The Daughters of Henry Wong

by Harrison Young

  “No. Of course not. I am not a man who does that sort of thing.”

  “Kill your wife, you mean?”

  “Have her killed. I wasn’t there, remember?”

  “How could it have been done?” said Julia, “assuming it wasn’t suicide, which quite obviously it was.”

  “Depends on the poison,” I answered. “Dissolve it if it’s a powder. Boil it down to sludge to concentrate it, if it’s a liquid. Maybe mix it with something that will make the sludge adhesive. Paint the inside of the chamber. There were some instances of Emperor’s wives disposing of Palace rivals that way in the Ming period. Everyone knows how it’s done.”

  “Such cheerful history,” said Julia, sounding uncertain. “But her drinking the whole cup in one go tells you it was suicide.”

  We glided through the early evening traffic and into the Cross Harbor Tunnel. It was just getting dark outside.

  “Look, I didn’t kill her,” I said. “Some men would have. She’d been having an affair for years…as you suspected.”

  “Mercury?”

  I left it at that, and let her believe I’d known about Mercury all along and hadn’t cared, let her think about husbands killing their wives. I could tell it didn’t totally upset her. She had Henry’s resilience – as poor Amanda had not.

  When we got to the Peninsula I told the driver to leave the car and take a taxi home. I told Julia I stank and needed to take a shower. She said she’d use the other bathroom. I spent five minutes enjoying the hot water and the white noise. Then I dried off, combed my hair and walked out into the living room totally naked. Julia was sitting on the couch, equally bathed, but bundled up in a hotel bathrobe and with a drink in her hand. I sat down beside her.

  “I was hoping you’d do that,” she said.

  “Punish me,” I said. “Rub ice on my chest or something.” I’d seen that in an X-rated movie when I was in college.

  “Why?” she said.

  “I’m relieved that Amanda is dead.”

  “She must have been very unhappy.”

  “Of course she was unhappy,” I said. “Her children didn’t talk to her. She believed her father was dead. And her husband had brought back from New York, and installed in the house a woman – and to make it worse, it was her sister – a woman who was everything Amanda wasn’t: educated, elegant without trying to be, wonderful with her little boys…”

  “Not as pretty.”

  “Much more alluring.”

  “We are being very bad,” said Julia.

  We went on like this for quite a while, and I was interested to discover, being in a position to observe, that every lie I told her, every compliment I paid her, every implicit promise, excited me.

  “I like tall men,” said Julia, putting her hand on my knee.

  “Sam said you were very nice to him.”

  It didn’t even give her pause. “He is worth being nice to,” she said. “But I was just trying to make you jealous.”

  “You will have to stay here,” I said.

  “In this hotel?”

  “Don’t you like the room?”

  “The room is fine,” she said. There were four rooms, actually, each painted in a different pastel color, with faux-impressionist paintings whose color schemes matched the walls too exactly. Also a long balcony with a fabulous view.

  “But will you visit me?”

  “When I can. We will have to be circumspect. I assume there will be an inquest. The newspapers will have a field day. You have no idea what the Chinese newspapers in this town are like.”

  In another room a gilded clock chimed four o’clock.

  “I’ll have to go to New York at some point,” she said. It was impossible not to see that she was imagining calling a real estate broker about putting her tidy apartment up for sale, giving away her cat, canceling her subscription to the Times.

  “Yes, and stay there for a while,” I said. “Remember, my position is that Henry is coming back. I am a grieving, dutiful son-in-law.” Julia ran a shameless fingernail along my thigh.

  “If there are sympathy votes, you must get them,” she said, “but how often will you be able to come see me?”

  “That depends on whether I can get you out of that bathrobe.”

  She stood up at once and let the robe fall to the floor. A pleasing roundedness, as I’ve said. Colorless skin. Eager.

