Love and Other Consolation Prizes(93)
These women, these children were auctioned off like cattle for four hundred dollars each, with discounts for buying in quantity.
She tapped the newspaper. “This was big business. Almost forty years after slavery was abolished, this was still going on. Here I am trying to write about the world’s fair and cotton candy and roller coasters and cosmonauts, now all of a sudden my story leads directly to the seedy underbelly of the Garment District, to the Tenderloin. And to other places.” She shuddered. “From what I’ve gathered the whole mui tsai system was spotlighted by…” She looked down at her notes. “Winston Churchill. He railed against the selling of people as servants and prostitutes. And then the whole thing collapsed. The circus of that odious business was dismantled by the League of Nations. You could say that was one of the fringe benefits of the Great Depression—too many workers, even in red-light districts. The demand dried up. No profit. So no more supply from overseas.”
The waitress reappeared, and Juju ordered a bowl of clam chowder. Ernest ordered a red Reuben and watched in silence as Juju paged through her copious notes.
“And now no one talks about it,” he said. “It’s as though…”
“It never happened,” Juju finished.
“So are you still going to write about me? About your mother?”
“I’m not sure I’m the right person to write anything,” Juju said. “I know I barreled in here like a bull in a china shop, but now it’s obvious why you were so reluctant to talk. It’s very personal. I need to turn in something for my deadline, though.”
Ernest nodded.
“In the meantime,” Juju said. “I do have one other question. Something that’s been bugging me ever since I started digging around. I mean—I have friends who work in City Hall, good friends, people who can get me old records. So I’ve been pulling on loose threads, trying to track down every detail about you and Mom.”
“You’re worried,” Ernest said, “that I’m not telling you everything. You think I’m covering for Maisie—the great widowed heiress, Margaret Turnbull. She’s a popular Seattleite now, a society page regular. She’s in the news almost every day…”
Juju looked up from her notes. “Well, yeah. That too, now that you mention it. But actually, what I’m trying to figure out—and it’s something silly, but I’m curious…because I can’t seem to find a record of you and Mom ever getting married.”
Ernest smiled and finished his tea. “That’s because we’re not.”
Juju coughed and then reached for her water glass.
“What do you mean you’re not married? I’m looking at your wedding ring.”
Ernest regarded the bit of gold he wore. He thought about the matching band on Gracie’s ring finger. “We told everyone we were married. Back in the day. The fiction of being married was a necessity at first—the only way anyone would rent us an apartment. Most landlords demanded to see a marriage certificate, but we managed to fudge it. A few years later we were basically living as a young husband and wife, and I proposed—believe me, I did—again and again, but your mother is quite stubborn.” Ernest drummed his fingers on the table. “She decided that we were as good as wedded, even though there’s no common-law marriage here in Washington State. And, well, as the years turned into decades, it seemed too late. If we had gotten married, the legal announcement would have been in the paper, right next to the police blotter and the obituaries.”
“You’re serious,” Juju said.
“Then everyone would know we’d been deceiving them—they’d have questions and we wouldn’t have suitable answers. It was easier to just leave well enough alone.”
Juju closed her notebook and set down her pencil.
“But it was more than that.” Ernest smiled, though he felt like crying. “I think she felt unworthy of the sanctity of marriage, somehow. It was a way for your mother to pay some kind of sad penance for her former life. None of it was her fault, I should have done more to protect her—every day I wished I had, but we were just…teenagers. When she went to the Tangerine, I was fourteen, your mother seventeen. We were complicit, willing participants, and our lives were wonderful and they were horrible and everything was painful and true, the good, the bad, together.”
“So…to this day…”
He nodded. “To this day…”
“You’ve been living together.”
“In sin?”
Ernest looked into his daughter’s eyes—Gracie’s eyes, Fahn’s eyes, Madam Flora’s eyes, his mother’s weary, desperate eyes, the eyes of the little sister he’d known for only two days. “Parents always have a story that their children don’t really know,” Ernest said. “I guess this is mine.”
—
AS ERNEST AND his daughter walked up the wooden stairs to his apartment at the Publix, Juju kept going on about how she couldn’t believe that she and Hanny had been born out of wedlock. Their whole adult lives, their mother had chided them about how they should settle down, get married.
“After a while, marriage just didn’t matter,” Ernest said. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Well, it matters now,” she said. “What if Mom does something crazy again? What if the doctors find out? They won’t let you make medical decisions on her behalf…”