The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  Of her mother’s affections, Alice had always had an overabundance, now more than ever. Her mother could not pass by her without laying a hand on her head or shoulder. She kissed her when she sat to eat. She embraced her when she left the house. Such gestures made Alice feel as if her mother were an extra cloak, a feeling that was equal parts care and suffocation.

  Perhaps because of such ministrations, her mother’s own failure had not occurred to Alice as a possibility, so when Dr. Carr had informed her on the evening of Friday last that her mother had been stricken with a kind of shock, most likely brought on by her concern over her husband, Alice had stared at him pleasantly for a moment. There must be an error in his figuring. But by the next morning, when both Doctors Carr and May concurred that her mother suffered from Bright’s disease, an ailment of the kidneys, and Alice had gone to her mother’s chambers and seen her face, she would not have been surprised to learn that by week’s end she would lose both parents.

  She could not stand to be in either’s room. She felt that between the professional and capable hands of the doctors and Lucy and the hotel staff, there was nothing she could offer. She was impatient with their presence, but lived in fear that everyone would quit the apartment, leaving her the only person to ease the suffering. She found herself spending what she hoped was not an unduly noticeable amount of time sitting at the window of the front room. There she could make a pretense of keeping watch, of greeting visitors. She tried to strike a pose that suggested she was available for help.

  Charlie had come to Ida when there was nowhere else to go. Ida had known that even then. Julia and Alice had returned to North Adams early in 1874, after less than six months away, responding, as she had always said she would, to Sampson’s assurances that he was ready to be father as well as husband. He had written her on paper torn from a ledger book, which had instantly endeared him to her, as had the fact of the letter itself, knowing as she did how rarely he undertook that particular endeavor. He had written, It is true that my knowledge of that other man is hideous torment to me. But it is also true that without you, I am a man alone at the bottom of a vast mountain, my face lifted to the sheer expanse above me. Without you, I am this man for time eternal. She had held the letter up for baby Alice and had said, “You see. He is our own Calvin Sampson after all.”

  After their return to North Adams, after Julia and Sampson, Alice between them, had settled into life in all their wary ways, after the town’s interest in all of them had faded away like a footprint in sand, to Charlie it had seemed as though he were watching three children playing house on a wide expanse of thin ice, melt already slick across its surface. Everything he did communicated his determination to present himself as a viable alternative to the choice Julia had made. He quit the factory. He made a declaration for citizenship.

  He abandoned the Methodists and, on a chilly day in March 1875, was received into the Sampsons’ Baptist church. The Sampsons attended the baptism, as did Ida and Lucy, gathering with the other congregants around the baptistery and reciting Matthew 28:19 in one voice before Charlie was lowered backward beneath the water while Ida stole an appraising look at Julia.

  His citizenship was granted by Chief Justice Horace Gray after an examination before the judge in September of 1876. In the same year, regular service commenced through the Hoosac Tunnel, California Democrats staged an anti-Chinese rally that attracted a crowd of twenty-five thousand, and less than one percent of the Chinese in America were citizens.

  He opened his own wholesale and retail store, funded in small part by an investment from the Sampsons. He specialized in Chinese curios, coffees, and teas, and the Transcript praised his latest endeavor for its very large stock of heavy groceries, consisting of flour, syrups, molasses, etc., selling at extremely low prices for cash. Sing’s motto in business, the Transcript revealed, was “Pay for what you get, and be sure and get what you pay for.” He was, in the minds of the townsfolk, if not one of their own, certainly one their own could now wholeheartedly embrace. They frequented his shop. They inquired after his health. They prayed alongside his kneeling form.

  Shortly before Christmas of 1877, Alice appeared in the store, her four-year-old head barely clearing the counter. She had maintained the sober demeanor of her infancy, and Charlie, staring down at her from behind the cash register, felt as if beholding a grown woman from a land of diminutive people.

  If he was surprised to see her unattended, he did not show it. “Can I help you?” he asked.

  She wanted to buy a gift for her mother. “I have money,” she said, opening a small purse and showing him the several coins within.

  He nodded solemnly.

  And so he found himself treating his daughter as he would have treated any customer. He displayed his wares with respect and circumspection. He selected a wide array of items that he thought her mother might like, his heart in a state of exquisite misery, and then he stepped back in his usual way, allowing the final election to be the customer’s alone.

  While Alice decided between a spray of silk flowers and a small carving of a dog, he studied her. Her hair was as black as his own. As she concentrated, her mouth turned down slightly, her eyebrows gathered toward each other. Her lips moved in small ways, as if in quiet discussion with herself. She handled the objects with excessive care. How could he stand encounters such as these? How could he not?

  “They are both very nice,” he offered.

  She regarded him, her brow still knit. “You are very tall for a Chinaman,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am.”

  “I am very tall,” she said and returned her attentions to the items before her.

  He waited. He had spent so much time over the last few years catching glimpses of his daughter, trying to discern himself in her, that it had not occurred to him that those similarities might someday present themselves to her. He imagined her holding him in her attention and announcing that they looked very much alike.

