“Yes, Mother, of course. I thought you knew, would have seen. George Parker wants to marry me, and I love him, and I think he’s wonderful and so kind, but strong, and I said yes.”
“Gwinnie, he must be twenty years older than you.”
“Eighteen years, Mother, actually seventeen years and eleven months. But it doesn’t matter. We’ve discussed it, and it doesn’t matter.”
“Well, Gwinnie! Well! Well! Well!”
Totally nonplussed, Mary Sekloong retreated behind the barricade of parental authority.
“So you and George Parker have it all worked out. I suppose I should be glad to hear that. It spares your father and me so much trouble. To you the difference in age may seem a trifle. But George is a mature man, not a silly young girl. He should know better. He’s almost forty, and you’re not yet twenty-two. Have you thought? You’ll be forty when he’s sixty. You could be left a widow at fifty. You do plan to marry in the Church? You can’t go back, you know. Have you told your father?”
“No, Mother, I wanted to tell you first.” Quiet, obedient Guinevere was wholly in command, the steely Sekloong strain showing itself in her for the first time. “Yes, Mother, we have thought it out. We’ve discussed the age difference many times. George was … still is a little reluctant. He wants only what’s best for me. But I know, Mother, I know with all my heart that he’s best for me. If I don’t marry George, I won’t ever marry anyone else, and I’ll regret it all my life.”
“Are you asking my permission?” Mary was astonished by the strength of her daughter’s will. “Or are you just telling me? I suppose you want our blessing, your father’s and mine?”
“Yes, Mother dear, of course we do. I’m asking you, begging you with all my heart.”
“And if we say no? What then?”
“I’ll be very sad.”
“Sad—and what then?”
“I don’t know, Mother, really I don’t. We don’t want to defy you.”
Mary gazed at Guinevere’s calm, candid features as if seeing her for the first time. The petite, red-haired girl was absolutely determined, while shrewdly evading a direct confrontation. How could she have known her child for more than twenty-one years, yet not known her at all?
“Where,” she asked mechanically, “will you live?”
“We thought Shanghai for a year or so. George can’t leave his work yet. But he wants to go back to America. He really belongs there, and it’ll be better for me. In Shanghai, he says, I’ll always be different … be cruelly snubbed as a Eurasian. In America they may not notice. Anyway, it won’t be as bad.”
“It’s a long way from home,” Mary stalled.
“We know—and we’re sorry. But you’ll visit, and we’ll visit. George says we must decide—either to settle here or put down roots in America.”
“Except for the age difference, Gwinnie,” Mary conceded, “you could do much worse. George Parker’s a good man. And I agree with him about Shanghai.”
“I know, Mother,” Guinevere smiled. “We discussed that too.”
“Well, let me think about it,” Mary temporized. “I’ll speak to your father, but you must tell your grandfather.”
“Thank you, Mother. You’re a dear. I knew we could count on you.”
Guinevere smothered her mother with a hug. Weary of fighting her daughters, Mary knew she would finally give her blessing to the match.
“I haven’t said yes,” she nonetheless cautioned. “Just we’ll see, just maybe. But what about money?”
“George says he doesn’t want any money. Not because he doesn’t respect you and Father. He just doesn’t want anyone to think he’s marrying me for money.”
“Very high-minded,” Mary observed dryly. “Particularly since his own father’s by no means impoverished. A banker, isn’t he? We’ll see about that. You can hardly come to him in your shift.”
Mary was never to be able to remember Charlotte’s wedding clearly. She retained only a confused impression of incense, chanting, and massed flowers whose heavy fragrance and many hues overwhelmed her senses. The shocks that preceded and followed the ceremony remained clearer in her memory than the marriage she had been forced to accept—and to view through a mist of the tears she had sworn she would not shed.
Shortly after Guinevere left her in the morning-room, Charles had returned home. Obsessed with her own news, Mary barely noticed his troubled frown.
“Parker? George Parker?” Charles was taken aback when she told him of her conversation with their elder daughter. “Nice chap, but this is a surprise. Never thought Gwinnie was sly. Anyway, I always thought George was more your admirer than Gwinnie’s.”
