The Moonlight Palace (8 page)

Unlike Deepavali, which went on for days, or the Chinese Spring Festival, which lasted for at least three, Christmas struck me as a rather flimsy holiday, like the crackers we had just opened—noisy but short-lived. I wondered if the Christians felt disappointed when night fell, and thought that I must remember to ask my friend Bridget about it.

We sat in an almost sullen silence. I had the anxious feeling that this miasma could turn, at any instant, into a group depression. Even British Grandfather looked to be at a loss.

Dawid cleared his throat. “Now we will sing Christmas songs,” he announced. Dawid and I knew the songs from our many Christmas choral recitals at the Raffles School. He started with “Silent Night.” British Grandfather instantly joined in, and Uncle Chachi mouthed the wrong words, while the rest just hummed along. We sang “The First Noel,” and “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”

Grandfather’s eyes were shining with happiness, bluer than blue. This was the British Grandfather I remembered, fierce and happy, the center of attention, the leader of our small band. We switched to “Good King Wenceslas,” and then I saw that Grandfather was not smiling at all, but weeping. Nei-Nei laid one hand on his shoulder. The rest of us dragged slowly to a silent halt, and only Dawid went on obliviously singing for a few lines, alone:

“Sire, the night is darker now,

And the wind blows stronger.

Fails my heart, I know not how . . .”

Then there was silence, interrupted only by the sound of Grandfather’s hiccupping breaths.

“Oh, this is so foolish,” said Grandfather after a moment, mopping his eyes. “A silly child’s son
g . . .
” He shook his head. “Forgive me. I look in the mirror,” Grandfather went on, “and I am simply—amazed. Who is that old man? Who can he be? Indeed, it is not I, not the I who lives inside my head. When I dream at night, I can run and my legs and heart are strong. And yet, I am swept back into the past by a few children’s songs.” Now he did smile, and his smile had the temporary brilliancy of a rain-washed sky.

“Inside every old man lies the heart of a ten-year-old boy. Brave . . . unstoppable. The defender of field mice!”

Nei-Nei Down put her fingers up to her mouth. Her eyes shone out at British Grandfather. “You are still our great defender,” she said.

Soon afterward, the Singapore aunties and uncles came by for a late-night visit, along with unattached cousins twice and three times removed. All were somewhat bewildered by the evidence of a Christian holiday—they had come, in fact, because everything was closed on Christmas and there was nothing left to do but to go visiting. Otherwise, it was an ordinary day, and their ordinariness came as a great blessing.

Nei-Nei brought out plates of halwa and her much-loved almond crescent cookies dusted with sugar, and these rendered the plum pudding less overwhelming. It became merely another sweet, just as the evening became merely another evening.

In a shadowy corner of the room, British Grandfather and Uncle Chachi took up their usual game of Congkak—a game played with boards and tamarind seeds. I saw them watching Nei-Nei Down weave gracefully among the guests. Her hair was pinned up, a few gray wisps trailing down. She wore a silver-embroidered
kebaya
, an embroidered Peranakan blouse over a long embroidered skirt, which she had inherited from her mother. She looked quite youthful, moving around the room, serving sweets. Her figure was still as slim as a young girl’s.

“I wonder,” said Uncle Chachi, “if we will ever get our cup of tea.”

British Grandfather folded his arms. “The closest ones come last,” he said. “That is an immutable law with women.”

Uncle Chachi made a move on the Congkak board. He frowned. “Ah, I am going to lose,” he said. “Again.”

“You don’t pay proper attention,” Grandfather chided him.

Uncle Chachi glanced at the plum pudding. “All I want is a cup of tea,” he said, still eyeing Nei-Nei Down. “And a little peace and quiet, perhaps.”

“I know what you want,” Grandfather said. His voice snapped out, like the crack of a whip. Never, not even in my most disobedient childhood, had I heard this in his voice. “But you will have to wait your turn.”

Uncle Chachi was helping himself to a serving of plum pudding when British Grandfather spoke. He stopped with his plate hanging in midair, the glistening pudding suspended from a silver jelly server. I thought he would make some joke about his sweet tooth. But Uncle Chachi’s face turned gray. He lowered the plate to the table and set down the jelly server.

“I have always wanted what was best for the family,” he said. “Only that. Always that.”

