The Binding Chair (5 page)

May poured perfume on a handkerchief and held it to her face as the rickshaw man pulled them through the markets, but Alice drew the air deep into her nose, trying to sort out smells. The rickshaw threaded through alley after alley clotted with pedestrians until it came to a standstill by the Yu Yuan Garden wall. “No farther,” the rickshaw man said to May, who translated. Alice stood up to see what was blocking their passage. Ahead, in the courtyard of the Temple of the City God, a throng had gathered around a platform in the center of which was something that looked like a flagpole.

“Is it a holiday?” Alice asked May, who rose to her feet, slowly. The rickshaw man sat, his narrow buttocks balanced on one of the shafts between which he spent his days running, his feet on the other. Few things could induce him to waste an opportunity for rest.

“No.” May’s voice was strangely flat, uninflected. She spread her arms wide. “Not a holiday. Just an ordinary one. You said you wanted to see the Old City. China. Here she is. In all her …” Alice waited for the word
glory
, but May had stopped speaking.

The two of them watched an officer lead and then push a native girl, her hands tied behind her back, up a flight of wood stairs to the platform. As the crowd heckled, she fell to her knees, keening.

“What is she saying! What’s happening to her?” Alice shook May’s arm up and down, as if trying to pump a reply out of her.

“Look,” May said finally. “Watch.”

A second officer, dressed identically to the one who had forcibly escorted the girl, dragged a bale of wire up the steps of the platform. He began unwinding it as the first read aloud from a paper. Alice watched the shining loops fall from the bale as the officer made one end of the wire fast around the weeping girl’s waist with a slipknot that he tested and tightened. Then he climbed a stepladder in order to thread the other end through a pulley, creating a primitive tackle attached to the top of the pole. When he let go, the wire dropped; its tip fell like a bright needle and swayed, glinting in the sunshine. The officer stepped carefully down from the ladder. He stood still, saying nothing, surveying all the faces turned toward him. A few words to the crowd, and a basket was passed forward over the heads of the onlookers. Woven from stout sticks, it was the kind of basket used for carting firewood, and the officer in charge of the wire lashed its dangling end to the basket’s thick handles, so that it hung just at the height of his shoulders.

While he worked, the crowd remained quiet, as if engrossed by the performance of an especially adept magician. At last even the rickshaw man stood up on his shafts, pulling cold dumplings from his pocket and chewing them with a circular, ungulate motion of his sinewy jaws. Every third bite or so, he used one finger to extract a bit of gristle from his mouth, examined it minutely before flicking it into the crowd.

The officer who had read aloud from the paper made a further announcement, and the onlookers began mounting the steps in single file, more orderly than any group of Chinese Alice had yet seen. It remained quiet enough for her to hear the girl’s cries.

“What’s she saying! What are they doing to her!” Alice kept asking her aunt, but May said nothing. She appeared as transfixed as the rest of the crowd.

Alice saw that each person who climbed up to the platform carried a stone and reached up to drop it in the basket. As the basket grew heavier and was pulled progressively downward by the weight of the stones, the girl stopped screaming. For as long as she could, she stood on her toes. Then she tried to climb the pole, perhaps hoping to lower the basket all the way to the platform and thus relieve the wire’s constriction; but if this had been her plan, she’d waited too long, she no longer had the freedom of movement or the strength it required. Her forehead against the pole, she coughed, and blood came out of her mouth.

“Why,” Alice said. “They’ll … They will … It’s going to cut her in half!”

May nodded, expressionless. She looked at the tears running from Alice’s eyes.

“But why!”

“Adultery. She ran away and was caught. She brought disgrace to a powerful family. She didn’t understand, perhaps, what marriage … What it demanded of her.”

“But can’t anyone—”

“No,” May said. “They can’t.”

