This Old Man (15 page)

“Next month. Night school.”

“That's wonderful, Marla. How did you fit that in?”

“Hackey said okay. He said it wouldn't hurt me to get some better grammar.” She laughed wickedly. “It didn't do nothing for my grammar, but I don't care, because I'm quitting Hackey.” She'd said this many times before, but never with this kind of determination.

I didn't know how to ask the next question, so I just blurted it out: “Am I coming home to live with you?”

“Well, sweetie, things isn't ever that simple. See, I've got to slip away, where he can't find me. I'm not even going to tell you where I'm going, so if he finds you, he can't make you tell him. But I'll keep in touch. Elizabeth over at that house will know how to reach me, if it's an emergency or something like that. I'll send you some money when I can. I won't have much for a few months.”

“I'm working at Candlestick Park this summer. I can send
you
money.”

“Well, maybe.”

“How is Hackey going to handle this?” I asked, blowing a puff of air out of my mouth. I knew how Hackey would handle it.

“I've made that man lots of money, and he's been good to me most of the time. Part of the time. He loves me, best as he can. I think he wants me to have a good life.”

I nodded, as if I believed her.

“Who am I fooling? My baby, who's seen it all? Hackey will be having shit fits when he finds me gone. But I've gotta go, baby. What's he going to do when I'm forty and no good to him, put me out on a raft to float? I gotta just disappear, where he won't come looking for me, you understand?”

“I understand.”

“I am going to miss him, honey.”

Each to her own, I thought, giving her hand, which felt so frail and dry, a comforting pat.

“There's only just one thing. If I get out from under—”

Yes, I knew the rest.

“Well, if I'm gone, he might lean on you a little bit more, come looking for you and all.”

“I thought of that.”

“Listen, baby, burn those pictures.”

“Oh, no. I'm hanging on to them. I might need them some day.”

My mother nodded. “You do what you think. You always was on your own anyway. You'll be okay?”

“I'm fine at Anza House.” Despite Carmella, I thought.

“I knew I was doing the right thing, sending you there, you know that, sweetie? That might be the most decent thing I ever done.”

After that there wasn't much more to say. We walked down the hill to a flower shop and looked around in there for a while, until the first bus came. I bought her a rose to pin to her suit coat, and she slipped me $25 just as she got on the bus.

There was the usual hum of activity at the vegetable market. Mrs. Kwang slapped her hands together to kill gnats that were circling her fruit. “Hello there, Greta,” she said. “Do you want a nice tomato?”

I'd been taught to say no, thank you and wait to be coaxed. Hackey always liked coaxing. What he especially liked was to stop, just before I bit. “Oh, no thanks,” I told Mrs. Kwang. “Actually, I'm looking for Wing. Do you know where he is?”

“Oh, yes, he's at the hospital,” she said.

“How is Old Man today?”

“My father-in-law is very well today. He will live to be a hundred and ten years old. I think he'll live longer than all of us!” Mrs. Kwang smiled shyly. “You see, I take good care of him. I feed him good food. Wing is taking him a small supper now.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Kwang. I'll go on over and wait for Wing there.”

“No tomato?”

My mouth was watering. I wanted to grab one of those things and pop it in my mouth.

“Here.” She picked out the plumpest, brightest red cherry tomato in the pile. One bite shot thousands of sweet seeds all over my mouth. I didn't dare open my mouth even to say thank you.

There was that time when I was about nine, and Hackey took us to the King's Table for dinner …

The restaurant's in Millbrae, a town on the San Francisco peninsula. It's made to look like an old English pub, with a huge buffet table you can go back to over and over. I load up on macaroni salad, deep red Jell-O, thin slices of rare roast beef piled high, black olives, fresh hot bread, sliced peaches, scalloped potatoes, Yorkshire pudding puffs—and six cherry tomatoes. I have to cup my hand around the plate to keep things from falling off on my way back to the table. The bread, five tomatoes, and half the roast beef go into a plastic sack in my purse. That's for tomorrow and the next day. Then I begin working my way down the mountain of food to the savory macaroni salad on the bottom. The first thing I have to take care of is that one tomato that is rolling around on the mountain peak. I suck it into my mouth. My mother says I look like a vacuum cleaner. My mouth falls open when I laugh. I bite down, and tomato seeds spray all over the white tablecloth. My mother can't stop laughing as she slides the seeds into a neat pile with her knife. Hackey looks from one to the other of us, faking a smile now and then, but he hasn't been able to get into the silliness of it. Finally he says, “You got enough on your plate to feed the Russian army.”

