“Cap?”
“Mmm?”
“That’s a lot of bull.”
“Yes,” she said at last, “indeed, it is.”
“Cap?”
“Mmm?”
“Do you ever really know someone?”
“Oh, sure. Most folks you know right off. Problem is, then you go deciding to love them, and you forget.” She rocked some more, then added, “You, I knew right off. When she brought you back instead of giving you away that first time. You were just a wee bit, sweet to the marrow. Oh, I knew you right off.”
“Cap, keep going. Don’t stop.”
“Lordy, I thought you were gonna sleep.”
“What did I do wrong? I must have done something to make her send me away to Morie.”
“Not a damn thing,” Cap said. “By then you were walking, of course. And, oh my, talking. Asking the questions. This little bitty girl, running down the halls, with the johns due any minute, and you asking why, why, why.”
“She gave me away because I asked—?”
“She can’t be running a whorehouse with a toddler underfoot.”
Valentine swore that Rose had put a spell on me. I don’t disagree. The earthquake, the fire, whoa, none of that spiked such a tremor in me.
I had to concentrate. I had to concentrate very hard to see my way. And until I could, I took my meals, everything, in the attic, where it was quiet and small and I could look at the sky through the ox-eye window; I could look at the underside of the sewing machine.
Bobby visited me. He stood at the door and whispered, “Anyway?”
But I’d misplaced my laughter. And my desire.
His kisses felt suffocating; his arms, his heavy legs on mine made me panic, as if I were being crushed.
Of course, being so young, we didn’t have the language. I didn’t know what to tell him. I’d lost my way, that was the simplest, kindest way to put it. I wasn’t sorry she was gone, I didn’t miss her, but she took something from me—at the very least my hope—and without it I couldn’t put my lips against the scruff of Bobby’s chin and feel anything but scratched.
For a time, you see, I left my body on the earth and floated above. My body was just too angry and sad. When I returned to it, I felt I had to catch up quickly, urgently—to be smart in all the ways I had been foolish. I pored over the books in her library, I read the newspapers—morning and evening editions. I was desperate to learn the ways of the world, to know how to be.
Bobby said, “Come back, Vera. Wherever you’ve gone, come back to me.”
I replied, “Bobby, what do you think about the new scheme for the trolleys? What do you think of Roosevelt’s plan to limit the number of Japanese people entering the country? It’s wrong, isn’t it? Do you think Taft will be a good president?” I had a hundred concerns like that.
Bobby said he didn’t think much of Taft or any man who allowed himself to get so fat.
“Is that all you have to say about it?”
“Don’t worry,” he assured me. “I won’t get fat.”
I didn’t bother to hide my disappointment. “Bobby, don’t you want to know what is happening in the world? Don’t you want to learn—?”
“Tell you what,” he said, “if there’s food or the scratch we need inside one of those books you’re reading, I’ll eat it. Meantime, I’m gonna fix the wheel on Tan’s pushcart, so he can get to the grocer.”
That’s when I saw just how far and high Bobby would go, and it would never be with his mind, only his hands.
I said to myself, Vera, you are being ridiculous; you will regret this; he is a good man—all that. I dared myself to look at him. And when I couldn’t quite see him and me together, I did an awful thing—truly the most awful. I gave Bobby Del Monte the Invisible.
Tan and I made quite the pair. He was suffering too. He’d begged Lifang to stay; he impressed upon her the possibility of starting over in the new Chinatown. But she’d yearned to get away from the ash and those tong boys, who were already claiming, even expanding, their turf. She yearned to get away from Tan. LowNaa agreed to go as Lifang’s chaperone, promising he’d be back, but Tan knew that was unlikely.
To make certain that her father wouldn’t follow, Lifang spat at his feet and promised that she despised him.
Lifang’s parting gift to me was a dirty pot with a soiled rag she left outside my door—her final insult. I seethed over that pot. Honestly, it took me years to realize that it wasn’t an insult. Lifang just needed me to be her witness, that’s all. That pot was her declaration of all she was leaving behind. And like any person, she needed someone to know that she intended to become someone new.
March arrived wet and cold. I decided it was time to leave the sewing room. I got dressed and started taking my meals downstairs.
In my absence, Tan, Capability, and Valentine had begun having their meals at the worktable in the kitchen. I joined them. They never asked about Bobby, though once Cap reached across the supper table and cupped my sad chin in her hand. “Shh, now, that’s why they call it falling, darlin’. You’re falling in reverse.”
After I gave him the Invisible, Bobby returned to his former habit of eating with the orphans at the Ladies’ Protection. Pie took her meals in her room.
That left Tan, Capability, Valentine, and me free to discuss over supper our shared obsession: money. Where to get it; how little we had. We sold the booze, and with it the art and what remained of Rose’s silver.
That’s when Valentine and Capability put a toe in. They were seeing their regular clients outside the house, but only here or there. Cap had a trilling soprano, popular at the time, and, of course, whenever Valentine opened her mouth, out boomed a velvet
