Songs Of Willow Frost: A Novel Part 13

Her shoes, her leggings, her dress, the figure of sweet, blind Charlotte, hung from the rafter above, the rosary wrapped around the wooden beam and around her slender neck and around William's broken heart.

Tears.

(1934).

William had been to only two funerals that he could remember, and both had been at Sacred Heart. The first was for a sister who died of old age at eighty-eight. The other was for a toddler who had wandered outside, fallen into a fountain, and drowned. William remembered that both of those services, like the one for Charlotte, had a distinct smell of pine, from the lowly casket, hastily fas.h.i.+oned out of seasoned wood hewn from the forest that surrounded the orphanage. As William looked out the window toward a large stand of evergreen, he imagined the trees closing in around all of them, the orphanage as one giant coffin, their existence contained within an open casket for all to see. He wished that the lid had been closed on the vessel that contained Charlotte's body. He didn't like seeing her that way. He couldn't help but regard her lifeless body and recall all the times he'd imagined his mother's funeral. As a little boy he'd feared losing her-feared being alone. Now his ah-ma had returned and yet he'd never felt such loneliness. He never realized it was possible to mourn someone who was still alive.

As he walked by Charlotte's casket to pay his respects, he noticed the black and purple rings around her neck, the indentations where the beads had broken the skin and soft tissue, the damage covered with a thin veil of talc.u.m. Her eyes were half-open because Sister Briganti refused to leave coins on her eyelids to keep them closed. She'd been afraid someone would steal them. As William glanced at the slivers of milky blue, he realized that Sister Briganti was probably right. Lots of kids felt sorry for Charlotte, but she had no friends. Just me.

"I'm sorry, Willie," Sunny said as he followed him past Charlotte and down the steps to the nearest pew, where a group of boys was sitting.

William didn't say anything. He just stared past Father Bartholomew as the stodgy old priest offered a homily about parents and children. William looked past the man in his robes and vestments, through the stained gla.s.s behind him, at the shapes of the trees that swayed in the wind, casting shadows on the translucent panes.

"I heard she cried," Sunny whispered.

William nodded. Blood. The thought made him grimace as he remembered Charlotte telling him about her inability to shed tears. He wished he could forget looking up at his dear friend, watching dark lines run down her cheeks from the corners of her bulging eyes. The pressure from hanging had ruptured her seared tear ducts.

As William listened to Father Bartholomew, he looked about the chapel. Charlotte's father sat across from them, next to Sister Briganti, who was kneeling reverently, head bowed, hands clasped around her rosary. The closest she ever got to something akin to happiness was during prayer. William stared at her, offended by her serenity. Look at me. Let me see your eyes, he wanted to shout. He needed some unspoken confirmation that she felt something for her part in all of this-that she acknowledged some small responsibility, a token of remorse. But the more he swelled with anger, the more that acidlike emotion spilled back onto him. Because William felt lost as well, as though he were floating in the moral backwater between sins of commission and sins of omission.

"Her father looks like a ghost," Sunny said.

News of Charlotte's unspoken relations.h.i.+p with her father had spread about the orphanage, and in the course of hours William had learned new words like debauchery, molestation, and incest-too many words that struck too close to home. But if there were any doubt about the veracity of Charlotte's story, it had been answered by her death. And no one could help but stare at Mr. Rigg. Not because of the horrible things they imagined him capable of, but because he didn't look like a monster. He looked toothless, defanged, and baleful. He was no kind of decent father, he was barely a parent, and now Charlotte would be put into the earth alone, orphaned forever.

"I can't believe he's here," William said. "She hated him."

As though the man were enc.u.mbered by the condemning stares, he stood, wiped tears from his eyes with a handkerchief, looked at his daughter's body once more, without a smile, without a frown, and left without a word, just as the choir in the balcony began to sing.

"I'd love to get my hands on him," Sunny said, shaking his head. "Afterward they'd call me Sunny Sevenkiller."

