Behind the Masks

by Susan Patron

  “Well,” Mrs. Babcockry sniffed, “if them fine ladies go …” She patted a ringlet of her shining hair.

  I glared, filled suddenly with a desire to throw a whole bucket of slop water on them both. Mrs. Babcockry may have fancied herself among the most proper of Bodie women, but here she was dallying with a stranger, and he was behaving in a sickening way, as courtly and elegant as a king. And all at Momma’s expense, as she lay, semiconscious, in Mr. Monahan’s arms.

  I said, “Thank you for your help, Mrs. Babcockry. We must be going. Good day.” I turned to the men. “Come on,” I ordered, and set off at a brisk walk, not looking back, kicking tin cans and trash in my way. Bessie Babcockry would spread the story so fast it would be all over town by the time we got home. She never understood Momma, who was not exactly like the other respectable ladies of Bodie. Ever since she married Papa, Momma had lived in mining towns like Cerro Gordo and Aurora and Bodie. She knew what it meant to be proper. And yet, she said, when pigs and chickens came into your kitchen because there wasn’t any door at all, and only a dirt floor, well, that could make a woman see things a little different. It could make even a proper, respectable woman not pay the slightest heed to gossip.

  Another burr under Mrs. Babcockry’s saddle—she and everyone else knew that Papa loved Momma more than the moon, whereas most nights Mr. Babcockry fell asleep on a chair in a saloon. It was a place, he often said, that was more peaceful than his own home.

  Mrs. Babcockry may have had the most beautiful hair of any man, woman, or child in Bodie, and she may have just received a most beguiling invitation to a Horribles play, but I wasn’t going to waste one second giving a fig for her opinion.

  Mr. Duval and Mr. Monahan left after depositing Momma on a chair in our parlor, and I was beginning to help her to her bedroom when the Chinese girl reappeared and supported Momma’s other side, with startling strength for such a small girl. Glad for the help but surprised at her sudden appearance in our house, I wondered what new problem her presence could foretell.

  “Who are you?” I asked when we had Momma settled on her bed. “Do you speak English?”

  “Hush,” Momma murmured. “Be more civil.” Turning her head toward the girl with some effort, Momma went on, “You are welcome in this …” and was suddenly asleep again.

  “It’s the laudanum makes her sleepy,” the girl said. “Don’t be giving her too much. Soon she’ll crave it more and then more.”

  She was wearing a long, blue, threadbare jacket with loose sleeves, cotton trousers like a man’s pajamas, and cloth slippers. A person could get dressed in one tick of the clock with clothes like that, instead of having an almighty number of buttons and petticoats and hooks and pins to do. Her hair was pulled back and caught in a long braid. It was shiny and straight. Mine was brown and flimsy and refused to be held in place by combs or hairpins, which fell out uselessly upon the floor. We both had unfortunate forehead wisps that were too paltry for bangs and too short to comb back. I wished I could trade clothes and hair with her, except for the forehead wisps, which I do not need any more of. “You don’t sound Chinese,” I said, meaning it as a question. She began removing Momma’s shoes.

  “Born in Bodie, not China,” she said, and I guessed that she’d had to explain this more than once. Most of the Chinese I’d heard in the Emporium or on the street were hard to understand because of their accents, but so were the Italians, Swedes, French, Dutch, and Indians. She asked, “Have you table scraps, an onion, some bones?”

  “So you are a beggar,” I said.

  She put her hands on her hips and faced me. “Yes, beseeching the makings of soup for your mother. Well, I was, but not now. Not after you fixed on me begging ‘em for myself.” I flushed red. “Settle on if you want to trust me,” she said, “even though I’m Chinese. Once you get it sorted out in your mind, let me know.” She stared at me until I turned away, half shamed at my rudeness and half angry at her audacity. “Your father,” she went on, and she scratched at a welt on her wrist, “didn’t take so long as you are taking.”

  I whirled back around. “My father? What have you to do with him?”

  “He helped us. Defended Sam Chung.”

