“Sure,” she said. I opened my eyes to find her large, dark eyes directed at the water that lay above my groin.
“I am bobbing to the surface,” I said.
She fetched me a towel, then removed herself to the small table at which she and her children ate, and on which she folded laundry.
I stood to dry myself, and Chun Ho said, “Flower.”
When Mrs. Hess had partaken of what her clients agreed was Lydia Pinkham’s in ruby port wine, her dignified carriage grew famously erect; she looked, in fact, as though she might tip over from carrying herself all but on the balls of her feet in their patent leather slippers. Her mammoth bosom rose and fell rapidly at her prow as if a powdered creature transported into the parlor for applause. She blinked her eyes a good deal and spoke quite slowly, though I could not tell whether to herself she sounded quick and nimble of tongue. Malcolm seemed as spifflicated as she, though he did seem to recognize me, and to turn his face toward the woman to his right, who, at that instant, yawned.
“You’ve an admirer there, all right,” a stocky man said as he lit his cigar. It was fairly apparent that he had set his sights on the slight, ruddy girl for whose company Malcolm had paid. I wondered what salary his insurance firm gave a boy who at best might be a clerk, that he might spend so much money on liquor and whores.
Because it was the end of the working night, Mrs. Hess’s servant, whom we knew as Delgado, made his tour of the downstairs rooms, dimming the lights. He carried a short, thick truncheon in his coat and, although he was of stringy build and quiet demeanor, I had never seen a man stand up to him. Mrs. Hess sat beside Malcolm, on the other side
from her girl, and soon she was snoring demurely; that would change, I knew, and we would all be treated to great, gasping noises unless Delgado removed her to her quarters in the back of the house.
Malcolm was pinching the girl’s jaws with his hand, squeezing hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. I watched Delgado approach him from the rear of the sofa.
“If you must be a whore, you whore, then have some
manners
while you’re at it,” Malcolm said.
The stocky man said, “Do not address her in that wise. And drop your hand from her face.”
“By jockies!” Malcolm said, trying to stand. The girl rubbed her face, and Malcolm gave up, sitting back, his fists raised, his eyes closed, stupid with drink.
“Sir,” Delgado said.
“What is it?” the boy asked, his eyes still closed.
“It is time to retire, sir.”
Malcolm opened his eyes. Delgado’s suggestions were almost always accepted.
“A cabriolet, sir?”
Malcolm said, “Awoke.”
Delgado turned to me. I said, “He means to say he’ll walk, I think. But here.” I held up some coins, and Delgado came around to accept them for Malcolm. “Send him home. He’ll never make it on his own. He’ll be lucky, any rate, if he’s admitted at home.”
“You know the gentleman, sir?”
“His father and I are, you might say, associates in trade, Mr. Delgado.”
Delgado raised his sparse brows, took the coins, and lifted Malcolm from the divan as if he were a frail boy instead of a bulky cross between child and adult man.
“You might have a word with the father about the comportment of the son,” the stocky fellow said.
I turned to him and stared. He dropped his eyes and attended to the
girl whose face Malcolm had bruised. The stocky man addressed her with exaggerated concern, and she shrugged her shoulders and made to smile; it looked more like a leer.
I walked to the foyer, where I found Delgado about to descend the steps with his charge. “Allow me, Delgado,” I said. “If you’ll help me stuff him into the carriage, I’ll escort him home. What I gave you for fare I hope you’ll use for a drink.”
“Mr. Bartholomew,” he said. He inclined his head an inch. I had heard a rumor that on a Portuguese cod fisherman, somewhere off the English coast, he had cut a man very badly with a gaff and, while the fellow bled, Delgado had used the hook to keep the crew from coming to the man’s assistance. According to the story, he had never said a word, from start of fight to death by exsanguination.
It was a mild enough night, but I took the blanket from the driver and laid it on Malcolm’s shoulders and chest, more as a stay against his soiling his clothing if he took sick than as a protection from the night. We made our way south and west through the smells of coffee and bread and, once, the sour stink of a brewery.
“Mr. Face,” Malcolm said.
“You’ll be forgiven tonight,” I said. “But Delgado will remember.”
“Ooh,” the boy said, and he affected to laugh. “Mr. Face,” he said again.
