Chapter Twenty-Seven — Pearl
Monday the twenty-seventh of September.
The French Hospital at the corner of Avenue Joffre and Rue Lafayette had been the French Hospital for thirty-one years. It had been built in 1906 by a subscription of the French Concession Council, with red brick from a kiln at Pudong and tiles from a workshop at Yixing, and the chapel at the corner had a stained-glass window the Sœurs de Saint-Paul-de-Chartres had brought from Chartres in 1910 in the second hold of the Tonkin. Dr. Morancy had taken charge of the third-floor wing in 1928. He had put Pearl in the corner room at the East end, in the bed by the window that took the shade of the plane-tree on the sidewalk — the bed he kept, by a small unspoken arrangement with Sister Marie-Claire of the door, for women he had known when they had still been girls of seventeen at the rehearsal halls of Avenue Joffre.
Pearl had been in that bed since half past three on the morning of the second Wednesday of September. Mr. Wang's rickshaw had passed a Japanese sentry of nineteen at the corner of Avenue Foch and Sichuan Road North on the way back from the Marina Ballroom at the Cathay, where Pearl had finished her last set at half past two. The Settlement constable forty yards off had not, at the hour, told the marine that Mr. Wang's rickshaw was a rickshaw he was letting through. The marine had not been on the corner the night before. The marine had been nineteen, in a uniform he had been wearing for eleven weeks, with a rifle of the Type 38 of 1905 vintage, the safety off. He fired one round.
The round went through the side of the rickshaw three feet from the pavement and into Pearl's hip, and it did not come out. Mr. Wang had jumped down and had, with the wrong reflex of a rickshaw man, kept running for forty yards toward the French Concession line before he understood, by the change in the weight of the cab, that he was running with a wounded passenger. The Portuguese boyfriend had been at the second corner waiting for her at the curb because Pearl had told him, that evening at the chair, not to come into the Marina; he had run to her; he had caught her, half out of the cab, in his arms. He had said, in his Macanese Portuguese, Pérola, and Pearl, with the round in her, had said, Sweetheart.
By the third Monday she had been in the bed four days, and I had sat beside it four days, in the wooden chair Dr. Morancy had set two feet from her head. I had taken her right hand on the morning she first woke from the morphine, and I had not let it go since. The Portuguese boyfriend had been on the bench in the corridor the whole four days, not eating. When Dr. Morancy laid a hand on his shoulder he had only said, I am staying, and the doctor said, Yes, and after that no one tried to move him.
The shade at the window had moved three inches since half past three. The plane-tree at the sidewalk was the plane-tree the French Concession had planted in 1912 along Avenue Joffre, a Platanus orientalis with the bark in the small pale plates the Concession plane-trees had. The shade moved, in September, at the rate of two and a half inches an hour at the third floor by the East-facing window. I had been watching it. I had been watching it because the shade was a thing one could watch without becoming, by the watching, a thing the bed had to attend to.
Pearl wore the pale-blue hospital gown with the tag at the shoulder seam, and no jewellery except the small jade earrings the Portuguese boyfriend had given her on her twenty-fifth birthday in May at the Sun Sun department store at the second counter on the third floor. Sister Marie-Claire had set her hair in a loose plait tied with white cotton ribbon. The plait was the plait of a Pearl who had not, in nine years on the Paramount stage, ever worn a plait. The plait was the plait of a Pearl who had, this week, been the woman in the bed.
She looked at me.
Sweetheart, she said.
Pearl.
Sweetheart. Listen.
Yes.
I have been in this bed for the count of four days, and I have been counting. The counting has come to one piece of business advice.
Pearl.
Listen.
She said it the way she said it on a Wednesday at four o'clock at the gallery table at the second flat at Rue Joffre, when she had set the brandy bottle between us and was about to say a thing about the season's bookings I would, by midnight on the same evening, have written down in the dressing-room ledger. The voice was the voice she used for a price across a table. It was the dry even voice that had, in March of 1934 when she was twenty-two and I was nineteen, told a German booker from the Cathay that her younger half-sister from Wuxian was not, at the listed fee, available for the second Thursday of the month, and had then, when the booker raised the fee by a third, said, Yes, now she is. It was the voice in which Pearl had been, for nine years, the older sister.