“Oh, Charles,” said British Grandfather, in a changed voice. “—We have been the best of friends, haven’t we?”

The two old men embraced each other tearfully. Christmas certainly was a very strange holiday.

TEN

Never Well Since

T
here is in the science of homeopathy a remedy based on the symptom “never well since.” The cure was Natrum muriaticum—an attenuated tincture of sea salt—indicated also, Uncle Chachi declared, for Grandfather’s desire to be alone, his harping on the past, his forgetfulness, headaches, sore throat, and general weakness.

Uncle Chachi believed in homeopathy, like many men of his generation who had been educated in England. King George himself, he pointed out, turned to homeopathic remedies, as did the entire royal family in times of need. I think Uncle Chachi never altogether forgave himself for allowing allopathic doctors to treat my parents and brother during the 1918 flu pandemic. Homeopathy, he swore, would have kept them alive. And it was true, statistically speaking, that more homeopaths survived in 1918 than those who consulted the doctors and went to the hospitals.

Grandfather was never well again after Christmas. He woke the day after our feast with a parched throat, fever, and a burning desire to be out in the fresh air—even when the monsoon poured down around him. He was constantly begging poor Danai to wheel him outside, or at least to seat him by an open window, while Nei-Nei scurried around wrapping his throat in scarves, wheeling him inside, and slamming all the windows closed.

After a few days of Uncle Chachi’s remedies and Nei-Nei’s dosing with bitter herbs and winter soups, Grandfather seemed to rally a little—but not entirely. “Never well since.” Some days his memory seemed shattered; he thought we in the palace were running a boarding school, and Nei-Nei Down, he said, was too harsh a mistress. He asked me for recitations, and I tried to oblige, dredging up all the old poems I could remember from childhood, though the pieces he requested were hopelessly old-fashioned. Nor could he for the life of him understand why I was not better schooled in Latin and Greek.

“What kind of a madhouse are we running here?” he would demand.

We ran in circles around him. Old Sanang roused herself to incredible efforts. Many nights, I would find her sitting upright in a chair outside his room, fighting off sleep, listening for any signs of distress within. Sanang had once been a renowned seamstress, driven into poverty by arthritis. Her knotted hands worked now to embroider new handkerchiefs for British Grandfather, her rescuer. She provided a fresh handkerchief each day, though Grandfather had a great fondness for the paper ones called Kleenex, the kind the movie stars used to remove cold cream from their faces. Still, the pile of embroidered handkerchiefs grew.

Dawid visited the candy stalls in Little India and brought sacks of candy to tempt Grandfather—to no avail. Danai ended up the secret beneficiary of these candies. Nei-Nei Down managed to be everywhere at once—in the kitchen barking out orders, napping fitfully in a folding cot by the side of Grandfather’s bed, harassing the local herbalists and healers and hawkers, chastising Grandfather as if he were doing all this deliberately, dying just to spite her.

I saw very little of Geoffrey during this time, for Nei-Nei was a fearsome dragon at the gate, and she carefully supervised which visitors were allowed. The worse Grandfather got, the fewer visitors she admitted, turning away even old friends and admirers. Poor Geoffrey did not stand a chance.

Once when he came to call, she locked all the doors and drew down the shades. Humiliated for his sake, I escaped through a back window and took Geoffrey for a walk in our garden, explaining that Grandfather’s current illness—which I tried to make light of in the early days—did not permit him the pleasure of visitors.

As we came back from our short stroll, we spied Nei-Nei Down standing in the circular front drive, studying Brown’s Pierce-Arrow. Before our very eyes, my grandmother did a shocking thing. She glanced quickly right, then left, and kicked the side of Geoffrey Brown’s car. It was no accident. It was a vicious little kick, made by her small slippered foot. I expected Geoffrey to be outraged, or at the very least offended. But Geoffrey just seemed amused. Perhaps the tiniest bit chagrinned. That’s how perfectly even his temper was. “She thinks I am not good enough for you,” he said. “She’s right.”

“She is not,” I said, “right. —And she’s a terrible snob.” I was embarrassed for her—for all of us.

“Perhaps I’ll win her over in the end,” Geoffrey said musingly. “Though I doubt it.”

