Edward Whittemore: Quin’s Shanghai Circus

What else did he mention? said Quin, having just heard repeated everything his aunt had ever been able to tell him about his father after he disappeared from New York. About his mother she could tell him nothing, not even having been aware that her younger brother had married. The missionary couple had only been able to add that the woman who came to their ship in Shanghai asking for help was an American about thirty years old, that her papers were genuine and proved both her own and the baby’s identity.

The fat man scratched his liver.

What else. What else? Nothing else. He’s still alive though, that friend, his name is Father Lamereaux. Lived in Tokyo before the war and still lives there although he never sees anyone, no one at all except a dead cat. Rather a strange man. Too bad you can’t write to him but he never touches mail, something to do with a vow he made during the war. A vow? Of course if you were to talk to him that would be different.

Talk to him?

Not that expensive by freighter, nephew, and once you get there you’ll be able to taste the finest horseradish in the world. The finest and the best.

The fat man groped behind his back trying to find a kidney to scratch. Quin nodded to himself.

Buffalo. What did you say your name was?

Didn’t say. Right? It’s the same as that wooden sign in the window.

What? Geraty?

When addressing St. Edward the Confessor I use none other.

All right, Geraty, that’s just fine. Now tell me how you knew who I was when you walked in here. And better than that, tell me why you walked in here in the first place.

Geraty’s head rolled sideways. He seemed exhausted by the weight he was carrying in flesh and memories. He licked his gin and began reciting in a monotonous voice.

He said Father Lamereaux must have also mentioned the neighborhood in the Bronx where the aunt lived. Tonight he was in the same neighborhood visiting friends.

Who? said Quin.

Geraty ignored the question. He left his friends and passed a bar with his name on it. That intrigued him so he stopped in for a drink. Someone used Quin’s name and when he heard it, he didn’t know why, Father Lamer-eaux’s long-ago story came back to him. The recollection made him wonder. The neighborhoods were the same, his own name was on the bar, thirty years had passed.

A coincidence?

Or perhaps thirty years didn’t matter. He was curious and decided to find out. He picked Quin’s pocket to see how he spelled his name, to see if the two Quins were the same.

Quin nodded. The tale was so outrageous and told so matter-of-factly he might have believed it if Geraty had left out the pickpocketing episode. But with the exception of opening and closing his horseradish jar, Geraty seemed too clumsy to do anything covertly.

Quin watched the giant sink closer to the counter.

Come to think of it, nephew, the old man’s become such a recluse he might not want to talk to you even if you did go to see him. He wasn’t just another priest, Lamereaux, he was quite a rake in his time. He might not want to recall that era at all, I mean not at all. Still there could be a way.

Quin waited, expecting there would turn out to be a way.

Yes, just possibly. Do you know whose feast day you are honoring this evening with your beer? By chance, that of St. Brigid, known for her miraculous powers and particularly for her charity. Charity I said, that may be the clue we’re looking for. It so happens that Father Lamereaux was the guardian of a boy, an orphan who was brought to America not long after you were. Father Lamereaux loved that boy dearly but he’s never been able to see him because the boy can’t make the crossing alone, he’s a little simple in the head, and Lamereaux’s lumbago is so bad he can’t make the crossing either. Lumbago. As I remember a lot of his friends had it before the war. Well it seems to me that if you took the boy with you for a visit the old hermit would be so delighted he’d tell you everything.

Geraty ordered another round. They rolled the dice, Quin lost. The giant’s bleary eyes roamed the bar completely out of focus.

Boy isn’t right, he’s only a few years younger than you are. I only call him that the way I’d call you a boy. Most of the time he’s just like anybody else only more so. More so, anybody. Now and then you have to tell him what to do but he’s obliging and friendly and kind, kinder than anyone you’ll ever meet, saints preserve us. I know because I’ve just been to see him.

In that case, buffalo, why aren’t you taking him to Japan?

Because it wouldn’t be for a visit, that’s why. My bowels haven’t moved since I left the East, haven’t and won’t until I get back where I belong and stay there. I came to this country to sell a magnificent set of documents on the sources of Japanese culture, my life’s work, intending to retire on the proceeds in some pine grove and what happens?

What?

The rich He hath sent empty away.

What happened to the collection?

What do you think happened to it in this hell of stupidity and violence? They confiscated it.

Why?

Pornography, hard-core pornography, no redeeming social value. Value? Manuscripts written by the monks who invented rock gardens and tea ceremony and made Zen famous and made No and Go famous and everything else anybody has ever heard of? No value in them? Does that make sense? Does it? Now does it?

Geraty was raving, yelling, waving his arms. He lost his balance and fell into the counter, his face coming to rest in a pool of spilled gin.

He was muttering to himself, Manchurian telephone numbers and Chinese addresses, the name of a bar in Mukden where he had gone to get drunk after buying a supply of films before the war, a description of Bubbling Well Road early one winter morning when he was on his way to a warehouse on the outskirts of Shanghai. He returned to Tokyo, still in the thirties, to make a train connection to a beach just south of the city. He changed buses three or four times in the international quarter of Shanghai before approaching the locked, shuttered room where he went nightly to set up his movie projector, to take off his clothes, to whisper silently to himself the words with which he secretly greeted the wealthy degenerates and drug addicts he was there to entertain, magnificat anima mea Dominum , my soul doth magnify the Lord. He sneaked through the black-market district of Mukden late in 1934, and again in 1935, noting discrepancies.

Smiling affably during the early months of the Occupation in Japan, having just stolen a secret intelligence report marked with the code name Gobi , he ordered drinks for everyone at his favorite Tokyo bar and shouted out yet again the verses from St. Luke that obsessed him.

He hiccuped. Someone was poking him in the ribs.

Wake up, buffalo. What’s the boy’s name and where do I find him?

Geraty blinked up from the bar. He sneezed, raising a spray.

You were born there and lived here, I was born here and lived there. See the difference? Don’t bother, there is none. The truth is I don’t know who you are or what you’re talking about. Nothing you’ve told me makes any sense, nothing I’ve heard in years makes any sense. The truth? The truth is that everything they said about my leprosy drugs before the war was a lie, but then and now and forever He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart. Are you satisfied now? Is that what you wanted to hear?

The boy’s address, buffalo. And Lamereaux’s address in Tokyo. And yours.

Geraty emptied the gin glass into his mouth without taking his head off the bar. He scribbled the address of the orphanage in Massachusetts, an address in Tokyo, the name of a bar in Tokyo.

Everybody knows the place. They can tell you where to find me.