What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  And just at that moment, the Good Thing Philip had been seeking came into his mind.

  On some Wednesdays, the Mercedes that pulled up to the curb to collect him was his father’s, with the damaged front fender and his dad at the wheel. Philip would get into the front seat and his father would say How was class, break any bones this week, and Philip would say Fine—he was always fine. As they got to the corner and were turning into the thick traffic of the bigger road, his father would say Hungry? and of course Philip was always that too, so they could go to the ice cream store.

  Little more than an open-air box between a hairdresser and a shoe shop, the ice cream store had a spinning rack of magazines, a shelf of stacked cigarette packets, a coffin-size refrigerator case filled with bottles of Coke and Green Spot and Fanta, and the soft ice cream machine. Philip always chose vanilla and his father chose chocolate and vanilla mixed, and his father wouldn’t object when Philip bit off the tip at the bottom of his cone and sucked the ice cream through.

  They had an understanding: Don’t tell your mother. His father didn’t have to say it. It was in the way they canted themselves forward as they ate, to avoid drips on their clothing; it was in their ritual toilet afterward, before they got back into the car. His father would take two paper napkins from his pocket and give one to Philip. They’d solemnly wipe the stickiness from their lips and chins and fingers, and then Philip would run to discard the crumpled napkins in a bin. He always did that, even though the street had a long seam of rubbish at its edge. Some people don’t know any better, his father said, but we do.

  Ice Cream Wednesday was perhaps the best Good Thing of all. The front seat, the secret ice cream, but more than either of those things, the mostly speechless hour with his father when the Nitnoy part of Philip drained away. Not completely—he was still there inside Philip, loathsome and weak, deserving of torment—but he shrank as small as he ever got while Philip was in the front seat of his father’s car, punching the buttons on the radio to find an American station, singing Bye, bye, Miss American Pie while his dad tapped out the beat on the steering wheel.

  Ice Cream Wednesday wasn’t a definitely-would-happen Good Thing, but might-happen was all Philip had, and it would have to be enough.

  Chapter Seven

  “FIRST, LET us welcome the new ladies to Thailand,” said Genevieve.

  Her audience, seated on the Duncans’ rearranged furniture, was a mix of familiar and unfamiliar faces. The three New Ladies, who had introduced themselves as Clara Pettis, Renee Martelli, and Julia Green, were seated together on a sofa; the flanking bentwood chairs held Irene Duncan and Joan Benderby and Alice Billings and Helen Malcolm, all of whom would be called Old Ladies if one were being consistent—but one was decidedly not. The term “veterans” had been ventured, but that had smacked of limblessness and foxholes, and was not taken up. So it was the New Ladies, and the Ladies. When new New Ladies came, as they did every year or so, old New Ladies would become just Ladies, and some of the oldest Ladies would return home.

  “And gentleman,” Genevieve added belatedly, looking at the lone man among them. He was seated on a hard chair that had been brought in from the dining room.

  “I guess I’m an interloper,” said the man, laughing. “I’m Henry Schultz. My wife is the, um, employee.” He rose and came forward to offer his hand to Genevieve, and then continued it around the room. When everyone’s hand had been shaken, he remained standing, like a schoolboy waiting to be quizzed.

  “These meetings are really for the wives,” said Genevieve. “Of course, you’re welcome to be here, but I’m not sure you’ll find it all that helpful.”

  “I told him it would be all right,” said Irene, with a bit of anxiety. Genevieve had felt a rush of recognition upon meeting Irene when she’d arrived eighteen months before. She was like so many girls Genevieve had known at school, chipper and positive and can-do, an energetic seconder of motions, a born class secretary with no aspirations to be president.

  “Oh, I think I will find it useful,” said Henry Schultz. “I mean, I don’t exactly do mending, but I’ll be in charge of the household while we’re here.”

