The Celestials Read online

  Presently, however, their years ahead were his only concern. Even the unrest among the workers could not take his mind from its one task: a life with Julia and their baby. And why not? Why couldn’t anyone’s life be his own?

  And so as soon as the factory’s machines had been quieted for the week and as soon as he could extricate himself from his charges, he headed to the Wilson House, the portrait in its stiff envelope in his breast pocket like armor for the heart.

  His hair was slick with Macassar oil, his recently purchased navy-blue worsted suit was pressed, his collar starched, and his tie pinned with a delicate clip of jade and gold. In a small sack, he carried offerings for the baby. He had no idea what Americans brought as gifts for the newly born, so he relied on Chinese tradition. He was ignorant of the child’s name. He didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl. A wavelet of sadness broke across his chest.

  As he walked, he fingered the items in his pocket: For a rich, healthy life, coins tied together with red string. For protection against the demons who steal young children to reinforce the foundations of bridges, a tiny arrow he had carved from wood. To give the baby’s head a proper shape, a little pillow filled with rice. His stitching was clumsy, but he had used a piece of silk from a head scarf of his mother’s, and he hoped that Julia would forgive the handiwork in favor of the sentiment behind it.

  He nearly collided with Sampson on the way through the Wilson House’s front doors.

  Sampson’s jacket was unbuttoned, his collar askew, yet even so, the man was better dressed than Charlie could ever be. Sampson’s face registered no recognition and then he looked as if he might laugh. Charlie thought that if he did, he would strike him. But Sampson only grasped him by the shoulders and pulled him into the front hall. “Sing,” he said. “Just the man. Do you have a minute?”

  Charlie thought about saying no. He remembered years ago, as a child, what a revelation it had been to realize that when his parents summoned him, he need not answer.

  “Of course,” Charlie said, allowing himself to be led to one of the reading rooms off the lobby. For this man he would always have a minute.

  They seated themselves in armchairs that promised more comfort than they delivered. Other than Morris Kronick, the hotel’s thirteen-year-old Jewish errand boy, they were alone, and the boy was asleep, his hands tucked under his arms as if for warmth.

  Sampson modulated his voice not at all. He had two things to ask. Perhaps Charlie had already heard the news of Mrs. Sampson’s return. Perhaps he had heard more. It was actually of no mind what Charlie had heard or from whom, since it should have been clear to the foreman by now that the only version of events that mattered was Sampson’s own. Here was the situation as he understood it, and as he hoped Charlie would as well: his wife had brought with her from Michigan an infant girl.

  A girl, Charlie thought. He felt no disappointment that the child was not a boy. Our daughter, he thought.

  Despite her protestations to the contrary, Sampson went on, it was clear to him, and would be to Charlie, that the girl was some share Celestial. He needed Charlie’s help.

  At this, Charlie’s heart rippled like a cloth spread across a wide table. He had always had this reaction to men of power asking for aid. There was something lovely and exciting about their petitions, like a praying mantis bowing before his mate.

  Sampson seemed to hold no embarrassment at making this request, and though the foreman would have liked to believe that what accounted for this was Sampson’s belief that they were equals, he knew the opposite to be the more likely explanation.

  “I must have the father’s name,” Sampson said. “And I must have your help to achieve it.”

  Charlie had a vision of pulling his calling card from his breast pocket and handing it to Sampson with a bow.

  What did American men like Sampson do when so extremely confronted? Charlie’s life had been devoted to nudging and ushering Americans into the positions he desired them to take, as if trying to push a bead of water across a table. The idea of direct confrontation was so foreign it was like the woods on the far bank of the river that had run along his hometown’s edge.

  Morris Kronick woke with a start, rearranged his limbs, and regarded them dully.

  “I am here to help,” Charlie said, feeling the deception even more than usual. Had everything he had ever uttered been a lie?

  Sampson appeared relieved. “I need you, of course, to think of your men, to think of anyone who . . .” Here he faltered, uneasy. His sad eyes swept the room. “Well, anyone with whom you think I might want to speak.”

