Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

Unfortunately, at least for my mother, my father was out celebrating repeal the day I was born and when he got back to the house he found himself confronted with a Caesarian. He was drunk, “Godawful drunk,” he wrote later, and he never was sure what really happened. Either the scalpel slipped or he forgot to wash his hands and sepsis set in or it may have been that my mother was just one of those women who is destined to die in childbirth. He was never certain because he blacked out during the delivery and when he came to my mother was dead and I was lying well wrapped in a crib that they had bought for me. He’d managed that while out on his feet. The temperature outside, my father wrote, was 11 below zero and a blizzard had started. He wrapped my mother up in a sheet and carried her out to the garage where she froze nicely and stayed that way until the blizzard ended four days later and he could get around to having her buried in Missoula. He never did write why he decided to name me Lucifer.

My father really wasn’t a very good doctor. He barely passed his pre-med at the University of Texas and the only medical school that he could get into in the twenties was the University of Oklahoma in Oklahoma City and that was by a fluke. Somehow he made it through, working as a theater usher at night at the old Empress on Main Street. He had married my mother by then and she worked in a department store, Rohrbaugh-Brown’s it was called then. He made $9 a week; she made $12.

My father interned at St. Anthony’s hospital in Oklahoma City and got through that without killing anyone. He had enough sense to realize that he would never be a good doctor and barely a competent one. For a while he thought about becoming a ship’s physician, but the competition in 1932 was too stiff. Then he heard about the practice that could be bought for a thousand dollars in Moncrief. He borrowed the money from my mother’s parents, who died in a car wreck before he had to pay it back. My father didn’t kill anyone in Moncrief either, except my mother.

After she died my father suffered fits of what he diagnosed as “depression and remorse.” He drank a lot and scribbled long passages in his diary, alternately blaming himself and me for her death. Ultimately, he accepted all of the blame. But I still remained Lucifer Clarence Dye.

He had hired a sixteen-year-old farm girl to look after me. Her name, I later read, was Betty Maude Christianson and he paid her $3.50 a week plus room and board and whatever pleasure she got from his thrice-weekly visits to her bedroom. Or so he wrote.

It was in the spring of 1934 that he sobered up and began writing the letters. He wrote to the Methodists and the Baptists and the Presbyterians. He sent long letters to the Assembly of God, the Church of the Brethren, the Episcopalians, the Christians and Missionary Alliance, and the Ethical Culture Society. He wrote to the Evangelical Covenant, the Evangelical Free, and the Evangelical and Reformed. He wrote to the Lutherans, the Friends, and the Latter Day Saints. He wrote to the Pentecostal Holiness and the Christian Scientists. Finally, he wrote to the Seventh-Day Adventists and, in desperation, to a Catholic cardinal in St. Louis, I think, offering to “come over to your side.”

My father, in a spirit of atonement, had decided to become a medical missionary, preferably in China, and he was offering his services to any organized religion that would accept them. None did, unless you can call Texaco a religion. Through an old college friend whose father was the vice-president in charge of Texaco’s overseas operations in Asia, my father was offered a job as company doctor in Shanghai. We sailed from San Francisco on August 19, 1934, aboard the Midori Maru , bound for Kobe and Shanghai.

My father and I lived in a company house in the International Settlement on Yuen Ming Road with my amah , Pai Shang-wa, a thirty-five-year-old spinster from Canton who spoke Cantonese as well as Mandarin and the harsh Shanghai dialect. She insisted that I learn all three, and when I made a mistake she slapped me, but not very hard. I didn’t speak English too well until I was nearly six, and this made it a little difficult to communicate with my father, who spoke no Chinese, not even passable pidgin. We also had two other servants, a cook whose name was Ma Yiu-ha, and a house boy-driver, Fu Ying. I remember that I called him Foo-Foo and sometimes he carried me around the house piggyback.

My father wasn’t home much, not that his duties were either arduous or pressing, but he preferred to spend his evenings at either the American Club or the Shanghai Club, which then featured the longest bar in the world. It still does, I understand, except for one in Las Vegas, but that one curves, and the one in Shanghai is straight, which still makes it the longest straight bar in the world.

Up until August 14, 1937, I have only the dim recollections that any child would have who was three years and nine months old. But on that Saturday my father, feeling either expansive or guilty for having neglected his only son, took me to lunch at the Palace Hotel. I remember that we had Shanghai duck and that it was very good and that my father cut up my pieces for me.

I remember, too, that outside the hotel, Nanking Road was packed with people, mostly refugees from Hongkew and other northern areas. Although I didn’t know it, Japan had launched its attack on Shanghai the day before, once again demonstrating its preference for beginning wars over the weekend, just as it had done in 1932 and would again do in 1941.

Refugees packed Nanking Road. They were the blind, the sick, the old men carrying old women on their backs, babies in their mothers’ arms, and just ordinary people, all sagging with the burdens of whatever they could rescue — pans, chickens, pots, their much-prized blue teacups, and rolls of straw matting. They flowed over Soochow Creek Bridge near the Russian Consulate and fanned out over the Bund and Nanking Road, a half-million persons who snarled traffic and stalled streetcars as they tried to escape the war that was to last almost eight years to the day.

Most of them had given up moving. They huddled at the curb, against walls, on any step they could find. Nanking Road was a refugee camp, a reluctant one which offered neither refuge nor safety.

I recall that we came out of the Palace and stood there for a while, looking at the crowd, as my father probed away at a molar with a toothpick. I held his left hand. Across the street were the Sassoon House and the Cathay Hotel. But they were only a couple of buildings to me at the time. In the distance we could hear the crunch of shells as Chiang’s big Northrup bombers tried to knock out the Idzumo , the Japanese flagship, a superannuated cruiser that had been built by the British. The Japanese Third Fleet was then in the Whampoa River and its cruisers were shelling the Chinese troops, mostly the crack 87th and 88th Divisions, softening them up for the Japanese infantry which had landed at the mouth of the Whampoa at Wusung. I liked the noise because it sounded like firecrackers.

My father started to say something, but just then the Chinese Air Corps’ Northrups came over, heading west, and we both looked up. Some cylindrical things fell out of one of the bombers and glistened in the sun.

The first bomb hit the Cathay Hotel across the street. It blew out all the windows. Another bomb ricocheted off the Cathay and into Nanking Road where it exploded. The blast blew us against the red brick wall of the Palace Hotel. Then another bomb hit the Palace and hurled us back into the street. I found myself lying there in the street, still clutching my father’s left hand. There was the hand and the wrist and part of the forearm. And that was all. I couldn’t find any more of him as I wandered among the dead, trying not to step into pools of blood or on pieces of flesh. Everybody seemed dead. I walked around, still holding my father’s hand so that the end of his forearm dragged in the dirt and blood. It was quiet. Almost the only sound I could hear was my own voice, speaking Mandarin, asking a man without a head, “Have you seen the rest of my father?” I looked around and saw another man’s body smeared flat against the red bricks of the Palace Hotel. Some parked cars had caught fire. Streetcar lines were down and tangled like old fishing line. I stumbled over the lower half of a woman’s body. There was no top half. I kept asking the dead if they had seen the rest of my father and when they didn’t answer I started walking up Nanking Road, the blood squishing in my brown high-topped shoes. I still carried all that was left of my father.