Sarah Canary (33 page)

Chin leaned out over the rail, his long braid spilling forward. Schools of fish were eating the bread that the sea gulls missed. Round rings of mouths showed themselves like a pox at the waterline. Occasionally there was the flash of a silver tail. A seal surfaced among the fish, scattering them, its face wet and shiny, its neck encircled with a collar of water. This was the third seal he’d seen.

Chin counted the seals to ward off his unpleasant boat memories. First, the omen seal he had seen while the earth trembled at Steilacoom Lake. Chin remembered how he had thought the first seal was a woman, just for a moment, before he saw it clearly. The same way he had mistaken the mermaid for a dead child. Second, the seal that had followed Sam’s canoe like a pet dog all the way up the canal from Seabeck to disaster. Chin had almost touched it once or twice with his paddle. And now a third one. They were strange creatures, boneless and wormish, not quite fish and not quite beasts. The third seal called to the steamer with its unlovely voice.

Miss Dixon unpinned the rose from her dress and threw it out, overarm. It hit the water, floated away from the boat. The seal swam up beneath it, tossing it aside. ‘I’ll take you to see the sea lions at the Cliff House,’ she offered, and Chin didn’t know which of them she was speaking to, but he doubted it was him. ‘When we’re settled.’ She replaced the empty pin into the black pleats of cloth at her bosom, brushed the back of Sarah Canary’s hair with her fingers.

‘I’ve been thinking some more about Sarah Canary,’ she added. She folded her arms on the deck rail, gazing out into the waves. The sun made a bright circle like a mirror on the back of her hair, turning it just in that spot from black to gold. ‘One of the pieces of the puzzle is Harold,’ she said. ‘And I don’t know that we’ve paid enough attention to him. If Sarah Canary is just what she seems, harmless, vague . . .’ Chin thought that Sarah Canary had never seemed harmless or vague to him. Mysterious, rather. Possibly powerful. Certainly purposeful. He said nothing. ‘. . . then why is she being trailed by an assassin? Why would anyone want to kill a harmless, vague woman?’ Miss Dixon looked straight into Chin’s face, her eyes large and intense, awaiting his answer. Chin was afraid to look at her eyes.

‘Harold is crazy,’ Chin told her, looking past her to the curving horizon of water. He had no doubts about this. He remembered Harold’s face, like a gargoyle, Harold’s voice, like water on coals, when Chin had first come upon him again sprawled on the floor in the Bay View Hotel with a bloody chopstick in his hand.

‘Maybe not,’ said Miss Dixon. ‘Why does one person want to kill another person?’ She began to count on her fingers. ‘Revenge. The person has done something.’ She held up a second finger. ‘Avarice. The person owns something.’ Three fingers. ‘Fear. The person knows something.’ She dropped her hand back to the rail.

Chin noticed a few omissions. ‘Hate. The person is something,’ he added. Chinese, for instance. A gull had landed on the deck railing near Sarah Canary. It tipped its head, stretched its neck, ruffled its feathers. It watched Chin from the absolute center of one red-rimmed eye.

‘I was just about to say that. Have you ever heard of Caspar Hauser?’ Miss Dixon asked.

‘No.’

‘This is a very mysterious story. Caspar Hauser appeared out of nowhere in Nuremberg about fifty years ago. He looked to be sixteen or seventeen years old. He didn’t speak. He walked only with difficulty. The sun seemed to hurt his eyes. There was a note pinned on to him that said he wanted to join the army. No one knew where he had come from.’ Miss Dixon looked down and the circle of sunlight on her hair became a crown.

‘Later, as he learned to talk, things became even more mysterious. He said he’d been raised entirely secluded inside a closet. The whole time he was growing up, he had no contact with anything or anyone except that three times a day a man’s hand would place his meals into his room. He could remember nothing else, no other life but this. Until the day he left the closet, he never saw any more of the man than his hand. Sometimes the food was drugged, and when he came to, he would be clean, his hair and fingernails cut. Maybe he had some toy horses to play with. I don’t quite remember,’ Miss Dixon said.

