The Man With No Time

7

The room was full of babies, and they all had numbers written on their wrists. Some of them wore colored ribbons around their throats, trailing enormous floppy bows over their shoulders. Those babies were not crying. The other babies had lengths of string around their necks, dirty pieces of string tied in rotting knots, and they were crying desperately. A very thin, stooped woman in a conical straw rice-paddy hat like the ones we used to see on the newsreels from Vietnam moved from one crying baby to another, spooning something white and thick into their mouths. As they sat up and sucked at the spoon the strings around their throats blossomed into bows, and when the bows became big enough they pulled the babies over onto their sides. Now the other babies were beginning to cry, their colored ribbons dwindling into dirty string, but the thin woman ignored them and shuffled in her rope sandals to the wall.

There was a big round orange button on the wall. I hadn't seen it before. The thin woman pushed it, and the wall slid upward to reveal a broad, steep chute. She pointed to a handle below the chute and gestured for me to pull it. When I did, dozens of new babies cascaded down the chute and into the room. The old woman raised her head to look at me, and beneath the conical straw hat I saw she had a black eye.

“Simeon,” Eleanor said.

I rolled over and came face-to-face with a cerise bear, one of the twins' menagerie. “What time is it?” I asked. The couch was too short for me, and my legs were stiff from having slept with them drawn up.

“Eleven. I've fixed some juk.”

“Any word?” My feet hit the floor sooner than I expected them to, jarring me all the way to my teeth.

“Shhh,” Eleanor said reprovingly. “Pansy and Julia are asleep.”

I eyed the couch, a world-class collection of lumps. “How do you sleep here?”

“You managed,” she said, smiling at me.

“But you're delicate,” I said. “The slightest wrinkle in the sheet-”

She pulled my nose between her thumb and forefinger. “Oh, bananas. I sleep like a horse and you know it. Come and eat something.”

I got up. The floor only heaved twice beneath me. Horace was sitting at the dining-room table eating juk, rice gruel, from a bowl. He'd combed his remaining hair with water, making him look like a farmhand visiting the big city.

“Morning again,” I said. “How long has it been?”

“A little more than five hours.”

“Let's figure he was somewhere close by when we got Julia,” I said, sitting. My back cracked. “He'd just called, so we know he was near MacArthur Park at five-thirty. What's he doing now?”

“Who knows?” Horace said. In spite of the slicked-down hair, he looked much better, five years younger than he had when we left for the park. He'd gotten one child back, and his faith in Uncle Lo had been vindicated, after a fashion. “He'll call when he's ready.”

“Maybe the question is, where is he now?” Horace gave me an interested glance, and it suddenly struck me that I hadn't seen him alone with Pansy since the kids disappeared. He'd always been with Eleanor and me, consigning Pansy to other rooms. “Maybe he needs this time to get from here to somewhere else.” I looked around. “Speaking of where, where's your mother?”

“Pansy packed her off,” Eleanor said, coming into the room with a bowl in her hands. “Mom was driving her wild. Tears, accusations, nattering.” She put down the bowl, sat next to me, and pushed her fingers through my hair, combing it back. “About four yesterday afternoon she told Mom to get out of here and go home.”

I dropped the spoon into my juk. “Your mother's house,” I said.

“Sure, her house,” Horace said crankily. “Where else-”

“That's where he's going,” I said.

Eleanor sat up. “Whatever it was he wanted, he didn't find it here.” She looked at me, but she was thinking about something else. “Should we call her?” she asked Horace.

“Why?” Horace said. “He doesn't know where she lives.”

“Actually,” I said after thinking about it for a moment, “he probably does.”

“How would he?” That was Horace.

“How'd he know about the twins?” Eleanor asked him rhetorically.

“I know who told him about the twins,” I said. “Who told him everything except ancient history, in fact.”

“Who?” Eleanor had a hand on my arm.

I pointed across the room at the cross on the wall. She followed with her eyes and then gave a small gasp.

“Mrs. Summerson?”

