This Old Man Read online

  “We haven’t completely unpacked. Where would we put it? Anyway, we’re on the waiting list for the Ping Yuen project apartments, and when we get one, we’ll have more room. Even a balcony.” He said this proudly, as though they already lived there. “I suppose you’re wondering about the rest of the place?”

  I was dying to know about it. “Where does everyone sleep?”

  Wing said, “You are sitting on my parents’ bedroom. It opens up into a bed at night. There are also two other bedrooms. My two little sisters share one, my two brothers and I share the other one.” He smiled for the first time that day. “Yes, three Chinese brothers in one bed, can you picture it? And of course there’s a corner of our room that’s surrounded by screens, and that’s Old Man’s room.” I knew, without asking, that no one had occupied Old Man’s bed all those weeks he’d been in the hospital. “It’s Old Man I want to talk about,” Wing said.

  I dreaded what was coming. “I’m not really mad anymore.”

  He brushed that off. He probably knew I was lying. “I want you to know about him so you’ll understand him.”

  “How am I going to understand him, Wing, I mean, looking at it realistically? I’m a sixteen-year-old Caucasian American girl with practically no family, and I eat spaghetti and meat loaf and happen to think they’re delicious. He’s absolutely the opposite of everything I am.” I allowed a bitter edge to creep into my voice. The vibrations in the floor were getting to me.

  “I’m not much like Old Man either.”

  That was true, he wasn’t at all like the intolerant tyrant I had heard ruling his universe from the other side of the door. Somehow Wing was able to love that most unlovable of men. How? I decided to listen.

  “He was better today.”

  “Oh?” I would listen, but not too enthusiastically.

  “Dr. Tseng put a stethoscope up to Old Man’s ears and let him listen to his own heart. Old Man loved it. He said it was like a poem, in perfect meter. His heart is very strong, you see. Now he isn’t calling Dr. Tseng a turtle anymore.” Wing looked at me pointedly. “Turtles are out.”

  “What’s in?”

  “He has a better name for the doctor. The name is—” Wing hesitated. “You’ll get mad if I tell you.”

  “I’m already mad,” I reminded him.

  “The name is Guang-doo, which means feebleminded person. That’s an improvement over turtle. I should know.”

  “Old Man is all too generous,” I said.

  Wing grinned, and for some reason it felt like a patronizing gesture. How had things turned, all of a sudden?

  “Has Old Man once in his whole life ever given in to anything?”

  Wing thought for quite a while. “Yes,” he answered slowly. “He got sick, didn’t he? He’s never been in the hospital before. That’s a big concession for him, can’t you see?”

  6

  The time had come to hear about Old Man. The history I’d imagined for him wasn’t enough to keep me from being furious over his pig-headed, intolerant, overbearing, uncompromising ways. “Tell me where he was born, exactly. Don’t just say ‘in China,’ okay?” Reluctantly, I was letting the spirit out of the bottle.

  Wing answered all too eagerly, glad to have the bottle unstopped.

  “He came from Sunkiang, a city of about seventy-five-thousand people when Old Man was born.”

  “And?”

  “Sunkiang is in the southern part of China, along the Soong-Huang, the Pine River. It was a great literary center. Old Man was the son of the son of a wealthy man, whose name was on the Pak Ka Sing, the Hundred Families Name List. Old Man was, of course, a great scholar, like his father and grandfather. He was one of the few prized students admitted to the Hanlin Academy.”

  “What’s that, some college?”

  “More important. These students, who were all past their doctorates, had the great honor of compiling the history of the dynasty.” Wing beamed with pride, his eyes dashes in the rolls of his cheeks. Now the bottle had been shaken, and its contents were exploding. His smile slowly faded. “But Old Man never got to the Hanlin Academy.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “It was the early 1900s,” Wing began, as though this were a tale told over and over. I pictured him sitting on the floor at his grandfather’s feet, hearing the story for the first and fortieth time. “The first car came to Sunkiang, and the first streetcar also. There were these revolutionary republicans who fought against the Manchu Dynasty, which our family supported. There were all kinds of riots in the streets. I’ve heard it was bloody and vicious. It went on for a long time, but finally, the Manchu Dynasty fell about 1912, and China became a republic.”

