The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (20 page)

Zhu
says no more. Li’l Lucy is heading for trouble.

“Why
in the blue blazes,” Li’l Lucy says, swallowing the shot and pouring out
another, “would Pichetta rat on me when I pay her? Huh? That don’t make no
sense, Miss Zhu.”

“Take
care of yourself, kid,” Zhu says. “Just take care of yourself.” Under Tenet
Three of the Grandmother Principle, she’s not allowed to help Li’l Lucy, but
that’s not the worst of it. In truth, she doesn’t know what she can do to help
Li’l Lucy even if she could. “Did anything come for me by post?”

“Why,
yes.” Li’l Lucy stumbles to the foyer. There, behind an umbrella stand, is a
package wrapped in string and brown paper. She picks it up. “You mean this?”

“That’s
it!” At last, the package Zhu has been waiting for. Muse was right, it’s here!

Li’l
Lucy shakes the package, listening for telltale sounds. “Is it from a
gentleman?”

“No.
Give that to me!”

Zhu
lunges, and Li’l Lucy holds the package high over her head, ducking away,
giggling. She darts across the parlor, trying to read the label. Li’l Lucy
hasn’t had more than a third-grade education. “Go. . . .gold. See? I know
‘gold!’ Tray. . . .tray. . . .”

“It
says Lucky Gold Trading Company. Now hand it over.”

“Why,
that’s in dirty ol’ Chinatown. Did you order somethin’ from a Chinaman’s store?
Oh, I bet I know. You got yourself some of them pink silk bloomers everybody’s
talkin’ about. Can I see? Oh, please, please?”

“It’s
not, but would you like pink silk bloomers?”

“Oh,
yes, and Miss Malone keeps promisin’, but you know what a skinflint she can be.”

“Give
me my package, and I’ll buy you pink silk bloomers.”

“You
would do that for me?” Tears start in Li’l Lucy’s eyes. “You really would?”

“Of
course.” Zhu looks away, embarrassed. Li’l Lucy is like a beaten animal. The
slightest kindness overwhelms her. “Is your bedroom empty?”

“Help
yourself.”

Zhu
runs upstairs with her package, finds Li’l Lucy’s room, and locks the door
behind her. She dared not request delivery at the boardinghouse. If Jessie
intercepted the package—and Jessie has to know everything that goes on at her
private residence—she would never understand. Instead, Zhu told the clerk at
Lucky Gold Trading Company to deliver the order in her name to the Mansion for
a manservant employed there. Now she tears at the string, rips the package open.

There,
in the crisp brown wrapping paper, is a pair of loose trousers made of soft
blue denim and a long matching tunic, specially cut nice and loose to her
measurements. It’s called a
sahm
, the customary garb the men of
Chinatown wear. There is a pair of cloth slippers with straw soles, too. She
tears off her hat and veil, the cloak, the shirtwaist, the strangling collar,
the skirt, the underskirt, the slip, the bloomers, the garters, the stockings.
She unlaces the corset and tears it off, breathing gratefully.

“You
must maintain authenticity, Z. Wong,” Muse says sternly.

“Buzz
off, Muse. I don’t need a corset in a
sahm
.”

She
slips everything on. What freedom! Is this really the freedom she so casually took
for granted three long months ago before she stepped onto the bridge in the
Japanese Tea Garden? Yes! Everything feels so loose and easy. The sleeves of
her new tunic hang inches below her fingertips, concealing her feminine hands.
She unwinds her braid from around her head and lets it hang down her back like
a queue. She rummages in the package. Joy! The clerk didn’t fail her. She takes
out the soft, charcoal-gray felt fedora with a high crown and a broad brim. A
Western-style hat like many men in Chinatown wear. She pulls the brim down low,
concealing her brow and her eyes. She rummages in the package again. Ah-ha! The
final touch. Spectacles with round lenses tinted a beautiful watery shade of
sea green. She pushes the spectacles up her nose. Between the hat and the
glasses, she conceals nearly half her face. Conceals her gene-tweaked eyes.

She
stands before Li’l Lucy’s mirror, slouching her shoulders, lowering her chin. She
looks crude and common, just like a slim Chinese man. She could pass for any
one of the tens of thousands of bachelors who crowd Chinatown. She looks
anonymous.

Excellent.
Exactly what she wants.

