To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  A tree top blown by heavy winds will bow its head, but when the weight is gone the tree looks back to heaven.

  The sun sets at night beneath the cavernous waves, but by a secret path returns to its beginning.

  Feeling returns to the tips of my fingers, pin pricks, which work their way up my arms until I can push my chest up. Then my legs come back, and I struggle to my feet. And so, dragging my heavy head along with me, numb on one side of my face, and badly bruised, I reach the wheelhouse and cut back the throttle. I look at the compass, but the needle is jumping unhelpfully. I tap it, I move everything away from it, but still it won’t settle.

  Time. How much time has this taken? How much time have we lost? I check the chronometer, but it appears to have stopped. I look at my watch, strapped to my wrist as always, but its face has been smashed in my fall. I glance out at the sky, but the sun’s position is hidden by cloud.

  “Fan?” I call softly. I hold my breath, listening. Somehow, in some way, I think irrelevantly, I have got to get back to the surface. Like those men my stepmother spoke of, the whalers who rode on the whales.

  I open my mouth to breathe, and, as if the air has turned into poison, my world blacks out again.

  Some years ago, when I first joined the pilotage, I went out with one of the senior pilots in answer to an emergency. A gill-netter had been seen circling furiously in the straits off Brotchie Ledge. The cause of this peculiar behaviour was not apparent, but it was clear that, if left to itself, the gill-netter would sink.

  We had trouble catching her: the skipper had left the throttle wide open, and we went round and round after her, blowing whistles and ringing bells. Finally we were able to cut into the middle of the circle, and from this vantage point we could see the owner of the gill-netter slumped over in the wheelhouse. In ever-closing circles the gill-netter was approaching the breakwater where we feared it was bound to capsize. Before this could happen, however, the boat began to ship water, and, with her decks awash, we were able to jump aboard and rescue the mariner. He was not ill or dead, as we had feared. He had had, he told us, the deepest, sweetest sleep he had ever known.

  Just so, when I awaken this time, with my back against the cold wheelhouse stove, I feel curiously refreshed. I remember everything, from the moment of Fan’s question to now, with the spaces in between filled in with a series of pictures, like stills taken from a film. I remember being asleep or unconscious, although I have had no dreams. I remember the infinitely slow passing of time, a series of grey slides without horizon, through which I was travelling.

  We are among islands. Strikingly high islands inhabited by seabirds. I see tufted puffins, Cassius and rhinoceros auklets, and pelagic cormorants in my first quick look. The Rose is piloting herself, caught in a heavy tide rip, which seems to be carrying us safely enough for the moment, but I can see the need for caution. There are reefs here, and a wind, which, though gentle now, can quickly blow up. And I know where I am, somewhere in the western Scott Islands, heading south, back the way I have come but off the outermost northwestern coast of Vancouver Island.

  I do not need a calendar to tell me what I know. That there is no way I can continue north. My accident, or small stroke, as I suspect it was, is cause enough to turn back.

  But there is more to it than that. It is time to be thinking of home.

  —

  My mother, India Thackery, and her employer, my stepmother’s future husband, Sing Yuen, had a program. It included the solicitation and distribution of food and clothing in the slums of Chinatown. It contained concern for the fate of women held captive in the upper stories of Chinatown buildings and the establishment of a refuge for them. It was measured in meetings with other likeminded citizens. It was called “reform.”

  Putting aside the mistakes of the past, changing the order of things. They moved through the underside of the commercial section of the city, the network of tenements, where real estate was leased and subleased until there was only the slightest connection to a landlord; where rooms, licensed to hold four people, contained fifteen to twenty, and where eight men might wait to eat the seven two-inch fish that Sing Yuen had been able to send to them.

  In this land of Gold Mountain, to which so many had come, there were lessons to be learned. And Robert Haack, following in the tracks of his friends, fingering his poem, worrying, absorbed them.

  But there is more than one kind of lesson.

