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I remembered what my father had told me about the British and French boys attacking him at school. “But you knew the Europeans
were just as bigoted as Mum’s farm folks.”

“I had no desire to live in another international settlement, that’s true. Anyway, we had no money to travel, and since Diana
seemed inclined to keep her job, we had to stay close to Manhattan. Chinatown was an afterthought.”

“But how did it even come up?”

“Diana announced one day that it might be ‘amusing’ to live closer to my roots. Whatever the hell she meant by that.”

Tai had told me about landlords “frying real estate” to make it hotter and hotter until only the rich Hong Kong and Taiwan
tycoons could afford it. “Chinatown real estate’s no bargain now. Was it ever, really?”

“Yes and no.”

My father opened the window, letting in a flow of cold air and the dim strains of jazz from the party. If the terrace wrapped
all the way around, he’d have nowhere to hide from Mum’s pals; fortunately Dad’s room faces the street.

He turned. “When Diana gets an idea in her head, she’s like a cat stalking a bird, you know? There wasn’t one Chinatown apartment
advertised in the paper, but she insisted we go look for signs, ask around.”

“And that’s how you found our apartment?”

He scowled at me and waved his arm. “Wait. Just wait. We found nothing, she’d about given up when we passed a shop with this
old inlaid chair in the window. Rosewood. It was identical to a chair that belonged to my grandmother in Hangchow. Christ,
that miserable chair! Every year when we made the pilgrimage to the old bitch’s estate, my sisters and I had to sit in that
chair and have our picture taken. I
loathed those sittings. The little man beneath his drapes, decades behind the technology of the West…”

“An inlaid chair.” I felt as if the pieces of an invisible puzzle were about to drop into place.

“I wanted to walk on, but she kept badgering me, and eventually the shopkeeper saw us and came out. He recognized me.”

“It was the same chair.”

“Yes. He’d been a friend of my father’s in Shanghai before the war. They both raised money for the Republic—pulled in something
like ten million between them. Those were uncertain times, and they promised to look after each other’s business and personal
affairs if the need should arise. After this fellow threw his support behind Chiang Kai-shek they became political adversaries,
but he never forgot that promise. Personally I never wanted to see him or that hideous old chair again, but the next day he
telephoned about the apartment on Mott Street. His association owned the building.”

I felt the words cutting into the sides of my mouth as I spoke them, clearly, slowly. “It was Li, wasn’t it? He was the reason
we lived there.”

My father’s hands trembled as he fought with a match. I grabbed a massive desk lighter that he never used, held it for him.

“Yes.”

“But why? Why did you hate him so? Why wouldn’t you tell me when I asked you?”

“I told you about a boy I knew. Nigel Halliday.”

“Of course. The one that tried to drown you.”

He stared at a blank spot directly above the door for a good minute before he continued. “Li was an operator for Halliday’s
father, the arms trader. He had the scruples of a gutter rat, but he covered it up with all that crap about Chinese tradition
and face. He was a bloody liar, Maibelle.”

According to my father, Li had not left China after the Japanese invasion, but stayed on for years brokering munitions deals
between the Hallidays, the Japanese, and the gangsters who ruled Shanghai in league with Chiang Kai-shek.

“He did it all under the guise of patriotism, but when the time came, it wasn’t the British or the Japanese or the Germans
that made him grab his precious antiques and run, but his own countrymen. Men like my father.”

Dad’s cheeks pulled tight. “The reason I went back to China was to try to find my father. Instead I found Li. He lured me
in. He promised to help me.”

“Did he?”

“I told you. Li was a bloody liar.”

But I couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe him.

“I loved Li, Dad. He treated me like his own daughter—friend. I felt safe with him.”

The light was too bright in my father’s workroom. It made my eyes do curious things. Like turn my father’s face gray and white.
The switch was within reach. I could turn off the light and we’d be sitting together again in the dark. Instead I picked up
a small brown box filled with air.

But when I let it go he was still there, still patched with gray and white, looking older than I remembered ever seeing him
before. The sight of him filled my throat and squeezed and squeezed until I couldn’t bear it. I reached for the lock and tumbled
it.

