The Binding Chair (21 page)

“Dick!” Dolly said, mollified, smiling in spite of herself. “How can you be so mean!”

“I’m not mean. Eleanor is perfection, and so are you. But Eleanor might just as well be a man, and you are my wife.”

In Shanghai, where the ability to make money was valued above any other, Eleanor had become quite famous. Not that anyone knew the connection between her lisp and Dick Benjamin’s fortunes, but there must have been something to induce him to make her a partner. Perhaps he’d simply been overwhelmed by her peculiar genius. Add, subtract, multiply, divide: Eleanor could do unlimited calculations in her head faster than a team of Chinese with abacuses; she never made a mistake. It wasn’t advanced mathematics, but it was complex—mentally juggling the fluctuations of ten or more commodities at once, playing the numbers of the Hong Kong market off those in Shanghai. Not that the work she accomplished was what she’d aspired to at Oxford; it wasn’t an elegant, acrobatic leap of theorem but a nervous choreography of numbers—like the New Year celebration she’d seen her first year in China, a great dragon of numbers reeling below fireworks of facts, winding over a hundred black-trousered legs, shaking its big head and twisting through hers. And much more absorbing than a classroom of rude, bored girls who would graduate without giving another thought to mathematics beyond whatever might be required to venture out, Dutch treat, for tea.

Ignoring her protests, May had taken Eleanor to the dressmaker, to the milliner, to the Siberian Fur Shop on Avenue Edouard VII. She had taken away all her hair pins and accompanied her to Monsieur Joseph to get her marcelled, and now, despite her advanced age, Eleanor received proposals almost weekly, from men of every description, native and foreign. She refused them all, just as she refused to ride in a rickshaw or to let the servants pick up after her or hold her towel as she stepped from the bath or shake out her serviette and lay it on her lap.

So, when Dick Benjamin said
Dashed peculiar woman
, it was this that he meant.

“Good-bye darling,” he called to Dolly as Eleanor came down the stairs, pulling on her overcoat, and he kissed his daughters and raised his hat to May.

“What’s he so happy about?” Arthur asked.

May pushed the paper toward him. “Revolutionaries tore up the track in Fukien.”

“Again?”

She nodded. “No freight for a fortnight at least.”

“Rice doubled?”

“Tea. Now what about the horses? Tell me.”

“They are not from Flanders. They’re from Australia. Each one cost six hundred pounds to transport to France and now they’re dropping from battle fatigue. I mean literally. They shake, they fall, they go down begging on their knees when they hear a loud noise, the poor loves.”

Alice sensed diversion. “So what’s to be done?” she prodded. But Arthur was thinking too hard to answer. Before he’d finished rereading the article, he had a plan.

Arthur collected pledges from forty-seven rich, sentimental women in Shanghai, cornering them at dinner parties and tea dances, and especially at the race club, after a frisky pony had fattened their purses. The next day he’d send his boy to collect on the chits they’d signed. With the money, he chartered a mail boat out of Marseilles and paid an agent to oversee the building of makeshift stalls onboard, the collection of the horses, and the hire of a seaworthy groom to tend to them en route. For any horse strong enough to return to battle, Arthur provided an equine mask to protect it from nerve gas—a mask designed and manufactured by the company who fashioned them for humans.

As soon as the agent, a M. Arrete, cabled that the boat had finally left and would arrive in Shanghai in three weeks, Arthur went to inspect the old stable he’d rented from the Shanghai Horse Bazaar. Abandoned for years, the drafty building on Connaught Road was overrun with little native deer, which he regretfully chased off the premises. (Kindhearted to a fault, he provided them with the compensation of a salt lick some miles away, just outside Chang-su-ho’s garden—far enough from the stable but not, as it transpired, from the country club, where, emboldened by a little salt and compassion, the deer attacked the rose garden en masse. Unnaturally aggressive—was there something in the lick? He’d bought it from a native apothecary—the deer ate every rose. They bit the blooms off and left the thorny stems, slaking their thirst in the fishpond.)

When at last the horses arrived, they presented a sorry spectacle, with dull coats rubbed raw in places, torn ears, tattered tails, every rib showing. Even the wharf coolies, a hardened, downtrodden lot, handled them gently. They stroked the great trembling noses that stuck out from under the blindfolds they wore to be led down the gangplanks.

