My Last Empress

by Da Chen

  I don’t know how long I slept. When I awoke, all the smoke had vaporized and I was lying in the barber chair back in the storefront. The boy was clinking his bowl, finishing another meal, and the woman was busy embroidering her silk apron. The gui shi rushed out with a headless rooster.

  “I chased own ghost away. See? Head cut off. You want?”

  I pushed away the bloodied bird and inquired about the fate of Annabelle’s ghost.

  “Her ghost here with you but her soul far away in China.”

  “But she’s buried here.”

  “Not matter. Leaves fall on own roots. She return to birthplace after death so she reborn.”

  “Reborn?” I uttered, holding my spinning head. “Reborn into what?”

  “Reincarnation. Body of another. Now you pay.”

  For days I lived in a hazy world reliving those moments of eerie revelation. The ghost might have been the gui shi’s wife flown from a hidden rope, and my own image the cunning reflection of a suddenly hauled-in mirror—the boy did disappear before the act. But in my heart, in that hazy ghost chamber, I felt my Annabelle, and she felt me.

  In the weeks that followed, the faceless emperor did vanish. Sadly, come the fall, my favorite New England season, only occasional traces of Annabelle were all that remained in my fragmented dreams. She appeared once as a migrating swan heading south, tiny in the blue sky, barely audible in the air. Another time she was a palm-treed island lonesome at sea.

  All the empresses and emperors in my books resumed their slitty eyes and oval faces, and Yale was un-shanghaied. New Haven returned to its dread of white picket fences and drab leafiness, and my Annabelle was but a swan dying, her song a thinning echo calling me from misty, ancient China.

  My life resumed its tranquility, and I slept much better. A certain buoyancy returned to my youthful body though I remained alone and lonely despite the insistent efforts of my mother for me to participate in such banal activities as Vassar Night, Smith Afternoon, and Wellesley Weekend.

  Dr. Price was called again by Father for a nondiagnostic consultation. A certain sheen in my eyes convinced the Bostonian that I was much in need of some conventional pleasure and ready to be unleashed into the social settings where some rightful girl’s affection might just be the very last nail to seal the coffin of my illusions. How wrong was he!

  I made perfunctory appearances in social soirées, always that shadowy fellow alone with my Annabelle-in-my-head, rocking in a wicker chair. I prided myself on keeping a three-foot distance from all the un-Annabelle girls in attendance. There were no specific faces that I remember in those outings or any particular voices that I can recall hearing. It was all a blur of bubbling girls whose chatter resembled morning birdsong.

  Only on one occasion did I feel nearly faint when I saw a shadow of a girl, as blithe as Annabelle, thin ankled with blond pigtails swinging over the nape of her swan neck. Was it a Vassar Afternoon or a Smith Evening? It was a burgundy V that I recalled and leafy Poughkeepsie that came to mind. The sunlight was amber, soothing, shining playfully through the canopy, highlighting forgotten food and neglected drinks on picnic tables.

  I chased after her as she ran unknowingly to chat with this girl and laugh with that, like a butterfly, eluding me from one tribe of partygoers to another. I raced after her as a hunter would his prey: from the garden, through a long and narrow corridor, up the grand stairs leading to the Villard Room. And there, alone, she was on top of the flight, about to disappear again into the grand ballroom when she paused, sensing my footsteps. How I felt my heart stop and breath hold. How I wished she could have stayed in that pose forever. The light from the window framed her stillness—like an angel she was. The chatter outside the window faded into the distance, and the summer shimmered in my vision. I was alone with her, three steps apart, our hearts beating in the same rhythm: such an operatic moment with music swirling on the magical waves of a full orchestra reaching for that glorious climax. Then she turned and smiled.

  Her buckteeth hissed like the fangs of a wolf.

  My heart broke, a thousand pieces.

  If any smile could kill, hers did. I fled in flight, faking a stomachache through the dark corridors draped with the portraits of a brooding Matthew Vassar.

  Was it my Annabelle that I saw inhabiting the chosen Vassarian on that miraged afternoon?

  Did she not once dream of matriculating at Vassar where proper ladies were groomed? Had it not been her wish to be empress of an ancient land, and after death, a ghost thinned between the wall and its wallpaper?

