Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  Years later, when the three of us came on Memorial Day for the summer-long stay with my father, he had the houselady prepare the apartment above the garage for us. Whenever we first opened its door at the top of the creaky narrow stairs we smelled the fresh veneers of pine oil and bleach and lemon balm. The pine floors were shimmering and dangerously slick. Mitt would dash past us to the king-sized mattress in the center of the open space and tumble on the neatly sheeted bed. The bed was my parents’ old one; my father bought himself a twin the first year we moved into the new house. The rest of the stuff in the apartment had come with the property: there was an old leather sofa; a chest of drawers; a metal office desk; my first stereo, the all-in-one kind, still working; and someone’s nod to a kitchen, thrown together next to the bathroom in the far corner, featuring a dorm-style refrigerator, a half-sized two-burner stove, and the single cabinet above it.

  Mitt and Lelia loved that place. Lelia especially liked the tiny secret room that was tucked behind a false panel in the closet. The room, barely six by eight, featured a single-paned window in the shape of a face that swung out to a discreet view of my father’s exquisitely landscaped garden of cut stones and flowers. She wrote back in that room during the summer, slipping in at sunrise before I left for Purchase, and was able to complete a handful of workable poems by the time we departed on Labor Day, when she had to go back to teaching.

  Mitt liked the room, too, for its pitched ceiling that he could almost reach if he tippy-toed, and I could see he felt himself bigger in there as he stamped about in my father’s musty cordovans like some thundering giant, sweeping at the air, though he only ventured in during the late afternoons when enough light could angle inside and warmly lamp every crag and corner nook. He got locked in once for a few hours, the panel becoming stuck somehow, and we heard his wails all the way from the kitchen in the big house.

  “Spooky,” Mitt pronounced that night, fearful and unashamed as he lay between us in our bed, clutching his mother’s thigh.

  Mitt slept with us those summers until my father bought him his own canvas army cot. That’s what the boy wanted. He liked the camouflaging pattern of the thick fabric and sometimes tipped the thing on its side and shot rubber-tipped arrows at me and Lelia from behind its cover. We had to shoot them back before he would agree to go to bed.

  When he was an infant we waited until he was asleep and then delicately placed him atop our two pillows, which we arranged on the floor next to the bed. We lay still a few minutes until we could hear his breathing deepen and become rhythmic. That’s when we made love. It was warm up there in the summer and we didn’t have to strip or do anything sudden. We moved as mutely and as deftly as we could bear, muffling ourselves in one another’s hair and neck so as not to wake him, but then, too, of course, so we could hear the sound of his sleeping, his breathing, ours, that strange conspiring. Afterward, we lay quiet again, to make certain of his slumber, and then lifted him back between our hips into the bed, so heavy and alive with our mixed scent.

  “Hey,” Lelia whispered to me one night that first summer, “the woman, in the house, what do you think she does at night?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, stroking her arm, Mitt’s.

  “I mean, does she have any friends or relatives?”

  I didn’t know.

  She then said, “There’s no one else besides your father?”

  “I don’t think she has anyone here. They’re all in Korea.”

  “Has she ever gone back to visit?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think she sends them money instead.”

  “God,” Lelia answered. “How awful.” She brushed back the damp downy hair from Mitt’s forehead. “She must be so lonely.”

  “Does she seem lonely?” I asked.

  She thought about it for a moment. “I guess not. She doesn’t seem like she’s anything. I keep looking for something, but even when she’s with your father there’s nothing in her face. She’s been here since you were young, right?”

  I nodded.

  “You think they’re friends?” she asked.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Lovers?”

  I had to answer, “Maybe.”

  “So what’s her name?” Lelia asked after a moment.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  I told her that I didn’t know. That I had never known.

  “What’s that you call her, then?” she said. “I thought that was her name. Your father calls her that, too.”

  “It’s not her name,” I told her. “It’s not her name. It’s just a form of address.”

