Telling Lies

Chapter Two

I HAD no idea what Chinatown did about Christmas, but votive candles in little jars pasted with decals of a blond Virgin Mary seemed an unlikely part of local tradition. I counted a dozen candles flickering on the covered stoop of Emily’s apartment building.

There hadn’t been any candles or pots of flowers on Emily’s stoop when I had arrived there straight from the airport at four o’clock. At four, it wasn’t dark enough for candles. Agnes Peter told me that Emily had spoken to her about lighting candles for Marc. That’s what I was thinking about when I saw them. Maybe Emily had set out the candles, I thought, as either a gesture toward custom or, more likely, some sort of nose-thumbing at Establishment rituals.

Whatever the reason for the candles, I was encouraged: if Emily had set them out, she couldn’t be too far away.

It was almost seven. I tried Emily’s apartment, and when there was no answer, buzzed her landlady, Mrs. Lim. Still no response. I pulled the collar of my sodden wool coat higher on my neck and went to the edge of the stoop to watch the rain and try to decide what to do next. If Em didn’t show soon, I had friends in L.A. I could impose upon for at least a ride back to the airport.

Across the street there was an eight-foot plaster Buddha with a line of Christmas lights strung between his hands. He grinned malevolently on traffic flowing north out of Downtown toward the Pasadena Freeway, traffic that was still heavy long after rush hour. I watched the cars, and the people trudging along the sidewalk, looking for Emily in everyone who passed.

I was beyond cranky. Except for a few doughnuts during filming breaks, I hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before. I thought there might be funds enough available on one of my MasterCards to cover moo shu pork and a few drinks at Hop Louie’s, a restaurant a block over on Gin Ling Way. The company of people who had homes to return to would be a nice change. What I really wanted was a hot bath and a warm bed. I had put in a long day even before I got on the plane from San Francisco.

Basically, I’m self-employed. I make documentary films. There isn’t a lot of money in it. Most of my films are co-produced by the PBS affiliate in San Francisco, now and then by WGBH Boston or the BBC. It’s good work, it’s what I want to do. The tough part is selling the product. Like most arts-related industry, selling the product really means selling myself. My image, that is. Now and then my soul; I have a daughter to feed.

I had spent the day filming promotional spots for PBS affiliates. You know the sort of thing, “If you enjoyed this presentation of ‘Aged and Alone,’ and want to see more quality programming like it, then the most important gift you may give your family this holiday season is a membership in Wichita’s only viewer-sponsored television station, WKRN.” Or Duluth’s, or Honolulu’s.

Someone with more zeroes in his contract than I have thought I should look network-slick for fund-raising, so a wardrobe/makeup person had been brought in to give me a commercial veneer. I didn’t mind at first. It was like the old days when I used to anchor the evening news. But every time the camera stopped, this makeup person, Stella, pulled out her sponges and brushes and patched my face.

We had started before five that morning. By one, when my producer, Errol, came back from a liquid lunch, my coating of matte-finish goo was pretty thick, and I bore little resemblance to the portrait that sits on my mother’s baby grand.

Errol’s own cheeks glowed like Max Factor crimson number six. He gave me a boozy leer when he said: “Aleda Weston surfaced today.”

“So?” If I could have moved my lips I would have said more. But my face was clenched in Stella’s hand while she painted over break-through freckles and under-eye shadows that I thought gave my face character.

“After twenty-two years, Aleda picks today to come out of hiding.” His eyes had a morbid sparkle. “Something’s up, Maggie. Something very interesting.”

“Can I quote you?” I asked, released from Stella’s clutch at last. “I want to quote you…”

“I want to hear what your sister, Emily, has to say. And your father.”

“My father has quit talking,” I said.

“Don’t let me down, Maggie. We can do a beautiful, exclusive piece on this.”

The gleam in Errol’s eye reminded me of a funeral director I once interviewed. Ever since Abbie Hoffman’s suicide, Errol has been hot for stories about the heroes of the old New Left, their demise, their parole, their transformation into middle age, their occasional reappearance after years in hiding. He finds them poignant.

“The time is right,” he said, trying to hold my eyes with his. “It’s the twentieth day of December, Maggie. Think about it.”

For an hour before this conversation, I had been trying to figure out a way to persuade Errol that he should let me leave the studio before we had taped the spots for Cincinnati, Seattle, and Tupelo, Mississippi. I hadn’t told him yet that Emily had called me while he was out drinking his lunch.

