Face (41 page)

T
hat night the phone rang. And rang. I was afraid it would rouse Harriet. I assumed it was Tai and so took the receiver off
the hook. Afraid to sleep, I was just filling the developing tank in preparation for a night in the darkroom when someone
hammered on my door.

“Maibelle.” A man’s voice in a high whisper. I didn’t recognize it.

Telescoped through the peephole, my brother stood waiting outside. I flung open the door to welcome him.

“Good, you’re dressed,” he said. “Your phone’s broken.”

“What’s going on?”

His arms hung, jerking, at his sides.

“Dad’s collapsed.”

My father was in the emergency room at New York Hospital with my mother waiting for the surgeon to arrive. Henry said something
about sending a telegram to Anna, but I couldn’t listen. I was transfixed by an older couple dripping blood. In their late
eighties, someone said. Attempted a double suicide. Dark red stains bloomed like carnations
across their sheets. My father’s lung had collapsed. They’d already taken the X rays. Cancer.

When I finally worked up the courage to look at him, I was astonished to see him blink. It was too hard for him to speak—I
could see the pain clasp his face with each breath—but despite this he gripped my hand. His nails were still bitten to the
quick. His hair was a little damp. The moonpuffs soft and full. His head seemed immense by comparison with the rest of his
body, veiled by a sheet.

Whatever had happened earlier in the evening was pushed aside by the pallor of his skin. No nightmare, nothing that could
happen to me, could possibly be worse than this. I had told him about the hidden pictures, and now he was dying.

My mother leaned over him, kissed his cheek, and rubbed his other hand.

The emergency room seemed unnecessarily dark and, except for the moans of the old people, too quiet. I looked around for someone
to complain to. Some soothing light, music. And heat. This wasn’t a morgue!

My brother put his arm around my shoulders and drew me away.

“Calm down.”

“I’m calm!”

“You’re shaking. You’re crying.”

I hadn’t noticed.

“He’s not dead, Maibelle. We don’t have a prognosis yet. Don’t make it worse than it is.”

But I couldn’t help it. I kept seeing him trying to claw his way up to the plates of food, to the intersection of roads where
he could choose his route of escape.

My brother sat me down. I got up. The doctor arrived. I kissed my father before they wheeled him away. His cheek was icy.

“Give him some blankets!” I yelled down the forbidden hallway. “Can’t you see he’s freezing to death.’”

He’s come out of round one, minus the fallen lung. He may have weeks or months, the doctors tell us. But the cancer has spread
too far for further surgery or chemo.

The first of those weeks passes in a haze of exhaustion and dread. He looks like a high school science experiment with all
the tubes and bottles and computers hooked up to him. His skin has yellowed, his hair leaves grease stains on his pillow.
He can’t speak, but my mother does—about the coming elections, the latest teachers’ strike, a Van Gogh that sold for two million.
My brother hoards the TV controller and channel-surfs. I hold Dad’s hand.

Only if we are alone do I talk to him. I don’t bring up the pictures since I have no proof that they hastened his sickness
and, whether they did or not, he is in no position to discuss them. Or much of anything else, for that matter. So I tell him
stories. Li’s stories, though I don’t mention Li. The Fairy’s Rescue. The Pearl-sewn Shirt. I tell him Chinese versions of
Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella. Sometimes he falls asleep before I finish. Sometimes he stares at the ceiling with that faraway
look. Sometimes I feel his eyes roaming my face as if drinking my image. He gives no sign of protest. I like to think the
stories carry him to another place where he can be young and make new, different choices. The only one I hold back from him
is the one he once told me himself. The Man Who Chopped Trees on the Moon.

My father’s known for weeks about the cancer. He went to the doctor a few days after Mum’s party. After I betrayed her secret.
A connection? That eternal clucking in the back of his throat was not disapproval but disease.

He knew and told none of us that he had been condemned.

We took turns, as families will, standing watch at the hospital. From one day to the next I slept too little to dream, worried
too much for my father to feel my own ineffable terror. I recognized the piercing irony, that it took my father’s devastation
to ward off my own, but there was no relief, either way.

* * *

I went back to my apartment just once that first week, to pack a suitcase to bring uptown. This note was in my mailbox.

I’m sorry, Maibelle. I never meant to push you, never would have if I’d had any idea. If you’d let me know that much more.

I once wrote that silence is a prison and stories a form of refuge. I knew this was true from my own experience, and yet knowing
was not enough. My story held me hostage for twelve years until you gave me the courage to break the silence. I could not
do it alone, could not even have imagined how it would feel. Like coming up out of a well into the light, out of water into
air. Please. Finish telling me your story, so I can try to help you as you have me.

I love you, Maibelle. Believe that.

Tai

When I got back to the hospital, I called David Ling at the seniors’ center and left a message for Tai about my father’s illness.
I wasn’t sure what I was saying. I didn’t answer Tai’s note. “Indefinitely.” I used that word. Several times, I used it.

Otherwise, I didn’t dare think about Tai. I didn’t know if or when I ever would again.

