It was at Denver that she mentioned the spittoons. She looked at him a little anxiously, turning her head on the pillow. He curled a lock of her hair around his finger and promised that he wouldn’t take up chewing tobacco—not the most difficult promise he’d ever made in his life, but rewarding, in its own small way. He slept notably well that night.
In San Francisco, on a whim, he took her into Chinatown the foggy evening they arrived—the Chinese New Year. He didn’t warn her; the expression on her face as they crossed into the land of red and gold light was worth it. She walked beside him wordlessly through the crowds of Chinese in gorgeous silks, holding onto his arm and jumping a little at the intermittent rap of firecrackers.
Everywhere red and orange paper fluttered; incense and cooking smells lay thick. Rows of splendid lanterns dangled from the balconies overhead. All the shops bore tall signs in joyous scarlet, painted in gold Chinese characters and draped with crimson cloth.
He stopped at an open table covered with ribbons and dishes of narcissus in bloom, surrounded by baskets of fruit. A shopkeeper with a black skullcap and a pigtail down to his waist bobbed in pleasant eagerness. Samuel greeted him with a wish for the New Year in Canton pidgin, which brought the eagerness to enthusiasm. With quick, energetic movements, the merchant hopped up on a stool and handed down the two colored scrolls Samuel selected from the hanging display.
“We’ll put these over our door.” Samuel held the scrolls up to the saffron light of a Chinese lantern and pointed to the characters on one. “These are the five blessings. Health, riches, longevity, love of virtue, and a natural death.”
“Can you read that?” She looked at him as if he were something remarkable.
The merchant thrust an orange toward her. “Kun Hee Fat Choy!”
Samuel saw her eyebrows go up in consternation. “It’s a gift, for the New Year,” he said. “The orange is good fortune.”
“Oh!” With a smile of scandalized delight, she thanked the merchant. The shopkeeper then presented her with a dish of the narcissus. He clasped his hands together in his sleeves and bowed again, deeply. She held the orange and the flowers and made a little curtsy. “Thank you!” she said. “Thank you very much. Happy New Year to you, too, sir.”
The shopkeeper held up a string of red packets to Samuel. “Burn firecracker, mister? Dollar-quarter.”
He shook his head. “No can do. Go look-see.”
“Ah! Look-see, good. Big boom, ah! Missus like.”
“What does the other one say?” Leda nodded to the second scroll.
He hesitated, feeling suddenly reluctant to tell her. She put her nose among the flowers and looked up at him expectantly, her lips slightly parted, half-curving in a smile. The merchant read the scroll in Chinese, nodding helpfully.
Samuel had a little Cantonese, enough to understand him. He understood the calligraphy anyway. He just felt foolish saying it out loud. He would rather have had it hang, incomprehensible to her, behind some door in their house where only he would see it.
“You can’t read that one?” she asked.
“It’s just a New Year’s expression.”
She looked at the scroll, with its painted decoration in gilt and ebony. “It’s pretty. I wish I knew what it said.”
He rolled it up. “It means ‘Love one another.’”
Her lashes lifted.
“It’s just a saying.” He looked up at the other banners and read a few. “‘Longevity, Joy, Happiness, and Official Rewards.’ ‘May we always have rich customers.’ That kind of thing.”
“Oh.” She buried her nose in the narcissus again and peeked up at him, her eyes shining. “I see.”
He felt as if he were walking a tightrope blindfolded. Strolling off a cliff…and somehow, somehow, still walking on thin air, with an unthinkable depth beneath him.
The weather continues deplorable, Leda wrote to South Street, but I cannot grieve for that, when such excitement prevails at our final departure for the Sandwich Islands. We sail at this very moment on my honoured husband’s flagship, the Kaiea. This praiseworthy vessel enjoys—here she consulted the notes Samuel had written down for her.—a Gross Registered Tonnage of eighty-six hundred tons, and is built of steel with twin-screw propellers and triple-expansion engines of 17,000 horsepower, all qualities of particular excellence with regard to steamships. You will be pleased to learn that these attributes result in a service speed of twenty-one knots, which commendable swiftness exceeds the performance of the ship Oregon, present recipient of the Blue Riband of the Atlantic in honour of the most speedy passage between Liverpool and New York. There does not seem to be a Blue Riband for the Pacific, which is most unjust, I feel, as it is certain that the Kaiea would secure any such prize. I could write more exhaustively concerning the particulars of this admirable steamship, however Mr. Gerard has admonished me not to weight my letter with maritime “jargon.”
