The Daughters of Henry Wong

by Harrison Young

  We’d been sitting on a low wall on the edge of the “bandstand.” He now stood up.

  “I think I’m done here. You take the car. Be strong.” He left me leaning against a railing, looking out to sea. And as if to make the point that we are all connected, he disappeared down the path up which Serena had first led me.

  24

  I woke the next morning with a picture in my mind of a warrior in a bronze helmet. You could not see his eyes. Whether the Greeks made their helmets that way so as to hide their emotions from the enemy, or put on such helmets to shed their emotions, I do not know. The bravery of hoplites is hard to imagine. The word that attached itself to my waking vision was “strange,” which was how the newspaper article about my father’s suicide had described me. I placed a call to Helen Fong.

  I called my Boston grandmother before the broadcast. I should have warned my mother too but I didn’t want to miss the early evening time slot Helen had offered me. That’s what I told myself – as if five minutes would have mattered.

  “I’m sorry about Amanda,” said the older woman as soon as she heard my voice. “I never knew her, of course,” she added. I’d written to her about my wife’s death, but she hadn’t written back yet.

  “About my father…” I said hesitantly.

  “At last the questions come,” she said. “I thought perhaps you were going to let me die without asking any.”

  “Tell me what he was like?” I said. I wasn’t going to have an argument about who owed what to whom.

  “Short. Fearless. Taciturn.” She paused. It felt like she was opening a locked bookcase of memories and taking out a volume she needed to consult. “Your father was smart enough to go to Harvard,” she continued, “but he wasn’t an intellectual the way you are, Jonathan. You get your brains from your mother’s mother. She’s read all of Henry James’s novels, you know. Your father got his brains from…somewhere else.”

  “What about your brains, grandmother?”

  “I’m just a foolish woman, Jonathan. Never went to college. Never could abide Henry James. I made a silly marriage. He was nice, but I was too young. You should have seen us on our wedding day, though – both so tall and handsome. Anyway, I made a mess of things.”

  “That was a long time ago, and – I don’t know how to put this, grandmother – the Chinese blood you gave me may turn out to be useful.”

  “It wasn’t I who made you part Chinese,” she said.

  I waited for her to go on.

  “You did know the basic facts about your father, didn’t you, Jonathan? Your mother should have told you something at some stage.”

  “Mother is taciturn, grandmother, to use your word.”

  “I suppose that’s what made your parents compatible,” she said. “I’ve never understood your mother. But to what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

  “It probably isn’t reported in the Boston Globe,” I told her, “but Pearl River Bank is engaged in a rather dramatic takeover fight with a bank called Chao Yinhang. Or I suppose now it’s a proxy fight. I have to persuade the shareholders of both banks…”

  “If you expect me to understand finance, you are wasting your time,” she said, interrupting.

  “Think of it as an election. I have to do some television. I’m running against a man named Mercury Chao for managing director…”

  “Did you say ‘Chao?’”

  “That’s right. Why?”

  “Romanized ‘ao,’ rather than ‘ow’?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She paused, and again I imagined her retrieving a book. “It’s just that there was a boy with that name on the ship that took us from Shanghai to Portuguese Africa, where we were exchanged for Japanese diplomats. He was a Roman Catholic.”

  “Only a Bostonian would remember that detail,” I said.

  “A person’s faith wasn’t a detail back then. And I paid attention because he was on his own. His father had asked me to look out for him on the voyage – talk to him, make sure he ate, cheer him up if possible. Which I did to the extent I could. I had your infant father to care for.”

  I did some quick math. The boy could have been Mercury’s father, except that the coincidence seemed impossible. “That boy might have been Mercury’s father,” I said. “Mercury’s the man I’m running against.”

  Boston grandmother took that in. “What’s become of him? His name was Jefferson.”

  “That was Mercury’s father all right. He died four years ago. He was in his late sixties.”

  “Is there anything else you need to know about your father,” she said. She seemed ready to wrap the conversation up.