  “Yes, of course,” Charlie said, already filing through his workers’ faces and names as though, if he looked carefully enough, another father would appear before him.

  Sampson also needed his foreman, if it was not too forward a request, to speak to Mrs. Sampson. She had always liked Charlie. Perhaps even if she would not speak direct about the recent events, she would somehow allow Charlie access to rooms that she had so far kept hidden. At least from him, he added quietly, and Charlie had the urge to cup the man’s shoulder. He pushed at the sack of gifts for his daughter with his booted toe and assured his employer that he would do what he could. He would call on Mrs. Sampson at this very time.

  “Oh, no,” Sampson said. “Not now. She is resting with the baby and says they are not to be disturbed.”

  He looked as if he would speak further, and Charlie waited.

  Sampson looked at the boy asleep again in the chair across the room. The sight seemed to sadden him anew. “She is changed since her return,” he said.

  Charlie’s gut flipped with worry and possibility. “I would think so,” he finally offered.

  Sampson glanced up at him as if unsure whether the Celestial was, against all odds, employing humor. “No,” he said. “Not in the obvious ways. She is somehow more . . .” He appealed to Charlie helplessly.

  Charlie had never seen him at such a loss. He found the situation unpleasant. “In China, they say new mothers are as the tiger.”

  It was unclear whether Sampson understood what he meant. He again turned his face to Charlie. “I’ve really never seen anything like it,” he said.

  And Charlie nodded as if his boss had unrolled before him a map to his wife’s inner workings, a tidy scale in one corner, a compass indicating true north in another.

  “What is the child’s name?” Charlie asked quietly.

  Sampson regarded him as if from a distance. He said nothing, unable, even in the context of this unprecedented intimacy, to admit that it had not occurred to him to ask, or to her to offer.

  Ida kept from Lucy and Alfred until the following Saturday evening, embarrassed at her outburst. Since Thursday last, she had felt her self to be the breaking wall of a dam. She’d been able to manage her days and restrain herself from speaking too loudly to shopkeepers or losing patience with children in the street. But her body had grown heavier each day as if, with full petticoats and skirt, she was wading farther into deep mud.

  She tried to sort out what she knew from what she only thought she knew. Charlie and Mrs. Sampson were indeed faithful friends. Beyond that, she reminded herself, she knew nothing. She had no right to feel betrayed, and yet she did, her feelings sneaky trespassers on grounds she had thought well fenced. So she found herself climbing the front stairs of the Pearl Street tenement, hoping that the sight of her friend would deny any further mortification.

  Lucy and Alfred sat on the small bench they used as a sofa, reading together a letter on the paper Ida recognized as belonging to the oldest Robinson cousin, still in their Virginia hometown. Neither of them seemed to have heard Ida’s entry.

  They laughed, leaning into each other’s shoulders with an ease and affinity before they looked up.

  “Oh, Ida,” Lucy said, her face filled with affection. “Now I am happy.”

  Ida knew her to be speaking the truth, but had also seen what she’d seen: the reliable constant of family warmth. She knew
her sentiments made no sense. She understood that she herself had more family to return to than Lucy or Alfred had in this world entire, but that was of no matter. She understood that things as they had been in this faraway town could not go on forever. She could not remain forever sitting across a large room from Lucy, four hands held in two laps.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Alfred asked.

  “Not a thing,” Ida said. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Alfred blushed, and Ida gave him a quick smile as she made her way to the chair.

  Lucy stared at her queerly, and Ida allowed her friend’s open countenance to loosen her heart like kind, working fingers unlacing a boot.

  “What’s the news?” Ida asked, indicating the letter, hoping that they would not require her to speak of her outburst.

  “It’s good,” Lucy said, but glanced at her feet as she spoke, so Ida braced for whatever was coming next. The cousin was to marry. Her husband needed a reliable hand in his lumber mill. The town was in need of a primary school teacher.