Zhu
hides her clothes in a corner of Li’l Lucy’s closet, then silently pads
downstairs. Her slippers whisper on the Persian carpets. Li’l Lucy sits again
at the calliope, the half-empty whiskey bottle on the bench beside her. Between
Myrtle and Pichetta, the parlor is tidy again and fragrant with fresh roses and
lilac water.

Daphne
the door maid, a robust German woman with a harelip, has materialized at last.
She heaves herself onto the couch and gulps a mug of beer.

The
doorbell rings. Li’l Lucy leaps up, adjusts her slip, checks her face in a
gilt-framed mirror, and smooths away tears from her eyes.

“Company,
girls!” Daphne yells and slaps Li’l Lucy’s sagging butt as she ambles to the
door.

Two
women stumble out of their bedrooms and down the stairs, cursing, pulling on
silk chemises, hands fluttering at their hair.

“I
ain’t had more’n four hours of sleep today.”

“I
ain’t had more’n four hours of sleep this year.”

They
laugh and groan, striding past her. Someone bites into a clove, releasing spicy
scent. Zhu bends to examine a brass spittoon. The women pass her without a
single glance.

As
if she were invisible.

Very
excellent.

*  
*   *

Zhu
treks down Dupont Street to a completely different neighborhood along this thoroughfare.
From a block away, she spies the tumbledown Stick-Eastlake town houses huddled
on the narrow streets, the exotic jury-rigged rooftops. A pall hangs before the
intersection at Dupont and Post like an invisible curtain. Invisible, but very
real. The boundaries of the neighborhood are so well marked—California Street
to Broadway, Kearney Street to Powell—that when a tong war rages or bubonic
plague breaks out, the police simply barricade all those intersections. The
street sweepers never venture here with their Studebaker wagons. The shadowed
cobblestones are always slick with mud, butcher shop blood, fish juice, and
spittle.

Zhu
steps across that intersection into Chinatown. What people call the “City of
the People of Tan”--Tangrenbu.

She
enters a peculiar silence. The sounds of downtown—horses trotting, bootheels
clattering—are suddenly hushed. Somber men stride by in denim
sahms
,
straw slippers, queues wrapped tightly around their heads or trailing down
their backs. They wear felt fedoras like Zhu’s, brimless embroidered caps, or
the peasant’s broad-brimmed straw cone.

She
is overwhelmed by a distinctive stench: raw sewage infused with the scent of
sandalwood, the spice of ginger, cloying incense. A sickly sweet smell mingles
with scents of roast pork and frying peanut oil—the odor of opium. Opium is
legally imported by those willing to pay the tariff and illegally smuggled by
those who would rather keep the extra twelve dollars a pound for themselves.
Nowhere else and nowhen else has Zhu ever smelled such a unique blend of
olfactory stimulation. The essence of Tangrenbu.

Zhu
steels herself. She knows the history—Muse has filled her in on many a long
sleepless night.

Chinatowns
are scattered through the West, but only San Francisco’s Chinatown is known as
Tangrenbu. For decades, Tangrenbu has been the primary port of entry for
immigrants from the Far East. The bachelors who fled the war-torn,
drought-ridden homeland in the 1850s came to California—
Gum Saan
or Gold
Mountain—seeking their fortunes. They panned streams in the Sierras, seeking
out rich veins hidden behind shafts deserted by less patient Forty-niners, only
to be terrorized, robbed of their findings, or murdered by gangs of mountain
men. They planted vegetables, coaxing lettuce, onions, and celery from soil
abandoned by less diligent farmers. They set up small factories—dubbed sweatshops
because they worked long hours for little pay—producing boots, trousers, or
cigars. They willingly performed women’s work---cooking and cleaning—and opened
restaurants or laundries of such skill that the fine gentlemen of the West Coast
no longer sent their shirts to Hong Kong by steamship for proper washing,
starching, and ironing, but patronized the local laundries. The bachelors toiled
sixteen hours a day laying track for Mr. Huntington’s transcontinental
railroad, taking half the wage—a dollar-fifty a day—other workmen demanded. And
when the Golden Spike was driven and the great task completed, opening up the
West to the rest of America, they returned to their port of entry, to their
home away from the homeland, to the only place they could go. They returned to
Tangrenbu.