“He’s dead, Maibelle. We don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

Through the crack poured an old song, familiar and slow. Late sixties? Pulsing like a dirge and strangely cold, a Doors song.
“Hello, I Love You.” The year after we moved out of Chinatown. Before Li died. “Hello, I Love You,” on the car radio for just
a few seconds before Mum switched it off. We drove, surrounded by pine and peach trees, in a Connecticut wonderland. Another
place and time.

With a savage blow I knew exactly who Nigel Halliday was. Not the boy but the man. I had met him.

I drew back from the door and lowered myself onto a stool.

“It’s all right. I’ll stay a while longer. Make another of those boxes, Dad. Show me how they work.”

The grayness lifted and he smiled a little, turned to his bench.

“So simple.” As he surgically cut through the paper, I slid back fourteen years.

* * *

A Sunday in late spring. I had just turned fourteen. Anna was off at college (or so we thought; actually she was doing “independent
study” at a retreat founded by her comparative-religions professor somewhere near the Canadian border). Henry was spending
the day at a workshop learning to be a conscientious objector. The previous summer Mum had signed me up for riding lessons
in Central Park; now my parents were extending that education by taking me to a polo match in Connecticut.

I could sense Dad’s excitement as we left New York and he shoved the Rambler into high gear. He wore a pair of jodhpurs that
must have been forty years old, and as he drove he talked about playing polo in Shanghai. They’d practiced in Jessfield Park,
he said, by the university. “Some bloody good players in those days.”

One of those players ran into us at the polo grounds. He was about my father’s age but taller, massive. His jodhpurs stood
out from his hips like cardboard. His helmet sat squarely atop his blond head. I thought he must be some kind of royalty.
He was that handsome.

My father grabbed the man’s hand and pumped it up and down. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Nigel Halliday. Twenty years if it’s
been a day. Burma, wasn’t it?”

“Right you are! Caught you photographing one of General Chennault’s shipments of silk stockings or toothbrushes or some such
thing, eh what?”

“Oh, Christ, don’t remind me.” My father laughed and shook his head. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I live just down the road a bit.” Halliday turned to my mother and me. As the introductions were made, he brushed a kiss
across Mum’s hand and held onto it until she began to blush. She tipped her head back, smiling, breathless.

He invited us back to his house after the game. “You live nearby, too, old boy?”

My father placed his hand lightly on my mother’s shoulder as they began to walk. “We have a penthouse on Central Park West.”

“Doing well for yourself, are you?”

“Can’t complain.”

It all sounded so glib and easy, but as I trailed after the grown-ups I caught Mum shooting Dad eager glances. I also became
conscious of the sweat wrinkles on the back of my father’s shirt, the way his old jodhpurs sagged in the seat, and I wondered
why he was suddenly talking in this emphatic British accent.

A small perfumed crowd coiled around the spectators’ area talking and smoking and sipping from lavender paper cups. Nigel
led us through to the front row of chairs, where a young Chinese woman with waist-length hair sat alone reading a paperback
Bible. She was dressed in a crimson silk blouse and a tight black side-slit skirt, her hair twisted into an ornate gold lacquer
comb designed like a peacock’s father. Halliday introduced her as his wife, Lydia.

The adults went through the usual back-and-forth about whether our visit would be an inconvenience. As if there were any question.
Mum was about to expire from curiosity. Dad was like a dog on a leash. And Halliday had issued the invitation as if it were
an imperial edict. Lydia quietly assured my parents that we would be no trouble at all.

It was a fast-paced game and by the fifth chukker the horses’ flanks were steaming and most of the riders were swinging wild.
Only Nigel was able to sustain the tight grip of horse and mallet that guaranteed control of the ball—and his team’s victory.

Afterward, we followed Halliday’s silver Mercedes through a fieldstone archway and on past a small lake dotted with swans,
on between wildly blooming fruit trees to a country palace that belonged on the cover of
House Beautiful.
After some discussion, it was agreed that Mum and Lydia would tour the house, “the riders” head to the stable. I chose to
be a rider.

On one side of the path a squadron of black-faced jockeys stood holding lanterns, on the other a cluster of cherubs peed into
an enormous swimming pool. In the stable yard wing-footed huntsmen shot water into a fountain. Frozen midget slaves seemed
a recurring motif.

