Peter Davies - The Fortunes

“Cut your hair, I see,” Crocker said when he met him. He nodded, too shamed to speak. “Much better that way. You look like a man at last.”

It was the next day Crocker had suggested he outfit Ling “like a civilized fellow.” He’d walked out of the store feeling a head taller, less Crocker’s servant than his muse, his prototype, even perhaps his protégé.

He had a little mirror in his room, an old pier glass, the silver backing cracked and peeling so that looking in it he saw himself bent like a stick in water. He admired his new attire in it and decided he cut a fine figure, even if the flawed glass made him seem always to be bowing slightly to himself. (Only little Harriet, who had liked to follow him about clutching the end of his queue in her tiny fist, missed it, staining her pinafore with tears until he promised to grow it back.)

He had shown Little Sister the clothes. He showed her his hat, he showed her his collars and cuffs, starched and ironed. And she had stroked them gently, taken them off one by one. She ran her fingers through his hair when she’d lifted off the derby, then caught it — what was left of it — together at his nape. “Short as a boy’s,” she breathed. He closed his eyes, remembering her washing and plaiting his hair. He had been planning to tell her it had been his idea to cut it, but she didn’t ask, and he felt cheated somehow. He was already in a foul mood from having to wait for her. He’d stormed up and down the boardwalk, the heels of his new boots thundering. In his Western suit and hat, he must have looked like a ghost in the night, and startled Chinese had stepped aside for him, cursed him in Cantonese under their breath. But he had said nothing in return, just as he had said nothing to the ghost boys who had once taunted him. Why? he wondered now, in her arms. What was he ashamed of?

He’d come to see it as a trade, losing a queue, gaining a handsome outfit — an advantageous one, at that. He’d taken to wearing his new hat tilted forward, low over his eyes, to disguise his shaved forehead. It was the look of a rake, a young tough, and he marveled that now he could stride along the boardwalks of town without anyone expecting him to step aside. It wasn’t only Chinese who mistook him for a white, nor only at night. Once in broad daylight when one urchin shoved another into his path, the one who trod on his toes, besmirching his boots, actually apologized, and Ling found himself clipping the offender around the ear as heartily as he might clap a fellow on the back. He hooked his thumbs in his vest as he’d seen Crocker do, threw his shoulders back as he strode, had to remind himself to round them again as he went about his household duties. When his queue began to grow back, he’d already determined, he’d bind it up under his hat, perhaps even lop it off himself (never mind his promise to Miss Harriet). Time enough later to grow it out before he returned home.

After they had lain together he had produced a gift for Little Sister—“I almost forgot”—a silver thimble. He had studied the choices in the little haberdashery in a sweat, the storekeep eyeing him narrowly, and finally opted for one with a scrolling band around the base. She held out her hand and he slipped it on, stubbing her finger slightly. She twirled it between them, watching it catch the light. She was laughing, the same low snigger he remembered hearing through her door so many nights. Now he realized it was sobbing.

He reached for her, but she rolled away, hunching her shoulders, the bones of her back rising and whitening like the knuckles of a fist. His hand hovered over her, stroking the air.

Finally she started to speak, as if to the wall. “My father said he was taking me to visit my grandmother. I believed him, but my mother must have known. She wept when he took me, called me back, hugged me tight. I said she was being silly — I was a pert one—‘Silly, Ma, I’m only going for the day.’ She didn’t tell me. I used to hate her for that. But I think she just wanted me to be happy for one last hour.”

He stared at his hands in his lap. He was thinking of the first coin he’d given her, Crocker’s gold piece with the woman’s head on it: Liberty, he’d lately learned. He climbed heavily to his feet, began to dress.

“How much money do you have now?” she asked, as if she’d read his mind.

“Some,” he hedged. “Not much.”

But she’d looked at the clothes and not believed him.

“I thought we were partners.”

He told her he didn’t have enough for that, but she wasn’t satisfied. “I’m a good earner, aren’t I? A hard worker. I have some savings too.”

“You?”

She nodded, and he knew she’d been holding out on Ng.

“How much?”

But she just shook her head, and he was relieved, in fact. He’d had the sudden fear that she’d saved more than him, that she’d saved every cent he’d ever spent on her. He had to fight the impulse to tear the place apart for it, shake her until her teeth snapped and she told him where it was hidden.

“If you don’t have enough,” she said now, “get your friend Crocker to extend you some of that famous credit. Or better yet, buy me himself.”

“Never!”

“Not like that,” she whispered. “But couldn’t he give me a job, like you? I can clean, sew. Don’t they need a maid?”

“You’d do laundry again? Ironing?” He was trying to jolly her along; he couldn’t imagine taking her to the Crockers. He already saw to their needs. But mostly he couldn’t imagine presenting her to Crocker.

“You could say I’m your wife,” she implored him, but she saw in his face that he couldn’t. “Ah, at last,” she said, lying back as if satisfied. “You’re ashamed of me.”

He started to deny it, but she shrugged sulkily. “I’m happy for you. You’ve done well. Risen so high, you’ve left me behind. From women’s work to man servant. Good for you. Or does he call you his China boy ?”

She hadn’t bothered to cover herself, and in the dim light her areolas seemed to lie on her chest like dull copper coins.

“But why now?” he asked. “Why do you want to leave now?”

She squinted, sighting along her body; tapped the thimble against her belly.

“If it’s a boy, he’ll be all right, I suppose, but if it’s a girl? What life for her?” She closed her eyes. “Listen to me, even I don’t want to bring a girl into this world.”

He fastened his collar, picturing her for a moment in her bath, scrubbing herself raw until the water turned pink.

“Isn’t there any… remedy?”

“What? Cathartic pills, or preventive powders? Perhaps you were thinking of a button hook, a chopstick.”

He winced.

“You’re lying. Aren’t you lying?”

“It could be yours,” she’d said then from the bed, the thimble pointing at him like a gun barrel, but it didn’t sound as if even she believed it. “Would you deny it a father?”

He paused at the door, confounded. It was so peculiar to wonder if he was a father, after wondering for so long who his own was.

“Better that than a father who doesn’t want it,” he offered at last.

“There are worse things.”

“How can you say that?”

She stared into the candle, her eyes shining with flame. “Oh, that. That was a lie,” she whispered. “My father didn’t sell me to Ng.”

Ling shook his head wearily. “So?”

“When we left, we left together, he and I. He had come back for me, you see, my father, from Gold Mountain. He had made money, and now he wanted me to help him make more.”

“What are you saying?”

She looked at Ling like he was a fool.

And he was, he thought, slumping against the wall. It was why she couldn’t run off, why the old man never lay with her, why he absented himself every night.