“It’s mandatory, Maggot,” she had said. “Meet me at my apartment at four.”

She must have forgotten to tell me about the rain.

Errol was watching Stella daub white makeup in my chin cleft. She said, “Little collagen injection would fill that right in.”

“I’ve thought, Errol,” I announced, hoping that I oozed conviction when in my heart I was lying. “Get me on the first available flight to L.A. I’ll see what I can talk Emily into.”

He had bought it, both the promise and the ticket. So there I was, standing on Emily’s stoop the second time, waiting for a break in the downpour.

The rain sluiced down in straight, vertical sheets that flooded the streets and poured down the eaves and made the votive candles sputter.

I was nudging the candles toward a drier area when a woman swathed in a heavy black shawl dashed in beside me. She wore crude, peasant sandals, and her sodden skirt clung to bare legs. She shivered. I assumed that she had only stopped for temporary shelter, until she reached into the folds of her clothes and brought out a candle of her own. When she struck a match over the wick, I saw her face clearly: she was no more Chinese than the blond decal Virgins flickering in the candlelight.

She could have walked up from one of the Latino neighbor-hoods around Downtown. But why? To leave a candle in this doorway?

“The candles are pretty,” I said, but she gave me a no comprendo shrug. She dropped the lighted candle into a small baby food jar and set it down among the others. I tried to speak with her, but she was finished with her business before I got past hace frio. She said a quick Hail Mary and headed back out into the night.

I watched her go, thinking that maybe she was on some sort of pilgrimage and this stoop represented one of the stations of the cross or something. Whatever she was doing, she shouldn’t have been out: It was late, the weather was extreme, the neighborhood was none too good and the woman was very pregnant. I thought she should be home in bed, and hoped she had a bed to go home to. Emily would have known exactly what to say and do.

I tugged up the collar of my coat and followed the woman into the rain. Before I gave up on Emily and went in search of a bed of my own, I thought of one more place to look, though I dreaded it. Emily was on staff at French Hospital, three blocks down Hill Street from her apartment.

She didn’t do rounds, she wasn’t that sort of doctor. Instead, she checked on things she had growing in the laboratory, staph and strep and various other agents of modern plague. The hospital itself was okay, a small, neighborhood place. But Emily’s little corner of its labs was the stuff of nightmares.

I walked in an ankle-deep stream of frigid runoff, shivering in my wet clothes. Every doorway I passed had a night tenant huddled under plastic drapings. Seeing them only made me feel colder. When I saw the lights of an open bakery on the opposite side of Hill Street, I dodged the splash of a pair of cars and crossed to it. A sign in the window promised fresh coffee.

A tiny man in starched white baker’s coveralls and cap stood in the open door, watching impassively as I leapt over the runoff in the gutter.

“Is your coffee still hot?” I shook out a shoeful of water beside his threshold.

The baker nodded and backed into his shop. I hesitated before following him. I didn’t want to soil his immaculate floor, but the lights inside and the smell of fresh-baked something overcame any fastidiousness on my part.

By the time I had my shoes back on, the baker had filled a Styrofoam coffee cup and was fitting it with a lid.

“You go,” he said, pushing the cup toward me.

I didn’t want to go. It was warm inside and I couldn’t drink the coffee out in the rain. There were some round tables by the front window. My intention was to sit down for a few minutes and get warm. If Emily came past on her way home, I would see her. But when I started to shrug out of my coat, the baker snapped open a white paper bag and put the coffee inside it.

“You go,” he repeated.

“I go,” I sighed, rummaging in my pocket for money. I thought he must be ready to close.

“You go.” He pointed toward the door and waited for me. “Whatever you say,” I conceded. My coat was cold when I shoved my arms back into the sleeves. I picked up the bag and dropped a couple of sodden, crumpled dollars onto the counter. He brushed the money back toward me. “You no pay.”

“I insist.”

“You no pay.” He folded his arms as if offended. “You go.”

I was stung. I thought I might have committed some cultural gaffe and didn’t argue further. I stuffed the bills back into my pocket, grabbed the white bag and went to the door.

I turned for one last whiff of the place and saw the baker dialing a wall phone. He spoke into the receiver in rapid Chinese. I clearly heard him say “Lim” twice. To tell the truth, everything he said sounded like “Lim” to me. His manner was so much like Em’s landlady, Mrs. Lim, brusque and grouchy, that I might have been listening for her name, assuming a kinship. Wondering what I was doing that made me so offensive, I admired Emily anew for her ability to get along peacefully with so many people.

