House of Many Gods

by Kiana Davenport

  She lies back in her bed recalling those early days, though she never quite remembered the first sight of the bridge, or the Lurline entering the harbor, or the skyline of San Francisco. What she remembered was how, at that moment, she had felt grateful for not having had a happy childhood. Whatever happened next, she was not a lamb being led to slaughter …

  WHEN THE LURLINE HAD DOCKED, SHE FOUND HER WAY TO CHINATOWN, the only place she could afford until she got her bearings. Down narrow streets of sterile, asphalt frightfulness, she saw people cupped in the shadows like effigies. Then gold shops, pagoda’ed temples. An old woman in slippers dragged a promethean handbag while beside her a barefoot child thriftily carried new pink rubber boots. Ana stepped from a bus into a slippery tide of discarded shrimp heads, the sound of wind chimes, odor of burning incense. Then she had relaxed somewhat: Things looked so familiar she could have been in Honolulu.

  In broken English, a vendor had offered her a mushroom big and virile as a steak. Or, dried camel eye from some doomed caravan traversing ancient spice routes. Dong Quai for “happy womb.” She moved on, struck by the smell of singed ducks hanging in doorways, the offal of rabbits being disemboweled on-site. An amber hand waving the blue meat of monkey.

  Streets were almost suffocating, but with a redemptive squalor, a sense of hustle, of focus, immigrants struggling toward better lives. Here and there the old and the new world meshed, the 1960s moving in. Young Asians in blue jeans slapped fresh paint on storefronts. A couple flew by on a Harley. But then across the street, old men squatted, throwing dice, and in an alley a child emptied its bladder into an abandoned shoe.

  She bought a slithery square of barbecued mock meat and a bag of moist, pink li hing mui, and gazed at cheap curios and smiled. Even litter on the ground seemed beautiful. Even tiny women in doorways, hurling bright balls of spittle into open drains. Passing a barrel of fresh pig’s feet, Ana had suddenly slowed down, remembering midwives bringing bouquets of pig’s feet with which they had made soup to shrink her womb. She remembered how, after childbirth, they had tenderly kneaded her belly. She put those thoughts away.

  Light rains began to fall, undyeing Chinatown as colors ran from posters and clothes on racks. Down Fifteen Cent Alley she had found Tung Lok, the Happy Together Hotel. The lobby smelled rancid, and she heard people coughing in their rooms. Her walls were flocked with dead roaches, but there were no bloodstains on her mattress, and her sheets were clean.

  At dusk she had walked the streets again, asking for work in several shops. People passed her arm in arm. Even the gods had company: icons of Buddha, Jesus, and Confucius lined up abreast for sale. She felt the fog curl up her sleeves, a chilly sense of loneliness, the sense of one who has crossed frontiers and sees that what was left behind is already fading into flashbacks. There was only now, the aftermath.

  For weeks she labored in a sweatshop, stitching pockets into cheap dungarees. Around her in palpitant, moist heat were Mexicans, Asians, and Latins—robust, velvet-eyed women nursing their infants as they bent at ancient Singers. Ana stood the heat until one day, exhausted, she fainted between blue pyramids of dungarees. The owner woke her by pinching her, punching her with his fist between her shoulder blades.

  After that, she served dim sum in a restaurant where four-generation families ate, holding each other in their laps. Each day, in the abrupt turbulence of beaded drapes, she exploded from the kitchen, pushing carts loaded with metal and bamboo steamers, lifting and replacing the scalding lids hour after hour until whole constellations of blisters lined her palms. Skin peeled from her fingertips, which bled.

  When Chinese customers were rude, she had the manifest advantage of being an “immigrant” not understanding their language, pretending not to understand English. They cursed her, waving her away, and she reflected on how, at home in her islands, she had never thought of Chinese as rude or cruel. She had only thought of whites that way.