  Just as there were days when the winter wind blasted through the tunnel streets, and men brushed ice from their eyelids and the tatters of their clothing, so there were days when the sun struck haloes from the buildings, and India and Haack sat outside on chairs from the restaurant, reading. When Yong Sam’s men took a holiday, and the Association meeting was three weeks away, and anything seemed possible. When the world was expanding, and the circling planets spoke not of repetition, but of endless mystery. When the boy from Carmel Valley in California, who had listened to poems and novels at his mother’s knee, who had lived, except for those times, a life of utmost misery since his father, the goat farmer, had banished the boy and mother to a hut on his property and had only fed the child for what he would gain from his labour…when Robert Haack knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the story of his life would end happily.

  “It makes me think,” interrupts my ghost, who has returned now that I’m heading south (as I believe she has always intended), “of Jim Post at the Savoy.”

  “Pardon, Fan?” I say, trying to pay attention, although I have a splitting headache and am plotting our course for Quatsino Sound and Coal Harbour, the old air-force base, where I hope to get medical attention. And from where the whales are still hunted. “I’m sorry but I don’t understand.”

  “It was before your time, Robert Lam,” she says. “He was a vaudeville comedian at the Savoy, like I said. He put his thumb to his nose like this—” and she demonstrates a rude hand gesture “—and blew very loudly through his lips.”

  “What?” I say, for it takes me a moment to get her drift. “Oh…it’s called a raspberry, Fan.”

  “Yes.” She nods. “He was famous for it.” And she keeps on nodding, as if what she’s said is important.

  One night, while Robert Haack lay sleeping in his room at the Metropolitan, and while a thin layer of snow shrouded the streets outside and blew in through the open window, there came a knock at his door. He awoke to that knocking with a pounding heart, for all his fears had awakened with him. It was just such a summons that he had long feared, whether it be from the men of the Association, who were at that time engaged in a boycott of Chinese businesses, and on whose charity he relied for the payment of his rent, or from Yong Sam, who had grown tired of waiting for payment of his debt. Haack cursed himself for a fool for neglecting to prepare for danger and rolled silently out of bed and onto the floor. He lay there listening to his own quick breathing until a voice from the hallway called out quietly, “Robert Haack, please wake up! It is important!”

  The men he knew didn’t announce themselves. Whether workingmen or Tong, he doubted there’d be any warning, or any awakening either, except, perhaps, to take his last breath. Moreover, against all probability, the dog, Charlie, who kept a lookout beneath Haack’s window and who had always proved faithful, had given no alarm. Haack thought for a moment, then stood up, pulled on his pants, and spoke through the door.

  “Who is it? What do you want?”

  “It is I,” the voice said helpfully, “the herbalist, Lum Kee.” Robert eased open the door and smelled the aroma of herbs and grasses that clung like a signature to Lam Fan’s uncle. Lum Kee stepped forward, smiling his apology and polishing the snow from his spectacles. “I am sorry to awaken you,” he said, “but I need your help. My niece, Lam Fan, has disappeared. Her friend, Miss Thackery, and I are going to look for her, and we both hoped that you might come with us. We are very worried,” he added unnecessarily, for Robert Haack, who knew the old man’s reputation for steadiness and common sense, could
read the concern on Lum Kee’s face. There was no need to explain. With the shortage of Chinese women, women sometimes did vanish in Chinatown, although most of the trade was in children or in women who were already known as prostitutes.

  “But everyone knows that she’s your relative,” said Haack, puzzled, as he put on the rest of his clothing. “I can’t believe that anyone would dare to harm her.”

  Lum Kee simply shook his head, as if the world he had trusted had come to an end.

  They went into the corridor together. “There is one more thing,” the herbalist said reluctantly. “India tells me my niece was once addicted to opium. It could be that she has slipped into her former ways.”

  Opium. The abandoned baker’s daughter’s original friend. A disease of grief and loss, of rootlessness, in my opinion, which offers, as does all addiction, a return to the mother’s breast.

  But hadn’t she given it up? thought Haack. Hadn’t her life, according to India, changed for the better?

