I heard him before I saw him, the uneven tread of his one bad leg, and when I looked up, I couldn’t stifle the gasp that rose in my throat. He had lost weight, a lot of weight, and they had shaved off all of his beautiful hair. But he had groomed himself as best he could, and it showed in his freshly shaved face and the way he smelled of talc. We smiled at each other cautiously, as if meeting for the first time, and our hands moved to meet through the grate, but they stopped just short of touching.
“How are you, Darcy?” he said with the old propriety that was there even in the midst of intimacy, and I saw him glance at my waist.
“I’m all right. How about you? Is it terrible in here?”
We seated ourselves on the benches. “Not really. No one mistreats me, and the warden has been kind. He told me to act cheerful. He said people don’t like sad inmates. They might feel sorry for them but they don’t parole them. He says I’m almost certain to be paroled as soon as I am eligible. He knows how much I want to get back to you and Rennie and the baby.”
I looked away from him and down at my hands. My palms were sweaty and I wiped them on the skirt of my dress.
“How is Rennie?” he said.
“She’s all right.” I could see it coming and I wished for a way to put him off. If only I’d been born with Jolene’s ability to talk a dog off a meat wagon. She’d have double talked him until he forgot all about babies. It was probably only the full-cut dress that had saved me so far.
“Does she ask about me much?”
“Always,” I answered without letting him capture my eyes.
“And what do you tell her?”
“Not much. That you had to go away for a while.” I glanced at him. He wasn’t as I remembered. He looked like a defeated old man instead of one in his prime.
In a troubled voice, he said, “That may satisfy her now, but in a year or two, she’ll want to know more.”
“No, she won’t,” I said, happy to be able to ease his anxiety, at least in this. “She’ll have forgotten by then.” And as soon as it was out of my mouth, I knew. The way his face fell, making him look so profoundly old, I knew. “I didn’t mean—I only meant that when they’re little they forget so quickly.”
He shook his head, as if to shake off the hurt. “It’s all right.”
We were quiet for a while after that, not the nice kind of quiet we had once known together at the inn when we were too content for speech. This was the kind of quiet that makes the mind scramble for words that don’t come, and try as we did, we could not fill the silence that divided us as much as the metal grate. If only I could have touched him. If only we could have lain together, everything might have been confessed and forgiven. That was how it had always been with us. Unable to say the things we felt, our bodies had still been eloquent. If only there was no grate between us. All we could have touched was fingertips and that would have made us too pitiful to ourselves,so we each raised a hand only to stop just short of contact.
“You don’t look well to me,” he said at last. “You should have gained more weight by now. You were much bigger with Rennie.”
Avoiding his eyes was no longer possible, and when I slowly raised mine, his were filled with such tenderness and concern that I had to look away again. He didn’t suspect, would never suspect what I had done. For Luca, it was a thing too terrible to be even remotely possible.
“I’m not pregnant,” I said. There was nothing left to say. His face didn’t change immediately. Added to the concern was only a quizzical look, as if what I’d said made no sense. “…I’m sorry. There just isn’t any baby anymore.”
The truth came to him slowly and he would put off comprehending as long as possible. “You had an accident?”
Why couldn’t I lie as I had done the night Aaron came to the porch? That lie had rolled off my tongue easily enough: Aaron hadn’t hurt me, I’d said. Why couldn’t I lie then, at the prison? Why couldn’t I say that I had slipped on the stairs? Or had a sudden pain? No. I was a liar but not an indiscriminate liar. I’d lied about Aaron because the truth would have been unlivable. I would tell the truth about the baby because the lie would be unlivable. I shook my head, no.
“Then I don’t understand.”
Staring down at my lap, I hoped to find something inscribed there for me to say. “There’s a woman…” I began. “She lives in the woods around Galen and she…takes care of women who—”
His hand came down on the counter with such force that the guard stationed by the door turned toward us. “No!” He said the word to silence me, as if keeping it from being told would keep it from being true. His whole body quivered, like a lightning-struck tree before it’s brought down forever. “You’re lying. You wouldn’t do that. You couldn’t.”
