The Celestials (21 page)

Ida knew her to be speaking the truth, but had also seen what she'd seen: the reliable constant of family warmth. She
knew her sentiments made no sense. She understood that she herself had more family to return to than Lucy or Alfred had in this world entire, but that was of no matter. She understood that things as they had been in this faraway town could not go on forever. She could not remain forever sitting across a large room from Lucy, four hands held in two laps.

“What's the matter with you?” Alfred asked.

“Not a thing,” Ida said. “What's the matter with you?”

Alfred blushed, and Ida gave him a quick smile as she made her way to the chair.

Lucy stared at her queerly, and Ida allowed her friend's open countenance to loosen her heart like kind, working fingers unlacing a boot.

“What's the news?” Ida asked, indicating the letter, hoping that they would not require her to speak of her outburst.

“It's good,” Lucy said, but glanced at her feet as she spoke, so Ida braced for whatever was coming next. The cousin was to marry. Her husband needed a reliable hand in his lumber mill. The town was in need of a primary school teacher.

So, here it is, Ida thought. Here is the gate in the wall. A life waited easily for the Robinsons on the other side of that wall. From her own vantage point, the news was jubilation's opposite, so she was surprised that when she closed her eyes against the worried countenance of her best friend, the face that came into focus was the broad, full one of the Celestial foreman.

“We are not yet decided,” Lucy said. “What is your mind? Should we go?”

Ida kept her eyes closed. “Do you want to go?”

Had her eyes been open, she might have been witness to the pain spread across Lucy's face.

“I'm only curious what you think,” Lucy said. She understood, looking at her dear Ida, that they were in a trap of their own making. She wished that she could free them as one freed the hem of a poorly made dress, one stitch at a time, the thread coming easier with each snip and tug.

Even Alfred felt the sad mix of desperation and resignation in the room, and a mild panic spread across his chest, believing as he did that nothing good could come of a woman's unhappiness. When Ida remained silent, continuing to sit there with her eyes closed, he said, perhaps a little too rudely, his own mixed feelings about leaving Ida at war within him, “It isn't her life.”

“Alfred,” Lucy said. “Ssh.”

Ida said he was right.

Lucy said, “If we go, you must come home with us.” She held a hand to her chest as if to soothe its heat. “I cannot think of a day spent without you in it,” she said finally.

Ida opened her eyes. They were the words she had been waiting to hear, but she understood that her friend uttered them now only because she
could
imagine such a day.

Ida would never grasp how fully she had misunderstood this moment and her friend's emotions in it. She would never be able to see Lucy's need for her as any kind of match for her need for Lucy. She would always make sense of Lucy's kindnesses and generosities as those of someone on the verge of departure.

“Maybe I will come,” she said. She kept her inner eyes on her conjured image of Charlie and wondered at the release of a heavy weight, as if she were a sandbag being poured empty. It did not occur to her to worry at the ease with which her reliance on one person had seemed to translate into reliance on another. She did not ask of herself, as someone else might have asked of her, whether she wanted to be the sort of woman who was in such need of care and attention that she could discover it in any corner of any room.

Julia opened the windows in the bedroom and the front parlor as wide as could be managed. The August heat was breaking and an evening wind had found its way through the street. The sounds of Saturday rode through on the wind's back.

She did not worry: the baby had already proved herself a champion sleeper.

She lowered herself onto her side next to her infant. The chest rose and fell in the movement of rapids over river rocks. Normal, Julia's sister had said. Julia still barely believed it.

Outside, the sun lowered, and evening blanketed the town. The hoots of children subsided. The whip-poor-wills and grosbeaks began. Somewhere, someone was cooking something delicious. Somewhere else, fertilizer was being spread.

Her senses were like no previous acquaintance. They were the ropewalker's cable she had been witness to as a child, high and taut beneath the canvas roof of a circus tent. She
tucked her hands beneath her cheek and continued to regard her girl.
I could stay here for all time
, she thought. She understood herself to be free of exaggeration's grip. Her world was now her body, the girl's, and the circle they fashioned together. These were her feelings, simple and plain.

Chapter Twelve

Julia had insisted on returning to her regular teaching commitments despite her husband's protestations. The more adamant he became, the more sure she was of her decision. In the few days she'd been home, she had found this to be the case more and more, and she was not yet recovered from the surprise. Whereas she had spent the first night and day unable to slow the rapid pacing of her mind, unable to keep possible solutions and entreaties from turning over like a factory's waterwheel, she now imagined her mind as an ancient Greek column, her life an edifice with that column at the center of a great roof. Her husband was welcome to join her, but the shelter was not dependent upon him. For the first time she imagined herself as advocate and adversary. It was not a completely logical way to feel, since in most ways, the shelter over her head did surely depend on the presence of her husband, and she was in many ways anything but his equal.

It was as if she had been given clear knowledge of God's large purpose. So when she pulled on her gloves and gathered the handles of the baby's wicker basket, hefting it against her hip, her husband merely stood there. And when she reminded him that he was not to come to the lessons, not to meddle where he had no business meddling, he only nodded and wished her a good day.

He spent the afternoon sitting in his favorite armchair, and upon her return several hours later, he would be unable to answer her inquiries as to how he had passed his time.

Even before her arrival in the classroom, the teachers were engaged in speculation and debate. Mrs. Hollings revealed that she certainly wouldn't have accepted Mr. Sing's purchase of Thanksgiving turkeys if she had known what kind of degradation those boys were bent on practicing. Miss Cowley advocated caution, arguing that judgment should, as always, be reserved until the full situation had been made clear. Not to mention, Mrs. Brighton added, Mrs. Sampson's impeccable record as a woman of dignity and moral activity. Mrs. Hollings granted them what she could, but argued that there was a baby who came from somewhere, was there not? And what was to be done about it now? Clearly this mixing of the races had come to the most distressing of situations. Somebody, they all agreed, must take up the reins of responsibility. None of them noted the irony of having this conversation within the Celestial classroom, the Celestials themselves politely awaiting these very same volunteers to commence their usual lessons.