I placed the thumb and forefinger of my left hand on his nostrils and pinched; the while, I clasped his lips between the thumb and forefinger of my right. He began to struggle, so I slapped with elbow and forearm upon his chest, and he went crimson. I squeezed and then let go with both my hands. “Don’t call me that a third time,” I said.
He began to go very pale, and I knew that he was about to heave his night’s drink. “Driver!” I called. “To the curbing, if you please, at once!”
While Malcolm leaned out to the right, I climbed down from the left, gave the driver his instructions and his fare, and I made long strides to escape the sound of the boy’s blubbering and spew.
I was at Seventy-second Street, and I would have a good night’s walk in which to think. I had been fascinated by Jessie’s tranquillity—not a word about the children until I referred to them, when I said only that I had an eye on an opportunity and that I must devote time to developing it, and hearing in return only her assurance that she knew me well enough to exercise patience. Of course, there was little about Jessie that did not fascinate me: her form, her face, the delicate tattoos and their location, and her ability to work for Mrs. Hess and keep herself fresh and somehow inviolate.
I said, “Ba!” A man carrying a heavy burlap sack came abreast and went faster as I spoke. I had addressed not him but myself. I was becoming foolish—inviolate, indeed!—and it occurred to me that I must see her less, or not at all, if I was to remain strong enough to survive in this city, and in my profession, and in, as a matter of fact, my own flesh. When I realized at once that I would not forsake seeing Jessie, and that I felt as if I
could
not, I also realized that something like my life was now at stake. I walked faster, as if to outrun my thoughts.
That pace, and the sound of my harsh, rapid breathing against the inside of the mask, reminded me of a story M had told me. I could not remember where it was set, or what the ship was called, but it concerned a man from the Isle of Man. I did recall how, as he said it to me, I reminded myself that I was hearing a tale from the man who had written perhaps the greatest story told by an American about American industry. His
Whale
was a hymn to the catching of enormous creatures and using them, blubber and ambergris, for the manufacture of oily light and the perfumed scent on golden breasts and dark brown nipples I had just recently left. How the owners failed to hire a captain who would serve their will was a lesson to every man of capital, and how they lost a ship laden with oil was the story’s moral: If you have a plan, you must see it through, and if you have none, you have no business; hire slackly and lose your investment; do not risk your money with a man who covets none.
The fishing vessel had been caught by a freeze in a cove off Lyme
Regis, and the crew had actually watched the salt water thicken, first on the rigging and on the nets, and then on the bowsprit, and then in the sea that slapped, more and more slowly, against the hull itself. Within hours, as M told the story, the ship was halted, ringed with ice that lay tight against her, and the masts were like the limbs of trees in winter—bone-white, glinting. “It made the Ancient Mariner seem like a passenger on a pleasure craft,” he told me, sitting forward to lean his elbows on his knees, rubbing his hands as if against the cold that came blowing into the room from out of his story.
“The captain pitched over dead,” he said, “frozen on the spot. He fell out of his shoes, in fact, and they remained adhered to the deck by inches of ice that now lay over everything. This was—did I tell you?—the winter of 1832, famous for its killing chill. The frail were culled, and only the hearty survived the year, especially along the English coast.
“That left a first mate who was too drunk, whether with fear or gin I cannot say, and a second mate who was barely old enough to tell
himself
what to do, much less a crew of a dozen tars who had long before that, I daresay, considered catching and eating him.”
“They were cannibals?” I remembered saying, gullible as a lamb in an abattoir.
“Shipmate, there’s more than one way to devour a boy on a boat,” he told me. “But to the inclemencies, then, shall we? Here they are: worse than becalmed because a ship with no wind can send a cutter out to tow her an inch at a time if needs must. And there’s always the hope of a sudden gust of wind. But this was the dead of winter, mind. And the ship as fixed in the ice as a glass eye in a stuffed and mounted Muscovy duck. And the temperature falling, and night coming on, and the captain dead, the first mate incapacitated and soon enough to freeze to death.
“ ‘What shall we do, sir?’ calls the cabin boy to the second mate. The men fall about grunting—it would have been laughter in a fairer clime—at the sight of the little fellow thus questioning the fellow not much larger or older.