  It was the truth. Lelia had great trouble accepting this stunning ignorance of mine. That summer, when it seemed she was thinking about it, she would stare in wonderment at me as if I had a gaping hole blown through my head. I couldn’t blame her. Americans live on a first-name basis. She didn’t understand that there weren’t moments in our language—the rigorous, regimental one of family and servants—when the woman’s name could have naturally come out. Or why it wasn’t important. At breakfast and lunch and dinner my father and I called her “Ah-juh-ma,” literally aunt, but more akin to “ma’am,” the customary address to an unrelated Korean woman. But in our context the title bore much less deference. I never heard my father speak her name in all the years she was with us.

  But then he never even called my mother by her name, nor did she ever in my presence speak his. She was always and only “spouse” or “wife” or “Mother”; he was “husband” or “Father” or “Henry’s father.” And to this day, when someone asks what my parents’ names were, I have to pause for a moment, I have to rehear them not from the memory of my own voice, my own calling to them, but through the stat icky voices of their old friends phoning from the other end of the world.

  “I can’t believe this,” Lelia cried, her long Scottish face all screwed up in the moonlight. “You’ve known her since you were a kid! She practically raised you.”

  “I don’t know who raised me,” I said to her.

  “Well, she must have had something to do with it!” She nearly woke up Mitt.

  She whispered, “What do you think cooking and cleaning and ironing is? That’s what she does all day, if you haven’t noticed. Your father depends so much on her. I’m sure you did, too, when you were young.”

  “Of course I did,” I answered. “But what do you want, what do you want me to say?”

  “There’s nothing you have to say. I just wonder, that’s all. This woman has given twenty years of her life to you and your father and it still seems like she could be anyone to you. It doesn’t seem to matter who she is. Right? If your father switched her now with someone else, probably nothing would be different.”

  She paused. She brought up her knees so they were even with her hips. She pulled Mitt to her chest.

  “Careful,” I said. “You’ll wake him.”

  “It scares me,” she said. “I just think about you and me. What I am . . .”

  “Don’t be crazy,” I said.

  “I am not being crazy,” she replied carefully. Mitt started to whimper. I slung my arm over her belly. She didn’t move. This was the way, the very slow way, that our conversations were spoiling.

  “I’ll ask my father tomorrow,” I stupidly said.

  Lelia didn’t say anything to that. After a while she turned away, Mitt still tight against her belly.

  “Sweetie . . .”

  I whispered to her. I craned and licked the soft hair above her neck. She didn’t budge. “Let’s not make this something huge.”

  “My God,” she whispered.

  For the next few days, Lelia was edgy. She wouldn’t say much to me. She wandered around the large wooded yard with Mitt strapped tightly in her chest sling. Close to her. She wasn’t writing, as far as I could tell. And she generally stayed away from the house; she couldn’t bear to watch the woman do anything. Finally, Lelia decided to talk to her; I would have to interpr
et. We walked over to the house and found her dusting in the living room. But when the woman saw us purposefully approaching her, she quickly crept away so that we had to follow her into the dining room and then to the kitchen until she finally disappeared into her back rooms. I stopped us at the threshold. I called in and said that my wife wanted to speak with her. No answer. “Ahjuhma,” I then called to the silence, “Ahjuhma!”

  Finally her voice shot back, There’s nothing for your American wife and me to talk about. Will you please leave the kitchen. It is very dirty and needs cleaning.

  Despite how Ahjuhma felt about the three of us, our unusual little family, Lelia made several more futile attempts before she gave up. The woman didn’t seem to accept Mitt, she seemed to sour when she looked upon his round, only half-Korean eyes and the reddish highlights in his hair.

