The Man With No Time

Eleanor?”

“No,” Eleanor said, trying not to look surprised. “He was gone when I moved in.” She sat next to her.

“Honestly,” Mrs. Summerson said, waving her hand in front of her face again. “It's not enough I can't see what's in front of me, now half the time I can't remember what's behind me. It's like living by flashlight, and the little circle of light keeps getting smaller. Dr. Summerson passed on,” she said to me, “two years before Eleanor's mother-how is your mother, Eleanor? — took Horace up to Sacramento to open that what-was-it?”

“She's fine,” Eleanor said, smiling at her. “It was a grocery store.”

“Grocery store,” Mrs. Summerson said simultaneously, then tapped her temple. “Not completely gone yet. I told them it wouldn't work,” she said to me. “Sacramento had too many Chinese, I said, and the people up there couldn't tell them from the Japanese and there was still bad feeling about the Japanese in some places. Not as bad as in China, of course. If the Americans had suffered Japanese atrocities the way the Chinese did, I doubt there'd be a Jap left in America. We'd have run them into the sea.” She cleared the tension from her throat, a ladylike ahem. “They're your brother's twins, aren't they?”

“Yes, Mrs. Summerson,” Eleanor said, sounding like a little girl.

“Nice boy. More common sense than you have, but you've got the poetry.” She regarded the framed sampler. “Did you know, Mr. um. .”

“Grist,” I said.

“Did you know, Mr. Grist, that Eleanor tried to change that saying when she embroidered it in Chinese?”

Eleanor suddenly looked very uncomfortable.

“No,” I said. “Did she now?”

'She certainly did. She wanted to put in a whole new line. After MY HANDS ARE FOR MY FELLOW MAN, she Wanted to write, MY HEART IS FOR MY FELLOW CHILD, MY SOUL IS FOR GOD. And only eight years old. Isn't that something?'

Eleanor was scarlet. “It certainly is,” I said.

Mrs. Summerson clinked her teaspoon against her saucer. 'And she used to call it 'Christ Must.' '

“Mrs. Summerson,” Eleanor began urgently.

“Because Christmas was the one day each year when you must believe in Christ.” She sat back triumphantly. “Isn't that wicked?”

“Tea, Simeon?” Eleanor asked between her teeth.

“You little pagan,” I said. “I'd be afraid to take tea from your hands.”

“But I'm forgetting my duties,” Mrs. Summerson said hastily. “Please. Let me pour.” Her hands trembled slightly as she lifted the pot. Aside from a plain gold wedding band she wore no jewelry. Eleanor's eyes followed the big hands with an expression I couldn't quite read.

“Someone was just talking to me about you,” she said, passing Eleanor a cup and saucer with a wedge of lemon. “Who was it?”

“Uncle Lo,” Eleanor said conversationally, as though we'd been talking about him for hours.

“Oh, of course. Poor man.” She shook her head gravely. “I suppose he came and saw you?”

“Last Friday.” Eleanor sipped her tea and waited.

“Dreadful thing. Mugged, right there on the streets of Chinatown. It's getting so no place is safe any more. I've been thinking of putting in new locks.”

“It's a good thing he wasn't really hurt,” Eleanor said neutrally.

“Well, his pride was hurt. And there was that eye, of course. Not very distinguished-looking, I must say. He's always been such a self-reliant man. I suppose he's getting older, too.”

“I wasn't aware that you'd kept in touch with him,” Eleanor said. “I knew you and he knew each other in China, of course.”

Mrs. Summerson moved things around on the tea cart in a way that, in a less godly person, might have suggested a stall for time. “He popped up about a year after your mother and brother came back from Sacramento,” she said to the dish of lemon slices. “You must have been eleven. Just knocked on the door one fine morning with some lovely ivory for me. That was when there were still elephants, of course. We simply went back to the same work,” Mrs. Summerson said, putting down her tea untouched. “Exactly as we did with you and your mother. Mr. Lo got them out of China and Dr. Summerson and I got them into America. They'd just eased up on the Chinese quotas, and it was easier than it had ever been to get visas and passports. I only wish Dr. Summerson could have lived to see it. It would have gratified his soul.”

“So Uncle Lo brought out people after us.” Eleanor was clearly surprised at the news, and not entirely pleased. She actually sounded jealous.

“A few.”

“From where?”

Mrs. Summerson pursed her lips. “Mostly Fujian,” she said. “It's on the coast, so it's a little easier. And then, too, the people are mostly fishermen, so there are lots of boats around.”

“Well, I'll be darned,” Eleanor said.

“How many times have you seen him since?” I asked.

“Two or three. He came every five or six years or so, so make it three. Three times in the last twenty years. Of course, the Chinese government put a stop to all that in the eighties, and I haven't heard from him now in, well, let's see, five years.”

“You never told us about this.” Eleanor managed not to make it an accusation, although her feelings were plainly hurt.

“It never came up, my dear.”

I put down my own cup. “What did he say about the mugging?”

“Oh, he was in a terrible state. Mad enough to spit. Said he'd been jumped right on the street.”

“What did they take?”

“Everything. His money, even his cigarettes. I gave him some money, of course, and let him stay here. I let him buy his own cigarettes.”

“What day did he arrive?”

“Well, he was here three nights and he left on shopping day, which is Friday, so it must have been Tuesday, mustn't it? Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday night, and gone on Friday morning.”

“Did he come back?”

She glanced up at me and then looked at the ceiling. Then she looked back down at the cup in her hand. Her back was rigid. “No,” she said, an Asian quarter-tone higher. She was a terrible liar.

I let it pass. “Who beat him up?”

“Thugs. One of those gangs. Everyone's in a gang these days, it seems.”

“Did he say what he was doing in America?”

She relaxed. “Just visiting,” Mrs. Summerson said. “More lemon?”

In the car, Eleanor wrapped her fingers around my upper arm and rested her head on my shoulder. “There was a time when I loved that lady more than my own mother,” she said. “She was everything I wanted to be.”

“Meaning?” We were most of the way back to the apartment, and it was still only three-thirty.

“Generous, good-hearted, self-sufficient, and white. All the white kids in school were calling me names then. Ching-chong. Wang-wang. And I'd go home, and she'd be white, too, even if she did speak better Cantonese than I did. Horace and Mommy were in Sacramento, and I felt like the only Oriental in the world.”

“Poor prickly little Ching-chong.” I was thinking about Mrs. Summerson's lie. Lek had heard Lo say, “Dim sum time.”

“I outgrew it,” she said. She rubbed her forehead against my shoulder. “I'm sleepy.”

Her forehead felt good. “Me, too.”

“You've been great through all this. Very steadying.”

“It's not over yet.” Mr. Manly speaking.

“It's going to be all right. I'm not going to ask you how you found out about Mrs. Summerson. You made a promise, and I know you didn't break it.”

“Of course not,” I said with the quick indignation of the guilty.

“I may have to kiss you on the neck.”

“The ear,” I said.