The Moonlight Palace (12 page)

A few weeks after Grandfather’s funeral, I posted a sign by our front door that read:
R
ING FIRST
. N
O
T
RESPASSING
.
I did this only after our steady stream of Singaporean friends and relations had slowed to a mere trickle and then finally ceased. Our comforters had left behind flowers and more food than we could possibly consume. They had cooked buckets of chicken rice. We shared our bounty with the beggars of the Kampong Glam. But soon, the white irises and lilies began to die, exuding their sickly sweet smell.

My timing was right, for the very next day Brown came by. He was the only man foolish enough to read the sign and ring our doorbell. No true Singaporean would have done either.

“Have people been bothering you?” he asked, jabbing toward the sign with his cane. He was dressed formally for this sympathy call. The cane, which I’d once thought so charmingly dapper, now struck me as a terrible affectation. A disguised weapon. His white smile looked like a grimace. I had not anticipated the waves of nausea that rolled over me at the sight of my former suitor.

“That sign is meant for you,” I said, as coolly as I could manage. “And if you ever trouble me or my family again, I will do something terrible to you. I know exactly who and what you are.”

Now the smile did indeed devolve into a grimace. I watched his mobile face go through several emotions in sequence: surprise, dismay, disbelief, dislike. It landed, finally, on contempt. He looked down upon me from his considerably superior height with something like amusement.

“And how, precisely,” he asked, “do you propose to keep me away?”

I had tried to prepare myself for this moment, this very scene,—and had always come up empty-handed or with something ridiculous, such as bashing him over the head with an umbrella. So I can only call what followed a moment of inspiration.

“I will write about you in the newspaper,” I said.

His smile disappeared.

I pressed on. “Remember that I write a social column,” I said. “There is a great deal I could say. I might even include you in my Singapore Style page, as a recipe for the perfect sneaking, thieving, sniveling, deceiving villain. We are,” I concluded, quoting Brown himself, “as others see us.”

“You’re insane,” he said at last. “The whole lot of you. Living in this broken-down shell of a palace. Thinking you can hide in the past. Well, you can’t. I’m not sure it’s worth the cost of the repairs, but one way or another, the future is coming. It’s coming for you as well, Agnes. I was willing to rescue you from that.”

“I’ll take my chances on the future,” I said. “But not on you.” And I swung the door closed in his face.

I waited in the front foyer, breathing hard. Perhaps he would try to break down the door. In the aftermath of that encounter, my body began to tremble and shake, as if I were caught in an earthquake. Brown did not ring the bell again. After a bit, I heard the crunch of gravel, and his Pierce-Arrow shot off, spitting stones behind it. We were safe, for the moment. Still, I continued to shake. I lay down on the floor, right there by the front door, and closed my eyes and folded my arms tightly across my chest, as if rehearsing for my own death.

When Nei-Nei Down stepped into the hall, I opened my eyes and propped myself up on my elbows. I did my best to smile gaily.

My grandmother stooped down and helped me stand. She patted my hair into place, a familiar gesture I found soothing. “You did well,” she told me. “Your grandfather would be proud.”

Guilt and shame did not vanish overnight. I still thought of myself as the author of Grandfather’s death. I had written his death warrant when I begged him to save Wei at any cost. I had aided and abetted the enemy. I had fallen prey to vanity. I had loved foolishly an unworthy object.

I felt ashamed and aggrieved and angry—a poisonous recipe, as I discovered. But I could not afford to wallow in despair. I thought of myself as the head of the family now—a presumption that Uncle Chachi would have resented, had he known. Yet it did me some good to think so. It forced me back on my feet. For I determined to walk myself out of the depths. I could not stay under, since everything, I felt, depended on me.

I was not alone in my delusion. In fact, I think the only member of our household who did not believe that our fates now rested solely on their shoulders was little Danai. She was so bereft without Grandfather that Nei-Nei permitted her to adopt a little striped tabby cat, whom Danai named the Colonel, in Grandfather’s honor.

The rest of us struggled briefly for control, like children playing at tug-of-war, pulling the rest of us off-balance, first in one direction, then the other—even Dawid, who had been in India when Grandfather died, and who, despite his great efforts, had not arrived back in Singapore until a few days after the funeral. We could all see how he suffered over this, and given his nature, I am sure he believed his absence was to blame for Grandfather’s death. He was the sort of person who could never fall asleep in a streetcar, in the secret conviction that his watchfulness kept it from running off the rails.

Dawid’s way of taking ownership of the palace was very touching. After the rest of us had retired in the evening, leaving the tea things until morning, Dawid would tidy up the place, even washing the dishes, so that when we woke, the kitchen was shining, and everything had been put into its proper place. Old Sanang grumbled at first, as she did at even the slightest change, but after a time she began to refer to Dawid as “the evening shift,” and this she could accept for she, after all, worked the early morning shift.

Nei-Nei Down attempted to run everything as she always had, by shouting orders and working twice as hard as anyone else. But a new foolish fondness had entered her personality, which gave these orders a comical aspect. “Straighten your coat!” she would bark at Uncle Chachi, but then she would smooth it herself, with fingers unexpectedly soft and trembling. “Go to bed!” she would command and then offer me a glass of
cheng teng
made with sea coconut, or a bowl of congee.

