Night in Shanghai (3 page)

The money Lin Ming had quoted him seemed to override such concerns, not to mention his own insufficient skills: fifty dollars a week for band members, and one hundred dollars a week for him, the leader. Granted, those were Shanghai dollars, worth only a third of American, but Lin had said Shanghai prices were as low as dirt—twelve dollars for a tailor-made suit, two for dinner in a restaurant, three dollars for a woman, all night. And in Shanghai he could have any woman, no race laws, a thought that would not stop tugging at him as they steamed across the Pacific.

At home, in Maryland, he’d had his share of white women. Sometimes, when he played a party, he got lucky with a good-time girl afterward, and once in a while, when he was performing as an Egyptian or an Argentine, that girl would be white. None of them were the kind of girls he could know, or call on; they were janes, party girls, girls with bobbed hair and short flapper skirts who liked to be drunk every night, and were still young and pretty enough to do it. Actually there were very few girls back in Baltimore that he could call on, because he had never earned enough money to court the kind of respectable girl he wanted. He hoped Shanghai was going to be different.

On the ship, in his tiny metal-riveted cabin, in the small mirror screwed to the wall, he assessed his face as he tried to put his hopes in order. He took after his father’s family, everyone always said so, light-skinned people. His father’s mother had been a teacher, and her father a chemist and an officer in the Twenty-fifth Infantry regiment in the Indian Wars. He had inherited his father’s looks and his mother’s ear for music, which came in turn from her own mother. But that grandmother fell in love with a landowning man during the Reconstruction years and became a farm wife outside Easton on the Chesapeake’s far shore. She never wavered, his grandmother; a cream and tan beauty in her youth, she played the rest of her life on a parlor upright, performing works that asked hard, crashing questions with no easy answers, pouring through open windows to dissipate in the tangled woods. He had loved that place.

But it was gone, separated from him first by a continent on the rails, and now by the blue Pacific. He had never been at sea before, or on any vessel larger than the flat-bottomed scow he and his cousins had used to explore the tributaries of the Chesapeake up and down Talbot County. He stayed in his cabin that whole first day aboard ship, so afraid was he. It was not until the sun was dropping into the December horizon that he heard the thump of music from Lin Ming’s cabin, and stood with his ear to the metal wall. He knew the song, he had heard it on the radio, back on Creel Street—“Memphis Blues,” by Fletcher Henderson. In a rush of longing, home came back to him, the velvet air, damp and biting in winter, sweet in summer. He almost heard the far-off roar of the crowd at an Orioles game, the slipping, satisfying ring of leather shoes on white marble steps. He had left that world, but not its music, for that had crossed the ocean and was here with him, making him bold. He stepped out and knocked on Lin Ming’s door.

His knuckle had barely touched the metal when the door swung back. Lin looked at him like a thirsty man seeing water; farther along, Thomas would understand how much the other man hated to be alone. “Come in! I thought you would never be emerging. What?” He followed Thomas’s gaze to his ankle-length Chinese gown, slit up each side for easy movement, worn over trousers. “You never saw one? It is freedom. Try sometime. You like Fletcher Henderson?”

“Very much,” said Thomas, always appreciative of the musician’s formality and control.

Lin looked pleased. “He is high level. And to me, he sounds like someone who works from the sheet music. Like you. What’s wrong? You look like you want to show a clean pair of heels! Don’t be embarrassed. I could see that you work by the reading and writing. Now here.” He piled a stack of seventy-eights into Thomas’s arms. “Take these to your room. Take my gramophone. These are songs the Kansas City Kings play, and we have twenty-two days to Shanghai, enough time for you to write them out. At least you can arrive with something.”

Raised on obstacles, Thomas felt the surprise of gratitude almost like a blow. In his experience, one got help from friends, from family, not outsiders. “Thank you.”

Lin waved him away. “Don’t thank me yet. I am taking you to China, where things are as precarious as a pile of eggs. Japan is invading us, they need land and food and the labor of our millions. They already occupy part of the north and are pushing south. China should be united to fight them, but we are divided into the two sides who want to kill each other—the Nationalists and Communists.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“Neither. And I tell you why. The Nationalists and Communists may be poles apart, heaven in the north and the earth in the south, but they do agree on one thing—they think jazz is a dangerous element, and must be banned. So! How can I support either side?”

