The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  He wondered as to Alice’s developing appearance. He imagined he could predict her passions and sadnesses. He flew on fantasies such as these until his wings tired with the knowledge that all these things would never be his to see. How could he know what made her smile when he could not even know her smile? And then he would plague himself with questions: Were her teeth small or gapped? What were the lengths of her fingers? Did she suffer from headaches? Did she suffer at all? And most of all, what did she know of her father? He imagined Julia storing her secrets away, doling them out piece by piece, or saving them up to hand to her daughter at some point in one spectacular flourish. His largest fear was that there would be no doling or flourish, just year after year of silence.

  The factory’s windows were dark and empty. The doors were bolted. He climbed over the fence and walked the gravel path to what had been their entrance. The temperature had dropped. He put his face to the nearest window, but all was dark, and he could not see what now went on in those rooms.

  On Wednesday evening, Fannie Burlingame arrived at the Wilson House apartment to pay her respects and say her farewells to Cousin Calvin. When she reappeared from Sampson’s chambers, she was dry-eyed and brisk, and Alice rose from the window seat to escort her aged cousin to the door.

  Alice had never felt comfortable around Fannie. There was nothing she could point to as hard evidence of her cousin’s disapproval, but she felt it nonetheless, the same way she felt small dips in conversation sometimes, as if a soft spot had been discovered, the ground almost giving way. The town thought Fannie an odd duck. She had adopted a Celestial boy. She had never married.

  Alice held the door open and waited for Fannie to pull on her gloves. The old woman regarded her. “This has been hard on you, I imagine,” Fannie said.

  Alice had heard something similar from just about every visitor to the Wilson House that week. “It is harder, I’m sure, on my parents,” she said. “I am trying to be a help. And, of course, we have Lucy. She’s been quite wonderful.”

  Fannie fastened her cloak at her neck. “What word do you have from your father?” she asked.

  Alice stared at her, confused. “So sorry,” she said, “but I’m not sure what you mean. You yourself have just seen my father.”

  Fannie looked neither surprised nor chagrined. In fact, Alice could not remember her studying her with more kindness. Fannie patted Alice’s hand and apologized. She was old, she said. Alice must forgive her, she added, and then she kissed Alice on the forehead and left.

  At seven, twelve, sixteen, Alice had been much the same person as she had been at one, three, and five. Likewise, at twenty, what she knew, she knew because she had been told, not because she had inquired. If she had made a written record of what she knew about her parents, it would read like an index or endnotes. She knew, of course, of her father’s Chinese Experiment. She had the sense, even as a child, that any subsequent failures or successes were measured against that first unprecedented event. The Chinese had left and Sampson had persevered, yet he had lost significant monies in other business ventures. Alice remembered hushed, anxious conversations between her parents behind closed doors. When she was fourteen, the Millard factory sole stitchers staged a walkout, the first shoe strike since the Celestials’ arrival seventeen years previous. That same year, her father retired, the business sold to Chase. Her father had been melancholy for weeks after his retirement, and Julia had told Alice that they must do what they could to cheer him. Alice had been unable to think of what talents she might possess that her father would find worthwhile, and so she had spent some hours sitting across from him doing her lessons, occasionally asking him for help though she needed none.

  So it was unlike her now, as a twenty-year-old, to edge into her mother’s dressing room, open the armoire, and draw from the bottom shelf the leather valise that accompanied her mother wherever she went. Alice had spent her life watching this valise be moved from carriage to train, train to carriage, one bottom shelf to another, but until now, it had never occurred to her to ask about its contents let alone see for herself.

  She took the case into her own room and locked the door behind her. The leather was worn, lovely to the touch, and as the lock sprang open, Alice noted how easy behavior such as this was and marveled at her never having engaged in it before.

  Having had no expectations for the contents of the case, she was equally and pleasantly surprised at it all. A handkerchief clumsily embroidered with her mother’s initials and her wedding date. Letters from the Baptist church that Alice didn’t bother to read. A rock with a white band around it. Mementos of Alice’s life: a lock from her first haircut, her first tooth, a portrait of mother and daughter that Alice remembered sitting for. A carved wooden dragon. A mahogany hairpin. Tucked into one corner, wrapped in muslin, a small pair of black cloth baby shoes. Her own, Alice assumed, but she didn’t remember wearing them.

  At the sounds of Lucy moving past her bedroom door, Alice shut the case and slipped it under her bed. No one would miss it now, and she resolved to return to it later when she had more time.

  As night fell, Charlie stood across from the Wilson House, looking up at the Sampsons’ windows. He was three months shy of his forty-sixth year. His eldest son, Herbert Hallen Sing, was fourteen, his youngest, Robert Edward Lee Sing, seven. He lived at 2722 Third Avenue in New York City and was in the employ of the Chinese firm of Sun Hung Lo at 196 Park Row, “catering to Chinese residents and the curious.”

  His eldest child, his daughter, was up there, behind those windows. He waited.