Even in his distracted state that caught Horace's ear. “Mrs. Summerson?” he asked.

The phone rang, breaking through the silence like a dentist's drill.

“No games this time,” I said. “Just answer it.”

Horace went to the phone, blew a deep breath out through tight lips, and picked it up. “Hello?”

Eleanor's fingers tightened on my arm.

“Hello, Lo,” Horace said. He looked over at Eleanor and their eyes held. Horace nodded twice and rattled off something in Chinese. I caught “Ah-Ma,” or mother, several times, and Horace shifted his gaze to me and lifted his eyebrows. “Okay, okay,” Horace said and then listened. “Yeah, okay. Yes. Bye-bye.” He pushed down the buttons on top of the telephone and said, a little grudgingly, “Good, Simeon.”

“Mom's,” Eleanor said.

“He wants the place empty by noon. He wants it to stay empty until five this evening. He wants all Mom's stuff put out in plain sight.”

“Not just another pretty face,” Eleanor said, making circles with her fingertips on the back of my hand. She hadn't done that in years.

“Can you reach them?” I asked to mask my confusion.

“They're home right now,” Horace said, starting to push buttons.

“How do you know?”

“Uncle Lo says both cars are there.” He finished dialing and waited.

“Uncle Lo's very careful,” Eleanor said. “It's a good thing he doesn't really mean to harm us.”

“I don't know about you,” I said, hanging on to her fingers, “but I'd gladly throw him out of the helicopter for what he's done already.”

Horace started talking. He encountered some resistance, raised his voice, remembered that Pansy was asleep and lowered it again, and began to gesture with his right hand. He rolled his eyes and looked at Eleanor. “Her purse, too, right?” he asked.

“Of course,” Eleanor said. “And her wallet, and all the money in it.”

Horace returned to the fray, using his right hand to drive home points and, occasionally, to wave inarticulately in the direction of heaven. When he hung up he looked as tired as he had the first time I'd seen him that morning.

“She could tie a knot in a tree,” he said. “Nothing is simple. Should she leave her purse? Should she call the neighborhood security guard? Should she send the plumber out and hide in a closet? How do we know someone else won't come along and rob the house? Everything has to be turned inside out, held up to the light, weighed in the hand, bitten, and once all that adds up, it's time to argue about it. When I was growing up I thought everyone was like that. I thought that was how people figured things out. When I went to junior high school it took me most of the class period to answer the first question on my first multiple-choice test. I was looking for the trick, the double-cross, the sucker punch. Jesus, no wonder I've lost my hair. I failed the written part of the driver's exam four times because I was too busy searching for the hook to answer the questions. It's a miracle I can drive today.” He fell heavily into his chair.

“She's had a lot of trick questions,” Eleanor said levelly, although I knew she agreed with him absolutely.

Horace shook his head from side to side. “Oh, sure, sure. Bad luck all the way. Treachery on every hand. And after Daddy died she managed to get out of China and wind up in America years later with two grown kids and two grandkids, one of whom is a boy, and she owns property all over the place, more safety-deposit boxes than I've got dresser drawers, and she's finally got a plumber of her own. She hasn't exactly ended up like Auntie Shih, has she?”

“Okay, Horace.” Eleanor glanced at me. “Auntie Shih got her back broken during the Cultural Revolution,” she said. “Some ham-fisted farmer was helping her with self-criticism and didn't know how strong he was.”

“They're going to clear out?” I asked Horace.

“They're probably gone already,” Horace said tightly, “What the hell does he want?”

I looked at my watch and yawned. “Nothing to do till five,” I said.

Eleanor reached over and put her hand politely over my mouth. “Yes, there is.” She got up and stretched. “Clear your plates, please. I'm tired of servitude.”

“What's to do?” I asked her, knowing what she was going to say.

“Well, Uncle Lo's in Las Vegas. Let's go talk to Mrs. Summerson.”

“Yes, who is it?” she said, peering pale blue at us through glasses that were not only thick but dusty.

