The Secret (27 page)

Though my father and I did not guess it at the time, Wu was honoring us to meet us there. I began to understand it as I observed the businessmen at nearby tables. So far as my father was concerned, we might as well have been eating at McDonald’s. But Luk Yu had stayed open during the Japanese occupation and had been, for seventy years and more, a distinguished Hong Kong restaurant.

“You are anxious to know the conditions in which our goods are made,” Wu said when we—that is, my father and I—were struggling to conquer slippery dim sum with chopsticks. “We will visit some shops tomorrow.”

The next morning he took us in his car for a tour of Hong Kong. They drive on the left there, in the British fashion—which took a little getting used to. We had lunch in a café on the Peak, the highest point on the island. We spent the afternoon visiting three workshops.

Hong Kong sweatshops were nothing like the barbed-wire camps on Saipan. They were certainly not luxurious, and they would not have begun to meet U.S. federal or state standards, but the young women who worked in them were not slaves.

“Any of these girls can quit her job at any time if she doesn’t like it,” said Wu.

“As a practical matter—” I started to say.

“As a practical matter, she has to earn a living, but there are many shops, and she can try others.”

“Looks pretty rough to me,” my father said. We were looking at a room where twenty or so young women worked at sewing machines. The windows were open, and oscillating fans blew air across the workbenches, but the temperature had to be in the high eighties.

“They come here from the Philippines, typically,” said Wu. “A girl works five or six years and then goes home. She may come back after a few months, for another five or six years. Anyway, she talks about the working conditions and the wages in Hong Kong, and her sisters and friends come here looking for this kind of work. So, they must not think it too bad.”

“Don’t they want to get married?” my father asked.

Henry Wu nodded. “They come here at age seventeen, typically, work five or six years, then maybe another five or six years, and go home to marry before they are thirty—holding a dowry a young man has been glad to wait for. They are paid in Hong Kong dollars, one of the world’s most stable currencies, and they deposit their savings in Hong Kong banks.”

“But when they go home—”

“They leave their money here, where the banks can be trusted absolutely.”

“Then how do they get their money out?”

Wu smiled. “Bank-machine cards. ATM cards. They work the same as they do in the States. Internationally. These are the nineties. We’ve had ATM cards for years.”

My father thought he had been subtle and had not shown his growing impatience with Chinese food and chopsticks. Apparently he had not succeeded in concealing his wish for Western-style food eaten with silverware, since that evening Henry Wu took us to an excellent Austrian restaurant called Mozart Stub’n, all but hidden on an out-of-the-way street in the part of Hong Kong called Mid-Levels. There we dined on asparagus for an opener, followed by green salad, then beef and potatoes with turnips—cooked so you could eat them, as my father put it to me later—followed by a rich chocolate torte and coffee. We drank two bottles of an excellent Austrian red wine, then generous splashes of Courvoisier with our coffee.

“You don’t run things the way they do in Saipan,” my father said to Henry Wu as we contemplated our brandy.

“That’s a very different thing,” said Wu.

“I’ve canceled our contracts with Alexander on Saipan. I’m looking for someone to take them up.”

“I can’t match Saipan prices,” said Wu frankly.

“We can negotiate,” said my father brusquely.

“You don’t want to risk the wretched publicity that’s going to come out of Saipan.”

My father ignored the comment. “I’m going to have to put someone out here for a time to talk about designs and quality, shipments, and so on.”

Henry Wu nodded toward me. My father looked at me quizzically.

“I wish I could,” I said. “But there’s no way.”

44

JERRY

I hired Charlie Han and sent him to Hong Kong. It was a great choice. As a New York Chinatown Chinese, he spoke the Cantonese that was spoken in Hong Kong and southern China, not the Mandarin that was spoken in Beijing. He knew the garment business and did his job well. On the other hand, as I’d had to expect, word came back before long that he was establishing a business of his own. Next the word came that he had married a young Hong Kong Chinese girl and had become a father. Charlie was a professional hustler.

