The Man With No Time (11 page)

“He looks young enough to me, dear,” Mrs. Summerson said, smoothing her big hands on the front of her skirt. “Young and vigorous. Lots of good hard work in him.”

“And that's where it'll stay,” Eleanor said. “Inside him.”

“The way you young people talk.” Mrs. Summerson bent forward and peered at the tea table to see whether she'd forgotten anything. “Jam, sugar, rolls, cream—do you take cream or milk, dear?—well, never mind, we have both, lemon, butter. The tea is Darjeeling. Please sit down. When I was married my husband and I never bantered back and forth like that. Of course, we were serious people. Too serious, I dare say. Still, it was a good life.” She sat at one end of the sofa, tucking her skirt under her legs. “You remember Dr. Summerson, don't you, Eleanor?”

“No,” Eleanor said, trying not to look surprised. “He was gone when I moved in.” She sat next to her.

“Honestly,” Mrs. Summerson said, waving her hand in front of her face again. “It's not enough I can't see what's in front of me, now half the time I can't remember what's behind me. It's like living by flashlight, and the little circle of light keeps getting smaller. Dr. Summerson passed on,” she said to me, “two years before Eleanor's mother—how is your mother, Eleanor?—took Horace up to Sacramento to open that what-was-it?”

“She's fine,” Eleanor said, smiling at her. “It was a grocery store.”

“Grocery store,” Mrs. Summerson said simultaneously, then tapped her temple. “Not completely gone yet. I told them it wouldn't work,” she said to me. “Sacramento had too many Chinese, I said, and the people up there couldn't tell them from the Japanese and there was still bad feeling about the Japanese in some places. Not as bad as in China, of course. If the Americans had suffered Japanese atrocities the way the Chinese did, I doubt there'd be a Jap left in America. We'd have run them into the sea.” She cleared the tension from her throat, a ladylike
ahem.
“They're your brother's twins, aren't they?”

“Yes, Mrs. Summerson,” Eleanor said, sounding like a little girl.

“Nice boy. More common sense than you have, but you've got the poetry.” She regarded the framed sampler. “Did you know, Mr. um . . .”

“Grist,” I said.

“Did you know, Mr. Grist, that Eleanor tried to change that saying when she embroidered it in Chinese?”

Eleanor suddenly looked very uncomfortable.

“No,” I said. “Did she now?”

"She certainly did. She wanted to put in a whole new line. After MY HANDS ARE FOR MY FELLOW MAN, she Wanted to write, MY HEART IS FOR MY FELLOW CHILD, MY SOUL IS FOR GOD. And only eight years old. Isn't that something?"

Eleanor was scarlet. “It certainly is,” I said.

Mrs. Summerson clinked her teaspoon against her saucer. "And she used to call it 'Christ Must.' "

“Mrs. Summerson,” Eleanor began urgently.

“Because Christmas was the one day each year when you
must
believe in Christ.” She sat back triumphantly. “Isn't that wicked?”

“Tea, Simeon?” Eleanor asked between her teeth.

“You little pagan,” I said. “I'd be afraid to take tea from your hands.”

“But I'm forgetting my duties,” Mrs. Summerson said hastily. “Please. Let me pour.” Her hands trembled slightly as she lifted the pot. Aside from a plain gold wedding band she wore no jewelry. Eleanor's eyes followed the big hands with an expression I couldn't quite read.

“Someone was just talking to me about you,” she said, passing Eleanor a cup and saucer with a wedge of lemon. “Who was it?”

“Uncle Lo,” Eleanor said conversationally, as though we'd been talking about him for hours.

“Oh, of course. Poor man.” She shook her head gravely. “I suppose he came and saw you?”

“Last Friday.” Eleanor sipped her tea and waited.

“Dreadful thing. Mugged, right there on the streets of Chinatown. It's getting so no place is safe any more. I've been thinking of putting in new locks.”

“It's a good thing he wasn't really hurt,” Eleanor said neutrally.

“Well, his pride was hurt. And there was that eye, of course. Not very distinguished-looking, I must say. He's always been such a self-reliant man. I suppose he's getting older, too.”

“I wasn't aware that you'd kept in touch with him,” Eleanor said. “I knew you and he knew each other in China, of course.”

