The Last Rose of Shanghai(57)

He felt a pang in his stomach. She was right—he had not done enough. “Well, if this is what you want, I’ll let you go. I wish you all the best. I wish you a bright and happy future in America.”

Miriam gazed at him with happiness, relief, and what he thought might be an apology. “I want to go to Vassar College, Ernest.”

He could barely nod when Mr. Blackstone gave him a form from a manila folder; he signed at the bottom and gave it back. He stood straight as Miriam picked up her suitcase, stood straight as Mr. Blackstone steered her out of the courtyard. His back grew stiff, his hands chilled, his face numb. He couldn’t protect her anymore. She was on her own. She would become a professor like his father or grow up like a cowgirl, learn to ride horses, and meet eccentric people, but he would never know.

Miriam paused at the courtyard’s door and turned to him. She looked . . . like his mother at their last Passover. Then Miriam turned around and disappeared through the door. He covered his face. He had lost his other sister, his parents, his lover. If he lost Miriam, too, he would be utterly alone.

He picked up his canvas bag, stumbled out of the courtyard, and grabbed Miriam’s hand just as Mr. Blackstone opened the car’s door. “I changed my mind. You can’t go. Please, Miriam. Please stay with me. I love you. I love you very much.”

“Ernest. Have you lost your mind?”

“I’m sorry. You must stay with me, Miriam. I’m sorry, Mr. Blackstone. She can’t go with you. I won’t allow it. I will not give you my consent. Please give me back the form.”

Mr. Blackstone let out a heavy sigh, handed him the form, and ducked into the car. Miriam screamed, trying to get in, but Ernest pulled her back. He held her tight as Mr. Blackstone’s Packard growled and staggered forward, as the red taillights disappeared among the rickshaws at the end of the street.

“Get off me; get off.” Miriam shook him off. “I hate you. I hate you!”

He closed his eyes. Relief, sadness, and guilt washed over him.





45


AIYI


When I came home, Peiyu was studying a pile of red envelopes on the round mah-jongg table. New wedding invitations, she said. She and Cheng’s mother had picked out another auspicious date for the wedding, and she had made a deposit at the best restaurant in Shanghai, the same restaurant where the generalissimo and his wife, Soong Meiling, were wed. She also made a reduced list of two hundred people. Many were my spoiled aristocratic relatives with lost fortunes. Some of the concubines’ families were strategically left out.

“The new date is the last day of February next year, in about three months,” she said. “Cheng’s mother agrees that this wedding will drive away bad luck, and we’ll have fortune, happiness, and prosperity. Are you sick? You look terrible, Aiyi.”

“I don’t think a wedding is going to change anything.”

Sinmay came in, hands folded behind his back, his long robe casting a long shadow. He looked angry, gloomy, trapped in a garden of thoughts, mumbling that Emily had not replied to his letters.

“Well, a wedding is all we need. Right, husband?”

I looked at Sinmay, the ultimate authority in the house. We were different. He was the cherished firstborn son who’d received a baby elephant for his fifth birthday; I was the insignificant girl who received instructions of obedience. He, a Cambridge graduate; I, a local college dropout. He loved poetry; I loved money. He donned traditional Chinese scholar’s robes; I wore figure-showing dresses. He had an American mistress; I was to wed my cousin.

And the inheritance fight had separated us like a wall; there was nothing I could do to repair our relationship.

Sinmay coughed. His slow gramophone voice rang out. “Don’t be stubborn, little sister. Your wedding is our family’s business.”

“You’re nervous, Aiyi. Every girl gets nervous before the wedding. That’s normal. Your mother made a good betrothal. You and Cheng are meant for each other. It’s a marriage well matched from the door to the roof,” Peiyu said, quoting a proverb.

“They sealed up my club,” I said.

A red envelope dropped out of Peiyu’s hands. She gaped at me and then Sinmay.

“What a disaster,” Sinmay said. “Did you tell Cheng?”

“I haven’t.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t tell him.”

I didn’t understand.

Peiyu scanned the envelopes on the table. “We just agreed on the date. And you’ve lost your business . . . They won’t cancel the wedding, will they?”

Sinmay didn’t say anything, and I thought, for the first time in my life, he felt sorry for me.

Until now, it had not occurred to me that with the freezing of my business, my marriage to Cheng was no longer matched from the door to the roof.



Silence again. Its cold feet crawled, teeth gnawing noiselessly. My skin prickled; I shivered.

I was poor. I’d lost my club, my business, and now I had nothing.

You must have money and own things, so you won’t be a ball people kick around, Mother had said to me when my addict father sold the mountain in the outskirts of Shanghai, her dowry, for some pipe money. His addiction would grow worse, his temperament would change, and he would beat her when she refused to give him money. He would grow ill and die eventually, and months later, toddling on her three-inch golden lotus feet, Mother packed up for a ski trip in Switzerland. She loved the feeling of being airborne, she had said, and she had hoped this would be a trip to start her life of freedom, but she knocked her head against a rock. I would learn she had surreptitiously changed her will before the trip, adding my name and entitling me to a share of my family’s vast fortune, against the tradition that women couldn’t inherit properties.