  “So how does Old Man fit into all this?”

  “I’m coming to that. Be patient.”

  Patience was never easy for me.

  “In those days a Manchu proudly wore his hair knotted into a long braid down his back.”

  “Yes, a queue, I read about it in a Pearl Buck book.” He’d never heard of Pearl Buck. How could he be Chinese and not know Pearl Buck?

  “Like all the other scholars, Old Man wore a queue also. The revolutionaries thought the queue was a sign of Manchu tyranny over the people. So a big pastime was prowling through the streets with knives and shears, and slashing off the men’s braids. This happened to Old Man,” Wing said, with quiet rage.

  “I’m sorry.” I truly was. “But couldn’t it just grow back?”

  “You don’t understand. It was terribly demoralizing. A nobleman would lose great face when something like this was done to him. He’d lash out in anger maybe, like Old Man did. He’s always been outspoken.” Wing glanced toward me for some reaction, and I gave him a small nod. “Old Man became an enemy of the republic. All the aristocrats were, of course, but Old Man was targeted for death. He hid in the shadows of his courtyard, to save his life. He was a prisoner in his own home.”

  I had a certain satisfaction in knowing that Old Man had suffered this disgrace, this terror. But I was embarrassed for him, as if I’d seen a great beast reduced to slithering. I could not let myself picture Old Man—then a young man—with the stubby hairs of his amputated queue over his collar, cowering within the gates of his home. “What happened to him then, Wing?”

  “Here’s the good part. One night a crowd gathered outside his home. Old Man thinks that the Christian missionary called the people together in that very spot so Old Man would hear. Oh, I wish you could listen to him deliver the missionary’s speech the way he heard it that night. But I’ll translate.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  “The missionary stood on top of a wagon—this is what the two remaining servants described to Old Man. And with his black Western hat, underneath the first electric streetlight in Sunkiang, he said, ‘In the Country of the Starry Flag, where I come from, everyone worships God and His Son. My honored friends, I give you my word as a gentleman, as an American, and as a Christian, that because my people worship the Father and the Son, there is no misery, no suffering, no oppression, no poverty, and no class conflict, no sin, no sin, my friends, in America across the sea!’”

  “They actually believed that? That all Americans were Christians and never sinned?”

  “Well, why not? What else did they know? And then the minister stepped down from the wagon and began mingling with the people, all the time backing toward Old Man’s gates. Behind his back he handed a bundle to a servant at the gate and motioned that he should carry it to his young master. In the bundle was a Western suit, a wide-brimmed hat, and an American passport. Old Man left for Shanghai in the middle of the night and sailed the next day for America.”

  “What a shock it must have been when he realized the missionary had been lying.”

  “Lying?”

  “Wouldn’t you say he was lying?”

  “I would say he was telling the truth the way he understood it. Old Man has always told his own view of truth. But anyway, Old Man got here and found that the missionar
y’s view was wrong. In gratitude to the missionary, who after all did save Old Man’s life, you see, he became a Christian. But he wasn’t ever peacefully resigned. Do you understand him now?”

  I shook my head no, not yet.

  “It takes a while,” Wing sighed. “I’ll wait.”

  And I thought of Wing, robed in silk, walking silently through the courtyards of his ancestral home in Sunkiang, reciting poems to himself, and waiting for me to come around.

  In Mr. Saxe’s waiting room, the minutes crept toward 4:45. Other kids sat there smoking, blowing bubbles, doing homework, playing with an old Rubik’s Snake. I was the only one who seemed to be watching the heavy hand of the clock drag itself from minute to minute. Finally the big black kid who saw Mr. Saxe ahead of me came strutting out of the office, tugging at his cuffs as though he’d just been fitted for a new suit. He was grinning; he’d obviously won a round with Mr. Saxe, who now stood at the door calling for me.

  He studied his clipboard for a minute or so, with his glasses way down on his nose. He wore a tan suit and a yellow shirt with blue ink dashes on the pocket. It was the first time I could remember seeing him in more than one color.

