Songs of Willow Frost (38 page)

As the commotion faded, a bugler played the Call to the Post. Everyone double-checked their betting slips and waited for the bell to ring and the horses to come thundering out of the gate. All but Liu Song, who glanced at William and then back toward Richard Barthelmess, who was watching the race unfold from the staircase. She remembered his piercing eyes and his cleft chin from
The Yellow Man and the Girl
. He’d played Cheng Huan, a Buddhist who cared for Lillian Gish, his broken blossom—the unwanted and abused daughter of a prizefighter. Liu Song had read about a reporter so upset by the scenes of abuse that he’d left the set to vomit.
Liu Song shook her head solemnly as she remembered the tragic ending, where Lillian was beaten to death. Cheng Huan had built a shrine in her honor before taking his own life.

As a wave of cheering swept across the clubhouse, Liu Song turned her attention to the track. Spectators rose to their feet for the finish. Some bettors screamed with joy; others swore and tore their tickets, pitching them into the air, where the pieces rained down like confetti at a parade. She watched as William stood with his hands outstretched, trying to catch the bits of paper as they flitted about. He caught a handful and smiled at her. She clapped for him, blowing him kisses.

Then behind William she saw the triumphant jockey riding his Thoroughbred to the winner’s circle. The small man was clad in leather and silk, with whip in hand. Liu Song grimaced when she saw the welts on the horse’s back and foreleg. She ached for the exhausted horse as she watched its muscles twitch and could smell the sweat and fear. She felt Leo’s hand on her backside and was jealous of the blinders the horse wore. She wished she had something similar to shut out the world.

Mother’s Daughter

(1934)

William walked alongside his mother, who had had enough of the Bush Hotel and the memories that came with it. He followed her across the street, past a man on the corner of Jackson who was passing out pamphlets and yelling, “The Russians did it!” while a muralist painted a scene with George Washington in it on the opposite street. They stepped around families who huddled for warmth near gushing steam vents and avoided policemen who looked weary of another night of having to relocate vagrants.

“But what happened to Colin?” William asked as they walked. He wasn’t sure how much more he wanted to know about his father—Uncle Leo. There had been such unspoken sadness throughout his childhood. He’d assumed—no, he’d hoped—that the man he’d seen off and on had been Colin. Now it dawned on him that the man in his life must have been someone else. “Did he ever come back for us?”
Did he come back for you?

Willow nodded. “The morning after his fiancée had showed up he packed his things and then came to see me. He was a wreck of apologies and excuses and prior commitments. My heart hurt to see him. He came to say goodbye. He finally professed his adoration, but his actions didn’t match his words. He left the same day. He had to go—even I understood that. He had a mother to take care of and a family business to save, a beautiful fiancée to share his life with—
all of his ambitions here, all of his plans were an escape—the spotlight faded and the curtain fell upon all of his hopes and my dreams of a life with him, a better life for us. But I didn’t give up acting.”

William listened to his mother, who seemed like a shadow of the woman she portrayed on-screen. She rubbed her thin arms to ward off the chill in the air.

“I was so hurt, so angry with him, but also so desperate and frightened of the possibility of losing you.” Willow shook her head. “Colin left me heartbroken. But he promised to come back for me. He left me with money, some money anyway. He promised to set things right. He said that he’d find a partner to run his father’s business, or force his brother to fill his shoes. He said that the woman who had shown up was a problem he would resolve. That he wanted me to carry on as best I could. That we would fix this whole mess and start over—he begged for me to have patience. He wrote to me and said that he was a dragon and I was his phoenix. And that one day we would be together again and my life would change, I’d transform.”

“When did he come back?”

William watched his mother for a long time. She didn’t answer, then finally shook her head. “It took him a year to write that, and by that time I’d given up all hope. Then the letters came, quite often. And in those letters he said that he’d return as soon as he could—six months more, perhaps—a year at the most.” William watched as she drew a ragged breath and exhaled slowly. “But those months became five long years.”

The same amount of time I’ve been at Sacred Heart
. William recognized the irony.
Right after you said you’d be right back
.

“I’d lost my job when the music store closed. I was an unwed mother, a dancer, and no man in his right mind would have anything to do with me. Besides, if I married a Chinese man, I’d lose my citizenship and might have to go to China—a place I’d never been. I had no idea what that would mean for you. But I couldn’t marry
a white man either, not that anyone wanted me for more than …” She trailed off. “My reputation was in the gutter. I lived in fear of losing you permanently to the state at best and Uncle Leo at worst. For months I went to bed every night weary, hungry, sick, and fearing a knock on the door. I woke every morning rushing to your bed to make sure you were still there. Your third birthday came and went. I didn’t even celebrate it.”

William stopped his mother, who was so lost in the story that she almost walked into traffic. When the light changed, he walked her across the street. They passed a familiar alley, and William heard music and boisterous sounds from the Wah Mee Club—gamblers cheering on a winning streak, and a collective groan when someone rolled an unlucky seven.