  By 1893, Stephen Grover Cleveland had succeeded Benjamin Harrison as president, and the small town of Pomeroy, Iowa, had been nearly destroyed by a tornado, seventy-one killed, two hundred injured. The first public zoo in the United States had opened in Philadelphia, and Madison Square Garden was home to the first artificial ice rink in North America. The discovery of saccharin had been announced, and in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison had demonstrated incandescent lighting to the public for the first time, while within a span of less than a week, Asaph Hall had discovered Deimos and Phobos, outer and inner moons of Mars.

  The 1893 World’s Fair opened in Chicago in May, displaying a map of the United States made entirely of pickles, and in the same month, the Supreme Court legally declared the tomato to be a vegetable.

  Kwang-su was emperor of China, and the Kong Chow Company in San Francisco had shipped 1,002 sets of bones back to China as a way for the deceased’s clan members to avoid the displeasure of the spirits and the condemnation of society at large.

  California labor leaders had introduced a MADE WITH WHITE LABOR label that winemakers were forced to put on their bottles, true or not. Twenty-eight Chinese were murdered in the mining town of Rock Springs, Wyoming, eleven burned alive in their cabins. At the Treadwell Mine in Alaska, all but one of the eighty Chinese miners—the well-liked China Joe—were forced aboard small boats and cast adrift. Thirty-one Chinese were massacred on the Snake River in eastern Oregon. In Tacoma, Washington, three thousand Chinese were given twenty-four hours’ notice to quit town, and for decades, no Chinese would be allowed back.

  The Chinese Exclusion Act was eleven years old. It would be five decades before repeal.

  That September the weather in North Adams was brilliant, as though God’s angels were singing in sharp tones. Oren David had returned from visiting the World’s Fair and Niagara Falls. Miles Bracewell had, as usual, sung in the Baptist church on Sunday, and on the twenty-seventh of the month, in separate rooms in their Wilson House apartment, both Julia and Calvin Sampson passed particularly difficult nights.

  Alice was at a loss. There had been now, for nearly an hour, a man standing in front of White’s Jeweler and Silversmith across Main Street. He seemed to have noticed her, sitting there in the window seat, though she couldn’t be sure. She decided that they were engaged in a game, though she wasn’t clear on its rules. Finally, when she grew bored, she turned to Lucy as she passed through
the room, clean head rags and a tin bowl of fresh ice on a tray, and told her there was a man down in the street.

  “How strange,” Lucy said, unable to keep her impatience out of her voice. She took Julia’s shawl off the settee and headed for the back rooms.

  “He is a Chinaman,” Alice said evenly, and Lucy stopped, her hand on the door’s knob.

  This was the reaction Alice had often received when she spoke in any way of China or the Chinese. She had always registered the response. Once, a teacher had asked if she was part Indian, and Alice had said no, and that had been that. Although her lack of curiosity may have been more than mildly surprising to those around her, it was not a conversation any of them wanted to have, and so they allowed her lack of inquiry to maintain itself, the way one allows a crack in the ceiling to go unattended. Perhaps this will not need attending to at all, one thinks in such situations, at least until the moment, and sometimes beyond, when God’s weather comes pouring through.

  Because it was the familiar thing to do—and during a night when both one’s parents were on the downward path the familiar seemed to offer the most solace—Alice merely said, “He must be acquainted with my father.”

  And Lucy merely answered, “Yes, he must,” before opening the door, passing through it, and closing it with her foot.

  While Sampson was not afraid to die, it was also clear that he wanted to live. He was impatient with doctors and clergy, and before she fell ill, only Julia could calm him enough to remind him that everyone wanted what he wanted. Everyone was doing what could be done to make him well. He was like a boy in the midst of a tantrum, unable to articulate even to himself what he wanted, but clear that his desires were large and crucial. Julia was the only medicine that worked. So soothing was she that he found himself extending his fits so she would not leave his side. “Stay,” he said to her again and again so he could take pleasure in watching her do so.

  But by that Wednesday, she had been missing from his chambers for several days, and his body had begun to accept the small ways in which parts of it were shutting down like gas lamps being dimmed for the night. Except for the effect of opiates, he would be conscious until the end came and science retired in defeat, and those witnesses to his body’s failure would later say that he had faced death as he had faced life, with composure, and with the anticipations of the faithful, but he would have been the first to tell them in his brisk way that appearances were almost always deceiving.

  Julia was ill, he had been told, and he could not bear that his body would not allow him to tend to her.

  “Is she alone?” he asked Lucy once and again, though each time she assured him that she was not.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, tugging at his bedsheets and pillows, bringing him at least momentary relief. “I won’t allow such a thing.”

  And he would smile and close his eyes, reassured, and then open them, panic written across his face in a clear hand. “Is she alone?” he would ask.

  “I must see her,” he would say, and Lucy would tell him that she would do what she could.

  “I made a mess of things,” he said once on that Wednesday, the late afternoon sun warming his pale face.

  Lucy did not know how to answer.

  “Is she alone?” he asked, and she sent hushes at him, her hands ministering to him like expert witnesses.