“I did.”
He sank to the bench slowly, holding the grate for support, and I wanted more than anything to hold him in my arms—for it was my tragedy, too—and tell him how very sorry I was, how for me, no night was absent dreams of that unborn child. But it was I who had done it, and I knew I was the last person he would take comfort from. I couldn’t stand to see him like that—so aware of his powerlessness, his bitter understanding that he could do nothing to affect life beyond the grate.
More wrenching than the angry words was the pleading that followed. “Please, Darcy, tell me. Tell me you didn’t.” Then he began to cry.
“I can’t,” I said. It was too late to lie. Though belatedly, I realized that the truth was just as unlivable as the lie would have been. From here, there was nowhere for us to go. I knew that, and with that knowledge came other knowing. Luca would not come back to me. He would go back to Italy to see if he could find something left of warmth, of welcome, of loving familiarity, of goodness and dignity.
Tearing into my thoughts, he sprang up at me with a savagery that was no part of the man I’d known. Clenching his fingers through the grate, he willed me to look at him, and when I did, I saw a feeling so raw it scared me, a hate so personal that I shrank from him, afraid the grate might not hold.
“What if Jewel had done what you did?” he said, his blue eyes shot with blood and tears.
“I wish she had,” I said quietly.
“I wish that too.” He changed then into someone I did not know, and yet had oddly created, someone not quite human who suffered an animal kind of anguish, undiluted with any thought of salvation. He didn’t have to say it. I already knew, had known even before today. But he gave it words anyway. “For the first time, I’m glad to be in prison—” The guard started toward him, alerted by the violence in his voice, in his rage-taut body. “Glad that something keeps me from you. I’d kill you”—he groped in an agony of frustration —“and this whole rotten country!”
The guard motioned to another and together they tried to drag him away, to pry his fingers from the grate, the fingers that once used to entwine themselves in my hair, the fingers that now, without restraint, would have wound themselves around my throat. “Don’t come back here ever again!” he screamed as they dragged him away. “Never, never, come back…”
I never did.
9.
Back In The Closet Lays
There was nothing mysterious about the way Mr. Sung came into our lives. He came just as all the others had come. On a day in summer, about four years after Luca had gone to prison, with Rennie soon to celebrate—if that word could apply and it didn’t—her ninth birthday, he just walked up nice as you please, a little Oriental man in ragged clothes, who barely came up to my shoulder. When he smiled, his slanted eyes completely disappeared. Rennie hid behind my skirt in a fit of shyness.
“You rent room?” he asked.
An old reflex made me snap, “No, I don’t rent room. Who sent you here?”
“Men on train,” he answered.
Those old goats had never quite gotten it through their heads that Jewel was dead, I th
ought irritably, and that the inn hadn’t taken boarders in years. “Well, those train men are a pack of senile old liars,” I told him, pushing a clothespin over the line. “There’s no room at the inn.” I laughed bitterly at my unintended joke. “So you just go on up the road the way you came and get back on the train. They don’t like strangers around here, especially Chinese strangers.”
“I not Chinese,” he corrected me, smiling. “Korean.”
“It’s all the same. Whatever you are, I have no rooms to let.”
He started to turn away, when some memory of Jewel made me add, “Look, I’m sorry. I’d like to help you. But we’re women alone.”
He nodded, as if to show me he understood and did not think worse of me for it, and I went back to my laundry. When I turned around again, he was gone.
Rennie stood before me, a little storm cloud. “How could you send him away like that? I don’t think he had any place to go.”
“Don’t be like that,” I warned her. “We don’t know anything about that Chinaman. He could cut our throats during the night while we slept.”
“He could not.” She rolled her eyes at me. She was growing up and getting fresh, the way children without fathers often do. “The way you make us sleep together behind a bolted door, Jesus Christ couldn’t get to us.”