Installed in the repaired stable, with
mah foos
to care for them around the clock, the warhorses were treated not only by veterinarians from the race club but by doctors from the London Mission hospital, whom Arthur paid to make stable calls. In addition, he dosed them with patent medicines: Vetarzo’s Blood Medicine, as well as Clark’s Blood Mixture, Chamberlain’s pain balm, Petromiel, Chlorodyne, Dover’s Powder, and especially Sanaphos’s reconstructive nerve food, a case of which he’d wheedled out of a French chemist on Avenue Edouard VII.

“You’ll kill the poor bastards,” Dick said at dinner, “Pouring all that rubbish down them. Don’t you know a horse’s digestive system can’t take such assaults?”

“But they’re doing splendidly, Dick,” said May, defending her husband. “You should come see them.”

And, oddly, the horses were thriving. On bright afternoons, Arthur, May, and Alice picnicked out at the stable, with Number Four to serve.

“You have found yourself, Arthur,” his wife said, teasing, half-serious, standing up as tall as she could to kiss his chin. “You are a rehabilitator of sad, sick cavalry animals.”

The horses nickered at Arthur. They frisked and danced and checked his pockets for sugar lumps. They lipped his ears and nipped off his hat. With their hot, gusting breath, they blew the tinnitus right out of his head. The mere sight of their hugely warm and whiskered noses made him relax, and he offered his ringing ears to them, once going so far as to introduce a pinch of snuff into a cavernous, trembling pink nostril, laced with crimson veins. Quite a trick to align his ear to the rearing head. But the
relief
—the release of that deafening sneeze, and the silence that ensued. It wasn’t as good as sex, but almost.

Arthur had thought to send his horses back home, but Australia was so far away, another long journey, so instead he sold them to rich Settlement families, who took great pleasure and absurd pride in veteran warhorses pulling their traps. What could be better, more fashionable, in the midst of wartime’s social whirl, ladies off to bandage rolling and marathons of sock knitting? Arthur had the family tailor sew up military-looking decorations, affixing his approximation of a Victoria Cross with Palm to the horses’ bridles.

“You know, Arthur,” Eleanor said, reviewing his rumpled receipts. “You’ve actually made money!”

H
E WAS EXPECTING
the arrival of a second shipment of horses to fill his now-empty stable when the epidemic began. At first influenza was mistaken for cholera, because it struck so swiftly. Eleanor, for example, was sitting at her desk at the brokerage. The runner had just returned from the cable office with the latest numbers from Hong Kong. He placed them silently before her. She’d been waiting: in her head, ready to receive the prices, were eight towers of numbers. Like a city on a hill, she thought, surprised at herself for being so fanciful. Mathematics was austere and holy, a music sung unto itself, uncontaminated by sentiment or desire or any of what Eleanor would judge, if not foolish, then separate from her spartan life of the mind. She closed her eyes and saw that sunlight gilded the number towers; it sparkled off the corners of fours and sevens, slid in syrupy waves from eights and threes. She was so dizzy she put her forehead down on her blotter, right on top of the white slips of paper the boy had brought.

“Eleanor?” Dick asked. “Are you all right?”

“I’m not, I’m afraid.”

“What’s the matter? Shall I call for the trap?”

“Please,” Eleanor said, although the idea of riding through the streets of Shanghai behind the jogging pony seemed dangerously ambitious. If she could move, she’d lie down on the floor.

“Will you—Eleanor dear, could you please pick your head up?” Dick asked. “I don’t like to see you like that.”

“I will in a minute,” she said faintly. “Do you think you could ask them to stop the abacuses, just for a little while? The clatter is—”

“But they have. It’s quiet in here.” Dick leaned over and put his face near Eleanor’s. “You’re not crying are you?”

“It’s just that I have the most terrible headache.”

“But you’re crying. I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I’ll stop. Give me a moment.”

Around Eleanor’s desk collected a small, silent audience composed of Dick Benjamin and the other partners, Kelly stroking his mustache and Potts fiddling with the coins in his pocket, and the six Chinese bookkeepers, standing absolutely still.

“Too much thinking,” Potts said at last. He was the one partner who had opposed Eleanor’s inclusion in the business. “Women’s brains aren’t built for it.”