“Ban jazz?”

“I know.” Lin shook his head. “The arrogance. One hundred mouths could not explain it away. And how could the government ever ban any type of music anyway? This is the age of radio! But Little Greene, listen.” He had started using the nickname on account of Thomas being twenty-five to his twenty-eight. “When you get to Shanghai, Japanese people will try to tell you we Chinese are incapable of governing ourselves. That is their superstition, that we are lazy and disorganized, stupid, we are children who need them to take care of us. They will tell you that we want them there.”

“I don’t think they’ll tell
me
anything. I’m a musician.”

“Just remember, no matter what they say, do not believe it. They want us as their slaves.” He stretched, settled his gown, and said, “I am dying of the hunger. Let us go to dinner.”

It was the twentieth of December when they finally steamed up the Huangpu, watching from the rail in the cold as lines of coolies carried goods to and from the docks at the water’s edge. They sailed around a turn in the river and the Bund came into view, an imposing colonnaded line of eclectic façades topped with cupolas and clock towers. Behind it crouched a city of low brown buildings.

The ship dropped anchor, and passengers lined up to board the lighter that would take them to shore. He could see the Bund was thick with traffic, its sidewalks crowded. The energy seemed to come right through his feet the moment they bumped the dock and he stepped on the ground again, dear solid ground; he dodged through the crowd behind Lin Ming. All around them passengers swirled away to meet friends, relatives, and servants, then dispersed across a narrow strip of grass directly onto the boulevard.

“No customs?” said Thomas, for they had simply walked ashore, without even showing their identification.

“A free port,” Lin said proudly. “All are welcome.”

On the sidewalk, the air rang with a dozen languages. They were surrounded by men in Chinese gowns and padded jackets, and wand-like women in high-necked dresses and sumptuous fur wraps. Other men passed wearing tunics from India and robes from Arabia, some with faces darker than his own. Suddenly he was not different anymore, everybody was different. No one looked twice at him, for the first time in his life. And no one cared that he stood right there on the sidewalk, neither deferring nor giving way nor lifting his hand to tip his hat, which was in itself a marvel. Even a few pale foreign women in their tick-tock heels and woolen coats walked right past him, unconcerned. He could feel a grin growing on his face.

“Over here,” Lin Ming called, and Thomas saw him holding open the door to a black car. Rarely had Thomas ridden in a private car, but he slid in now, the smooth, fragrant leather and the murmur of the engine enveloping him. Shanghai was a fairy world, he decided as they drove along the river with its endless docks and braying vessels of all shapes and sizes.

The city was mighty, yet Thomas could see hints of the war Lin had described, too: clots of soldiers in brown uniforms standing along the wharves, puttees tight to their knees and rifles hooked casually on their shoulders.

“Japanese,” Lin confirmed.

“I thought you said they had only taken over the northeast.”

“Yes. Shanghai still belongs to China. But there was trouble four years ago, in ’thirty-two—fighting—and the foreign powers forced a cease-fire by promising that only Japan could have troops in Shanghai. China could not.”

“No Chinese troops here? But it is a Chinese city.”

“Correct.” Lin dripped dark irony.

“How could foreign powers force China to accept a thing like that?”

Lin almost wanted to laugh. “You are forgetting what I told you on the voyage. Shanghai is the city of foreign Concessions. Little colonies, each owned by another country. The city seems very free to you foreigners, but we Chinese must serve someone else. Do not forget that. You are a
jueshi jia
, a jazz man, you of all people should understand that we are not free. Up ahead, you see that row of docks? The Quai de France? That is the Frenchtown. This part now, we pass through? This is the International Settlement, belongs to Britain and America.”

“Like foreign colonies,” said Thomas.

“Concessions,” Lin corrected him, and said something musical in light, tapping tones to the driver, who made a right turn. “And here is the Avenue Édouard VII, the border of Frenchtown.”

