Authors: Karen Shepard
The Celestials (34 page)
Sampson returned the wave as if in a parade, and Charlie gave the baby a bow.
“Say good-bye, Alice,” Julia whispered into the pucker of her daughter's perfect ear. “That's my good girl. That's my own good girl.”
On Wednesday the twenty-seventh of September 1893, Charlie Sing descended the metal steps of the 6:15 from New York City. The sun was low, its light a pale mix of summer and the promise of winter. Its heat was pushed aside by the briefest of breezes and he wished he had carried a warmer coat. He had not expected to return to North Adams in this lifetime and felt the wary anticipation of a disobedient dog returning to an owner's outstretched hand.
Sampson was dying. Charlie and Ida had known for weeks, since Lucy Robinson's letter. But a second, more recent, missive contained the unexpected news that Julia, too, was ill. From the shock of her husband's failing health and the fatigue of caring for him, the doctors were saying. Neither was expected to survive the week. Ida read aloud, standing at their kitchen window on Third Avenue in New York City. She had been his wife for over fifteen years. They
had married in the United Baptist Church, Richardsville, Virginia, before God and Ida's wary mother, grim father, and six angry brothers on the twenty-third of July 1878. She was the mother of their five surviving children, whose sounds in the small apartment filled him with pleasure. Each time Ida had carried a child, the adjustments to her figure had amazed them both. Having missed this experience with Julia, he had found the incremental changes riveting and tremendous, as if he'd been allowed to glimpse the busy life of an underwater world. Watching her negotiate the maneuvers of daily life, he had been filled with warmth and gratitude, and had often crossed the room to take her hand and press it to his mouth.
Lucy's second letter did not mention Alice, and they did not speak direct of her either, but Ida looked up from the small, neat pages and said, “You must go.”
On September 27, Alice May Sampson woke before light. She was two months beyond her twentieth birthday and lying in her childhood bed, surrounded by the detritus of her early life, felt herself ill-equipped to manage what needed managing. Though the Wilson House apartment had been busy with strangers and friends, clergy and physicians, she felt, as she often did, that what was of relevant concern to those around her did not bear on her own province.
In late June, her father's health had showed some improvement, and the Sampson family had returned to North Adams from their home of the last three years, Washington, DC, with wary hopes and cautious optimism. Her father's
meetings with friends were cheery, and she grew impatient with the length of time the short walk through the lobby of the Wilson House and down only a block of Main Street took, halted as they were by well-wishers of all shapes and sizes, people at whom she smiled and nodded whether she recalled them or not.
She resented this as she always resented time with her father taken from her. She had spent most of her young life feeling as though she were in competition for his attentions. On one side of the field stood clergy and bankers, hospital builders and school fund-raisers, sadness and regret, missionary societies and worthy individuals, bravado and pride. On the other, Alice. She had felt more guilt than usual about this resentment when, by late August, his health had taken one turn for the worse after another, and the family left for Saratoga in search of some relief. Less than a month later, a week prior, they had returned to North Adams, none of them relieved of their sufferings. It had been necessary to have her father transported in a chair from carriage to apartment, which Alice found both saddening and mortifying.
Of her mother's affections, Alice had always had an overabundance, now more than ever. Her mother could not pass by her without laying a hand on her head or shoulder. She kissed her when she sat to eat. She embraced her when she left the house. Such gestures made Alice feel as if her mother were an extra cloak, a feeling that was equal parts care and suffocation.
Perhaps because of such ministrations, her mother's own failure had not occurred to Alice as a possibility, so when
Dr. Carr had informed her on the evening of Friday last that her mother had been stricken with a kind of shock, most likely brought on by her concern over her husband, Alice had stared at him pleasantly for a moment. There must be an error in his figuring. But by the next morning, when both Doctors Carr and May concurred that her mother suffered from Bright's disease, an ailment of the kidneys, and Alice had gone to her mother's chambers and seen her face, she would not have been surprised to learn that by week's end she would lose both parents.
She could not stand to be in either's room. She felt that between the professional and capable hands of the doctors and Lucy and the hotel staff, there was nothing she could offer. She was impatient with their presence, but lived in fear that everyone would quit the apartment, leaving her the only person to ease the suffering. She found herself spending what she hoped was not an unduly noticeable amount of time sitting at the window of the front room. There she could make a pretense of keeping watch, of greeting visitors. She tried to strike a pose that suggested she was available for help.
Charlie had come to Ida when there was nowhere else to go. Ida had known that even then. Julia and Alice had returned to North Adams early in 1874, after less than six months away, responding, as she had always said she would, to Sampson's assurances that he was ready to be father as well as husband. He had written her on paper torn from a ledger book, which had instantly endeared him to her, as
had the fact of the letter itself, knowing as she did how rarely he undertook that particular endeavor. He had written,
It is true that my knowledge of that other man is hideous torment to me. But it is also true that without you, I am a man alone at the bottom of a vast mountain, my face lifted to the sheer expanse above me. Without you, I am this man for time eternal
. She had held the letter up for baby Alice and had said, “You see. He is our own Calvin Sampson after all.”
After their return to North Adams, after Julia and Sampson, Alice between them, had settled into life in all their wary ways, after the town's interest in all of them had faded away like a footprint in sand, to Charlie it had seemed as though he were watching three children playing house on a wide expanse of thin ice, melt already slick across its surface. Everything he did communicated his determination to present himself as a viable alternative to the choice Julia had made. He quit the factory. He made a declaration for citizenship.