Eleanor summoned her will and sat up. She looked at Potts. “You are a low and despicable man.” Her voice shook. The office, which usually seemed dim, struck her as cruelly bright. “And I know for a fact that you do not understand how to predict futures with logarithms. Not really.”

“Eleanor!” Dick said. “She’s ill!” he said to Potts. “You can see for yourself that she’s not … not herself.”

“You can’t!” Mr. Potts advanced on Eleanor’s desk. “Logarithms have nothing to do with it.”

“See!” she said. “What did I tell you!” Eleanor closed her eyes. She wasn’t herself. Or rather, she was, but she’d been crammed into the skin of someone smaller, sewn in tight so that every nerve danced with pain. The golden towers of the number city were gone, and now, scribbled on the red inside of her eyelids, were hundreds, thousands, of prices, rising and falling in a seasick wave.

S
YNTAX AND
S
YMMETRY

T
HE EXIGENCIES OF EARNING WHAT SHE MUST
to keep hold of the very room of which she despaired—the single room in which she slept and bathed and cooked and ate, in which she sat at a table under a bare lightbulb, laboriously translating texts from Russian to French and from French to Russian—had, since the Revolution, inspired Suzanne Petrovna to supplement her inadequate income with tutoring and piecework that came not from publishers but from refugees. By 1926, her steadiest employment had for years been the translation of letters whose object was to secure jobs or information, the whereabouts of lost relatives and strayed fiancées. She wrote complaints to magistrates and protestations of innocence to officials of the court, explaining injustices too complex to render in elementary, refugee French.

The cost of a simple grammatical mistake or a misspelling could be a man’s credibility, a woman’s honor—at least this was what Suzanne told herself, now that her texts had become human lives and she parsed not only documents but hearts. For her efforts she was paid modestly, sometimes offered food instead of money, but she grew used to—dependent upon—the emotional sustenance such employment offered. If it was not her honor that was threatened, if it was not she who had lost the woman she had planned to marry, the son she had nursed and bathed, at least it was she who chose the words to bring them back. Chose between
devastated
and
bereft
, between
implore
and
insist, hope
and
pray
.

An organized person, she liked to lay out her papers and pens and dictionaries the same way each time. She placed the text to be translated before her, reference materials to the left, scratch paper for rough drafts to the right, pens within reach in their tray.

She was filling the bladder of her new black fountain pen—a gift from a grateful client—when she heard the tread of feet on the stairs. A large person, she concluded, because the fifth stair creaked as it did when the neighbor to her left ascended, a man of substantial height and girth. Whoever it was moved slowly down the corridor, paused regularly as if looking for names or numbers on the doors. Most tenants of the building, which had no concierge, were too transient to bother to identify their rooms for callers—either that or too likely to be hiding from creditors. Only Suzanne had written her name on a card, with the words
Translation of Correspondence and Documents
, and pinned it to her door. The sound of feet stopped, as if the visitor was considering this information, and she stood, eager at the thought of unanticipated work. She tidied her hair in the mirror over the sink and looked to see that her dress was properly fastened, for sometimes, while bent over her papers, she opened the button at her neck.

“
Oui,
” she answered the knock, her hand on the latch but not yet opening the door. The voice from the other side was deep, and spoke French with a heavy Russian accent, inspiring the unlikely image of someone spitting out lumps of undercooked dough. Suzanne didn’t recognize it.

“I want … I have a piece of business to discuss.”

As most of Suzanne’s work came to her by word of mouth, she asked for the referral: “Who was it that sent you to me?”

“No one,” said the voice, and made no attempt to explain itself further. Suzanne found something familiar in its unapologetic terseness; what, she couldn’t think. She drew in her breath, unlatched the door, nodded at the man before her.

He had what she considered a typically Russian face, melancholic and stubborn, eyes that believed in fate and a mouth that mocked it. His clothes were worn and grimy; his hands hung empty from too-short sleeves. He wasn’t carrying the usual frayed envelope or rumpled sheaf of papers, but perhaps these were folded inside his coat. Suzanne stood back to let the stranger enter. He nodded, smiled, not with good humor but a sardonic stretch of his lips. He sat in her chair and dropped his hands in his lap, fingers laced.