“ ‘We’ll make a fire!’ pipes the second mate, intent on doing his duty, and on seeing the crew through the fray.
“ ‘What shall we burn, then, lad,’ groans an able-bodied, ‘fish in blocks of ice?’
“ ‘Charts, the log, and every book on board,’ cries the second mate.
“A fellow known as Button, Sterling Button, called by his shipmates either Silver or Bone, scholarly man with gold-rimmed spectacles tied round the back of his head to keep them on when he’s up in the ropes, says, in his deep voice that matches his broad, manly shape, ‘I’d rather perish, sir.’
“ ‘But you will,’ the second mate is wise enough to note.
“ ‘Then I will, but I’ll not burn my books.’
“ ‘What’s in ’em, then?’ asks one of the rugged net haulers, shivering in his boots and oilskins.
“ ‘Poetry,’ Button tells them. ‘Sweet music, hard truth, and wisdom. And a bit of sorrow, like spice in a Polynesian stew. Madness, even, though of the sane variety. And not for burning.’
“With that, he bolts, for he knows they’re soon to act. He hies himself to his hammock and his seaman’s trunk, a lovely structure of polished maple from his native New Hampshire and leather from a deer he shot when home. He opens the lid for an instant, looks in at the titles and the authors’ names, and, bidding farewell to the likes of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare and Laurence Sterne, he shuts the trunk and locks it, and he swallows the small metal key. ‘They can cut it out of me when they’ve done their worst,’ Button says. He opens his clasp knife and sits, awaiting them, perched atop his seaman’s trunk in the middle of a frozen waste like an Anchorite in the sweltering sands of the Holy Land.”
He had leaned, again, to refill our glasses, spilling a little after having drunk much.
“And there he sat.”
“But what happened? I must beg you: finish,” I said.
“No, shipmate. In the case of the tale of Button and his books, what happened matters less than Button’s decision.”
“To die for his books.”
“Exactly. Perfectly spoken. Die for his books.
That
, shipmate, is a reader for whom a man might decide to write something and see it through the printers and reviewers. Die for his books.”
“And that,” I remember saying, disappointed and bemused, “is all?”
“It is everything,” he said.
“You startle me with your unorthodoxy,” I ventured to say, “but you do so surely tell a tale. I dare not complain.”
“So they once said,” he told me, and turned his attention to the blue, oily gin.
His son, I thought, stepping back from the wheels of a yellow-and-white ice wagon from which trailed some of the sawdust used to insulate the great, cloudy blocks, had none of the highly flavored language, none of the easy command of one’s attention, nor any of the certainty—for all the uncertainty of M’s latter days—that made him a present public official and, once, an author to be reckoned with. His son was, in fact, a bully and a lout. He would enjoy the murder of Indians, I wagered.
I knew men, I reminded myself, who had engaged in a war’s worth of murder.
It was battle, I demurred. I was a soldier.
But the bully boy will also be a soldier, I told myself.
I could not have been more mistaken.
Outside the Five Points House of Industry that same night, I paused beside its smeared, unlighted window and its rugged wooden door. This was a refuge, I knew, for Chinese boys who wished to learn a trade other than their father’s. Women, of course, did not attend, nor were they taught how to dress like Americans and speak the language of the United States. They were drowned at birth in China, I had heard men say at the
coffeehouse beneath the Equitable Building. Surely, reading of gold miners in California and Oregon—it was where Chun Ho and her people had come from: “Oh-gin.” “Where?” “Oh-gin!” “Oregon?” “Sure”—I had seen stories of the binding of women’s feet at birth, of the uselessness, to their family, of girls, who would finally be of service as breeders for the groom’s family. Chinese women rarely appeared on the streets, and I saw very few, and all of them were bulky in their silk pajamas and oval shoes, and none seemed to walk with the abrupt energy of Chun Ho or, for that matter, to sit with the profound contemplation I sensed in her. I had seen her lift filled laundry baskets, two of them, each balanced on the end of a stick, that were almost as tall as she. Somehow her mother had felt obliged to serve Chun Ho’s wish for independence. Somehow Chun Ho had felt obliged to serve her own. I knew that she had a daughter and a son, and I knew that she would feel obliged to raise the daughter as an American person—a girl strong enough to live alone.