  “Come in, Greta,” he said, very solemnly. When we were in our assigned seats at his desk, he asked, “Have you had any contact with You-Know-Who?”

  “None.”

  “Good … good. And what’s happening with the job search?”

  “Nothing.”

  He slid the pen off his ear and tapped it on the clipboard. “Where have you been looking?”

  “I haven’t tried.” I hoped he’d get mad and yell at me. I was in the mood for a good scrap. And no one had yelled at me in such a long time.

  He flipped the pages of his desk calendar and mumbled something I didn’t hear. I was thinking about the story Wing had told me.

  In 1913, when Old Man came to San Francisco, there were no Chinese women here. He was twenty years old and ready to marry, to continue the line of his ancestors. For five years he tried to bring over the woman who had been promised to him in China. But in those days there were laws that prevented Chinese from immigrating, and most of those who came, came illegally, even the way Old Man himself did. Finally, his bride arrived, a tiny, frail woman who had been a healthy girl when he’d last seen her. She had been ravaged by the long, hungry voyage across the sea, having had no one to care for her broken, bound feet. In China she had always been like a child, attended by doting women. In the dismal, poor, brick-walled streets in Chinatown, life was so much coarser. She withered and died with the first son still unborn. She had given birth to a daughter, but what was a daughter in those days? The mother’s body was sent back to China to be buried in Old Man’s ancestral ground, and the little girl went back to be raised by old aunts.

  Many years later another wife was sent for Old Man, and she was Wing’s grandmother. She had been toughened by the chaos in China in the early 1920s, and she was ready for the grim reality of San Francisco’s Chinatown. She hit the California shore like a hurricane, and put a stormy end to Old Man’s loneliness. But she was not a very fertile woman, and eight years passed before their first son was born. Wing’s father came in the middle of the depression, which the poor people of Chinatown hardly noticed. There were two girls born quickly after Wing’s father, as though the woman had finally caught on. And then, having been a dutiful wife to Old Man, for forty years, she requested permission to go back to China to enjoy her old age. Old Man was alone again, except for his son, his two daughters, a few worthless grandchildren, and Wing.

  I liked this story. I would go over it and over it at odd times, like at night when I was falling asleep. I’d imagine Old Man’s pleasure when a fiery wife finally came for him, when his son was born, and then his grandson. I wondered if he had missed his wife terribly when she went back to China. I’d forgotten to ask Wing if she was still alive. Although I knew she’d be close to ninety, I decided to believe she was still living, that there were still letters that came by boat from her to her husband. I wondered if she would come back to San Francisco when he died. No, that’s right, his body would be sent to her in China.

  “Is Friday all right?” Mr. Saxe was saying. “Greta, I get the feeling you’re paying no attention to me.”

  “No, I’ve been paying attention, honestly.” Friday? “That’s fine.” For what?

  “You have the address.”

  “Where did you say?”

  “It’s written down on that piece of paper, see? On Sutter Street.” To my surprise, I found a slip of paper in my hand.

  “Now tell me what you were thinking about while I was talking.”

  “I was thinking about Old Man, Wing’s grandfather. He’s had a very lonely life, you know.”

  “I didn’t know,” Mr. Saxe said dryly. He wasn’t interested in Old Man that day, and I could see by the way he was stacking papers that he was ready for our forty-five minutes to grind to an end. But I wasn’t. Suddenly I was in high gear.

  “Did I tell you that Pammy and I have gotten to be great friends now that she doesn’t go to her boyfriend’s house every weekend? She’s a lot of fun. The doctor said she should get some exercise, so we took the bus to Golden Gate Bridge and started walking across it one night last week. A cop stopped us and said it was illegal. I told him the doctor at Kaiser prescribed it, but Pammy was giggling so much that I didn’t sound too convincing. The cop ended up driving us home. Can’t you just see us, pulling up outside Anza House in a genuine paddy wagon? Elizabeth nearly fell out the window watching to see just who’d get out of the car. And you should have seen the policeman’s face when he caught a glimpse of Jo running around in her baby-doll P.J.’s. It was a night, all right.”