Thomas saw that the street signs on the right were in Chinese, while suddenly on the left, he read Rue Petit, Rue Tourane, Rue Saigon. The buildings here had red stone façades with tall French doors and wrought-iron balconies, and between the cross-streets, small lanes led away. Peering into these, he saw women carrying vegetables for the evening meal, young girls in groups with their arms linked, grannies shepherding little children. It was as foreign as it could be, yet faintly familiar.

The false sense of welcome evaporated when Lin cut into his thoughts. “There is one thing you must know about the International Settlement, the district we just left behind—there are race laws.”

“What did you say?”

“It is shared by England and America, but they have the American race laws. Like your South.”

“Like the
South?
” Thomas felt his head squeezed. Here? On the other side of the world?

“Now, now,” said Lin, “do not react so. You are seeing a serpent’s image in a wine cup. It is only in that one district, and they will love you everyplace else, especially here, in Frenchtown, where they are crazy for musicians like you. Everyone will think you are exotic.”

Thomas sank back into the seat. Only one district? There was no way he was going to avoid the International Settlement, for it included the center of the city, the downtown, the docks, the Bund. He mulled this new worry as they rolled through Frenchtown.

“Look,” said Lin, “here we are.” They had stopped before a wrought-iron gate leading to a small front courtyard and a large house. Its European-style stone façade and tall windows were topped by upturned Chinese eaves; four or five bedrooms at least, Thomas thought, nothing like the small apartment in which he had been brought up.
We are gentlefolk
, his mother had always said, but that had been more a philosophy than a reality. The longing stabbed through him to have his own room; that would be a fine thing, after all the cramped and crowded places he had rested his head since his mother had passed. “How many of the fellows live here?”

Lin was already up the front steps. “Just you,” he said over his shoulder.

Impossible
, he thought, stepping up just as the door opened to a middle-aged Chinese man in a white tunic. Two other men and an older woman formed a hasty line behind him.

“Who are these people?” said Thomas. Through the door he glimpsed rosewood wainscoting and an expensive-looking porcelain bowl on the hall table.

“Your servants,” said Lin Ming. “This is Uncle Hua, your steward.”

“Servants?” The first word Thomas attempted to speak in his new household was so thick with disbelief it stuck in his mouth.

Uncle Hua joined his fists before his chest, and lowered his eyes deferentially. “Yes, Master,” he said.

Jesus, was it only yesterday?
was his amazed thought as he and Alonzo dismounted from the rickshaw in front of the Royal. The older man unlocked the lobby door, and dropped the brass key in Thomas’s hand. “This was Augustus’s key.”

It felt heavy and cold to Thomas. The bandleader he was replacing had died of a heart attack, in a brothel, and as he slipped the key into his pocket, he understood with a lurch that the house, the servants, the piano in the parlor, even the bed with its silk quilts must have belonged to Augustus too. Now their footsteps were shushing across the empty marble floors of the lobby, through the arch. Across the ballroom, on the stage, ten other men waited in a pearly circle of light, their legs crossed, loose-trousered, instruments on their laps.

Thomas got up beside the piano, one hand on the lid to cover his tremble. He knew he was a liar, and soon they would know too. “First, before anything else, my sympathy to every one of you for the loss of Augustus Jones. It was a shock, and I’m sorry. But now we have ten days before the theater reopens on New Year’s Eve. I know fourteen of your songs. That’s not enough, and I aim to learn the rest just as fast as I can. Hope you’ll bear with me.”

A resentful mumble circled the room.

A squat, short-legged man with a French horn cradled in his lap said, “How come you don’t know the songs? Where’d you play before?”

Sweat trickled as Thomas tried to deliver the answer he had worked out earlier. “Various places. Pittsburgh, Richmond, Wilmington.” In fact, with the exception of Wilmington, Thomas had never even visited those places. He was hoping none of the band members had either. “Let’s start with your signature tune—‘Exactly Like You
.’” The 1930 song, perennially popular on the radio, was sweet and simple, easy to play. He had practiced it. But as soon as he started it, instead of falling in with him, the others stayed in for only a phrase or two, and dropped off. He stopped. “What?”

“You gotta be kidding,” said the other horn player, whose jowls seemed to hang straight from the point of his chin to his collar.