Songs of Willow Frost: A Novel

by Jamie Ford

  William reluctantly agreed and fished out a handful of pennies. He bought Charlotte a bag of cotton candy, and she held on to his arm as he wandered past the rows of movies and newsreels, reading the strange titles aloud.

  “Sorry, kid, the only new flicks we got are work films—we get ’em for free from Uncle Sammy.” The proprietor sat back, dipping into a tin of wax that he applied to the tips of his wide mustache.

  William passed on a movie by Jimmy Durante titled Give a Man a Job. “Do you have any movies with the lady on the poster?” he asked.

  “Willow? I figured you’d ask something like that,” the man said.

  Why, because I’m Chinese? William thought.

  “Especially after her making the tabloids this morning.” The man showed him the front page of The Seattle Star, which featured a photo of Willow in a voluminous fur coat, being greeted at Union Station by the local theater critic Willis Sayre and a gaggle of Seattle dignitaries. They were flanked by two police officers on motorcycles. Stepin was seated behind one of the uniformed men, mugging at the camera. Everyone looked enthralled. William echoed that sentiment as he stared at the newspaper. She looked so much like his mother. She looks like me, William thought yearningly. And I look like her.

  The proprietor spoke up. “I don’t have any of her new movies, but take a look at the machine on the end there. She ain’t listed in the credits, but I think Weepin’ Willow is in there somewhere, as an extra, I guess. Give it a whirl.”

  William felt Charlotte squeeze his arm.

  He read the placard on the machine. “It’s only three minutes long.” Then he stood on the footstep, dropped a penny in the slot, and slowly turned the crank as a light came on and the title flickered in black and white. “The Yellow Pirate,” he said.

  “Do you see her?” Charlotte asked.

  Not yet. William didn’t answer. He was absorbed in the simple story of a Chinese merchant who sold his cargo and then returned, dressed as a comical bandit, and attempted to steal it back. He failed and was quickly killed, losing his Oriental daughter to an American sea captain—but she didn’t look like Willow. There were only three main actors and a handful of extras; many of them appeared to be the same people, only their costumes had changed from scene to scene, and only a few were women. William stared, trying not to blink, his eyes watering as he waited to catch another glimpse of the women who stepped in and out of the background. Then the movie ended.

  “Did you see her?”

  “I don’t know,” William mumbled, rubbing his eyes. “It all moved so fast and was too blurry at times. I don’t know what I saw.”

  “Then watch it again,” the man said.

  William began to wonder if this was just a ploy to milk them of every penny they had. Ploy or no ploy, it worked. With Charlotte’s blessing, he watched the movie five more times, each time catching a glimpse of a woman in the background who looked like someone he once knew. But he couldn’t be sure. The more he wanted the actresses to be his ah-ma, the more they began to resemble her. Each time his imagination projected memorable features onto the figures that quickly entered and then exited the scene. He gave up before his imagination ran away with him and the women on film began to speak to him directly, waving and calling his name.

  WILLIAM AND CHARLOTTE still needed a place to spend the night. The man at the penny arcade handed them a card on their way out that read, “All You Downtrodden Ones call 354 Rockwell, Sister Mary’s Mission.”

  “Not passing judgment on your character,” he said. “But just in case, the mission home is probably the safest place to rest your head.”

  William stared at the card as they walked down the street.

  “I don’t think we can, William,” Charlotte said. “Not a good idea. The sisters at the mission might just send us back to the orphanage.”

  William doubted that anyone at Sacred Heart would even want them back, but he agreed that the mission wasn’t worth the risk. So they walked down Skid Row, where First Avenue curved around Pioneer Square. Through a haze of dust and coal smoke he could see the street spilling like a river onto the mudflats south of the city, where hundreds of ramshackle homes and clapboard shacks were pieced together with scrap lumber and tar paper. A hand-painted banner hung across the road that read: WELCOME TO HOOVERVILLE. WHERE LIFE IS STRIFE. As the wind blew northward he could smell sawdust, urine, and despair.