  “We don’t do mending either,” said Joan Benderby. “We have people for that.” Her face was flushed under her leaning tower of a bouffant; had she already been drinking? Her hairstyle was days old and she’d clearly been sleeping on it. Joan had been odd even before that disgrace with her son; afterward, she’d become a bit of a mess. In Genevieve’s opinion, a weak mother made a weak child. Or perhaps it was the other way round—the difficult child weakened the mother. Chicken, egg. Genevieve gave Irene a meaningful look: perhaps it had been a mistake to include Joan, who was hardly a good example of how to cope in Asia. Irene gave a chastened nod: message received.

  “That’s a good place to begin,” Genevieve said. Mr. Schultz took her meaning and sat back down. “How many of you had servants in the U.S.?”

  Clara Pettis raised her hand. She looked like an overgrown child in her Peter Pan–collared blouse, hair scraped back and trapped by a headband. “I have a girl who comes in twice a week,” she said. “Does that count?”

  No, it does not, thought Genevieve.

  “Any experience you have had will be helpful,” she said. “However, no one would say that servants here are like servants at home.” She smiled, and the Ladies broke into answering chuckles. “Servants here are absolutely critical to a well-functioning household. It’s important to choose them well and train them properly. There are some pitfalls that you need to keep in mind.”

  Why had she said pitfalls? She normally used the word principles. She had a feeling of disconnection, a bizarre sense that if she closed her eyes and then opened them again, she’d see a different group of women. Ladies long gone from Bangkok, current Ladies back when they were New. She closed her eyes and opened them like the shutter of a camera, saw the group looking back at her, quizzical frowns beginning on some of the faces.

  Where was she? Oh, yes, pitfalls.

  “You’ve probably already noticed how pleasant the Thai are, always smiling,” she said. The New Ladies nodded; they had noticed. They had been here for a week already, staying at a hotel while their rental houses were readied. “They’ll smile and speak softly in every circumstance. That’s a lovely quality, of course”—her grandmother would definitely have approved—“but it means that you can’t count on the usual cues of facial expression or tone of voice to tell you when something has gone wrong.”

  “A fire, a flood, a sewage backup filling your house, they’ll still be smiling,” said Irene. The New Ladies looked alarmed by the word sewage.

  “And no matter what you ask them, ‘Kha kha kha, Madame,’ ” said Alice. Laughter among the Ladies; puzzlement among the New.

  “That means yes,” said Genevieve. “And also sometimes no.”

  “Kha kha kha, Madame,” said Alice, encouraged by the laughter. “Would you like me to cut your head off? Kha kha kha, Madame.”

  All of the women were laughing now except Joan, who was inspecting her manicure, and Clara, who looked worried.

  “It means yes and no?” asked Clara.

  “It’s impossible,” cried Helen Malcolm, laughing.

  “It is challenging,” said Genevieve. “And what it means is that you have to remain attentive”—she had almost said suspicious—“and always double-check everything.” She’d given this talk half a dozen times or more, and it was all true, good, useful information. Why, today, did it feel like propaganda?

  “Triple-check,” said Irene.

  “Do any of them speak English?” asked Julia Green. She was a busty woman in a flowing green dress; her hair was long and loose. Add a crown of flowers, and she’d be a credible match for the subject of an art nouveau poster. Was this considered acceptable grooming in the U.S. these days? It seemed that each fresh wave of New Ladies was more unkempt than the wave before. Now one of them was a man. Another one, Renee Martelli, was wearing pants. The styl
e called capri since Mary Tyler Moore had worn them on television a decade before, but which were really just the same old clam-diggers. In Genevieve’s opinion, a more elegant name did not make them suitable for luncheon.

  “Your Number One is the only one who must speak English,” said Genevieve. The New Ladies looked blank. “Your Number One is your head servant. She’s the most important decision you will make in Thailand. She’ll do the marketing and cooking and oversee the other servants. Once you’ve found a good Number One, half your work is done.”

  “And half your groceries are gone,” said Joan, her voice overloud. The New Ladies exchanged glances.

  “That happened to you,” said Alice. “It doesn’t happen to everyone.”

  “Tell me your servants don’t feed every monk in Bangkok from your pantry,” said Joan, still in that strident voice. “And waste good food in those spirit houses.”

  “Joan, hush,” said Irene, shooting her eyes at the doorway to communicate that her own servants might be in earshot.