As the chapel doors closed with a hollow, empty thud, all eyes turned to Sister Briganti; even Father Bartholomew seemed to be addressing her and her alone. Everyone watched as she sat like a statue in her pew, staring ahead stone-faced, regarding the blank s.p.a.ce in front of her as though looking for comfort or absolution.

William thought about Willow-his ah-ma. He couldn't conceive of any parents utterly abandoning their children. If anything, meeting Charlotte's father had clarified a painful reality-that even monsters can miss their children. Because the uncomfortable truth is that no one is all bad, or all good. Not mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, or husbands and wives. Life would be much easier if that were the case. Instead, everyone-Charlotte, Willow, Mr. Rigg, even Sister Briganti-was a confusing mixture of love and hate, joy and sorrow, longing and forgetting, misguided truth and painful deception.

Indian Summer.

(1934).

William kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the soft bed of warm gra.s.s over the place where Charlotte lay buried six feet below. A groundskeeper had peeled up the sod for the funeral, rolling it back like a carpet. William drew his feet together, resting his hands across his lap as he tried to imagine the feel of a pine box surrounding him, the smell of seasoned timber, sawdust, and wood glue. He looked up at a pale blue sky, the color of Charlotte's eyes. The sun had returned from its hibernation, and what few clouds William saw were stretched across the heavens like salt.w.a.ter taffy in a pulling machine. William closed his eyes and felt the heat from the sun teasing his eyelids. But as he heard geese honking and opened his eyes, he saw birds flying south and knew this respite wouldn't last. Charlotte's darkness was permanent. William missed her. He knew this was as close as he'd ever be to her again. He struggled to accept her death, since she'd been holding his hand just a few days ago. He felt as though he'd failed her and that leaving her behind was a betrayal of sorts. Who would remember her? Who would tend her grave? But as Willow had once said, I didn't have a reason to stay.

William knew from reading The Seattle Star that his ah-ma would be in town for at least another week. But he didn't know where she'd be staying, or who she was with, if anyone, though there was always the theater and the alley and the stage door. If not, there was Chinatown. That's where he hoped he'd find her. Like Charlotte's grave, he knew that neighborhood was where old bones, old skeletons were buried. He suspected that his ah-ma would be drawn there as well, to wallow in the memories, to drown in nostalgia.

His mother's stories had conjured dark thoughts of being seven years old again and waking up in the middle of the night to an empty apartment. He remembered how he used to open the window and sit on the cold iron grating of the fire escape, the breeze chilling his ankles where the feet of his footie pajamas had been cut off as he outgrew them. Back then he would wrap himself in a blanket to ward off the wintery Seattle night, when the wet air permeated brick and mortar, tile and wood, until his fingers and toes looked pale and grayish, translucent in the moonlight. He recalled those nights after the Crash, looking down into the alley and seeing hobos buried beneath piles of coats-reeking men, huddled together, burning garbage for warmth.

Strangely, he never felt alone on those nights, always confident that his mother would return. He'd sit and listen to beats wafting from the clubs and cabaret theaters below. He didn't know what to call that kind of music back then, but he later learned that joyful noise was a piano and a scratchy trombone playing cakewalk and ragtime, and a local version of Tin Pan Alley. The songs would blare and whisper, cras.h.i.+ng and receding, coming and going, reminding him of the sound from a Philco radio on a stormy night. As he grew older he realized that the strange rhythm was merely the doorman letting patrons in and out, releasing music into the night like smoke signals. Despite Prohibition, William would watch as men and women staggered into waiting cabs or ambled down the street, straightening their ties and hemlines, stepping to the beat with all the composure of Sunday churchgoers, but listing to the left or right as though the sidewalk were slowly s.h.i.+fting beneath their feet.

