This Old Man Page 8

  So he knew that it was clearly to be a battle between him and his father over Chen. Maybe his father was sorry then, for he tried to soften Wing’s shame by saying, “It is Old Man’s dying wish to have his first great-grandson here. We must respect his wishes.”

  Wing said to me, “If Old Man knew what Chen was really like, it would kill him. If he could see the pleasure Chen gets out of stealing, how he smiles when he tells me that he’s smarter than these white devils. No offense, Greta.”

  I smiled and patted Wing on the back to show I wasn’t offended.

  “What will I do?” he asked.

  “I told you. We’ll find him a job.”

  “No one will hire him. And I’d be embarrassed to go begging with him for a job. I won’t do it.”

  Somehow it became my responsibility, since I was so experienced now at getting jobs. I began forming a plan in my mind. “Okay, don’t say anything, let me do the talking.” We stopped walking suddenly, and Chen collided with us.

  “Hi, Chen!” I thought I’d start out cheerfully. Chen crossed his arms over his 49’ers T-shirt and stared at me with amusement. “We are going to be friends,” I said, enunciating each word carefully.

  “Oh, brother,” I heard Wing mutter under his breath.

  “Friends.” I patted him on the back, but his back didn’t yield to the touch the way Wing’s had. I smiled as warmly as I could, considering the fact that I couldn’t stand the guy. “I will help you find a job.”

  “Job?” Chen repeated.

  “Work.” I darted around the busy street, in a pantomime of industry—tidying up, organizing, sweeping, dusting. “I am working. This is a job. You get money for a job.”

  “Keep talking. He understands money,” Wing said.

  “Money,” I repeated, brushing my thumb across my open fingers. I hoped the gesture for money was the same in Hong Kong. There was no sign of understanding.

  “Just take one of his hot wallets. He’ll understand that.”

  I found a couple of coins in my overalls pocket. “Money,” I said, “money for job.”

  “Ah,” he nodded.

  “Come.” I led Chen into the first prosperous-looking restaurant I found. Wing waited outside, cupping his eyes against the window glare. Full of optimism, I approached a sour-looking waitress who had spilled soy sauce down the front of her uniform. “This is a friend of mine, Kwang Chen, and he wants to work. Do you have a job for him?”

  The waitress looked him over coolly. “No, no job,” she said, dismissing us with a wave.

  On the corner was a busy store with modern freezer display cases in the window. All sorts of Chinese packaged foods were stocked there to tempt passersby. Three people worked behind the busy counter. One, who appeared to be the manager, wore a French chef’s hat, but spoke Chinese.

  “Do you have a job for my friend here?” I asked.

  “Chinabug? No job.”

  Chen made an obscene gesture toward the chef’s hat. I figured that at least some gestures were universal.

  In the next restaurant the cook sat at a front table in the sun, reading a Chinese newspaper.

  “Do you need a dishwasher?” I sweetly asked. “Chen is strong and quick. Look—” I pulled Chen’s arm up to display firm biceps. “He’s very strong, he can carry heavy pans of dishes, and you wouldn’t have to pay him too much.”

  “I don’t need no dishwasher,” the cook said decisively.

  There was a fish market next door. A small brown man, perhaps Filipino and not Chinese, shifted ice shavings in a chipped pan and flicked spots of blood off the ice. They landed on his bloody apron. He reminded me of a heavy operating scene on M*A*S*H, except that his whole shop smelled like fish, not flesh. Most of the fish had heads on them still, and I figured that if this man hired Chen, I’d make an offer to buy all the dissectible fish eyes from him for Biology.

  “Yes, I could use a man two hours in the aftanoon,” the fish man said. “Two dollah a hour.”

  “Great! He’ll take the job,” I cried. “Chen, you have a job for money.”

  “No job,” Chen said flatly. A long string of Chinese words followed, and the fish man laughed robustly.

  “He say it smell too bad in here.” He sniffed the air and shrugged his shoulders. It probably smelled normal to him.

