Mr Chen's Emporium

by Deborah O'Brien

  ‘Who’s going to start?’ Jennie asked.

  ‘I will,’ said Tanya, standing up. ‘Angie, you’ve been so busy lately with the preparations for the show that you’ve had to neglect Amy. So we’ve done a bit of investigating for you. We had a little meeting and delegated the research. It was my job to find out what happened to Amy between 1873 and 1933. I’ve even come up with another building for you to draw, but I guess it’s a little late for that, at least if you want to finish it in time for the exhibition.’

  ‘Which building?’ asked Angie.

  ‘Well, Amy Chen became quite the real estate entrepreneur. She bought the big block of land next to the emporium where she built a hotel which opened in 1886.’

  ‘Do you mean the Boutique Hotel? I love that building,’ said Angie. ‘If I ever win the lottery, that’s the place I’d like to buy.’

  ‘Back then,’ said Tanya, ‘it was known as the Emporium Hotel. And according to the ads in the Millbrooke Gazette, it was a very fancy place to stay, with exotic interiors and every possible mod con. There were even internal bathrooms at the end of the corridors. Ladies at the south and gents at the north.’

  Tanya produced a sheet of printout.

  EMPORIUM HOTEL

  TWENTY-FIVE COMMODIOUS ROOMS, DECORATED IN

  ORIENTAL STYLE.

  EVERY ATTENTION GIVEN TO TOURISTS AND

  COMMERCIAL GENTLEMEN.

  LETTERS AND TELEGRAMS PROMPTLY DEALT WITH.

  EFFICIENT COACH SERVICE DAILY,

  EXCEPT SUNDAYS, TO AND FROM GRANTHURST RAILWAY STATION.

  MRS CHARLES CHEN, PROPRIETRESS.

  ‘I also found a photograph from February 1917,’ said Tanya.

  In the picture Amy was standing in front of a huge table with a silver candelabra as the centrepiece. In spite of her sixty-two years, she was dressed in a big picture hat and an elegant Edwardian gown. Her waist still looked slim.

  The caption read:

  Mrs Charles Chen, proprietress of the Emporium Hotel,

  celebrates its thirty-first anniversary by holding a

  luncheon to raise money for our troops.

  Angie couldn’t take her eyes off the photo of Amy as a mature woman. For so long there had been an image burnt onto her brain of a teenage bride, forever young.

  ‘I guess it’s my turn next,’ said Narelle. ‘I looked into the Chens. First of all, I have some good news. There’s a baby. I found the birth notice in the Gazette.’

  Angie’s eyes widened. ‘A baby. Amy’s baby?’

  ‘Yes, she must have been pregnant when Charles died. It was a boy.’

  ‘A boy!’ Angie put her hand to her mouth to suppress the squeal of excitement building in her throat. It was a few seconds before she could speak. ‘What did she call him?’

  ‘Charles Alexander Chen.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Angie, tears pricking her eyes. ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I haven’t checked the newspapers, but I did visit the cemetery and he’s not there.’

  ‘Well, he’s not at Millerbrooke either,’ said Angie. ‘Or I would have found him. Actually, it’s a wonder I didn’t see his name on Amy’s gravestone.’ Then she remembered that parts of the inscription had been worn away. ‘Maybe I should go back and take another look.’

  ‘Do you think he might have moved to the city?’ asked Moira. ‘That’s what young people do nowadays.’

  ‘I’ll keep searching for him,’ promised Narelle.

  ‘I’m next,’ said Moira. ‘And my assignment is the saddest. We were all curious about the cause of Charles’s death. So I checked the parish register. It was black canker.’

  ‘What the hell is that?’ asked Narelle.

  ‘It sounds horrible,’ said Jennie.

  ‘You can say that again,’ said Moira. ‘They had several names for it back then – all pretty graphic. In those days it killed more Australians than any other disease.’

  ‘So what is it?’ asked Narelle impatiently.

  ‘Diphtheria.’

  Nobody spoke for a few seconds. Then Jennie stood up.