  When she wasn’t with him, she was good to her word, attending with devotion to Julia. She would not have predicted that she would have stayed in their employ for so long and with such happiness, but she had. Years ago, when Alfred had made ready to quit the village, sick up to his ears with Yankees and their Celestial friends, he had assumed she would make the journey with him, and she had had to tell him gently that her life was there. She had hated to see his solitary figure, clothed in his Sunday best, disappear into the dark of the passenger car, but she had known her choice to be the right one.

  By the night of Wednesday, September 27, Julia was disoriented and in extraordinary pain, but clearly wanted to be in the company of her husband. Her dreams from that middle country between this world and the next were restless and energetic, and punctuated by a sudden lucidity, his name on her dry lips. This was something no one would have predicted, Sampson’s name where everyone would have expected Alice’s, but once heard, this wife calling for her husband made perfect sense.

  Her hallucinations were filled with gifts given and taken away. In some, she was blamed for things of which she was innocent. In others, she dodged responsibilities that were hers and hers alone. They were populated with curious and prodigious characters, or filled with the most ordinary of passersby. In some, she was alone. In others, Alice accompanied her. In none did Sampson appear. In her delirium, her torment at this was tenfold.

  Take pity, she begged, but to whom she was not sure. Alice had been all. Julia had lived her life by this belief. But here, on God’s threshold, she held what she had gained and what she had lost in both hands at the same time.

  She had not seen her husband for what seemed to her like days. Drinking and eating were beyond her. The pain was a wall against which she threw herself. She had no idea of the time, but she reached out with a sudden energy and came up with Lucy’s hand.

  “I must see him,” she said.

  “I know,” Lucy said. “I know,” the words like a distant train pulling into a faraway station.

  The obituaries of Calvin T. and Julia H. Sampson took up two full pages of the eight-page Transcript. The editors reported that Mr. Sampson had died at six o’clock in the morning of Thursday, September 28, four days shy of his sixty-seventh year. His wife of forty-four years had followed him to their Lord’s Celestial Kingdom at two the following morning, her sixty-seventh birthday. The paper reported his indomitable will and her kind heart and generous impulse. When it came to Calvin Sampson, the paper reported, all was definite, concrete, and substantial. Those he did not like had amplest knowledge of his feeling, and those he did were lifelong beneficiaries of his goodwill and fierce loyalty. Mrs. Sampson had not been specially prominent in the social life of the town, devoting herself to her daughter, and to her reserved ways and retiring life. The coffins of husband and wife were to be laid side by side in a single grave.

  The papers did not report that in the loneliest hours between Wednesday night and Thursday morning, Lucy and Alice had helped Sampson into a movable chair, had wheeled him into Julia’s chambers, had made sure that husband and wife were within reach of each other, and had quit the room. For a moment, the two women had stood in the parlor, but even that had seemed unseemly, and they had each retreated to their own bedrooms, as if on this night Calvin and Julia should be the only people allowed the company of one another.

  Neither woman ever spoke about that night. In the years to come, especially when her husband’s arms gentled and held her, when her children gathered around her like birds, their love allowing her to feel that she was capable of stepping off a cliff into flight, Alice liked to think that the time in that room had been a solace for her parents. That they had found a way to tell each other the things they had needed to say. She wished for them the life as they wished it rather than as it had been. From her life of abundance and blessing, she wished that she could have given them more.

  After a time, she had returned to the parlor, to her window perch, and though she made no sound, Lucy soon joined her, sitting in her customary chair by the fire.

  “We should take him back to his room,” Lucy said.

  “He is still there,” Alice said.

  For a moment, Lucy misunderstood, but then she joined Alice at the window, and both women regarded the man below through the bubbles and waves of the window glass. He was standing in the dim light of the gas street lamp, his face to them, as if he’d known that if he waited long enough they would appear.

  It was well past two. The night was dark, the sky’s stars and moon hidden with a solid wash of clouds. The glass was cold to the touch. Inside and out, all was stillness and q
uiet.

  “He is someone your mother would want you to meet,” Lucy said after a time.

  Alice had kept her curiosity at bay for so long that the strength of her desire to know was like sudden pain. She felt as if she’d been lowered into water too hot to stand.

  The year was 1893, and Alice May Sampson tried to decide what she wanted to know from that man beneath the street lamp, and whether she had the force to ask. She felt as though God had swept His hand across the world’s terrain, filled His palm with her parents, herself, and the stranger on the street, and all the shards and stones of man’s small business on this earth, and was now, after years of holding them in the hollow of His hand, going to cast them to the skies. In the far distance, there was the whistle of an approaching train. All three of them attended to it. Who knew what was possible? They lifted their faces and waited for what from His hand would be ordinary and what would be singular. Either would be welcomed. Both would be astonishment, for them and for us all.

  Bibliography

  The following sources helped in ways large and small:

  Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present, R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, eds.

  Their Lives and Numbers: The Condition of Working People in Massachusetts, 1870–1900, Henry F. Bedford

  The Crispins, Calvin, and the Chinese, Senior Thesis, Richard V. Bennett

  Baptist Life and Thought, 1600–1980: A Source Book, William H. Brackney, ed.