Peter Davies - The Fortunes

He had stood by the wall, brow furrowed, until one of the girls offered him tea. He sat with them then, and they had been friendly, even playful, one of them drawing a hank of hair across her upper lip like a mustache to make the rest laugh, another slipping off the flowerpot shoes she wore to simulate the tottering walk of bound feet (he had finally smirked at that subterfuge), until one after another— Zhen! Jia! — they had been summoned by the madam for her customers. After forty minutes it was just him and Ah Toy.

“You like my girls?” she asked him now in Chinese, but he put on a show of disdain.

“They’re nice enough for whores.”

“Nice enough to you, because they know you don’t have the money to buy them. You’re safe to them, like a brother.” She smiled demurely. “Or a eunuch in the Forbidden City.”

He flushed. “I have money.”

“Maybe.” She smiled sweetly again. “But not the balls to spend it.”

He searched her painted face for some sign of the coarseness of what she’d just said, as if for some blemish in the perfection.

“How much?” he demanded hotly.

“They’re all gone.” She shrugged, her silks rustling. “You missed your chance.”

“How much for you?”

She eyed him placidly, ignoring the impudence. He stared back, trying to guess her age, but her makeup — rice-powdered cheeks, penciled eyebrows, rouged lips — was like an embroidered screen. Only the dry claws protruding from her fingerless lace gloves gave her away.

“Bolder than you look. And a flatterer!” Only she used the Chinese euphemism “horse fart spirit.” “But I’m not for sale. Not anymore. Unlike some.”

“Meaning me?”

“You work for him, he pays you. The girls he pays to fuck, and you he pays to… wait, yes?”

“For now.”

“Ah!” She pointed a long enameled fingernail at him. “Ambition! Very good. What will it get you?”

What indeed? he pondered.

“Will you build railroads of your own? Have servants of your own? Chinese servants?”

“I just want to be rich,” he said quietly. “Never mind how.”

“Rich, rich.” She clapped her hands, and her bracelets rang. “Everyone wants to be rich. The only question is how.”

“What about you? Did you always know you wanted to be a whore, a madam?”

“A whore, no. No woman wants to be a whore, or be called one. I prefer haam-sui-mui, myself.” He blinked. “But a madam? Well, every whore wants to be a madam. I was the first, you know, the very first Chinese whore in this town. Why do you think I became so famous? I created the market for these girls. They’d none of them be here without me.”

He stared at her. She was not so unlike Aunty Bao, for all her finery.

“You’re proud of it.”

“It’s business. I treat them well — well enough. Better than I ever was.”

“And how do they feel about you?”

She was staring at the teapot before them, and slowly, as if it were a great weight, he found himself lifting it, refilling her cup. She nodded.

“Oh, they hate me, naturally. Every last one. What do you think? They’d thank me? Only their fathers thank me.” She peered at him. “You think I should be a mother to them, love them, spare them. Do I look like a mother?” He caught his breath, but she didn’t seem to expect an answer. “They’ve had enough of filial duty, wouldn’t you say?”

But he was lost in a memory of his own mother, in a silk dress, a red cheongsam, not unlike Toy’s, so smooth and slippery that when she sat him in her lap — he couldn’t recall how old he was, but not much more than a babe in arms — he kept sliding from her grasp. He remembered her laughter, but to him the slipping was terrifying. He cried, and when once he slid all the way to the floor, landing in a heap at her feet, he screamed all the harder trying to climb back up her silken leg, so slick, almost wet to the touch, that he couldn’t get any purchase on her, felt her warmth beneath the red but kept losing his grip and sliding to the floor. And all the time he wanted her to pick him up, just pick him up, but she wouldn’t, just kept laughing. It was so vivid — he had to fight the desire to grasp a bunched fistful of Toy’s dress — only it couldn’t be a memory, he knew; she’d died bearing him.

“If not me,” Madame Toy added, dabbing her lips, “some man would own them.”

“They might marry.”

“Ownership under a different name. Work without pay. Slavery is what that is. They fought a war in this country to end it!”

“So they’re better off as saltwater girls?”

“Shows what you know!” she retorted, finally provoked. “ Haam-sui-mui doesn’t mean that. It’s not Chinese. It’s from English— hand-so-me, what the ghosts called us. Means beautiful.”

She believed it, Ling could see, by the way she thrust her chin, and for his mother’s sake he wanted to as well.

“But it’s shameful.”

“Is not! These girls sacrifice their honor for their families. They should be proud, rather. It’s only men who are ashamed for women. Ashamed for themselves more like, for not being able to save us.”

Ling colored.

“Ai-ya!” She sighed. “It’s not the worst life. I tell the girls they could always be squeezing fish balls instead!”

He started at the reference. As a child he’d been mesmerized by old Tanka women at that work, squatting over a tub of fish paste, mashing it in their fists until the little white balls swelled like bubbles between thumb and first finger before dropping like milky pearls into a bucket of water.

Madame Toy poked a bony beringed finger in his chest.

“We’re not so different, you and I. Oh, I know about you. Crocker’s ‘pet’—the one he brags about — the first pet, first among thousands, but still a pet. And he’s not bragging about you. He’s boasting of himself, his vision.”

He caught her hand in his, and held fast when she made to pull away.

“A joke between friends,” she whispered. He caught a whiff of sweat beneath her perfume. “Let me find you a nice girl.”

She looked at him intently, painted eyes widening. “Ah, I see it now. You’re a mixed seed. Of course.” He gripped harder, warning, but she continued serenely. “That explains it. Half-breeds are always trying to be twice other men.” She pursed her lips. “And you hate whores because your mother was one.”

He felt her fist relax and he loosened his own grip and they held hands almost tenderly for a moment.

“I don’t hate them,” he muttered. Then: “Did you ever hear of a girl called Little Sister?”

“Sure.” He leaned forward. “They’re all someone’s little sister.” She shook her head ruefully. “But now I see what you want. Like other men, after all. The same thing, the one thing. Love. The only thing you can’t have, poor Chinaman, not on Gold Mountain.”

“Can I ask?” he began. “What would you — you or one of your girls — what would you do with a child?”

She sat very still. “I wouldn’t have one.”

“But if you did?”

“Even if I did, I wouldn’t,” she told him flintily.

A couple of the girls had drifted back in, and behind them Crocker, slightly flushed but otherwise just as when he left, smoothing his hands down his ample vest front.

“Dressed himself, I see,” Ah Toy murmured to Ling, with a final squeeze of his hand. “Careful. You could be out of a job.” Together they watched Crocker down a glass of rye standing up, one foot propped on a silk hassock as if it were something he’d just shot.

Ling had felt a qualm for Mrs. Crocker afterward. Felt some obscure kinship — both of them shamed somehow. She was such a refined figure, dressed in long gowns, her pale skin glowing against the dark fabrics, all gliding serenity next to Crocker’s bustling, bristling energy. But Ling must have betrayed something — bowed too deeply or too long, allowed some softness to steal into his voice — for she summoned him to her chamber a few days later. Crocker was at his office, the children at their lessons.