No Certain Home

by Marlene Lee

  7

  China 1937

  “Failure. It was failure again and again,” said Zhu De. Agnes sat opposite the Commander-in-Chief, the small table with its single candle between them. “We studied the failure of the Taiping Revolution. Although the Taipings divided up land, freed slaves and women, outlawed opium, they failed.” His face, unsmiling now, was lit from below by the short candle. “Their Kingdom of Heavenly Peace lasted fifteen years until they began to fight among themselves. They grew corrupt. At the same time the British and French waged the Second Opium War of 1858. Three-hundred thousand Taiping civilians were slaughtered in Nanking.”

  Lily Wu, who sat on a straight chair close to the table, lifted her hand. Zhu De paused while she translated.

  “In 1895 China failed again. China lost the war to Japan. I was a nine-year-old student. Our village and all other villages in China were taxed so that war indemnities could be paid. Rice-rioters prowled the roads for food. All China’s blood went to foreign victors. China bled continually.

  “The Reform Movement of 1898 failed, also. The Young Emperor ascended the Dragon Throne. I was twelve years old. My hair was allowed to grow in and my queue was cut off. China was to be industrialized like the West. But the reforms benefited only the merchants and rulers. The peasants were untouched. And without the peasants, backbone and heart of China, reform cannot succeed.” He looked about the cave before his eyes returned to the candle flame. “Thus did we learn from failure.”

  Agnes laid her pencil on the table and flexed her hand. The General stood and walked into the shadows at the back of his cave. He returned with a broken shard of pottery that he held near the candle. Agnes and Lily Wu bent near.

  “I have saved this to remind me of the bowl. It is from my family.”

  “It is broken,” Agnes said.

  “It came from a perfect bowl,” said Zhu De. “We labor to make another bowl. It is the shard that reveals the bowl’s perfection.” Zhu De laid the shard on the table.

  “The bowl is broken,” Agnes insisted, and picked up her notebook and pencil.

  “China was disturbed by foreigners’ spheres of influence,” Zhu De continued without disputing her. “She was drained of land and resources. Russia took Manchuria. Britain took the Yangtze River Valley and Kowloon Peninsula across from Hong Kong. France took provinces near Indo-China. Japan took Fukien Province near Formosa. Spain, then America, took the Philippines. All robbed China.” He picked up the pottery shard and turned it in the candlelight. Its crazed surface gleamed. Gradually his expression freed itself from pain, his eyes warmed, and his generous lips relaxed.

  “Again China struggled out of feudalism,” he said. “Revolutionaries formed a society. They called themselves Boxers.” He looked at Lily Wu. “It means ‘Righteous Harmony Fists.’” Lily We looked at Agnes to see if she understood. Agnes nodded.

  “Again they failed. The Yellow River flooded. Again rice-rioters took to the roads of China. The court diverted righteous anger from themselves to the foreigners who easily defeated the Boxers. Many years later when I lived in Germany I saw Chinese art treasures in comfortable homes. I saw vases from China, paintings, carved furniture, and I knew that my country had been looted.” He put his palms together on the table.

  “Foreigners profited from China’s sickness. Cheap Western goods replaced Chinese goods in the markets of every small village. No longer did the Old Weaver come and weave cloth from our cotton. We used western nails in place of Chinese nails. Foreign kerosene was cheaper than seed oil from our own crops. Chinese reformers longed to imitate the West. ‘We must study modern methods,’ my old teacher said, though he himself was unsure how to do so.

  “One day a traveler left a small book in our village. Mr. Hsi brought it to school. He dismissed our regular classes and we spent days studying this book of science.”

  The General’s voice dropped. His face twisted. “It was a pamphlet from a Cleveland soap factory, simple drawings of machinery that we took to be basic science.” Agnes wrote rapidly and did not look at his embarrassment. Silence fell. Agnes and Lily Wu stood. Zhu De roused himself, picked up the pottery shard, and watched them go.

  The next day Agnes and Lily Wu went to the library at the Communist Headquarters in Yan’an. Lily helped Agnes find a Chinese reference book. They read what Marx had said in 1857 when he was the London correspondent for the New York Tribune. China, the oldest empire in the world, he had written, was in its death struggle.

