by Shira Nayman
Robert had taken my hand and stroked it. “I’d like to hear. Really.”
I found myself telling Robert about a little girl in a white cotton dress with an eyelet collar. Of a mother who doted on her husband and only child, who’d made a haven of their cottage: lavender and geraniums in the window box, handstitched quilts on the beds. A childhood spent running with friends in the cobbled alley at the back of their houses, playing games on the grassy patch in front of the schoolhouse. Picnics in the surrounding countryside, threading daisy chains while my mother unpacked the lunch and my father napped on a blanket in the shade of a tree. And hunting for treasures: shiny pieces of quartz and flint, tiny bright ladybirds, and fragments of speckled eggshell.
I watched Robert’s face as I talked; saw in the softening of his features that each brushstroke I painted fulfilled the hopes of the portrait he had unwittingly commissioned—this picture of haven and innocence, of a child coming to full flower, untainted, free, within the benevolent bosom of her family.
At some point, I realized that this is what had made a refuge of our lovemaking: Robert’s utter belief in my goodness, in the idea of an eyelet-collared dress, lovingly ironed. It was there in my soul, this other self that could have been, should have been, that was every child’s birthright and shining hope. That inner spark that would one day become the North Star that Archibald was so fond of talking about, and without which the heavens would only smolder, empty and black.
Robert had given me this. And, for a time, it had held: my innocence, his longing, the belief in the construct we each clung to and shared.
Except there had been no picnics, no simple quartz and eggshell treasures, no father I had known, and certainly no white eyelet dress. Perhaps it was the knowledge of my own deceit that aroused in me the gnawing suspicion about Robert. If we were two of a kind, would he not also have lied to me?
The logic was inexorable. What secrets, like mine, did Robert have to hide?
I did not consciously decide to spy on Robert. I simply found myself, one afternoon, arriving an hour early at his club, where we were to meet. I slipped into the elegant building across the street and waited in the vestibule, peering through the glass panels of the door out onto the street. A car pulled up to the curb and Robert emerged, wearing a navy overcoat with wide lapels. A fellow member, leaving the club, engaged him in conversation and I could see the seriousness of Robert’s expression; he was nodding, his intelligent face taut with concern. The other man I saw in profile, the even small features arranged in impenetrable aristocratic politeness, though the hands, clenched together before him, betrayed agitation. There was something odd about them—as if the two men were engaged in some sort of charade. Had I imagined it, or did the other man cast a furtive glance in my direction? Once again, I wondered if Robert were up to something, guarding a secret beyond that of his origins.
There must have been clues, clues I chose to close my eyes to. How could there not have been?
I was struck by how much alike the two men looked: both slimly built and moderately tall, both with neat, fair hair. And oddly similar, too, in their bearing, the way each seemed to lean forward while remaining erect. Would a stranger walking by have seen it?
They shook hands, and then the man consulted his pocket watch and disappeared through the glass and brass door. Robert remained there some minutes before drawing a pair of gloves from his pocket and carefully pulling them on, his face transformed: private and mild and closed. Then he walked toward the street corner and disappeared to the right.
I pushed against the heavy doors; for a moment, it seemed as if the thick panes held my fate in their glassy palms. When they closed behind me, I had the unnerving feeling of being swallowed into a looking glass, of crossing to the other side. The cold leapt up at my face.
At the corner I turned right: there he was, Robert, up ahead. I became aware of something unusual about the condition of my own feet: a buoyancy that seemed to belong to the pavement, as if it were guiding me toward a destination. I was aware, too, of an irrational urge, every now and then, to turn and look behind me, as if I were the one being followed.
Robert kept a good pace. I worked hard to maintain the right distance, adapting my own stride to his while keeping a certain number of steps behind. When Robert made a turn, I worried that by the time I also turned, he’d no longer be in sight. Then something about his manner seemed to change—as if he’d decided suddenly that he were looking for something, something specific, which he knew he would find. I could feel my nerve slipping; I wanted to turn back, go home to my comfortable lodgings. But then Robert broke into a run, gained the corner, and made another turn. We were on a dark street; the height and closeness of the buildings muted the dim light coming from the sky. The pavement was uneven, slabs of old slate unbalanced by a hundred years of swollen tree roots. Up ahead, Robert was moving effortlessly, unhampered by the cracks and depressions and jutting slate edges underfoot. And then he came to an abrupt halt.
