The Binding Chair (10 page)

On top of the surcharge for an unspoiled maidenhead, Mr. Barnes rewarded May’s diligently manufactured responses by tipping her generously. The next morning, banknotes hidden between shoe and bindings, May pulled the linen from her bed, considered the smear of blood, no longer red but an abashed, almost apologetic shade of brown, and concluded that she had arrived somewhere that offered if not justice, then recompense. In a few days, she’d have the afternoon off, and she knew already where to go to buy a dictionary.

Each day she got out of bed by noon and used whatever time she could to read. She taught herself English grammar, she taught herself French and European history. If she remained as “native” as her profession encouraged, a seemingly traditional singsong girl, still she forsook the traditions and even the memory of her family. When Chinese intruded, May pushed it aside with English or French. When thoughts of Chu’en or Yu-ying beckoned, she banished them with another chapter of
The Middle Kingdom
. She traded dumplings for toast, green tea for black, bean paste for marmalade. She taught herself to forget her star god and the festival days marked by her mother and grandmother. Of her father’s death day she made no observance; her ancestors she declined to worship. And when the New Year arrived, she hid from the fireworks and the lion dancers; she didn’t light so much as one stick of incense to celebrate it.

Her dreams, though, remained stubbornly Chinese, filled with all the old superstitions. In them, the Emperor of Hell made frequent appearances, sitting on a throne, a pile of books in his lap. He looked benign, avuncular, and he tweaked her rouged cheek with such relish that she knew his desire for her. Consulting a text, he explained that the laws of the next world ordained that in death a woman be divided among the men who were her earthly partners. He showed May the passage and the sword he used to effect its directive.
But what
, he asked,
am I to do with you?

Well, she said, shrugging, you’ll just have to chop me into bits. He nodded
.

Such a shame to defile your beauty
, he lamented playfully, and he stroked the cheek he’d pinched.

Who is doing the defiling?
she thought.
You or I?
But she said nothing.

May felt no fear in the dream, no regret. It was as if the two of them, she and the Emperor of Hell, were considering a plucked chicken and how best to dismember it.

F
OR SEVEN YEARS
May worked without finding her benefactor. “It’s your own fault,” Helen told her. “It’s because you won’t go with a Chinese.”

The problem, of course, was
Chineseness
, May’s own. For Westerners, she was an exotic dish, one they weren’t sorry they’d tasted, but why choose her for a steady diet? Not that May didn’t have loyal clients, men who were happy to visit her once or twice a month, to sit with her afterward and help her with her English or her French, to make her gifts of books instead of bonbons—but even those men didn’t want a Chinese woman for a mistress. Not any more than they wanted to eat braised eel every night, or noodles slippery with hot pepper oil.

And now what could May do? She’d traveled even farther from herself.

Seven years. Seven Shanghai winters, raw and gray with dreary, dirty snowfalls. Seven damp springs and oppressive summers. Seven falls. One year, a painful rash on her thighs and a case of the grippe that hung on and on. The next, a pregnancy and a visit from the doctor—so expensive she wouldn’t have any new clothes that season.

May lay in bed for a week, then two, three, no longer in pain. Not exactly. “For pity’s sake, it’s happened to us all,” Helen said, sitting on the end of her bed. “A little miscalculation.” She moved to squeeze May’s foot through the bedclothes, a friendly gesture, but feeling the bandaged lump, she stopped herself. “You’ll get up tomorrow?” she said. “Promise?”

May nodded.

How to dismiss the long, efficient spoon, horribly like the instruments with which they ate?
They?
She.
She
was almost one of them now. Year by year she was becoming a foreigner, stranger even than they.

With what chilling swiftness it had been accomplished, the “procedure.” A little morphine, then, as the doctor said, “a nice, nice nap.” The only problem was waking up, swimming to the surface of the dark lake of sleep. Taking a breath. Unable to drown the memory of Yu-ying’s prescription for motherhood, to surface without humiliation scraped newly raw by the long curette. How had she borne it—so ignominious, so pathetic—her attempts to harvest the silk merchant’s seed?

“It’s not so horrible a thing as all that.” Helen was perplexed, watching May retch into a basin. Knowing nothing of May’s previous life, she shook her head. “With most girls, they’re sick before and it cures them.”

May looked up, face as white as the bandages on her feet. “You’ll lose your looks if you go on like this,” Helen said.