I couldn’t leave him out there on his own, with no supervision, so I leased a furnished apartment in Mid-Levels. We used it as a headquarters. I would go out and live in it for a week. Len would go. After Vicky had her second child—a rambunctious boy they named Jerry—she went out, too. Hong Kong became a sort of second home for us, each visit an adventure.

None of us ever learned a damned word of Chinese. It made Len think of Sue Ellen and remember the struggle she had gone through to learn the language of a quarter of the world’s population. He tried to learn a few words at least, as did Vicky. I never tried.

Something very strange—I got so I could read some of the Chinese characters, even when I could not understand the words. I learned the character for “exit,” for example, and could identify it without looking at the English word below it.

I learned to do something I had done in New York decades ago and had never done in recent years: ride the subway. The Hong Kong underground was so clean and efficient that I chose it often, even over the cheap little taxis whose drivers often refused a tip.

I should not exaggerate my Hong Kong experience. Len came to spend a great deal more time there than I did.

*   *   *

An odd thing happened. When I returned from Hong Kong, a letter from Lyon was waiting for me. It was from Giselle’s sister, Therèse.

Dear Jerry,

You will my bad English excuse as always. I am think it is bad for us no seeing each other no time. Giselle would have wished. I not see little Len since he was small boy. I no family here no more. Could you come and bring boy? Please? Write to say.

Therèse

I did not write. I put through a telephone call to her.

“Therèse … Len is a married man with two children. Right now he’s in Hong Kong on business. I’d like for you to meet his wife and children. But I don’t see how I can bring them all to France. It has big problems.”

“No? Sorree, Jerree. I had hope…”

“I’ve got a better idea. Let me fly you here, Therèse. Trip to the States, first class, at my expense. I’d like to see you again. Len would like to. Plan on staying a month at least. I’m alone, too. You can live in my apartment with me.”

“You would do this for me?”

I arranged for her a first-class ticket to Kennedy. When I finally recognized her coming out, I was amazed. Some Frenchwomen age badly, growing fat and mustachioed. Giselle, of course, had never done that. Well … neither had her sister.

Therèse had lines on her face, especially around her eyes, and the flesh under her chin was loose. She was sixty-five years old that year, two years younger than I was. But she was slender and walked with a spring in her step; and, wearing a rose print silk minidress, she had a figure many women would have died for. She was blond—not naturally so, I knew—and had had her hair styled quite short. She had a flair for makeup, knowing what was enough and what was not quite enough. Coming toward me, carrying a small, simple case and letting a porter push a cart with the rest of her luggage, Therèse was a vision of a self-confident, mature woman.

We kissed as we met there in the airport. I supposed some of the kids who saw us smiled, even laughed at us old people, but that kid rekindled a passion I had felt for Thèrese long ago. We had spent an erotic night together, years before I married Giselle.

“
Zheree
…” she whispered.

“Therèse. It is so very good to see you!”

The second night in my apartment we slept together. We had wonderful sex together. Therèse had a flair for it. I was ready to think it was a Frenchwoman’s special flair, but I don’t think so anymore; I think she shared with Giselle simply a healthy
woman’s
flair. Maybe being French subdued some inhibitions.

My wife’s sister. I don’t think Giselle would have objected. To the contrary. She had set me up to spend a night with her kid sister, who had all but fucked me out of my mind—back in France, in the old days.

Therèse had not been entirely straightforward with me. I needed only a few days to figure out that she did not intend to return to France, unless she had to. She had brought with her everything she very much cared about.

One night in the bedroom she opened an old, cracked leather photo album and showed me some faded, browning photographs.

“You know about zis thing,” she said. The pictures were of a brick-paved street in an apparently middle-class neighborhood. A
boulangerie
and a
boucherie
were visible; also, in one picture, the doorway of a church where two priests stood laughing. I had walked on such French streets a thousand times. But in these pictures a heckling mob herded five crying, cringing, stark naked girls, heads shaved, down the middle of the street. “Iss me,” she said, laying her finger on one image. “I am
ninezeen
year old. Zey take
sousands
of picture.”

