Mandarin

by Elegant, Robert;

  “Sit down, Mr. Lee, please sit down.” The Governor’s pinched face contorted in forced amiability. “A gentleman like you, there’s no need to stand, even in my presence.”

  Aisek was struck by acute fear. He had never in the past been invited to sit in the Governor’s presence. Such courtesy from a normally overbearing official must portend trouble. He sensed that the Governor was playing with him before pouncing like a terrier on a cornered weasel. Had the incompetent yamen clerks actually broken the secret of his accounts? Though that was virtually impossible, Aisek’s hands trembled on his knees as he waited for the Governor to speak.

  “Honored Mr. Lee,” the vindictive official began, “I take no pleasure in …”

  Aisek sat silent, determined not to reveal the near-terror he felt at being addressed with elaborate courtesy by a man who normally treated him like a despicable slave.

  “I take no pleasure at the prospect of being deprived of your valued services, honored Mr. Lee,” the Governor continued. “But I feel great pleasure at being able to give you a communication from His Honor, Mandarin of the Third Grade Lee Dawei, despatched from the yamen of His Excellency the Mandarin Li Hung-chang, Viceroy of Chihli.”

  The Governor passed a cloth-wrapped packet across his desk. He motioned for silence when Aisek offered his thanks, and he reverently slipped a scroll from its casing of Imperial-yellow silk. The Governor rose and bowed to the sacred document.

  “A Rescript from His Imperial Majesty, the Son of Heaven.” The official’s tone was unctuously respectful. “A copy is being prepared for you. The Sacred Decree is, however, quite straightforward. Briefly, it has pleased His Majesty to grant you a full pardon in cognizance of certain irregularities in the proceedings that condemned you and in recognition of the outstanding services the Mandarins Lee Ailun and Lee Dawei have rendered the Sacred Dynasty. The Lord of Ten Thousand Years is, further, graciously pleased to ensure good auguries in this the year of his coronation by this act of clemency.”

  Astonished that the hope he had so long denied himself was realized in an instant, Aisek could not speak. He bowed his head to hide the tears that started in his eyes.

  “You are free to return to your home whenever you wish,” the Governor added. “Even tonight if it pleases you. The Mandarin Lee Dawei’s packet, I am informed, contains funds for your journey.”

  “I’d like to be home by the end of the eleventh month,” Aisek finally declared. “But it will take a week or two to wind up my small affairs here. Then I’ll depart with joy.”

  CHAPTER 72

  December 28, 1873

  SHANGHAI

  The steel-blue gaslight glaring from the pillared portico of Jade House spilled onto the lawn that sloped gently for two hundred yards to Bubbling Well Road. Above the marble terrace six giant lanterns swayed in the light breeze, the giant shou, longevity, ideograms emblazoned on their oiled-paper skin gleaming scarlet. Hundreds of smaller lanterns flaring yellow in the December night outlined the three domes crowning the portico and sketched with strokes of fire the peaked roofs and the balustraded verandas of the long wings. The mansion was a fairytale castle spun of light and air rather than stone and mortar.

  “It’s barbaric,” Fronah remarked to Gabriel as dusk gave way to night. “But everybody for miles around will know the Haleevies have moved in.”

  Nervously stroking his silvered beard, her father pretended he had not overheard that tart comment. He was almost sinfully proud of his new dwelling, though he wondered where he would find the money for the builders, not to speak of paying for this night’s extravagance. He could not now also worry about his daughter’s mercurial temper.

  He should, he supposed, already have told Fronah of her husband’s death at the siege of Soochow ten years earlier—and shown her the proof: Lionel Henriques’s misshapen signet ring. But the six months’ grace he had claimed from his wife had not yet expired. Nor did he believe the American, who had returned from Tientsin three days earlier, was Fronah’s last chance for happiness, as Sarah contended. He was, perhaps, unenlightened by the lax standards of cosmopolitan, mongrelized Shanghai, but he could not welcome a Gentile son-in-law.