  ‘My contribution is a cheerful one, thank goodness. Do you all remember the day Angie read out Eliza’s story? I decided I’d like to know more about her. So I made some phone calls. Although it’s not as common a name as Smith and Jones, there are a helluva lot of Millers in the district. Anyway, only one claims a connection to the Millerbrooke Millers. Her name’s Mary and she lives at Cockatoo Ridge. She was married to a Ted Miller who passed away about five years ago. It turns out Ted was the grandson of James Miller, Joseph’s son. So I drove out to her house for a chat. Mary had some old photos of James. What a good-looking man he was. Blond, curly hair and at least six foot tall.’

  ‘I bet if he were alive today,’ Narelle interjected, ‘Jennie would be trying to crack onto him on a social media site.’

  Ignoring her, Jennie continued: ‘Mary told me something very interesting about Eliza. She wanted to be a doctor, but there was nowhere in Australia that accepted female students. So she went overseas. By then she would have been in her late twenties, and that was considered too old to be a student, so she lied about her age and said she was eighteen instead. Mary told me it started a family tradition. Ever since then, the Miller women have put their age back by ten years.’

  ‘Don’t we all do that anyway?’ interrupted Narelle. ‘On my internet profile I’m thirty-six.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were forty-six!’ exclaimed Jennie. ‘I thought you were my age.’

  ‘And how old is that?’

  ‘Twenty-eight.’

  ‘Yeah, sure!’

  ‘Jennie, what happened to Eliza?’ asked Angie, trying to change the subject.

  Directing a dark look at Narelle, Jennie returned to her explanation. ‘Once Eliza graduated, she returned to Australia, but she wasn’t allowed to practise in a hospital. I don’t know whether it was because she was a woman or on account of the overseas qualification or a bit of both. Anyway, she came back here and helped run the general practice.’

  ‘So that’s why it says “A pioneering woman” on her gravestone,’ said Angie. ‘And it also explains the quotation from Pasteur about grasping opportunities.’

  ‘But there’s more,’ said Jennie. ‘This is the part none of you know about. Not even Narelle.’ She gave her friend a superior smile. ‘While I was there, Mary told me about her son who’s a teacher at the local primary school. He’s divorced with two little girls. Anyway, they’re staying with Mary until they can find a place of their own. Just as I was leaving, her son turned up. And guess what? His name’s Mark. He looks just like James Miller. And he asked for my phone number.’

  There was a silence while mouths dropped open. Then everyone was talking at once.

  ‘That’s not the end of the story,’ said Jennie, interrupting them. ‘He rang me the same night and we went out last Sunday.’

  ‘A real man, Jennie,’ said Angie, giving her a hug. ‘And you met him face to face. In the old-fashioned way.’

  ‘We’re going to the pizzeria tonight. He’s bringing his kids. And I want you girls to know something important.’ Jennie took a deep breath as if she was about to give evidence in court. ‘I’ve decided I’m not going to sleep with him until at least the third date.’

  They laughed until their faces were wet with tears. Finally Ros took something silver out of her pocket – a memory stick.

  ‘Angie, we’ve put everything we found on this flash drive, so you can add it to your Amy Chen file.’

  ‘Thank you, everybody,’ said Angie through her tears. She wasn’t sure if they were from laughing or crying. ‘I wonder what Amy would make of her life being squeezed onto a tiny circuit board the size of her thumb.’

  ‘She would have embraced the technology,’ said Moira. ‘Look what she did with the Emporium Hotel. All the latest innovations.’

  ‘We’re so proud of Amy,’ said Ros. ‘She kept on going despite the loss of h
er husband. She rebuilt her life and achieved something positive. She was the kind of woman we’d all like for a friend. In fact, Angie, she reminds us a lot of you.’

  After they left, Angie put the USB into her laptop and browsed through the material. She lingered over the photograph of Amy in her grand dining room at the Emporium Hotel, looking so elegant in her dress and hat.

  Then she read the caption again.

  Mrs Charles Chen, proprietress of the Emporium Hotel,

  celebrates its thirty-first anniversary by holding a

  luncheon to raise money for our troops.