  If I could find her in that ethereal moment on the stairs of the Villard Room, would I find her in the chambers of the Forbidden City?

  7

  Here and now I open the new chapter of my life on the fresh page of my secret journal that my In-In has laid before me with red vertical lines to flock my words into the vertical order that a foreigner like me is unaccustomed to.

  It was the year I left Yale …

  Damn! The ink bled—too watery. It smeared the Ya but not the le.

  “In-In?” I inquire. My ink boy’s tears had dripped off his cheeks into my inkwell.

  Poor In-In. The youngest of the palace eunuchs, he still misses his home, and the thirteen lashes rendered him by Li Liang, the chief eunuch, for a broken vase, certainly have not helped. I wipe his eyes, and he grinds on, making our desk squeak like a night bug.

  Now that the ink is silky but not sticky, our tale can resume.

  The year I graduated from Yale, I signed up with the Christian Student Volunteer Movement (CSVM). I was offering myself for service as an overseas missionary for the China Inland Mission, the very division Annabelle’s father, and his father before, had been a part of. The act sent both Father and Mother into convulsions. Father immediately offered to enroll me at Columbia Law School and start me as a junior partner, with the potential to crawl into the letterhead of Pickens, Pickens & Davis. When he saw no sign of Junior softening, Senior threatened with the age-old scepter of disinheriting me. Mother readily concurred, though on an utterly different basis. She felt that I was not of sound mind.

  Annabelle and I would have been long gone had it not been for the oversubscription of eager volunteers to the mission. But then came the horror of two French Catholics burned to death on crosses by some inland Buddhist fiends. The scare dampened the voluntary fervor, causing a precipitous drop in numbers, leapfrogging me to thirteenth in the queue; but the scare also dried up the donations going that way, stalling the program indefinitely. A rejection from the San Francisco headquarters of the CSVM shattered both my plans and my fragile health. The headaches returned, as well as a low-grade fever, which I understood as Annabelle’s punishments for my inaction.

  One breezy day at the tail end of summer—that summer of horror that would change all—a drunken skipper of a single-mast boat miscalculated the wind strength and launched its bow into the Pickens yacht, capsizing the vessel. At the moment of impact, Mother and Father were downstairs readying themselves in the cabin to watch the sunset. They both drowned, coffined in the very yacht they had inherited, suffocating in the very waters they had loved. Oh, that heinous Long Island Sound, tomb of their twin caskets.

  In the somber reading of their joint will and testament, Father, in his unequivocal tone, repeated his threat of disinheriting me, and so did my mother. But a later signed codicil in the flowery signature of Mother, a loving afterthought, saved the day. It stipulated that I would inherit her entire estate on the condition that I, the sole heir, agreed to marry before leaving the soil of the New England states.

  A good start but not quite there yet. The legal theories and the case law precedents all concluded that a couple, when dying in the same disastrous accident together, are presumed to have died at the same time. This would leave Pickens Senior’s will intact, and since my mother would not have inherited his estate, this Pickens would not receive a dime. My surrogate lawyer, Melvin Davis, Esq., of Pickens, Pickens & Davis, argued that t
hough the two spouses expired at the same time, his wife who was junior by thirteen years (Father was quite a cradle robber) would be deemed to have survived her husband by virtue of her relative youthfulness and deceased later in time, thus giving rise to her spousal right to inherit the entire Pickens estate just long enough for her to bequeath all her estate to the living heir, me.

  Thanks to the good grace of my dear mother and the esquirely acuity of Mr. Davis, who was eager to get rid of me, an unnecessary partner, all I needed was a paper bride, a makeshift ceremony, and maybe, God willing, a quick divorce. Then I could retire from the world of nagging commerce and live off my legacy—suffice it to say, it was quite substantial for my meager need—and devote myself wholly to the honeymoon of my Asiatic voyage in search of my Annabelle.

  To satisfy Mother’s codicillary hoop, I cast the matrimonial net narrowly among the recently minted Vassarians. The mirage of Annabelle on that Poughkeepsied afternoon still shone golden in my meek memory. My deft fingerwalk through a borrowed Vassar graduate album aided me in locating my predestined choice, the bucktoothed misery. She had been no soap bubble of my frolicking imagination but the genuinely solidified statue of Susan Sanders, hiding between the pages of blond Brenda Samuels and the freckled brunette Carroll Souter, the oldest daughter of a ceramist father, with his own collection of blue-hued fine china proudly on display in Vienna galleries, and of a Bostonian toothbrush heiress mother.