  But she flipped the dog upside down and examined its underside. She held the flowers out at arm’s length and then pulled them in, holding them by her waist.

  He suggested the flowers. “Your mother likes flowers,” he said.

  She eyed him, then pushed the dog across the counter and opened her purse.

  “A good choice,” he said, wrapping the gift and pressing it into her tiny gloved hand.

  The front door opened and a flustered Julia swept in. She folded Alice into her arms and chided her for running off on her own. Her face was very near the girl’s and he remembered how whenever Julia had discussed something she felt of great importance, she had moved her face closer to his.

  Here we are, he thought. Mother, daughter, and father.

  Julia looked up at him. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I hope she was not too much of a disturbance.”

  She turned to Alice. “Apologize to Mr. Sing,” she prompted.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Sing,” Alice said.

  Mr. Sing, he thought.

  “Apologies not necessary,” he said to both of them. “No disturbance at all.”

  Shortly after that visit, Charlie Sing sat for one last portrait. It was notable for several reasons, not the least of which was the wry upward tilt of his mouth, as if he and the viewer shared some secret knowledge. He presented himself as the wise elder, his hands on the shoulders of two seated younger charges—two Celestials still at work in Sampson’s bottoming room. All of them were in Western suits, the gold chain of a pocket watch like Sampson’s draped casually across a worsted vest. One wore a straw hat. The backdrop and props worked to suggest the outdoors. He imagined standing before Julia in such a way as to appear an appropriate and even desirable partner. He hoped the photograph would communicate force and staying power. He hoped she would look at it and see a man who had conquered strikebreaking and shoemaking and was now turning his eye to further successes. He hoped she would see an American. But she was, apparently, unwilling to entertain him alone, and so the
door to the Sampson apartment was opened by Sampson himself, and Charlie found himself politely greeting husband and wife, little Alice peering at them all from the settee upon which she was occupied with an oversized picture book.

  His aspirations for this visit had been so high that he refused at first to see the scope of his failure, refused to see husband and wife exchange a quick glance after viewing the print, refused to hear the bemusement in Sampson’s voice as he exclaimed at the most unusual way the photographer had brought leaves and twigs into the scene. He chose instead to offer the photograph as a gift to both of them, to accept Sampson’s offers of tea as well as biscuits, and to smile and make conversation with his former employer. He wished Julia had studied the photograph longer. He wished she had entered the conversation. He wished to be able to join her on the hearth rug with Alice and her wooden blocks. He anticipated with dread having to take his leave.

  For a time, he displayed his copy of the photograph at one end of his store’s front counter.

  Ida had remained in North Adams, working at Lucy’s former sewing business, continuing the occasional English lesson with Mr. Sing. She watched him despair over the question of how someone could make do when on the other side of the road there was the possibility of so much more, until she could stand it no longer. His desire for Julia and their child was for Ida an animal too large for this world. It would have been easier if feelings such as these did not exist at all. As it was, seeing them but being unable to touch them herself was a torment. So she had left, returning in late 1877 to Virginia and her father, her ailing mother, and her brothers.

  Alfred was already returned, working as a slater for the Wilburns, and it was by way of him that she finally came to understand those feelings of Charlie’s by her own example. Shortly after her return, Alfred spent several weeks reslating their barn. He spent much of his time on the steeply pitched roof watching her move around below. His attentions caused her shame. It was no longer necessary to curry his favor, but to avoid her fear that she was the kind of person who took what she needed and then moved on, she gave him more attention than she might have. He endured her brothers’ teasing and her impatience, and his stoicism made her think that perhaps she had underestimated him. During those weeks of slating, she stopped one day and tilted her face up to him, and he smiled, surprised and pleased to be noticed, and gave her a little wave. And she saw that he was a good man, but not a good man for her.

  *

  From the depot, Charlie set out for Lucy Robinson’s place, but he knew she was spending most of her days at the Sampson apartment, and the thought of entering empty rooms not his own brushed him with sadness, so he turned in the other direction and headed for the factory.

  The last of the Chinese workers had quit the business and the town over thirteen years previous, and most likely he was the only Celestial now walking the streets. He recalled bits from the Transcript article that Lucy had mailed to him. The headline read, “Departure of the Chinese.” The workers were called “almond-eyed children of the Sun,” and their ten-year stay described as “an orderly and unmolested life, quiet to an extreme degree.” One phrase he had turned over in his mind in the years since came to him again as he stood before the familiar fence and red brick of the wide south wall: “And so as the time of the Chinese expired . . .” As if someone had known when they’d arrived that their time would be limited in advance by forces other than themselves. He remembered telling Ida when he first read the article that it was as if he had died but had not known it.

  She had told him that he was more alive than he had ever been while in that factory. And he believed her, and did not share his lingering worries that perhaps to have given up his first people, his first world, was to have given up too much.