Leda lifted her head from the writing desk and looked about her. We occupy the master stateroom on the topmost deck, she continued, which is comprised of three spacious rooms, namely, a dining room, a sitting-room, and a sleeping-cabin with bath and toilet-room adjoining. The fittings are very beautiful, of highly polished brass, Asian teak, and other exotic woods. A large gilt mirror overhangs the mantel. The walls are papered in lovely Chinoiserie of birds and blossoms, on a background of cheerful crimson, which I have learned is the color of good fortune among the Orientals, believed to be efficacious in the keeping away of evil spirits. Splendid vases full of fresh flowers, set out on the tables and in sconces on the walls, or bulkheads, as they are properly termed, greeted us upon boarding. The whole effect makes it difficult for one to imagine that one is on board ship. Mr. Gerard and myself have a steward whose sole duty it is to be at our service upon the pressing of an electrical button.
I must now close, as the tender which is to take off these letters and convey them back to San Francisco is preparing to leave us, and we will shortly be passing through the celebrated Golden Gate, an experience, I am told, which is not to be omitted even in the roughest weather. As you may note by my handwriting, our cabin is an excellent retreat from the general motion of the ship, placed as it is to take advantage of a particular design factor, which I must confess is not perfectly clear to me. However, it is true that the extreme pitching characteristic of such disagreeable weather is reduced to a more gentle roll in this location.
I remain, as always, your respectful and devoted friend…Leda Gerard
She admired her married name for a moment, and then sealed up the sheet, adding it to her other last-minute answers to the letters which had overtaken them at San Francisco, one for her from Lady Tess, another from Lady Kai, and the last from Miss Lovatt, writing on behalf of all the South Street ladies. She rang for the steward, who materialized instantly: a tall, spindly man by the name of Mr. Vidal, very decent and respectful. He took her letters and helped her into the rubber slicker and floppy hat that had been provided upon boarding the Kaiea in a downpour.
Besides a door to the inside passageway, the parlor gave out onto a sort of private balcony that overlooked the bow of the ship, but as this offered no protection from the weather, Mr. Vidal suggested—by raising his voice to a bellow over the driving rain—that she descend from the balcony to join Mr. Gerard on the captain’s deck. She was quite glad of the steward’s steady hand to help her on the outside stairs that led to the command quarters and the decks below.
The rain did not abate, and her view of the Golden Gate proved a dim one. Somehow, she felt completely safe aboard a ship that her husband had built, as she hadn’t on the Atlantic crossing, although she thought perhaps her ease was partially due to her becoming a more intrepid sailor. In point of fact, she felt that she might attain the status of “old salt” with only a little effort.
She found it vastly interesting to sit snuggled in her “sou’wester” in a corner of the heaving glass-fronted hurricane deck, her hands wrapped around a mug of hot cocoa, while
the ship’s captain gave orders and the engineer shouted into his mouthpiece, and the ship met the huge waves of the Pacific…“Pacific” evidently being an optimistic misnomer, as she mentioned to Samuel when a surge threw her off her stool and heavily against him.
He grinned and wrapped his arms around her, leaning back against the bulkhead. She thought it rather an improper pose, but no one paid them any mind, everyone else being busy with their seafaring business.
Once the tugboat dropped away and the course was set, the deck settled into a quieter routine. As Samuel had business with the captain, Leda decided to take advantage of Mr. Vidal’s offered escort to the first-class lounge. From the shelter of Samuel’s balancing embrace, she shook the captain’s hand and complimented him upon his work, to which he responded, “Well, you’re a sailor, ma’am! That you are.”
