Songs of Willow Frost (16 page)

“Well done, sweetheart—you blew ’em away,” he said as he
hugged her and kissed her on the cheek. “We must have made thirty whole dollars, and that was just from one song! Imagine if they stop here every day. You’re gonna make your uncle awfully proud. Rich too.” He stood at the nearest piano and played the first few bars of a victory march as she stepped away.

“My uncle?”

“Leo.”

“I know who he is.” Liu Song glanced outside, then back at Mr. Butterfield.

She watched as her employer counted out her portion, then tucked the money in a zippered bag that he kept beneath the counter.

“Now that you’re working full-time, he wanted me to pay him directly. He said he was saving it for you—that he’d take care of you later.”

Liu Song pictured herself in bed, tied down, with ropes around her wrists and ankles, like her mother, her poor, dear
ah-ma
. Liu Song wondered for the first time if Uncle Leo might have poisoned her ah-ma with the camphor oil. She knew he was prone to home remedies. Did it help, or merely hasten the inevitable?

Mr. Butterfield slammed the cash register shut, snapped his suspenders, and relit his smoke. Then his smile faded. “You know—I heard the bad news.” He pointed at the ribbon she wore. “I’m very sorry about your mom, that’s such a tragedy. I’m sure she was a lovely woman—she had to be, to have had a daughter such as you. If there’s anything I can do, if you need time off, you just let me know.”

Liu Song thanked him.

“At least you have your uncle. Sounds like he has big plans for you, chickadee.”

L
IU
S
ONG DREADED
going home. She skipped the trolley and slowly walked down Second Avenue like a prisoner heading to the gallows. She shuffled past old nickelodeons that were going out of
business and dozens of new movie theaters—the Bijou, the Odeon, the Dream. One marquee that caught her eye showcased
The Red Lantern
, a curious story about the Boxer Rebellion. Liu Song stopped and stared in awe at the poster of a slender woman in an elaborate, flowing gown and Peking-style headdress.
Ah-ma
, she thought, touching the cold glass, inhaling the damp Seattle air. But under close examination it became obvious that the star was a white actress—some Russian named Alla Nazimova. In fact, all of the actors had Western names.

When she was little, Liu Song had dreamed of the stage. Theater was everything she knew. Performing was all her father talked about. Now the stage was changing. It was moving, coming to life in storefront theaters. Even local vaudeville houses like the Alhambra had been converted to showcase moving pictures, which were cheaper. That’s where she and Mildred went to watch
The Hazards of Helen
and eat toasted watermelon seeds. Each week the adventurous Helen was nearly burned at the stake, fed to the lions, crushed beneath iron spikes, or cut in half with a buzz saw, yet by some miracle she always got away unscathed.

Liu Song wished she could be that fortunate.

Black and White

(1921)

“You’re late.”

“We had a very busy day at the music store,” Liu Song said. She stopped short of an apology as she watched Uncle Leo hang a red scroll outside their front door. The Chinese characters, painted in gold, were a traditional greeting, inviting the ghost of her mother—welcoming her back before she embarked on her spirit’s journey. And on the lintel above the door he’d hung a bundle of dried mugwort and a peeled onion to ward off any wayward demons.

Liu Song knew that Uncle Leo didn’t really care about her mother. But he was a slave to appearances and tradition. He was a man who strictly believed his fortunes were wedded to his superstitions, so why take chances? He went through the rituals of mourning even as his first wife had moved in with them. But he was still no family man. He was a businessman—a laundryman, whose hands were always filthy.

“Last night was a good night. Maybe tonight I’ll be lucky again.” He hiked up his pants, jingling the pockets, which were laden with coins, and wandered off for an evening of drinking and gambling at the Wah Mee Club.

Inside, Auntie Eng was already serving dinner. The chicken Liu
Song had plucked had been roasted and chopped. The savory aroma made Liu Song’s mouth water, but her appetite waned when she saw the group of curious strangers who sat around the table eating noisily, chewing, smacking, and picking the meat with their fingers, licking them clean. Liu Song watched as they ate from her parents’ celadon double happiness bowls, greedily shoveling rice into their mouths with her mother’s favorite chopsticks.

“You don’t cook. You don’t eat,” Auntie Eng said as she sat down at the table.

The visitors looked at Liu Song as if
she
were the stranger in
their
home.

“My sisters and my nephews,” Auntie Eng said. “They came up with me from Portland. My sisters will sleep in your room tonight. Their sons will share the couch.”

Liu Song stood helpless and hungry as the visitors stared back; then they ignored her and continued eating and chattering about Leo and how fortunate he was that Auntie Eng had been able to finally come to the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act had limited the flow of Chinese workers from hundreds of thousands twenty years ago to almost none today. Fortunately for Uncle Leo, his immigration records had been destroyed in the fires caused by the great San Francisco earthquake. After a three-day interrogation at Angel Island, he showed up on the steps of the newly rebuilt city hall with hundreds of other Chinese workers and posed as a paper son—claiming to have been born in the United States. Following a lengthy appeal, he was granted full citizenship, which allowed him to eventually bring over his paper wife, who lived with her sisters until Liu Song’s mother finally passed away.