  “The spirit houses are for the spirits who were displaced by building on the land,” said Helen. She had had a job in America, hadn’t she? A teacher of some kind. “I think they’re beautiful.” Genevieve had never thought of them that way, but she had to admit that they could be, miniature stone temples on pillars, piled with flowers and offerings.

  Joan was no longer paying attention, chewing at a cuticle.

  “Feeding the monks and putting offerings in the spirit houses are important Thai customs,” said Genevieve. “It’s best to look the other way. Monks and spirits don’t eat much.” Everyone smiled at that. “Plus, a good Number One is worth her weight in groceries. Once you have your Number One, she can help you find the rest of your staff—your Numbers Two and Three, and your driver and gardener.”

  “Five servants?” said Renee Martelli. Her frown accentuated her odd looks, her features already naturally crowded to the middle of her face. She would benefit from bangs, but her hair was pulled off her forehead and teased high above a shiny expanse of olive brow. She was looking less self-assured than she had when she’d arrived in her trousers, bearing a cellophane-wrapped plate of sticky, cobbled squares, like something at a bake sale. Irene had accepted it without a flicker of surprise, but while turning away to hand it off to her Number Three, had caught Genevieve’s gaze and held it, a wordless communication.

  “Once you’ve been here awhile, five servants won’t seem nearly enough,” Genevieve said.

  “I’ve driven on the left before,” said Henry Schultz. “I don’t need a driver, do I?”

  Genevieve didn’t know what to make of him—didn’t he have a job?

  “Robert drives himself,” she said. “But he doesn’t enjoy it.”

  “Tuk-tuks are lifesavers,” said Alice. “You do not want to walk anywhere, not even a couple of blocks. Too hot. Just flag one down and negotiate the price before getting in. One baht is reasonable for a short distance. That’s five cents.”

  “Just be sure not to go where the tuk-tuk driver wants to take you. He’ll drive you to a jewelry store or some tourist place and try to force you to buy things,” said Helen.

  “Tuk-tuks. Those motorcycle-cab things with the seats on the back?” asked Clara. “They look dangerous.”

  “They’re perfectly safe,” said Helen.

  “Ha,” said Joan. She took a cigarette box out of her purse and snapped it open.

  As though that had been a signal, New Ladies began taking cigarette packets from their own purses and bending toward one another over the flames of lighters like tulips nodding in a rainstorm, the room filling with the lighter clicks and murmurs of thank you.

  “No one tells you how it really is,” said Joan. “None of this”—she waved her lit cigarette to indicate the gathering—“prepares you.”

  “I found these meetings very helpful,” Irene said stiffly. She and Joan had been in the same batch of New Ladies.

  Joan snorted. “Pioneer laundry and cooking. How to beat the heat.” She coughed out a bitter laugh. “The servants do the laundry and cooking. And it’s impossible to beat this heat. It’s a hundred and three degrees outside right now at eleven thirty a.m., and this isn’t even the hot season.”

  “What should we discuss, then?” said Genevieve. She heard the vibrato of anger in her own voice, quelled it for the next sentence. “What is it that we’re leaving out, Joan?”

  “This isn’t the hot season?” whispered Clara.

  “How about the poisonous water?” Joan said. “Dysentery streaming from every tap. How about incurable malaria, always one mosquito bite away? How about the rain? The rain!” She jerked her hand in a gesture of outrage, scattering cigarette ash. “It’s biblical.”

  “There’s nothing really to do about the rain,” said Helen practically.

  “It’s not just the constant flooding,” Joan said. “The rain brings the insects. And then the frogs come to eat the insects, which would actually be helpful, except that snakes come to eat the frogs, and worse snakes come to eat those snakes. Snakes are literally everywhere.” She looked around at the other Ladies. “We had a snake come out of a toilet, remember that?”

  None of the Ladies responded, but they all remembered that. It had been a nonvenomous variety of snake, and its fangs had merely grazed the thigh of Giles Benderby, but there had been a lot of talk afterward about how best to prevent such a thing from happening again. The decision had been reached: the toilet lid must always be kept down, and everyone must knock on the toilet lid and then look in carefully before sitting, every time. Even the smallest child was taught to do that.