Only after Suzanne had really searched his face feature by feature did she remember it. What she recognized was the peculiarly dark-pigmented skin under his eyes: brown, purple, blue, gray—it partook of all but was none of these, a strange color echoed in his dark but somehow bloodless lips. The rest of him was very changed; he was stooped, his hair thin. Deep vertical lines creased his cheeks, as if he’d lost too much weight too quickly. Defensively, Suzanne folded her arms; she didn’t close her door but left it open to the public corridor.

“Go away?” she said, intending the imperative, but her voice lilted with nerves, and the words formed a question.

He shook his head, and his easy arrogance rekindled such a store of old resentments that she was forced to steady her voice.

“You must, though.”

“Your mother. Is she dead?”

Suzanne nodded.

“When?”

“Years ago. Fifteen years. During the summer. The twenty-seventh of August.”

“No one told me.”

“No.”

He nodded, glanced over the small, sparse room, noted the papers on the table, the two washed glasses on the shelf by the sink. “You have room for me for a night or two,” he said. She shook her head, and he smiled, again without pleasure. He switched from French to Russian. “It wasn’t a request.”

Suzanne continued to speak in French. “This is my home. I ask that you leave it.” Now he looked around, very slowly, allowing his eyes to rest on each object, conveying to Suzanne how shabby were her surroundings: the cracked enamel of the sink, the obviously mended chair, the flat and faded coverlet on the couch that served her as a bed. The Bokhara rug and mahogany armoire, the malachite lamps and the silver cup—all she had managed to retrieve from her dead brother’s apartments had long ago been sold. Beneath the window frame, the wallpaper had been scratched until it peeled off the plaster below: the work of her sometimes cat, jumping up onto the high sill to quit the apartment.

“You turn me away? What life you have”—he paused as if to underscore that life’s meanness—“I gave you.”

“I will call a gendarme. I will—” Suzanne broke off, realizing from his impassive expression that her father knew how unlikely it was that any plea for help might be answered in such a neighborhood. At three in the afternoon no police were on patrol; any man sober enough to stand was at work. Down the hall was a consumptive laundress, upstairs the mother of two young children. There were no others.

“I need a place until the end of the week. Then I leave for—”

“Where?”

“Lyons. A job.”

“Leave now, then. You can’t stay here.” Suzanne’s voice surprised her with its sureness. She could see that her father, despite his quick arguments, was taken aback as well. Still, he challenged her.

“Why, when I have a daughter with a roof?” he asked. He was tipping the chair back as he spoke, an old habit, she’d forgotten. She watched as he balanced on the two back legs, steadying himself with one hand on the table.

Without thinking—it wasn’t something she planned, not even for an instant, it was more reflexive than that—Suzanne reached her foot forward and gave the edge of the seat a hard push, enough to tip it over backward. She covered her eyes as her father grabbed at the table’s edge, and kept them covered for a few seconds after she heard his head hit the tiled floor. She was frozen, just as when she was a child and he’d beaten her, or the night he’d stood on her brother’s fingers. She was waiting for the blow and comforting herself with the thought that he’d grown too old, too weak, to actually kill her with his bare hands; and she, too, she was no longer a child, she was a woman now, fully grown and long past the time when he could have easily accomplished it, the end of her.

Suzanne was waiting, but she was waiting for nothing; there was no sound after the thump of his head, like the noise of a melon that had rolled off the tabletop. She opened her eyes, squatted by his chest to see that he was breathing. How odd that she’d never before looked at him so closely, her father. As it turned out, he wasn’t ugly. She was surprised by the graceful curve of cheekbone under his closed eye, the straight narrow nose, nothing like the lumpy potato nose of the peasant she had come to think him. He was dirty, but the skin above his lip was freshly shaven, his chin and cheeks as well, as if he’d conceded this small measure of hygiene in preparation for coming to her room. Seeing this, she remembered the feel of his cleanly shaven face. Hadn’t there been, long ago, lost in childhood, a holiday afternoon when he’d walked into the sea with her riding on his shoulders? She had put her hands on his face, just shaved, to steady herself.

Now what, Suzanne thought, still squatting. She was surprised to have done something she would have judged herself incapable of doing, surprised also that she felt neither guilt nor satisfaction in her violence. She was strangely unburdened of emotion. Early memories, even, had no power to move her. Did this indicate a disordered moral faculty, she wondered, an unbalanced mind?