  I had a sudden recollection of romance at Exeter. You’d pair up and agree to meet – and avoid eye contact when you did. Both of you had research agendas. There was an expectation of kissing and exploratory hands. “Look,” one girl had said, as we faced each other in the woods beyond the playing fields one Sunday afternoon, bright October sunshine on the yellow and scarlet leaves, a still-folded “picnic” blanket lying in a heap between us. Her name was Lydia and I think she came from Oregon. “Look,” she said, “I shouldn’t have come, but I didn’t want to be rude. We don’t know each other.” Then she unbuttoned the plaid flannel shirt she was wearing, with, it turned out, no bra underneath, and showed me her breasts. “Nice?” she said. I nodded. “Let’s pretend we fucked,” she said, “and if we ever get to know each other, that might be nice too.” Exeter could be like that sometimes: too much seriousness.

  “Miss Wong,” I said to Julia. “I must warn you I am not a moral individual.”

  “Oh, good,” she said.

  “I have responsibilities that require me to be unkind.”

  “Oh, please be unkind to me right away.”

  When I’d seen Amanda’s body on the stretcher, I’d jumped as if someone had snuck up behind me and shouted. I’d looked in on Amanda when I came home late one time, to see if she was asleep. She’d thrown the covers off and was half-naked, with her nightgown riding up. The bedside lamp was on – I suppose she feared the dark – and its quiet light bathed her smooth skin and rich black hair. She had a beautiful figure.

  Sex without complications was partly what I’d been after, marrying an elegant Chinese girl. I acknowledge that.

  Amanda and I had been sleeping in separate rooms for more than a year then. I hadn’t mastered sublimation. It would have been easy to frighten her, easy enough to turn off the lamp and wordlessly take her where she lay, so that she woke in darkness and confusion. The Castle had thick walls and heavy doors. No one would have heard her cry out, except perhaps Song, and I doubted Song would care. But I’d only stared at her like a Peeping Tom, full of longing and anger. I looked in again, any evening I could, until self-disgust compelled me to stop. Why did I torture myself that way? Why do I feel guilty about things I never did?

  The process of escaping Amanda’s ghost was rough on Julia, but it had nothing to do with Julia. It was the poison of past rejection coming out. I admit I’d thought about seducing Julia to get her to finance my plan – or allowing her to seduce me would be a better description – but with Amanda dead, I could molest Other Daughter without compunction. Which I more or less did, contriving to give her pleasure while delaying my own – torment again? – prolonging the encounter until she wanted nothing but sleep.

  The point, I suppose, was to take what I wanted for a change. When we were done I made Julia get out of bed and take a shower with me and stand wrapped in bath towels on the long balcony, looking back across the harbor at the neon lights of Hong Kong, as if it was Manhattan and we lived in Brooklyn and had aspirations. Sad when your best access to emotion is acting out scenes from a movie. But I suppose that’s what movies are for.

  We never did have dinner. I put her to bed in the second bedroom and watched her fall asleep, got a beer from the minibar and tore open a bag of popcorn. The day about to end in Hong Kong and beginning in New York was Halloween. Trick or treat , I said to myself. After that, I dozed in an armchair.

  I left her in the Peninsula, essentially marooned, for she had brought nothing with her. I might as well have had her feet bound. She was a very wealthy woman, of course, and could send out for Chanel or Ferragamo from the shops off the l
obby, but I doubted she would. I left at three in the morning, long after Mosquito had tracked me down and taken a picture of Henry’s Rolls.

  “Big Wendy in Mourning?” the caption said next day. Its readers would recognize the front of the hotel, built in 1928 and still in many ways the most glamorous in Hong Kong. There had been a time when bellboys would meet the trains when they arrived from the north, and carry your bags back across the street from the station to the hotel. You used to be able to take a train all the way from Vladivostok.

  Presumably Julia slept late and wondered what would happen next, like a princess the morning after the revolution.

  I went to see my sons.

  “Have you told them?”

  “Yes,” said Song.

  “Newmommie?” they said.