  That’s where we don’t want to end up, William fretted. Pioneer Square is bad enough. Instead of busy merchants in three-piece suits and fine hats, they now stepped around unemployed millworkers and bankrupt shirttail farmers who drank in the street and vomited in the gutters, cursing and swearing.

  Charlotte pinched her nose at the smell but didn’t complain.

  Amid the discouraging sights, sounds, and smells, William saw a polished sedan that stood out like a shimmering pearl in a rotting oyster. An old, uniformed chauffeur sat stoically behind the wheel as the sleek car glided by, heading uptown. Rich children in elegant clothing rode in the back and made slant-eyed faces, pointing at Charlotte and him as though they were monkeys on display in the Phinney Ridge menagerie. William watched them go and looked around. If anyone regarded him as a lost Oriental, they didn’t show it. The people William saw, those living and dying in the streets and alleyways, couldn’t see past their own despair or their next meal.

  As clouds rolled in, William crossed the intersection of King Street. He pondered finding a room back in Chinatown—someplace familiar, maybe even at the Bush Hotel, but those places near the train station seemed too expensive. So he kept wandering, avoiding establishments that were near burlesque houses like the Rialto or tattoo parlors, frowning at the many signs that read NO INDIANS. He’d once been mistaken for an Indian boy and worried that someone would complain and have them tossed out. Most of the doss-houses, like Father Divine’s Mission, the Boatman Hotel, and the Ragdale Home for Working Men, didn’t allow women or children. And vice versa for the women’s homes. More out of desperation and necessity than because of price or location, and because the sun was setting, William finally settled for a flophouse at First and Yesler that wasn’t so discerning.

  “How much is it?” Charlotte asked.

  William read the sign. “Twenty-five cents for a room, fifteen for a bed, and slings for a nickel. I’m not sure how you want to do this.”

  She took his arm and paused as though acknowledging his unspoken thought—which was that neither of them wanted to be alone. “I’ll share a room.”

  William led her down the concrete steps from the street into a tiny alcove beneath the building, where an old man with baggy eyes and a wrinkled, windburned face sat behind a glass, sipping coffee and playing solitaire with an old deck of cards. William slid a shiny quarter beneath the smudged window. “One room, please. One night.”

  The man looked up and did a double take, then nodded as though checking off a Chinese boy and a blind girl from the list of strangers that had visited. He took the quarter, examined it, and slid back a key. “We don’t normally allow boys and girls to share a room, but seeing as how she …” The man pointed to Charlotte’s eyes, then waved his hand in front of her, just to be sure. “Room Seventeen.” He went back to his card game.

  “It’s not much,” Charlotte said, smiling. “But it’s home.”

  Until tomorrow, William thought. Then what? All day long they had lived in the moment, not thinking too far ahead. They both seemed to know the quiet, lurking reality that if they couldn’t reach Willow, and even if they did and she wasn’t who William thought she was, or worse, if she rejected him entirely, then they’d be out on the street for real. Left to fight for meals with other homeless kids. Left to sleep in vestibules and doorways with their shoes on, for fear of having them stolen in the night.

  As they descended a lightless, garbage-strewn stairwell into a basement warren, William realized that this flophouse wasn’t much better. The rooms had been subdivided again and again into spaces barely large enoug
h for a bed and a locker. The walls didn’t even touch the ceiling. Instead, chicken wire had been used to bridge the gap, leaving everyone breathing the same air in the rooms, where he could hear tubercular men and women coughing and a baby crying. Everything smelled like cigarette smoke and body odors. As they passed a shared bathroom, William noticed a sign with a calendar nailed to the door instructing residents to avoid flushing during high tide because the toilet would back up. Lucky us. The tide is out.

  “It’s not so bad,” Charlotte said. “We can survive anything for one night.”

  William wasn’t so confident.

  “Besides, everyone knows that Blacks and Indians have it worse.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Sister Briganti,” William said, as he remembered the nun’s many baleful tales of the least among us. Stories of families sleeping in windowless rooms without heat or blankets. Where men with ripe sores on their legs and lice crawling their bodies drank homemade gin to stay warm.