  So, here it is, Ida thought. Here is the gate in the wall. A life waited easily for the Robinsons on the other side of that wall. From her own vantage point, the news was jubilation’s opposite, so she was surprised that when she closed her eyes against the worried countenance of her best friend, the face that came into focus was the broad, full one of the Celestial foreman.

  “We are not yet decided,” Lucy said. “What is your mind? Should we go?”

  Ida kept her eyes closed. “Do you want to go?”

  Had her eyes been open, she might have been witness to the pain spread across Lucy’s face.

  “I’m only curious what you think,” Lucy said. She understood, looking at her dear Ida, that they were in a trap of their own making. She wished that she could free them as one freed the hem of a poorly made dress, one stitch at a time, the thread coming easier with each snip and tug.

  Even Alfred felt the sad mix of desperation and resignation in the room, and a mild panic spread across his chest, believing as he did that nothing good could come of a woman’s unhappiness. When Ida remained silent, continuing to sit there with her eyes closed, he said, perhaps a little too rudely, his own mixed feelings about leaving Ida at war within him, “It isn’t her life.”

  “Alfred,” Lucy said. “Ssh.”

  Ida said he was right.

  Lucy said, “If we go, you must come home with us.” She held a hand to her chest as if to soothe its heat. “I cannot think of a day spent without you in it,” she said finally.

  Ida opened her eyes. They were the words she had been waiting to hear, but she understood that her friend uttered them now only because she could imagine such a day.

  Ida would never grasp how fully she had misunderstood this moment and her friend’s emotions in it. She would never be able to see Lucy’s need for her as any kind of match for her need for Lucy. She would always make sense of Lucy’s kindnesses and generosities as those of someone on the verge of departure.

  “Maybe I will come,” she said. She kept her inner eyes on her conjured image of Charlie and wondered at the release of a heavy weight, as if she were a sandbag being poured empty. It did not occur to her to worry at the ease with which her reliance on one person had seemed to translate into reliance on another. She did not ask of herself, as someone else might have asked of her, whether she wanted to be the sort of woman who was in such need of care and attention that she could discover it in any corner of any room.

  Julia opened the windows in the bedroom and the front parlor as wide as could be managed. The August heat was breaking and an evening wind had found its way through the street. The sounds of Saturday rode through on the wind’s back.

  She did not worry: the baby had already proved herself a champion sleeper.

  She lowered herself onto her side next to her infant. The chest rose and fell in the movement of rapids over river rocks. Normal, Julia’s sister had said. Julia still barely believed it.

  Outside, the sun lowered, and evening blanketed the town. The hoots of children subsided. The whip-poor-wills and grosbeaks began. Somewhere, someone was cooking something delicious. Somewhere else, fertilizer was being spread.

  Her senses were like no previous acquaintance. They were the ropewalker’s cable she had been witness to as a child, high and taut beneath the canvas roof of a circus tent. She tucked her hands beneath her cheek and continued to regard her girl. I could stay here for all time, she thought. She understood herself to be free of exaggeration’s grip. Her world was now her body, the girl’s, and the circle they fashioned together. These were her feelings, simple and plain.

  Chapter Twelve

  Julia had insisted on returning to her regular teaching commitments despite her husband’s protestations. The more adamant he became, the more sure she was of her decision. In the few days she’d been home, she had found this to be the case more and more, and she was not yet recovered from the surprise. Whereas she had spent the first night and day unable to slow the rapid pacing of her mind, unable to keep possible solutions and entreaties from turning over like a factory’s waterwheel, she now imagined her mind as an ancient Greek column, her life an edifice with that column at the center of a great roof. Her husband was welcome to join her, but the shelter was not dependent upon him. For the first time she imagined herself as advocate and adversary. It was not a completely logical way to feel, since in most ways, the shelter over her head did surely depend on the presence of her husband, and she was in many ways anything but his equal.

  It was as if she had been given clear knowledge of God’s large purpose. So when she pulled on her gloves and gathered the handles of the baby’s wicker basket, hefting it against her hip, her husband merely stood there. And when she reminded him that he was not to come to the lessons, not to meddle where he had no business meddling, he only nodded and wished her a good day.