Mrs. Summerson moved things around on the tea cart in a way that, in a less godly person, might have suggested a stall for time. “He popped up about a year after your mother and brother came back from Sacramento,” she said to the dish of lemon slices. “You must have been eleven. Just knocked on the door one fine morning with some lovely ivory for me. That was when there were still elephants, of course. We simply went back to the same work,” Mrs. Summerson said, putting down her tea untouched. “Exactly as we did with you and your mother. Mr. Lo got them out of China and Dr. Summerson and I got them into America. They'd just eased up on the Chinese quotas, and it was easier than it had ever been to get visas and passports. I only wish Dr. Summerson could have lived to see it. It would have gratified his soul.”

“So Uncle Lo brought out people after us.” Eleanor was clearly surprised at the news, and not entirely pleased. She actually sounded jealous.

“A few.”

“From where?”

Mrs. Summerson pursed her lips. “Mostly Fujian,” she said. “It's on the coast, so it's a little easier. And then, too, the people are mostly fishermen, so there are lots of boats around.”

“Well, I'll be darned,” Eleanor said.

“How many times have you seen him since?” I asked.

“Two or three. He came every five or six years or so, so make it three. Three times in the last twenty years. Of course, the Chinese government put a stop to all that in the eighties, and I haven't heard from him now in, well, let's see, five years.”

“You never told us about this.” Eleanor managed not to make it an accusation, although her feelings were plainly hurt.

“It never came up, my dear.”

I put down my own cup. “What did he say about the mugging?”

“Oh, he was in a terrible state. Mad enough to spit. Said he'd been jumped right on the street.”

“What did they take?”

“Everything. His money, even his cigarettes. I gave him some money, of course, and let him stay here. I let him buy his own cigarettes.”

“What day did he arrive?”

“Well, he was here three nights and he left on shopping day, which is Friday, so it must have been Tuesday, mustn't it? Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday night, and gone on Friday morning.”

“Did he come back?”

She glanced up at me and then looked at the ceiling. Then she looked back down at the cup in her hand. Her back was rigid. “No,” she said, an Asian quarter-tone higher. She was a terrible liar.

I let it pass. “Who beat him up?”

“Thugs. One of those gangs. Everyone's in a gang these days, it seems.”

“Did he say what he was doing in America?”

She relaxed. “Just visiting,” Mrs. Summerson said. “More lemon?”

In the car, Eleanor wrapped her fingers around my upper arm and rested her head on my shoulder. “There was a time when I loved that lady more than my own mother,” she said. “She was everything I wanted to be.”

“Meaning?” We were most of the way back to the apartment, and it was still only three-thirty.

“Generous, good-hearted, self-sufficient, and white. All the white kids in school were calling me names then. Ching-chong. Wang-wang. And I'd go home, and she'd be white, too, even if she did speak better Cantonese than I did. Horace and Mommy were in Sacramento, and I felt like the only Oriental in the world.”

“Poor prickly little Ching-chong.” I was thinking about Mrs. Summerson's lie. Lek had heard Lo say,
“Dim sum
time.”

“I outgrew it,” she said. She rubbed her forehead against my shoulder. “I'm sleepy.”

Her forehead felt good. “Me, too.”

“You've been great through all this. Very steadying.”

“It's not over yet.” Mr. Manly speaking.

“It's going to be all right. I'm not going to ask you how you found out about Mrs. Summerson. You made a promise, and I know you didn't break it.”

“Of course not,” I said with the quick indignation of the guilty.

“I may have to kiss you on the neck.”

“The ear,” I said.

“What have you got to bargain with?”

“I didn't have to go anywhere near Chinatown to find out about Mrs. Summerson.”

“What a man,” she said. “The ear it is.”

As she reached her face up to me I hit the bump at the bottom of Horace and Pansy's driveway. Alice took a good bounce, and I leaned down and got her on the lips.

She settled back, looking satisfied. “That's cheating,” she said.

“Bugger cheating, as the British would say.” I coasted Alice to a stop and looked up at the apartment. “Bet you a big one they're all asleep,” I said.

“What happens if you lose?”

“Then
you
have to give
me
a big one.”

“I am completely indifferent,” she said, “to the outcome of this bet.”

We closed the car doors softly and went quietly up the stairs. I eased the door open and let Eleanor in. The apartment was silent. At the end of the hallway, Eleanor stopped and said, “Oh.”