  William shuddered at the thought. Then he found their room and he shuddered again. Room 17 had a single lightbulb that hung precariously from the ceiling. The walls were covered in graffiti and an assortment of salacious artworks, some drawn with pencil or ink, others carved into the wood. William heard a cat somewhere, wailing, probably at mice—or rats.

  “I know you must think this place is dreadful, and it probably is,” Charlotte said, “but it’ll be okay, William—it’s only temporary.”

  For the first time since he’d known Charlotte, William actually felt like he was the one living with a handicap, being sighted in a place like this.

  He barred the door and she took his hand, searching with her cane until she found their bunk. The bedding was nothing more than a quilt of soiled, moth-eaten rags, so thin, so rough and foul-smelling that Charlotte peeled it back and shoved it in the corner. William broke out the bread and crackers, and they both nibbled on some of each. Then they huddled face-to-face on the squeaky bed with all of their clothes on, their hats too. They used their coats as blankets.

  “Are you still glad you came along?” William asked, apologetically.

  Charlotte removed her left mitten and slipped her hand into his, lacing their fingers together for warmth and comfort. “I haven’t been this happy in a long time. There’s not a place I’d rather be right now.”

  William still didn’t know what she had to be so joyful about.

  They sat in their tiny hovel, listening to the snoring, breathing, coughing, and the rhythmic squeaking of mattress springs somewhere in the basement.

  “We’ll find her, William. You have to feel it.”

  Of that he was fairly confident. But what if she doesn’t want me? he thought, keeping his fears to himself—bracing his heart for one final rejection. As the Moviola at the penny arcade faded into memory, as he strained to remember the show at the Moore Theatre, her image blurred and became warped, distorted by his feelings of abandonment. What if she doesn’t care?

  “My mother died when I was little,” Charlotte said. “But I remember her holding me—I remember feeling safe and happy and content. I didn’t even know that I couldn’t see; my whole world was nothing but those feelings.”

  She squeezed his hand.

  “What’s your earliest memory of your mother?” Charlotte asked. “The very first one?” She moved closer, their knees touching.

  William closed his eyes and tried to remember. Sounds came first, and then smells. “My earliest real memory,” he said, “is of lying on my back, staring up at the tin ceiling of what must have been our apartment at the Bush Hotel. I was wet and warm from a bath in the kitchen sink, and the towels felt cold and rough against my bare skin. I remember my nose twitching from the scent of ammonia or detergent, and I couldn’t stop giggling and kicking my feet as my ah-ma cleaned my belly button with a Q-tip.”

  “That’s a sweet memory.”

  He smiled.

  “She would say in Chinese, ‘Don’t be a wiggle-worm.’ Whatever else she said to me I’ve forgotten, or lost, along with most of my Cantonese. And I remember hearing live music on the radio, and the window—it was dark outside, except for the moon, so it must have been my bedtime. Ah-ma sat me up and I wobbled as she stretched and tugged this nightshirt over my head that must have been too small because I recall my ears throbbing afterward. I don’t even know if that actually happened. I was little. It’s been so long. I barely remember anything. I might have imagined it all.”

  William paused and cleared his throat. Then he went on, speaking more slowly.

  “But there was another time I’ve never forgotten, years later, I was older … maybe five, I’m not sure … she was helping me get dressed and I heard a knock on the door. She turned and walked away. A man’s voice was shouting something … in Chinese, and my mother shouted back even louder. I heard glass breaking. Then my world turned sideways, the ceiling became the wall, and the wall became the floor. My head hit something, and everything went dark. I wanted to cry but couldn’t inhale, or exhale.”

  “Who was that man?” Charlotte asked.

  Was that my father? “I … don’t know,” William said instead. He chewed his lower lip. “But I touch the side of my head whenever I think of that moment, even to this day.” He removed her hand from their shared mitten and guided her fingers to a crease on his temple, just below his hairline.

  “That’s how I know it’s a real memory,” he said. “Because I still have the scar.”

  He closed his eyes and felt Charlotte run her soft, delicate fingertips along his old wound that had been so neatly hidden.