  “Somebody must have wound you up all of a sudden.” Mr. Saxe smiled. His smile was so warm and yet so temporary. In five minutes he would have forgotten me and gotten lost in some other kid’s crazy, complicated life.

  With Old Man, nothing changed, not for centuries.

  7

  By the time Friday afternoon rolled around, I’d worked myself up into quite a frenzy over this date with Mr. Saxe. I’d folded and refolded the slip of paper with the address on Sutter Street, for proof that I was actually meeting him After Hours. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why. He must have had a legitimate reason to leave his office on county time and meet me on Sutter Street for—for what?

  “What’s that?” Jo asked, as I came down the stairs at my usual elephant’s clip.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What you’re wearing.”

  I was well aware of what I was wearing. It was a wraparound denim skirt that tied in a prim bow at the waist, and a red-and-green plaid western shirt Pammy had outgrown. I was even wearing pantyhose (a pair Darlene had left in the hamper), and Sylvia’s low-heeled brown sandals. I thought I looked rather, as they say, put together.

  “My God, witness this. Greta Janssen is wearing one of those things where both legs come out of the same hole.”

  “It’s called a skirt,” I said coldly. Jo was wearing a long Styx T-shirt and some navy shorts. The five guys from the group were evenly distributed across her chest and were jumping around a lot while she laughed at my outfit.

  “Where’re you going, got up like that?”

  “Out.”

  “Oh.” She nodded. “That explains it.” Jo pulled her arms in through the sleeves of her T-shirt and crossed them behind the rock group. The guys stretched across her, from elbow to elbow, while she looked like a war casualty. “Have fun,” she sang. One elbow waved lewdly. “You know, your legs aren’t really too ugly. A shave would help.”

  Well, I never needed to shave them, under the overalls. Suddenly I was aware of prickly hairs poking through the nylon fibers. I wished I’d worn knee socks.

  “Eh, who cares? It makes you look earthy,” Jo said, with a shrug that sent either Chuck Panozzo or his brother John flying over her shoulder.

  I waited for the bus at
the corner. Wraparound skirts blow in the wind, I discovered, and the wind funnels up the skirt, too. How could girls stand wearing such things to school?

  The bus left me off right in front of the Wainwright Building. I stood there waiting for Mr. Saxe and pinching my skirt around me like an old movie spinster. I spotted Mr. Saxe before he saw me, or before he recognized me dressed in such an undignified way. As for him, he was in a light blue three-piece suit. His thick heels tapped the street. He seemed almost jaunty, like a man openly cheating on his wife in midtown, midafternoon San Francisco.

  My heart began to race as he drew closer. Why were we meeting this way? What did he have in mind? Then I felt a chill run through me. He knew about my mother. Did he think it ran in the family? He carried a scratched-up briefcase. A man did not go out for monkey business with a zippered briefcase, did he? I searched my memory for anyone ever coming to my mother with a briefcase. There was no one that I could remember. But Mr. Saxe’s face showed flashes of monkey business, all right. I lifted my fingers for a tiny wave; they seemed so heavy, all of a sudden. As soon as I caught his eye, the carefree expression slid away from his face like a fan.

  “Oh, hello there, Greta. You’re right on time.” He checked his watch against a clock tower across the street, and I knew with a noxious mixture of relief and disappointment that it was to be Business as Usual.

  We rode up to the fifth floor silently. I felt huge and awkward and very cramped in the old padded elevator, until I realized I was still clutching the skirt to my knees. I relaxed a bit after that. Mr. Saxe straightened his tie as the door opened and gave me a final inspection and nod of approval just before we entered the office of Mr. Stanley Quinn, Chairman of BRAC—Business/Rehabilitation Alliance Corp.

  Mr. Saxe unbuttoned his coat. The vest under it fit him snugly, but there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. With my file open on his lap, Mr. Saxe told Stanley Quinn everything—about my mother, about my non-father, about Hackey, why I was hiding from him, and so forth.