  “The grandfather?” I said.

  She began reciting the names of relatives, which was one of her favorite activities. “Your father was First Lieutenant Francis Wentworth Lee,” she said. “He was decorated for bravery, but you know that. He killed himself before you were born, as you have finally discovered. The man I imprudently married, was, at the time of his death, naval Lieutenant Tolerance Lee, whose mother was a Quaker and tried to persuade him not to enlist. If he’d survived the war, he would have been your grandfather. Step grandfather, technically.”

  “The father of the boy on the ship, grandmother?”

  “His name was Chao, of course.”

  “But how did you know him?”

  “A friend,” she said.

  “Just a friend?”

  “He didn’t have a passport that would get him on that ship. That’s why his son was traveling alone. The boy had been born in Hawaii, which made him an American citizen.”

  “Mercury has a vacation house in Hawaii.”

  “Nice of you to call,” said Boston grandmother, “but I like letters better now that I’m getting deaf.” She hung up before I could say good-bye.

  I did the interview with Helen Fong live again, and in front of the same wall of books. I’d considered wearing traditional Chinese clothes, but in the end I stayed with my 1930s linen suit. I was only part Chinese, after all.

  “There was a story in a local newspaper last week,” I began, “to the effect that my father was a lunatic who killed himself when I was a little boy. As a matter of family honor, I wish to set the record straight.”

  Helen looked at me in surprise. I’d told her she’d have to take me on faith this time, and she probably assumed I would be talking about the merger, as I called it.

  “It is true that he committed suicide. He did so by jumping off the roof of a military hospital outside Washington, D.C. He was in the hospital because of what had happened to him in Vietnam, where he was a member of an elite unit called ‘Sog’ that worked behind enemy lines. He was captured while on a reconnaissance mission, and was a prisoner of the Viet Cong for several years. They treated him with extraordinary cruelty, and while they never broke his spirit, they damaged him psychologically. He received the Distinguished Service Cross when he was repatriated, based on the testimony of two other American prisoners. But he suffered increasingly from something called ‘post-traumatic stress disorder.’ He sometimes got very angry for no good reason. And because he did not want to endanger others, he decided to end his own life.

  “Now there was a reason the Viet Cong singled my father out for special attention. He was half Chinese, and as you may know, the Vietnamese do not like the Chinese. It is one of the great ironies of the twentieth century that the United States fought a twelve-year war to keep South Vietnam from becoming a satellite of ‘Red China,’ as Americans then called it, and as soon as the North Vietnamese had united their country, they fought a short war with China itself.

  “So I am one-quarter Chinese.”

  “Who was your grandfather?” said Helen.

  “I have spoken to my grandmother about that on several occasions.” Not true, but it sounded better that way. “I spoke to her last night on the telephone. She is eighty years old, lives in Boston, and is a person of great intelligence and cultivation. She won’t t
ell me. She says ladies keep secrets. So I don’t know.

  “Helen, thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak to a wider audience. A letter to the newspaper in question would have been inadequate.”

  So far, I had been speaking in English, but I now switched to Cantonese, as it was the language of most of our shareholders.

  “I am proud of my father’s heroism. I am proud of my Chinese blood. Those who planted the story about my father suggested he was ‘strange’ and that therefore I am ‘strange.’ Perhaps so. But they will discover that I have also inherited his determination.”

  Wong Castle was pleased – the Gurkhas, I think, most of all, though they expressed it only with increased cheerfulness, that being their trademark as soldiers. The reinforcements Philip Cooper had promised arrived that day – Dartmouth at noon, Notre Dame a few hours later – and managed to witness the interview from a corner of the library. They were both full-blooded Chinese, but Americans, and worked, respectively, in Army Intelligence and “somewhere else” – by which “Notre Dame” presumably meant the CIA. Dartmouth liked the bit about the so-called “Studies and Observation Group,” which for his generation in his profession is probably legendary. Notre Dame was restrained, but said he was “interested to know the history.” Song gave me a smile I had not seen before.