  We were duly introduced at tea at the Plaza’s Palm Court, a place for the Sanderses to see and not to be seen (they hid their teeth behind their teacups). She was a matronly eighteen but still possessed that mannequin physique with bony ankles and a blithe romping gait. There was no moment of her frowning recollection of our encounter on her part. All the better, for I, in the know, much preferred my desire to be passively unknowing, though intuitively collaborating. Her shortcomings—her hiccupy laughter, the fanglike teeth, an upturned nose, melanic nose hair, and bushy eyebrows—paled remarkably as long as she remained silent, preferably standing against the afternoon sun, framed by the golden light, letting me, without her knowing, play and replay that moment of enlightenment. Oh, one really could fall for an illusion.

  We were soon married in a white-everything wedding ceremony—how very summerly—all for my secret goal of reenacting that fabled Vassar afternoon. When God lifted the cloudy veil on the wedding day and let the sun shine through the stained glass windows of our matrimonial chapel, shedding a gauze of golden light over her shoulders, the entire church ceased to breathe. It was just me and my sunned angel.

  My woeful eyes saw a blank face. It could have been my Annabelle at the altar and Reverend Hawthorn in the pew looking on proudly instead of the ceramist.

  On our wedding night, I implored her to wear a Chinese empress gown that I had bought for a bargain from a silk store south of Canal Street. Bucktoothed Bride was unobjectionable to my groomy whim, and she was soothed by my elaborate excuse of a certain fancy for all things Chinese. However, when I suggested a puff of bubbling opium in an ornate pipe, my Vassarian bride’s eyebrows stood on their tails and her jaw dropped an inch southward. But the charming Pickens could not let such a blissful night go any way but Annabelle’s way. I, as Annabelle had done to me, fed a mouthful of that glorious smoke into her ready mouth. In one brief moment that lasted for an eternity, Susan and I dissolved together with the poison.

  In the candlelit bridal room, the muggy summer night materialized. I continued the steamy job at hand, lifting the hem of Annabelle’s skirt, parting her legs. She moaned her sweet moans, her knees clamping in fake resistance, then the base of her hip tautened and slackened in wanton submission.

  By sunrise my fresh bride was found kneeling, face buried in our satin settee, the silk gown barely draping her bare self, and the call for charge rang again in my foggy head. She was a living Annabelle, shy from the morning sun, begging for Captain Pickens to wake her with his bulbous baton. Oh, my submissive love slave! I crawled stealthily like a sunken-bellied leopard, eyeing my prey, adoring her in the faintest of light. Had Annabelle been alive, she would have been this creature, thin ankled, fine-kneed, narrow-hipped, sirening for a reprisal of the night gone by.

  When I caressed her unadorned tailbone with the tips of trembling fingers, my pale bride did not unleash an expectant sigh. A tender thrust was initiated along the valley of my doll. But my bride played an icy mannequin. Again I coaxed her with my throbbing staff, forcing my way onward as gently as a deprived and depraved soul could bear. The interior of my lover was cold as a cave. A certain irresponsive swaying of her hips, letting throw and toss whichever way I leaned on her, informed me that she was either still deep in her opium-induced stupor or coyly playing the fiddle for the mannequin-loving Pickens, who was accustomed to squeaking domination over his wooden love slave.

  It was neither. When the slobbering Pickens cease-fired in the midst of his assault to investigate her mutinous silence by lifting the empress gown off her head, unveiling his one-night bride, the sight of blood dripping from the corner of her mouth, yielding a certain malodorous stench, was all I needed to see.

  Who knows what I did to her in our foggy bed, upon the shaky chair, and over the satin settee. Had I banged her head against some sharp wall corner, my hands on her long curls, riding her, taming her in the act of ecstasy? Or had it been my Annabelle, acting out on her jealousies, from afar? The ceramist father-in-law’s words would soon save me from the hands of the law. He whispered her preexisting medical condition into the ears of the hulking sheriff: a rare case of extremely high blood pressure that rose in times of extreme stress, which the county coroner explained had ruptured her cerebral vessels, causing her, and many others before and after, to die in the arms of their loved ones.