  He was puzzled. Could India’s sister have been so unhappy and no one have known it? Why had nothing been said? Weren’t they all family? Wouldn’t she have asked for help, if not from her sister, then from her uncle, Lum Kee, whom she deeply admired?

  As Mrs. Lush, the landlady, opened her door to hiss at them to be quiet, Robert Haack added it up. It was like hunger and thirst; they didn’t exist until there was emptiness, or until they were brought to one’s notice. Say someone laid out a banquet in front of you, even if you had eaten two hours earlier, might you not be tempted to eat anyway? Especially if you were often alone, and your best friend, your sister, had other concerns? Especially if that sister worked at the Tai June opium factory and took home, on her clothing, every night, its odours? Especially if you were reminded of opium by day and by night?

  Robert Haack sighed. He found it difficult to listen to Mrs. Lush’s words. “Don’t worry, Lucy,” he said automatically to her rumble, “we’ll be real quiet.”

  “You know the rules, Mr. Haack. It’s after ten o’clock.” She turned her lace nightcap, mounted above a face that was pale and contoured like a rough field in uncertain light, towards Haack’s companion.

  “Mr. Lum!” she remarked. “I take it there is an emergency.”

  “Yes,” said the herbalist, politely. “I am sorry to disturb you.”

  “Mr. Lum needs help with a patient, Lucy,” said Robert in his best conciliatory manner. “He wouldn’t have fetched me if it were not necessary.

  “Well, all right, then,” said the landlady, withdrawing from the hallway, “but don’t think you can make a habit of it.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “No!”

  One look at India’s face as she waited outside with the lantern told Robert that she had reached the same conclusions as himself. She would not meet his eyes and kept glancing into the gloomy distance. “We have to find her,” she said. “We have to bring her back before anything happens!”

  There was no answer to that, and so the three of them, each occupied with troubling thoughts, followed the chain of brick and wood that lined the street, their footsteps printing the snow, and crossed Cormorant Street and stepped into the labyrinth of tenements that housed the opium dens of the city.

  Shed roofs and gables overlapped each other. The white-bread texture of snow lay softly against cold chimneys. In a doorway, his head resting on his chest, stood a poorly dressed old man. His eyes glazed in the lantern light, oblivious.

  “Here is such an example,” said Lum Kee, as if thinking aloud. “So many are like this man. He is half awake, at most. He feels nothing.” The three would-be rescuers gazed pityingly at the old man’s sunken chest and the dried, almost mummified texture of his skin.

  “But suppose,” Fan’s uncle continued, still as if to himself, “he goes without his opium, what then? He has half a fish to eat at most, and he quarrels over it with his friends. He has no wood to light a fire to cook it.”

  “You don’t mean you think it’s all right,” said India, “you don’t mean you don’t see its harm?”

  Lum Kee looked at her as if at last taking her in. “Suppose,” he said, “a man like this takes too much opium. What happens then? He sleeps and sleeps and dreams and dreams. But suppose a man gets drunk with liquor? He shouts, he sings, he beats his wife and gets put in jail.”

  India looked at Haack and Haack at India. Haack cleared his throat.

  “But that’s not what we’re talking about.”

  “It is white people, too,” said Lum Kee, “not just Chinese. Sometimes they give their clothes away if they have no money. It is always the poor who suffer.”

  India touched Lum Kee’s arm. “It’s my fault, isn’t it, Kee,” she said. “It is because of me and the factory. Fan wouldn’t have thought of it otherwise.”

  The herbalist shrugged and took off his spectacles to clear them of snow. “Nothing is certain,” he said. “We have not yet found her. Anyway,” he went on as India was about to interrupt with further protestations of guilt, “nothing like this is because of one person. It comes from many things. No, it is not your fault.”

  “Why now, when she seems so happy?”

  He shrugged again. “I think she is lonely sometimes. Opium is something to count on.”

  —

  We are setting a course to clear Kains Island, then into Quatsino Sound for Coal Harbour. My stepmother’s ghost stands close beside me at the wheel, her silks whipping in the wind. I have left the window open, letting in the chill, for I am fearful of the aftereffects of my stroke, concerned that I might fall asleep.