She used the voice now, in the morphine, on a Monday afternoon, with the round still in her hip, with the shade at the plane-tree moving on the bedclothes at the rate of two and a half inches an hour.
Set the price.
Pearl.
Set the price, sweetheart.
Yes.
Set it high.
Pearl.
Do not let them set it for you.
No, Pearl.
Promise.
Pearl.
Promise.
I promise, Pearl.
She let that sit. She let me hold it the way she had let me hold a measure at the bridge of a bandstand song in March of 1935, when she had stood behind the curtain with a glass of warm water and a thumb at the rib and had said, Hold it. Hold it. Now release, and the room had not, for half a beat, breathed. The room now, four years later, had not, for half a beat, breathed.
Then she said she had been thinking about the gallery at one o'clock on the second Sunday of June of 1936, the hour at the brandy when she had set the price for herself — and it had been a small low price, the price of a singer of twenty-five who had wanted to be the older sister of a singer of twenty-two. The price had been the price, she said. Do not set yours low, sweetheart. Set it high. Set it at the hour of an inaugural broadcast.
I held her hand and said yes. I did not, at the hour of an inaugural broadcast, ask what she meant. She knew what I had been carrying since the second Friday of August. She had known, by the column at her name on the list at the Japanese consulate, since the second Friday of September, when the Portuguese boyfriend had heard at the cargo line club at half past one in the morning a man from the consulate make a joke about it.
She had been thinking about the Mendelsohn, she said — the press at the small Pathé studio on Avenue du Roi Albert. The Mendelsohn would press the small black disc, and the small black discs would be three. She said it twice, three, to be sure I had it. She set the count on the bedclothes with her left thumb, three times, in the small slow way a woman in morphine on the third hour of a Monday afternoon set a count.
Then she set out the pieces, one at a time, the way she had once set out a season's bookings at the gallery table at the second flat at Rue Joffre, in the dry even voice, in the order she had decided in the four days she had been counting.
The Portuguese boyfriend would take the second small black disc, she said. She had told him so herself at quarter past nine on the third Saturday, at the chair: Take the second small black disc. He would carry it to the aerodrome at Hongqiao on the morning of the broadcast and by the Sikorsky to Manila, to the wire-relay at the Manila Tribune where his cousin Almeida worked the second desk. Manila at the hour of noon would print the second column. Manila at the hour of noon was the country at the wire-relay that would not, by any consul's word, hesitate to print.
Liang next. Liang is at the corner of Avenue Édouard VII and Avenue du Roi Albert, she said, my half-cousin at the Ningbo branch, with the rail-line at the small-cargo office. He would take the third small black disc by rail to Chongqing. The Hankou–Chongqing line would take him six days. The Chongqing radio that the KMT had set up in the second week of August at the third hour of the broadcast would, by the third Monday after the press, have the disc.
Teddy last. He would take the first small black disc by sea to Hong Kong, and with it, from the Pathé studio, the typed transcript of the third verse with the names. He would carry the transcript to the North-China Daily News at the Bund by half past five on the afternoon of the broadcast, and the paper would print it on the second Friday of November. Hong Kong would press at EMI by the second week of December.
She set the routing out the way one set out the order of three saucers on a tea tray.
I have set out the pieces, she said. Do not feel guilty. I am taking my own advice. I am setting the price. The price is the third verse going out. And again, lower: Set it high.
Yes, Pearl.
Sweetheart. Promise.
I promise, Pearl.
Good.
She set her right hand at mine and closed her eyes. The shade at the window moved another inch. Down on Avenue Joffre, somewhere in the third refugee tent at the corner of Rue Lafayette, a child of perhaps four was being told, in the Hongkou Shanghainese of his mother, to stop crying because the sister at the door of the tent had been at the second hour of the second nap and had said, that morning, that he was a boy of four and a boy of four did not cry. The mother's voice came up faintly through the open window. Pearl, with her eyes shut, smiled the half-smile she smiled when a small piece of life had come to her ear from the street and had been the small piece of life she had wanted.