  His newest, grandest, and perhaps ultimately ruinous possession, Jade House, was illuminated for the coming New Year, Saul assured himself, not for Christmas. It was ironic that a Jewish mansion in China should be en fête for the European New Year. The year 5634 of the Hebrew calendar had begun on September 22, 1873, while the Chinese would not hail the thirteenth year of the reign of the Tung Chih Emperor until February 17, 1874. However, the brilliant display also celebrated a far more important occasion.

  “Sarah, it’s just as well we built big,” Saul remarked defensively as he and his wife left their daughter and her lover. “We could never have squeezed the whole family into the old house on Szechwan Road: Aaron, Judwei, and their three youngsters; David and Lochi and their two; plus Maylu and old Aisek. Not to speak of Judah, his mother, and her fancy man.”

  “You always wanted to be a patriarch, Saul.” His wife ignored his scathing reference to the American. “Enjoy it while you can.”

  “While I can is right,” he answered bitterly. “You don’t need to remind me we’re balanced on a knife’s edge.”

  “I only meant we might never have them all together again, Saul. So please, don’t think about anything else tonight. Don’t think of the expense or the business. Just enjoy it.”

  Fronah and Gabriel remained beside each other on the lawn, though a little apart. Though the letters they had written during his three-month absence were long, intimate, and passionate, that exchange had not slaked their need to confide in each other at first hand.

  Gabriel had returned three days earlier to a tumult of words and a near-surfeit of caresses, for the lovers were undisturbed in the Nest of Joy. Despite Saul’s muttering, Sarah had already asked Judah to Jade House, where the entire family was to assemble for the New Year’s houseparty. Fearful of marring the joy of their reunion, the American had not raised the issue that was foremost in his mind until that morning, when they moved to the mansion, where their rooms were far apart in deference to Saul’s sensibilities.

  Since Fronah was as reticent regarding that vital question as she was otherwise forthcoming, Gabriel finally asked flatly what she had decided about his proposal. She had, she replied, thought about little else, which was quite true. She had, she added, asked her father about the Talmudic law and had made further inquiries at the British Consulate, which was quite untrue. The Talmud, she continued, made no provision for an abandoned wife, which was flatly untrue, while the Consul had advised that a divorce must be sought in London, perhaps of Parliament, which might even be true.

  “So you see darling, it’s impossible just now,” Fronah concluded. “If only I knew about Lionel—knew definitely.”

  “Well, Fronah, we’ll just rub on as we are for a while.” Gabriel’s tone was edged with anger. “But we can’t go on indefinitely. No, I’m not threatening, but I’m damned well going to find out what’s really happened to Lionel Henriques—even if I have to take China apart brick by brick.”

  Fronah felt a thrill of feminine triumph at that fierce affirmation of his devotion. She also felt contempt for herself. Why, she wondered, must she play such a devious game? She took no malicious pleasure in tantalizing Gabriel, but actually ached for his obvious distress. However, she was not simply perverse. She too was tormented by the irreconcilable conflict between her love for Gabriel—as well as the sensual delights of that love—and her manifest duty to China.

  Would she, Fronah asked herself, make a firm decision if the alternative were losing him? She simply did not know. The mystery surrounding Lionel’s fate clouded her mind, while the fulfillment—and the independence—she had attained through her engrossing work were the most powerful deterrents to a marriage that must radically alter her life. She was, nonetheless, as content as she could be when tension hung almost palpable between them.


  Gabriel Hyde watched his mistress’s parents stroll along the marble terrace. Despite his anger, he smiled at their linked silhouettes, black against the lanterns’ flare, which symbolized connubial joy for him, as paired Mandarin ducks did for the Chinese. At least, as Fronah had assured him, they now knew he was Jewish by Mosaic law and therefore no longer opposed his suit. Determined to cut through the thicket of legal complexities that prevented their marriage, he was as content as he could be when her manner was so inexplicably strained.

  In the reception hall Saul dutifully admired the scarlet poinsettias and the flowering cactuses. Jade House was also bright with the albino and purple cattleyas among the orange bird-of-paradise flowers and the pastel tuberoses Sarah had brought into bloom in the three greenhouses where six gardeners were constantly at work. Her triumph, however, was the azaleas flaming orange, yellow, and crimson in jardinières along the mahogany-paneled walls of the dining hall. She was delighted at forcing them to flower out of season because her Chinese sons loved azaleas.