I pulled up against the façade of a town house. Robert, dwarfed by a church, was looking up at the steeple, which I could see presided over a massive jagged hole in the roof; one of many bombed-out buildings throughout the city, awaiting repair. I could almost feel the dissolving of his tension; this was the place he’d been looking for. He climbed the steps, holding the thick stone rail. The huge medieval door swung open; a black velvet shadow swept across the steps, soft and unsavory as a bat’s wing. I waited several minutes then followed.
Inside the vault of the church, the smell of stone: limey and cold. Gray light, a thickness of sky pouring through the belly of the space, the ragged edges of the hole etched onto the mosaic floor. A feeling of being underwater: a fluid, slowmoving haze. Robert was nowhere to be seen. I slid into a pew at the back.
The silence was ruptured by a gentle, precise murmur, which echoed strangely in the disrupted space. The words became clearer, louder: no longer a whisper but boldly spoken. Latin, a prayer of some kind. I rested my head on the pew before me, breathed in the scent of frankincense and old candles baked into the wood.
And then I saw Robert, kneeling in the front row, directly beneath the open sky. Beside him lay mounds of rubble not yet cleared away: large asymmetrical stones, chunks of ancient beam. He was bowed over, and though his voice rang out clearly, his shoulders heaved with grief.
I don’t know when I first admitted to myself what I must have known from the start; walking along the corridor, perhaps, seeing, through a crack in the door, three of the younger girls sitting in front of the dressing table, leaning close into the mirror, chatting together while carefully applying color to their faces. I saw again the glossy lips, skillful gray lines encircling the eyes, the shading of those broad smooth cheekbones—and the flush of excitement, the guarded knowledge in the back of the eyes.
It is true I had heard things that first night, sitting in my room with the door ajar: the hushed voices of the girls as they made their way downstairs, conspiratorial and childlike. The sounds of people coming and going; I couldn’t be sure—there was quite a distance between my tiny room at the back and the main entrance. But my interest had soon waned. Closing the door, I picked up my pipe, along with a book, then lost the house, the girls, and their goings-on as I sank into that marshy green place and watched the words dance on the page before they exploded with images.
“Do sit down,” Han Shu said, gesturing toward a large white couch. “Well, now. How are the classes coming along?”
Compared with his rooms at the café, the office Han Shu kept at Manor House was a simple affair, dominated by a plain ashwood desk and an overstuffed couch where I now sat. In one corner, two wicker armchairs were placed opposite each other, separated by a small wicker and glass table.
“We have to make up for lost time but I think we’re making progress,” he continued, giving me a probing look. “I believe you’re ready to assume another duty I’ve had in mind for you from the start. Something that requires judg
ment—and ingenuity. Quite naturally, the time comes for each of the girls to go out and make her way in the world. I feel it is incumbent on me to keep the house full. Besides, there is always room for a little—how might one put it—expansion.
“In the past, the girls have come to us in one of two ways. Family members, usually the mother or father—poor people, it goes without saying—hear about Manor House and bring the girl. I must then make a decision. Will she fit in? Is she equipped with the necessary talents to make use of what we have to offer? It is not an easy process. The parent gets upset if I send the girl away—and even when I take her in, the parent can get ideas. We’ve had some unpleasant encounters, to say the least. I prefer, therefore, to take in orphans, or children who’ve been abandoned. The streets are full of them, as you know.”
Han Shu leaned forward conspiratorially.
“And now, with all the refugees from the provinces, swarming into Shanghai. I’ve seen mothers leaving children by the side of the road—just walking away. Perhaps they imagine that some kindly stranger will be able to feed their children better than they have any hope of doing.
“That’s where we come in. Me—and now, you.”