  He spent the afternoon sitting in his favorite armchair, and upon her return several hours later, he would be unable to answer her inquiries as to how he had passed his time.

  Even before her arrival in the classroom, the teachers were engaged in speculation and debate. Mrs. Hollings revealed that she certainly wouldn’t have accepted Mr. Sing’s purchase of Thanksgiving turkeys if she had known what kind of degradation those boys were bent on practicing. Miss Cowley advocated caution, arguing that judgment should, as always, be reserved until the full situation had been made clear. Not to mention, Mrs. Brighton added, Mrs. Sampson’s impeccable record as a woman of dignity and moral activity. Mrs. Hollings granted them what she could, but argued that there was a baby who came from somewhere, was there not? And what was to be done about it now? Clearly this mixing of the races had come to the most distressing of situations. Somebody, they all agreed, must take up the reins of responsibility. None of them noted the irony of having this conversation within the Celestial classroom, the Celestials themselves politely awaiting these very same volunteers to commence their usual lessons.

  The minds in the classroom were not entirely turned to the Celestial child. There was happy news of Mr. Robert Kingsley, engineer on the Hoosac Tunnel project, who had been so badly injured at the recent east end accident. It had been supposed that he would be rendered blind, but the news today was that the sight of one eye proved not to be wholly lost. The party of Gipsies that had lingered on Main Street since Tuesday last had finally seen fit to continue on its way. Several of the volunteer teachers were still speaking of their picnicking on Mount Greylock the week previous. Before the spread was laid, the rain had begun to pour and they had found themselves in the very home of the clouds.

  There was talk of the boiler recently installed at the Sampson factory and fully suitable for driving a forty-horsepower engine. And of the peach crop, and the Hoosac Tunnel, which had been advanced 288 feet during the month of July, with less than 1,500 feet of rock remaining to be pierced.

  The previous month, in the Transcript of July 10, 1873, the Chinamen had mad
e the following appearance in an account by a press excursion party from Boston:

  Sampson’s Chinamen

  We were of the few who early the next morning visited the famed shoe factory of Mr. Sampson, the introducer of “Chinese cheap labor” into Massachusetts. We were in the main workshop when the Chinamen came up-stairs to their work, six-and-a-half-o’clock. Such a merry sight we never saw in a Yankee factory. Laughing, jumping, slapping their companions on the back, tickling their ears, and other pranks, their eyes glistening with roguery and sport, they poured up the narrow staircase into the room, one hundred and eleven strong, as though they were going to an all-day frolic. Rapidly they passed to their respective benches or machines, quickly donned aprons and hats, and soon were at their work—all respectful, all industrious, and all seemingly happy. The best commentary on the success of the experiment is that last Monday the first three years’ contract for their labor expired, and the whole original force renewed the same cheerfully and willingly. Two additions have been made to the original number, engaged in San Francisco, and but a few have left from causes independent of the labor and compensation. We could not help asking ourselves, where else can we find factory hands who go to their work laughing and hilarious, or work so long and willingly without desire of change? These Chinamen seem to grow in strength and vigor the longer they are in this climate, as the growth of beards indicates; and if they could marry and fully adopt Western customs we have no doubt they would easily become assimilated with the great American composite of nationality, which in time will graft African, Indian and Mongolian upon the Caucasian tree.

  On July 10, everyone in the schoolroom had read and concurred with the article’s final claim; to react any other way had not crossed the mind of a one of them. But on this day, less than a month later, as white and Chinese alike turned to see Mrs. Sampson cross the threshold of her husband’s factory with a new wicker basket on her arm like a scale, the human noise of the room subsided. Perhaps the Chinamen’s growth had been too strong, too vigorous, thought the native volunteers. And even the most progressive of the Chinamen, faced with the sight of their employer’s wife and the child’s Celestial eyes, felt that assimilation was not the goal toward which they should have been striving.