‘I heard a story like this once.’ B.J.’s voice was unhappy. ‘Only instead of a closet, he lived in a tower, and instead of toy horses, he had books and lots and lots of wonderful toys and a magic rug, and instead of having trouble walking, he was completely lame, and instead of being alone, he had a godmother who loved him.’ B.J. had complained to Chin that Miss Dixon said a lot of very ugly things. What he really didn’t like about it, B.J. said, was how you couldn’t ever say she wasn’t right. Listening to Miss Dixon was like seeing the mermaid’s face. There it was, but why did you have to look at it? B.J. had resumed his position, back against the deck rail, face tilted sunward, shading his eyes with two hands like the see-no-evil monkey. Chin couldn’t tell what his expression was. ‘This is a nicer story,’ B.J. suggested gently.

‘Yes, it is,’ Miss Dixon agreed. ‘But yours is a fairy tale and mine is true. Caspar lived only a few more years. Because someone kept trying to kill him, someone he identified as the man from the closet. Finally, one day while Caspar was walking in the Hofgarten at Anspach, the man succeeded. They found a lady’s handbag in the snow where Caspar was murdered.’ The wind lifted the hair off Miss Dixon’s cheeks. ‘With a note inside. You’ll like this, B.J. The note was written backwards. You had to read it in a mirror. And even then it didn’t make any sense. But now it seems that Caspar was an heir to the Royal House of Baden. Which is why he was hidden and why he was killed.’

‘Same story,’ B.J. insisted. ‘Except that the king died of natural causes and the prince didn’t die at all. He became the new king. There was a coronation. Everyone was happy about it.’

Another steamer passed them, whistling, pouring out its clouds of white and black smoke. ‘We must be very close,’ said Miss Dixon. They could hear how close they were in the voices of the other passengers. The noise level rose slowly but steadily. The dirt of factories began to color the sky in the distance. The smell of the ocean intensified and turned slightly rotten, became a shore smell. Dead fish and garbage. The ocean cleansed itself by sending its refuse all the way to the shore.

‘This story makes you think of Sarah Canary,’ Chin said. It made Chin think of
ren. Ren
was the tolerance or benevolence a man felt toward others. There was no good translation. But
ren
was a product of community, of relationships, manifested only in interaction. A man raised in isolation would show no
ren.
Caspar Hauser would show no
ren.
And Miss Dixon was quite right. Sarah Canary also showed no
ren.
In the Confucian system,
ren
was the most fundamentally human quality. The ideogram was the same as the ideogram for
man.

‘Yes. I’m reminded of Sarah Canary by Feuerbach’s description of Caspar. When he was first found, Feuerbach said he seemed to hear without understanding and to see without perceiving. So it made me wonder if Sarah Canary might also be someone special. Something like a princess.’ Miss Dixon looked a bit embarrassed. ‘Fairy tales,’ she said. ‘I know. But she does sort of resemble portraits of some of the Stuarts. Have you ever seen a painting of James II? He has a kind of dark misshapen look. I think his eyes don’t quite match.’

Chin knew nothing about English kings and queens except that they had wanted the Chinese to continue to consume opium badly enough to go to war with the Manchu dynasty over it. It had something to do with the revered position merchants held in British society. It had something to do with a mystic principle of cosmic harmony the British called the Invisible Hand. Inverted, this was an image right out of Miss Dixon’s story. For sixteen years, Caspar Hauser’s entire visible universe was nothing more than a single hand. Which made Chin think of the Christian god, which made him think of the Taipings and Hung Hsiu-ch’iian, which made him think of failed Imperial Examinations, and he did not really have these thoughts one at a time: rather they all existed about him, ringing him like a landscape, though he could only bring one into focus at a time.

Meanwhile, the landscape of the bay grew rapidly larger and more detailed. On the right was the fortification that protected the entrance. Straight ahead, the little island of Alcatraz. The steamship rounded the point. Another boat passed them, a boat headed for China. Chin knew what it carried. Flour and bones. The polished bones of dead Chinese. Some twelve hundred men had been killed on the railroads the year before Chin came to Golden Mountain. Two thousand pounds of bones arrived in a single shipment to Canton just as he was leaving. Chin was stabbed with the sharp edges of homesickness. Treasured Mother. Home.

‘I always thought Sarah Canary’s clothes were expensive,’ B.J. said. ‘They mend themselves. How much do you think a dress that does that would cost?’

Chin extricated himself from his thoughts and returned to the conversation. What was B.J. saying? He looked at Sarah Canary. Her dress had held up very well considering how long she had been wearing it and everything it had been through. It was probably cleaner than you would expect. But mended itself? It had never been torn. Had it? Chin wasn’t sure.