He wondered if the clubs were still there. So many things had changed since then. So many places had been boarded up. Fortunes came and fortunes went. William couldn't grasp the concept of health, good or bad, but fortune-that was easy to comprehend. He'd noticed their luck changing as his ah-ma began to receive gifts-bouquets of purple and blue flowers, potted plants, and baskets of ripe fruit. And pink boxes of food-oh, the delicious food. His mouth watered as he remembered the savory, chewy sweetness of wind-dried duck sausage, which to this day was the best thing he'd ever tasted.

And his ah-ma's clothing began to change.

He remembered her blue dress, the one she used to wash in the sink and hang in the bathroom to dry every night-the one she wore every day-was suddenly replaced by a floral number with a lace collar. Then another. And another. And new hatboxes began to stack up in the corner, so high they seemed mountainous. So William would do what any sensible young boy would do; he'd climb them until they tumbled to the floor, then he'd turn them over and beat on them like drums, using his chopsticks.

His ah-ma would scold him, s.n.a.t.c.hing the utensils from his hands. He'd sit down and start to cry until she made funny faces that made him laugh, then handed him a shoe box of empty spools that he used as building blocks.

Then there was the strange man. William vaguely remembered Colin. He recalled, years ago, thinking he must have been his father, or at least a kind fatherly figure. Colin was always smiling and gracious-he never raised his voice, was always joking and laughing. Through the prism of memory, he seemed the perfect gentleman, with a spectrum of manners, decorum, and wealth. William remembered going for rides in Colin's fancy car. William used to sit in the back and watch his mother's scarf whip in the wind. Colin seemed to have been there from the beginning, but William had eventually guessed-by the way this man came and went-that he was not his father, not his true parent. But he was there, just out of frame, in William's earliest childhood memories. And he remained for years. His ah-ma and he seemed to have it all-health, happiness, a sense of belonging.

But then their fortunes changed again. The first thing William noticed was the emptiness in his stomach when their food began to spoil and eventually treats in neatly wrapped boxes stopped showing up and more often than not he went to bed hungry. The flowers had stopped coming as well, and the ones in their vases began to wilt and die; dried petals scattered on the table and blew on the floor when he opened the window. That was when he noticed that his clothes always seemed to be too small-his shoes too. But in retrospect, his ah-ma rarely let on that anything was wrong. Their austerity became a matriarch's virtue, one he had gradually understood. That loving mothers quietly sacrificed their flesh for their children, like ritual suicide, but slowly, one day, one hour, one meal at a time. Which is why he dutifully nodded whenever his ah-ma insisted how full she was-that she wasn't hungry-as he swallowed his guilt each night and ate her portion of the modest dinners she'd prepared.

And he remembered the caustic smell of mothb.a.l.l.s as his ah-ma tried to preserve their clothing, which eventually wore thin. She'd patch the knees of his trousers and darn the holes in his socks. He didn't know what bad luck was until their apartment grew colder, even with the windows shut. He remembered sleeping in his mother's bed, huddled against her for warmth. And on nights when she worked, which as he grew older seemed like all nights, he'd take his blanket and pillow and set them on the radiator, which was merely warm instead of hot to the touch. He'd s.h.i.+ver, bouncing back and forth between his feet, waiting for the blanket to heat up. Then he'd wrap the musty fabric around his shoulders and lie on the wooden floor like a caterpillar in a silken coc.o.o.n, his back to the bare metal of the radiator, feeling snug and safe once again.

William remembered that when he pressed his ear to the floor, he could hear music playing in the next building-a piano, drums, even a horn section, and people making all kinds of noise, some laughing, some fighting.

Then his ah-ma would return, sometimes sniffling from the cold.

"How was work at the club?" he'd ask. "Or were you onstage this time?"

William remembered her shaking her head and frowning, "It was just a party," she said as she curled up on the floor next to him. "With someone I used to know."

William felt her wrap the blanket around the two of them as he moved so she could share his pillow. She smelled strange, like smoke and sweat and old perfume.