  It all took a great deal of money, Saul fretted, though he had promised Sarah not to think of the cost of Jade House tonight. He would keep his promise—after some quick calculations. The outlay was at least 750,000 taels, almost a quarter of a million sterling, well over a million American dollars. Beside that immense sum, the staff’s wages might appear trifling, but they were a continuing drain. Although a senior houseboy received less than two pounds sterling a month, the wage bill was frightening because of the number he employed: twenty gardeners and grooms, as well as an indoor staff of fifty. Chinese labor was proverbially cheap, but not on that scale.

  He strove to forget the expense when they strolled through drawing rooms, sitting rooms, and parlors adorned with silk wallpaper hand painted in France—and furnished with antiques gathered from all over Europe. The Persian and Central Asian carpets alone represented an outlay of fifty thousand taels.

  Bemused by the multiplicity of reception rooms the architects considered essential, he reckoned that he could comfortably entertain four times the two hundred-odd guests invited to tonight’s banquet. Despite the mahogany panels glowing in the light of gas lamps hung with scarlet ribbons, the dining hall was more intimate. Twenty round tables set with Chinese services for twelve almost filled it, though the enormous hanging scroll painted with a single vermilion longevity ideogram dwarfed the tables.

  Saul shuddered when he thought of the extensive and expensive preparations in the three kitchens. The Sunya Restaurant had provided cooks to produce Chinese dishes for all the Chinese guests and most foreign guests. In the kosher kitchen his own cooks were preparing ritually slaughtered beef, lamb, and poultry, as well as the mock sausages of soybean curd he loved.

  Sarah and he had finally agreed they must serve nonkosher food, despite the additional cost of chinaware they could not use after it had been contaminated by eels, shrimp, and lobster, not to speak of snake, deer’s sinews, and pork. At least the grapes, peaches, and figs came from his own greenhouses. But, he calculated gloomily, each hand-raised peach cost an eighth of a tael, four times as much as the mangoes shipped on ice from Malaya.

  Saul Haleevie straightened his shoulders under his tailcoat and laughed softly. He might well be on the verge of bankruptcy. If he went down, he would certainly make a grand splash. His spectacular foundering would be long remembered, even if Jade House were later called Haleevie’s Folly.

  The great mansion was, however, an appropriate setting for this celebration. He owed the guest of honor more than he could repay in two lifetimes. Yet that guest could add just enough to his financial burden to crush him.

  Aisek Lee had played no role in the firm of Haleevie and Lee since his arrest for the abominable crime of filial impiety more than nineteen years earlier. Sarah contended that the bribes Saul had poured out for Aisek’s defense actually exceeded their monetary debt to the Chinese merchant. She further maintained that they had lavishly repaid whatever moral debt they owed him by adopting his sons, Aaron and David, and supporting them during their years of study for the Mandarinate.

  Aisek was primarily responsible for their prosperity, her husband reminded her. Aisek’s property, which Saul had claimed as his own to prevent its being confiscated by the Mandarins, was the foundation for the prodigous expansion of Haleevie and Lee. Since the firm’s wealth was inseparable from his own, he could no longer distinguish what was Aisek’s from what was his own. Calculating rigorously, he might find that he owed Aisek far more than he could pay in his present difficulties. The most practical—and most just—solution was to make over to Aisek half of everything he possessed. That distribution could, however, mean half his debts if he were forced to sell in the present depressed market.

  The crisis Saul had foreseen for some time was now upon him. Mercifully, the confrontation he dreaded had been delayed, for Confucian courtesy precluded his partner’s forcing the issue only a week after his return. He would not do so, Saul believed, until he had fittingly celebrated his birthday. This 28th day of December, 1873, Aisek Lee, born in 1814, was sixty years old by Chinese reckoning. He had attained the age when, the Sage Confucius declared, no slander or rumor could trouble his serenity.

