Mandarin

by Elegant, Robert;

  Though fascinated by the macabre aerial ballet, Fronah Henriques would have liked to blow out the candles. Since her husband was immersed in his newspaper, she resigned herself to that constant reminder of mortality.

  “The Buddhist monks burn themselves, too,” she mused. “I wonder if they know what they’re doing any more than these moths.”

  “What’s that?” Lionel Henriques looked up from the smudged print of the North China Herald.

  “Nothing really, Lionel. I was only thinking aloud.”

  “That’s fine.” He irritably adjusted the reading glasses he could no longer pretend he did not need. “You know that fellow’s still skulking. Extraordinary!”

  “What fellow, Lionel?”

  “Sorry, my dear. The Emperor, of course. Still skulking in that place in Manchuria. I can never pronounce it.”

  “Jehol, dear.” She smiled. “Hot Springs.”

  “Don’t be so deuced superior, Fronah,” he replied without rancor. “If he were a gentleman, he’d go back to Peking and get on with it. He could set the seal on the new era: peaceful cooperation for prosperity, the Chinese trading happily, learning to use modern arms. Even that’s fine, as long as they don’t get too strong.”

  “You’re desperately interested in Chinese affairs nowadays, aren’t you, Lionel. It’s quite a change.”

  She really shouldn’t tease him, for he was sensitive and occasionally humorless. He had witnessed the two crucial events of the past four years: the Mandarins’ seizure of the lorcha Arrow and the Allies’ march on Peking. Because he had seen them himself, those events now loomed transcendentally important in his mind—and he discoursed on China with great facility.

  “You and your father aren’t the only ones who can comprehend the Chinese.” An aggrieved note crept into Lionel’s voice. “Or that American Hyde. He’s still studying Chinese, I hear. That’s all right for diplomats and women, but an officer? I ask you!”

  “Quite, Lionel,” she replied. “Quite so.”

  She would not tease him again, though his earnestness tempted her. They were quite the old married couple after four years. They rubbed along comfortably, despite her occasional annoyance at his pretentiousness and his occasional irritation at her assertiveness. The ardor he had so nobly restrained before Judah’s birth had, however, not revived. Still, her son was not yet seven weeks old, and Lionel was most attentive in every other respect. She should be very happy with a devoted husband and a handsome son.

  “Hyde will never learn Chinese properly,” Lionel persisted. “It’s one thing to be brought up with it like you. Otherwise it’s impossible for a civilized tongue to twist itself around the lingo. Even your … ah … brother Aaron says so. But you’re not listening, Fronah.”

  “I am, Lionel, I assure you. You were saying that Aaron …”

  As often as not, Lionel reflected, Fronah didn’t really hear what he said because she was obsessed with the baby. He was, naturally, delighted to have a son, and the doting grandfather was not inclined to question his tangled finances. Moreover, there had been no more talk of boredom or a trip to London. As he’d hoped, motherhood had altered his wife, but the infant had indeed tied her down. Besides, the milky smell that floated around her was rather revolting.

  She was, he supposed, a fine-looking woman—if one liked the overblown type. Not his taste, but many men would find her high color and her swelling figure attractive. Yet she was actually rather slim—perhaps too slender for most men, who slavered after overdeveloped females with bovine bosoms—and when she smiled, the curve of her cheek and the glint in her brown eyes was piquant, almost gamin-like. However, her matronly serenity since the baby’s birth was not at all attractive.

  “Aaron was saying no European can learn Chinese properly,” Lionel resumed. “Not speaking of you, of course.”

  “Thank you, Lionel. I’m glad to be the exception.”

  “Something else he said. Damned interesting.”

  “I didn’t know Aaron and you were so close. He puts me off nowadays. He’s so sour and sarcastic since he failed the civil service examination the third time.”

  “Aaron’s a good chap. A splendid chap for a Chink … ah … Chinaman. He’s not bitter at Europeans, only the Manchus. He says it’s no wonder Lord Elgin permitted the looting of the Yüan Ming Yüan. After all, Chinese armies have to loot.”

  “Have to loot? Aaron said that?”