With her eyes shut she said, Sweetheart. Tell the Portuguese boyfriend to come.
I stood and went to the door and said, to the man on the bench in the corner, Mr. Sá. He stood and came in and sat in the chair I had left for him and took Pearl's right hand in his. She opened her eyes.
António.
Pérola.
Sweetheart. Listen. The papers. Hong Kong. Without me.
For the count of nine Mr. Sá did not say anything. Then: Pérola.
António.
Não.
Sim.
He laid his cheek against her right hand and wept the way a Portuguese boyfriend of a Paramount singer of twenty-five wept at a bed in the French Hospital at quarter to five on a September afternoon. He wept without sound, into the pale-blue cotton of the gown, and Pearl set her left hand at the back of his neck where the hair met the collar and held it there, the way she had held the back of his neck on the bench of the bandstand at the cargo line club in May at the second song of the second set, when she had taught him the small Cantonese chorus he had since learned to sing without an accent. Against his cheek she gave him the routing one more time — Take the small black disc. Take it to Manila. Take the papers after, to Hong Kong. Without me — and to each line he said only Sim.
Pearl closed her eyes.
The hour went from half past four to five, from five to half past five, from half past five to six. At six the shade of the plane-tree at the window was gone. The room, without the shade, was the small bare honest room of a corner ward at the third floor of the French Hospital, with the white plastered walls and the iron bedstead and the small mahogany bedside table on which Sister Marie-Claire had set, that morning, the half-glass of weak hospital tea Pearl had not drunk. Pearl breathed the breath of a singer of twenty-five at the third hour of the morphine — slower, slower, slower, with the small dry catch at the back of the throat the morphine took the edge off but not the catch.
At half past nine she opened her eyes once more.
Sweetheart.
Pearl.
The country.
Yes.
The country at the corner of Avenue Foch was a Japanese marine of nineteen who fired one round. It did not know I was Bai Zhu of Ningbo, twenty-five, second-billed at the Paramount. It only knew the corner.
Yes.
Sweetheart. I am sorry. I had wanted the older-sister thing for one more weekend.
Pearl.
Sweetheart. Goodbye, Wanyin.
Goodbye, Bai Zhu.
She closed her eyes. The breath went from four counts in and six out, to four and four, to three and three. The catch at the back of the throat went out before the breath did. At fourteen minutes past three on the morning of the fourth Tuesday of September of 1937, the breath at the bed at the third floor at the East end of the French Hospital stopped.
The hour of fourteen minutes past three was the hour.
Mr. Sá laid Pearl's right hand at the pale-blue collar of the gown, stood, walked to the door, and went out into the corridor and wept without sound. I stayed. I sat at her right hand for an hour. The hand cooled, slowly, in the way I had been told by Dr. Morancy a hand cools in the first hour after the breath stops — three degrees of warmth out of the palm, the fingers staying longer because the fingers had a smaller mass and held the warmth less and lost it slower at the same time. I held the hand through the three degrees. At quarter past four I said, in the voice of a Suzhou-born singer of twenty-three, Bai Zhu. Pearl did not answer. I will set the price, I said. She did not answer. I will set it high. She did not answer.
I stood and went to the door and out into the corridor. The Portuguese boyfriend was on the bench. I set my hand at his shoulder; he said nothing; I went past him and down the stair to the lobby. The stair was the stair the Sœurs de Saint-Paul-de-Chartres had built in 1906 with a Pingyang pine banister that had been waxed every six weeks for thirty-one years. I held the banister. I did not need to hold it, but I held it. The doorman at the lobby was Mr. Chen of the second uncle's family from the third lane at Avenue Joffre, a man of fifty-one in the green uniform of the Concession hospital service, who had been at the door at this hour for fourteen years.
