Last Night at the Telegraph Club(92)
Her mother’s chest heaved, and Lily saw that her hand was now stained with newsprint just like Lily’s. In the trash can, the newspaper itself was slowly coming uncrumpled; it was unfurling as if it were a living thing, the words sex deviate screaming across the room.
“You are young,” her mother said harshly. “You aren’t even eighteen years old yet. Sometimes girls have these ideas when they’re younger—before they meet their husbands. Girls love their friends and mistake that for the love they’ll have for their husbands. It only becomes an illness when you won’t let go of the idea. We’ll tell your father. He’ll be able to help you. You won’t tell your aunts and uncles about this. You won’t say a word to your grandmother. Do you hear me? Everyone knows you’re a good Chinese girl. This is just a mistake.”
The more her mother insisted it was a mistake, the more certain Lily was that it wasn’t. Perhaps that was the most perverse part of this: the inside-outness of everything, as if denial would make it go away, when it only made the pain in her chest tighten, when it only made her emotions clearer.
“It’s not a mistake,” Lily said miserably.
Her mother strode across the kitchen and slapped her.
Lily jerked backward, shocked. Her mother hadn’t hit her in years—since she was eight or nine—and she instantly felt like that child again, cowering in fear of another strike. With the terror came a crippling guilt and the belief that she must have done something awful, that she deserved this punishment.
She raised a hand to her stinging face; tears sprang into her eyes. Her mother looked both horrified and horrifying, her pale face suddenly blotchy with red, her brown eyes bright with anger.
“There are no homosexuals in this family,” her mother spit out again. “Are you my daughter?”
The tears spilled hotly from Lily’s eyes. She turned away from her mother and fled from the kitchen. In the hallway she saw Eddie and Frankie standing uncertainly outside the living room.
“Lily?” Eddie said.
She didn’t answer him. She put on her shoes, but her fingers couldn’t work the laces properly. She clutched the railing as she stumbled down the stairs. She heard her mother calling her—no, she was calling for Eddie, telling him to stop—and then she was at the front door. She wrenched it open; she stepped outside and down onto the sidewalk. She was crying freely now. The air was misty and wet. She didn’t know where she was going; she only knew she had to go away.
41
There are no homosexuals in this family.
Grant Avenue’s red-and-gold banners celebrating the Year of the Sheep sagged damply overhead, dripping on Lily as she crossed the street. A group of boys pushed past her with their arms full of unlit firecrackers, shouting and laughing.
There are no homosexuals in this family.
Portsmouth Square was ahead. She wished she had put on a coat, and her canvas shoes were getting wetter with each step, but she couldn’t go back.
Kath had been arrested. Lily’s stomach clenched.
There are no homosexuals in this family.
She kept walking. Past the International Hotel, past the gaudy lights of the International Settlement. The neon sign for the Barbary Coast nightclub, built in the shape of a woman’s naked leg, glowed through the dusk, advertising DANCING GIRLS.
Are you my daughter?
Lily went left along Columbus, walking quickly in an effort to warm herself up, and then she came to Broadway, and down the street she saw the lighted sign. The letter l in the word Club was on the fritz, blinking out every so often as if it were tapping out a message in code.
In a daze, she angled across Broadway, narrowly missing a taxi that honked at her as it swerved around her. She slowed to a halt in front of the club. She noticed for the first time a small window to the left of the door. It was filled in with glass blocks so that she couldn’t see inside, but it must overlook the end of the bar. She began to take in the other details around her: the stained concrete beneath her feet, blackened in spots as if people had stubbed out countless cigarettes on the ground. The faint smell of alcohol and smoke, like a bitter perfume, hanging in the chilly air. A layer of filth seemed packed onto the lower extremities of the building’s wall, which was covered in a dirty stucco that once might have been white, but had turned grayish brown over time. A particularly disgusting puce-colored patch spread over part of the wall beneath the glass-block window. The black door itself looked like it had come out of a fire, sooty and beaten, and there was a small white sign affixed to it.
She had to walk right up to it to read it in the gray light: CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE SAN FRANCISCO POLICE.
She shouldn’t have been surprised by the notice, but she was. She realized that she had stupidly thought she might go to the club—that Mickey might open the door for her, that someone might help her, or at least allow her to sit there while she figured out what she was going to do. Abruptly she became aware that she was standing right in front of the club on the sidewalk in full view. Once again she was putting herself in danger of being seen.
She turned away in a panic, not caring where she was going as long as she put distance between herself and anyone who might know her. She went uphill, racing up the steep sidewalk, and at the top she was forced to pause to catch her breath. When she raised her eyes and saw the nearest street sign, she was startled to discover it was the street that Kath lived on.