“You are running out of money, I think,” Henry said finally.
“How can you know that?”
“I’m a banker. I have to be able to tell.”
I said nothing.
“Ten thousand English books. I will pay you to catalog them.”
“My fellowship requires me to move on in another month.”
“See how you like the work until then. I will pay you enough to stay in the Mandarin.”
For the next three weeks, I worked in Henry’s library. It was late summer. Rain battered the terrace outside the tall windows. There was the threat of a typhoon. Then the skies cleared and Hong Kong steamed. The air-conditioning was erratic. I wore a tie, but took off my jacket, and decided that the baggy linen suits men wore here in the ’20s and ’30s made a lot of sense. Henry gave me the name of a tailor.
I invented a cataloging system. Henry liked history and geography, books with maps. He especially liked oversize books published before the First World War with handsome typography. There was only a smattering of “literature” but there were plenty of biographies and mystery stories. Sometimes I found bookmarks left between pages, or marginal notes in a mixture of English words and Chinese characters. Henry did read.
Amanda was never more than a vision in the hall, coming in from shopping or going out to lunch. I decided she considered me staff. Then one day, shortly before noon, she wandered into the library in a silk dressing gown, smoking a cigarette. She had broken up with whoever it was, Henry explained later.
“Are you making any progress?” she asked, looking at a magazine rather than at me.
“Yes.”
“There are too many books to ever finish.”
“I don’t have to read them, you know.”
“What do you do at lunch time? I never see you.”
“Song brings me a bowl of noodles, which I eat over there.” I gestured to a small table and chair in the corner. “But I never see you either.”
“Well, I’m here now.” Amanda smiled for the first time. “And I have quite stupidly sent Song to the Wet Market. And I doubt the Gurkhas can cook. Are you hungry?”
“I will be soon. What about you?”
“I am always hungry,” said Amanda. Oh wow.
I’d enrolled in introductory Chinese at Harvard because I thought it would be cool. (Bear with me; this is relevant.) Like all adolescents, I was trying on identities. The fact that “Charleston grandfather” regarded “red China” with superstitious horror was a recommendation. There was also a family connection. My father’s mother’s forebears had been China traders. Her house on Louisburg Square had several pieces of huanghuali wooden furniture, which turned out to be quite valuable, and scattered Chinnery sketches of men with pigtails smoking pipes and girls carrying bundles along a wharf.
But there was something else. Just what the ancestors of my father had done in China was never discussed. That included Boston grandmother, who lived there briefly as a young woman but had no stories to tell. All of this defined China for me as a land of secrets and misbehavior – meaning sex.
When I began to study the language, that association was reinforced. Chinese is a nudist among languages. It has no cases, no genders, no tenses, except where absolutely necessary. Grammar is mostly context. Its 40,000 thorny pictograms – more than anyone can know, by the way – are represented in spoken Mandarin by only a few hundred monosyllables, pitched at one of four tones, with the result that every word is potentially a pun. You will see native speakers drawing characters on their palms with a fingertip to resolve ambiguities. The language is endlessly allusive, but also marvelously direct – at once obscene and sublime. I loved it immediately.
I won’t say I loved Amanda immediately, but to be frank, her being Chinese was immensely erotic. It obliterated any judgment I might have had.
My uncommunicative grandmother had expressed faint amusement when I began my study of Chinese. I took that as approval. I assumed she’d approve of Amanda on aesthetic grounds.
Boston grandmother had the ability to keep things unspoken but still there. She never told me to work hard at school – somehow I knew from an early age that I was supposed to, even if my friends didn’t. She never told me not to talk about my family, when I got to boarding school. It would have been helpful if she had. But perhaps it was a lesson one has to learn the hard way. Both sides of my family are pretty interesting. The house in Charleston is practically a national monument. “If anyone asks in the future,” Boston grandmother told me after I explained my new nickname, “just say that you come from the South.”