“It's Eleanor Chan.” Eleanor pulled me forward. “And a friend.”

“Eleanor, dear,” Mrs. Summerson said, fumbling with the lock on the screen door. “What a treat to see you, not that I can really see you, I'm afraid. How are the children?”

“The children,” Eleanor said, momentarily thrown. She absolutely cannot tell a lie without preparation.

“Your little boy and girl,” Mrs. Summerson said, all blue eyes though the lenses. “Twins, aren't they?”

“The twins, yes,” Eleanor said, “well, no, they're not mine. They're my sister-in-law's.”

Mrs. Summerson peered at her for a moment as though she'd forgotten what she was going to say next, but then her face cleared. “Of course,” she said, “you're their aunt, aren't you? I vow, I'm losing my mind completely.” She waved a hand in front of her face, dispelling the fumes of confusion. “And look at me, keeping you standing here on the step like a pair of orphans. Please, come in, come in.”

She opened the door and then turned away from us and led us into the dim hallway, which smelled simultaneously of old sachet and cooking oil. As she retreated I heard her say, “Pansy is the mother, of course. Whatever is the matter with you?”

Mrs. Summerson was as tall as I was and had better posture. Her hair was white and cut bluntly, in a way that brought to mind the Chinese rice-bowl haircut. There was, in all, something indefinably Chinese about her in spite of her height and her big hands and fair skin and ice-blue eyes, something Asian in the way she held herself and in the way she walked, as though she were living in a climate much hotter than that of Southern California, and energy were something to be conserved. I could almost hear sandals slapping, and for a moment I remembered the old woman in my dream, the old woman with Lo's face.

“. . the parlor,” Mrs. Summerson was saying. “Right there, dear, to the right, you remember. Tea in a twinkling.” Eleanor and I went through a wide archway into the parlor, and Mrs. Summerson padded off toward the kitchen, saying to herself, “How nice this is.”

“She's gotten old,” Eleanor said wistfully, looking around the familiar room. We could have been in Canton. Chinese artwork was everywhere: fine old watercolors of clouds and mountains and bamboo and horses hung on the walls. Ivories and bronzes, smooth with touching, nestled close on shelves. The Three Ancients, ceramic and brightly colored, stood close together like gossiping old men, offering their blessings on the house. Above the fireplace hung a large black-and-white photograph of a plain wooden building set into a level, dusty field. The horizon was featureless. Lined up in identical uniforms in front of the building, which I had been told was a missionary school, were perhaps seventy Chinese children. They stared patiently into the camera, not hiding behind the photographic smile of the West. In the lower right-hand corner of the photograph, in white ink, was a date: January 10, 1942.

Next to the photograph was a framed embroidered sampler that said MY HANDS ARE FOR MY FELLOW MAN. MY HEART IS FOR GOD. Stitched below these lines were four lines of Chinese that, Eleanor had explained to me on the day of the twins' hundred-day party, meant the same thing. She'd spoken as an expert, since she'd done the embroidery when she was eight years old.

Eleanor had once lived in this house.

“I am a servant of the Lord,” Mrs. Summerson sang from the kitchen. “His wishes I attend.” Her voice was low and resonant, and it carried well. It had carried through churches and schools all over the face of China for almost twenty-five years.

Eleanor was staring at the sampler as though it were several miles away. Then she let her gaze wander over the room and down to the carpet. She listened to Mrs. Summerson sing, her eyes downcast, eight years old again and abandoned in Los Angeles.

“How long since you were here?” I asked.

“Same as you,” she said to the carpet. “Um, no. You've been here more recently.” She went to the sampler and straightened it. Then she untucked her shirt and ran it over the surfaces of some of the carved objects. She picked up a little ceramic statue of Christ, robed in incongruously bright Chinese gold and red, and blew on it. “She really can't see,” she said. “This place was never dusty.”

“No help?”

“Mrs. Summerson doesn't believe in help.”

“Well,” I said, “she's got the Lord.”

