"Oh, Horace." She’d gone back to pulling folded clothes out of her bureau drawers and stacking them in their cardboard box.
"Really, sweetheart, I mean it. You’ve done a great job."
She let out a modest laugh.
"And now you can come to work."
She looked up sharply. Had he said come to work?
"You see, I’ve talked it over with Roger." Happiness played around her father’s mouth, so proud and pleased was he with the prize he had to offer. "You know Roger oversees all my staff needs. And he’s already terminated someone so that the assistant-director position in the head office in Washington is open. For you." He beamed.
"Horace." She stared, stricken, the words all mashed up in her throat. "I can’t work for you."
"Now, honey, I know what you’re thinking. Working for Daddy!"
My God, she thought.
"But you won’t report to me, or Roger. We have it all worked out-"
"No," she interrupted. "It’s impossible. I can’t be around your life, your people. The things you stand for." If there was one thing she knew by then, by age twenty-two, it was that she had to get far away and stay away. Here in his world she was trapped in an intolerable corner, which seemed to grow tighter and tighter each year. And now no place in America felt right.
How clearly she remembered the night she’d first realized it.
She’d been only eleven then, exactly half her age on that day of college graduation. It was a regular dinner at the home of Janie Boudreau, her best friend from school. Alice was a frequent guest. She knew the Boudreaus felt sorry for her- there was no mother in Alice’s big house, only Horace and a housekeeper.
On this night Janie’s older cousin was there, visiting from Dallas. "So you’re the Alice, aren’t you?" He looked at her hard, through narrowed eyes.
"What do you mean?"
"Well-you’re Horace Mannegan’s girl, aren’t you?"
"Yes." She glanced quickly at her friend. Janie’s eyes slid away.
"I knew it! You’re the one who didn’t want to go to school with colored kids, right?"
"No," Alice insisted. It hadn’t been her idea! Not her, never.
"Yeah-come on. I remember. You didn’t want to go to a mixed school! Then your father made that speech, then the riots got started, and that’s how those girls got killed."
"It wasn’t me," she pleaded. "I never said-"
"Of course it was you! You’re Alice Mannegan. Alice Mannegan! Right, Aunt Dee? Huh?"
"Yes, Jackson," Janie’s mother had said in a quietly stern voice. "But Alice is Janie’s friend. Let’s talk about something else. Come. Who wants dessert?"
By that point, though, a messy silence had squashed down over the table. Everyone avoided everyone else’s eyes. The meal scraped to a nauseated conclusion.
It was only the first time, the first of many. After that night she’d known she was doomed. And she was. She grew up in the center of it, everyone’s lightning rod for pity, loathing, fascination, the whole freight train of emotions that followed the charging tension between the races.
Now, packing up her dorm room at Rice, she looked at her father, stunned. What he was suggesting was horrible, unthinkable. And as usual he didn’t even see it.
"I can’t work for you! Sorry, but it’s out of the question. Everyplace I went I’d be the ’Alice’ from the ’Alice Speech’! Especially in Washington. I’d never get away from it."
"Alice!" He got up, disturbed, and circled his chair a couple of times. "That speech was years ago! And we were only trying to restore a little bit of what was so good about America, what this great country has lost-"
"Like slavery?" she said bitterly.
"Please," he said mildly, as if she referred to something that was simply a bygone fashion and not a searing fount of human shame. "All I did was make a speech. It’s not as if I went out and burned the Fourth Ward down."
What? Her mouth fell open.
Just then a giggling group of girls stopped outside the open door.
"It isn’t-"
"I told you, her father’s Horace Mannegan!"
"Alice, is that your daddy?"
"No," she said sullenly. "It’s Horace."
"See! I told you, it’s him."
"You go in!"
"You!"
"Mr. Mannegan, sir, may I have your autograph?" The girl had long honey-colored limbs, short blond hair, and a string of pearls over her pale green silk blouse. The hand that thrust the pen and paper toward him had perfectly manicured pink nails.
"Yes, of course, dear." Horace smiled benignly, uncapped his gold corporate-looking pen, and signed. "We’ll be counting on your support in the next election."
"Oh, yes! Yes, sir! My parents-we always vote for you, sir!"
"Good. Don’t ever give up on this great country of ours."
"No, sir!"
"Here. Anyone else?" He signed autographs for all of them.
"Thank you, sir! Bye, Alice!"
"Bye," she said, hating them.
Horace turned back to her the instant they were gone and she saw his composed, boardroom mask drop away and leave, in its place, a father’s hurt and confusion. "I always assumed you would come to work for me."
Alice closed her eyes.
"I need you, Alice. I… depend on you."
"I know," she said. He depended on her to be the family in his life. When she was young, and living with him, she was the one who’d made sure he ate right, who told him it was time to stop working and go to bed. No one else ever told him he needed rest, or he was drinking too much, or he ought to cancel a meeting or an airplane trip because he was sick. She did. And he showered her with most everything she wanted in return. Everything except the freedom to be what she wanted to be-whatever that was. She had to break away. Whether he liked it or not. She had to.
Tell him. "Horace, I’m going to China."
"Where?"
"China."
"China! Why?"
"Please, Horace! You are aware, aren’t you, that for the last four years I’ve been earning a degree in Chinese?"
"Yes, but-"
"And that I visited there last summer? And loved it?"
"Yes, but-you don’t mean you really want to live over there? In China?"
He had gone silent, and she had started to cry herself, because after all she was leaving him. And it hurt him. Despite all her tangled emotions she didn’t want to cause him pain like this, him, her own-she could barely form the word in her mind-father. But she knew she had to go. And finally he had said all right, if it was what she wanted, he would go along with it.
And he had. He had bombarded her with love, and sent her regular checks every month, for the past fourteen years. The only time he had gone to war with her was over Jian. And he’d won. She hadn’t fallen in love since.
Ah. Alice lay back on the bed, feeling the knotted silk strings under her backbone, the scratchy chenille bedspread against her bare skin. Love. The love of her father. Love of her mother, which she’d never known. And grown-up love, or what passed for it, in whose arms she could always briefly forget before moving on.
She shifted on the bed. Mother Meng was right. She was getting too old now. Soon, she was going to have to make some kind of change.
Her eyes wandered to the dark crack of the Beijing night barely showing along the edge of the curtain. She reached down and fingered the soft embroidered silk of the stomach-protector.
Should she go out?
A few hours later, at the shift change down in the hotel lobby, Second Night Clerk Huang told First Morning Clerk Shen that the foreigner Mo Ai-li had left on her bicycle just before midnight.
"Ah, then I’ll watch for her return."
"Around dawn."