  At night she swept up hair in a beauty shop, then sat with the owner sewing hair-pillows which women bought to cushion their elbows in the sweatshops. They sewed till dawn, when the sun lit little rainbows in a toothbrush glass. Years later, she would remember those nights as luminous—two women gloved in human hair, lost in hanging strips of brilliant silks, a small rotating fan lazily wafting the silk this way, and then that way. Long hours drew them close, coaxing out confessions, their life stories knotted up in bits of thread they bit off with their teeth. And in the mornings, a roomful of brilliant pillows that often they fell asleep upon, waking at noon like concubines.

  Still, in the permanent twilight of exhaustion, Ana could not seem to make progress, to save enough money for proper clothes, a better job. She began to see how lack of money engendered shame, how without it people allowed themselves to disappear. She lost the dim sum job. The hair-pillow woman moved back to Hong Kong. She tutored English in the back room of a laundry. She waitressed, washed dishes. Graveyard. Swing shift. One job rinsing into another.

  One night a sailor offered her a fifty-dollar bill. Balanced on the girders of indecision, Ana reached out and thoughtfully touched the bill before she walked away. She was beginning to know hunger, what it was to lie awake and hear her insides working on almost nothing. She began to learn how far she could go on water and air, how far she could divest herself of herself without collapsing. She avoided open markets and food stalls. She began to despise food a little.

  In a mirror her face was becoming narrow; she imagined it all frontal like a cat’s. Increasingly she felt weak, intimations of how easily her system could fail, her organs ignore the chain of command, how hunger could drive verbal and motor skills back in evolution so that movements suggested a human being learning to walk upright. It was not quite starvation, which had manners. Starvation just walked up to folks and knocked them down.

  Hunger, near hunger, was sly. It allowed her to get up and move around, gave her a sense of mission: pay rent, find food. Hunger became her escort, walking her through the antique pungency of Chinatown, through viruses germinating in puddles under streetlights. Through a succession of jobs in little holes-in-the-wall, until she began to lose track of what it was she wanted, of what might be worth having.

  And she began to recognize certain women like her who had run away. Women of every color and hue who had tried to reinvent themselves, shedding their names, their languages, their backgrounds, everything but their skins. Women worn down, their edges blurred, on the verge of sinking out of sight. Ana began to find these women essential, their tragic incoherence proof that there were others worse off than she. She began to see how life could be brought to a standstill.

  She pored over discarded newspapers looking for odd jobs, even blood banks. And one day she saw the picture of a man she recognized. She stared at his face, etched with lines like an outdoorsman, a rugged, rather handsome face. An older man, a strong, straight nose giving him an unperturbed and rather noble profile. He had sailed on the Lurline out of Honolulu, bound for San Francisco.

  She sat back remembering how she had hastened to the ship, remembered it as huge and regal, yet something feminine and graceful in its lines. She remembered how, as she drew near, the ship seemed to look at her, to focus on her. Seeing the full size of it up close, she had felt everything around her drop away.

  Her first night on board, in the ship’s boutique she had bought one good dress and a pair of leather shoes. Later she stood on deck with her tattered suitcase full of island clothes, then stepped back and heaved it overboard. She had forty-eight dollars to her name.

  In the morning she had strolled the decks, studying passengers in third class and second class. Then she had ventured to the top deck, observing those in first class, how they dressed, how they talked. The way they seemed to move in slow motion. That was when she first saw him, a solitary stroller, a tall man lost in thought. He moved with the natural grace of someone privileged, and as he passed she felt the clean male scent of lime cologne settle over her. For a moment their eyes
had met, he slowed his pace, but then she looked away. He appeared to be somewhere in his midforties. She was twenty-three.

  Day after day she had watched him stroll the decks, perhaps because she had sensed he was watching her. Yet, as if by tacit agreement, they never introduced themselves.

  What would we have said? What would we have had in common?

  At night as couples floated past her dying upward into fog, she had stared at the sea, wondering where she would go when they reached San Francisco. What she would do. The morning they docked, she had glimpsed him at Immigrations, then lost him.