  And the little boys? Song had let them look into the library briefly as the television lights were being set up, but I knew they were too young to be told the story. They are five-eighths Chinese, I said to myself. That would cry out for explanation. What would “part Chinese” turn out to mean in the world they would grow up in? Was their father an eccentric because of his mixed heritage, or did Wendy just have eccentric DNA? Did Boston grandmother have a Chinese lover because of who she was, or vice versa? If they found answers, I hoped they’d tell me.

  Song didn’t trust the reinforcements Philip Cooper had arranged – especially after she discovered they’d slipped past her to watch me perform. She made them sleep in the Castle’s small outbuilding where the Gurkhas lived, tried to keep them away from Tommy and Philip, which was impossible after Dartmouth turned out to be good at catching geckos. She said they would have to do their watch duties sitting on the front steps. If I hadn’t intervened, she probably wouldn’t have fed them. She said something about Zhang, or what Zhang had said, that made no sense to me, but I was absorbed in my own plans. Later, I resolved to imitate Philip Cooper and listen better.

  I spoke to Sam on the phone right after the broadcast. He congratulated me but I sensed he was not pleased, for the simple reason that something had happened he had neither predicted nor arranged. First-class merchant bankers are like headwaiters, I decided. They dress up. They dispense approval and scorn. They can bone fish and pour wine without soiling the tablecloth. But they do like to be in charge.

  “Market reaction?” I asked him.

  “Astonished. No one knows what to think.”

  “Which, as you have taught me, means that they don’t know what anyone else will think.”

  “Correct.”

  “Well, I know what I think, Sam. I need a drink. Can you be in charge of that?”

  Sitting in Henry’s library later that evening, my thoughts returned to my dream about the Greek helmet. It was another mask, I realized. I constructed them all the time. And masks have to do with suppressing anger. Nothing so dramatic as my father’s post-traumatic stress disorder. Only a relic of a lonely childhood. But my anger did splurt out unexpectedly. At school I’d been cautioned more than once for roughness in soccer games. A goalie can crash into the attacking forward if he times it right. Perhaps that was why I had given up sports.

  And there were girls at Harvard who’d probably been puzzled not to get called after they’d been nice to me. Puzzled and hurt, even.

  25

  Sam and I had an excellent dinner, but we didn’t get drunk, which turned out to be fortunate. What was stupid, since I still didn’t carry a cell phone, was not telling Song where I’d be.

  We went to the Mandarin Grill – this was before the renovations – and sat in the corner table that was almost in its own alcove, so you couldn’t see it when you first came in. I regarded the previous Mandarin Grill as a sort of refuge, with its shadowy mirrors, perfect service and comfortable chairs. I used to go there by myself when I was having culture shock, my first years in Hong Kong. I’d eat lobster, drink white Burgundy and think about New England. Now the Grill is just a big modern room with an oyster bar.

  Sam and I started with whiskey and sodas. “You’re doing O.K., Wendy,” Sam said. “Your shares are up, which my colleague who devotes his life to understanding the arbs and the punters tells me is a sort of mindless vote of confidence. And of course, all the women in Hong Kong now want to know you. But let’s not talk about the deal. Tell me about something learned and arcane. I want to be cultivated like your grandmother in Boston.”

  “Let’s see. Do you know the metaphysical poets, Sam?”

  “Donne?” he said hopefully.

  “He and others.”

  “He’s the only one I can remember, and I don’t remember anything he wrote except ‘No man is an island,’ and that’s because Hemingway stole the punch line.”

  “‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls,’” I quoted.

  “‘It tolls for thee,’” said Sam.

  “I prefer the ones about sex – which by the way they referred to as ‘dying.’ Orgasm was both oblivion and transcendence.”

  “We did Donne in high school. They left those out – as if that would make any difference to a bunch of randy sixteen-year-olds. But Donne was a bishop or something. He couldn’t have gotten away with pornography, could he?”