  A disturbing line of thought was building inside her head. Was Amy raising money for the troops because it was a good cause, or did she have a personal stake in the war effort? Was her only child, Charles Junior, away at the Western Front? Angie did the sums. He would have been forty-three years old. Too old to serve. Thank goodness. Just to be sure, she checked on the net. The age range for enlistment was nineteen to thirty-eight. What a relief. Then she scrolled down the page, only to find an addendum. In 1915 the upper age was extended to forty-five.

  Angie rushed downstairs, put on her straw hat and sunglasses and went out the front door, not even bothering to lock it behind her – nobody ever locked their houses in Millbrooke. At Miller Street she turned right and almost ran up the road, past the Emporium Hotel and the café. On the corner of Paterson Street at the highest point in the town, she stopped, out of breath, in front of the War Memorial. It was like hundreds of similar shrines across Australia. A slender stone monument, and atop it, a white marble digger in a slouch hat, looking towards the distant hills.

  Angie stepped over the chain encircling the monument. Tentatively she placed her hand against the polished granite. She ran her fingers over the indentations made by the names, but didn’t dare to read them.

  Please don’t be there, she said to herself.

  She found Charles Junior on the western side, facing the setting sun. He was second from the top under a heading which read ‘Killed in action’.

  MAJOR C. A. CHEN (ACD)

  She sat on the stone plinth for quite some time, not crying – she felt too numb to do that – but thinking about the son who had given his mother a reason to keep going after she lost her husband. Then she recalled the words Phil had said to her as he lay in the intensive care unit, attached to tubes and monitors. ‘We should be grateful it’s not Blake or Tim lying in this bed. A child shouldn’t die before his parents.’

  Phil was right. A mother shouldn’t lose her forty-three-year-old son, and certainly not in a war that began in the Balkans and involved empires far distant from Australia. Those beautiful young men buried in foreign soil. Angie counted the names on the Honour Roll. There were fourteen – all different surnames. Fourteen mothers who had lost their sons. Her heart ached for every one of them, and for Amy most of all. How could you recover from something like that? Losing the person who’s the centre of your life? Not once, but twice in a lifetime.

  She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there when she heard a woman’s voice. It was Lisa from the pub.

  ‘Angie, are you all right? I saw you from my window and I thought you might be sick.’

  ‘Thanks, Lisa, I’m okay. I just found Amy’s son. He died in the First World War.’

  For a moment, Lisa looked puzzled. Then she said: ‘Is that the Amy who used to live in the Manse? Richard told me you were researching her. I’m sorry to hear about her son.’

  Angie gave a little strangled laugh. ‘It’s silly really. It was almost a century ago and I’m acting as if he’s my own child.’

  ‘Come and have a drink. You look like you need one.’

  ‘That’s kind of you, Lisa, but I think I’ll go home.’

  When Angie said the word ‘home’, she didn’t simply mean the place where she lived. It was much more than that now.

  Back at the Manse, Angie looked up Major Chen’s military record on the internet, only to find forty pages of scanned documents. The attestation papers were signed in an exquisite script with heavy downstrokes and elegant loops. On the enlistment form was a thumbnail description: six feet tall, one hundred and eighty pounds, olive complexion, brown eyes and black hair – just like his dad. He was married to M. Chen. In 1916 he enlisted in the Army Chaplains’ Department, known as the ACD for short, and was assigned the rank of captain. At the beginning of 1917 he was promoted to major. Chaplain-Major Chen died at Bullecourt on April 11, 1917 from a bullet wound sustained while praying over a dying soldier on the battlefield. He was buried in the cemetery at Noreuil.

  On his enlistment form there was a question asking: ‘What is your trade or calling?’ In reply, he had written: Minister of religion.

  Angie sank into the wing chair in Amy’s room and let the tears fall, unsure whether she was crying for Charles Junior, or for Amy and Charles, or even Angie and Phil. Maybe it was for all of them. She cried so hard, it reminded her of the weeks after Phil died. Finally, when she couldn’t cry any longer, she closed her eyes. It was four o’clock and sunlight was flooding through the arched window. Outside a kookaburra gave a startled laugh. Further down the street someone was mowing their lawn.