He abandoned the Methodists and, on a chilly day in March 1875, was received into the Sampsons' Baptist church. The Sampsons attended the baptism, as did Ida and Lucy, gathering with the other congregants around the baptistery and reciting Matthew 28:19 in one voice before Charlie was lowered backward beneath the water while Ida stole an appraising look at Julia.
His citizenship was granted by Chief Justice Horace Gray after an examination before the judge in September of 1876. In the same year, regular service commenced through the Hoosac Tunnel, California Democrats staged
an anti-Chinese rally that attracted a crowd of twenty-five thousand, and less than one percent of the Chinese in America were citizens.
He opened his own wholesale and retail store, funded in small part by an investment from the Sampsons. He specialized in Chinese curios, coffees, and teas, and the
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praised his latest endeavor for its very large stock of heavy groceries, consisting of flour, syrups, molasses, etc., selling at extremely low prices for cash. Sing's motto in business, the
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revealed, was “Pay for what you get, and be sure and get what you pay for.” He was, in the minds of the townsfolk, if not one of their own, certainly one their own could now wholeheartedly embrace. They frequented his shop. They inquired after his health. They prayed alongside his kneeling form.
Shortly before Christmas of 1877, Alice appeared in the store, her four-year-old head barely clearing the counter. She had maintained the sober demeanor of her infancy, and Charlie, staring down at her from behind the cash register, felt as if beholding a grown woman from a land of diminutive people.
If he was surprised to see her unattended, he did not show it. “Can I help you?” he asked.
She wanted to buy a gift for her mother. “I have money,” she said, opening a small purse and showing him the several coins within.
He nodded solemnly.
And so he found himself treating his daughter as he would have treated any customer. He displayed his wares
with respect and circumspection. He selected a wide array of items that he thought her mother might like, his heart in a state of exquisite misery, and then he stepped back in his usual way, allowing the final election to be the customer's alone.
While Alice decided between a spray of silk flowers and a small carving of a dog, he studied her. Her hair was as black as his own. As she concentrated, her mouth turned down slightly, her eyebrows gathered toward each other. Her lips moved in small ways, as if in quiet discussion with herself. She handled the objects with excessive care. How could he stand encounters such as these? How could he not?
“They are both very nice,” he offered.
She regarded him, her brow still knit. “You are very tall for a Chinaman,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I am.”
“
I
am very tall,” she said and returned her attentions to the items before her.
He waited. He had spent so much time over the last few years catching glimpses of his daughter, trying to discern himself in her, that it had not occurred to him that those similarities might someday present themselves to her. He imagined her holding him in her attention and announcing that they looked very much alike.
But she flipped the dog upside down and examined its underside. She held the flowers out at arm's length and then pulled them in, holding them by her waist.
He suggested the flowers. “Your mother likes flowers,” he said.
She eyed him, then pushed the dog across the counter and opened her purse.
“A good choice,” he said, wrapping the gift and pressing it into her tiny gloved hand.
The front door opened and a flustered Julia swept in. She folded Alice into her arms and chided her for running off on her own. Her face was very near the girl's and he remembered how whenever Julia had discussed something she felt of great importance, she had moved her face closer to his.
Here we are
, he thought.
Mother, daughter, and father
.
Julia looked up at him. “I'm so sorry,” she said. “I hope she was not too much of a disturbance.”
She turned to Alice. “Apologize to Mr. Sing,” she prompted.
“I'm sorry, Mr. Sing,” Alice said.
Mr. Sing
, he thought.
“Apologies not necessary,” he said to both of them. “No disturbance at all.”
Shortly after that visit, Charlie Sing sat for one last portrait. It was notable for several reasons, not the least of which was the wry upward tilt of his mouth, as if he and the viewer shared some secret knowledge. He presented himself as the wise elder, his hands on the shoulders of two seated younger chargesâtwo Celestials still at work in Sampson's bottoming room. All of them were in Western suits, the gold chain of a pocket watch like Sampson's draped casually across a worsted vest. One wore a straw hat. The
backdrop and props worked to suggest the outdoors. He imagined standing before Julia in such a way as to appear an appropriate and even desirable partner. He hoped the photograph would communicate force and staying power. He hoped she would look at it and see a man who had conquered strikebreaking and shoemaking and was now turning his eye to further successes. He hoped she would see an American. But she was, apparently, unwilling to entertain him alone, and so the door to the Sampson apartment was opened by Sampson himself, and Charlie found himself politely greeting husband and wife, little Alice peering at them all from the settee upon which she was occupied with an oversized picture book.
His aspirations for this visit had been so high that he refused at first to see the scope of his failure, refused to see husband and wife exchange a quick glance after viewing the print, refused to hear the bemusement in Sampson's voice as he exclaimed at the most unusual way the photographer had brought leaves and twigs into the scene. He chose instead to offer the photograph as a gift to both of them, to accept Sampson's offers of tea as well as biscuits, and to smile and make conversation with his former employer. He wished Julia had studied the photograph longer. He wished she had entered the conversation. He wished to be able to join her on the hearth rug with Alice and her wooden blocks. He anticipated with dread having to take his leave.
For a time, he displayed his copy of the photograph at one end of his store's front counter.
Ida had remained in North Adams, working at Lucy's former sewing business, continuing the occasional English lesson with Mr. Sing. She watched him despair over the question of how someone could make do when on the other side of the road there was the possibility of so much more, until she could stand it no longer. His desire for Julia and their child was for Ida an animal too large for this world. It would have been easier if feelings such as these did not exist at all. As it was, seeing them but being unable to touch them herself was a torment. So she had left, returning in late 1877 to Virginia and her father, her ailing mother, and her brothers.