  I thanked the man, inspecting the fish eyes on the way out. They were too small for dissecting, anyway. Chen, of course, was already outside, reporting my debacle to Wing. When I got out on the street, he said in much better English than I would have given him credit for, “You girlfriend have job for money!” He turned and ran up the street, glanced around once to laugh at us, and continued on his way to the park, where he’d probably be terrorizing the chess players in a few minutes.

  “I’m going home to get Old Man’s dinner. You want to come to the hospital with me?”

  I hesitated. I did want to go, just to frost Mr. Saxe, but I couldn’t do it yet. Maybe if I stayed away a few more days, Hackey would give up and start looking for me somewhere else. Besides, the poem wasn’t done. The time wasn’t right to go back to Chinese Hospital. “I’ve got to get home. I think it’s my turn to make the salad and set the table tonight. It’s a big occasion. Sylvia’s Chest Man is coming for dinner. We’re having skinned chicken and dry baked potatoes and lettuce-and-tomato salad with lemon juice squeezed on top. Melon balls for dessert. Doesn’t it sound wonderful?” I realized Wing wasn’t paying any attention, so I tried even harder. “The Chest Man has lost seven pounds already and can almost buckle his belt now. Sylvia’s asked her mother to cut down on the weekly care packages. Last Saturday’s only had three bags of Hershey’s Kisses, a box of Fiddle Faddle, and a two-pound Genoa salami. It was the first time I could lift the box with one hand.”

  “What am I going to do about Chen?” Wing said, for about the twentieth time.

  “He ought to live in a house like mine. We’re all misfits there.”

  Wing snapped out of the doldrums. He wrinkled up his forehead and glared at me. “Greta Janssen, you are not a misfit.”

  “I’m not? Maybe you don’t know enough about me yet.” There were so many things about me he didn’t know. They were things I wasn’t very proud of. My mother’s profession headed the list. Hackey’s plans for me came next. My own grim thoughts about Hackey—maybe they should be at the top of the list.

  “You are not a misfit, and I won’t let you go around telling people you are. That’s that. You want to talk misfits? Second Cousin Chen, he’s a misfit.”

  11

  “I’ve been concerned about you this week,” Mr. Saxe said. “Have you worked through your hostility yet?”

  Oh, yes, days ago. Kwang Chen was great for using up hostility. But I wasn’t about to let Mr. Saxe off the hook that easily. “You have a mole on your neck, you know.” His hand flew up to cover it. “Have you worked through your self-consciousness about that mole yet?”

  He was not amused. He assumed a more casual pose, but kept his index finger just over that brown bump on his neck. “You’ve been to the hospital, I suppose?”

  “I haven’t. But it isn’t because you told me not to go.”

  “Of course not.” He smiled, finally.

  “The time just hasn’t been right yet. Tomorrow or Thursday everything should come together.” I thought he’d ask what, or why. But no. I wished he were more predictable, like he’d been in February, when we first started out together.

  “Perhaps you should tell me about Chen.”

  I was stunned. I couldn’t remember ever mentioning Chen. “How do you know about him?”

  “It’s my business to know.”

  “You got spies on the streets?”

  “And other sources. What’s the story on this young man?”

  “Well, let’s see. He’s Wing’s second cousin, fresh off the boat from Hong Kong.”

  “I smell trouble.”

  “You’ve got a one-track nose.”

  “Do you spend a lot
of time with him?” By now he’d forgotten about the mole, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  “Oh, my, yes, scads of time. We meet for lunch at the Blue Fox at least four or five times a week.” The Blue Fox was only the most expensive, the most exclusive restaurant in town, but somebody stupidly put it right across the street from the city morgue. You’d think that would kill a patron’s appetite. Not Sylvia’s. She had gone there with her parents once and told us that each table got two waiters, a busboy, a wine captain, the maitre d’, and, on request, a visit from the high muck-a-muck chef himself. She told me she had ordered hearts of palm salad with her medaillons de boeuf. I couldn’t imagine eating the inside of a palm tree for free, much less for $28.95. I asked Mr. Saxe, “Have you ever been to the Blue Fox?”

  “Not that I can recall.” Who was he fooling? He certainly would have remembered a whole battalion entrenched at his table, practically spoon-feeding him. Besides, he couldn’t afford such places on what the county paid him.