  “Yes, my dear. How else would they get paid, he says. And he recited a little jingle. Seems it goes back centuries: If the generals don’t pay up, the troops won’t show up. If they can’t plunder, the ranks will come asunder. Quite amusing, isn’t it.”

  “Not terribly, though I suppose Aaron’s right.” She added, though she knew it would annoy him: “The great strategist Sun Tze advised generals: The soldiers must have their rewards, so that they see the advantage of defeating the enemy.”

  “Always my little female scholar!” he laughed. “But you do see it. Elgin was right—even by your blessed Chinese standards. Though he shouldn’t have burned the Summer Palaces.”

  “We agree on that, Lionel. Destroying the Yüan Ming Yüan was barbaric. But so was the looting—and your blessed auction. We’re supposed to be civilized. You can’t compare a medieval rabble like the Manchus and the soldiers of the greatest civilized power in the modern world.”

  “Fronah, you’re being contentious. At any rate, I think I’ll take a stroll. It’s a bit close tonight.”

  “If you wish, my dear. But you were complaining that I wasn’t interested. And then when …”

  “There’s a vast difference between interest and argumentativeness.” He twisted the signet ring on his little finger, and the gold gleamed in the lamplight. “Perhaps you’ll learn that some day, Fronah. Ah well, not to worry. Don’t wait up. I may be late.”

  His lips brushed her cheek, and he threw his linen jacket over his arm. His white figure strode briskly through the shrubbery to the gate opening on the Bund. Apparently untroubled by the heat, he walked jauntily. A minute after the gate clanged behind Lionel, a man in dark clothing closed the gate noiselessly behind himself. Fronah recognized the rotund figure of the number-one houseboy and wondered briefly why he was furtive. However, Lao King’s time was his own after he had finished his duties. His stealthy departure was also his own concern.

  “The master’s gone out, Small Lady, hasn’t he?” the concubine Maylu asked softly from the darkness. “Did anyone go with him?”

  “I thought I saw Lao King.”

  “That devil, too! Small Lady, I think we should summon the sedan chair. It’s a nice evening for a ride.”

  “I can’t, Maylu. Judah will be hungry. Take your maid with you.”

  “That wouldn’t do, not at all. I’d like you to come with me, please. Perhaps it’s important.”

  “And Judah? He’ll be howling.”

  “Not if you don’t wake him. It’s all nonsense, this barbarian notion of waking babies up to feed them so they’ll sleep. The baby amah can look after him if he does wake.”

  “Well, if it’s that important …”

  “It is, I assure you. Or it could be.”

  Fronah knew she would get no more out of the concubine, who could occasionally be as infuriatingly tight-lipped as she was normally indiscreet. Her important matter was probably trivial, but the older woman had strong claims on both her affection and her loyalty. Yielding to Maylu’s love of melodrama, as well as her superior knowledge of infants, Fronah followed her to the Szechwan Road gate. She would have been surprised if the double sedan chair had not been waiting for them.

  As the four chair coolies swung south toward the French Concession, globular lanterns swayed on the ends of their carrying poles, casting yellow rays on entire families sleeping on straw mats spread beside the road. The men’s torsos were bare in the heat, while the women wore just enough to preserve modesty. Their possessions were heaped around them in wooden boxes and rattan valises. All Shanghai
, particularly the Foreign Settlement, was crammed with refugees.

  The slapping of the coolies’ bare feet on cobblestones was succeeded by their sloughing through the dust of unpaved roads as they approached the narrow bridge over Yangjingbang Creek. Six years after the French had been granted the additional territory bounded on the north by the creek, that wedge of land remained largely undeveloped. Refugees’ huts clustered in the open spaces between the few buildings. When the chair bearers’ pace did not slacken, Fronah looked sharply at Maylu. The concubine’s features were stubbornly uncommunicative in the moonlight.

  The coolies finally halted before the gate of the South City. Maylu whispered to the corporal of the guard and listened intently to his soft answers. When she handed him a string of copper cash, the doors creaked ajar to admit the sedan chair.