T
WICE
T
HWARTED

W
HEN
M
AY WAS TWELVE, HER FATHER DIED
. According to the European calendar, this happened in 1889, in October, as May would calculate years later, consumed with the task of translating such dates—and anything else of importance—from Chinese to English. The district necromancer was consulted for the most propitious day on which to bury him, and as that day was two months after his death, the rigors of mourning seemed to May interminable. Her father, only forty-six, had died unexpectedly and had no coffin waiting, no suit of clothes in which to meet the rulers of the next world; everything had yet to be prepared. The household shivered with activity.

On the third day after his death—when his spirit would have reached the bridge between worlds—a phalanx of priests arrived to read scripture through the night. During these rites, May yawned, she swooned; in the morning she awoke on the floor, sleeping at the feet of her dead father.

On the seventh day after his death, and on the fourteenth and the twenty-first—each week for seven weeks—May and her mother and grandmother chanted May’s father on his way through the next world; they urged him toward reincarnation. He was a famous man, her father. A spirit like his was one for whose return China waited. After all, had he not defended their town from foreign devils? With his brothers he had burned the homes of missionaries, he had rid the countryside of their corrupt texts, their pale-eyed wives and daughters, and their disgraceful, impoverished, and downtrodden god. Of course May’s father might, it must be acknowledged, not be reincarnated at all. He might become a god himself, with a local shrine, a day of observance.

For weeks, his body lay in state, receiving homage. Around him tables overflowed with his favorite foods and servants squatted to burn incense and spirit money. An artist, fingers black, tunic and trousers immaculate, labored over a last portrait. Every so often, he climbed onto a chair to look from above at the body’s blind, silent face. As it was expected that she wail, May did. And at the encoffining ceremony, she kneeled with her mother and grandmother. With them she bowed so obsequiously low that she bumped and bruised her head on the floor.

To initiate the funeral procession, in unison the three women—mother, wife, and daughter—unbound their hair and swept it over the lacquered wood of the casket, relieving May’s father’s corpse of the corruption of death. Then the shining black box was carried from the courtyard while firecrackers burst, driving off jealous spirits. Ghosts without homes, without family to love and care for them.

Wearing white, May followed her father’s new and flattering portrait through the winding streets and into the ancestral graveyard. Next to May, as was the duty of a new widow, Chu’en wept and tore the hair from her head. In the graveyard, family and mourners were shocked to discover May’s father’s tomb already filled by the remains of some bold scoundrel eager to share in the blessings heaped upon so illustrious a resting place. The interloper was exhumed and dragged outside the cemetery wall as May, Chu’en, and Yu-ying looked on.

…   

T
HOUGH NO ONE
else in the family had died, the necromancer returned when May was fourteen. It was time for her betrothal, and in order to make an auspicious match, Yu-ying said the concerns of May’s departed father must be addressed. At a table reserved for only the most honored guests, the necromancer dipped his fingers in a bowl and wiped them dry. Offered wine, he drank, and he ate all the morsels of meat and fish and every cake set before him. When May’s grandmother had paid for his expensive advice, she contracted with a matchmaker, confident that May’s feet were as beguiling as her face. Yu-ying was almost sorry that propriety dictated that they remain bound and unseen. Left and right, each had a big toe that curled up, four that folded down, and a plantar crease so deep that several coins could be hidden inside it. Under her grandmother’s tutelage, May had learned how to care for her feet in privacy, how to wash them and to cut the corns and calluses with a sharp knife, how to stop infections with borax and odors with alum. She’d learned never to move her skirt while sitting, never to move her legs while lying down, and never to wash her feet in the same basin as her face—otherwise she would be reborn as a pig.

Following Yu-ying’s instructions, May had sewn a dowry of sixteen satin slippers, four for each season, and had embroidered their toes with peonies for spring, lotus flowers for summer, chrysanthemums for autumn, and plum blossoms for winter. She had made the red sleeping shoes that would contrast so startlingly with her white legs that they would tempt the most surly husband into bed. Advised that for the first eleven nights as a bride she should surreptitiously slip her tiny feet into her husband’s big boots, May hoped by this ruse to gain power over him. She was prepared for a future as a dutiful wife to the rich silk dealer selected for her.