But she didn’t. Somehow she summoned her talent for transforming despair into rage. And rage was good, it was tonic, it picked a person up. Besides, the whole wretched thing, the “miscalculation,” presented what Helen would call a silver lining: two new forms of solace and escape. Opium, May discovered, was almost as good as morphine, although the first time she smoked the drug, it provoked a fit of weeping, so pungently did it remind her of her mother.

Novels were more reliable. Especially one,
Madame Bovary
, which seized hold of May with a force equal to that of a narcotic. Not so much on account of Emma, who didn’t interest her after the heroine’s own spell of infatuated reading gave way to more reckless passions, but because of Charles: the botched foot surgery. Many nights, aching for sleep but stubbornly conscious, May imagined herself married to a doctor such as Bovary; and in her dreams (the kind, when at last they came, characterized by the dreamer’s sense of paralysis, suffocation) she endured his ill-advised attempts to repair her as Bovary had the hapless clubfoot Hippolyte. May’s doctor-husband boxed her deformities in little wood and metal caskets; he tightened the screws, sending her toward delirium and death. A death that only amputation might spare her.

It was, May knew, her feet that held her between one world and the next. On her red shoes she balanced between East and West, China and Europe, misery, happiness. Even her regulars, men who licked her face with the sloppy enthusiasm of dogs, who kissed her eyelids and murmured as they made love, and who after years of assignations still arrived bone hard with lust—even they refused to acknowledge a matter so troubling as May’s feet. In her company, their eyes avoided the floor, the end of the bed. And if ever she suggested unbinding, they changed the topic, or they left.

S
ÉANCE

W
ESTERN
S
IBERIA
. O
UTSIDE THE WINDOW, A
land of yellow lakes, black mud. The track, when Alice could see it, converged into a silver line through the muck and grass. Camels moved through the slush, shaggy and stoic, completely unexpected, looking lost and chilled. The towns they passed reeked of tallow boileries.

Alice slept during the day and found herself awake at night. In the dark, the lights from the train were reflected by the greasy surface of yet another river. The locomotive’s whistle made a keening noise, carrying an animate pitch of grief; and the vibration of the wheels on the track affected her as it didn’t during the day. Weeks, even months, later, lying in the dormitory at Miss Robeson’s Academy for Young Ladies, Alice felt the rattle under her back. She’d sit up, her blood beating in her temples, and pull back the curtain around her narrow bed, expecting to see out of a window to an empty blue expanse of frozen swamps. At school Alice slept the way one does on a narrow berth, as if expecting, at the blast of a whistle, to bolt, fully dressed, into a new station.

Tomsk! Omsk! Toboltz!
Ilka, Shilka. Chichma, Ufa
.
Zagladino, Abdulino! Ust-Katav!

The Trans-Siberian Express did carry souls between worlds. It pulled them past reason and into rhyme.

The train was crowded now, all the compartments filled. At Toboltz embarked Madame Veronica, a spiritualist, who announced that she would organize a séance in the library car, following dinner that very night. She promised Suzanne Petrovna that she could summon the ghost of her dead brother. The recently departed were very helpful; the proximity of his corpse was a definite enticement, as was the movement of the train itself.

“Spirits like carriages. Ships. Trains. Anything that isn’t tied down,” she explained.

The captain, listening, pushed aside his untouched plate of lamb. “May I, if you would be so kind, have a word with you?” he said to Madame Veronica, and drew her aside.

There was a piano in the dining car of the Express, but no one played it. Over it hung a blue-gray pall. Russians smoked a great deal, even the women: thick cigars, thin cigars, and long, black cigarettes in holders. The smoke rose to the ceiling and stayed there. The waiters stacked dirty dishes on the piano’s black lid. Madame Veronica sat on its bench; Litovsky fingered the untouched music on its stand. “I have …” He cleared his throat. “I have had a daughter,” he said, emotion scrambling syntax.

“Yes.” Madame Veronica nodded. “I know. She died.”

“Yes!” he said. “That’s remarkable! It is … I’ve … Do you know I believe I have seen her on this train!” Litovsky took off his officer’s hat. He turned it over and held it so Madame Veronica could see that inside the crown, protected by a circle of clear celluloid, was a photograph of a girl of perhaps fourteen. The girl had long, dark hair held back with a broad white ribbon. Her deep-set eyes were dark and her mouth full; over its left corner was a beauty mark like Alice Benjamin’s, one that imparted to her lips a strangely knowing and sexual air—as if even then, sitting poised and still before the camera, she anticipated the consummation of her death.