  “Dean of St. Paul’s. Wrote the poems about sex when he was younger. But the physical part is there largely by inference. What he gets across more beautifully than anyone else, I’ve always thought, is intimacy.” I was plagiarizing a professor, I realized.

  “There are quite a few of his poems,” I continued, “where it is just Donne and whoever she is.” Along with my other disabilities, I have a photographic memory. “‘And now good morrow to our waking souls’ – do you know that one? – ‘Which watch not one another out of fear;/For love all love of other sights controls/And makes one little room an everywhere.’”

  Sam thought about this for a while. “Love, yes, that does complicate things. You can discipline your behavior, but not your heart.”

  I was so struck by this unembarrassed confession that I said nothing. Philip Cooper had said approximately the same thing. If you have a job to do, your emotions can get in the way. They can trip you up when you aren’t ready.

  I definitely wasn’t ready. Perhaps Sam sensed this, because for the rest of the evening he was thoroughly entertaining.

  “‘One little room…’” he repeated after a minute. “So Donne invented ‘Sunday afternoons.’”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  “‘Sunday afternoons.’ Very chic in London right now. I thought they were a new idea, but I should have known better.”

  “You will have to explain.” He said we should order dinner first.

  “I’ll start at the beginning,” said Sam. “There was this guy who, on a dare at a dinner party, agreed to pose in the nude for a woman he didn’t really know. She liked to draw and paint with watercolors. She could draw pretty well, in fact, though she wasn’t a professional artist. But models are expensive. ‘What’s the big deal?’ the guy said after a few glasses of wine. So he went over to her house the next day and she drew him.

  “It turns out that posing is quite tiring, and you can’t do it for more than half an hour at a time. So after a while she stops and asks him if he’d like some tea and shortbread. ‘Sure,’ he says. She asks him if he wants to put on a robe, and he doesn’t know the etiquette, so he says, ‘No, being nude like this in an interesting woman’s living room is quite exhilarating. You pump a lot of adrenalin,’ he says. ‘It�
��s like a sauna that happens in your head.’ ‘Hmm,’ she says.

  “She brings a tray of tea things in from the kitchen, and they both sit down on the sofa. It’s one of those big old-fashioned sofas with down pillows, so it is very comfortable after standing still for half an hour. He leans back and takes a bite of the shortbread and of course crumbs fall on him. ‘May I,’ she says, and picks them off of his chest. ‘That’s an interesting sensation too,’ he says. ‘The physical sensation or the intrusion of your personal space?’ she says. He thinks about that. ‘Both.’ ‘Would you like me to do some more?’ she says. ‘I would,’ he says.

  “So she goes and gets a couple of brand new paintbrushes with tapered sable tips and begins to explore him, starting with his ears. ‘Tell me what works best.’ After a bit they decide he prefers it when she uses the tips of her fingers. She is completely unprincipled about where she touches him, makes him shift his position so she can get at ‘the best bits,’ as she puts it. When she’s got him pretty excited she stops, goes and gets his clothes and puts them into the washing machine. ‘You want me to pose some more?’ he says. ‘No, I’m liking this,’ she says. ‘Oh, so am I,’ he says, ‘but I don’t know how much I can take.’ ‘That will be interesting to discover.’

  “So for two hours, they alternate between talking and touching. She learns his life history and he learns more than he has ever known before about what turns him on – including, by the way, the fact that being touched in two places at once, if those places are correctly chosen, takes the whole experience up an octave. Then she brings his clothes back, warm from the drier, and he gets dressed. ‘I’m here most Sunday afternoons,’ she says.”

  “But no fuck,” I say.

  “Another planet,” says Sam. “Anyway, the guy tells a couple of his friends, of course – though he doesn’t say who the woman was – and one of his friends tells his girlfriend, who says she wants to try a ‘Sunday afternoon.’ She probably invented the phrase, to be honest. ‘I’m too ticklish,’ says her boyfriend. ‘No,’ says the girl, ‘I want to try it on him.’’’