The minds in the classroom were not entirely turned to the Celestial child. There was happy news of Mr. Robert Kingsley, engineer on the Hoosac Tunnel project, who had been so badly injured at the recent east end accident. It had been supposed that he would be rendered blind, but the news today was that the sight of one eye proved not to be wholly lost. The party of Gipsies that had lingered on Main Street since Tuesday last had finally seen fit to continue on its way. Several of the volunteer teachers were still speaking of their picnicking on Mount Greylock the week previous. Before the spread was laid, the rain had begun to pour and they had found themselves in the very home of the clouds.

There was talk of the boiler recently installed at the Sampson factory and fully suitable for driving a forty-horsepower engine. And of the peach crop, and the Hoosac Tunnel, which had been advanced 288 feet during the month of July, with less than 1,500 feet of rock remaining to be pierced.

The previous month, in the
Transcript
of July 10, 1873, the Chinamen had made the following appearance in an account by a press excursion party from Boston:

Sampson's Chinamen

We were of the few who early the next morning visited the famed shoe factory of Mr. Sampson, the introducer of “Chinese cheap labor” into Massachusetts. We were in the main workshop when the Chinamen came up-stairs to their work, six-and-a-half-o'clock. Such a merry sight we never saw in
a Yankee factory. Laughing, jumping, slapping their companions on the back, tickling their ears, and other pranks, their eyes glistening with roguery and sport, they poured up the narrow staircase into the room, one hundred and eleven strong, as though they were going to an all-day frolic. Rapidly they passed to their respective benches or machines, quickly donned aprons and hats, and soon were at their work—all respectful, all industrious, and all seemingly happy. The best commentary on the success of the experiment is that last Monday the first three years' contract for their labor expired, and the whole original force renewed the same cheerfully and willingly. Two additions have been made to the original number, engaged in San Francisco, and but a few have left from causes independent of the labor and compensation. We could not help asking ourselves, where else can we find factory hands who go to their work laughing and hilarious, or work so long and willingly without desire of change? These Chinamen seem to grow in strength and vigor the longer they are in this climate, as the growth of beards indicates; and if they could marry and fully adopt Western customs we have no doubt they would easily become assimilated with the great American composite of nationality, which in time will graft African, Indian and Mongolian upon the Caucasian tree.

On July 10, everyone in the schoolroom had read and concurred with the article's final claim; to react any other way had not crossed the mind of a one of them. But on this day, less than a month later, as white and Chinese alike turned
to see Mrs. Sampson cross the threshold of her husband's factory with a new wicker basket on her arm like a scale, the human noise of the room subsided. Perhaps the Chinamen's growth had been too strong, too vigorous, thought the native volunteers. And even the most progressive of the Chinamen, faced with the sight of their employer's wife and the child's Celestial eyes, felt that assimilation was not the goal toward which they should have been striving.

Julia was not so lost in the new definitions of her world that she neglected to detect the awkwardness, and a flicker of disquiet about Charlie's ability to be totally discreet passed through her, but her attentions were to her daughter as the needle of a compass to true north, so why should this not be the case for all others?

This was perhaps explanation for why, as she stood there searching out her usual table and students, she took note of the room's quiet but did not necessarily assign herself as its cause. The absence of the courtesies that usually greeted her arrival could be the unease of reunion, she told herself. She had, after all, been absent for several months. And men did tend to discover even more clumsy versions of themselves around babies.

Sitting across the room, Fannie Burlingame, Julia's cousin by marriage, fellow volunteer teacher, supporter of all things Chinese, took note of the room's temperature. Given how much of a supporter she had been of this Chinese Experiment of Sampson's, she would have shown her public endorsement for these boys no matter what her personal feelings about them, but she had been
gladly surprised by the extent to which she had come to care about Lue Gim Gong. She had discovered in him a talent for horticulture and she and her orchards had been much pleased by his attentions. She felt about him the way an unmarried woman of a certain age feels about most younger men: a kind, vaguely maternal regard. Indeed, she would before long formally and officially adopt him, and in the end, bequeath to him an orange grove in Florida and a sizeable part of her formidable estate, treating him in death as she had in life: as the son she never had. So, of all people in the room, she understood how a white American woman, even a white American woman of a certain class, could come to find herself engaged and delighted with one of these Celestial visitors, but engaged and delighted was one thing, the picture of mother and babe across the room quite another. It was, she felt, an unhappymaking situation all around, and a further misfortune that she must call the woman in question cousin. Her face expressed such worry that one of her students fetched her some cold water and insisted she drink.

It was young Lucy Robinson who stepped forward, breaking the stillness to stride across the room and bend at the waist to peer happily into the basket. The attack against her had been such an affront to the regulations of social interaction that she had found herself since that day able to cross those boundaries with more ease. It was as if having had the rim of a cup broken, she had discovered one could drink from it nonetheless. And an infant was an infant, and Lucy a nineteen-year-old lady. Her vision of the future was
a warm, grassy meadow flocked with babies. It had always been thus. The attack had made these hopes more desperate, not less, and she tried to keep the sharpness of her need out of her speech as she relieved Mrs. Sampson of the basket, advising her to sit. She took the child expertly from its nest, cradling the tiny head against her shoulder, her body finding a rocking rhythm as easy and natural as the gait of a well-trained pony.