Flushed with this commendation, she made her way down the treacherous outside stairs, and in the lounge found out just how true the statement was. All the rest of the hundred-odd passengers had confined themselves to their cabins. There was no one in the saloon at all but one seasick schoolboy, who sat in a plush velvet chair with his shoulders hunched and his mouth squeezed into an awkward line.
Mr. Vidal asked him if he didn’t wish to join his parents in their cabin, and was informed in a miserable whisper that the boy was traveling alone, and he’d been sick in the basin in his cabin, and it smelled so awfully that he couldn’t stand it. And then he began to cry.
Leda took his hand. “Come up to my stateroom directly,” she said. “It doesn’t roll so there. You may lie down, and in a little while you’ll feel better.”
His fingers curled around hers gratefully. Shepherded by Mr. Vidal, they made their way by the inside stairs to the master stateroom, with the boy’s hand growing tighter and tighter on hers, his tearstained face growing whiter and whiter as they went. Just as they reached the parlor, and Leda sat him down on the sofa, he leaned over his lap and vomited into his trousers.
“Oh, my!” Leda wrinkled her nose. “Let us take those off instantly, and you may lie down.”
But the boy sobbed and pushed her hand away. “I can’t—I can’t…you’re a lady!”
“All right, dear. Don’t worry a moment. Mr. Vidal!” She stood up and turned. “Please see to his trousers. I’ll wait in the passage—hand them through the door and I’ll take them away.”
“Yes, ma’am. Just drop them down the stairway for the time being. I’ll get him a blanket.”
Leda stepped into the hall and took the offending trousers when he thrust them out the door. She grabbed the railing and made her way to the stairs. She couldn’t quite bring herself just to pitch the soiled garment, so she only rolled it up and tucked it at the top step before she turned back to the cabin.
Outside the door, she was startled to hear Samuel’s sharp voice inside—unintelligible—with a ferocity in it that jolted her. She started to push open the door, just as something slammed into it from the other side. Leda seized the passageway railing; the door bounced wide with Mr. Vidal hanging onto it. He stumbled back, grabbing the handle for balance.
Samuel stood in his dripping rain gear, just inside the outer door, staring at the steward. “Keep your stinking hands off him.” His words grated, like an animal’s warning. Cold poured past him from the open door. “Get out of here. Before I kill you.”
A gust of wind banged the outer door shut. Leda blinked at him, and at Mr. Vidal. The steward’s blue jacket was ripped at the collar. The boy lay propped up in the corner of the couch, wide-eyed, his mouth half-open and a blanket clutched over his bare knees. He looked as if Samuel were some unexpected monstrosity from the deep.
“Samuel! What on earth—” Leda clung to the door frame with the roll of the ship. The steward’s ripped collar and the expression on Samuel’s face frightened her.
“What did I do?” Mr. Vidal stood rubbing his shoulder, utterly bewildered. “Sir, I—what did I do?”
Samuel didn’t move. She could see the pulse beating in his throat from where she stood.
And it dawned upon her, with a slow falling together of one thought after another—the boy half-dressed and weeping, the other man, Samuel’s rigid face…
“Oh, Samuel! It’s not what you think,” she exclaimed. “I asked him here. I asked them both. The child was seasick; he ruined his trousers. Mr. Vidal was helping me.”
The ship swayed. On the sofa, the boy worked himself upright, dragging the blanket fully across his bent knees. She saw the crystallizing of reason in Samuel’s eyes: a moment of comprehension, and then a rush of deep color in his throat. He glanced at the boy, and at Mr. Vidal.
He looked at Leda. And then: distance. All trace of emotion left him.
With a methodical motion, he began to take off his wet gear. Just as if nothing had happened, he handed the oilskins toward Mr. Vidal. The steward hesitated.
“Are you hurt?” Samuel asked, in a quiet voice.
Mr. Vidal’s jaw twitched. “No, sir.”
“Will you accept my regret?”
“Sir.” The other man stood to his spindly height.
“What did I do?”
“Nothing.” Samuel’s face was stony. “I’ll speak to the captain about compensation to you, if you wish.”