The notion of Uncle Leo marking time with each of her mother’s seizures, each fevered moment, made Liu Song sick to her stomach. He’d been waiting, barely able to contain his annoyance at having to care for her ailing mother. Liu Song went to her room to collect herself. Then she fixed up her bed and found blankets for the children.
After that she went to the living room and sat quietly as Auntie Eng and her sisters played mah-jongg and gossiped and drank
huangjiu
from porcelain teacups that her mother had been given as a wedding present. The women talked about war and famine and the fall of the Manchus, and about family they had left behind and hadn’t seen for years. They clucked about Uncle Leo’s businesses. He’d opened hand laundries in Portland and Olympia, and had bought a used laundry truck, but still worried about losing business to the new treadle-driven machines. The women talked and smoked and belched and ate boiled peanuts, throwing the wet shells on the floor until the barley wine ran out and they all staggered off to bed, leaving Liu Song to sweep up. She ate the peanuts that remained in the bowl and then changed into her bedclothes. She curled up on the cold wooden floor, next to the hissing radiator, with only a sheet, listening to the children snore. She had terrible dreams, and when she woke in the morning she had strange bruises in hidden places and smelled like Uncle Leo.

M
R
. B
UTTERFIELD WAS
right. The next day the rubbernecker bus came by twice. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon, loaded with gawkers who marveled at Liu Song. Some even got off the bus and had her sign their sheet music.

One well-heeled blond woman handed her a small leather book and a pencil. “Just your name, dear,” she said. And after Liu Song wrote her name in Chinese, the woman asked again, “No, your
real
name. What’s your name in English?”

Liu Song hesitated, confused, then signed
Willow
. She wondered if this was what it had been like for her ah-ma on the evening of her grand performance. She wondered if her mother had had any inkling of how bad things would soon get.

B
Y DAY
’
S END
, Mr. Butterfield was humming a happy tune and counting the money he’d made. “We’ll need to double our orders of
sheet music,” he said as he sat down on an old leather stool and unscrewed his hip flask. He offered it to Liu Song, who shook her head and smiled politely.

“I haven’t played that much since I was your age,” he said. “Who knows? We keep this up, kid—I might even sell a few of the new Weltes.”

Liu Song took a dusting rag and wiped down one of the enormous pianolas. “Do I get a commission on one of these as well?” she asked.

Mr. Butterfield took another swig. “Missy, if we sell one of the player pianos, I’ll give you ten percent, and ten percent of every roll of music that goes with it to boot. Though you might have to shorten your skirt a bit if you expect to attract those kinds of dollars. Your voice isn’t your only sales tool, you know.”

Liu Song ignored his comment about her skirt and played a few notes on the piano. She didn’t know much, just some jazz stingers she’d heard in the neighborhood and had taught herself to play. She plunked away, then left the store on an open chord.

As she walked to the trolley stand, she contemplated earning twenty-five dollars per piano—fifty for a deluxe model, enough to move out on her own, for a while at least. She wondered if she’d be able to enroll in school again, or if she needed a parent, and would Uncle Leo and Auntie Eng even let her leave? She felt tightness in her chest, her gut. She hated the thought of being alone but hated the notion of going home even more. Then she remembered that even if she sold one of the autopianos, the money would probably go directly to her uncle. She slumped onto a cold iron bench next to a man reading a copy of
The Seattle Star
. As she glanced at the paper she recognized the dress on the back page—her mother’s dress, the same dress she was wearing. The feature photo was of
her
, singing in front of Butterfield’s. The man slowly lowered the newspaper. She recognized his eyes, his gentle smile.

“Not bad for black-and-white,” Colin said with his curious accent
as he folded the paper and handed it to her. “But you’d look much better in Kinemacolor.”

Liu Song had seen only one moving picture in color—
The Gulf Between
, with Grace Darmond. Her father had taken her to a matinee of the sad tale of a young girl who falls in love with a man whose wealthy, disapproving family comes between them. As Liu Song delighted in Colin’s presence, her happiness flowing from her beating heart to her aching stomach, she worried about having feelings for someone—anyone—especially after losing so many people who had meant so much to her. She hesitated to hope and dream, unsure if she could take another loss—even a rejection seemed far beyond her capacity to endure.

“Ngóh m
’mìhng?”
Liu Song was weary from singing all day, but now her tongue was tied in knots. She switched to English. “Why are you here?” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, that’s terribly rude …”

“Well, aside from working on my American dialect, I had to see—no, I had to
hear you
for myself. After reading such a flattering write-up in the
Star
, I thought I’d pay you a visit. And to be honest, I think you even outdid your mother—may her spirit rest.”

Liu Song’s smile faded as she looked down at her empty hands. “I can’t believe she’s gone. It’s better for her, I’m sure. But …”

“Again, I’m so terribly sorry, Liu Song.”

“My parents …”

“Are
proud
of you.”

Liu Song heard a brass bell as a streetcar came and went. It was getting late and her stomach was growling, but she didn’t want to go home. She felt grateful that Uncle Leo read the
Post-Intelligencer
instead of
The Seattle Star
.

“I knew your parents well enough to know that they would want you to perform, onstage, singing, acting—any way you can. Even here.” He touched the newspaper. “This is a good start. I think your mother’s spirit has been busy.”

Liu Song ached for her ah-ma’s presence. A Chinese spirit is said to come back in seven days, before departing. Perhaps her mother
was
looking out for her.