“My, my, what language from a little girl. What would your daddy say if he heard you?”
“He’ll never hear me,” she said morosely. “He’s never coming back. You said so yourself. He’s never coming back because you won’t write him and ask him to come back.”
“It’s not that, and you know it.” My words were garbled because of the clothespin in my mouth.
“Then why don’t you write to him?”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “He doesn’t write to me, does he?”
“Well, then, why can’t I write to him?” she persisted.
“We’ve been over this before. I won’t have you begging him to come home when he doesn’t want to. He wants to go back to Italy. That’s where he came from and he wants to go home.”
“How do you know what he wants? You haven’t seen him in four years.”
“You know something, missy, you’ve had an awful lot to say ever since you turned eight. You were much sweeter when you were seven and if you want to see nine, you better get out of my way before I take a switch to you.”
“We don’t have a switch.”
“I’ll make one then.”
She rolled her blue eyes to show she wasn’t the least bit intimidated. “What about the Korean man?”
“Who?”
“The Chinaman. Can we keep him?”
“He’s not a puppy, and more’s the pity. A puppy I’d keep,” I said, thinking she was Jewel all over again.
“Well, if Papa’s never coming back, it’d be nice to have a guest around the inn again. It’s very lonely sometimes,” she finished wistfully, and the thought of her loneliness softened my resolve.
“Oh, hell, I don’t know.”
“Please. I just know he will be good for us. Did you see his eyes?”
“Yes. They were slanted and black.”
“They were shining.”
“I don’t know. He’s probably back on the train by now.”
“He’s got short legs,” she said. “I can catch up with him. I know I can.”
“I don’t know. Maybe—but only for a few days.” She was off before I could change my mind, her gangly legs a blur of motion. “He better have money to pay,” I called after her. “I’m not about to start supporting Chinamen in my old age.” But she was already too far to hear.
Later, it struck me odd when Rennie told of how she’d found Mr. Sung again. First, she had gone to the train stop, but he wasn’t there. Then she went into the town, thinking he’d be looking for other lodging, but he wasn’t there either. Finally, she found him, of all places, sitting on his pack at the bottom of our lane, as if he was waiting for her. And that was how it always was to be with the Chinaman. If you said a thing was red and he knew it was blue, he wouldn’t contradict you. Instead he’d just wait in complete faith for the moment he knew would come when you saw it was blue on your own.
I’d never been the curious sort, and other people’s peculiarities drew me not at all. But Mr. Sung could have made a stone curious. There was his history, for example—he had none. The little man had come to this country from parts unknown two months before and had taken the train from New York into Pennsylvania, and from there found his way to Galen. He had no family in America, no work papers, and no reason for coming that I could make out. When I asked him pointedly just why he’d come to Galen, he just looked at me with those slanted eyes and said, “I get off boat. I get on train. Men call names. I hear Galen. I say, sound like good place to get off.” Beyond that, I couldn’t get much out of him. If you asked him something he didn’t want to answer, he would turn deliberately dense and claim he didn’t understand the question and you could repeat it ten different ways till kingdom come and he would still shake his head like a slow-witted fruit-picker and smile. I considered that he was making a fool out of me by speaking exactly the way I’d always expected a Chinaman to speak, and yet his basic kindness made that a very dim possibility.
Sometimes I thought he was just pulling my leg with the way he talked. His eyes looked considerably more intelligent than his speech and manner would suggest. I would have bet money that if ever I should sneak up on him, I would catch him speaking perfect English, maybe even better than mine. There was something like royalty about him, as if he’d been kidnapped from a palace in China and pushed off the train in Galen. But then, living with Luca had made me touchy about language, so maybe it wasn’t so after all.
I learned through Rennie, as I did all the few things I gleaned about Mr. Sung, that his other name was Chun, but neither of us knew which was the first name and which the last. I suppose it didn’t matter since it all sounded like pots and pans anyway. For his part, he called me Missus, and nothing I could do would persuade him to call me Darcy.