A diviner was summoned to examine the prospective match by studying the Eight Characters. His blind eyes, lacking both pupils and tear ducts, shone; they spilled over down his cheeks. Sitting across the table, unaccountably May found she wanted to press her thumbs into them. “Auspicious,” the diviner pronounced. “It could not be more so.” He pulled himself to his feet, catching hold of the wall-hanging with fingers still greasy from the offerings he had gobbled.

As he left, May told herself how lucky she was. She was thinking of her cousin, married off to a hunchbacked tin peddler. Among May’s suitors, the silk dealer was certainly the most handsome and polite. Twice he had sent his manservant with gifts: ten expensive bolts in ten jewel-like colors, along with a seamstress to sew the goods into gowns, a pair of jade bracelets, two gold hairpins, a butchered pig, and a chest filled with tea and spices and wine.

O
N THE MORNING
of the wedding, fixed upon the first day of the second month, a large marriage sedan with red silk curtains came to collect May, dressed for the ceremony, from her home. The sedan was not accompanied, as May and her mother and grandmother expected, by a blue chair bearing the groom, but came instead with a note explaining that the silk dealer’s presence had been required that morning to avert a business emergency. The wedding would nonetheless take place at the divined hour, and May’s future husband awaited his bride eagerly.

May read the missive, shrugged. As there was no one before whom to wail and carry on, lamenting separation from her mother and grandmother, she got into the fancy red chair quietly. She had not closed her eyes the previous night, and during the rocking ride from one town to the next she fell asleep and dreamed what seemed a not unpropitious dream of lanterns. She woke only slightly perturbed by the fact that the dream lanterns had been decorated with symbols she could not read.

The sedan had stopped moving; she parted the curtains to discover herself parked before the closed main portals of a large and prosperous looking household. Over the lintel hung varnished plaques painted with gold announcements—past honors awarded the silk merchant’s family by the emperor. “Highly favored … lavishly bestowed …” and so forth. Between gate and gutter were stacked May’s few trunks and furnishings, which had been picked up from her grandmother’s home the previous day.

She yawned. “Are we early?” she asked one of the men who had carried the sedan. “Why are the doors closed?” But the man didn’t answer. Beyond the walls she could see the roofs of west and east wings, each enclosing a separate courtyard. May sat back against the cushions in her itching, cumbersome skirts. Her ornate hair combs, of red enamel the same shade as that of her dress, bit into her scalp. It couldn’t be that she’d come on the wrong day—after all, it was the silk dealer’s servants who had come to fetch her.

An hour passed, then another. She was hungry, thirsty and needed to relieve her bladder. But now the sedan was surrounded by meddlesome neighbors, eager to inspect its occupant, who sat, still unreceived, in the street.

“You’d better go home,” an old woman said, pulling the curtains wide open with the hooked end of her furled black umbrella, and May agreed.

But the bearers wouldn’t take her. The sun began to set, the four men drew cloaks over their heads and leaned their backs against the wall around the courtyard. May sat shivering and willed herself not to cry. “Don’t worry,” said one. “This happened with the third.”

She looked at him. “The third what?”

He rolled his eyes. “What are you? Simple? The third wife. The one before you.”

May said nothing. She widened her eyes, she drew in her breath sharply, but her mouth she kept closed. She was not so young that she would betray her shock to a servant and thereby widen the net of her own vulnerability. Instead, she shrugged. She sat back against the cushions; she yawned and unfolded her arms as if she’d known all along, of course, that she was not to be the silk dealer’s first wife but his fourth.

The sedan chair man watched her. “It could be all night,” he said. “There’s a pot under the seat if you want to go.”

May didn’t answer. She forced herself to wait until all four of the bearers were asleep, and then she drew the curtains and fastened them before clumsily squatting to urinate, her wedding dress bunched up under her arms.