  Shortly after the New Year in 1878, Julia took Alice on an afternoon excursion. They took the stage to Pittsfield, then walked several blocks to the unassuming studio of a fledgling photographer named Whitmore. Alice was accustomed to being her mother’s near-constant companion on all assortments of outings, but they had never sat for a photograph before, and her mother had taken even more care with their attire than she usually did. Julia wore her most somber dress of black silk. Her collar was white, the bow at her neck a dark green velvet. The dress’s sleeves were gathered in tight pleats at the wrist, the rest of the sleeve draping so as to leave the shape of her arms to the imagination. The dress’s skirt was wide and full, obscuring the upholstered chair upon which she sat.

  Alice sat in her mother’s lap, wearing a white eyelet dress trimmed in white lace, polished black boots, and a plain white bonnet. She had not wanted to be held on her mother’s lap, maintaining that she was big enough to stand, or even to have her own chair, but her mother had insisted and Alice would rarely be the kind of daughter to refuse her mother direct. She was by this point an uncommonly serious child, and though she had no idea why she had been brought to a place such as this one, she trusted her mother, and so she sat as told, still as the sky, watching the man disappear behind his giant machine that looked, she told her mother on the return stage, like a bug. She liked bugs.

  In the photo, Alice’s eyes appeared as black as they were in life. Julia’s eyes appeared, as blue eyes always did in those early days of photography, white, and had Mr. Whitmore not colored the irises blue, her appearance would’ve been startling. The child regarded her mother, and although Julia looked toward the camera, there was something in her expression that suggested the strain of holding her eyes where they least wanted to be.

  The print, which she had delivered to Charlie, snapped his heart like brittle bone, suggesting as it did that although Julia was holding the viewer in her gaze, she was not holding him in her heart or mind. As a response to the portrait he had made for her, it was, for Charlie, a devastation. It made clear, once and for all, that her eyes would always and forever be in motion, seeking out those of her daughter, with neither the attention nor the inclination for any other pursuit.

  He had therefore, at Lucy’s suggestion, turned to Virginia. There was mining to be done in Virginia—hadn’t he done that long ago in California? Ida’s aunt ran an affordable boardinghouse with clean rooms and good food. He might not know the place, but he knew someone in it. He had even discussed the matter with Sampson, who had urged him to go. Had Charlie thought that he would remain in North Adams for all his days? It was time for him to make his way in the world like a true American. Sampson bade him well.

  By February of 1878, Charlie had gone, and by midsummer, he and Ida had wed. He did not feel her to be a consolation prize. He felt, as he tried to make clear to her, that someone had taken his face between soft hands, turned it from the window through which he had been looking for so long, and said, merely, Look. Over here. There is much to be seen. The fact that he had not looked in this direction before, he told her on the night before their wedding, was the fault of the viewer, not the view.

  At the small Baptist church that she had first attended as an infant in her mother’s arms, she and Charlie stood before God and her family, and Ida marveled at her lack of nerves. Truly, she thought, she had never known a man like this one.

  Alfred was witness to the marriage. He stood in the last row of the airless one-room church barely able to contain his gall at her choice. And so Charlie was glad, when he and Ida decided to move back North—to escape her still-angry family for what they hoped would be the more tolerant anonymity of New York—to be leaving Alfred behind.

  Lucy, too, had been to the wedding, and seeing her there sharing space with Charlie in God’s small room had settled something for Ida, and she had felt lucky to have them both in the world.

  In the early going, Charlie had been so sensitive to Ida’s anxieties that he had imagined his feelings for Julia written in bold characters on a long scroll and rolled tight, tied in red thread, and sealed with wax. It had given Ida and him enough space to find the materials to build their own kind of happiness, and although in the structure they ma
de, Julia’s absence was always for him like a boarded-up window, it was nonetheless a place of sturdiness, filled with both warmth and breezes and many clean rooms.

  It was only after Ida and he had been confident of each other for many years, after they had been able to speak of North Adams and their time there, that he had relaxed his vigil, and the scroll began to unroll as if someone’s large hand had given it a small push down a long table, and Julia came leaping from the paper as if she had never left. And he imagined both women in the same crowded room, pushing against whatever pushed back. He told Ida almost everything. He did not say he was the girl’s father, but he did not feel he had to say such a thing for it to be the truth between them. He did not tell her how often he continued to think of Julia and Alice. These thoughts, he knew, did not detract from his strong feelings for Ida and their own children. Because he could not explain this phenomenon fully to himself, he chose not to attempt to explain it to her.

  Alice had, of course, been there throughout. She had, according to bits and pieces from Lucy’s letters, turned out to be a straightforward and reserved child. She had a tendency toward moodiness, and was sometimes dramatic in unexpected ways. Once, Lucy had written, as a nine-year-old, the child had cried when they replaced one carriage with a new one. A mention in one of Lucy’s letters of something she had said or done could buoy him for days, and omissions of such details left him bereft and irritated, and on days such as those, Ida and their children had learned to move with the quiet of spiders, making their own happinesses. Though he near constantly considered asking Ida to seek news of the girl from Lucy, he considered it more strongly at times such as these, but the pain he knew such a request would cause kept him from making his deliberations a reality.