  In another part of the book they found a letter from Mark Twain to the New York Sun on Christmas Eve, 1900. He criticized the payments that Christian missionaries exacted from the Chinese government. The next day Agnes took the book to the General’s cave and asked Lily Wu to translate for Zhu De.

  “Who is this Mark Twain?” he asked, and Agnes explained, surprised by feelings of pride and homesickness, that he was an American writer who, like herself, had spent his childhood in Missouri.

  8

  Denver 1910

  Failure. Agnes had failed. Sitting in the train car, she fed her infant nephew when he was hungry and jiggled him mechanically when he cried. Since Mother’s death in the mining camp and Nellie’s death in Oklahoma, life had gone out of everything Agnes touched. She’d shipped Mother’s body to Oklahoma for burial beside Nellie, then quit her teaching job to look after Father and the children. But Father drank, the children ran wild, and Nellie’s baby sickened.

  At the Denver depot she handed down the baby through the train window, almost as if she might stay on the train herself and go right on through Denver. As soon as Aunt Tillie reached up for the bundle, the young life in its dirty blanket began to wail. When Tillie looked into the wizened little face, the baby looked back. For the first time in weeks its desperate gaze locked into place, as if it knew this woman possessed enough strength and comfort to help a baby stay alive.

  “Didn’t know if you got my letter,” Agnes said after she’d gotten off the train and followed her aunt along city streets to the bus stop. People on the sidewalks—white, Indian, Mexican, European—were as swarthy and spicy a mix as she’d lived with in Trinidad but they held no interest for her. The world used to be a round, spicy place. Now, since Mother’s death, it was flat.

  “Here’s where we get off,” said Tillie after a long, silent ride on the street car. Carrying her valise, Agnes followed Tillie down Colfax. Horses and buggies and an occasional motor car rolled past.

  “I don’t have enough room for you and the baby,” Tillie said, transferring the child’s weight to the other shoulder.

  Agnes thought of the mesa and the adobe schoolhouse; of the empty schoolroom at night where she had read and written Robert Hampton and improved herself. She thought of it and then stopped thinking of it.

  “We don’t take up much space.” She followed Tillie through an iron gate set in a high brick wall. Like the wall, the house Tillie lived in was brick, and big as a hotel. From the wide porch furnished with two hanging swings and wicker furniture, they entered a hallway. Agnes glanced into the parlor at a piano, wing-back chairs, a fireplace with marble mantel.

  “Is this a hotel?” she asked.

  “Not exactly,” said Aunt Tillie. They went to the back of the house and up some stairs. Tillie’s room was on the top floor.

  “You get your exercise,” Agnes said. She let go of the valise handle and leaned against the wall. But Tillie wasn’t listening. She’d made a crib for the baby, a basket that rested on two straight chairs pulled together to face each other.

  “Should we change his diaper?” Tillie asked.

  Agnes took a clean diaper from the suitcase.

  “I set a wash basin in the bathroom,” Tillie said. As Agnes peeled off the diaper, a stricken look crossed Tillie’s face. “I forgot to buy powder.”

  “You don’t need it unless he’s got a rash,” said Agnes. “I just wash him up good.” She had dropped her schoolteacher diction and was back talking the way she always had.

>   She went down the hall to the bathroom, the finest one she’d ever seen: white tile floor, long porcelain tub, toilet with water tank and chain. She put the diaper to soak and returned to Tillie’s room. By now the baby had fallen asleep in its basket.

  Tillie stared out the window before she removed her hat and laid it on the four-poster. “When are you going home?” she asked. “I don’t have much room here.”

  Agnes nodded toward the sofa. “I can sleep on that,” she said, and knelt to unpack.

  “My landlady doesn’t like me to have overnight guests,” Tillie said uneasily. “You can stay for a few days. Then we’ll decide what to do.” She looked away. “What about the children?”

  Agnes’ expression dulled. Her voice flattened. “Father beats the boys. He tried to beat me. Mother stood for it, but I won’t.”