  One afternoon Lelia cornered the woman in the laundry room and tried to communicate with her while helping her fold a pile of clothes fresh out of the dryer. But each time Lelia picked up a shirt or a pair of shorts the woman gently tugged it away and quickly folded it herself. I walked by then and saw them standing side by side in the narrow steamy room, Lelia guarding her heap and grittily working as fast as she could, the woman steadily keeping pace with her, not a word or a glance between them. Lelia told me later that the woman actually began nudging her in the side with the fleshy mound of her low-set shoulder, grunting and pushing her out of the room with short steps; Lelia began hockey-checking back with her elbows, trying to hold her position, when by accident she caught her hard on the ear and the woman let out a loud shrill whine that sent them both scampering from the room. Lelia ran out to where I was working inside the garage, tears streaming from her eyes; we hurried back to the house, only to find the woman back in the laundry room, carefully refolding the dry laundry. She backed away when she saw Lelia and cried madly in Korean, You cat! You nasty American cat!

  I scolded her then, telling her she couldn’t speak to my wife that way if she wanted to keep living in our house. The woman bit her lip; she bent her head and bowed severely before me in a way that perhaps no one could anymore and then trundled out of the room between us. I suddenly felt as if I’d committed a great wrong.

  Lelia shouted, “What did she say? What did you say? What the hell just happened?”

  But I didn’t answer her immediately and she cursed “Goddamnit!” under her breath and ran out the back door toward the apartment. I went after her but she wouldn’t slow down. When I reached the side stairs to the apartment I heard the door slam hard above. I climbed the stairs and opened the door and saw she wasn’t there. Then I realized that she’d already slipped into the secret room behind the closet.

  She was sitting at my old child’s desk below the face-shaped window, her head down in her folded arms. When I touched her shoulder she began shuddering, sobbing deeply into the bend of her elbow, and when I tried to coax her out she shook me off and dug in deeper. So I embraced her huddled figure, and she let me do that, and after a while she turned out of herself and began crying into my belly, where I felt the wetness blotting the front of my shirt.

  “Come on,” I said softly, stroking her hair. “Try to take it easy. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say about her. She’s always been a mystery to me.”

  She soon calmed down and stopped crying. Lelia cried easily, but back then in our early days I didn’t know and each time she wept I feared the worst, that it meant something catastrophic was happening between us, an irreversible damage. What I should have feared was the damage unseen, what she wouldn’t end up crying over or even speaking about in our last good year.

  “She’s not a mystery to me, Henry,” she now answered, her whole face looking as though it had been stung. With her eyes swollen like that and her high cheekbones, she looked almost Asian, like a certain kind of Russian. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. She looked out the little window.

  “I know who she is.”

  “Who?” I said, wanting to know.

  “She’s an abandoned girl. But all grown up.”

  During high school I used to wander out to the garage from the house to read or just get away after one of the countless arguments I had with my father. Our talk back then was in fact one long and grave contention, an incessant quarrel, though to hear it now would be to recognize the usual forms of homely rancor and still homelier devotion, involving all the dire subjects of adolescence—my imperfect studies, my unworthy friends, the driving of his car, smoking and drinking, the whatever and whatever. One of our worst nights of talk was after he suggested that the girl I was taking to the eighth-grade Spring Dance didn’t—or couldn’t—find me attractive.

  “What you think she like?” he asked, or more accurately said, shaking his head to tell me I was a fool. We had been watching the late news in his study.

  “She likes me,” I told him defiantly. “Why is that so hard for you to take?”

  He laughed at me. “You think she like your funny face? Funny eyes? You think she dream you at night?”

  “I really don’t know, Dad,” I answered. “She’s not even my girlfriend or anything. I don’t know why you bother so much.”

  “Bother?” he said. “Bother?”

  “Nothing, Dad, nothing.”

  “Your mother say exact same,” he decreed.

  “Just forget it.”

  “No, no, you forget it,” he shot back, his voice rising. “You don’t know nothing! This American girl, she nobody for you. She don’t know nothing about you. You Korean man. So so different. Also, she know we live in expensive area.”

  “So what!” I gasped.

  “You real dummy, Henry. Don’t you know? You just free dance ticket. She just using you.” Just then the housekeeper shuffled by us into her rooms on the other side of the pantry.