Grandfather’s slump infected us all with gloom. It did not help matters that we had entered into the second monsoon season, a particularly unrelenting one. I woke to the sound of rain and slept to the sound of raindrops battering the palace roof, seeking admittance. Poor Nei-Nei went around like a bedraggled bird, her hair and skirts askew. She sloshed through the garden in knee-high gutta-percha boots, looking for peonies to rescue, but they, too, had slumped against the eternal downpour. Only Uncle Chachi and Dawid maintained their good humor. At the dinner table, they kept up a running dialogue that none of the rest of us had the heart to enter.

At Kahani’s, too, business had slowed. There was a brief flurry of after-Christmas sales into the New Year, a handful of remorseful late gifts, but these soon sputtered to a halt. The Christmas bills had now arrived. Serangoon Street became a ghost town. The bright holiday stalls folded up like flowers and disappeared. Much of our temporary holiday staff followed suit. I was afraid that Bridget, too, would lose her job, but Mr. Kahani promoted her into the ranks of estate jewelry, where he still all but forbade me to set foot.

“The two of you are always gossiping, every chance you get. So stay away from your friend during business hours, please. The estate customers are a particular clientele. They do not want to hear the chatter of teenagers. You are free to talk as much as you like whilst your friend smokes out back.”

It was impossible to keep secrets from Mr. Kahani. Much less the scent of our cigarettes. Still, I was offended that he dismissed our conversations as mere gossip. Bridget and I thought of ourselves as true modern women, forward-thinking; we talked eagerly about new ideas, new inventions, books, socialism, politics, women’s suffrage, our obligations to the rest of humankind, science—Bridget was especially interested in new scientific discoveries—and of course, men. But Mr. Kahani made it sound as if all we talked about was men, and this was not true.

For the first time, my workday at the store seemed to drag on, and I watched the second hand move around the face of the large store clock with morbid fascination, for it seemed to move more slowly every day and every hour. I cleaned and tidied and sprayed the glass display cases with diluted white vinegar, wiped the strands of pearls with a soft cloth, but I could not trick the time into going any faster. My feet ached from standing. I began to share Ron’s contempt for the customers’ endless debates, their long, drawn-out indecision. Compared to what was happening at home, in the world, their worries seemed trivial. What did it matter, after all, if this young man bought a circle of diamonds or a solitaire? What was the difference between a ruby and a sapphire? You liked red or you preferred blue—that was all there was to the matter. No one’s life hung in the balance.

Mr. Kahani invented more clerical jobs for me, working beside me in the back office. I believe he was trying to give me time to clear my mind. And in our hours together, which we normally spent in business correspondence, he devoted more time to the reading aloud of newspapers, and even more to the discussion of books. Around this time, he began to suffer from severe headaches, which debilitated him to the point where he lay for hours, nearly immobilized, on the sofa in his office in his twitching stocking feet, a pillow propped under his head. On the floor, enchanting customers, Mr. Kahani could pass for a handsome man of forty. But in the throes of these attacks, he looked to be in his late sixties. It soothed him, he said, to talk about books.

Yet he fell asleep more often than not, sometimes while we were in the middle of a conversation about Arnold Bennett or the Rossettis. Silence might have helped more. Only in the mute interstices of our conversations did his face ever relax. I wished I could rub his hands in my own, the way Nei-Nei Down had taught me to cure a headache, massaging the inside muscles of the palms—but she had also taught me never to touch a strange man. Even shaking hands with a man felt daring. It did not matter that I had absolutely no romantic feelings whatsoever toward my employer; my impulse came of pity. I had been taught to resist pity as well. So, we talked about books, and I found that Mr. Kahani made many wise recommendations. My library includes many volumes that he suggested back then.

One day, I was called into his office and found a strange man sitting there, with the tea tray and tea things propped in front of him. He was a very small man—his body, hands, and feet all so tiny, and only his head appeared to be the size of a grown man’s, thus preternaturally large on his small body. He looked, in fact, like a doll sitting in front of a doll’s tea set. This man was introduced to me as Mr. Singh, editor and publisher of the
Singapore Gate
newspaper’s evening edition.

Mr. Singh was perhaps an inch or two shorter even than I was, but was extremely upright. His hair was slicked back into two distinct parts and shone like the wings of a raven. Even his eyeglasses sparkled. He wore a red-and-blue-striped suit that must have been purchased in the boy’s department of a store.