  Aisek was happily preoccupied by his reunion with his sons and his concubine Maylu, as well as by meeting his son’s families. He had not alluded to business matters directly, though he had observed—apparently casually, but ominously in Saul’s judgment—that his old partner was obviously prospering mightily. Delighted with his five grandchildren, who were by Chinese law and practice Saul’s grandchildren, rather than his own, and cushioned by the luxury of Jade House, the returned exile was apparently incurious regarding the affairs of Haleevie and Lee.

  “Naturally, I can’t live on your bounty forever,” Aisek had replied that morning when Saul observed that he must return to the firm as an equal partner. “I’ll find something on my own, though I’m in no hurry. Anyway, the firm doesn’t need two taipans.”

  That generosity had confirmed Saul’s sense of obligation—and heightened his foreboding. Aisek obviously possessed no more than the clothes and the mementos he had brought back from his penurious exile. Without capital, he could do nothing in Shanghai, and, after two decades, he was out of touch with current business practices. The Chinese merchant would undoubtedly be a burden for the rest of their lives, but Saul resolved that he would bear the burden gladly—if it did not crush him.

  Aisek was, moreover, his partner, not his pensioner. He could hardly expect his partner to live in less splendor than himself, but he could hardly build another Jade House. Nor could he sell the mansion and divide the proceeds. He could not even sell the house on Szechwan Road in the depths of the depression, but had been glad to rent it to Khartoons’ new manager. Yet Aisek must soon discover the reality behind the glittering façade of opulence. His partner was too shrewd for his present uninquisitive good will to endure indefinitely.

  Saul Haleevie smiled with conscious effort as he looked around the crowded dining room. He could not allow the leaders of Shanghai’s three chief communities—Europeans and Americans, Jews, and Chinese—to see that he was gravely worried. Besides, he had to show a happy face to Aisek.

  He smiled across the round table and lifted his cup to his partner. After the waiters cleared away the final dish, the noodles whose length symbolized long life, the inevitable Chinese ceremony was to be enacted. Saul shuddered at the medicinal mao-tai spirits and held his cup upside down to show that it was empty. Aisek grimaced in delight and filled his cup for another toast. Though his round face was flushed pink beneath its web of fine wrinkles and his bald dome was wet with perspiration, he offered still another toast to his partner.

  The returned exile brushed food particles from his blue silk jacket and turned his chair toward the open space beneath the great scroll displaying the longevity ideogram. Beside him, Maylu glowed in a blue satin gown embroidered with mandarin ducks and scarlet peonies. She sponged an imagined stain from he
r black satin cuff, where tiny butterflies flitted among minute roses. Overjoyed at her man’s return, the concubine was ecstatic at her belated acknowledgment as Aisek Lee’s chief wife, his only wife as well. Maylu oscillated between childlike glee and the aloof dignity that befitted the first lady of the banquet.

  Turning her own chair, she sat primly beside Aisek for a moment. But her high spirits were irrepressible. She waved gaily to Fronah, who was seated at the adjacent table, and lifted her cup in a toast.

  “I never understood till this moment what Maylu went through all those years alone,” Fronah whispered to Gabriel. “She put such a good face on it. She seemed cheerful, but she was always alone.”

  “Alone,” Gabriel asked quietly, “though she had you and the boys?”

  “I know now she was always really alone.” Fronah’s brooding mien was lightened by a gamine grin. “Especially at night.”

  Gabriel wisely said no more.

  “Sa-law, Sa-ha, lai …” Aisek gesticulated expansively. “Saul, Sarah, come sit beside us. It’s as much your night as ours.”

  When the Jewish couple flanked the Chinese couple, David and Aaron led their wives and children into the open space beneath the scroll. Both wore black surcoats over Mandarins’ robes with hoof-shaped cuffs and skirts embellished with many-colored billows. On David’s breast shone the peacock of the Third Grade, on Aaron’s the wild goose of the Fourth.

  The older brother, who was junior in official rank but senior in familial authority, had pondered the propriety of their wearing their Court garments. As a judge, he was naturally preoccupied with the law, which was virtually obsessed with the forms of Confucian propriety. He had finally acceded to David’s argument that the ritual celebration of their father’s sixtieth birthday permitted them to wear their surcoats to honor—and delight—him.