Fortunately Halliday’s stable boy was full-scale and alive, and in minutes I was astride a white filly named Lotus, my father
and Nigel on
stallions. As Nigel led the way down a steep bank and across a narrow stream, I concentrated, kept my back straight, thighs
tight, reins loose under my thumbs as I’d learned from my lessons.

We reached a glen where the trail was wide and flat, and Nigel nudged his mount to a trot. Our horses quickly followed suit,
and I fought the impulse to flop back in the saddle. Though my rhythm was uneven, I managed to get enough control to convince
myself I was posting.

At the edge of a freshly mowed meadow, Nigel upped the ante again, and the three of us took off in a canter that sent me lurching
forward with one hand clutching the pommel, the other Lotus’s mane. I inhaled the horse’s warm, musty odor, the surrounding
scent of cut grass.

Dad glanced back and smiled. “Keep it up!”

Nigel heard and misunderstood—or else understood all too well. He dug in his heels and took off at a gallop. My father and
I followed suit, Dad’s shouts to slow down unheeded.

I had too loose a grip on the reins to pull back on the bridle, and without that cue to stop, Lotus instinctively began to
race, running downhill back into the forest, then onto a wide dirt lane, closing the stallion’s lead.

I let my upper body go flat and reached for a hold along the bulging muscles of the filly’s neck. My feet had lifted out of
the stirrups on the first leap forward and though I felt around to reseat them, the stirrups were flapping too wildly and
so I was left with my feet dangling free, clenching the horse with my knees.

The foliage blurred, then spun and blended into a tunnel of green that made me feel as if I were suspended inside a mammoth
wave. The movement seemed to spiral outward, leaving my body and mind quite still and replacing my initial terror with a strange
ethereal joy. I gulped the wind and breathed the fluid movements, surging up and forward with each clap of hooves. It was
a paradise of motion.

Like flying.

The road curled up a long hill that wore Lotus down to a slower pace, still galloping but relenting. Now I dared to lift my
head and saw at the
end of this tunnel of trees the shadow of a horse and rider, black against the light beyond. And my exhilaration gave way
once more to terror.

It was Glabber coming out of the woods.

The demon in the basement.

I wanted to scream, to wake up, but there was no escape. And so, instead, I shut my eyes and hugged Lotus even tighter.

She must have picked up the tension in my body, because just as we reached the edge of the forest she did a nervous two-step
and came to an abrupt stop. I would have hurtled straight to the ground, but my fingers were so deeply entwined in her mane
that, when my hips launched into space, my hands were held in place. I was drawn into a smooth rotating slide, my body falling
right around until I hung like a human kerchief under the animal’s throat. Whether out of fear or relief I’m not sure, but
I started giggling as I hung and soon was laughing uncontrollably.

I suppose the sight of me was pretty funny, and Halliday began laughing, too. Then my father, who’d been thrown while giving
chase, came straggling up the hill on foot just ahead of his horse.

He was not amused.

I dropped to my feet and ducked out from under the horse’s cheek. “I’m okay,” I said.

Dad gripped my shoulders as he checked me over.

“Really, I’m fine.” But I was actually shaking, and so was he. I squeezed his hand to reassure him.

“Hell of a rider, you have there.” Nigel joined us on the ground. “Now, you, old man, I’m not so sure of. Made a bit of a
side trip there, eh what?”

“I see you haven’t lost your touch.” But to my surprise Dad didn’t sound angry. No, his voice was flat, stunned, the same
as it had been on the night the Chinatown chicken died.

“I’m
all right!”
I insisted.

“Well, Mei Mei,” my father said quietly, “enough riding. We’ll walk the horses back from here.”

A few steps on he whispered in my ear. “Let’s not tell Mum you fell off the horse.”

I smiled. “You fell off
your
horse, you mean.”

“That either.”

Back at the house, Nigel led us through an immaculate parlor to a solarium where the women sat chatting. Dad and I took chairs
next to Mum. Nigel seated himself on an overstuffed sofa across from his wife and extended one leg in midair.