  I shaved, changed into one of my linen suits, and went into the library to read the more incendiary Chinese papers. The line they took – they seem to believe that libel can only be committed in English – was that I had killed both my father-in-law and my wife, in order to live in luxury with Julia. Some hinted that she was my sister rather than Amanda’s. We both came from America, after all.

  Something told me that the right course of action was silence. I pulled a book of poetry down from the shelf. Robert Frost, if you’re curious: “There was never a sound beside the field but one/And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground…”

  Serena would like that poem, I imagined.

  A package arrived from our family lawyers. Amanda had written a will when we were first married, leaving everything to me, and also a letter outlining the kind of funeral she wanted. Odd what marriage makes people think of. It was supposed to take place in St. John’s. She’d even specified the hymns. I called the lawyer and told him to get on with it. “I do not think I can manage the details myself, just now,” I explained. Solicitors and funeral directors have a lot in common.

  At four, I called Julia and told her what to order for our dinner.

  When business started in London, Simon called. I told Song to say I was out. I had gone out, in fact, had myself fitted for a black suit, and bought a black armband.

  “I will have a dressmaker sent over tomorrow,” I told Julia. “You must be perfect at the funeral.”

  I stuffed her hairbrush and the hand mirror Tommy liked and a few other items into a bag before I left the Castle. I also stopped in at Shanghai Tang, guessed her size, and bought her a couple of those silk pyjama-like suits – one in canary yellow and one in sober grey.

  “No shoes?” she said.

  “You’re my captive.”

  She still had the high heels she’d been wearing when Amanda died, and when I’d brought her under the harbor and taken her to bed.

  She went into the other room and came back wearing the grey outfit.

  “Stainless steel,” I said, referring to the color.

  “Would that I were,” she said. “Sam called.”

  “And?”

  “He wanted to know what you were up to.”

  “He didn’t call me.”

  “Maybe he thinks you did it.” She liked playing with that idea.

  “He’s smarter than that.”

  “How did he know where I am?” she said.

  I handed her a copy of Mosquito.

  “Oh,” she said. “I guess I wasn’t prepared for that.”

  “You will be news forever in Hong Kong, Julia.”

  She let me give her too much to drink and feed her chilli prawns with chopsticks, one by one, sitting beside her in bed, until she jumped up and went into the bathroom to be sick.

  “Will there be reporters with flashbulbs and microphones if I ever try to go out?” she asked, curled up beside me after she recovered.

  “Probably,” I said. “But everything will look better in the morning.”

  After she went to sleep I went into another room and called Sam.

  “You’re a shit,” he said.

  “That’s my job now,” I said. I guess he had gotten pretty fond of Julia.

  “There’s a rumor Mercury is about to increase his offer,” he said after a long pause. “He probably figures you’re in shock and might concede. Anyway, your shares have moved up a bit more.”

  “I’m not in shock,” I lied.

  When I left at 10 p.m., my “TV girlfriend,” Helen Fong, was camped in the cream and gold lobby with a cameraman. The Peninsula shouldn’t have let her do that. Then again, they had traditionally let prostitutes sip tea in the lobby, so long as they stayed on the correct side of the room. I saw her before she saw me, and managed to sneak around behind her and grab her by the waist. She jumped and screamed in the discreet way young ladies are presumably taught to jump and scream at St. Mary’s Ascot.

  “You want to come upstairs?” I said. Her cameraman tried to turn toward us, but she waved him off.

  “Julia’s up there, right?”

  “Yes. She’s passed out. It has been pretty stressful for her. But the suite has plenty of beds if you want an exclusive interview.”

  Helen looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

  “Don’t you like sex?” I said – I probably was in shock – and then: “Just kidding. Seriously, do you have to wait here all night?”

  “That’s my job,” she said, not looking particularly proud of her profession.

  “She won’t come out until tomorrow morning at the earliest,” I said.

  There was a note on my bed in Song’s neat Chinese, which said roughly the following: “Small man Sam call. High heels call. Say no matter what time.” There was a London number.