  That night at Tung Lok Hotel she scanned the newspaper article under his picture. “… Recent relaxation of immigrant restrictions in Chinatown … 50,000 people congesting the area … alarming rise of syphilis, tuberculosis …” She studied his photograph, his features, hoping he would be kind. In the morning she bathed, and washed her hair, then oiled it into a smooth French twist and slipped on her one good dress, now frayed and rusty at the seams. Then she made her way to a local clinic.

  The line was long, the sun intense. The old man ahead of her removed his shirt, his back so thin he seemed to be wearing a larger man’s skin. She wiped her face, then stood counting the long jade vertebrae of his backbone. Inside there was such a mob, the nurses looked in need of nursing.

  One of them regarded Ana disdainfully. “We don’t buy blood. Unless you’re here for TB examination.”

  Ana shook her head, then pointed to the newspaper she was carrying. “I’m here to see him, Dr. McCormick.”

  The woman frowned. “For what? He’s very busy. Look how long these lines. You understand? We have bad problem now in Chinatown.”

  She was about to retreat when she saw him in the corridor. He was wearing a white lab coat, holding the hand of a mortally thin Chinese woman, talking softly, as if she were a child about whose future he knew a sad story.

  “I know him,” Ana told the nurse.

  “So? You go now, or wait for other doctor to see you.”

  She remembered the way he had looked at her aboard the ship—as if she were beautiful—and knew that somehow he would help her. He must help her. A man shouldn’t look at a woman that way if not prepared to perform a kind of exorcism over her loneliness and desperation.

  People coughed. She smelled their fragile, humid bodies, the condensation of sweat on amber arms. She felt her owns arms, so thin. In that moment she was no one. She had nothing to lose.

  “Look, it’s highly personal. Please tell Dr. McCormick I need to see him. Tell him … it’s the girl from the ship, the Lurline.”

  The nurse studied her as if she were both novel and absurd.

  But minutes later he peered out from an examination room, smiled faintly, and came forward.

  Timidly, she took his hand. “I’m Ana. I hope you remember me. I used to watch you stroll the decks …”

  “Of course I remember. I should have introduced myself then. How can I help you? Are you ill?”

  She shook her head. “I’m here because I saw your picture in the paper. I came to ask if possibly you knew of an opening here, receptionist or anything. I’m afraid I haven’t been able to get my bearings since I arrived.”

  In a glance he took in her dress, her worn-down shoes. He sat her down in a corner. “Ana, I don’t officially work here. I’m with a lab outside the city. My field is immunology, and they’ve called several of us in for consultation. It’s pretty serious.”

  She had never felt so desperate. “Well … do you know someone who could hire me? I had two years of university at home, a science major. It’s just … I left the islands quickly, with no forethought.”

  “And it’s your first time in San Francisco.”

  “My first time anywhere.”

  Months later he would tell her how he had seen her coming up the gangway of the Lurline in her island clothes. He had watched her stand alone on deck, waving to no one as the ship’s bow slowly turned and headed out to sea. She had looked so brave and lonely, something touched him. During the crossing he had thought to introduce himself, but she was young and he felt he had already thrown his life away.

  MAX FOUND HER A SECRETARIAL JOB AT A COMMUNITY COLLEGE where eventually she would complete her degree. At first he puzzled her, a man who dressed impeccably as if to compensate for something lost in his expression, something sad, used-up. He asked few questions. He did not seem to ask much of life either.

  But as weeks passed, they began to talk in such a natural way the hours seemed calibrated into periods of stillness and motion, coolness and warmth, a flawless, almost timeless ease. Yet Ana was careful, leaving blanks rather than lie so that she would not have to cover her tracks, lie to protect earlier lies. Rather, she told him half-truths.

  She had dropped out of university. She had left home because her family stifled her. With seeming modest dignity, she spoke of her Hawaiian father, a well-known lawyer. And her uncle, a celebrated trumpeter who had played for heads of state in Europe. Testing Max’s credulity, she began to see how near truths and half-truths could ease her way into the world.

  And so she told of her great-grandfather who had owned a phaeton and matching steeds with which he had raced through the cobblestone streets of Honolulu to play checkers with the queen. And as she continued, Ana saw how in telling her tales, she assumed a kind of power over Max, how in linking sequences of made-up events she captured and held his attention, making him her accomplice.

