“You know damned well where We are going,” he screamed. “And you can do as you damned please. We are fed up with being bullied by women.”
“Your slave never dared raise her voice to Your Majesty,” Aluta sobbed. “How Your Majesty can think …”
“We’ll think what We damned please, woman. And We’ll go where We damned please. We’re going to the Flower Lanes, to respectful, obedient women who don’t plague Us. Screw the uncles! Screw her! And you too, woman!”
CHAPTER 76
November 28, 1874
SHANGHAI
“You can’t expect too much too fast,” Saul Haleevie warned. “It’ll happen in its own good time—Chinese time, which is different from our time. It’ll go on, even though that Manchu lad is ailing. He won’t last forever, I hear.”
Fronah smiled wryly at her mother, who was squinting at her embroidery hoop through the tortoise-shell reading glasses she would wear only in the privacy of the family. Sarah was determined to faithfully depict her favorite slipper orchid, which flaunted its amber and saffron brightness in the pallid late-November afternoon. Though the conservatory was warm under its glass roof, coals glowed in the cast-iron fireplace framed by flower-patterned tiles. Sarah returned her daughter’s smile and glanced with affectionate amusement at her husband.
Saul never referred to the Lord of Ten Thousand Years as the Tung Chih Emperor, but called him “the young fellow up North” or “that Manchu lad.” Perhaps, Fronah mused, he found the name difficult to pronounce; or perhaps he would feel decrepit if he so explicitly acknowledged that the sovereign of the world’s largest empire was a youth some four decades younger than he. Still, she was more tolerant of others’ idiosyncrasies, even her parents’, as she herself grew older.
“My diplomat friends are worried about what … who … comes next.” Saul was oblivious to his women’s amusement. “The lad can’t last more than another year. Since he had to give up on the Summer Palaces, he’s been wilder than ever. The young fellow spends all his time carousing in the … ah … Flower Quarters.”
He looked sharply at his daughter, who was staring at the bright orchids and ruffling the sheaf of letters in her lap. When she looked up, he felt she was again accusing him of deviousness for having kept her husband’s death secret so long.
“Look, Fronah, I’ve said I’m sorry a hundred times,” Saul apologized explosively. “I’m very sorry I didn’t tell you about Lionel earlier.”
“It doesn’t matter, Papa,” she replied without rancor. “Certainly you should have. But it wouldn’t have made any difference.”
“For God’s sake, Fronah, do as you want,” he rumbled. “You will anyway, I know.”
“Saul, that’s all over now,” Sarah interjected. “It’s up to Fronah and Gabriel. Just leave her alone.”
“It’s all right, Mama,” Fronah said quietly. “Honestly, it doesn’t matter. And I don’t mind any more.”
“Well, then, I was saying,” Saul resumed, “unless we understand how the Chinese look at time, we can’t see why they don’t understand progress. For them … even Aaron and David, sometimes … time doesn’t move forward in a straight line, but around in circles. How can they progress when there’s no place to go?”
Fronah, who had felt time urgently nudging her between the shoulder blades during the past few months, tried to concentrate. Despite her interest in her father’s theories, intellectual discussion could not divert her from recalling the vicissitudes of her own life.
When she regained her composure and rejoined the bar mitzvah reception after her father told her that Lionel was dead, she had looked around eagerly for Gabriel Hyde. Her mother informed her that he had left in haste after suddenly remembering an essential duty.
“Gabriel said to tell you he was sorry he had to go,” Sarah had explained briefly. “Very sorry.”
When her lover did not appear that evening or the next morning and sent no message, she had demanded that her mother repeat the entire conversation.
“So you let it slip that I hadn’t told you he was Jewish?” she snapped. “That wasn’t very helpful.”
“Fronah, be reasonable,” Sarah replied. “How was I to know? I only discovered it myself by accident.”
“I suppose that’s true, Mama. But what else happened? He might have had to dash away. But to disappear and send no word, that’s not like him at all. What else did he say?”