  She dozed and dreamed of Amy and Charles. They were celebrating their golden wedding anniversary in the dining room of the Emporium Hotel. Charles Junior was there too. He had a limp from a shrapnel injury, but had survived the war. The room was full of people dressed in evening clothes. Angie was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and felt out of place. At the far table, hard against the side wall, there was someone familiar. A man with grey hair. He had his arm around Blake. Angie exchanged smiles with him.

  When she woke to the sound of wattlebirds outside her window, the dream remained vivid. Amy and Charles growing old together. Wish fulfilment, of course, but it made her smile. Then she recalled the man at the far table.

  It was Phil.

  Afterwards the dream lingered in her head like the smell of a freshly baked sponge cake. Warm and comforting. Although Phil had been part of her dream, it hadn’t resembled the ones from those early weeks in Millbrooke. Back then, her husband had been the star, miraculously returned from the dead, causing her to rejoice and then to crumple when she woke. Today he had been nothing more than a supporting player, just off to the side. She hadn’t rushed to him. In fact, she hadn’t been surprised to see him at all.

  What did it mean? Should she consult Blake? No, she was sure she could work it out for herself. As she sat in her chair, looking at the patches of Amy’s wallpaper still glued to the bedroom wall, she thought she saw something out of the corner of her eye. A flittering movement. Surely not an apparition – she didn’t believe in them anyway. When she turned, she realised it was only the sun flashing through a gap in the curtain. And suddenly Phil’s cameo appearance in her dream made sense. At last she’d found a place for her dead husband – not as a ghost, or as an imaginary friend nobody else could see, but as a source of strength, just there on the periphery of her vision.

  EPILOGUE

  Angie and Richard were seated in the office of Millbrooke’s solicitor, Jim Holbrook, who was presiding over the exchange of contracts. Such matters were handled at a distance in the city. Sometimes a purchaser never met a vendor. But this was Millbrooke, a town where documents were handled in the old-fashioned way with the buyer and seller in the same room. Not only was Angie’s vendor sitting beside her, but he had been a constant in her life from the very first weekend she came to town.

  This morning Richard wasn’t wearing one of his signature woollen caps and Angie was relieved to see there weren’t any antennae emerging from his scalp, just a mane of silver hair. It was really quite attractive. Why did he hide it under those silly hats? He’d also shaved off his grey stubble and donned a denim shirt – he’d even ironed it. Angie had never really noticed him before. Not as a man. He was just Richard, shabby, irritating, reliable, kind, funny and oddly appealing. All the same, it wasn’t one of those miraculous
makeovers where ten years had been scrubbed from his age. Nor had he turned into an instant heart-throb.

  Why did that make her think of Jack? She hadn’t heard from him since he returned to his family in San Francisco. Not an email or even a text message. Then again, she hadn’t tried to contact him either. There was no unfinished business between them, no need to keep in touch. Did she miss him? Sometimes at twilight when she recalled their evening drinks in the garden. Sometimes at night when she thought about the empty bedroom across the hallway. And in the morning when she woke up alone under the toile-patterned quilt.

  Yet there were also moments when she wondered if the relationship hadn’t been a figment of her imagination all along.

  After the formalities were over, Richard and Angie retired to the emporium café for a Lapsang Souchong.

  ‘By the way, how was your conference?’ she asked him. He had only returned the day before from an architecture symposium in Sydney.

  ‘Good, but I was homesick.’ When he said ‘homesick’, he was looking directly at Angie.

  ‘Did you wear a suit?’

  ‘Don’t own one, Ange. But it’s okay for architects to look eccentric. People expect us to be a bit odd. Like artists.’

  She kicked him under the table.

  ‘How are things going with the art show?’

  ‘Oh, I almost forgot. Here’s your ticket for Thursday’s twilight preview,’ she said, fishing in her handbag.

  ‘What do I owe you?’ He went to take out his wallet.

  ‘It’s complimentary.’

  ‘Thanks. Can I help with anything?’

  ‘We could do with some blokes to put up display panels and handle the heavy jobs. And Moira’s painted wardrobe needs to be moved.’

  ‘I’m available and I’ll round up a few of my mates from the pub.’

  ‘Great. Blake and Tim are driving down Wednesday afternoon. And you remember my friend, Vicky? She’s staying for the weekend.’

  ‘How is she now?’

  ‘What do you mean by now?’