  “Then after lunch Chen and I take a stroll through Montgomery Street and visit our stockbroker. We check on the London gold market. We drop in at Gumps to buy a few très, très expensive gifts.”

  He let me go on like that for a while, and just when I was really flowing with it and about to tell him we had gin-and-tonics at the top of the Hyatt Regency, in the bar that spins around, he broke in with, “You are wasting your own time, but you don’t care. However, you are also wasting my time, and I can’t allow that. Tell me about Chen.”

  “Okay, I will. I tried to get him a job the other day.”

  Mr. Saxe found this amusing. He cut his laughter short, though, after his earnest lecture on wasting time.

  “I was terrific. I got him the job, but Chen turned it down flat. Two dollars an hour in a fish market. How could he pass that up?” I thought I’d go for another laugh. I wanted to use up the hour watching him try to regain control after each of my classic punch lines.

  He cleared his throat, tapped his pen. “All right now, let’s sober up. Chen is not a good influence on you. In a word, he’s poison. I know he’s a mugger and a pickpocket, but I tell you, he’s just warming up to bigger and better things. Some of his buddies have been picked up for extortion, burglary, assault—not petty stuff, big stuff.”

  “How come you know all this?”

  “Never mind. You know where all these guys come from? Half the time they’re recruited from Hong Kong by organized crime in Chinatown.”

  “Chen? That just proves that you don’t know a thing. Chen came for Old Man. He came as a dying wish.”

  “Sure, sure. Let me tell you what goes on out there. You’ve got your Hua Ching, a gang of immigrant kids after money and power. They terrorize merchants and peddle their services to protect shop owners from violence. Guess who causes the violence? Hua Ching.”

  “Do you watch TV a lot? This sounds like an old Kojak show.”

  “To you, everything’s a joke. How splendid for you.” He got up and walked over to the small square of a window he has, which faces a decayed brick wall. “Do you ever read the papers?”

  “Sure I do, every day.”

  “A few years back there was a story in the papers about the Golden Dragon Restaurant in Chinatown, remember it?”

  I shook my head. He couldn’t see me, peering out the grimy window at the wall. “No,” I said.

  He turned around. “Then I’ll tell you about it. Three kids came into the restaurant and fired away with a .38 pistol and an automatic rifle. Five innocent bystanders were killed. You think I’m making this up? Go to the library and look it up in the Reader’s Guide.”

  “Five people died?”

  “Five innocent people. Want to hear more? There are rival gangs. You’ve got the American-born Chung Ching Yee, also called the Joe Boys, and Suey Sing, and Yu Li, and other gang names I don’t even remember. I tell you, Chinatown is seething, and I want you to be careful.”

  “What does that have to do with poor Chen?” I asked. I wished Mr. Saxe would sit down. He was making me nervous hovering over me that way. He’d never done that before.

  “Chen is rotten. The police are watching him. They’ve got their eyes on all these immigrant kids in Chinatown. Don’t give me that pained sigh, Greta. This is fact. Listen up: if you hang out with these kids, the cops will get you, too. If the guys don’t get you first. They think nothing of putting a bullet through white flesh.”

  “What are you, some kind of racist?”

  “Not a racist, a realist.”

  “Well, I don’t believe you,” I said pouting, even while I thought of Chen’s cold, defiant eyes, dark and hard as raisins.

  “Just stay away from the kid,” Mr. Saxe shouted. He sat down at last with his hands on his hips, like a mad coach.

  Wasn’t he the one who said he never got mad? What a score for me! I kept running with the ball. “Stay away from Hackey, stay away from my mother, stay away from the hospital, stay away from Old Man, and now stay away from Chen. I might as well join a monastery in Tibet.”

  Mr. Saxe threw down his arms and leaned way back in his swivel chair, with his eyes closed. We sat that way, silently, while ten minutes lugged themselves by on the clock. I didn’t shift positions or even move a finger, for fear he’d interpret my movement as giving in first. I concentrated on being absolutely still. The monks in Tibet were probably masters at that.