  “We all have scars, William. You. Me. I’m sure Willow has more than her share.”

  She gently kissed his blemish, then wished him good night.

  Velvet Rope

  (1934)

  William and Charlotte woke the next morning and turned on the light, to the vociferous complaints of their neighbors in the next room. They quickly turned off the bulb and gathered their meager belongings. William could barely knot his tie in broad daylight, yet somehow Charlotte and her amazingly dexterous fingers managed to craft a perfect bow in the gloaming. Eager to leave, they left the flophouse midmorning, shooing away a flock of pigeons that had been picking at earwigs crawling on the cold steps that led up to the street. The sidewalks were less crowded than the night before, though there were now men of every age, sleeping in gateways or raggedly snoring beneath nearby bushes with sheaves of old newspaper stuffed into their coats to stave off the crisp, damp Puget Sound air. How they remained asleep was a mystery, especially as the Salvation Army marched by, banging their loud bass drums. They formed a semicircle in the square, where the brass instruments lit into a heaven-splitting hymn that William barely recognized as “Solemnize Our Every Heart.” Charlotte grinned from ear to ear as the two of them sat on a vacant bench and listened to the men and women in their strange, bright uniforms playing bugles, trumpets, cymbals, and trombones. Before the song was over a stout woman passed a tambourine among the crowd asking for donations for the poor and downtrodden. William regarded the homeless men sleeping in the gutters and put in a nickel.

  William thought his companion should eat as they walked uptown, so they stopped at a lunch counter and ordered shredded wheat with cream, sprinkled with salt, and shared a cup of Ghirardelli chocolate. He let Charlotte have most of the hot cocoa and barely touched the cereal. His stomach was a knot of excitement and anxiety. As he glanced around the diner, he worried that grownups might question why they weren’t in school, but then he looked outside and saw dozens of kids their age, many younger, shining shoes, delivering newspapers, and sweeping up in front of stores. Public school is free, William thought, but even that has become a luxury some can’t afford.

  At the counter, William asked a stranger for directions, then guided Charlotte toward the new Skinner Building, where the 5th Avenue Theatre was impossible to miss. Its glowing red and yellow neon sign must have been four stories tall—William spotted i
t from three blocks away and squeezed Charlotte’s hand. Plus flashing signs for KOMO and KJR adorned the roof, along with towering radio antennae, which broadcast NBC Red and NBC Blue. But his heart quickened even more when he saw the entrance to the theater and its Chinese motif—layers of gold and jade, with massive, studded double doors painted burgundy, the threshold guarded by a pair of giant Foo dogs. Each golden canine was at least a foot taller than he or Charlotte.

  “Is this the place?” she asked.

  William looked up at the lighted grand marquee, which read: SEATTLE’S OWN WEEPING WILLOW FROST. PLUS: STEPIN FETCHIT—THE WORLD’S LAZIEST MAN. FEATURING ASA BERGER AND THE FOX MOVIETONE PLAYERS, WITH THE INGÉNUES. Stepin was a bigger star and had been in dozens of movies, but Willow, a local hero, had managed top billing.

  “Without a doubt,” William said. He’d forgotten that the 5th Avenue was a Chinese theater, at least on the outside. Somehow it was fitting that Willow would be performing here. It was the audience that would appear out of place.

  William took Charlotte’s hand and showed her how to touch the ball within a Foo dog’s mouth. “You’re supposed to rub it for good luck.”

  “Do I make a wish?”

  “You can if you want.”

  Charlotte closed her eyes and furrowed her brow. Then she smiled.

  “We should get in line,” William said as a crowd gathered, everyone waiting for the box office to open. William’s eyes widened when he saw that the theater was showing movies—some with Willow, though most of them, like Show Boat and The Galloping Ghost, featured Stepin. There was also an anthology, showcasing some of the other performers who would be appearing live, once in the afternoon and once for the final show of the evening. As much as William wanted to watch the other movies, he knew that they needed to save their money. So he didn’t mention the other shows as they lined up and bought tickets from a blond woman for the matinee, which cost thirty cents apiece, half the price of the evening show.