Han Shu gave a rare grin that showed his stained teeth to full advantage.
“We are those kindly strangers. Even so, we have to be careful not to make a mistake. Once a girl is here, there is no sending her back.” Han Shu clapped his hands. “This is where your experience can help. I don’t expect any of the girls are quite ready to leave at the moment, but we could accommodate two, maybe three new additions. One at a time, over the course, say, of a month. The right girls, mind you; I cannot impress on you enough how important that is.”
I nodded dumbly. I had seen the street children often enough, with their scabby pox and dirt-caked skin. The idea of taking one in seemed a worthy task: cleaning her up, giving her a home.
“Tonight might be a good time to begin,” he said as I rose.
“It’s better to work at night, I’m sure you’ll agree.”
I had skipped dinner again. As the evening wore on, I became aware of that insectlike crawling in my belly. A drink, I thought, might settle my stomach.
The back of the house was in darkness. I passed through the hallway and down the stairs, feeling my way along the walls. In the kitchen, I filled my cup from the pitcher of cold tea and took a rice biscuit from the tin in the cupboard. I trained my ears on the darkness but, aside from a faint creaking and a low mechanical hum, heard nothing.
I left by way of the door leading to the front of the house. As I approached the main stairway, I heard voices: dim, at first, they grew louder with each step. And then the sound of the green door swinging. I ducked into the schoolroom.
What was that? A man’s voice? Followed by the calm, steady reply of a girl speaking broken but confident English. The stairs creaked. I pushed the door gently with one finger and peered through the crack. I glimpsed only the girl’s back, so it was hard to tell who it was. Behind her was the man, portly, of medium height, a Westerner with a full head of wavy light-brown hair. He said something inaudible; the girl laughed. His hand darted out as the two of them mounted the stairs, and patted—no, grasped—the girl’s small behind. Then he laughed as well: a deep-throated male rumble. He had lowered his hand immediately, but I fancied I saw it still, a ghostly white imprint on the back of the girl’s emerald taffeta dress.
I let the door close and retreated to the kitchen. Better return the way I came, I thought, letting the image of the white hand on shiny green fabric slip from my mind like the thinning of blue smoke into air. Something Archibald used to say wafted to mind: there’s knowing and there’s knowing. Then this, too, went the way of smoke as I climbed the back stairs, my mind a singular dart of concentration aimed solely at my cloisonné pipe.
I’m on a mission of mercy, I thought, as I stepped into the muggy gloaming.
Though the existence at Han Shu’s was simple, I knew that to a child accustomed to scavenging for food and spending nights under leaky eaves, Han Shu’s provision of clothing, hot meals, and a bed would seem nothing short of bountiful.
I had no idea where I was going, yet I felt more sure than I had felt in a long time. I looked up, almost expecting to see a burning North Star, but all I saw was pregnant cloud dragging the sky earthward. I could not have explained it, but as I turned the corner and headed toward what the foreigners of the bar and café crowd called the Rat Quarter, I had the feeling that I was homeward bound, that I was going back, finally, to where I belonged.
To a Westerner newly landed, this was all just poverty—a uniformity of filth and want and disrepair. But I had been in Shanghai for long enough to register the changing nuances of the districts I passed through: thin poles strung with tatty clothes appearing here and there from a window frame in one area but wholly absent further on—a sign of owning more than one set of clothes and of some measure of hygiene. The occasional squawk of a hen, or hiss of a fat meaty snake, the sounds of women with humor enough to laugh, the mingled scents of pickled cabbage and steaming rice, of glazed duck sizzling in grease or the charred salt smell of fish baking among hot coals: the emblems, hereabouts, of relative plenty. And then, stepping across an invisible divide, such smells were extinguished, replaced by the stench of a hundred stagnant puddles festering with mosquitoes, of unwashed bodies and open rivulets of human sewerage. The animal life here did not hiss or squawk but was beady-eyed and mute, making itself known in wretched gnawings and scuttlings. The occasional sickening odor of singed fur and putrid cooked flesh were evidence that these vermin were being put to use as food.