Even the little man’s talents were peculiar. He was always very polite and courteous and glad to do whatever he could around the house. He liked to cook and frequently stank up the kitchen with his concoctions. I wouldn’t eat anything that had heads or feet floating around in it, but Rennie, always so finicky before, seemed to like everything that came out of his cauldron.
In spite of myself, I came to appreciate Mr. Sung’s slaughtering skills. I’d always made such a bloody, godawful mess of killing chickens and pigs. But the Chinaman knew a much neater way. He simply broke their necks with one quick motion. By killing them first, no blood spurted, only oozed when they were hacked up. I watched, fascinated, as he killed and then expertly butchered them, but I never could master it myself.
Even this unaccountable skill was by far not the oddest thing about the Oriental. Strangest of all were his nocturnal wanderings. Every night, sometime after Rennie and I had gone to bed and lay safe behind our locked door, I would hear the creak of his old mattress as he got out of bed, hear the whine of half-rotted floorboards as he crossed the room, and finally the sound of the front door being softly opened and just as softly shut behind him. Where did he go night after night? Where could a Chinaman go in the middle of the night in Galen? The whorehouse in the woods was the only place I could think of and he seemed too fastidious for that, even if one of the girls had been agreeable.
In spite of all his strangeness, his being a heathen, and that he was only five feet tall, there was a dignity about him that I came to grudgingly respect. A respect, I am certain, that was never returned. Because although he was unfailingly polite to me, I was convinced that underneath it all, he felt only sorry for me and thought his landlady all too fallible. It wasn’t that he ever said anything particularly meaningful to me, and certainly never accusing, but still I sensed t
hat somehow, he knew or had guessed just how poorly I had managed my own life and Rennie’s. And I resented him for it.
Nor was I happy about the closeness that had quickly sprung up between my daughter and the stranger, and I only let him stay because making him leave would have broken her heart. He’d become her favorite playmate, if not her only soul mate, and often on entering a room filled with their voices, they would suddenly fall silent, as if in a conspiracy of which I had no part.
There was something about him that I didn’t like and, moreover, didn’t trust. He knew too much, though why I thought this I couldn’t say. Our reputation in Galen was practically legend, and I knew better than to think any of the townspeople would stoop to talking with a heathen. But how much had Rennie told him? There was no way of knowing because, in spite of her youth, in this one way, she was her mother’s daughter and kept her secrets well.
That September, Galen School had a picnic for the children and their parents. Rennie didn’t ask me to go. She knew from experience that I would refuse. I imagined she would go by herself. Strange to tell, the other children and their mothers and fathers never taunted her because of her parentage. But neither did they befriend her. They mostly just kept their distance. I think it was her otherworldliness that gave them pause, as if she might cast a spell and turn them all to frogs. But Rennie didn’t choose to go alone. Instead, she went with Mr. Sung. Later, they came back for supper and fell all over each other at the table recounting the day to me. None of the mothers or fathers would talk to the little man, which didn’t surprise me. But the children all liked him, except for little Mabel Schuyler, whose mother said that if I was any kind of decent woman, I’d throw the heathen out, and since I continued to let him stay, with no husband in the house yet, it must mean I’d taken to sleeping with Chinamen, in addition to all my other misdeeds. I would have liked to have gone to the picnic and stood in the gazebo on the square and shouted that I indeed had relations with Mr. Sung every day and twice on Saturday nights. But my face never changed, and I didn’t say a word when she told me. Secretly, I’d planned to ask him about his board money. He was months behind and had, in fact, never given me another dime after that first day when he’d dropped some money in my hand, looking at the bills as if he’d never seen money before and wasn’t sure of its uses. But now, I changed my mind. He probably didn’t have any more money and would decide to leave if I pressed him. And those sons of bitches might think I’d thrown him out just to suit them. That would never do. So now he could stay till the second coming as far as I was concerned.
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