The doorman said, in his Shanghainese, Miss Su.
Mr. Chen.
I am sorry. Go home, Miss Su.
Yes, Mr. Chen.
I went out and walked West along Avenue Joffre into the hour of dawn. The plane-trees laid the shade of dawn on the sidewalk. Avenue Joffre at quarter to five had the small early sounds the Avenue had at quarter to five — the milk cart at the corner of Rue Lafayette, the second sweeper at the second arcade, the small bell of a coffee man at the third café before the café opened at six. Under those sounds, the city was a city the Shanghai Mainichi had on the front page of the morning edition the word fallen in five places.
Between Rue Lafayette and Avenue du Roi Albert there were three refugee tents. The Concession parks had filled in August with three thousand from Hongkou and Zhabei, and now also with those from North of Suzhou Creek who had found the Settlement doors no longer let them in. The third tent was a French Army surplus tent of the kind the Concession had used in the typhoid quarantine of 1925, the canvas mended in three places with white cotton, the door tied open with a bit of jute string.
A woman of thirty stood at the door of the second tent with a weeping child of four, her hand in the child's hair. She had on a faded blue tunic and dark cotton trousers, and at her feet a bundle wrapped in a square of brown oilcloth. I stopped. From the inside pocket of the handbag I took the four almond biscuits I had wrapped in wax paper for Auntie Lin, the ones Pearl had not eaten and had handed back to me, saying, Sweetheart. Keep the small wax paper for the hour you will know it. This was the hour. I knelt on the sidewalk.
Mei mei, I said to the child. She looked at me. I put the wax paper in her hand. Eat them. She opened it and ate the first biscuit, slowly, the way a child of four ate a thing she had not been given in weeks.
Miss, said the mother, in her Hongkou Shanghainese.
Auntie.
Thank you. I am sorry. We are at the corner.
Yes, Auntie.
I stood and walked on. I did not look back. The wax paper had been Pearl's hour. The wax paper was now the child's. I had been carrying the small wax paper since the third Saturday of August, and the hour at which I had known it had been, in the end, this hour, on a sidewalk on Avenue Joffre at the third refugee tent at quarter to five on a Tuesday morning in September, with Pearl twelve minutes dead and the price not yet set and the country at the corner.
I have been setting the price wrong for nine years, I said to myself at the plane-trees, on the Avenue Joffre at the refugee tents, in the hour of dawn. Set it high. I kept walking.
The corner of Avenue Joffre and Bubbling Well Road was the corner. The Paramount was closed — closed not by Mr. Du's calendar but by the second curfew the Settlement Council had set at the second emergency session on Saturday at eleven o'clock. Mr. Lin the doorman was not at the door, and the long red carpet was not rolled out, and the gas-lamps at the second arcade were down to the small low wicks the lamp-lighter set when the lamps were not to be lit for a third evening.
I went along the side wall to the back vestibule and knocked the knock at the back door. Three short, two long, three short. Mr. Wei Liangzhi opened it.
Miss Su.
Mr. Wei.
Pearl.
At fourteen minutes past three.
Yes, Miss Su. And then: Go down.
He stood aside. The hall behind him was the back hall of the Paramount at the hour, the small dim hall with the boiler door at the end and the smell of cold-storage and yeast and the third night of a closed weekend. I went past him to the door at the back of the kitchen, through the kitchen, into the cold-storage room. The pipe was at the second ledge. The cook was at the kitchen. The dust-grey sparrow was at the skylight. I went through the arch. I went down the forty-two steps. The candle at the wall ledge above the second-to-last step had been lit. I went down. I went toward the man who had been, since the second Saturday of August, the only man in the city who had been keeping the count of nine for me, and I went down to tell him that Pearl had said set it high and that I had said I promise and that the price was the third verse going out, and that the woman at the second tent and the child of four would, that evening, eat the almond biscuits Pearl had handed back to me in May at the small wax paper she had told me to keep for the hour I would know.
The hour was the hour.
I went down.