Several times, I passed children who stopped what they were doing to watch as the white woman in the floral dress passed by. It was my light hair they looked at most; I could see their dark eyes fly there and settle. I took the children in with a quick sweep of my eyes: the ankles like twigs poking up from the ground, the firm straight posture, the item or two of clothing that each of them wore, the dark matted hair and alert gaze. Once, the look of a child almost made me stop: the intelligent stillness of the face, the soft, thoughtful set of the mouth. When I realized it was a boy, I kept on, with a twinge of regret.
It was instinct that told me, suddenly, to come to a halt and listen. Cocking my head, I located the sound of the scrambling and turned, finding myself in a closed-off alley. In the far corner, a sheet of corrugated tin with jagged holes was propped up by brick fragments and sticks. Beneath this, a group of children played. A few yards away, several older ones combed through a mound of garbage, calling to each other in street slang. They noticed me collectively, as if linked by invisible antennae: stopped as one in their movements and fixed me with intense and calculating stares. I could feel what had been a bolt of vigilance melt into simple curiosity. I took two steps forward. From beneath the tin roofing, and from atop the hill of peelings and rotting fish heads, the children’s eyes followed me.
Slowly, I approached the corner and peered under the roofing. I did not even register the look of two of the children there, could not have said whether they were female or male, so blinded was I by the third, a girl. Her eyes were somber and yet crinkled at the edges with humor; unexpectedly, she smiled. The grime on her face made her teeth seem especially white. I reached out my hand and the girl raised herself on her haunches as a cat might, regarding me with chocolate eyes.
“Come,” I said softly, using the slang I had learned from Han Shu’s girls, and she stepped over the packed-down dirt that was the floor of the dwelling and offered me her greasy warm hand. As we walked the length of the alley, the girl stole a look at me, then again, every few minutes, as we climbed over the sty and made our way back along the narrow, winding street. It was only when we rounded the corner more than an hour later, onto the street where Manor House stood, that I realized the girl, whom I had already named Ma Ling (“No name,” the girl had insisted when I asked. “My name is no name.”), had uttered no word of farewell to he
r playmates, had not so much as given a backward glance in the direction of the world she now left.
Han Shu was wearing a white silk smoking jacket; his black hair was slicked back, showing the broad flattened shape of his skull and emitting the familiar floral and musky scent. Gingerly, he approached the girl. Ma Ling eyed him steadily. A sliver in her dirt-caked cheek marked the site of a dimple.
“Well, well, and who do we have here?” he said. “Why, Christine. I do believe we have ourselves a beauty.” He switched to street slang: “Your name, child, what is it?”
“No name,” the girl replied as before, with the same determined set of her jaw.
“I’ve called her Ma Ling,” I said.
“Ma Ling. Yes, that’s fine.” Han Shu took her hand and led her to the couch. “I’d like the two of us to have a little talk.”
Ma Ling walked with Han Shu and sat beside him on the white couch. He told her about the house, about the other girls, about the three meals a day, the bed of her own, and the lessons from me. The child listened attentively, for all the world as if she regularly sat through such briefings. Han Shu patted her shoulder and helped her to her feet.
“Now,” he said. “You go along with Christine. She’ll clean you up and show you to your room, and tomorrow you’ll have a pretty new dress.”
Ma Ling did have a pretty new dress the next morning. It was draped over the foot of her bed when she awoke: a blue satin gown reaching almost to the ground, with lace at the sleeves and throat. After heating several cauldrons of water and then washing the girl gently with a washcloth, I had stayed up most of the night refashioning the dress I had chosen from the walnut chest Han Shu kept in the attic.
While the other girls slept, I helped Ma Ling into the dress and showed her how to brush her hair, which still smelled of the lye I’d used to remove the lice. Fully dressed, Ma Ling stood before me with that same matter-of-fact air she had displayed the previous night, and it was clear that Han Shu had been right; she was a natural beauty. Ma Ling could not have been more than fourteen, and looked both older and younger than her years: still childlike in stature, but with an uncannily poised and mature bearing.