“You've got it backward.” She put the little Jesus down and went to the large photograph of the children and drew her sleeve across the glass. “Mrs. Summerson is the Lord's servant.”

“We're all the Lord's servants,” Mrs. Summerson said. “If only we knew it.” She pushed a jangling three-wheeler tea table into the room, lifting the back edge to roll it in front of her, and I hurried around to take it from her although she looked strong enough to carry it one-handed. She regarded me in a kindly fashion through the magnified eyes that made her glasses look like a dime-store joke. “So,” she said as I positioned the table in front of the small rosewood sofa, “this is your young man.”

“What a sweet thing for you to say,” Eleanor cooed. “Especially about an old codger like Simeon.”

“He looks young enough to me, dear,” Mrs. Summerson said, smoothing her big hands on the front of her skirt. “Young and vigorous. Lots of good hard work in him.”

“And that's where it'll stay,” Eleanor said. “Inside him.”

“The way you young people talk.” Mrs. Summerson bent forward and peered at the tea table to see whether she'd forgotten anything. “Jam, sugar, rolls, cream-do you take cream or milk, dear? — well, never mind, we have both, lemon, butter. The tea is Darjeeling. Please sit down. When I was married my husband and I never bantered back and forth like that. Of course, we were serious people. Too serious, I dare say. Still, it was a good life.” She sat at one end of the sofa, tucking her skirt under her legs. “You remember Dr. Summerson, don't you, 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.

“What have you got to bargain with?”

“I didn't have to go anywhere near Chinatown to find out about Mrs. Summerson.”

“What a man,” she said. “The ear it is.”

As she reached her face up to me I hit the bump at the bottom of Horace and Pansy's driveway. Alice took a good bounce, and I leaned down and got her on the lips.

She settled back, looking satisfied. “That's cheating,” she said.

“Bugger cheating, as the British would say.” I coasted Alice to a stop and looked up at the apartment. “Bet you a big one they're all asleep,” I said.

“What happens if you lose?”

“Then you have to give me a big one.”

“I am completely indifferent,” she said, “to the outcome of this bet.”

We closed the car doors softly and went quietly up the stairs. I eased the door open and let Eleanor in. The apartment was silent. At the end of the hallway, Eleanor stopped and said, “Oh.”

Over her shoulder, I saw Horace and Pansy lying on the couch, their arms and legs in a knot. Pansy was facing us, and her eyes flew open at the sound of Eleanor's voice, and Horace jerked around spasmodically and then fell off the couch. Both of them were blushing furiously, but Horace just rolled all the way over and came up on his knees facing us with his hands outstretched, looking like Al Jolson.

“Eadweard's at Mom's,” he said. Pansy sat up, her face crimson, smiling like a fool.

“Already?” Eleanor looked at her watch. “But it's-”

“You know Mom. She drove by every fifteen minutes. He was only in there an hour. The third time she went by, his car was gone. She went in and found Eadweard sitting on the living-room floor.”

Eleanor ran to him and kissed him and then kissed Pansy. Pansy let out a kind of strangled giggle, and Eleanor backed off. “She's bringing him down?”

“No,” Pansy said firmly and happily, putting one hand to her forehead as though she had a fever. “We take a plane, six o'clock.”

Eleanor surveyed the two of them. Horace's shirt was held closed by only one button, and his hair was sticking up again. “I think we old folks ought to leave these two kids alone,” she said, turning to me. Her delight made her look ten years old.

“I'll take you on a double date.”

“That sounds half as good as a single.”

“It's already set,” I said. “Want to come?”

“Sure,” she said. “We've got celebrating to do. Let me change my clothes. What are we doing, anyway?”

“Dinner.”

“That's very informative. Dressy or not?”

“Not.”

“What else is new?” Eleanor said.

“Horace,” I asked, “what did he take?”

Horace looked at Eleanor and then at me, and then he tucked his shirt in. “That's the funny part,” he said. “He didn't take anything.”