We're not going to let him spoil our fun this night. I blow the paper off my straw, and it flies past my mother, winging its way to a table of old folks on leave from the Home. The Jell-O shaking on my plate like blubber is enough to drive us wild with laughter all over again. Oh, a new discovery: the macaroni tubes fit over both my little fingers. I curl my macaroni pinkie around my water glass. My mother has to turn away from me to keep from cracking up. The old folks are all staring at us, waiting to see what happens next.

“Jesus Christ, it's like going out to eat with Laurel and Hardy,” Hackey says. He throws $20 down on the table and leaves. We still can't stop laughing and carrying on like slapstick comics, even when we discover that Hackey isn't in the lobby, or even in the parking lot, and we're twenty miles from home and have $2.17 between us to get us home.

I have always loved cherry tomatoes.

I didn't have to wait long at the hospital. Nor did Wing seem surprised to see me when he came out of Old Man's room. He looked positively ecstatic that day.

“Oh, I'm glad you're here, Greta. Guess what? Chen lost the job.”

“What job? Did he go to work for the fish man?”

“No, no, no. This job.” Wing gestured toward Old Man's door. “Old Man yelled and yelled and told Chen not to come back to this room, or he would never eat another bite of food, and Chen would have his great-grandfather's death on his conscience forever.”

“That's wonderful! I'll bet Old Man would have done it, too. Now he's all yours again.”

“All mine. He was in such a good mood tonight. He told me stories about life along the Pine River, in the old country. He told me about his father, who had the weight of responsibility for a household of forty-six.”

“That's some family.”

“Oh, they were not all what you would call family. There were his brothers and their wives and children, and many servants, and orphans from the village, and travelers stopping with him on their way to the big cities.”

“It sounds like something out of
The Godfather
.”

“Doesn't it?” Wing smiled. “Of course, my great-grandfather wasn't a crook.”

“I never suspected he was, never for a moment.”

“How different it must have been for Old Man when he came to this country,” Wing mused. “Do you know he lived in a cave with twelve other men one summer?”

“In a cave?”

“They were building the railroad in those years.”

I couldn't picture Old Man doing manual labor. Somehow I thought he'd always closed himself in a heavily draped room to read and write and sip hot tea, while everyone else worked to feed him.

“When he came to San Francisco,” Wing continued, “he took whatever work he could. He speared trash in the streets with a stick. When the stick was full, he got ten cents. Also, he used to strap himself into a harness to wash the outside windows on tall buildings.”

“Old Man washing windows? I don't believe it.”

“He was much younger then.”

“Yes, but with all his education and learning, couldn't he get a job as a teacher?”

“He didn't speak English. And besides, Chinese were not allowed to work except in the lowest of jobs that no one else would take.”

“Then who taught the children here in Chinatown? Someone had to teach them Chinese.”

“You don't know, do you? There were no children, only men. It was very lonely here for him. He never had an easy life, you see, once he was an adult.”

If only I had known him when he was a young man washing windows. What did he do after work, I wondered.

“He tells me the men sat around together telling stories about better days, and gambling away their small salaries. They sent money home to their families in China, and they had nothing to spend the rest on anyway.”

When had Old Man's life turned around? When had he gone back to being the aristocrat he was born to be? When his son could support him, I guessed, and his grandsons could serve him. How long had he waited to be treated like a rich man again—fifty years? What a museum of warring memories he must have been.