  “If you’re not going back,” Tillie said in a constricted voice, “what will happen to Myrtle and John and Sam?”

  “Myrtle’s hired out. Sam and John left for Oklahoma.” She had sent them to Nellie’s husband, sent them all off when Father was up in the camps. Before he could get back, she left with the baby. She had not told him where she was going.

  Her family was her body. She had not known that Mother was the heart of her body.

  “Charles Smedley has this coming,” Tillie said bitterly, “stealing my sister’s money from her trunk the minute she died. He took the last little bit from her… .” Tillie let herself go, and sank onto the sofa. Her cries woke the baby. The baby began crying, too.

  Agnes crossed the room. Distracted, she jiggled the baby basket, then ran to the woodburning stove at the end of the hall; ran back for hot pads; returned to pick up the hot kettle; carried it to the bathroom; poured boiling water over the diaper in the tin basin; added cold water; scrubbed the diaper with a bar of soap; wrung it out over the basin; hung it on a towel rod to dry; ran back to Tillie’s room; sank down beside her aunt. At last, realizing she was afflicted, she broke into sobs and tried, without success, to stanch her tears with the heels of her hands.

  Agnes got off the street car at the Colfax stop and began walking. Her term at the stenography school in Greeley, paid for by Aunt Tillie, had ended. Shifting her suitcase to her other hand, she looked up at Tillie’s window on the top floor. The baby was gone, taken back by its father to Oklahoma. Before he left he’d asked Tillie to marry him, but Tillie had refused.

  “He would never be able to forget how I earn my living,” Tillie had written Agnes at the stenography school. Agnes realized that her aunt had made up her mind about men. Made up her mind about the parlor house in Denver; about her room and what went on there. Made up her mind about her body and her money. Tillie had decided what was hers and what wasn’t.

  Agnes entered the house. In the parlor off the hall a woman sat at the piano singing “I Dream of Jeannie With the Light-Brown Hair.” Agnes stopped outside the door and listened, her valise in her hand.

  “Borne like a vapor—” The woman turned on the piano stool. She wore heavy make-up and looked shrewd. “What do you want?” she asked.

  Agnes backed out of the doorway. “I was just listening,” she said. She had heard that sweet, sad song somewhere in her childhood. Not in the mining camps of Colorado, but earlier, in the green and rolling hills of Missouri. Mother’s people had sung those sad and sugary words.

  “Where are you going?” The singer came out of the parlor and squinted down the corridor, an aging woman trying to look young. “Who are you?”

  Agnes looked back over her shoulder at the corseted body hour-glassed in front of the window at the far end of the hall.

  “I’m Agnes Smedley!” she called back. “I’m visiting Tillie Ralls!” She was not Jeannie with the light-brown hair, and she was not Annie Laurie, either, the song that soon began drifting in fragments up the steps behind her. She was Agnes Smedley, visiting her aunt, Tillie Ralls, a prostitute who had saved herself but could not save Mother any more than she or anyone could save the Jeannies and Annie Lauries and all the beautiful, sad women of poetry and song who do not save themselves.

  Aunt Tillie was waiting for her at the top of the stairs. Agnes lifted her valise over the last step.

  “Have you finished the term?” Tillie asked. Agnes nodded. Inside the room they looked at each other warily. Agnes set the valise on the floor and knelt beside it.

  “I got a letter from your brothers,” Tillie said. She held out a single piece of paper toward Agnes.

  Agnes shrugged.

  “John and Sam—” Tillie began again.

  Agnes bent over her few belongings. “I don’t have time to read it.” Pivoting on her knees, she emptied everything she owned into the bottom bureau drawer.

  “Your sister and brothers need you,” Tillie said. She began to pace about the room. “My landlady won’t let me keep overnight guests.”

  “I don’t see why not,” Agnes growled. “There’s a lot of coming and going in this house.”

  Tillie shot her a glance. “I make a living here,” she said. “It pays the bills.” She returned to the bureau and looked at herself in the mirror. Gingerly she touched the dark circles under her eyes. Then she picked up a tortoise-shell comb and slowly, rhythmically, began to comb her hair.