  I’d saved the articles recounting the recent trials of Sam Chung that ran in all our Bodie newspapers. Papa’s ways of questioning and cross-examining witnesses made the spectators in the packed courtroom go wild, cheering and clapping as if he were Mr. William Shakespeare. He dug things out of people like a miner looking for gold, chipping and hammering away. No one expected Sam Chung to be acquitted of murdering a man whose mules ate his vegetables, but my father obtained a hung jury. The prosecution called for a retrial. Another hung jury. Finally, at the third trial, the jury unanimously acquitted Sam Chung.

  Papa’s successes made him a lot of enemies as well as friends. Suddenly I was plain worn out. I wanted Papa to come home, to take care of me and Momma. How weary I am of the recklessness and danger of Bodie! If only Papa would practice law in San Francisco, where not every man carries a gun in his pocket, and where there must be as many theaters and playhouses as we have saloons. I felt like a small child instead of a nearly grown woman of fourteen. The girl stood watching me. I asked, “How old are you?”

  She shrugged, then said, “Nearly twelve.”

  I made a tell-that-to-the-jury face, learned from Papa, to show I didn’t believe her. She looked barely ten. I went to check on Momma—she was still sleeping—and arranged some clean flour sacks around her head in case the gum were to bleed again. When I returned, the girl was gone. I stuck my head out the door and saw her neat small figure jogging toward Chinatown on King Street. “What’s your name?” I called to her.

  “Ling Loi Wing,” she yelled back over her shoulder. As she disappeared around the corner, it occurred to me that I hadn’t once thanked her.

  I went in search of neck bones and other scraps of a cooked chicken, a potato, a bit of cabbage, an onion. I should be the real beggar, not Ling Loi, for I’d have begged to take back my unwelcoming ways. Regret was the bitter ingredient in the soup I finally made.

  Monday, June 7, 1880

  Dear Diary,

  This morning Momma awoke feeling better but she is not a good patient—she is much too impatient! She and Papa long ago decided I should become a nurse, following in Momma’s footsteps, but I am as unsuited for nursing as she is at being nursed. Of course I care for her diligently, but in truth I’d rather do most anything else.

  She wanted to dress and attend to the work of the house, but I had already scrubbed the kitchen floor, cleaned the chimney lamps, and made biscuits for supper. I begged her to rest and to rinse her mouth with warm salted water as the dentist urged, and she finally agreed that she would. She insisted I go to school as usual. Soon she was once again sleeping, her wound still raw and tender.

  I am forced to attend school even though most likely by now I know as much as the teacher. Before leaving, I went to Papa’s little antechamber, his home office, where he keeps notes on his legal clients—figuring I may find some clue about his disappearance. My father has escaped serious injury and death over and over, and I had heard so many stories of his dangerous livelihood, defending accused thieves and murderers, that I almost didn’t believe he could ever die.

  I was shocked to find the door to his antechamber locked, as I’d never noticed it had a lock—even the front door to our house does not have one, as I believe only banks and shops have locks in Bodie. I had read the words on the bronze plaque affixed to Papa’s door a hundred times before, but today they struck me like a secret passcode.

  Truth, Enter Freely,

  Be Witnessed,

  Find Justice.

  Something about the silence beyond the door drew me, as if Truth were an actual being within. If Momma were better I’d ask her about this, or perhaps try to find the key myself.

  School is always a torture, and how much better educated I would be if I were allowed to remain at home reading books on my
own. (I have already read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott many times, and Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger, and the plays of Wm. Shakespeare, and Papa’s copy of Walden—these are the books, plus of course Momma’s housekeeping book and the Bible, that have traveled with us each time we moved.) Yet my ideas about self-education are not understood by my parents, however often I explain them. My mother also longs for me to have religious instruction, but as we have no church in Bodie I am safe for now, and in any case I have read the entire Bible twice. There is a saying among the miners that once a town has either a church or a hanging, it is time to move out. So far, we have had neither and there are only streams of folks moving in.