Five days after my father enters the hospital, just when it seems he is out of immediate danger and we can try to formulate
some semblance of a routine, my mother is summoned to the phone at the nurse’s station. She is gone for about ten minutes,
and when she returns, her left eye is twitching. She bends to kiss my father’s cheek.

“Maibelle and I have to go out for a little while, Joe. Henry, you stay here till we get back?” She grabs my elbow. I hardly
have time to scoop
up our coats, which we put on haphazardly while racing down the corridor. The elevator is packed, overheated, no place to
ask questions.

“What’s going on?” I yell as she sails into the grim autumn bluster outside.

She puts two fingers into her mouth and whistles for a cab. I didn’t know she could do that. I never could. I thought only
Henry could. Two taxis vie to claim her. She picks the first, which is not the Checker but a crummy yellow Chevy, something
she would never ordinarily do. She gives the driver the gallery’s address, and he grumbles; it’s only a two-dollar fare.

I slide the inside window shut. “So, what is this?”

Her hair is all over the place. Her coat is buttoned out of order, and her eyes, fixed on the driver’s photograph up front,
look like animal traps.

“Foucault died.”

My initial impulse is to laugh. I stifle it. “That’s what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?”

“Not like this.”

We lurch, skipping through a red light. I’m not sure what she means, and the way her lower lip is trembling, I’m afraid to
ask. The metallic surface, the glint of sharpened teeth, are just cover. My mother’s tenacious bluff. She reaches for my hand
and squeezes hard. Something about it reminds me of when I was very small, when sometimes she’d wear white gloves and take
me shopping, the feel of her hand through the kidskin gripping mine as we crossed the street. Only this time it feels as if
she’s the one who needs to be shepherded across.

The gallery looks dead now, too. She left it closed, pictures hastily removed from the walls when Dad got sick. The only sign
of occupation is the security light in the back. She stares for a moment while I pay for the cab, and sighs as if she’s relieved,
as if she expected maybe to see the whole thing blown away. Then it’s all business and she hurries up the steps. Her key is
in her hand.

I picture Foucault’s beaked face emblazoned on the building’s white
granite front, like one of those great proletarian banners of Lenin or Mao in holograph nodding, blinking, warning us away.
“Mine!” he mouths.

I’ve been without sleep for too long. This is all right. Mum’s finally got what she wants. Her hidden cache at the very least.
After everything she’s been through she’s entitled. When Dad dies, what will it matter?

She is at the lock, worrying the key.

“Come here,” she calls over her shoulder. “Help me with this.”

But it won’t turn. The brass of the tumbler is brighter than the plate, unscratched. And then we hear steps inside. A light
comes on in the foyer. My mother’s nails bite my skin.

A man’s voice from inside calls, “Pull out the key.” A British accent. Young.

I withdraw the key, her hand still clutching my wrist, pushing against me.

We step backward, almost over the step. I catch the belt of her coat to keep her from falling and note again the missed buttonhole.
But there’s no time to change it.

“How d’ye do? You must be Madam Chung. Coralie said you’d be popping ’round.”

He looks like a club bouncer. Large square head with hair too far back, massive shoulders busting out of that houndstooth
suit. A single furrow, an exclamation mark, down between his eyebrows. He’s smiling, extending an open fist. I think of my
grandfather’s flyswatter.

“Who the hell are you!” My mother’s voice booms as she pushes forward. He catches her across the shoulders and shakes his
head, smiling, but not apologizing. The way a parent would stop a child. He’s easily half her age.

“Executors say I’m not to let you in, I’m afraid. ’At’s why we changed the locks, you notice. You’re a sort of persona non
grata, according to the old man’s will.”

She stomps on his foot, twists her body around, reaches for me to move forward. Two against one. I glance at the stairs. I
could slip by
and make it up there, but then what? I don’t care about the rest of her trove, and my father’s work is in the safe.

She wrestles out of his grip and stands glaring up at this hulking obstacle who no doubt is much quicker than he looks. “You’re
out of your mind! I own this gallery!”

“Not the way I read it, mum.”

“Don’t you dare call me that!” Her eyes now belong to the cornered beast caught in her own trap.

“Miss Coralie—”

“How do I know you’re not a burglar? I’ll call the police and have you arrested!”

Never in my life have I seen my mother like this. I pity her, yet she mesmerizes me. I wonder if this is an act. If not, she’s
got even more guts than I realized. This man could kill us both with a single blow, and she’s treating him like a schoolyard
bully.

I lay my hand on her arm. Her whole body is quivering. “You must have some authorization.”

He raises an eyebrow, as if suddenly I’m his coconspirator, and slides a hand inside his jacket. A pellet, dry and frozen,
rattles briefly in my chest, but he pulls out only papers. Papers sealed by a London court and signed, in a shaky scrawl,
by Gerard Foucault. A second order for the guard service is signed by the executors of the estate and undersigned by Coralie
Moutiers, the new president and owner of Galleries Foucault International.