  The New Ladies were sliding alarmed eyes toward one another. Toilet snakes, malaria, dysentery. It was too much to tell them all at once. These meetings were intended to drip the truth onto the New Ladies, not deliver a choking flood. Irene was looking urgently at Genevieve. Genevieve knew she should speak, but sat as if mesmerized, her mind blank. How could she counter what Joan was saying? Every word of it was true.

  “I once saw a tuk-tuk ride up onto the sidewalk,” said Joan. “It pushed a crowd right into the khlong.” She stabbed her cigarette toward Genevieve as if in accusation. “Those khlongs are basically streams of liquid garbage.”

  Immediately after making this statement, Joan gave a little scream and leapt up from her seat. It was inexplicable—was she possessed?—until Genevieve saw that the cigarette between Joan’s fingers was no longer smoking: the burning end had fallen into her lap.

  Henry Schultz was the first to move. He nimbly stepped on the ember where it had tumbled onto the floor, produced a square of handkerchief from his pocket and immersed it briefly in one of the carafes of ice water sweating on the nearby sideboard, then stepped to Joan’s side and pressed the wet cloth to the smoking hole in the fabric over her upper thigh. Joan stood with the empty unburning paper tube still between the fingers of one upraised hand, looking down at the strange man’s hand so close to her crotch. Genevieve felt an enormous desire to laugh.

  Helen moved next, replacing Henry Schultz’s hand on the handkerchief with her own and nudging Joan out of her frozen stance, crouch-walking along with her toward the room’s exit. Their heels clicked down the hallway. A distant door opened, then closed.

  “Joan’s had a terrible time,” Irene told the New Ladies.

  “We shouldn’t gossip,” said Alice, her lowered voice warmly promising the opposite. The New Ladies angled their heads toward her. “Her son overdosed on heroin a few months ago.”

  It had been a horrible incident, the boy comatose in one of those rooms that were scattered around the seedier quarters of the city, his scared friends abandoning him there, leaving him to the mercy of strangers, one of whom had taken him to the hospital.

  “Did he die?” Clara quavered. She looked on the verge of tears.

  “No, no,” said Irene soothingly. “He was sent home to live with grandparents.”

  There was no appreciable change in the New Ladies�
� expressions, the word heroin still beating in the air.

  “I’ve been here more than four years,” Genevieve said. The crisp sentence pulled all of the women’s attention to her. She watched it sink in: four years. “I’ve never seen a tuk-tuk on the sidewalk. No one I know has been bitten by a venomous snake, or contracted malaria.” This was stretching the truth. “As for drugs, we all know that they are a problem with teenagers in the U.S. these days too.” The New Ladies nodded. “It’s a simple matter of discipline.” The implication was clear: no normal teenager used heroin, no good mother let him.

  “For every inconvenience to living in Bangkok, there is a solution,” Genevieve continued. The words were coming easily now, automatically, as though from a mechanism inside her, a player piano plinking them out from a scroll. “To cope with the heat, install air-conditioning units in the bedrooms and good strong fans in the rest of the house and stay indoors during the hottest hours of the day, which are noon to four. Walk slowly, and get new clothing, everything sized just a little larger than you wear at home, so the fabric doesn’t cling. You’ll need several pairs of sandals to wear outdoors; save your closed shoes for air-conditioned events.” She and Irene called this the loose clothes, open toes speech. “You can have an entire wardrobe handmade here for very little money. Think of it—as many new outfits as you want, and your husbands won’t object to the expense.” Relieved smiles were starting around the room, although to her own ears, her voice sounded like one of those demented television-commercial housewives: Mmm, you can really taste the difference. “And while it’s true that tap water isn’t safe to drink, bear in mind that you will never need to drink from the tap. Your servants will boil up a supply of water to keep in the refrigerator; you can have them put a small bottle into each bathroom for toothbrushing. As for malaria, having your garden sprayed twice a year will very effectively control the mosquitoes.”