  Teacher Minnie Williams had taken a dislike for me on the first day, for what reason I do not know. It may be because her brother, Con, is rumored to be a member of the secret citizens’ committee of vigilantes, called the 601. These citizens believe the law is not always as swift or as just as it should be, and at times they have forcibly driven out of town, in the middle of the night, certain persons they judge to be guilty of law-breaking. This has happened even after a jury declared the person not guilty. My father often spoke out against the vigilantes.

  News of Papa’s supposed death had spread through town, and Miss Williams was clearly shocked to see me. She made me come to the head of the classroom while she questioned me in front of the other students. I have always felt that she would have done better to work in the mines, for she had the determination of a mule and the strength of two men. I do not know if bossiness is a needed quality in a miner, but she had that, too.

  “Why are you not in mourning?” she demanded, as I was wearing my usual calico dress instead of black clothing required of the bereaved. She was older than Moses but all of us scholars knew how strong she was, and we tried not to make her raise her voice because it could pierce your eardrums with its sharpness.

  “Because I do not mourn my father,” I answered.

  “What insolence and ill-breeding,” she screeched. “Your father raised a crude and ungrateful daughter, going against God and nature.” In this way, she insulted both Papa for being a poor father and me for failing to pretend grief.

  “But, mistress,” I said as politely as possible under the circumstances, “would you have me lament someone who is not dead?”

  Miss Williams looked aghast. “His death is reported in both the Daily Bodie Standard and the Daily Free Press, Angeline Reddy,” she said in a harder tone, the one to which we have been taught never to answer back. “Who are you to contradict two newspapers as well as your teacher?”

  I stared at the floor, knowing I should not reply unless to agree.

  One of the Babcockry boys, the older one, Hank, spoke out from the back row. His voice was changing, so mostly it was deep but every so often it jumped, going up high, just to remind him, I suppose, that he’s not a man quite yet. He said, “My pa tole me everyone knows Mr. Patrick Reddy was a one-armed Irish shyster.” His voice slid up on one-armed and made him sound like a sick cow until it went back down again on Irish. Papa had lost one of his arms in a gunfight before I was born, and thus met Momma, who was his nurse. She convinced him to become a lawyer. He has been called a shyster before, meaning dishonorable, although surely it’s because people are jealous of his great and unmatched skills in defending the most guilty-seeming accused. Then Eleanor Tucker, who is older than me by a year and has a constant stream of beaus and a rich daddy, said, “Miss Williams, may we please return to our geography?”

  Eleanor is most studious, and I confide to you, dear diary, that this can be an almighty irritating aspect of her. She seemed to be implying that geography was more important than Papa, but it was Hank’s worse insult that made me forget proper behavior when standing before the classroom.

  “And yet my Papa can do more with one arm and his smart brain,” I retorted to Hank, “than your father could do with two of both.”

  Miss Williams stamped her foot; I felt it through the floor like when the mills are pounding ore from the mines. She said, “Hank Babcockry, go stand in the cloakroom until I say you may come out. While you are in there, think about unruliness in this classroom, talking without permission, and speaking ill of the dead.” He shuffled to his feet, the tallest boy in the class and also the skinniest. As usual, he wore an old pair of his father’s pants, too big around the waist and held up with a rope.

  Miss Williams continued, “Ellie Tucker, stand in the corner and balance your geography text on your head as a reminder of polite behavior.” Then she turned back to me. “Angeline Reddy, hold out your hands.” I’d never had my hands paddled, though I’d seen the welts they raised on the hands of others.

  One of the smallest children in the front row began to cry very quietly, the Higgins sisters clutched each other, and both the towheaded Fouke boys looked down at their desks. No matter how much we fought among ourselves, none of us liked to see another get the paddle. Glancing up, I caught a sympathetic look from Eleanor as she rose from her seat.

  The paddle was kept in sight on Teacher’s desk, a reminder to us students. Miss Williams seized it and smacked it, ferociously, onto my outstretched palms and fingers. At once my hands felt as if they had been thrust into a very hot fire; they throbbed and stung and the pain got worse, then worse still. Tears came to my eyes and all I could do was to hold my hands before me as if they were frozen in that position. I did not cry out.