17

I sat in Mr. Saxe's office, with my chin digging into my knees. I was wearing jeans long enough to cover my sneakers, and a bulky yellow sweater that sent bits of fluff up to tickle my nose. My mood was low—the hormones were battling it out. “I haven't heard a word from my mother, and it's been two weeks.”

“I'm glad you brought it up,” said Mr. Saxe. He didn't look at all glad. “Let's talk about her.”

“I want to know where she is.”

He shrugged his shoulders, not exactly lying, but implying that he didn't know.

“You know where she is, don't you?”

There was the slightest hesitation. “Yes, but I'm not going to tell you. Your mother explained all that. I can tell you she's safe, she's staying in a rooming house that's run by a nice Irish gentlewoman, and she's started school.”

“Oh, well.” I shrugged. “I never did keep close tabs on her.” Not knowing where she was now made me miss her more than I ever dreamed I would. No matter what, I always used to know where she was. “I've got other things going on.”

“Many other things.”

I couldn't think of a single one.

“Look, Elizabeth doesn't get home from school until five-thirty. Now's a good time,” I reasoned.

Sylvia was into her Miss Goody-Two-Shoes routine. “You're asking
me
to break into Elizabeth's room?”

“Who said break in? It's not Watergate, you know. She leaves her room unlocked. We just open the door.”

“I dunno, I dunno,” Sylvia stammered. “I don't even know what we're looking for.”

“A piece of paper. Or an address book. Or her journal. She's got to have something that tells where my mother is.”

“Why do you need to know? Are you going there?”

“No. It's just that I have a right to know. She's my mother. I'm a minor, you know? A minor has a right to keep up with her mother's whereabouts. It's in the Constitution.”

“Okay,” Sylvia said, with a deep sigh. “But I'm not involved. I'm just coming along for moral support. If anybody asks me, I don't know anything, got that?”

“For God's sake, we're not robbing Elizabeth. I'm just going after some information that's mine anyway. Never mind. I don't need your help.”

“No, no, I said I'd do it.” What a martyr.

We tiptoed out of our room. There was no need to sneak around, really. Jo's radio was at top volume so she could hear it in the shower. From the kitchen we heard Pammy's clunking and clanging as she started the potatoes boiling and got the hamburgers laid out on the broiler pan. As for Carmella, she was occupied. We peeked through her partially open door, hoping we wouldn't be caught. There she sat, on her bed, with a box of soda crackers, a jar of Skippy's chunky-style peanut butter, and a quart of strawberry jam. She put the jelly knife down on her bedspread and ground cracker crumbs into the carpet with her foot. She blew crumbs off her lap into the air where they spun in a circle and landed back on the bed.

Sylvia chuckled. “She even makes peanut butter and jelly look disgusting.”

“Come on,” I whispered, “before it's too late.” We opened Elizabeth's door. The room smelled just like her—a solid, earthy smell like a leather coat.

A bookcase made of bricks and unfinished, knotty boards hulked along one wall. Books were stacked every which way, some open face down on top of the piles. Elizabeth's closet was wide open, and a few dresses and blouses hung in a huddle to one side. The other side was bare, except for cartons stacked up to the rod. It looked like she wasn't at Anza House on a permanent basis.

The desk, a huge, metal secretary's desk, was a field of clutter—carbon paper, five-by-seven cards covered with notes, budgets, menus, bills, letters, two calendars. Sylvia stood in front of the desk with her hands on her hips and one knee bent. Her whole posture spelled disapproval.

I opened the middle drawer of the desk to find the usual treasures—paper clips, tape, scissors. The side drawer was stuck. I opened the middle drawer again to release it. There stood a row of manila folders, one for each of us, with our names printed in purple ink. “Here it is!” I glanced up to show Sylvia that our work was paying off, but Sylvia had vanished and left the door open. Some friend, I thought, as I thumbed through the folders to find
JANSSEN, GRETA
.

The folder had my I.Q. and personality tests in it. I'd have to come back another day to read the results. There was a double-spaced report from Mr. Saxe that began, “Greta Janssen, a sixteen-year-old Caucasian female, was referred to this office by Lutheran Social Services.”