I remember an incident – some sort of visitor’s day at Exeter – when Charleston grandfather was about to say something, and Boston grandmother just looked at him, and he didn’t. What we were all talking about, what he might have been prevented from saying, I have no idea. It is a memory without a soundtrack.
The thought snuck into my consciousness that I’d been a father without a soundtrack. Philip and Tommy had never spoken to me because I had never spoken to them. Was that true? Yes, largely. They’d certainly heard me speaking – to Amanda, to Song – but had concluded that they weren’t admitted to that fraternity. So one of them had attempted to open diplomatic relations with a drawing. I should have had it framed, but I didn’t know what had become of it. All I could remember now was the red suspenders – that and my first impression that it was a picture of a monster. I couldn’t any longer have said why it looked like a monster. Perhaps I’d felt like a monster that night. I’d let my feelings define reality for much of the past eight years. Reality had had to knock pretty hard at my door to get attention. Perhaps my sons had been knocking too, but quietly. There was room for optimism in that thought, along with guilt.
Amanda was ready for our first date in less than an hour, which I came to realize was significant. She enjoyed being seen with me, I decided, if only for the novelty. I enjoyed the tiny pressure of her hand on my arm when she wanted to get my attention. She made me talk so she could listen to my accent. We went out again.
It turned out she was fairly bright. She had opinions I had never encountered before, and defended them tenaciously no matter what contrary evidence I deployed. I teased her and told her she was charming. She liked that – both the compliment and the teasing. Henry, I now realize, had never bothered to dispute her. He told me he would have sent her to university if she’d wanted to go. “England, New England, whatever,” he said. “Actually, she was probably afraid of being homesick, and having to make new friends.”
Henry suggested I resign my Sheldon Traveling Fellowship and accept a Wong Staying-Put Fellowship. “Your Mandarin is fine,” he said. “You should work on your Cantonese.” I agreed.
Amanda took to bringing me coffee each morning when she finally got up. If there wasn’t a party to go to, she read romantic novels until midnight. We had increasingly intense conversations, during which Amanda’s silk dressing gowns became increasingly absentminded about their function.
I proposed.
“Would you like to be a banker?” said Henry.
So there I was, eight years on, sitting in Henry’s library. I often sit there at night and listen on earphones to Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach. That particular night, I found myself remembering Harvard, which Yo-Yo also attended, by the way. Class of 1976. There was this course you were supposed to take about the Puritans. Harvard was founded by Puritans. The course wasn’t required, but people who did take it had it over people who hadn’t, in the way that people who once rowed for their school have it over people who have never been in a shell. So I took it.
I am not a Puritan but I was curious how their minds worked, and what they thought their deal with God was. The answer turned out to be that human beings are ghastly – innate depravity was a phrase and concept they were fond of – that virtue gets you no credit with God, and that but for grace we are all doomed. The bleakness of this vision gave me a thrill, to be honest.
The course wa
s created by a dead professor named Perry Miller, who as a young man was working in Africa, trying to have an adventure, and as he was loading 55-gallon drums of oil on to a flatbed truck one blistering afternoon, he decided he ought to go back to Cambridge and study the Puritans. Harvard has that kind of hold on some people. You find a corner of your mind where magic happens. I found Chinese. What I didn’t manage to do was fall in love. There was this vision I had, especially when listening to the right sort of classical music, of scholarly achievement, rainy weather and sexual generosity, all mixed together, which made a hole in my heart that no one filled. Perry Miller concocted his brew out of sweat and theology. I know nothing about his love life but the principle holds. You discover in yourself a capacity for intense appreciation of something beautiful and obscure, and it seems to you there ought to be a girl. If you don’t find one, it can be a problem. It can also be a problem if you do, as I have learned from reading about the divorces of my classmates in the book the college publishes ahead of each reunion, because the sort of girl you meet and marry in Cambridge will have her own point of view, her own ambitions, intensities that may cease to resemble yours as both of you stumble into adulthood. But that never prevents regret for the nameless girl you didn’t follow out of class one October morning, who looked like she’d be fun to talk to and nice to touch.
