Last Night at the Telegraph Club(84)

But no one was there when she arrived. The streetlamp was shining on an empty sidewalk.

She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, shivering. It felt like hours. When she saw a police car cruising down Columbus, she shrank back into the shadows, but she knew she couldn’t wait there all night. With a desperate, sinking feeling, she turned toward home and resolved to call Kath first thing in the morning. She would understand why Lily hadn’t stayed on their corner.

When she got home, she tried to be as quiet as possible, but she was clumsy from the cold and stumbled on the stairs. The door to her bedroom stuck and she had to force it—with a rumble—to open.

The silence afterward was unbearable. She heard the creak of bedsprings, the squeal of her parents’ bedroom door.

She rushed to undress, shoving her clothes under her bed and pulling on her nightgown so fast she nearly tangled herself in the sleeves. She accidentally stubbed her toe against one of the bed’s legs and couldn’t suppress a yelp of pain. Tears smarting at her eyes, she climbed into her bed and pulled up the covers just in time—her father was sliding open the door, saying, “Li-li, are you all right?”

She rolled over, pretending to be sleepy. “Yes, Papa.”

“Couldn’t sleep?”

“No.”

He came in and sat on the edge of her bed, switching on her bedside lamp, and she had to turn over to face him, schooling her face into emptiness. He placed a warm hand on her forehead. “You’re a little hot.”

“I’m fine. I just couldn’t sleep.”

He studied her for a moment, and she willed herself to look normal—sleepless, maybe, but normal—and she must have succeeded, because he eventually removed his hand. “All right. Well, if you’re not feeling well in the morning, let me know.”

“I will.”

“Good night.” He turned off the lamp and left, sliding the pocket doors shut.





—1950


Judy Hu marries Francis Fong.

Lily attends the third annual Chinese American Citizens Alliance Independence Day Picnic and Miss Chinatown Contest.





—1951


Dr. Hsue-shen Tsien is placed under house arrest on suspicion of being a Communist and a sympathizer to the People’s Republic of China.


—Aug. 12, 1951

JUDY takes Lily to Playland at the Beach.

In Stoumen v. Reilly, the California Supreme Court rules that homosexuals have the right to public assembly, for example, in a bar.





—1952


Francis begins working as an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.





—1953


Judy is hired as a computer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Judy takes Lily to the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.





JUDY


Three and a Half Years Earlier



The Opium Den diorama was located on the left side of the Musée Mécanique at Playland, just past one of the mechanical fortune-tellers whose eyes rolled each time a coin was dropped into the machine’s slot. Judy had seen the Opium Den before, and though she’d been horrified the first time, it had never struck her with such disgust before today.

That morning, as she and Francis prepared to pick up Lily, Frankie, and Eddie for their long-scheduled Saturday outing, she had tried to convince Francis that it was too cold for a trip to Playland. “It’ll be foggy and windy,” she had said. “Let’s take them somewhere indoors instead.”

But Francis had resisted. “The boys want to go to the Fun House, and Frankie wants to ride the roller coaster for the first time. I promised them I’d take them there last month.”

So they had piled into Francis’s Mercury and driven out to Playland at the Beach. Judy watched Francis take Eddie and Frankie to the wooden roller coaster while Lily wandered off to the Musée Mécanique to feed pennies into the automated dioramas. As a child, Lily hadn’t liked the rides very much, but she could watch the miniature figurines processing through their painted wooden worlds for hours, thrilled by the tiny, orderly details. Lily was fourteen now, and Judy suspected her interest in those mechanized marvels had waned, so she followed her niece inside to wait for her.

There was a bench a few feet away from the Opium Den, and Judy sat down there, pulling a paperback out of her purse to read. It was The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, which she’d borrowed from Francis, who had a taste for science fiction. She thought some of the novels he liked were terrible, but she was enjoying this one. She couldn’t focus on the story, though. From her vantage point it was hard to avoid noticing each time the Opium Den whirred into life, and children seemed to be endlessly feeding it coins.

The diorama wasn’t very large, maybe two feet wide by one foot deep, but it contained a number of weird creatures that twitched or jumped when the machine was running. It depicted an underground opium den populated by figurines with slanted eyes, ghostly skin, and blank expressions, possibly intended to represent men in the throes of opium-induced euphoria. In the back of the den, a Chinese man lay in an alcove in the wall, jerking up and falling back over and over again. A disturbing figure with a skull-like face descended into the den from a stairway on the right. To the left, a door sprang open to reveal a hanging skeleton. And most bizarrely, a giant cobra popped out repeatedly from behind a fringed curtain in the back.