Uncle Chachi, of course, presumed he was always in charge, and so he did not alter his behavior noticeably, though he seemed to be making an effort to dress a bit more smartly as the head of the family, putting away his beloved scuffed slippers, for instance, in favor of European-style loafers with tassels. He even polished those loafers, late into the night, taking pains to look well.

After a week or two, we stopped wrestling for control of the household, and things settled back to their usual communal chaos, in true Singapore style.

I have neglected to speak about my work at the
Singapore Gate
and at Kahani’s during this time. I took time off during the mourning period, and when I returned to the newspaper, at least, it was as if I had never been gone. While the family was formally in mourning, we kept busy entertaining guests, and when the official mourning period of forty days had
ended, I went back to school and back to work wearing my band of mourning on my left sleeve. People treated me with kid gloves for a short time, with the welcome exception of Mr. Wms, who barked, “Where the hell have you been?”

I slipped back into my accustomed place at the paper. Strangely enough, I found it comforting to work with grown men who ignored me almost completely. Ink-stained, disheveled, balding, foul-mouthed, sweaty, heads down, they rushed from story to story, deadline to deadline. They were a grimly happy bunch, and when I spotted them carousing after-hours in the speakeasy across from the
Gate
offices—after-hours being very late indeed, sometimes first thing in the morning—they were a sloppily happy bunch and would no more have recognized me there than anywhere else. I simply did not exist for them. Only Mr. Singh and Mr. Wms acknowledged my presence at all. And Mr. Singh spent more time out of the office than in it—arranging for ads, I supposed.

Sometimes, on a city tram, I’d spot someone reading my columns—or at least the Society Page that featured my columns, and I would be overwhelmed by a feeling of wonder. The secret to those who write is that they come to the art simply because they cannot speak. Yet there were perfect strangers, reading what I thought about the newest fashion of low-heeled shoes, or taking in my advice on embroidery or snapshots or hiking the Bukit Timah. If I had been forced to speak about any of those things aloud, in front of strangers, I would have jumped off the tram.

I thought less often about Kahani’s Jewelry Emporium because things there were going so badly. It was not just the business slump—such declines were to be expected. Ron told me that sales fell off each year, a few days past Valentine’s Day, and didn’t pick up again till close to Chinese Valentine’s Day, on the seventh day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar.

One day, I noticed something wrong with Mr. Kahani himself. He had been listless for weeks, but now the circles under his eyes had become grayish. His walk had turned to a sleepwalker’s shuffle. No one spoke of it, but all of us felt it—no one more keenly than Sahhdie, his dragon guardian at the front of the store. She never left off frowning and scolding the rest of us. Even Ron came under attack, and he bore it meekly.

“Is Mr. Kahani ill?” I asked one morning. Sahhdie nearly bit my head off.

“Why would he be ill? Pull your skirt down over your knees, and do your work for a change,” she snapped. Which was hardly fair, since I always did my work. In slow times, I’d invent things to do, shining the sterling silver, wiping strands of pearls with a soft cloth given for the purpose, cleaning the glass cases till they sparkled. I looked for things to do. So did Bridget, exiled to the other side of the store, in among the estate jewels. We could only wave across the aisles. We’d been expressly forbidden to come near each other during work hours, as if we were primary school girls who might wreck the store. I would have defied orders, at least while Mr. Kahani and Sahhdie weren’t looking, but Bridget needed the salary too badly to risk getting fired. She was saving up, she told me, for college. She was as determined to further her education as I was to end mine once and for all. I was counting the days left until high-school graduation.

Mr. Kahani was barely a presence in the store during this time. When he was there at all, he snuck into his office for longer and more frequent periods of rest. His stomach ailments had worsened; his complexion was the color of pale jade. His answers to everything were vague, sometimes nonsensical. And the men he kept company with were the lowest of the low. “He’s in a bad way,” Bridget would say, puffing on a cigarette in the alley between our store and the apothecary next door.

“Do you think he owes money to one of the secret societies? Or maybe to the Sun Yee On gang?” I asked. Chinese gangs had been involved in the jewelry business as far back as anyone could remember. They were powerful and ruthless, with a finger in every pie.

“More likely the Green Gang,” Bridget said.

I suppose this was a reference to Mr. Kahani’s greenish pallor. No, he could not be involved with criminals. More likely, he was turning to street medicine and quack remedies from Aw Boon Haw, the “Tiger Balm King.” I noticed that he sent out for frequent deliveries from the medicine shops of the Kreta Ayer area.

When we tried to work together in his office, as we had in earlier times, Mr. Kahani would suddenly bend in half, like a jackknife, from the severity of his stomachaches. He barely touched food; he had grown thin and listless, yet bloated, like a beetle. The pain was so bad that beads of sweat would stand out on his forehead. Was it possible, I wondered, that some rival jeweler was trying to poison him?

When I questioned Uncle Chachi, he dismissed my concerns out of hand. “Mr. Kahani has money pressures, just like any other businessman. We have been friends for decades. If he had any serious problems, I would know about them. Do your work,” he said—just like Sahhdie. Why did everyone assume that I was slacking off?

But one afternoon, Sahhdie appeared in front of my counter in a state of panic. Her usually immaculate appearance was disrupted as if some giant hand had rumpled her from head to foot. Her black hair was wild, her jacket askew; her lipstick was smeared, and her eyes were wide with fear.