“I am very pleased to meet you,” he said, in a voice that made it clear that I should be the one who was pleased. “I understand you are interested in literature.”

“Yes.” Mr. Kahani spoke for me. “She is a great one for reading.”

“Many young people do not appreciate the power of words,” said Mr. Singh, squinting at me severely.

“Miss Agnes has a great reverence for language,” said Mr. Kahani. “She is not like most young women nowadays.”

“I am glad.” Mr. Singh nodded.

Mr. Kahani warmed to his subject. “She would like to live by her pen,” he said. This was news to me.

Mr. Singh angled his body a degree further in my direction. “Is that true?” he asked.

I had sent out a few stories and poems to local magazines and newspapers. All of them had come back. The only one that had included a handwritten note had chastised me for not including the correct return postage. “I would like to live by my wits,” I said.

Mr. Singh had a high, eerie laugh, like a child’s—almost a giggle. “—I need certain office help for the
Singapore Gate
evening edition. Are you familiar with it?”

“We read it together,” Mr. Kahani asserted.

“You like newspapers?”

“I love them,” I said honestly. I named the six or seven papers to which Mr. Kahani subscribed.

Mr. Singh looked duly impressed. “How fast can you type?” he asked.

“I type forty-five words per minute,” I said.

He pursed his lips. “That is not very fast,” he said. “But perhaps you are very accurate?”

“Not terribly.” I was nothing if not honest.

Mr. Kahani was about to interrupt again. Mr. Singh hurried on. “Perhaps you could tell me then,” he said, “what you consider to be your best qualifications as a secretary.”

“I am loyal and hardworking,” I said. “I keep confidences. And I like to keep things tidy.”

“I am not looking for a wife,” joked Mr. Singh.

“I am not looking for a husband, sir.”

Mr. Kahani put his oar in then, while Mr. Singh and I sat glaring at each other. “Miss Agnes underestimates herself,” he said. “She is too modest. She is very organized, very thorough. She is always looking to take on extra duties.”

We all relaxed a little. Mr. Singh started again. “Allow me to ask your impression of the evening edition of the
Singapore Gate
. How would you say it differs from other papers?” He dabbed at his brow with a small colored handkerchief he’d drawn from his breast pocket. Inside Mr. Kahani’s office it was always warm. Mr. Kahani must have had thin blood. “And kindly do not tell me, ‘Because it comes out at night.’ —Believe it or not,” Mr. Singh said to Mr. Kahani, “this is the answer I get from most applicants.”

In fact, the
Singapore Gate
was in my opinion a mediocre Straits newspaper—nothing like the papers from London and New York. I tried to think of something neutral to say. “It deals with local and international news in equal measure.”

“Very good,” said Mr. Singh encouragingly. “And if you could change one thing about our newspaper, what would it be?” Again he turned to Mr. Kahani. He did not appear to treat his friend any differently because he was blind. “You see, I am always asking questions. Always learning. It is possible to learn from anyone.” He beamed at me. “Go ahead,” he said.

“I would get more advertisements,” I said.

Mr. Singh’s reaction startled both me and Mr. Kahani. He leaped to his feet. “Exactly!” he shouted, galvanized into waving his short arms. “That is exactly right! We need more advertisements. Not longer articles or shorter articles. Not more good news or more bad news. Advertisements! That is the key to everything.”

“Everything,” agreed Mr. Kahani.

“You are a clever girl,” said Mr. Singh. “Very astute. Your teachers must be saying all the time, ‘She is a clever one, that Miss Agnes.
’
”

“Not so much,” I said.

“Perhaps they are not clever enough themselves. You are too subtle for them.”

“We have excellent teachers at Raffles Girls’ School,” I said loyally. “Much better than at Nanyang High School.”

“But how do we get these advertisements?” Mr. Singh said, sitting down. “That is the real question. That is not so easy to do.”

“You have no social columns,” I said. “No wedding announcements. No fashion.”

“We are not a ladies’ magazine,” said Mr. Singh. Now he was back to glaring at me again.

I decided to ignore this. I myself liked to read about weddings and funerals and fashion. And I was not a trivial person. People were naturally curious about other people; there was no shame in that. “But if you had a fashion column,” I went on doggedly, “you could write some puff pieces about the local stores. Then they would take out more advertisements in your paper.”