"I'd like to go to a party," he said, thinking of birthday parties, dinner parties in the neighborhood. He'd never been to one of the big fancy ones, but he'd seen people celebrating in the restaurants and clubs. "I'll be good ..."

"It's not a party for little boys," she said, tearing up.

What's the matter, Ah-ma? He remembered thinking those words, but he had been too afraid to ask. Sometimes he made her cry when he spoke, especially when he asked too many questions. He didn't know why.

"It's just the weather, it's just a cold," she said, as though reading his troubled mind. "It's nothing. Everything will be okay." But as she wrapped her arms around him, he could feel her sobs. It was the first time he remembered ever feeling scared.

"WAITING FOR LAZARUS?"

William opened his eyes, looked up, and saw Sunny blocking his view of the sky, which was now streaked with orange and pink. I must have dozed off, he realized as his friend lowered himself to the ground and lay perpendicular to William.

"I didn't know her as well as you, but I miss her too," Sunny said, nodding toward the plank of wood that rested in the dirt. The fresh paint bore Charlotte's name.

William didn't say anything. He knew the grave marker was intended to be only temporary, until a family member or a kindly benefactor would pay for a granite slab. But as he looked around the burial ground and counted dozens of similar wooden signs, most of them faded and rotting, he knew those hopes had also been laid to rest.

"You skipped out on Sat.u.r.day ch.o.r.es," Sunny said. "But I doubt Sister Briganti noticed. She's been in reconciliation all afternoon with Father Bartholomew."

We all have atoning to do, William thought. He felt guilty for leaving Charlotte alone. He regretted his lack of conviction and was p.r.o.ne to fits of guilt and paralyzing bouts of regret. He wasn't certain Sister Briganti felt such emotions.

"You missed supper."

"Not hungry," William said as his stomach grumbled ever so slightly, a faint reminder that he was capable of feeling something other than sadness. He hadn't eaten since before the funeral. And he'd lost what remained of his appet.i.te when he learned that Charlotte's father hadn't bothered to take any of her belongings when he left Sacred Heart. The sisters, in their strange, generous wisdom, had scattered her possessions among the orphans like birdseed. William bit his tongue as he imagined spiteful girls pecking at the remaining bits of Charlotte's existence until there was nothing left.

"I'm sorry, Willie," Sunny said, tearing blades of gra.s.s and scattering them in the warm autumn breeze. "But your mother is out there-you don't belong here. I don't want you to leave again and I'll miss having you around. But you need to go. You need to find your mom while you still can. That's what I would do."

William didn't need the reminder, though he wasn't sure how he'd go about leaving again. He'd already spent what little money he had, and without Charlotte's help he wouldn't get far. He'd heard about street kids earning pennies by helping ferry pa.s.sengers with their luggage at Colman Dock, or standing in line for rich people at movie theaters or the opera. The notion seemed bleak, but possible.

Then he noticed Sister Briganti walking slowly, solemnly across the mossy courtyard toward the grotto. She palmed her rosary.

"Did you hear what I said, Willie? You don't belong here."

William stood, dusted off his trousers, and then helped Sunny to his feet. William stared at the place where he and Charlotte used to meet. The trees were swaying gently in the wind, brown leaves tumbling from the outstretched branches like thistledown.

William walked toward the main gate. "None of us belong here."

WILLIAM SAT ON a bench at the nearest streetcar landing. He had enough money to make it halfway to downtown, but not enough for a transfer. He didn't care. He was done with this place. His mother, his beloved ah-ma, was out there-somewhere. If she wanted him, if she missed him, if she only vaguely remembered the sweet times with him, amid the cameras and glitter and stage lights of her world, none of it seemed to matter. All he knew was that he needed something to fill the pit of emptiness, the cavity that served as a gateway to nothing but raw, exposed nerve-where warmth and cold hurt him in equal proportions.