Madame Veronica looked at Litovsky with professional kindliness. She had not removed her own hat for dinner; its long black plumes gave her the aspect of a disorganized stag beetle.

“Do you, that is to say, what I mean is … She died in the … on a train.”

“Of course!” Madame Veronica said. She grasped both his hands. “Tonight. In the library car.”

“A
DISGRACE!
An absolute mountebank!” Miss Waters said to the girls’ mother as they were preparing for bed.

“Yes,” Dolly Benjamin said, nodding. “She’s holding it in the library car?”

“This very night! And the captain hasn’t the sense to stay away from such chicanery. If this is what the Russian army is coming to, it’s no wonder the country is going to rack and ruin. I read that several hundred people were trampled at the czar’s recent public address. The army couldn’t contain them. It’s—”

“I’m surprised that officious
provod, prov
—I always forget the name of that porter person.”

“
Provodnik.
”

“Yes, him. Why is he allowing it?” Dolly asked.

Miss Waters made a snorting noise.

In their berths, the sisters lay still, listening to the sounds of their mother pacing in the neighboring compartment. The snap of the latch on her traveling case, the sound of pills being shaken from a bottle. To swallow them, Dolly didn’t trust the water from the train’s electric samovar. “Damn!” Alice heard her say, struggling with the seal on the cap of a liter of imported water.

It wasn’t just living in China that had done it. Dolly’s own mother had died of puerperal fever after the birth of her sister, and she’d always worried about illness. As a prospective bride, among the concerns she had voiced through her father and the office of the Sydney marriage broker were whether Mr. Solomon Benjamin had a water closet in his home and an American milk boiler in the kitchen. And would he agree to yearly travel, particularly during the feverish month of July, and at least as far away as the mountains of Japan—Lake Chusenji would be fine. And surely Shanghai had a kosher slaughterhouse, a proper fire brigade, and European hospitals and
accoucheuses
? Was smallpox absolutely controlled? Did the Chinese servants live on Mr. Benjamin’s own property? Was the water from a well or from the river? Put as delicately as possible, wasn’t the Whangpoo afflicted with overly high levels of human excreta? And, really, she couldn’t think of boarding a ship from Australia unless Mr. Benjamin assured her that he would tolerate visits from her relatives. She hoped he understood, she had lived all her life in Sydney, where it was dry and healthful, and if her poor widowed father was to let her go, he must know that she was going to be safe and happy.

“Say that, Daddy. It’s the truth. And put in that I’d like to call him by some other name. Anything will do—Tom, Dick, or Harry—but Solomon is, well, impossible. It’s too, I hope he’s not the type to take offense, but it’s too fat and grizzled and biblical, and he doesn’t look like a Solomon. At least not from his photograph.”

Mr. Benjamin wrote in reply that all of Miss Cohen’s fears were those reflecting life as it had been lived a generation ago in Shanghai. The new water purification plant was unparalleled. Sewers were installed throughout the settlement, and the plumbing in his house was better than what she would find in London, Paris, or even New York. Midwives were certainly either Swiss or English. If, God forbid, there was need of a hospital, Miss Cohen would go, as did all foreign residents, to Kobe or Tokyo. The milk boiler was on order, and could the broker forward a notarized copy of her birth certificate? Here was proof of his British citizenship, and the year-end report of his banking firm, Benjamin, Kelly, and Potts, on Jinkee Road, just off the famous Bund.

In sum, as the broker said, here was a lonely, eligible bachelor whose financial security was more than sufficient to offset his geographic limitations. Miss Cohen would have no trouble with in-laws, as Mr. Benjamin’s father was dead, his blind mother in Baghdad, his siblings all in Bombay. His house was large and had a staff of three Europeans and thirty Chinese, including a laundress, a hairdresser, and a tailor so clever he could copy any Paris gown without a pattern—he had only to look at it or see a drawing. All the servants lived on the premises and bathed regularly. Her sister, her brother, her cousins: they would be welcome and comfortable; and, all other concerns being satisfied, he would accept the name Dick.

The marriage broker in Sydney leaned back in his chair and looked at Miss Dolly Cohen and her doddering father. He raised his eyebrows. “Really,” he said. “You won’t do better.”