Over her shoulder, I saw Horace and Pansy lying on the couch, their arms and legs in a knot. Pansy was facing us, and her eyes flew open at the sound of Eleanor's voice, and Horace jerked around spasmodically and then fell off the couch. Both of them were blushing furiously, but Horace just rolled all the way over and came up on his knees facing us with his hands outstretched, looking like Al Jolson.

“Eadweard's at Mom's,” he said. Pansy sat up, her face crimson, smiling like a fool.

“Already?” Eleanor looked at her watch. “But it's—”

“You know Mom. She drove by every fifteen minutes. He was only in there an hour. The third time she went by, his car was gone. She went in and found Eadweard sitting on the living-room floor.”

Eleanor ran to him and kissed him and then kissed Pansy. Pansy let out a kind of strangled giggle, and Eleanor backed off. “She's bringing him down?”

“No,” Pansy said firmly and happily, putting one hand to her forehead as though she had a fever. “We take a plane, six o'clock.”

Eleanor surveyed the two of them. Horace's shirt was held closed by only one button, and his hair was sticking up again. “I think we old folks ought to leave these two kids alone,” she said, turning to me. Her delight made her look ten years old.

“I'll take you on a double date.”

“That sounds half as good as a single.”

“It's already set,” I said. “Want to come?”

“Sure,” she said. “We've got celebrating to do. Let me change my clothes. What are we doing, anyway?”

“Dinner.”

“That's very informative. Dressy or not?”

“Not.”

“What else is new?” Eleanor said.

“Horace,” I asked, “what did he take?”

Horace looked at Eleanor and then at me, and then he tucked his shirt in. “That's the funny part,” he said. “He didn't take anything.”

8 - Card Tricks

T
he double date turned out to be a fivesome.

“This is Sonia de Anza,” Hammond said proudly across the table. Then he forced a smile that looked like it weighed ten pounds and added, “And this is her brother, Orlando.”

Seated, Sonia de Anza was as tall as Hammond and a lot better-looking. She was dark-haired, straight-nosed, square-jawed, and striking, with oddly yellowish eyes, the longest real lashes I'd ever seen, and delicately flaring nostrils that made me think of perfume. Orlando was Sonia as a boy of seventeen, with the same features metamorphosed, as though seen through water: The square jaw added definition to her face while the fringe of lashes softened his. Even a member of another species could have seen at once that they were brother and sister. Hammond and Sonia were dressed casually, Hammond in a red muscleman's polo shirt and Sonia in a pale lavender blouse that made her skin look darkly creamy, but Orlando was decked out in an IBM-issue white shirt with a badly ironed collar and a narrow black patent-leather tie. He glanced once at my aging Megadeth T-shirt and then looked politely away.

We all mumbled pleasant preliminaries at each other, and Eleanor and I let go of each other's hands long enough to sit down. I immediately grabbed her hand back. The restaurant was Hammond's choice, one of those vestigial time capsules from the fifties where you sit in red leather booths and eat red meat, and women with red lipstick drink Manhattans with red cherries and blow smoke rings. A big Christmas tree blinked and shimmered in the foyer, dropping needles on dummy presents and scenting the air with pine. I felt like all I'd done in the past three days was eat meat. The sleepless nights were playing tricks with my sense of time, making the lunch with Hammond seem only hours ago. Lo was as two-dimensional as a figure in a frieze.

“Al says you should have been a cop,” Sonia de Anza said at once. Her voice was low and throaty, softer than her face had led me to expect.

“I did not,” Hammond said huffily. “I said he
thought
like a cop.”

“Gee, Al,” I said, “almost thanks for the compliment.”

“What does a cop think like?” Orlando asked. He made it sound like a trick question.

“Like a snowplow,” Hammond said, fearsomely avuncular. “We bull our way through the fluff until we hit something hard.”

“How disappointing.” Orlando offered kindly old Uncle Al the cold shoulder. “I'd hoped cops thought like Porfiry in
Crime and Punishment.”

Hammond threw him a sour glance and then looked at Sonia. “Orlando's gifted.”

“He'll graduate from USC next year,” Sonia said, a little apologetically. “He'll only be seventeen.” She patted his hand. “But he's still being a little fart. He knows what cops think like. They think like me.” He opened his mouth, and she said hurriedly, “Like I.”

Eleanor nodded toward Orlando, and said to Sonia, “He's very beautiful,” and Orlando went redder than the leather in the booth.

“Well, you know what they say about appearances,” Sonia said, clearly pleased.