  “Be seated, Angeline,” Miss Williams said.

  I stood there, bent over, gasping, and it was difficult to hear, while the tears in my eyes prevented me from seeing. It was as if my other senses had closed down and there was only searing pain.

  One of the Higgins girls in the front row, Beverly-Ann, tugged at my skirts. She tugged and tugged, and dimly I realized that Miss Williams was still holding the paddle and looking at me through narrowed eyes. She insists that her students receive punishment stoically, without showing any emotion. I turned finally, straightened, and walked to my seat. I kept my throbbing palms and fingers from touching any surface for a good long while.

  All afternoon I could scarcely hold my pencil with my thick and useless hands. The welts matched the pattern on the cane paddle.

  At home I was not much help to Momma. Though I tried wrapping my hands with flour sacks, I could not carry the heavy buckets of water needed to wash the blood off her clothes. Momma was not herself, being weepy and agitated over Papa, who should have sent a message to us by then. Finally I told her about sneaking into Mr. Ward’s establishment by the back door and discovering that Papa’s casket was empty. She rallied at this news and I was thankful that she ignored my boldness as a trespasser along with my failure to return to Dr. Rawbone’s office in time. She is more than ever sure that Papa lives. Many times before, during trials and investigations, he has disappeared or been called away, so we are confident that he is working on a case.

  I gathered up the soiled cloths, leaving her to doze, and on my way to the lean-to cellar, I made a discovery. The girl, Ling Loi, was standing just inside of our door.

  “Message for you,” she said. She did not smile.

  “Yes?”

  She waited. I frowned. I could wait as long as she could. But what was this game we were at? How could she be so gentle and kind to Momma, yet to me behave like an outdoor cat that has never known human touch?

  Finally too exasperated for this to go on, I said, “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  “Your answer.”

  I thought back to our conversation, yet could recall no question or request. I got the last of the bread pudding out of the pie safe and put it in the center of the table with two spoons. She flicked a glance at it, then gazed at the wallpaper. She scratched the inside of her forearm. I picked up one of the spoons and put it into her hand. She set it back on the table.

  I sat down and placed my hands on the table, palms up so she could see the marks on them. “I had my hands paddled today,” I said, “because I talked back to the t
eacher. I told her my father wasn’t dead, even though the newspapers said he was. Now tell me: Is your message from my father?”

  “I still wait to find out if you trust me,” she said. “I’m as Chinese today as I was Saturday. Yes or no.” Then she added, “Also I was educated in a brothel and I sometimes work for criminals.”

  I fanned myself with an old copy of the Daily Free Press. Polite people are not supposed to mention brothels, although it is a fact that there are dozens of these places where women entertain men on Bonanza Street near Chinatown. I would love to catch a glimpse of those women, for I have heard that they tell bawdy jokes and make themselves beautiful by painting their faces with emulsions and powders and by wearing gowns with low necklines, but they stay indoors and I am not even permitted to go to Bonanza Street. Everyone always says Bodie is the wildest and worst of all the mining towns, but I never get to see much more than the regular saloons on Main Street, and that is just the same all the time—tired, dirty miners and cardsharps passing money and whiskey across the tables and shooting their guns—usually, but not always, at the ceiling.

  “I’d enjoy seeing a brothel, but I do not want to know anything about your work with criminals,” I remarked, to show her she couldn’t shock me even though she just had. She said nothing. I must summon the faith of Peter to be able to hold up even a shred of a conversation with her. I asked, “Do you not want bread pudding?”

  She shook her head. We were both wearing exactly what we’d been wearing the other day. Her bony, flea-bitten wrist looked as fragile as a teacup. It made me feel distressed.

  “My mother is recovering,” I said. “I thank you for your help.”

  She nodded once.

  I remembered that Momma says we should be kind to everyone we meet, as we are all fighting a hard battle.

  “Please sit with me at this table. We can play a game of cards or I’ll read to you.” She continued to stand where she was, a person with no amusement in her, as if laughter were a special skill that has to be learned, and no one had bothered to teach her. After another minute she turned toward the door.