“Well, if I’ve done something to deserve—”
“Thank you, Mr. Vidal,” Leda interrupted. “That will be all, except that you may bring a fresh set of the boy’s trousers back. What is your name, dear, and your cabin number?”
“Dickie, ma’am. B-5.” The boy spoke in a small, hoarse voice. “Ma’am? Could I have my own pillow? It’s on my bed.”
“And his pillow,” Leda said. She turned back to him.
“Are you feeling better?”
He snuggled down into the blanket, still gazing in awe at Samuel. “Some. But my mouth tastes awful. And my nose burns. And I’m thirsty. How come he threw him at the door, if he didn’t do anything wrong?”
“It was a misunderstanding,” Leda said.
“I’ll bring a pitcher of lemonade, ma’am,” Mr. Vidal said. He gave a stiff bow, little more than a nod, and left the cabin.
“It was an awful big lick,” the boy said. “He flew all the way from here to there.”
Leda took a breath. “I’m sorry you were startled, but it was an unfortunate error.”
“I don’t think it was, ma’am. He just come in here and grabbed him and there he went! And he said he’d kill him. Did you hear that?”
She pressed her lips together.
Samuel said nothing. He grasped the handle on the door and opened it into the wind. The gale took it and slammed it behind him—shutting him out, leaving Leda and Dickie alone in the parlor.
Rain matted his coat against the back of his neck. He thought only of the stairs beneath his feet, the wind at his back, the roll of the ship as she crashed down through the next wave. The empty deck stretched in front of him with rain swash sweeping along it, white ripples over silvered wood.
In a door bay, he took shelter. He leaned back against the steel surface, gripping the handrail on either side of the door, his fingers already aching in the wet and chill.
For a long time, an endless time, he watched the sea surge past. He began to shake, uncontrollably.
It was the cold; he told himself he was shaking with the cold.
“Oh, shit,” he mumbled. “Oh, shit.”
He dropped his head back hard against the door, welcoming the pain of it. He ground his teeth and slammed his head back again. It hurt; it hurt all down his chest and arms and legs.
How could she know?
He’d looked right in her eyes and he’d seen it. Nobody sane would have done what he’d done; nobody normal. Jesus, Vidal hadn’t even caught it; Samuel had hurled the man across the room by the collar, and the steward couldn’t figure out why.
Leda had.
Chikushō. Beast. Beast! He wasn’t even rational. Why hadn’t he stopped for the instant it wou
ld have taken to realize there was nothing wrong? How could he betray himself like that?
Oh, Leda, oh, Leda, you shouldn’t know, you can’t know, you can’t.
The ship rose and fell, a slow pendulum working against the blow. Three quarters of a million dollars of engine and steel; he owned every inch of her: his name was on the papers. Six hundred people got paid every month with checks drawn on his accounts; profits of four hundred thousand a year went right back into a bank with his name on the door of the biggest office.
His name—that he’d had to choose out of a book.
The Origin of Norman Surnames. He remembered it; it had been all he could find in the school library for a source. So he’d made himself a Norman, looked into the mirror and decided he had a Germanic nose, and his gray eyes were Norse; he’d imagined a family and a past, how his ancestors had come with the Conquest, how his real grandfather had been killed in the charge of the Light Brigade, had lived in an ancient and noble castle, but a crooked land agent had cheated him of all his money, and someday, someday, a letter would come that would say it had all been a mistake; that what Samuel remembered had been the fiction, none of it had happened; Lady Tess and Lord Gryphon kept him safe until his real parents could find him again.
Fantasies. Dreams and smoke. Leda! In his heart he’d felt how he hung in thin air, with safe ground yards behind him. The same way he’d known, at fourteen, or fifteen, or thirteen—who knew how old he’d been, or was?—that no real family looked for him.
His arms were shuddering, his muscles hard with holding on. His hands and the brass rail felt as if they’d become the same thing.
She shouldn’t know.
She shouldn’t! He stared at the sea, with cold moisture dripping down inside his collar. It wasn’t possible that she knew, that from her own experience she could comprehend. She’d married him, bound herself to him, let him touch her. She could not have known.