“How do you feel about it, Charles? I’m afraid she’ll insist whatever we say, and I’m tired of fighting. But how do you feel?”
“Damn it, how can I know what I think when I haven’t had a chance to think? You only told me twenty seconds ago.”
“I’m sorry, my dear,” she replied with unwonted humility. “I suppose it was a shock.”
“Truly a shock. At this rate, we’ll soon have no children left. But I suppose you approve. After all, he’s not Chinese.”
“Charles, I’ve said I was sorry about that. I can’t say more. I don’t necessarily approve just because he’s not Chinese. And there’s the age difference, the distance if they live in America.”
“Also, he’s not Eurasian.” Charles would not lightly relinquish his righteous grievance. “That’s on the credit side, too.”
“Charles, I love you and you’re Eurasian. I could hardly dislike Eurasians—my own children, by my own choice. But I hate what the world does to Eurasians, what you’ve suffered and I’ve suffered—myself and for you.”
“All right, my dear. That was unfair.”
He kissed the top of her head in a rare gesture of tenderness. Gratefully, she reached up and stroked his cheek.
“Look here, Mary. We’ve got other problems. Harry’s turned up for the wedding, and …”
“But why shouldn’t he?”
“Of course, he should be here. But he’s told me what he meant by ‘borrowing’ Thomas and James. I think he was afraid to tell you.”
“Borrowing? I’d almost forgotten. I thought it was just another of Harry’s wild fancies. What does he mean?”
“They both want to play soldiers, attend the Whampoa Military Academy. Harry’s all for it. I’m so damned angry it’s hard to tell you.”
“But I thought that—or something like that—was what you wanted.” Mary could not restrain her own bitterness. “After all, it is Chinese.”
“Dammit, Mary, I won’t bicker with you, not now about this. I don’t want my sons to be soldiers, Chinese or not. Good iron doesn’t make nails, you know, and good men don’t make soldiers. I’m not so devoted to China. That’s Harry’s line and the old man’s, not mine. Can’t we discuss this without …”
“I’m sorry, Charles,” she said with honest contrition for the second time in three minutes. “I can’t think what’s got into me tonight. You’d think I was the nervous bride.”
“What do you think of Harry’s latest craziness?”
“Very little, I confess. What’s that song? ‘I Didn’t Raise My Son To Be A Soldier’?”
“Don’t dither, Mary. I know it’s a shock, but this is serious. Damned serious. Of course, the boys are all for it.”
“Suppose we refuse?”
“We could. But what good would that do? I’m afraid they’d just go. They’re too old. And my lunatic brother would smuggle them to Canton with great pleasure. Besides, I don’t want to split the family further.”
“Charles, can we really do anything?” Mary realized that she could not oppose Harry’s plans for his own son, while Thomas would, as usual, follow his younger brother. “They’ve both been mad about soldiering since they were very small.”
“We could try. Send them away to school in England.”
“Do you really think so, Charles?”
&nb
sp; “No, I suppose not. Not really. We can’t lock them up. And I can’t stand any more family fights.”
“I’ve been afraid of this,” Mary mused. “James is becoming as hot a political firebrand as Harry. And Thomas won’t be separated from James.”
“It may be just as well, though …” Charles said hesitantly.
“How can you say that? If we can’t persuade them, can’t stop them, that’s one thing. But we must try, we must talk to them. How can you say it’s just as well?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you, Mary. Thought it wasn’t necessary. But the old man’s furious with James and almost as angry with Thomas. Might be good to get them away for a while.”
“Why?” she asked. “The boys and Father don’t see each other that much.”
“That’s right,” Charles rumbled in embarrassment. “But it’s who James has been seeing. That’s the trouble.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Well, it’s not easy to tell you, my dear. But James, it seems, is running wild. A woman.”
“At seventeen?” She was mildly disturbed, but not surprised. “Why should your father mind? How can he object? James is a chip off the old block. Both old blocks.”
“Because of one particular girl. You don’t keep up with the old man’s adventures, do you?”