  Finally, he said, “Our time’s up.” He didn’t get up to walk me to the door as he usually did. Instead he motioned for me to leave, to get out of his sight. I groped for my purse under my chair and left without a word. I wondered if he was angry with me over Chen, or angry with himself for losing control. Or maybe he was mad about having such a rotten, crummy job that made him see the world as bleak and futile all the time, and never paid him enough to compensate, or to get him a lunch at the Blue Fox.

  He was wrong about Chinatown, wrong about Chen, and I thought I had a way to prove it. I took the bus to the main library to gather the evidence against him. I’d check the old newspapers, and my faithful bible, Newsweek, and I’d show Mr. Saxe that he was getting hysterical over nothing.

  The library had terrible acoustics. Every whisper in the reading room bounced off the walls, so I soundproofed my table with a stack of bound magazines piled three and four deep around me. I read through dinner, and through the buffer time, which was the leeway Elizabeth gave us—I read till one hour past deadline, after which we’d better either be dead or have an airtight excuse for not phoning. I knew I could be in serious trouble, but I couldn’t stop yet.

  Finally, with my head beating like an angry tom-tom, I’d read enough to realize that Mr. Saxe had spared me the real horrors. I rubbed my eyes until my vision blurred, pushed away the stack of books, and left the library. A man with stubble on his chin and a Goodwill-type coat lay sprawled on the bottom step of the library, and I stepped around him. Lights were coming on along Market Street as I walked—in the opposite direction from everyone else, it seemed—to catch my bus home.

  But I couldn’t go home to the other misfits. Wasn’t there anyone in the entire city of San Francisco who was normal? Who came from a regular middle-class family that decorated their Christmas tree with popcorn and cranberry strings? That owned a station wagon and camped at Yellowstone and Grand Canyon in the summer? Whatever happened to the average two-story home with the white priscilla curtains on the second-floor bedroom windows?

  I used to study the Sears catalogues that came in the mail. I used to look at the ruffled curtains and knobby maple tables and the flowery-print sofas that opened into double beds, and the toilet-tank covers in blue fluff to match the bath mats. Then I would wonder who bought such things, who lived in homes where the toilets were decorated? Now I thought I’d finally found the secret of Sears, Roebuck, and Co.: no one. The catalogues were pictures to illustrate fairy tales, the big headliner fairy tale being the Great American Dream.

  Wasn’t it the Great American Dream that brough
t Old Man to San Francisco? Look at him now—dying in a hospital surrounded by a family two generations deep into American soil, and still poorer than ever, crowded into a shabby apartment. No wonder Old Man refused to learn English. No wonder Wing’s father refused to speak it after he learned it.

  I did not take the bus home. I went instead to Chinese Hospital. It was well past Old Man’s dinner hour, so I knew I wouldn’t run into Wing. I walked up the three flights of stairs and reached Old Man’s door, out of breath. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I felt content just being there.

  I heard voices inside the room. Old Man’s I recognized. The other? Was it the foreign doctor? Would he be speaking so loud? He wouldn’t be speaking in Chinese. It was Chen. They were in a heated argument, neither waiting for the other to finish a sentence. Chen could easily outshout Old Man, but Old Man’s voice rose to a frantic pitch to compete.

  The voices stopped abruptly, and Chen burst out of the room, bumping right into me. He acted as though he didn’t recognize me. All Caucasians must look alike to him.

  Two things struck me about Chen. One, he didn’t close the door behind him the way Wing did, as though a baby were asleep on the other side. And two, he kept his arms pressed to his sides and his fists clenched, looking as tight as a Chinese tailor with pins in his mouth.

  I waited until I was sure Chen would be out of the hospital. I left then, too, and went home to find Pammy lying on the floor, in labor.

  12

  Just when we needed her most, Elizabeth was over at San Francisco State, for a special social work seminar. Jo kneeled on the floor beside Pammy, with a stopwatch in her hands. Sylvia huddled in her corner of the ring.

  “Her water broke,” Jo said, shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders. This must have been significant, but none of us knew why.

  “There’s a bloody mess on the bathroom floor,” said Sylvia.