As he looked back at the school, his residence for these past five years, he saw the stout figure of Sister Briganti walking toward him. He didn't feel like running, or arguing, or supplicating-all he felt was gravity pulling him homeward, to his ah-ma, the person he'd orbited his entire childhood, until she'd given him up. He shrugged and turned his back to Sister Briganti, hoping she'd leave him alone but expecting to feel her wrenching his ear and dragging him back to the orphanage. He listened for the clanging bell of a coachman, the crackle of sparks from the wires overhead, the s.h.i.+mmy of wheels on tarnished rails. But all he heard were footsteps and words in Italian that he recognized as a prayer.

Amen, he thought as he waited. He tensed, his stomach in knots, his heart beating frantically. He remembered the words Run away, Liu Song. Run away! And she had. His mother had run away from everything. She had run away from me.

Then William heard the flutter of wings as a flock of birds vacated their perch atop the trolley line. The wire shook with the approach of a streetcar. He turned around, and Sister Briganti was staring down at him, her lips pursed. She handed him an envelope containing streetcar tokens and a note.

"The note is from your mother. I debated whether or not to give it to you, but after what happened ... with Charlotte ..." She glanced toward the cemetery. "Save a token for the return trip." She turned and walked away. "You can thank me when you come back."

I'll never thank you. And I'm not ever coming back. William swallowed his words and unfolded the note, which read: Waiting at the Bush Hotel.

Home.

(1934).

William felt reborn to walk the streets of Chinatown again. In his imagination every face was a long-lost relative, every city block was a welcome mat. He relished each sensation, each rediscovered memory, from the sweet, tangy smell of fresh oyster sauce to the magical way fish scales s.h.i.+mmered like flecks of glitter in the gutter as old men in bloodstained ap.r.o.ns hosed down the sidewalks. And King Street had hardly changed in his absence. There was still the familiar yelling and laughing from the alleys, the distant wail of a saxophone, the songs the j.a.panese Baptist Sunday school children sang as they collected money for the poor, and the splas.h.i.+ng of ivory mah-jongg tiles that sounded so much like rain. The only aspect missing was the grip of his mother's gloved hand as they used to walk to the Atlas Theatre. The click-clack of her heels as they stepped around mud puddles dotted with cigarette b.u.t.ts and pigeon feathers.

But this time William was alone. He listened to the lumbering, bellowing trains coming and going from the station two blocks away as he stood outside the Bush Fireproof Hotel, which looked vacant.

The brick facade looked a bit smaller, but the tall building still stood out like a tombstone, marking the death of everything he'd known. He inhaled and smelled diesel and shoe polish and tobacco and the metallic scent of blood from the butcher's stall up the street. And with each scent came a glimmer, a memory of his childhood that had been all but washed away by the wood soap and the lye of Sacred Heart.

As he stepped inside he asked the front desk manager if he could look around.

"Look all you want," the man said, through a haze of cigarette smoke. "Hard to keep tenants these days, after that whole fracas way back when."

William paused for a moment, then remembered reading about Marcelino Julian, a migrant worker who a year and a half earlier went on a rampage in and around the old hotel, killing six men and injuring a dozen more. The hard times had brought out the worst in people. William climbed the stairs, trying not to let his imagination run away with him as he noticed dark stains on the carpet.

He couldn't remember the number of his old apartment, but his feet led the way to the stairs that he used to slide down on, belly-first, leaving a rug burn on his stomach, to the sparkling vinyl flooring in the hallway, which changed from silver to gold with each step. As he walked down the silent hallway, he came upon the door to his former apartment. He felt as though he were merely arriving home from school, five years too late. His life had taken a strange detour, but somehow he'd managed to find his way back. He looked at the note Sister Briganti had given him, out of concern or guilt, he didn't know, nor did he care. It simply listed the Bush Hotel. No apartment number. No other message. But he understood. His ah-ma had known where he was all along. She'd written him before, but those messages had been kept from him, until now, under the right circ.u.mstances. Is that what your death bought me? William would have asked Charlotte if he could. Had her final answer to the question of her father softened Sister B's pious heart?