  I assumed they were going to tell me it was time to look for a “white knight,” which I had learned meant “anyone other than the first guy.” The white knight got you, but somehow you saved face. Psmith & Graves would get its fee. Serena had gotten a bit of training. Too bad about Henry’s system – but please burn the relevant files. Whatever they had to tell me could wait. I had women to destroy and whistle-blowers to save.

  I went to bed and had very bad dreams: being swept down a river fully clothed, my linen suit dragging me under, Boston grandmother torturing the father I had never known, and my mother not wanting to get involved. In the last scene I was an infant. My mother was opening her dressing gown as if to feed me. Then she got that tired look on her face and pushed me away. I woke up with a start. Bare breasts have always excited me, made me angry, made me sad. Lucy, Lydia, Julia, Serena. I felt like a ping pong ball. Then sleep smothered me again.

  19

  Sometimes the sheer ugliness of Hong Kong overwhelms me. I am an aesthete, after all. But the city’s ordinary citizens reassure me. As soon as I had extricated myself from my nightmares and Song’s breakfast attentions, I headed into the office. Full of nervous energy, I took the Peak Tram down to Central and walked the rest of the way to the office. Waiting at a light, I found myself surrounded by other early risers. Only a few seemed to recognize me. I saw a secretary from the bank talking to her friend behind a cupped hand. But they were happy to stand closely packed around me, as if under a tree in a sudden downpour.

  Chinese do not smell the way Westerners do. Some say this comes of eating less meat, or rice instead of potatoes. More likely, it is genetic. They also have less body hair. This makes their proximity less intrusive. On the other hand, when they walk the streets of Hong Kong – “they” meaning shop assistants and construction workers, not bankers – they go about in shirts and singlets and nearly transparent shifts, so that you sometimes feel you have walked into someone else’s bathroom.

  This is not actually an unpleasant sensation. It is rather as if a group of strangers found themselves confined by a typhoon in a shelter too small for privacy. We are in this together, their body language seems to say. We will get through this together. I am happy to agree.

  I called Sam as soon as I was at Henry’s desk, taking pleasure in reaching him at home.

  “They’re raising their bid to effectively twenty-two,” he
said. “Formal announcement in an hour.”

  I pictured him sitting up in bed, with the newspaper propped against some gorgeous sleeping companion. I had a sleeping companion too now, and abstinence to make up for. Sam had said Serena would probably be pleasant to go to bed with “if you could get her to stop talking.” Julia didn’t talk. She made wordless sounds of pleasure.

  “Most of the increase is in shares,” Sam went on. “The new offer is above the trading price in the pre-opening gray market, which means the market believes the offer is good enough.”

  “How can you know what the gray market is from bed?”

  “You have to know who to call – and I’m not in bed, by the way. Where are you?”

  “Office.” I tried to sound nonchalant. “How do the people you call know about the new offer if it hasn’t been announced?”

  “Very impressive work ethic,” said Sam. He wasn’t giving me any slack. “They don’t know, but sometimes there are rumors. Team Mercury benefits if the gray market gives a little guidance to the punters, so it’s not surprising if word leaks out.”

  “So you figure he’ll win?”

  Sam hesitated.

  “Well, I do,” I said. “I want to call a shareholders’ meeting to decide who controls the combined organization.”

  “You’re crazy, but go on.”

  I explained that if Julia and I (on behalf of Henry) took the all-shares alternative in Chao Yinhang’s offer, we would control about a quarter of the new total – and more if a few friends did the same. I didn’t think many people would refuse the increased offer. It was too good to ignore. But there might not be that many people who actually wanted Mercury to run the bank. If we could work out the timing, the shareholders of both organizations would get to make two decisions at once.

  “So he’d win the battle but lose the war,” I concluded.

  “Provided you got the votes,” said Sam.

  “We’ve got a better chance of that than of persuading the punters to turn down a forty-something percent premium,” I said. “That’s what it is now, I think.”