Dear Miss Minturn, I am grateful to be allowed in your company again. Yours, B. Edward Ivory III
I had not received such an extravagant gift in nearly two years. The next night I wore the bracelets to three party calls. When I went on my afternoon carriage ride with Shining and Serene, I pointed out beautiful birds and clouds so that those on the sidewalks could see the brilliant conquest I wore on my wrist.
THE NEXT MORNING, Madam said I had a phone call from the American. Edward apologized for the intrusion, as well as for presuming I might talk to him. His host, Mr. Shing, had said invitations should be written by letter a week in advance. But he hoped I would understand his haste. The manager of the shipping company had reserved two seats in his box at the Shanghai Race Club, and because he had fallen ill with influenza, he could not go. He had offered them to Edward. As it happened, Sir Francis May, the governor of Hong Kong, would also be present and seated two boxes away. “I thought I might press my luck to see if I could persuade you …”
A chance to meet the governor! I immediately regretted my meanness to Edward from the day before. “I would be also pleased to see you again,” I said, “so I can personally thank you for your lovely gifts.”
Since Chinese people were not allowed at the race club, Magic Gourd said we had to ensure there was no doubt about my right to be there. She brought out the lilac dress my mother had worn at the Shanghai Club. The dress still looked new and fashionable. I pictured my mother the last time she wore it. The old heartsickness remained and it could fan quickly into anger. I told Magic Gourd the weather was too cold. I found another that I had worn with success to a Western restaurant, an excursion costume in cerulean-blue velvet. It had a capelet and narrow skirt with a provocative cascade of folds at the back. I tried on a brimmed hat with a few modest feathers. But when I thought of sitting among foreigners vying for the attention of the governor, I exchanged modesty for plumage that would give me confidence. I wore my hair loosely bound and I fastened a strand of pearls Loyalty had given me the night of my defloration. An hour later, Edward arrived driving a long-nosed automobile—a sharp contrast to the boxy black cars that sputtered and wheezed. He said, almost apologetically, that his father had sent the Pierce-Arrow town car on one of his ships as a gift for his twenty-fourth birthday. He was twenty-four, four years older than I was. As we drove to the race club, I realized I did not need to do anything to attract envy and attention. The car brought people on the streets to a standstill as they watched us go by.
When the governor of Hong Kong arrived, a hubbub arose, and people followed him like an unloosened hive of bees. We watched from our seats, and when the governor turned in my direction, he nodded and smiled. “How nice to see you, Miss Minturn.” This led to a buzz of questions. “Who is she?” “Is she his secret lover?” I was baffled that he knew my name and was immediately light-headed with happiness in attracting temporary fame among the foreigners. Edward was impressed as well and poured me glass after glass of delicious cold wine, enough for me to become giddy, and I soon found special beauty in everything around us: the muscles of the horses, the brilliant blue sky, the sea of hats, of which mine was the loveliest. In my state of tipsy exhilaration, I could have smelled manure and thought it was perfume. After the third race, the governor stood, and again glanced my way, smiled, and tipped his hat. “Good afternoon, Miss Minturn.” This time I knew who he was. He had been one of my mother’s favorite clients, a kind man who greeted me warmly whenever I wandered through the parties. He had a daughter, my mother later told me, who died when she was my age. I had not been pleased to hear that. But the unpleasantness of his remark then was worth his acknowledgment of me at the race club. I had been elevated to a person of importance. Edward slyly passed along a rumor to a few people nearby that he had heard that the governor was a friend of the family. “She won’t confirm it. But I believe her father was the governor before Sir May.”
Edward asked that day if he and I could be friends. He said he would be pleased to serve as my companion, an escort to the places an American girl might want to see and could not unless accompanied by a maiden aunt. I assumed he was asking to be my suitor. If he was, he would be my first foreigner.
I SOON DISCOVERED that Edward’s offer to be my companion meant exactly that and nothing more. During the first week, we walked through the Public Park, dined at a restaurant, and visited American bookshops. I knew he was fond of me, but he did not hint that he would like to become more than a friend. I guessed he was afraid to press further, given our disastrous beginning. Or perhaps he knew I had other suitors and thought it was unseemly to compete. Maybe he thought one of them was Loyalty.
During the second week, he took me to see a temple, but as soon as we arrived, he developed a crushing headache and had to quickly return home. He told me he had suffered from migraines since childhood. But I worried that he had caught the new Spanish influenza. The Ivory Shipping Company had been secretive in reporting the arrival of three sick men from the United States. Almost immediately, the manager in the Shanghai office also fell ill. They recovered, and no one knew for certain if it had been the deadly influenza, but during the scare, the Ivory Shipping Company had put all its employees under quarantine—all but Edward, who was not, strictly speaking, an employee. If Edward was indeed infected, he might infect me, and then everyone in the House of Vermillion would be imperiled and the doors would be closed. Each day we read terrible stories of the number of people in other countries who had died. Even the Spanish king had nearly died of it. We expected the wave of death to arrive in Shanghai any day. Thus far, except for families in poor sections of the city, few people we knew had taken ill with it. At our house, we drank bowls of bitter herbs, and we noted whether any guests were flushed or dizzy, a symptom that was easily confused with drunkenness. If a man coughed, Madam Li was quick to rise with a kerchief over her nose and ask the guest to return another time. Those asked did not take offense. The streetcars were washed down each night with limewater, and Madam Li followed that precaution and had the servants wash the courtyard leading to the house with a strong dose each morning.