“Nothing, except that he was very sorry, my dear.”
“And what else did you say, Mama?”
“I think I gave him a wrong impression,” Sarah confessed. “I was so happy and excited I didn’t watch what I was saying. I talked about Lionel then. I’m afraid he thought you knew about Lionel all the time.”
“Mama, that’s terrible. How could you? If he thinks I was keeping that secret, no wonder he’s angry. I must see him. I’m going to Willards Hotel right now.”
Though eager to be helpful, the desk clerk could offer Fronah little comfort. Captain Hyde, he said, had departed for Tientsin that morning. No, the Captain had left no message. And he had taken all his belongings, even the trunk of summer clothing he normally deposited in the box room.
Fronah berated herself for her own deceitfulness. She was bitter at her father’s secretiveness, and she raged at her mother’s indiscretion. She was, above all, infuriated at Gabriel for his headlong departure.
She would not, Fronah decided, communicate with him. She would not humiliate herself by offering labored explanations like a naughty schoolgirl. Why couldn’t he trust her? How dared he rush away without even asking for an explanation? But she loitered near the front door when the postman called at the Nest of Joy punctually each morning.
In mid-August, when she was half-resigned to never again hearing from Gabriel, his long-anticipated letter finally arrived. Dated July 18 from Dairen in Manchuria, it had been inordinately delayed in transit.
My dear Fronah [the semiformal salutation was chilling], I have been meaning for some time to write to thank you and your parents for asking me to Judah’s bar mitzvah—and to apologize again for my hasty departure. However, my duties have been both heavy and engrossing.
The Mandarin Li Hung-chang has made me a Military Mandarin of the Third Grade. David’s nose is a little out of joint, I’m afraid, though he still takes precedence over me because of his earlier date of rank and being on the civil side. The Mandarin has promised me command of a cruiser, and, in the meantime, has appointed me deputy commander of the entire North Sea Fleet with the substantive rank of commodore. I find it fascinating—and trying—to endeavor as tactfully as possible to guide my Chinese commanding admiral, who happens to be the boss’s son-in-law.
There were two pages in that vein. Not a word of either affection or reproach until the final paragraphs:
This letter is difficult to write, as you will understand. I trust you will pardon the consequent stilted tone, as well as my precipitate departure, which was impelled by acute disappointment.
I have naturally not discussed whatever once lay between us with anyone else. David, always the discreet gentleman, has not inquired. However, he is obviously distressed. Nonetheless, I do not believe that any other, even your brother, who is my closest friend, should be privy to the events which revealed how tenuous were the ties that formerly bound us.
Matters are now clear to me from your mother’s inadvertent revelations, for which, I beg you, do not reproach her. I got them out of her with somewhat ignoble cunning. At any rate, I am now sadly convinced that, in your heart, you have no real desire for marriage. I regret that fact deeply, but I must accept it.
I ask your pardon for having pressed you, and I shall not trouble you further with my unwelcome attentions. Perhaps we shall encounter each other when duty next brings me to Shanghai. I cannot say when that is likely to be.
Yours faithfully,
Gabriel
Hers faithfully, indeed! Though the irony stung, she was somehow comforted by the stil
ted manner he deplored when she reread his letter for the first of many times. He must have been intensely moved if he had retreated into sophomoric formality.
By rejecting her peremptorily, Gabriel had forced her to acknowledge to herself that she wished to marry him and live with him all her life. Her fears dissolved—and she knew beyond doubt that she loved Gabriel, and wanted him, and would never again waver.
But she must not overwhelm him with protestations of love. The more vehement she was, the less likely he was to believe her.
She therefore waited a week before composing a letter that almost matched his feigned detachment, though not, she assured herself, his stilted tone. She owed him an explanation, she wrote, as well as an apology for letting him believe she had told her parents he was Jewish, though that was now irrelevant to her. She explained her mother’s confusion, which led him to conclude that she had known of Lionel’s death for many years. He would undoubtedly judge her father’s secretiveness extraordinary. But she had truly not known until the day of the bar mitzvah. She mentioned neither love nor marriage, though she signed herself: “Love, Fronah.”