  Mr. Sanders not only did not accuse me, as many would in such a case of neglect (the coroner confirmed her time of demise to have been about four hours before reporting), but he also credited me with the praise of making “her last day in life the happiest” and offered an unworthy apology for having promised “a cracked vase” into my hands, depriving me of lifelong bliss as a wedded man. I was rather moved by his generosity of shouldering all the blame that could have been borne by me, for which I could have spent lengthy years licking the keyhole of some smelly upstate prison cell.

  As I sat in the front pew, six feet from my prettied-up corpse of a bride, a girl I barely knew, awash in the deep sorrow of her sobbing parents, I felt an extreme urge to burst out my criminal deeds: the mouthful of opium, that sordid urge of mine that brought us the unwanted ecstasy that killed her. But I didn’t and couldn’t! Annabelle-in-my-head, now an experienced, soothing ghost, rushed me to the door where the departing guests were and had me thank them as she had directed me at my parents’ funeral, my wedding, and now my bride’s departure. I, newly orphaned and now widowed, red-eyed and withdrawn, stood by the door where we had wed only days before, thanking those who had congratulated me as sincerely as they now consoled me, ignoring my ill-fated bride all prettied up in an open casket display.

  I felt like a thief who had stolen someone else’s pearl. Susan, in another life, could have fallen in love and married an even-tempered, less virile Harvard Man, who would have paled in every way in bringing her the kind of ecstatic satisfaction that I must have done. She would have borne her bucktoothed brood and lived to be an adorably toothy granny, but she was gone, sacrificing her youth for me and my Annabelle.

  8

  I had moved into my parents’ townhouse, now that I was the legal owner. Legal I might be, but was it moral? Three deaths in one summer? How summarily convenient. Jack the Ripper couldn’t have ripped a neater job.

  I shall say that as I dug deeper, a certain speck of fact popped up, as it would occasionally in my mental upheaval, and clarity surfaced.

  On the very deadly afternoon when Father and Mother went sailing with their yacht friends, I had been expected on board as well to get some fresh air, though I had not known that
I was to be matched on the fateful cruise with a suitable girl just returned from finishing school in Paris. I had planned on going because an art curator, Bernard Hughes, who had dedicated his life to acquiring Oriental arts, portraits, and antiques for the Astors, was the guest of honor, and he, in Mother’s words, looked forward to meeting the young Pickens.

  Minutes before I was to step out of the house with Mother and her company, Father had long been on board, I was suddenly attacked by a most severe case of diarrhea, the kind that threatened to empty one’s entrails. Strangely, I hadn’t eaten anything remotely trigger-happy as far as that kind of downpour was concerned. Neither had any part of me been chilled; on the contrary, it was a summer day that needed chilling. As soon as I felt it was safe to go, the urge would return, rendering it utterly improper to board anything without embarrassing the entire Pickens clan and their friends. Exactly three hours and thirty minutes later the disaster would strike, and I would be the only Pickens left dry ashore. The incessant cramping of my lower abdomen only ceased upon hearing of the boat’s sinking.

  Cosmic puzzlement? Perhaps. But that would not be the only coincidence of the day. An uncanny article in a newspaper that I usually never rested my eyes upon published a list of other minor coincidences stitched together by a snoopy newspaperman, fedora and cigarettes and all, I imagine. He wrote, and I quote from the article headlined as “The Eerie Coincidences Leading to New York Society’s Sink of the Decade,” that the skipper of the lobster boat was aged thirty-nine, the ninth child of a Great Neck Catholic clan. He had nine children of his own, and it was the ninth anniversary of his marriage (a prolific lobsterman) to one of twin sisters, who each had only nine toes. The accident took place on the ninth of the ninth month, exactly nine minutes after seven—a clock on board had stopped in the moment of the accident.

  These might all sound like mindless rhyme concocted by a desperate newspaperman. Maybe the coincidences weren’t so coincidental after all. Let the preponderance of evidence paint itself: that portrait of a cunning criminal, my Annabelle-under-the-quilt.