I went back out into the rain, wondering whether hotels ran credit card checks before they handed out room keys.

Down at the corner, French Hospital was a lighted block against the dark of a school playground beyond it. I hugged the coffee close to me, hoping for some warmth to seep through the cup.

“I am Caesar.” A man shrouded in a tattered tarp held a gloved hand toward me, offering a limp square of paper. “I’m deliverin’ to you the message and the truth.”

The scrawny brown dog he led on a shoestring leash cowered behind him and growled at me. I took the man’s paper, assuming it was some sort of religious tract, and pressed on him the wet money the baker had refused. I felt it wasn’t rightfully mine, anyway.

“Bless you.” He looked closely at me through the downpour. “I don’ want no money. I already received my reward.”

He reached toward me and frightened me. I started to run back toward the shelter of the bakery lights.

“Wait,” he cried with such anguish that I stopped. “Pretty lady, don’ be scared. Jus’ take your money.”

“What’s wrong with my money?”

“I can’t take nothin’ from you.”

“Go buy the dog a meal, he looks hungry.”

“We’re okay.” He had to hold the money against his upturned palm to keep it from being washed away. “Please, I can’t take it from you.”

“Keep it,” I said, and rushed past him. “It is the message and the truth.”

Outside the hospital entrance there were more candles. And flowers, too, several little pots of them, and one good-sized spray of white carnations. The ribbon sash across the carnations had DOLOR spelled out in gold letters. Pain, it meant. Stuck to the flower easel was a round pro-choice sticker. I wasn’t sure what the message was, except it had nothing to do with Christmas.

The small waiting room inside was crammed with people, a mini U.N., a fair representation of the city’s immigrant makeup. The information pamphlets on the wall came in five different languages, but they all looked poor. Women held sleeping children in their laps, men stood along the sides, clustered in pairs or trios, with their heads together. A brace of nuns averted their eyes as I passed.

Behind a window at the far end of the lobby, I found a receptionist. She was a round little woman, about my age, with TRINH FREEDMAN pinned to her stiff white bodice. When I cleared my throat, she looked up from the stack of file folders she was sorting.

“Is Emily Duchamps here?” I asked.

“The hospital has no comment to make about Dr. Duchamps.”

I stifled a laugh. The hospital must have learned over the years how to deal with Emily’s crusades. I had heard the State Department use nearly the same phrase when Em took off on an unauthorized medical mission to Cuba during a typhus epidemic. I hoped that this was only a flash of deja vu and not a clue that Em was in trouble again.

“I’m Dr. Duchamps’s sister,” I said. “I’ve come to fetch her home with me.”

“Oh! Miss MacGowen.” Trinh Freedman’s head snapped back and she blushed. “I didn’t see it was you. We don’t say nothing to the press about Dr. Duchamps.”

“Glad to hear it. Will you please page my sister or point me in her direction?”

“Page her?” She looked around the lobby, meeting the dozens of eyes turned on us. Then she got up and smoothed the seat of her white uniform. “Come with me, please.”

“If she’s in the lab, I’ll wait here,” I said.

“Doctor is not in the lab. Please, this way.”

She led me into the maze of slick, polished corridors.

I’m not sure when denial kicked in. I was considering offering Trinh my unpaid-for Ferragamo pumps in trade for her worn, white oxfords instead of thinking about where she was leading me, or why everyone we passed stopped in their tracks and stared. Even when I’m dry, I don’t have the sort of looks that make people stop and stare. I should have tumbled.

Because of my line of work, I found the scene we walked through thoroughly familiar: big city hospital, knots of uniformed police and paramedics sloping against the walls, plainclothes detectives with guns on their belts, medical people in white lab coats and soft-soled shoes bustling among them, the smells of coffee and disinfectant.

Trinh checked back to make sure I was still with her, waited for me to catch up. The door I followed her through was marked INTENSIVE CARE, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

When I went inside, I saw panels of monitors, the back of a uniformed nurse hovering over a patient on a raised hospital bed. The patient lay absolutely motionless.

“Barbara,” Trinh said to the nurse. “Miss MacGowen has come to see Dr. Duchamps.”

The nurse stepped away from her patient.

I stood frozen, dazzled by all the white-white sheets, white gown, masses of white gauze bandages, dead-white skin.

Incredibly, in the middle of the whiteness, all six feet of her stretched the length of the high bed, was my sister, Emily.