His reply, which reached her five weeks later, expressed relief that she had not deceived him regarding her widowed state. He was also glad the other matter now appeared as trivial to her as it had always appeared to him. He sent her his deep affection, though not his love, and he hoped to see her on “the most friendly terms quite soon.”
The long gaps in their communication were almost intolerable when Fronah felt so pressed by time. Nonetheless, she allowed herself three days for reflection before replying to Gabriel’s second letter. Striving to convince him, she acknowledged her previous terror of responsibility and her almost perverse vacillation. But, she assured him, all her foolish reservations had now totally vanished. Her single overriding desire was to be with him again—and to prove her steadfast love to him.
Almost seven weeks in transit, Gabriel’s reply arrived on October 28. His language was, thank God, no longer stilted, though it was still guarded. He was, he wrote, too old to play childish games. He valued her affection deeply, and he returned it sincerely. But he wondered whether their mutual affection could serve as the foundation for anything more than lasting friendship. It was, he feared, too late—almost certainly too late for him and probably too late for her. He pointedly neither spoke of coming to Shanghai nor invited her to visit him.
This time Fronah did not hesitate. She, too, was weary of playing games, and she was frightened.
She wrote immediately to tell Gabriel that she wished to marry him, adding, “I will go wherever you wish, my darling.” That sentence was the most difficult she had ever written, for it implicitly renounced the work that had made her a mature and complete person. However, she could still hope that Gabriel’s enthusiasm, which almost matched her own, would retain him in the Mandarin’s service for many years. But she would be forever incomplete without Gabriel. Unless he forbade it, she would come to Tientsin, ostensibly to visit her brother David and his wife Lochi. She ached to be with him—and to prove to him that her emotions were now fixed. But she would not force herself on him against his wishes. That letter closed: “My deepest love always, Fronah.”
She now waited for Gabriel’s reaction, which could not reach her until a month after the posting of her own. Her mental review of their exchange having taken no more than two minutes, Fronah tried again to concentrate on her father’s discussion of the divergent Chinese and Western concepts of time.
“Since the Chinese consider time circular and, therefore, eternal,” Saul Haleevie reiterated meticulously, “they are truly convinced that the human race is immortal because men repeat and prolong the existence of their ancestors—at present and in the future.”
“Also they count the years in cycles of sixty years, instead of centuries.” Fronah’s interjection elicited an approving nod from her father and a puzzled glance from her mother. “A cycle goes round and round forever, while our century goes from the past through the present into the future—without repetition.”
“The forward progress of time and, therefore, the urgency of time is a Western concept,” Saul continued. “It means nothing to the Chinese.”
“Yet they’ve always kept precise historical records.” Fronah automatically championed the Chinese. “The most detailed and accurate of any civilization.”
“Because the word becomes the reality,” Saul added. “That’s why Chinese revere the written word, much like Jews. For Jews, the word represents the transcendent reality of God. For Chinese, the word is God … or Heaven. But we were speaking of time.”
“It’s the same concept, really, Papa. Man is the center of the Chinese universe, while time doesn’t progress. Man must therefore put fixed marks on the whirlpool of eternity by precisely recording his own doings.”
“You’re getting rather metaphysical, aren’t you, dear?” Sarah jibed, though she normally enjoyed their intellectual acrobatics. “This waiting must be going to your head.”
“I’ve made up my mind, Mama. I’m going to him. He must agree.”
“It’s not very ladylike, my dear. You can’t throw yourself at …”
“Ladylike be damned!” Fronah exploded. “Unless he flatly says no, I’ll …”
A tap on the door cut off the discussion more effectively than Sarah’s protests. To her surprise Fronah saw Lao Woo, the lean number-one houseboy who had served her since the departure of the reluctant pimp, Lao King, thirteen years earlier.