I thought of all the people I had known in college, and before that at Exeter. I hadn’t kept up a single acquaintance, which had to be a clue about myself. All those arguments constructed of too much intelligence and too few facts, around an oval table on an autumn morning. All those nervous boys and handsome girls, spewing out onto the Plimpton Playing Fields to get apple-cheeked and muddy after lunch. Huc venite pueri ut viri sitis, it said above the door of the Academy Building: Come hither boys that you may become men. Exeter was designed to prepare people like me for what I now faced.
I leaned forward and crumpled into my own hands. Tears ran down my wrists. To the extent possible, I allowed no sound to escape. When I had finished, two or three minutes later, I stood up carefully and walked down the hall to my bedroom. As I was closing the door, Song turned out the lights in the library.
I suppose I should have been embarrassed to have Song hear me crying. I assumed she had. But she was more a piece of furniture than a person. She had no emotions, so if she got to see mine, it didn’t matter. She’d been at the Castle since 1985, well before my arrival. Servants came and went but she was always in charge. I saw her but I didn’t see her. I took perfect service for granted; why else does one live in Hong Kong? Oblivious as I was in those years, I’d never wondered what went on in her head. Or where she came from. In retrospect, I realize she would have regarded me as dangerous. Perhaps she cast a spell to avoid attracting my attention. She could have done that.
4
From where I sat three mornings later on a balcony overlooking the Ladies’ Recreation Club’s tennis courts, it was possible to see only one of the players, a skinny Chinese girl in a sun visor, whose willingness to run after the ball exceeded her ability to hit it. Even at nine in the morning, she glistened with sweat. The shadow of the sun visor prevented me from seeing whether she was happy with her life, but she had nice long legs, and she would certainly be making her husband happy if she wrapped them around him with the same enthusiasm she gave to her tennis.
On the hillside opposite, in addition to green jungle and vertical architecture, there were half a dozen sulphur-crested cockatoos – raucous, spectacular birds, descendants of several pairs, so tradition said, released by their Australian owners on Christmas morning of 1941, hours before the Japanese arrived to take said owners away to torture and death. There were supposed to be about forty of the birds on Hong Kong island. A few swirled over Wong Castle from time to time.
The girl in the sun visor tucked tennis balls into a pocket up under her skirt, as girls playing tennis do, allowing me a momentary view of her entire thigh. Amanda didn’t like tennis. She belonged to the LRC, founded in 1883 and political property of two dozen mostly British board members, because… well, probably because she could. Come to think of it, she didn’t come very often. Anyway, the directors of the club never rested from their self-appointed task of inventing new rules, prominently posted and assiduously enforced, which caused the organization to be known in some quarters as the “Latest Regulation Club.” “Members playing tennis are reminded that at least 60% of their costumes must be white” and “Gentlemen members may bring no more than two weekend guests per month” had taken years of debate. My personal favorite was “No pool toys are permitted in the pool.” I was a gentleman member because of Amanda but I rarely visited the place.
Another cockatoo flapped languidly through the humid morning air across the valley. Torture and death. I have a habit of thinking in dramatic terms. Perhaps it comes of being idle. If character is destiny, it begins as a pose. We prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet, as T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock says. And the mask hardens into a self. My maternal grandfather was a “Senator” because people called him that and he didn’t correct them. He was appointed as quite a young man, when his ancient predecessor expired seven weeks before his term of office did. A new senator had already been elected, his ancient predecessor having been persuaded to retire, but the Governor, who had the appointing power, decided to give my grandfather a little dollop of prestige, and sent him to Washington for about a month to cast an important vote. To my way of thinking, he was more of a Federal Express package than a senator, but the honorific made him happy.