“Certainly not! I don’t care to and couldn’t if I did.”
“It seems there’s one particular young lady. The old man took up with her six months ago, and now James has got himself involved with her.”
“Foolish girl should know she can’t have the best of both worlds. That’s not James’s fault.”
“The old man doesn’t take to it that kindly.”
“He’ll cool down,” she replied with composure. “He always does. But what of Thomas?”
“Oh, he just tags along. Thomas Tag-along, he is. Not that girl, of course, but others. But when I left him, the old man was saying: ‘Let them go. Let them go to Whampoa. Maybe it’ll do them some good. Their parents obviously can’t control them.’ It’s not very nice.”
“He won’t pull the temple down on our heads because of adolescent misbehavior, will he?”
“No, I suppose not, of course not. But he can make himself damned unpleasant.”
“I know that. But I’ll have a word with him just as soon as this wedding, this alliance you and he want so badly, is over.”
“And the boys?” Charles asked. “What about Whampoa?”
“All we can do is have a word with them when the marriage hysteria’s over.”
Two days after Charlotte’s wedding, Mary sat in another church for an utterly different ceremony. The new electric fans suspended from the blue-stippled wooden beams of St. John’s Anglican Cathedral whirred uneasily over two plain pine coffins. The sparse ranks of mourners were varied: a few local Portuguese; a group of itinerant British, American, and Australian reporters from the China Mail; and a sprinkling of lower-middle-class Eurasians. Mary’s attendance was a conscious penance, for she hated funerals with superstitious, unreasoning dread. Young Charles, loving, sensitive, and remarkably erudite at eleven, had insisted upon accompanying her.
Within one coffin lay a young American named Harold Hobson who had been chief sub-editor of the China Mail. Within the other was the body of his fiancée, a Eurasian girl called June Shaw who, Mary suspected, was Sir Jonathan’s unacknowledged granddaughter. She had, therefore, felt that some member of the family should be present, and she had ordered the car without informing Charles. As the Anglican priest in his pleated white alb droned through a brief, repellently sterile service, she recalled the conversation that had brought her to the Cathedral.
Michael Ford, a middle-aged Irishman everyone called Henry, was acting-editor of the China Mail. He was one of her unlikely friends whom the children called “Mother’s waifs.” She found his pawky humor amusing and his conversation, ranging from Shakespeare to cricket, more interesting than the gossip about social and commercial machinations she heard too often. Henry Ford had appeared unannounced and unexpected at the Small House about tea time the Sunday after the wedding. Although he obviously did not need another drink, Mary had ordered him a whiskey-and-soda.
“I’ve come, Mary Macushla, to tell you a curious tale.” His words were slurred. “Would you like to hear it? A fairy tale that’s nothing to do with the real world you live in?”
She smiled and waited.
“Once upon a time, there were two princesses called Shaw, May and June Shaw. Not really princesses, but young, poor Hong Kong Eurasian girls. Perhaps you know of them?”
She nodded, for she had heard the persistent rumors regarding their ancestry.
“May Shaw, the older one, married a Yank. He wasn’t much of anything in our grand little community, just a chap trying to get by. Worked as a clerk for Gilman’s. No real future. You know Hong Kong. But for May anything white in trousers was a way upward—a way to break out of the pigeonhole where our tolerant, generous Colonial Society filed her. I warn you, this isn’t really a fairy tale. It’s a tragic farce—funny, pathetic, and sad, like the lives of most Eurasians on the China Coast.
“May, like her sister June, was very sensitive. Didn’t like thinking about their mixed blood. Very sensitive. No one knows exactly what happened, perhaps just a word someone dropped. But May took it as a slur on her mixed blood, slurped down a bottle of Lysol, and died in Queen Mary Hospital.
“A year or so later, her sister June, good-looking colleen, became the inamorata, soon fiancée of Harold Hobson, my chief sub. One of Hob’s assignments was writing headlines for the Dorothy Dix column, that Yankee advice-to-the-lovelorn syrup. And one morning, the day before yesterday morning, Hob gets a call from Queen Mary Hospital. The same thing, Lysol.