Outside, from beyond the wall, came a high, shrill wailing. Had the sedan chair offered any room for May, in her awkward crouch, to startle and upset the contents of the pot, she would have. But as it was, jammed tight between the wooden front of the vehicle and its upholstered seat, motionless she listened to what sounded like the screams of not one but many women. Though the howls were not intelligible words, they conveyed a quality of conversation, as if one answered another.

May got to her feet and, having no place to empty it, replaced the pot carefully. She peered out of a crack between the curtains at the bearers. Eyes still closed, they slept through the racket undisturbed, and how could this be? Was she hallucinating the howls? Were they a message from the gods of matrimony, a message sent only to her, a woman on her wedding day?

The wind picked up, and in the dark behind the trembling red fabric around her, May smoothed her skirts, she felt to see if her hair was still in place, she sat—she couldn’t have said for how long—as if hypnotized. When the curtains blew apart, she made no move to refasten them but watched as the clouds fled, revealing stars, remote and immaculate, a moon wasted thin as an eyelash.

Just before midnight—it was still the first day of the second month—the door in the wall opened, and four women appeared, one considerably older than the others. May knew orthodox customs of marriage required that a new wife could not step over the threshold unless escorted by an established woman of the house, either the master’s mother or one of his wives, preferably the first; but having waited all night, the last thing she expected to see was a full entourage. The expressions on the four women’s faces implied that they had at last decided to share the burden of their distasteful duty.

May stood and bowed. Seeing the women, she understood that she had come to a place where beauty would be no guarantee of favor. She felt the first wife’s hand burn with jealousy as she helped her to step down from the sedan.

O
NCE INSIDE THE
gracious, well-tended garden, May looked for nuptial preparations, but there was no awning set up, no tables with food or drinks. No lanterns, no guests, no offerings. Nothing. Could it be that no celebration was expected? Without walking, May stumbled, as if what she saw—what she didn’t see—had literally jarred her. A servant brought a chair, and she sat, silently, feeling as though she had fallen out of gravity or some equally powerful force, whatever kept her securely placed in the world.

To her predicament May applied whatever of Yu-ying’s proverbs she could, but, like small bandages on a large wound, they fell away, useless. Worse, the disillusion that began at the front gate intensified with each successive doorway through which she passed. No sooner had May stepped inside the courtyard of the residence’s east wing than her soon-to-be mother-in-law refused her gift of black silk shoes decorated with seed pearls, saying she wasn’t that old yet and threatening to be more trouble to May than Yu-ying had been to Chu’en.

The marriage ceremony was performed by a single priest, who stood before the ancestor tablets in the silk merchant’s family shrine on the drafty second floor of the east wing. It proceeded without music, without applause, without bells, and resembled no wedding May had ever witnessed. In fact, this occasion for which she had long waited—for which her whole life thus far was mere preparation—was so perfunctory as to leave May with only one memory, that of her new husband’s freshly shaven cheek, cut in two places, as if he had flinched under his manservant’s hand.

Within minutes it was over, she was in her new room, not chased there with the groom by a laughing crowd making merriment and yelling unnecessary instruction. No, May was accompanied by one person only, a coolly quiet maid who helped her to undress and to climb under her cold covers. Then she was alone. She lay in bed thinking of the two cuts on the silk merchant’s cheek. Perhaps it wasn’t her husband who had moved; it could have been his valet’s hand. Which one of them, listening to the screams, had been, like her, alarmed? Which, like the sleeping sedan-chair men, accepted such protest as part of the household?

…   

T
HE RIVALRIES ENGENDERED
by May’s arrival were so acrimonious that the silk dealer spent two nights with each of his previous wives before once visiting May, and so her first week set the course of married life: one of tedium colored by nervous apprehension. Each day she waited in her room or the tiny garden adjoining it, trying to occupy herself with the comely arts she’d been taught, needlework or painting or singing. In the morning she ate by herself, seated before her own small table; at noon she ate in a dining room with the other women, none of whom spoke to her, but who watched the movements of her chopsticks so intently, she wondered if they might not be waiting for a poison to take effect; and at night she ate alone again, as did whichever wives were not honored by the master’s company.