As I foolishly bragged to my Exeter classmate, I come from one of those complicated American families that’s been collecting honorifics since the eighteenth century: revolutionary patriots who turned into mill-owners and intermarried with slave-owning Southern planters – all of whom read Latin. My father was a Bostonian, but distantly related to various Confederate generals. The girl he married, who in due course turned into my tragic mother, was from South Carolina. They met at the sort of dance where that sort of thing is supposed to happen. Unfortunately for all of us, the Vietnam War also happened, so my beautiful widowed mother moved to Charleston, where I was brought up in the penumbra of my senator-grandfather.
The mask I think about, by the way, looking in the mirror and free-associating as I shave, is that of Bruce Wayne, the cultured philanthropist who is secretly Batman. Or maybe I’m Robin to Henry’s Batman. It’s embarrassing, really. So who am I to ridicule my grandfather?
I’d had a fight with Amanda that morning. Or a disagreement.
“You should talk to Mercury,” she’d said as she buttered her toast.
“Why?” I’d said, sitting on the edge of her bed with my coffee.
“For support.”
“How?”
“Get him to say things at the Hong Kong Club, or be quoted in the paper.”
“A bank that needs to be well spoken of is already lost.”
“Is that your stupid badger?”
“Bagehot. No, it’s me, but the principle is his. Hints and sighs and faint praise can destroy a bank. Better that Mercury says nothing.”
“That wasn’t just hints and sighs up in the New Territories.”
“No, it was not, and did you see how I handled it?”
“Yes, darling. You got yourself on TV, and I understand you looked very handsome.”
“The point is that I acted as if there was no problem. And by the way, our stock is up a dollar and a half since Monday.”
“Wendy, for God’s sake, there is a problem, and it grows every day that father doesn’t reappear.”
“The problem only exists if people think we think there is a problem. And you want me to tell Mercury that we do?”
“I think you should merge,” she said impulsively.
“Henry would never agree to that.”
Amanda had given me a look that implied my confidence in Henry’s safe return was touching but childish, and put her napkin on the tray, which was the signa
l for me to leave. I’d decided to read the newspapers at the LRC, where I was meeting “Sam Canadian.”
My grandfather’s response, by the way, had I ever had the bad judgment to raise the issue of self-dramatization, would have been that (a) he had been a senator, whereas Batman was imaginary and (b) the Japanese really had tortured people. He was irredeemably literal.
It seemed improbable that Sam was a member of the Ladies’ Recreation Club, but that was where he’d suggested we meet when I’d returned his call on Tuesday. He was walking toward me with his tie loosened and his suit coat over his shoulder, looking like he owned the place.
Sam, who was of Armenian descent, had rechristened himself because his legal name, adopted by an assimilation-minded grandfather, was “Knowles,” and there had been another Sam Knowles in Hong Kong, working for one of the London law firms, with whom Sam Canadian, who came from Calgary, did not wish to be confused. As a financial center, Hong Kong is the right size for everyone to know almost everyone else. The other Sam Knowles, who was boring, quite naturally came to be known as “the other Sam Knowles,” which in the Chinese way was shortened to “Other Sam.” He hated the name, but everyone in the expatriate community used it, even after Sam Canadian abandoned “Knowles.” Eventually Other Sam moved back to London.
Sam Canadian liked his new name – “sounds Armenian, don’t you think?” – and that’s how he’d introduced himself on the phone. “You need a friend,” he’d said – by which he meant I needed an investment banker. He said he’d gotten my home number from Cedric Fung. Cedric was a friend and mentor to me, and I wanted to ask Sam how he knew him, but improbable friendship seemed to be Sam’s core competence.
“Stand up,” Sam said when he got to my table. “I want to see how much shorter I am than you.” I complied. “Here, Benedict,” said Sam to the nearest waiter. “How much shorter am I than Mr. Lee?”
Benedict demurred.
“Gotta be at least a foot.” Sam finally extended his hand. “Nice to meet you.” We both sat down. “Coffee please, Benedict, sugar, no cream. How about you?”
The Daughters of Henry Wong Page 3