally outgrown the responsibility, but now they insist that everything be rinsed before it goes in the machine. So why do we even have this expensive thing? I’ve stopped arguing.”
Waiting for each dish with a cloth between splayed hands, Sammy watched how slowly and methodically Freddie rinsed. Perhaps he relished the act, or perhaps he had long ago feared to incur the wrath of their father, should he leave a single speck.
“
I’m glad we have another chance to talk among ourselves, brother to brother,” Freddie said. “We didn’t really carry on with each other when we were younger, did we? You visited so rarely, and then you disappeared with your camera.”
Yes, he remembered, the many unfocused pictures of patterned shadows and plays on angularity and easy lifeless subjects. He’d aped Bresson for a phase, then moved on to Man Ray.
“I realize this might appear untoward for me to bring up,” Freddie said, “but when it happens, I want you to have reasonable expectations.”
“Reasonable expectations?”
“Yes, that’s one way to put it.”
He noticed that Freddie now spoke in a lowered voice, with dramatic consideration in the half pauses, as if raising some magnificent hidden truth to the surface. This was probably the manner of speaking that he switched to in court, in order to make his arguments sound more convincing. Was Freddie conscious of it? A dog might be unaware that its fangs showed.
“Father knows how expensive it is to raise a family in London,” Freddie said. “He wants his grandchildren to have what they need.”
“You think I rushed here for his money.”
“I’m not exactly saying that.”
“You needn’t.”
“Sammy, if you don’t mind my saying so, you weren’t ever really here before.”
He was glad that Freddie didn’t know of his mother’s plans, or that, to snuff his protestations about the sale of the house, she’d offered a sizable advance on his inheritance. That sum would dwarf by many magnitudes whatever he stood to inherit from his father. Of course, he could pacify Freddie’s concerns by telling him that he had no reason to squabble over their father’s money.
“Good night,” Sammy said with forceful indignation, and walked away. It felt better to leave Freddie alone with the dumb dishes than to question notions of decency to kin.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 5