  “Go slow, now,” Maylu told the coolies. “No hurry for us.”

  After winding through a maze of alleys, the chair entered a lane Fronah knew well. The fan makers were putting up their shutters, but pedestrians clustered around itinerant barbers and food peddlers, while eager children surrounded candy hawkers and toy sellers. It was too early for sleep in the South City, too early and far too hot. Fronah started when the coolies halted at the mouth of an alley so narrow she and Maylu could not walk abreast. The drying fish strung between the house fronts brushed their hair.

  Fronah finally knew their destination, if not their purpose. She motioned Maylu to precede her, for the climb to the third floor was hard for bound feet. Fronah herself was panting slightly when they reached the door marked OLD MOTHER WANG, MIDWIFE. She had not been winded when she raced up those stairs to change into Chinese costume before meeting Iain Matthews five years earlier.

  Maylu pushed the door open to reveal that time had worked no alteration in Old Mother Wang’s establishment. Sitting unchanged among the unchanging implements of her craft, the midwife nodded.

  Fronah’s lips parted in surprise when she saw her stout houseboy, Lao King, cosily sipping tea by the light of cheap tallow candles. Maylu hissed at her to be silent and eased open the door to the bedroom cubicle.

  Memory afflicted Fronah. She recalled the concubine’s horror at seeing the blood on her thighs when she washed herself after that dire afternoon with Iain Matthews. The memory was so vivid that it overwhelmed the present, and she saw only that past scene.

  When Maylu nudged her, Fronah returned to the reality of the present. She saw her husband lying on the wood-plank bed and drawing on a long opium pipe. His patrician features were blurred by the fumes that trickled from his nostrils. For an instant she disbelieved her own eyes, convinced that her imagination had conjured Lionel up in the dim cubicle, which was lit only by the flicker of a miniature hurricane lamp.

  Willing the distressing scene to disappear, Fronah closed her eyes. When she opened them, Lionel still lay on the bed.

  Her thoughts whirled incoherently: Tragically, Lionel needed opium, but why did he come to this sordid tenement? She would have been unhappy had she known, but she would assuredly have tried to help him—and she would never have driven him to such squalor. He knew she hated opium, but why must he leave his home to smoke his pipe? And why had Maylu, who liked an occasional pipe herself, contrived this dramatic revelation?

  Lionel had not moved during the few seconds she had been standing in the doorway. She saw with further surprise that he was quite naked in the heat, though he was normally modest of his person. She saw with astonishment that he was partially aroused, though he was so infrequently ardent with her.

  Lionel continued the motion begun as the door opened, and she realized that he was still unaware of her presence. He extended the pipe, and a small hand reached out of the darkness for the burnished bamboo tube. His hand groped toward a pale gleam in the shadows behind him.

  A naked young girl with budding breasts entered the dim light. She was giggling coyly, and she was, Fronah noted automatically, not quite pubescent. Lionel’s arm clasped the child’s waist, and his hand played between the child’s thighs. A second girl emerged to encircle his erect penis with her elfin fingers.

  Fronah slammed the door shut. Unseeing, she dashed through the anteroom and down the narrow staircase. She ran along the alley, brushing aside startled pedestrians, until she reached the sedan chair. The coolies stood stolidly immobile when she screamed at them to move.

  Teetering on her maimed feet in the moonlight, Maylu appeared a few minutes later. The coolies trotted off at her sharp command.

  Fronah turned her back and shrugged off the concubine’s sympathetic hand. Her tears finally started, and she sobbed as they passed through the French territory. When the sedan chair approached Szechwan Road, her weeping subsided and she finally heard the concubine’s consoling murmur. But Fronah would not deepen her humiliation by speaking in the coolies’ hearing. Besides, she was infuriated at Maylu for the shocking manner of the shocking revelation.

  When they entered the garden, she at last demanded, “How could you, Maylu? How could you do that to me?”

  “Would you have believed me, Small Lady,” the concubine asked gently, “if I only told you?”

  “The shame, Maylu, the shame. To think that he … that I … Maylu, I can’t bear it. What can I do, what possible …”

  “Only you can decide, Small Lady. But it was my duty to show you.”