If ever a girl looked utterly miserable, in whatever circumstance, Therèse looked agonized in those pictures. I could not understand why she had preserved them all these years.

“You have heard of zis thing, no? You know what I have done and what they have done to me?”

I took her hands in mine. “I have heard of it, Therèse. The war. Many of us did odd things. A lot of time has passed. I did things I’m not proud of. We all do.”

“You heard,” she murmured. “For all zese years I have live where everybody knows about zis.”

“And nearly everybody has forgiven,” I suggested.

“Uhh … zey say. I not know.”

We talked a lot and reached a decision that she would stay in New York. Not only that. When Len came home from Hong Kong, we confronted him with our decision that we would marry.

I was going to marry his mother’s sister. I didn’t ask Len if he liked it. I suspected he did not. I liked it, and Therèse liked it, and that was all that counted.

Therèse and I left on a wedding trip. We flew Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong, settled into my apartment there, and made Hong Kong our base for visits to Bangkok, Singapore, and Beijing.

I did not turn our wedding trip into a business trip. Except in Hong Kong, where we lived in our apartment, we stayed in the best hotels. I had a sense that this might be my last great romantic fling, and Therèse had the same sense for herself. We wanted to savor and cherish every moment.

We did not carry cameras. Our eyes were our cameras, our memories our film.

Therèse was the only woman I ever knew who had utterly no interest in Cheeks merchandise. She was a direct, earthy Frenchwoman, and when the time came to be intimate she simply stripped and that was that. The time to be intimate might begin at six and go on till midnight, and she might be naked all that time; but naked was the way to think about love, work up to love, and make love—not wearing some odd, impractical garment.

I could not complain, even if the erotica she scorned were my business and my living.

“Ah, Zherree, you want I should wear zees, I wear zees, but ees more beauty zan zee
skeen?
”

She called my cock “beauty.” “He is very beauty. He look good, feel good, taste good.”

She told me about the German lieutenant who got her in trouble. “He want marry me,” she said. “He say he send for me as soon as war is over. We live in Germany, he say. On day when I was shamed I didn’t know he already dead. Shot by Resistance sniper in streets of Paris. Zis I learn only in 1946. His family invite me to come, live with them. I could not.”

She knew more about me than I had imagined. Giselle had told her. “She lucky girl,” Therèse said of Giselle. “She dance
tout nu,
but she no fuck with Boches, not never. Never enough hungry. Fortune always smile on Giselle.”

We stayed in the Far East for a month, then went home to find that my son had created a problem.

*   *   *

By now our gross sales, stores and catalogs, exceeded five billion dollars a year. Something like 60 percent of our merchandise was imported, a little of it from France, still, but most of it from Asia, chiefly Hong Kong.

As if anticipating my visits to Bangkok and Singapore—and skimming off a little for himself, I am sure—Charlie Han had arranged for some of the goods labeled “Made in Hong Kong” to be manufactured actually in some other places. The old Chinese city of Canton, now called by its real name, Guangzhou, was a center for the manufacture of knock-offs. Name a famous brand, and likely you could buy a replica made in Guangzhou. The Chinese factories in Guangzhou were especially good at making vinyl and latex clothing. Black vinyl miniskirts were a specialty, and were seen on girls astride motorcycles all over the world. Latex clothes were a fetishist line, not just for us but for others in our business, and most of them were made in Guangzhou and sent all over the world with labels saying they were made in Hong Kong.

Our merchandise entered the United States across the docks supposedly regulated by the New York Port Authority. Other merchandise landed at Kennedy.

Returning from my wedding trip, I learned that my son had executed contracts moving most of our imports into container shipping.

I had seen the ships moving out of Hong Kong. I had seen them arriving in New York. Huge, squarish ships loaded with hundreds of sealed containers.

Sealed containers. That was the point. Since time began the longshoremen and others had pilfered a certain amount of merchandise off every shipment arriving in the port. It was a tradition. With sealed containers—