Edward recovered from his migraine headache, only to fall victim to another a few days later. He said it felt as if poison had entered his brain. It began like a pin poking into his eye. It then went into his skull and the poison spread like fire. His mood was always dark just before an attack, and that was how I could predict when one was about to occur. I would not hear from him for days, and then he would return in a bright mood. He told me that he was forced to stay in a darkened room. He could do almost nothing, not even think. But he knew he was getting better when he could sit up. He took that time to write in his travelogue and it helped alleviate his malaise, as if the written words had purged the last of the poison in his brain.
When he suggested we take a long excursion in the car, I asked if it was wise. If he suffered from an attack, how would we return? That was when he decided to teach me to drive.
During my first lesson, I drove slowly, and he told me how happy he was to have the opportunity to admire the passing landscape. To me, it looked monotonous. There was not a spot of flat land that had not been tilled and planted. He had me practice making turns at every intersection. He tossed a coin, and if it showed heads, I turned right, and if it showed tails, I turned left. Edward took the wheel when we had to go in reverse where the road was blocked by buffalo cows or a pile of rocks set there for whatever odd reason farmers set rocks on roads. Wherever we went, we attracted the attention of peasants bent over in the fields. Edward honked and waved. They stopped work, stood up, and stared solemnly at us, never waving back. Here and there, we saw walls of houses whitewashed with lime. We passed villages where men were hewing logs into coffins. We watched a line of people dressed in white treading over the narrow paths between rice fields, headed up to a cemetery on the hillock. As I became a more competent chauffeur, I drove faster. The pages of his book flapped open, and a letter fluttered out and was
gone before he could catch it. I asked if we should turn the car around, and he said we did not need to retrieve the letter. He knew the contents well enough. It was from his wife, telling him that his father’s health was poor.
I was disappointed to learn he was married. But I was not much surprised. Most of my suitors had wives, at least one, and whenever a man mentioned the fact, I was reminded of my standing as a momentary diversion, a pastime for now and not necessarily the future. To many men, I was a woman who existed only in a particular place, like a singing sparrow in a cage.
“Is your father’s condition serious?” I asked.
“Minerva always makes it seem so. She uses my father’s health to lure me home, and I don’t appreciate being baited. I know that sounds unfeeling. But I know the lengths to which Minerva will go. Our marriage has never been a happy one. It was a mistake and I’ll tell you why.”
He spoke frankly. Many men did, assuming that courtesans would not be shocked, given what they had done. But I also felt he confided in me as a friend, someone he hoped would understand. When he was eighteen, he said, he was walking alongside a fence outside of a horse pasture. A blond-haired girl in the pasture waved and ran up to him. She was plain-looking and stared with open infatuation. She knew his name and who his family was, which was odd. “That was Minerva,” he said, “and her father was the horse doctor who treated our horses. She had accompanied him twice to our house.” Edward told her to hop over the fence and he took her into the nearby woods, not sure what they would do. She lifted her skirts and said she knew how. Without a word more between them, they had sex. He stopped before he finished so she would not get pregnant, and she told him to go ahead because she would later wash herself out. Her uncle had taught her how to do this. She said that so breezily, as if it were normal. For two years, they met in the woods. She always brought along a spout and a jar of quinine solution, what her father used to treat horses with staggers. As soon as they finished, she poured this into her vagina while lying down, then stood and jumped up and down for half a minute to wash away his semen. She didn’t think it was embarrassing, but he usually turned away. They hardly ever spoke except to say when they would next meet.
One day, the horse doctor, his wife, and Minerva were seated in the Ivory family’s parlor, demanding that Edward marry their pregnant daughter. Edward was stunned because Minerva had always used the quinine. Mr. Ivory declared his son could not possibly be the father. He tried to bully Minerva into admitting she had been promiscuous with others. Out of defiance of his father—and not in defense of Minerva—Edward said it was indeed his child. His father then offered the family a large sum of money to be rid of them, and that moved Edward to say he would marry Minerva. The girl cried in disbelief, as did Edward’s mother, and Edward was proud that he had stood up to his father—until the wedding night a week later. He was appalled to find this idolizing girl lying on her back in his bed and not in the woods, with no jar of quinine necessary. Soon after the wedding, Minerva told her mother she had never been pregnant and feared what Edward would do when no baby came. Her mother said to wait another month and tell him she had a miscarriage. So she did, with tears and sobs, and he was compassionate and managed to get himself to say “love” to assuage her grief. She mistook it for actual love that had finally blossomed in him. She then confessed she had never been pregnant, thinking he would now be grateful for the subterfuge. He asked her if anyone else knew and she said that only her mother did.