“He was shattered, but he figured out what’d happened. ’Twas all the fault of that Dorothy Dix woman. Hob’d read a puff in her column for blood-tests before marriage. Foolishly mentioned it in passing to his Miss June Shaw—and she brooded. She didn’t know what a Wassermann test was … begging your pardon, Macushla. She thought it was to test her mixed blood and that Hob was throwing her over. The Lord knows, she was sensitive enough about her mixed blood. So June, too, took the Lysol way out. Hob put the telephone down and just sat there stunned. Then he asked would we run a short obituary. I said sure and loaned him ten dollars. After visiting the Hospital, he bought a bottle of whiskey and took it to his room at the European YMCA in Kowloon. Wrote some letters, finished the bottle, then jumped from the roof, six stories up. End of my fairy tale, Mary.”
Although the story was a baroque blend of farce and tragedy, Mary decided she must attend the funeral. The macabre tale of June Shaw epitomized those unfortunate Eurasian girls who were sustained by neither position nor wealth; they were moved by desperate longing to escape the narrow world without hope in which the prejudice of both Chinese and Europeans confined them.
Mary sat dry-eyed through the impersonal service. When she and young Charles emerged into the blinding sunlight afterward, she felt her gesture had been meaningless. Her youngest son put his hand into her own and led her toward the St. George’s Building. Without speaking, he fished in his pocket for coins as they passed the row of beggars on Battery Path. Accustomed to the Little Mandarin’s thoughtful silences, she was immersed in her own thoughts.
“Mother, we did right to come,” he finally said with the precocious insight that still surprised her. “It was proper that someone from the family should be there.”
She wanted to protest, to deny his knowledge of June Shaw’s parentage. But she kept silent, allowing him to continue.
“Mother, we owe a lot to many people, don’t we? And we don’t always pay our debts, do we? Sometimes I think the whole Sekloong family, except you, is so busy worrying about itself and its place and its possessions that we never worry about anybody else.”
Mary smiled wanly. She could not at that moment refute his observation.
; “Mother,” young Charles said, “I don’t want to be that way. If there were only you and I—perhaps Father and the girls—it might be different. But there’s too much family, too much money, too much pomp and pretence. Mother, I want to go to Stonyhurst. And perhaps I’ll become a priest.”
May 31, 1925–July 9, 1926
The scrolled neon sign flickered violet on the vermilion pillars flanking the entrance of the Alhambra Night Club and dyed the doorman’s gray-caracul shapka a sickly mauve. The six-foot-three former major in the Czar’s Own Preobazensky Guards, who had fought the Bolsheviks to the hopeless end with Admiral Kolchak in Siberia, wore the full-dress regalia of a Don Cossack. Bandoliers crossed his chest; a curved saber hung at his side; and soft-leather boots encased his calves. He contemplated the rabble on Bubbling Wall Road with supreme disdain, even his waxed mustaches curling scornfully. A patrol of Chinese policemen pushed through the throngs, their British sergeant’s commands demonstrating that foreign law governed the Chinese city.
A semi-circle of rickshawmen, pimps, touts, hawkers, and beggars jostled each other just beyond the doorman’s reach. They shouted in a half-dozen languages at the men emerging from the Alhambra’s portals. The patrons, Chinese, Europeans, and Eurasians, were all sleekly well dressed. One woman dared the raucous cordon. The semi-circle parted respectfully when a Packard limousine discharged a heavily painted Chinese opera star. Her powdered white cheeks and sequined cheongsam showed that she was hastening to a rendezvous with her protector.
The chill Shanghai night was damp and penetrating. Sheltered by a corrugated cardboard windbreak, a figure in gray rags lay on the grimy pavement. Jonathan Osgood Sekloong glanced idly at the beggar and saw with revulsion that an emaciated baby sucked one shriveled breast. Groping in his pocket for a silver Mex dollar, worth about four shillings, he looked away from the mother’s pock-marked face. She obviously hoped that the generosity of the International Settlement would help her evade her imminent rendezvous with death. Jonnie dropped the silver dollar into the battered enamel basin at her black-soled feet.
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