  “Why did you start to smoke opium again, Fan?” I ask. “It couldn’t just have been because of where my mother worked. If it had begun to bother you, you could have told her. I’m sure together you could have solved the problem.

  “No,” I go on, interested in a theory I am building, “I am sure it was because of your childhood. It left its mark upon you, and you never recovered. Everyone knows that opium is used as relief from pain. You were suffering, perhaps not physically, but mentally, and that’s why you smoked.”

  She looks at me wryly. “Is that what happened to you, Robert Lam? Somebody was mean to you as a child, and you never grew up?”

  “Fan!” I am hurt beyond all reason. “There’s no need for that. I am trying to understand what happened.”

  She looks at me, clear-eyed. “I liked to smoke my pipe. It was calm. It was peaceful. I could forget about my troubles. I only stopped to please my sister, not to please myself.”

  “Ah,” I say, nodding wisely. “So the moment you felt she was less interested, less committed to you, that she was getting involved with a man—Robert Haack—you strayed.”

  “Not strayed, Robert Lam,” she says stubbornly, “I told you, I liked to smoke. It was my habit, and it never hurt me. Besides,” she says, before I can marshal an argument, “nothing happened that time. That was not when I started up again, that came later. This was the time I met Sing Yuen.”

  “Sing Yuen?”

  “Yes,” she says proudly, he was the one who came to rescue me. He was the one who ran through snow with no shoes on.”

  —

  What makes a man look up from his work in his restaurant as he supervises preparations for the Festival of the Dead, as tables are loaded with dressed pigs and goats, pastries, fish, and sweetmeats, and as the remains of one hundred and sixty Chinese, in clay jars, are made ready for shipment to Hong Kong? Perhaps he expected to see the arrival of flowers, or the instrument cart with its drums, bells, and bows, its roof of carved figures, human and animal. What Sing Yuen did see when he glanced up, however, alerted by a prickling of the hairs of his neck, was a solitary female figure making its way from Fisgard Street into an alleyway that led, as he knew well, nowhere but to the brothels and opium dens of the inner labyrinth of Chinatown.

  Sing Yuen: a man who could make decisions, who felt his heart turn over with dread as he recognized Lam Fan; who ran after her, bare
foot as he was, and, taking stock of her symptoms, not trying to change her mind, walked with her, walking, walking, walking for hours until the hunger for opium was pushed out of Lam Fan by exhaustion.

  But what happened to the others, who had no way of knowing of these events?

  For Lum Kee had led the others to a particular door, and had knocked on it and walked in. Inside, one Chinese and three white men shared a pipe while sitting around a table. A fourth white man was rolling a cigarette, and two other Chinese were dreaming on couches. The room was clean and well-kept.

  “What do you want?” asked the Chinese who was overseeing the pipe. He looked old beyond counting, his body a mere scaffolding of bones.

  “We are looking for someone,” replied India, glancing about her.

  “There is no one here,” the man said, and he turned his back to them. Lum Kee dropped his eyes at this rudeness, and Robert Haack coughed into his handkerchief nervously.

  The white man who had been rolling a cigarette picked up his hat from a chair beside him, put it on, and pulled the brim low to hide his face. He edged to the door, trying to squeeze past India, who was blocking his way.

  “I am so sorry you should have found me here,” he said to her politely. His companions, ministered to by the divan keeper, continued to smoke.

  “I am sorry, too,” said India, making room for him to go and turning to leave herself. There was no point in staying where they were not wanted, and where clearly Lam Fan wasn’t present. The air was heavy, the room gloomy, and she wanted to go outside. Lum Kee had preceded her.

  But the man who wanted to leave was prevented by Robert Haack.

  “Wait a minute,” said Robert, looking him over, “don’t I know you?” He reached out and tipped the hat up. A look of horror crossed his face, and he blurted out the man’s name—”Henry McMullen! What are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you that,” McMullen replied sullenly, repositioning his hat and losing his air of apology. “I could ask you what you’re doing here.”