“I thought I was being morally good by marrying her,” he said, “and goodness had punished me. I told Minerva I would never love her. And she said in turn that if I tried to divorce her, she would kill herself, and to prove her threat was real, she ran out into the frigid night wearing only a nightgown. Later, after she thawed, I said I was leaving, and she should divorce me on grounds of abandonment, and if she did not, she would live out her days like an untouched childless widow. I left the house and came home only occasionally—whenever I received her letters claiming my father or mother was gravely ill. We never shared the marriage bed ever again. That was six years ago. My mother has actually become fond of her. She encourages me to return from wherever my latest adventures have taken me so that I can resume fathering a child. It’s a sad arrangement, and all of us have played a role to make it so.”
“Including her uncle,” I said.
When it was time to return, I had no idea how to take the same hopscotch route back to Shanghai. Edward, I learned, had an indelible geographic memory. He was like a living compass and map. He remembered all the turns, the detours, the potholes, and the smallest landmarks—a notched tree, a large boulder, and the number of whitened walls in each village. He claimed his indelible memory did not extend to memorizing what he had read. He had to work hard to learn the poems from Leaves of Grass, he said. But once he learned them, he could retrieve any passage that perfectly suited the view or our mood.
I had grown fond of him. He depended on my companionship, and I was delighted to provide it because he treated me as his friend. Yet I also worried that he might one day wish to become my suitor, and then we would no longer be friends, but a courtesan and her customer, who met with different expectations. Intimacy of that kind would not strengthen friendship.
We often talked about the war. We walked up Bubbling Well Road two or three times a day to a café or bar to hear the latest reports. He admired the leaders of the Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen and Wellington Koo. He admired Woodrow Wilson even more. In his opinion, those three had what it took to finally return the German Concession and Shandong Province to China. He hoped to enlist in the service. If he could not find a navy recruiting station in Shanghai, he might hitch a ride aboard one of the ships taking Chinese workers to France.
“Why didn’t you enlist while you were in New York?” I asked.
“I tried. But my father and mother did not want me to be drafted and risk having their only son killed. My father sent off a letter to a bigwig general. It said I had a serious heart murmur and it was signed by a well-known doctor. I was not allowed to join.”
“Do you really have a heart murmur?”
“I highly doubt it.”
“Why would you not know for sure?”
“My father turns lies into the official truth. Even if I had nothing whatsoever wrong with my heart, the doctor wouldn’t tell me if I asked.”
One afternoon, when he returned me to the house, he asked if I had any free evenings available. I had seen the signs in his eyes. The time had come and I was sad that we were going to exchange friendship for business. He knew that my evenings were booked with parties and that I had suitors whom I invited to my boudoir. He had certainly given me enough gifts to be treated with favor. “I can set aside any evening you would prefer,” I said.
“Wonderful!” he said. “I want to take you to a play that the American Club is putting on.”
I felt oddly disappointed.
ON THE FIRST warm spring day, two months after we met, we drove to Heavenly Horse Mountain in the southwest corner of Shanghai. The mountain was not high, but it spread itself wide over the land with a graceful skirt of green trees, shrubs, and wildflowers. Edward said we could hike to a spot where a tunnel-like cave would lead us to a different world on the other side. He had gone once by himself. As we set out on our hike, I thought of the poem he had recited when we first met.
Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere—on water and land.
This time, I felt no haunting loneliness. I was with a friend who calmed me. We walked side by side through a forest of bamboo, white oak, and Chinese parasol trees. The forest was thick with shrubs and fragrant wild jasmine. When the path narrowed, I walked behind him. He wore a knapsack, and his brown leather journal peeked out of the top.
I watched him take long strides as he leaned forward into the mountain. The path grew rocky and steeper. Our walk had become more strenuous than what I had in mind. I removed my short jacket. My blouse was already damp with perspiration. My skirt felt heavy and cumbersome. When we finally reached the cave, I proposed an early lunch, and we sat on boulders. While eating our sandwiches, I saw his travelogue lying to the side of his knapsack and reached for it.
“May I?”
He looked hesitant at first, then nodded. I turned to the page where his pencil had been inserted. He had lovely smooth handwriting that demonstrated an assured rhythm, as if he had never hesitated in writing his words.
When the rice fields flooded and turned the roads into slow rivers of mud, our beasts of burden—both men and mule—sank and became stuck. The carters were cursing. I was still on the cart, and saw that a plank of wood on the side of the cart had been dislodged when the cart sank. It was about five feet long. I instantly devised a plan. I placed the plank over the mud. I would walk to one end, swing it out like a clock dial, and then walk to the other end and swing it out again. Once I reached the mule, I would place the plank in front of the beast and encourage it to take the first step, and with one foot extricated, it would have the momentum to haul itself out.
As I stepped onto the board, one of the carters held up his hands and gestured for me to stop. I ignored him. They watched me with skepticism etched across their faces. They mumbled to one another and grinned. I did not need to speak Chinese to know they were belittling me for trying.