  She told of a thieving ancestor who had stolen all the land from her father’s side of the family.

  “We never speak of him in public. Hawaiians believe the tongue is the steering paddle of the mouth. Better to hold the paddle still than speak offending thoughts.”

  She told of farmers of the valleys whose torches zigzagged through the nights, folks so poor they still went forth to borrow fire.

  “Some nights our fire god Lono-makua, sends them fire from the hearts of bursting rocks, which we call pōhaku. With these, folks light their torches, until each rock says it has had enough.”

  Max had leaned forward smiling, only half believing her tales. But by patiently listening, he saw how very slowly, like an image in a developing tray, her truer self began to emerge. And later, recalling the stories she had told, Ana realized that some of them were true.

  She remembered Nanakuli nights rippling with running flames as folks without electricity ran through the fields with borrowed fire. There was an uncle famous for his trumpet-playing, though he had never played for heads of state. And in fact, her father was a well-known lawyer, though he had started out a beachboy. What she did not tell was that for the first sixteen years of her life, she did not know he was her father. And the woman she believed was her older sister turned out to be her mother.

  … She birthed me in a tub, in wartime during blackout. My mother, Malia. Stifling her screams by biting down hard on a bar of soap. Then wiping her birth blood on her mother’s thighs, and calling me that woman’s child. In that way, I was born to lying. I was born a lie …

  When they had finally confronted her—telling her who she was, and who they were—she understood there was such a thing as truth with taste, and truth without taste. She had been unplanned, a mistake. And even after they told her, her parents virtually ignored her, so impassioned they looked right through her trying to get at each other. And so she had made her own mistake, and finally got their attention.

  All in all, she had not entirely lied to Max. Her background, if not happy, was interesting. She was interesting. Only, she never told him of the child. Perhaps when the girl was older, perhaps when they were in touch again. She fell asleep thinking of the metaphysical quality of the word perhaps.

  IN TIME SHE AND MAX HAD BECOME LOVERS, NOT BECAUSE SHE loved him but she felt he had earned her, more than earned her. And because she was weary of being alone, weary of self-loving, and self-loathing. She wanted someone to do it for her. They lived in his house in Pacific Heights, a rather formal
house—all was foreground and exact. But one room held only a grand piano and a terrace overlooking a garden of blooming orange trees. Ana thought she could live in that one room. She could grow old and die there watching the gardener rake the gravel driveway slowly and thoughtfully, like a croupier.

  A stately Siamese prowled the house and some nights it padded across her stomach. Something breathed softly in her face. Paws like little clutching hands. She dreamed of old midwives, their voices shouting “Pahū. Ho‘opūhūhū!” Push. Push hard. She remembered how in those moments she wanted to reach up and strike them. Let them lie down and push. She thought how her mother must have pushed, wanting her out, unborn.

  And some nights she dreamed of the father of her child, handsome, reckless, eyes of shave-ice green. Handcuffs jangling at his hips. Then she and his child had been banished to a dehydrated coast. Four years I tried. A bastard raising her little bastard. In the end she had loved the child. She had thought of marrying the father. But then a gunshot, a sound so innocent. Like someone opening a flip-top can. And there was nothing but to run, find a better life. Men did it all the time.

  As she and Max grew closer she began to perceive how the act of conversation was a gift, how that exchange between two humans made one feel less alone, feel just a bit more capable of bearing things. And so she came to love the give-and-take, the miracle of cells jostling and combining, the slow adagio of minds proceeding in the same direction.

  When he saw how bright she was, how hungry for knowledge, he sent her back to college to finish her degree. Then he steered her to certain medical texts which introduced the interlocking brilliance of the human immune system, the difference between T-cells, antibodies, and antigens. The makeup of phagocytes and lymphocytes. The genius of the thymus, a tiny gland that produced tens of millions of killer-vigilantes of the human immune system—lymphocytes or T-cells—and then proceeded to kill off those cells, keeping only the most “intelligent,” with the sharpest powers of recognition.