  “The houseboy, Lao King?”

  “Obviously he’s arranged it for the master.”

  “Why, Maylu, why?”

  “Many men are like that, only liking children. Lao King wished to protect his own daughter. Your husband wanted Lao King’s daughter.”

  “It’s fearful, Maylu, horrible. I’m not a Chinese wife. I can’t tolerate it … not such humiliation. Spurning me for … for those infants. The vileness!”

  “He can’t help it, Small Lady. If he had paid Old Mother Wang, I’d never have known. He’s really depraved, your husband. He won’t pay his debts.”

  “Won’t pay his debts?” She laughed hysterically. “That’s funny, very funny. He’s depraved, utterly depraved. He won’t pay his debts.”

  “I’ll give you something to make you sleep. But first feed little Judah. It will make you feel better. You’ll see.”

  October 5, 1861

  SHANGHAI

  Lionel Henriques did not return to the Nest of Joy that night. While her household pursued its normal routine the following day, Fronah sat in the yellow velvet chair in the morning room and listened for his footsteps in the hall. The servants revealed their knowledge of her tragedy only by their excessive desire to please, a flicker of subservience alien to independent Chinese. Mutual reticence preserved the decencies, though she knew they considered neither opium addiction nor, even, pedophilia a gross perversion—indeed, hardly unnatural. They respected her grief, though they could not comprehend it.

  Curiously, Lao King, the number-one houseboy, appeared least affected. He was, as always, brusquely efficient, though his eyes slid away from her gaze. He would not apologize for the injury he had done her by pandering to the master’s tastes, because he had done so to preserve his own daughter. She would have to sack him, Fronah decided, but she would find him a good job.

  Though the servants neither quarreled raucously nor cracked ribald jokes in their accustomed manner, the Nest of Joy otherwise maintained its normal efficient buzz, punctuated by the clanking of the cast-iron polisher on the teak floors. But Lionel’s betrayal had destroyed the purpose of the villa. The ritual of housekeeping was as pointless as a play performed to an empty theater. What, Fronah wondered hopelessly, would she say when he did return?

  Fronah slept little the next night, despite the bitter draught Maylu forced on her, and she insisted on having Judah’s cradle beside her bed. She lay awake long after midnight, haunted by her bleak vision of the future and her fears for Lionel. She only knew what she must not do. Confiding in her parents would cause them anguish but would not help her. She rose repeatedly to look into
the cradle each time she believed she heard Judah whimper, though her son was sleeping soundly.

  Could Lionel, she wondered, have done something desperate? However, he lacked the passionate disposition of men who took their own lives. She had, she reflected bitterly, thought him also lacking in carnal passion. Yet that passion, withheld from herself, had been spilled out on prepubescent harlots.

  After a few hours of troubled dreams, she awoke to a sense of overwhelming deprivation. It was a minute before she remembered the reason.

  That lapse cheered her slightly. The great world had not come to an end with her discovery of her husband’s perversions, but continued to revolve as usual. Nor was that discovery necessarily the end of her personal world.

  Somehow, she would cope. Perhaps William MacGregor could cure Lionel’s depravity. Perhaps her husband was only emulating Chinese men’s passion for unbudded virgins. Perhaps he and she would now go away, leaving the vices of Shanghai behind him. Having made that tentative decision, she was almost cheerful as she dressed.

  Fronah did not hear the tread in the hall for which she had waited so long. She was not aware that Lionel had finally returned until she heard him asking the houseboy for a pot of coffee. He was clean-shaven and clear-eyed when he joined her in the morning room, his white linen suit freshly washed and pressed.

  “That tastes good.” He sipped appreciatively. “I did miss my coffee. Missed you too, my dear.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she replied in the same tone. “A pity. I’d have sent you coffee if I’d known where.”

  “Not at all, my dear Fronah. How could you know?”

  His normal hauteur appeared unshaken. He was quite composed, perhaps faintly amused. She gazed at his lean face, searching for signs of his depravity. His features displayed neither vice nor contrition.