  Agnes got to her feet. She felt no gratitude. “This house is noisy,” she said. “It’s hard to get any sleep.” But since she needed a place to stay, she would have to ignore the nighttime laughter of men and women and the music from the bar drifting through hallways. She wished she could consider Tilly’s line of work. But men’s sex terrified her. Without being certain of what exactly her aunt did to earn a living, Agnes knew she, herself, could not do it.

  “You can stay one night,” Tillie said. “Longer than that, and I lose my place here.”

  Agnes stood biting a fingernail. “I have to get a job,” she said. “I’ll get a room somewhere.”

  “I can call a friend of mine. He’s a newspaper man.”

  “Maybe he needs a reporter.”

  “I just sent you to stenography school!” Tilly snapped. “You’re trained to be a secretary. If you’re not going to take care of your brothers and sister, then you’re going to be a secretary!” They glared until, moved by common memories of a frail, sad-eyed woman, they reached for each other. Agnes clung to her aunt as they stood teetering in the middle of the room. After a bit Tilly took Agnes by the shoulders and shook her gently.

  “Take care of your sister and brothers,” she said. “I’ll support all of you as well as I can.”

  “I can’t take care of them! I can’t!” She did not know how to be a mother; she could not be a mother or act like a mother. Mother had been a mother at great expense. There was grave danger in being a mother.

  Tilly stroked her niece’s hair and kissed her cheeks. She led her to a chair, but Agnes refused to sit.

  “I’ll be a secretary,” she said. “And then,” she added in a low, rigid voice, “I’ll be a newspaper reporter.”

  “I’ll rent a room for you,” Tillie said. “Go talk to the editor.”

  Agnes went for the interview.

  “What sort of experience have you had?” asked the editor.

  “Teacher. Stenography school in Greeley,” Agnes answered. “But I don’t want to be a secretary. I want to be a reporter.”

  The editor laughed. “Have you worked on a newspaper before?”

  “No,” said Agnes. “But I read a lot. I work hard. I’m a fast learner.”

  The editor gave her an appraising look. “Let’s talk about it over dinner,” he said, and took her to the Windsor Hotel on Larimer Street. Although the editor said the hotel had grown seedy, Agnes thought it splendid. She felt distinguished beside the tall, educated man whose fine head of hair was just beginning to gray at the temples.

  “My parents brought me here when I was a boy,” he said. “There were skylights in the ceilings then, and a gas-jetted chandelier right above where we’re standing.” Beneath heavy l
ids his eyes roamed the lobby. “Ask your aunt about the old Windsor.” He took her arm and guided her toward the dining room. “She knows all the best hotels in Denver.” Agnes glanced up to see if he was insulting Aunt Tillie. “Knows all the best people, too,” he added seriously.

  At dinner he told her what fork to use. The fricasse was delicious, whatever “fricasse” meant. The editor had ordered it, so it must be an elegant dish. He said her dress set off her slimness, and the gray set off her blue eyes. Gray added an interesting smoky effect, he said. He spoke smoothly and listened well as she talked about the schoolhouse on the mesa.

  “Why don’t you get another teaching job?”

  Agnes shook her head. “My certificate’s expired.”

  “Held any other jobs?”

  “Domestic work.”

  The editor put his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Tell me about the stenography course.”

  “It was a waste of time and Aunt Tillie’s money. I don’t want to be a secretary. I want to be a newspaper reporter.”

  “Maybe some day I’ll let you write for the society page.” He leaned back and wiped his mouth with a linen napkin.

  “I’m not experienced in society,” she said. “I’d rather write news.”

  “You have to learn the newspaper business before you can do that,” he said. “You have to write and write and write.”

  Agnes stopped chewing. Since she’d quit her teaching job, she hadn’t written much. “I took English at the stenography school,” she said. The term in Greeley might be useful after all. “I work hard,” she repeated. “I’m a fast-learner. If you give me an assignment, I can do it.”

  “I’m sure you can,” said the editor. “What do you like to do in your free time?”

  “Read,” said Agnes. “But I don’t have much free time. I clean house for Tillie’s landlady every day.”