She walked down the hall as far as the stairwell, to be sure it was empty. She could get him that far, anyway. But when she pulled at his boots, intending to drag him out the door by the feet, they came off easily—so big they must have been borrowed, or stolen—and she fell backwards onto her tailbone. He was wearing no socks, and his feet were as white as a corpse’s beneath the grime, so she took hold of him by his trousered ankles and dragged him into the hall, his head bumping over the saddle. He was heavier than he looked; by the time she rolled him around the corner and into the stairwell, she was panting.

Suzanne’s father fell only a few steps and then came to a stop, but his head struck each tread, so hard that she cringed. Perhaps this would grant her a few more minutes of his unconsciousness, safeguard a chance for her to think. She set the boots neatly on the landing, returned to her room, and locked the door. It would be best to leave, she thought, to pack a bag and go—she didn’t know where, but once she was outside she would think more clearly. Outside she could breathe again. She had a few francs; she’d go out the back way. But then from down the hall she heard a moaning, a French and Russian cursing, a tripping and stumbling, followed by one and then another stamp, the kind required to put on buckleless boots, even overly large ones. Suzanne looked at her door once more, to check that the bolt was secured; then she backed up until she was on the other side of her room. Under the bed, she could see two red reflections: the cat’s eyes, round with surprise. She hadn’t even known the animal was in the room.

Suzanne listened to her father pound on the door, counting the times, only four, and this, too, was unexpected—she thought he’d throw his shoulder against it until the lock gave. He didn’t yell, he didn’t call her any names, he didn’t say anything at all. He walked away, and she listened to the sound of his boots descending the stairs. Sitting on the floor with her eyes closed, she heard the cat jump onto the sill, back legs scrabbling for purchase, the thud as he landed on roof tiles.

For eight days, Suzanne stayed in. She didn’t open the door to any inquiries, and thereby she lost two pieces of translation from potential clients who didn’t know her well enough to push valuable papers under a locked door, let alone money. She sat at the window and drank tea with sugar, then tea without sugar, and when the wet, reused leaves wouldn’t produce even a hint of color or flavor she drank hot water. She ate a tin of smoked herring—actually smiling that this had turned out to be the occasion for which she’d saved it—a stale half loaf, and two packets of biscuits, meted out three per meal. Then, after two days of eating nothing and feeling queasy, then faint, she went out, her auburn hair pinned under her hat, a dark scarf pulled up to her nose.

He said he was leaving in a week, he said he was leaving in a week, she recited as she stepped tentatively around corners, peering out from under her low felt brim. I waited eight days, and he said he was leaving in a week
.

After a month, Suzanne forced herself to put away the scarf and hat, but her bravery was an act, and at night she lay in bed listening for a vengeful tread on the stairs. When she slept, her dreams were nightmares, and often she woke standing at her door, checking the lock to see, was it secure? Weeks passed, one after another; she didn’t relax but grew only more and more nervous. She lost the ability to work efficiently and, worn down by poverty and apprehension, fell ill, recovered poorly. Even a short walk brought back her fever; she coughed until her eyes watered; she was obliged to seek a cure in the southern sun—in Nice, where, hoping to elude consumption, she lost what money remained to her and sat for hours on a bench overlooking the sea, calculating not only her poverty (for that math was simple enough: first she had very little, and then she had even less), but how, in the course of her life, one reversal had mysteriously precipitated the next, until there she was, discovering as if for the first time that the shoes she wore were not serviceable but ugly, her life was not one of simplicity but of privation.

As Suzanne followed the gendarme along the Promenade des Anglais—the mistral now whipping over the beach and threatening to tear the awning right off the tobacconist’s stall—she crossed her arms over her chest to keep her coat closed. Into what new mess was she allowing her father to push her?

On the other hand, could anything be worse than spending a night outdoors, listening to the relentless washing and worrying of the tide? The Oriental woman in the litter: she had materialized like some mandarin fairy queen, held aloft by those two silent, braided acolytes, the severity of their dress emphasizing the opulence of hers. Suzanne hurried after the gendarme, coughing, panting. Perhaps there
were
witches and genies and … She shook her head. No, what there were, were fevers, and when fevers didn’t improve, deliriums.