William didn't knock. Instead he felt for the cold bra.s.s of the doork.n.o.b and opened the unlocked door. Inside, the place was barren, save for an old carpet and a few empty beer bottles strewn in a corner. The apartment smelled like dust and cat urine, and judging by the cobwebs on the ceiling, no one had lived here for some time, maybe since they'd left. Without the benefit of furnis.h.i.+ngs, pictures on the wall, curtains, blue flowers in a vase, it looked larger than he'd expected-an empty box that a home, a life, a family had once fit into comfortably. Now devoid of the tokens and touchstones of life, the place felt like a mausoleum, a rotting cavity, mirroring the pit in his stomach. The only home he'd ever known was now a forgotten void where even the ghosts had grown bored and weary and fled to more comforting surroundings.

"h.e.l.lo," William said softly, hearing nothing in reply.

The only sound came from his leather soles on the creaking wooden floor as he peeked into the bedroom. The s.p.a.ce was nothing but blank walls and an open wardrobe with a single coat hanger. The wire frame looked so still, William could have sworn the hanger had been painted there. Daylight poured in through a cracked window, illuminating a swirl of soot and grime that made him want to sneeze.

Maybe she isn't here. Maybe this is Sister Briganti's idea of a joke.

"Willow?" William asked, sniffling. He saw a shadow move, but the shape was only a flight of pigeons that had nested on the fire escape. They fluttered and squawked, dancing about one another, oblivious to his presence.

He swallowed and slowly opened the bathroom door. The overhead light socket was empty, and it took the better part of a minute for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. His heart froze when he saw the outline of a figure draped within the confines of the claw-foot tub. The shadow was that of a woman-her head tilted back, the peaks of her bare knees rising above the dirty, mildewed lip of the basin.

"Ah-ma?"

The shadow woman inhaled, which caused no small relief to William as he stepped closer. She was clothed in a pale blouse and skirt. The tub was dry. It was as though she were bathing in memory alone. Her fur stole covered her chest like a blanket. Her hat sat in the bottom of the tub, near the drain. William could hear a baby crying in another apartment, somewhere down the hall, though the haunting, desperate sound was gone so fast he might have imagined it.

"Ah-ma?" he asked again.

She didn't say a word. William watched as she blinked, the whites of her eyes seeming to glow in the dimness of the room. That faint glow was wet with tears.

"I'm sorry I wasn't there when you got back," William said, suddenly realizing that those were the words he'd hoped to hear from her. Instead she said nothing as she sat in the tub, staring at the blank wall in front of her as though watching an old movie.

Finally she spoke. "This is where it happened."

I know what happened here. William swallowed the words.

"This is where our lives changed," she said. "This is where I lost you."

Will.

(1924).

In a dreamlike fog, Liu Song stumbled out of bed and to the crib where her two-year-old son was standing up on wobbly legs, crying. In the darkness she felt his small hands reaching out to her. She picked him up, put one arm beneath the baby fat of his chunky thighs, and curled him toward her, her nose pressed into the fluff of his hair, which smelled like lilac soap and fresh shea b.u.t.ter from his nighttime bath.

"Ah-ma," he said in a toddler's voice.

"Shhhhh ..." she whispered as she felt his tiny sausage fingers touch her cheek, her nose, and her lips. She knew he could recognize her voice, her smell, but he always had to touch her face, especially in the dark, just to make sure. Liu Song felt him draw a long breath and then peacefully exhale. His entire body went limp, as though he'd been running in a dream and the sandman had finally caught up to him.

Liu Song swayed back and forth for a moment, debating whether to return him to his crib. She loved rocking him when he was so peaceful, such a contrast to the first time she'd held him, warm and wet and screaming, at the Lebanon Home for Girls.