The Last Rose of Shanghai(20)
“I can’t stay here and talk to the cockroaches all day, Ernest.”
“What happens if you get lost on the street? Or . . . or . . . God! I have to get some sleep so I can go to work tonight. But you stay in this apartment. Can you promise me, Miriam?”
He heard nothing for a long moment; relieved, he was falling asleep again when he heard a grunt. “You don’t care about me.”
15
AIYI
Two weeks and five days. That was how long Ernest served the customers. I supposed I should have been pleased, for his humble attitude had appeased everyone—Mr. Zhang and even Mr. Li and manager Wang. But each time I scanned the dancing customers, the drinking men, I was bothered. All my competitors had something to attract customers: Sassoon’s Ciro’s had the fanciest brandy, Del Monte had the exotic Russian girls, and those small dance clubs had cheap admission fees. My club had no signature feature. Stride piano was my plan to raise my club’s competitive edge. But four months would be a long wait.
But I couldn’t force Ernest out; I had promised.
I closed the clothbound ledger in my office. I wondered what had happened to me, this indecisiveness.
My Nash stopped in front of a massive walled building guarded by two gray stone lions with carved manes. From inside the high wall, my old butler called that he was coming and pulled open the double wooden gates painted in vermilion.
This was my home, but it belonged to my oldest brother, Sinmay. Our grandfather had built this fifty-eight-room compound in the late 1800s in a prime location inside the Old City, hoping to house many generations of the Shao family. The compound, encircled by high walls mounted with stone dragons, had four wings in four directions, a central reception hall, and a fashionable swimming pool Sinmay had installed. Sinmay’s residence, the east wing, included a study, a music room, and a salon where he showed off his poetry collection to his literary friends; my room, an individual building near a koi pond, was located at the west wing near the back. The compound was the last legacy my grandfather had left, poorly maintained and in need of a thorough cleaning, but still a jewel in Shanghai’s landscape and an indicator of my family’s standing and past opulence.
It was before dusk, the air a swath of gray, the sky pale like rinsed silk, and the century-old ginkgo trees, pines, and oaks—blackened and leafless after the bombing—looked forlorn with their bent limbs. Near the fountain in the courtyard, in a spot reserved for Cheng, was his black Buick. Next to his car was Sinmay’s black Nash—so he had returned from his trip out of town. It occurred to me that Cheng must have filled Sinmay in on the goings-on at my club. It made me nervous.
As the oldest of my siblings, Sinmay was the patriarch of the family. If he grew angry at me for hiring Ernest, he might find it a good excuse to drive me out of this house. He’d been looking for an opportunity to kick me out since our inheritance fight. Our clash had started when Mother wrote me into her will, entitling me to a share of the family’s fortune equal to my brothers’. Sinmay argued that since women traditionally were not eligible to receive an inheritance, he, the firstborn son, had the right to execute the will his way. I sued him by the law under the new Republic of China, an unthinkable step for many people who regarded lawsuits as scandalous. But I won, and the money was returned to me, and Sinmay never forgave me for shaming him publicly.
Neither of us could have foreseen that we would lose all our inheritance to the ruthless Japanese.
I had thought to move out and live in an apartment, but I simply couldn’t do it. It would be a declaration to sever my relationship with my family. Besides, only divorced women, widows, and prostitutes lived away from their families. And now the war had emboldened rogues and gangsters who made a living kidnapping and robbing women like me. I must be accompanied by my chauffeur, who was also my bodyguard, to and from my club. I couldn’t go shopping alone or go to the Sincere, my favorite department store. Radio was a memory because it was banned by the Japanese, playing music on a gramophone was a dream because it was restricted by Sinmay, and parties and festivals were forgotten fancies because of food shortages.
The truth was I wouldn’t dare to live alone. I was raised to value my family, and family was in my blood. So million-dollar-business owner that I was, I still lived in fear of my older brother, who, at his whim, might make me homeless. This, of course, would never have happened had Mother been alive.
I missed her. Life was not the same without her. Each day I got out of bed, thinking of this hard truth: a family without a mother was like a pearl necklace without a string.
I ducked out of my car, my high heels hitting the ground overlaid with stones in shapes of diamonds and circles. I could hear the clashing of mah-jongg tiles coming from the reception room near the fountain. My siblings, Cheng, and my sister-in-law all held the fervent belief that passing the days by playing the game of mah-jongg would kill the indignity of occupation and possibly heal all wounds of pain.
“Aiyi? Is that you? Come here.” The voice of Peiyu, my sister-in-law, came from the reception room.
I had no choice but to turn around and thread down a pebble path, passing the osmanthus evergreen bushes and yellow dahlias that bloomed each spring. On a bench near the gardenia garden, my nephews and nieces were playing under the watch of Peiyu’s nanny; behind them, my family cook fetched a live carp from a wooden basin, smacked its head, and began to scale it.