“Very sorry!” Fumbling under his jacket, Lao Woo spoke in pidgin in deference to the older Haleevies. “One piecee letter have come. I savee maybe very big pidgin, so hurry bring Missee.”
Fronah took the light-blue envelope. She no longer marveled at the servants’ knowledge of her affairs. A hundred letters, including foot-square envelopes heavy with official seals, might be left for her return. But Lao Woo knew unerringly that this letter was urgent.
She turned the envelope over in her hands, almost afraid to open it. Though she had not hoped for such a prompt reply, the flap was marked: “Commodore G. Hyde, North China Fleet, Tientsin.” The address was written in Gabriel’s Spencerian script and in her brother David’s distinctive ideograms as well. The red seal that identified “North Seas Fleet Official Correspondence” explained its arrival. If Gabriel were in such haste, it should be good news. Perhaps, however, he was anxious to forestall her threatened visit.
“Open it, child,” Sarah directed impatiently. “What’s inside won’t improve with keeping.”
Fronah reluctantly slipped her forefinger beneath the flap. She peeled it away gradually as if it would be desecration to tear it. She unfolded the stiff blue notepaper and smoothed the creases on her knee. Finally, she could put off reading it no longer.
Fronah, my dearest [the salutation was, at least, not discouraging], I have read your last letter over and over again. Quite candidly, I am of two minds. I don’t quite see an assured future for us together, though I know I care for you profoundly.
Fronah smiled in delight at that acknowledgment. The faint line between her dark eyebrows grew deeper as she read further.
I will not come to you again, though perhaps I should. I simply cannot rush back and forth, even though the better part of me demands that I should.
However, I must be brief to catch the dispatch boat. Come to Tientsin if you wish. If you truly mean what you have written, by all means come to me.
Fronah gasped in delight, but she frowned again as she read on:
I must, however, tell you candidly that I have not made up my mind as to the future. I cannot make up my mind now, and it is more than likely that I shall not be able to make a firm decision even when I see you.
I love you more than I have ever loved anyone. But, somehow, I am afraid. I, too, fear marriage. If we married and [the next line was scored out] something happened to you, it would be the end of me.
This may sound foolish to you. In part, it does to me.
But let me be as clear as I can: I now distrust my own feelings. And, to be cruelly candid, I distrust yours as well.
Come to Tientsin if you wish. Come, however, with the understanding that I can, unfortunately, make no commitment. But come if you wish.
All my love,
Gabriel
Fronah carefully returned the letter to its envelope. She smiled and nodded in reply to her parents’ interrogative gaze. Later she might tell them that Gabriel was indecisive and that he had virtually rejected her—if she told them anything more than that she was going to Tientsin. She had made up her mind, and she would not alter her decision. Since he had not forbidden it, she would go to Tientsin, though she feared she could be desperately disappointed.
CHAPTER 77
Night of January 12-13, 1875
Peking
THE FORBIDDEN CITY
The wasted figure was more majestic in death than it had ever been in life. The cheeks once plump with self-indulgence were haggard, and the rice powder that covered the smallpox scars accentuated the lines scored by suffering. The Tung Chih Emperor of the Great Pure Dynasty, who had mounted the Heavenly Dragon after reigning for thirteen years and ruling ineffectually for less than two, appeared to have worn himself out in arduous service to his people, rather than mindless dissipation.
He was better served in death than he had been in life. His elders, who had failed to curb his self-destructive excesses, had laid him out in Imperial splendor. A half-hour after his passing, his corpse was arrayed in the golden Dragon Robes of Eternal Longevity. His head was raised by a pillow to face south as an emperor must when he looks upon his subjects or awaits the Supreme Dragon that will convey him to his first audience with the Jade Emperor in Heaven. Born amid glorious omens in the year of the dragon, 1856, he had slipped quietly away at the beginning of the double-hour of the dog in the waning days of the year of the dog, by Western reckoning just after eight in the evening of January 12, 1875.
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