“I worked two, sometimes three jobs—everything temporary, singing, dancing, and acting a little, when I could, which wasn’t very often,” his ah-ma continued. “But as my mother found out years earlier, women’s jobs don’t pay very much, hardly enough to live on. I even went back to the Stacy Mansion, hoping to find work as a singer, but I had been a novelty, yesterday’s news. They barely remembered me, and nobody cared. As a last resort I approached Mrs. Peterson for a mother’s pension. I even let some local priest splash water on your head so you’d qualify. I tried desperately to better my English so you could speak like an American. But she turned me down. She said I wasn’t old enough to be a pensioner and that if I loved you I should just give you up. I left her office and never went back. In the end, I had a tiny bit of money tucked away. That got us by for a while. I made it last as long as I could.”

As they walked, William wondered where they were going. In the darkness his ah-ma seemed more ghost than human, more shade than substance, more of a memory than a mother. He watched as she touched an old movie poster that had been pasted to a brick wall; the paper was cracked and chipped, peeling. As they walked the air seemed fresher, the sounds of motorcars and club music more
familiar. He’d walked King Street before with his ah-ma, years ago. They’d walked this avenue often.

“I was only a girl,” she said as tears streamed down her cheeks. “But as Colin always pointed out, I was my mother’s daughter and I could always act—always put on a performance. So I took on a new role as a
xi sang
. Leo had always wanted a sing-song girl—a pretty girl to accompany him, someone he could show off. And I wanted you. So I pawned my dignity, for whatever it was worth.” She paused as though she were waiting for a reaction, one of anger or rejection. William didn’t know how to feel or what to say, so he said nothing and kept walking.

“I went to meetings and socials, and sang and performed opera for Leo and his clients. I was his … 
companion
. And he paid my rent and let me keep you. He even let you come along on some of our outings,” she said as she stared into the darkness. “I … made the best of the worst of things. I kept going. For three long years, I kept playing my part, always thinking I would get away—that I’d take you and we’d disappear. But I could never save up enough money to be sure. And I was afraid that if we fled and failed to escape, I’d lose you forever. Then the world fell apart.”

“The Crash?” William asked as he looked around the street and saw boarded-up buildings and a man sleeping on a park bench, cradling a half-empty wine bottle like a mother holding a child. The rounders were everywhere, men who worked all summer and drank all winter, drifting from one mission home to another.

His ah-ma paused for a moment, then kept walking. “That too.”

Gilded

(1929)

Liu Song opened the fine silk robe Uncle Leo had given her and turned sideways in front of the bathroom mirror. Her hands contoured her belly, which two months earlier had been smooth, flat, and soft to the touch. Now her belly felt as firm as a green winter melon. Her stomach protruded as though she’d gorged herself on an eight-course meal, taking extra helpings of dessert. After years of being careful and taking every precaution, of surviving close calls and drinking the bitter root tea prescribed by the old, white-bearded man at the Hen Sen herb shop, her worst nightmare had repeated itself. Liu Song didn’t look as though she was carrying a child, yet, but she certainly felt pregnant. Her nausea hadn’t been as bad as it had been with William. She drank ginger ale and smoked clove cigarettes, which helped to keep her food down. But she was sore, seemingly everywhere. Her sensitive parts felt more sensitive. She found that she could cry for hours for any reason and sometimes no reason at all, though she certainly had her pick of subjects to rue, the least of which was simply remembering who the father was. Liu Song shuddered and rubbed the goose bumps on her arms.

Mercifully, she hadn’t seen Uncle Leo in weeks. It took months for the Crash to reach Seattle, but when it did everyone, including her former stepfather, felt its arrival. When regular orders at the laundry had disappeared in a wave of cancellations, he’d fired all of
his longtime workers and replaced them with cheaper labor, which in Chinatown was saying something. And as she had watched some of those workers move out of the Bush, American, and Northern hotels and into flophouses, she wondered how long it might be before she was out on the street as well.
Would he force us to move in with him?
she wondered.
Or will I work folding sheets and duvet covers instead of accompanying him to the horse races and the Wah Mee on Saturday nights?
If only she could be that fortunate. The end of Prohibition was nowhere in sight, but even if it was, there wasn’t enough gin and whiskey in the world to make her forget the price she’d paid for the sordid life she’d created for herself.

Liu Song tried to read the newspaper. She didn’t know much about the stock market, or speculating, or buying on margin, or any of the complicated terms that headlined
The Seattle Star
these days. But she knew what dying slowly was all about, and everyone was struggling to hang on, each neighborhood was slipping away bit by bit as each new bank would fail to open its doors. The runs on the banks got so bad that People’s North End Bank equipped their storefront with tear-gas nozzles. And when the sawmills began to lay off leathernecks by the thousand, the world of workingmen toppled to the ground like falling timber. Liu Song tried to be grateful for her gilded cage, but the bars were everywhere she looked.

“I’m going to school now,” William said from somewhere in the kitchen. He was so much older now, a bit taller, more adventurous. Ready for school.

Liu Song closed her robe and tied it around her waist. She wandered to the front door, where William was ready for another week as a first grader at the Pacific School on Twelfth and Jefferson. “Don’t forget you have Chinese school today.” She handed him a wooden writing slate with Cantonese characters etched into the frame.

She raised an eyebrow as he frowned. “Yes, you have to go. I know it means you’re going to two schools, working twice as
hard—that just means you’ll be twice as rich. Don’t be late—for either school.” William had been learning city Cantonese at the new Chong Wa building, but he preferred English to Chinese. As a boy of seven years, he spoke English almost as well as she did.