Miss Dixon ignored B.J. ‘Well, anyway, it’s a possibility,’ she said. ‘An upbringing like Caspar’s would explain the way she behaves. And it would explain Harold.’ A host of small boats was moving out to meet them, carrying agents who shouted advertisements for various hotels and restaurants. Chin watched as they came up beside and below; the agents swung on board, distributing their cards among the passengers.

‘Dinners, seventy-five cents.’ An agent spoke to B.J. He tipped his hat to Sarah Canary. ‘Breakfasts, half a dollar. Lunch, twenty-five cents. All meals include potatoes, bread, butter, and coffee.’ He held out a flier. ‘Homelike surroundings.’

‘We will stay at the Occidental Hotel,’ Miss Dixon told B.J. before he could be tempted in some other direction. ‘I always stay there.’

B.J. refused the flier. He was looking particularly docile, practically insensible. He was paler than his usual pallor. ‘I’ve never seen this many people,’ he whispered to Chin. ‘I mean, maybe if you counted them
all,
everybody I ever saw, I have, but not in a group like this. Not all in the same place at the same time.’ He clung to the rail while their steamer nosed its way through a maze of boats and wooden docks. The sounds of voices on shore were so loud now that no single one could be distinguished from any other. B.J. put his hands over his ears. Miss Dixon was obviously too purposeful to mind and Sarah Canary seemed unfazed. The steamship scraped into its dock. The gangplank opened outward and down while the passengers cheered.

Miss Dixon held tightly to Sarah Canary’s arm as they debarked so that they merged into a single body. This slowed their progress considerably; such a large space had to be emptied around them. B.J. and Chin followed, one after the other, B.J. first and then Chin. The people were so close on all sides that Chin hardly had room to notice what walking on solid ground felt like again. He enjoyed the unyielding dirt, although his body still remembered the boat and tipped him slightly from side to side as he stepped. If he stopped walking to savor it, the other passengers leaving the ship carried him forward anyway.

‘The Master of Pain,’ a tall, beautifully dressed man with a gold watch around his neck told B.J., stepping along beside him. He had a deep, trained voice. ‘You need do nothing. Don’t say a word. I can diagnose your disease merely by looking at you. And I can cure it. I can provide testimonials from patients as far away as New York. I have worked with the crowned heads of Europe. I am as close to a miracle as you will ever come.’ B.J.’s mouth was open. Miss Dixon reached behind her with her free left arm and seized B.J.’s hand.

‘Fairy tales. Come along,’ she said, pulling.

‘Oysters!’ a woman with a tray shouted after them.

Miss Dixon guided them to a row of coaches, choosing one that looked particularly clean. It was hitched to a brown mare in blinkers whose tail whipped about restlessly while she stamped her back feet. The horse froze a moment, releasing a stream of urine into the street, then resumed her stamping. ‘The Occidental Hotel. Montgomery Street,’ Miss Dixon told the hack-driver. She looked at him sternly. ‘No whip.’ He shook his head, held out his hand to help Sarah Canary. But Sarah Canary did not want to get into the coach. She had to be coaxed. She had to be wheedled. B.J. got on and off again twice to show her how easy it was. During this process a young, sandy-haired man hurried up from the dock behind them. He was carrying two carpet bags and panting.

‘Miss Dixon,’ he said breathlessly. ‘I would have been gratified if you had allowed me to find you a carriage.’ Was he the man who had given Miss Dixon the flower on the boat? Or were there others? How many others? Why did Miss Dixon attract so much male attention? Chin had no reason to dislike this man. He tried to find one.

Miss Dixon swept her skirts into the coach. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said pleasantly, ‘if my ability to find my own transportation has caused you unhappiness. I’m afraid I was thinking only of myself.’ Her answer pleased Chin; he didn’t ask himself why. The sandy-haired man retreated, choosing a buggy for himself, setting his bags into it, climbing aboard. His buggy left in a clatter, heading around Tangrenbu, where the Chinese all lived one on top of another, up the hill to the big houses where, the Chinese house servants said, a man might have a dozen rooms, one room to cook in and another whole room for eating, one room for reading and another for sleeping, and none of these rooms shared with even one other person.