In Australia’s frontier days, money was to be made in the importing of wives. That was when the broker’s father had established a business in providing Australian men with London girls whose noses were large, whose eyes were small, whose bloom was off. Now there were rather too many of these women’s daughters, even pretty ones like Dolly, and so he sent them off to Singapore or Hong Kong or Shanghai, places where clever nomadic Jews were making a lot—a disgraceful lot—of money. The broker felt no compunction about taking them for all they were worth.

A
T TEN O’CLOCK
, Alice, still awake, heard her mother open and then quietly shut her door. Alice slipped from under her covers and peered down the corridor just in time to see her mother’s skirts disappearing through the exit at the end of the coach.

“Ces?” she whispered, but her sister didn’t answer.

Miss Waters’s door was closed, and Alice slid silently past it, through the rattling corridor, its lights dimmed by nine, Petersburg time. She hurried after her mother.

In the library car were assembled Captain Litovsky, Suzanne Petrovna, a whispering Polish couple, and, to the surprise of Alice, hidden in the shadowy draperies behind the club chairs, the austere
provodnik
, recently widowed. He laid a photograph of a fat, blond woman on a table that had a chessboard inlaid on its surface. Without speaking, Suzanne and Captain Litovsky produced photographs and laid them down beside the
provodnik
’s. Dolly removed a locket from around her white throat and opened it to reveal a little boy’s round face, his lips open in laughter. As her mother’s finger’s undid the tiny gold catch, Alice felt a twist of jealousy, so familiar she barely noted it.

Madame Veronica looked at all these and hummed to herself in concentration, releasing more of a buzz than a tune, as if she were a small motor. “All right,” she said. “Yes, yes,” she said. “Shall we sit?” And everyone took a chair pulled up to the inlaid table. Around it, they were seven, and uncomfortably crowded, shoulders hunched and touching.

“Mlle. Petrovna?” Madame Veronica turned to the woman from Paris, who withdrew a signet ring from the depths of her muff and set it in the center of an ebony square.

“Mr. Borodi?” Madame Veronica said, and the
provodnik
turned out all but one small light on the wall. Alice, taking advantage of the dark, crept forward into the shadow between two of the big club chairs.

Madame closed her eyes. No one spoke. Minutes passed. The noise of the track passing under the wheels of the train grew and grew, ticking and ticking like a great clock grinding forward, pressing the breath from their lungs. Dolly Benjamin began to weep.

“What will he say?” she asked, as if to herself. “What can he say?” She stood, jarring the table. “He only knows a few words,” she said. “Dog. Moon. Mama.

“Oh!” she said, turning to Madame Veronica. “Don’t you let him say Mama! If you let him call me, I shall die! I shall!”

Alice hugged herself. What sympathy she felt for her mother was drowned out by the undignified sound of Dolly’s grief. That David, in death, commanded attention withheld from his living sisters was not a thought Alice permitted longer than an instant. At twelve, her outrage found a more comfortable target in her mother’s noisy weeping.
Shut up. Shut up
. She tried to obliterate the tears with the force of her silent will.

“Mrs. Benjamin,” began Madame Veronica. But just then, as she began to reach her plump hand toward Dolly, the captain stood as well. He fell face-forward on the table, rigid, his eyes open and fixed, unseeing.

“A medium!” Madame Veronica cried. “He must be!”

The
provodnik
turned on the lights and snatched up the photograph of his fat wife.

“The man has been taken ill,” he said. “He’s subject to apoplexies. Not apparitions.” He turned the captain’s rigid body over; he laid him on the floor and loosened his collar and his belt. He began to mop at the shining puddle of saliva Litovsky’s open mouth had left on the table.

Alice, forgetting that her presence was uninvited, came out from between the chairs and stood among the grown-ups, who were so absorbed by the disastrous culmination of their séance that it was a minute or more before anyone noticed her.

“Why, what is this?” Madame Veronica said, as if Alice might be a supernatural manifestation, the lost child summoned by her father’s faint.

“
Alice Benjamin
—” Dolly began.

“You can’t punish me,” Alice interrupted. “I’ll tell Father.” She crossed her arms. “See if I won’t. I’ll cable him at the next station and tell him you were talking to spirits and spiritualists on a Russian train. That you tried to contact David.” Dolly covered her face with her hands, and Alice felt the cool thrill of power.

“
Alice,
” her mother whispered. “Not in front of—”

But it was too late. Having emerged from the shadows, Alice discovered suddenly, with intoxicated surprise, that she didn’t care, no, not at all, what any of these people might think of her.