  “I guess that’s right,” I said. “I should have seen that. You know it all. I guess I still have much to learn from you about dealing with women.”

  “What you say!” he exploded. “What you say!” He slammed his palm on the side lamp table, almost breaking the plate of smoked glass. I started to leave but he grabbed me hard by the neck as if to shake me and I flung my arm back and knocked off his grip. We were turned on each other, suddenly ready to go, and I could tell he was as astonished as I to be glaring this way at his only blood. He took a step back, afraid of what might have happened. Then he threw up his hands and just muttered, “Stupid.”

  A few weeks later I stumbled home from the garage apartment late one night, drunk on some gin filched from a friend’s parents’ liquor cabinet. My father appeared downstairs at the door and I promptly vomited at his feet on the newly refinished floors. He didn’t say anything and just helped me to my room. When I struggled down to the landing the next morning the mess was gone. I still felt nauseous. I went to the kitchen and he was sitting there with his tea, smoking and reading the Korean-language newspaper. I sat across from him.

  “Did she clean it up?” I asked, looking about for the woman. He looked at me like I was crazy. He put down the paper and rose and disappeared into the pantry. He returned with a bottle of bourbon and glasses and he carefully poured two generous jiggers of it. It was nine o’clock on Sunday morning. He took one for himself and then slid the other under me.

  “Mah-shuh!” he said firmly. Drink! I could see he was serious. “Mah-shuh!”

  He sat there, waiting. I lifted the stinking glass to my lips and could only let a little of the alcohol seep onto my tongue before I leaped to the sink and dry-heaved uncontrollably. And as I turned with tears in my eyes and the spittle hanging from my mouth I saw my father grimace before he threw back his share all at once. He shuddered, and then recovered himself and brought the glasses to the sink. He was never much of a drinker. Clean all this up well so she doesn’t see it, he said hoarsely in Korean. Then help her with the windows. He gently patted my back and then left the house and drove off to one of his stores in the city.

  The woman, her head forw
ard and bent, suddenly padded out from her back rooms in thickly socked feet and stood waiting for me, silent.

  I knew the job, and I did it quickly for her. My father and I used to do a similar task together when I was very young. This before my mother died, in our first, modest house. Early in the morning on the first full warm day of the year he carried down from the attic the bug screens sandwiched in his brief, powerful arms and lined them up in a row against the side of the house. He had me stand back a few yards with the sprayer and wait for him to finish scrubbing the metal mesh with an old shoe brush and car soap. He squatted the way my grandmother did (she visited us once in America before she died), balancing on his flat feet with his armpits locked over his knees and his forearms working between them in front, the position so strangely apelike to me even then that I tried at night in my bedroom to mimic him, to see if the posture came naturally to us Parks, to us Koreans. It didn’t.

  When my father finished he rose and stretched his back in several directions and then moved to the side. He stood there straight as if at attention and then commanded me with a raised hand to fire away.

  “In-jeh!” he yelled. Now!

  I had to pull with both hands on the trigger, and I almost lost hold of the nozzle from the backforce of the water and sprayed wildly at whatever I could hit. He yelled at me to stop after a few seconds so he could inspect our work; he did this so that he could make a big deal of bending over in front of me, trying to coax his small boy to shoot his behind. When I finally figured it out I shot him; he wheeled about with his face all red storm and theater and shook his fists at me with comic menace. He skulked back to a safe position with his suspecting eyes fixed on me and commanded that I fire again. He shouted for me to stop and he went again and bent over the screens; again I shot him, this time hitting him square on the rump and back, and he yelled louder, his cheeks and jaw wrenched maudlin with rage. I threw down the hose and sprinted for the back door but he caught me from behind and swung me up in what seemed one motion and plunked me down hard on his soaked shoulders. My mother stuck her head out the second-floor kitchen window just then and said to him, You be careful with that bad boy.