To those
with a poetic bent, the enigmatic industrious aliens—young men who came without
their families, wives, or children—were called the Celestials. To American politicians
and American laborers--fearful of the possible immigration of half a billion
workers in a stuttering economy—they were called the Yellow Peril.

Few
Americans were feeling poetic in 1873 when Jay Cooke, who financed the Union
army, squandered $15 million on five hundred miles of Northern Pacific track
and failed to float a bond issue of $100 million to complete the job. Mr. Cooke
announced that his bank could not pay depositors on demand. The subsequent bank
panic caused a stock market crash. Debtors defaulted on loans, business owners
slashed payrolls. Bankruptcy and unemployment ran rampant. The ensuing
depression lasted a grueling five years and, in its wake, arose militant
sandlot movements, angry mobs, and violent gangs who roamed the cities seeking
loot and revenge. There were riots, hangings, stonings, burnings. British and
Irish and German and Italian immigrants seeking a better life in America welcomed
no one new in an increasingly competitive job market.

How
much the world has changed, Zhu thinks, striding down Dupont Street into Chinatown.
And how much the world has stayed the same. Now she joins the throng of silent men.
Men everywhere, but no Chinese women or children.

During
the past three months when Zhu wandered through Chinatown in her Western lady’s
clothes, a shopping basket on her arm, she was a barely tolerated intruder in
Tangrenbu. Yet, veil drawn over her face, passing for Caucasian, she never
feared for her safety, either. Neither whore nor slave, she was untouchable,
and the bachelors gave her a wide berth.

But
as a Western lady, she couldn’t venture down the alleys where Wing Sing could
be held captive. The bachelors would always turn her away, block her path, or
unceremoniously escort her clear out of Tangrenbu. When she asked about a girl
in apple-green silk, all she got was a blank stare or a frown.

Now,
as an anonymous bachelor, Zhu can go anywhere. No one turns her away from any
place in Tangrenbu. Now hands beckon, shadowed doors swing open, secret smiles
greet her as she hikes down the sloping block.

“Well
done, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers. “Your disguise is working.”

Yes!
For the first time in three months, she doesn’t have to hurry through
Tangrenbu, searching in vain for Wing Sing. She saunters at her leisure. She
belongs. She ducks out of the pedestrian traffic, pauses on a street corner.
She takes off the tinted spectacles and looks around.

A
certain splendor adorns Tangrenbu. From the plain facades of the Stick houses jut
elaborate balconies painted yellow or green. Vermilion paper bulletins punctuated
with ebony calligraphy cover every available wall, announcing local and
international news. Gilt signs and flowered lanterns hang in doorways. Gleaming
brass plaques of the T’ai Chi tacked on lintels bring good luck. Silk streamers
tied to railings drift in the wind amid tinkling wind chimes made of abalone
shell. Potted geraniums, stunted fuchsia, cineraria, and starry lilies seek sun
in stray nooks and corners.

Elaborate
gingerbread, a curving roof, and gilt balconies adorn a joss house—one of the
multidenominational shrines in which those who worship any number of deities
may stop, rest, and contemplate the divine. Zhu peeks in, sees a shrine in the
back tucked amid candles, smoking incense burners, and glimmering offerings.

She
moves on, passing a few fancy shops amid the vegetable stalls, fishmongers, and
butcher shops. She pauses. A shop window displays brocades and embroideries,
jade and ivory carvings, painted porcelains, jewelry of pearls and coral. She
examines a rack of brooches. Is that the flash of multicolored glass on golden
wings, the golden curves of a tiny woman’s body?

Her
breath catches.

Oh!
Is it the aurelia?

But
no. Her eyes have deceived her. It’s only a tiny dragon wrought of jade and
gold. Lovely, but not the aurelia. Not what she’s searching for. She pushes the
fedora back and rubs her forehead, frustrated.

She
presses on, turning off Dupont, and striding freely through a labyrinth of
alleys previously denied her. She sees a wizened fortune-teller in his black
skullcap and denim
sahm
crouching on the sidewalk with his low table and
a basket of bark, an oracular tome. He had summarily dismissed the Western
lady. Now the fortune-teller looks up at the anonymous bachelor and grins, his
mouth a black slash. He waves her on. This is the place Muse identified in the
Archives as a probable location where Wing Sing could be held captive—Spofford
Alley.