Anya filled a small cup with water from the old-fashioned basin and pitcher atop the dresser, detached the flower from her hair, and with thrifty care settled it in the cup. He had a strange sense of being back in Baltimore, in a narrow row house where vents were closed off to save all the heat for one room, and a child’s clothing, when torn, was always taken apart to be stitched into something else. He had seen his mother linger for long minutes at the strawberry man’s mule-drawn cart, finding what was bruised and crushed and talking the man into letting her have it for a few cents less.
He watched as Anya placed the flower by the bed and then peeled her dress from her milky shoulders. She turned her back with a natural ease for him to unhook her. He put his hands on her skin, different, satin to his velvet, and the pale feel of it was exciting to him. As he picked her up and laid her on the bed and undressed her, the greatest difficulty was holding himself back, and their first time was over all too soon.
But he awoke before dawn the next morning and they did it again, slowly now, and at leisure, until both were still and content.
He thought she might protest when he said he had to go, but she was sweet, acquiescent. “There’s a clean washcloth on the dresser, and a towel. Beside the basin.”
He washed and stepped into his clothes before he kissed her. “Thank you.”
“No, no, all thanks is for you.” She wound her arms around him and kissed him back, stopping just before she drew him down again.
It was getting light when he came to the house. He let himself in quietly, slipped up to his room, and stretched out between his sheets. Now he had what he wanted, a real woman. He folded a pillow behind his head and closed his eyes to enjoy the first early voices from the lane, the tinkle of cart bells, the crank-up cough of an automobile. He was replete with love, so every sound was music to him, every noise an echo of beauty, doors opening and closing, wheels creaking, the burbled cooing of the spotted dove outside his window. But just before he surrendered to sleep, when the real world started to clank apart and disassociate itself into the other, it was Song’s face he saw, not Anya’s.
4
ANYA WAS HIS girl through that spring of 1937, and she came to the club most weekends. He loved having her sit up tall and lovely at his table, his for all to see. Song and Du still had not come in, and while at first he had watched in hopes of seeing her, now he was glad they had not returned. Anya was a lovely bird whose plumage was always on display.
She lifted his spirits, which he needed, because the war was chipping away at his Kings. Now Eddie Riordan, the drummer, had stopped going out and was eating at noodle stalls in order to finish saving his passage home. The trumpet player, Cecil Pratt, was starting to talk about the same thing. Cecil had a Japanese girlfriend, and he went up to Zhabei most nights to stay with her, in a sector that had become almost entirely filled with soldiers and civilians from Japan. Much as he hated to leave her, Cecil said the sight of so many men in uniform unnerved him.
On the nights Anya came to the club, Thomas went back to her room with her, always leaving before dawn so he could sleep at home. He liked it that way, separate. When Alonzo and Keiko invited them all over for lunch, he never mentioned it to Anya. Keiko was different, part of their lives, almost Alonzo’s wife, though they all knew he had a real wife back home and children in college, to whom he sent most of his money. But here in Shanghai, Keiko was his woman and everyone’s older sister, cooking Japanese food, homey in her scuff slippers and apron, shiny black hair tufting from her neck-knot. While Alonzo sat back in his chair like a potentate, she plied Thomas and Charles and Ernest with grilled fish, vegetables cooked in soy and wine and vinegar, and steaming mounds of rice. Those were happy afternoons, which he enjoyed without Anya.
But on his nights off, the two of them went out together, and he let her take him into other worlds, to be with dancers and drug addicts and gamblers, philosophers and utopians, and assorted secret plotters who hoped to take over China. In her company he met actors, artists, and poets, drinkers and pleasure seekers.
“And yet none of them are Communists,” he said to her one night.
“Of course some of them are,” she retorted. “We’ve discussed this. One third of Shanghai is-”
“I know,” he said, “but who? I never seem to meet any.”
“No one wants to admit it,” she said. “They kill Communists.”
“It’s a conundrum. I cannot be sure they really exist.”
“Listen.” She leaned in and dropped her voice. “I know all kinds of people-people who know Shanghai’s secrets. And you know what they told me? Very hush-hush? That the Foreign Language School at number six New Yuyang Lu is a Communist front.”
“Truly?”
“Yes. It was whispered to me that they don’t teach languages at all. Go there one day, and you will see, they look like everybody else.”
He drank more than usual that night, and barely remembered going to Anya’s room and finally arriving home at dawn. When he awoke at midday, it was to a thudding headache and a mouth that was swollen and parched. And something else, voices. He washed and hurried into his clothes.
Downstairs he found Charles and Ernest in his dining room, tucking into a lavish breakfast prepared by Chen Ma, grits and thick slices of ham and big creamy curds of scrambled egg.
“Oliver and Frank are leaving!” Ernest blurted through a mouthful of egg.
“What?” He sat heavily. “Those two? I thought they never saved anything.” A bottom-class ticket cost 150 U.S., but that was 450 Shanghai, a lot to save when you made 50 a week, and Shanghai lay before you, arms wide, every night. Few had done it. “Where’d they get the money?”
“Dog track,” said Charles. “Soon as they won, they got them two tickets. Say there is going to be a war here, we all got to get out.”
“Well,” said Thomas, leaning back for Chen Ma to serve his own breakfast, “there could very well be a war here, they are right. But I’m not sure we’ve all got to get out.”
“You’re not scared?” said Charles.
“Sure I’m scared. But I was scared back where I grew up, too, and I like it here better.”
They exchanged a look. “Us too,” Ernest said.
“If they invade Shanghai, we’re going to have to lay low. It could be bad. But we’re not in this war. And another thing-both sides love jazz. Whoever wins, however it comes out, we should still be able to play.”
The boys exchanged looks. “We’ll stay,” said Ernest.
“Never going back,” Charles agreed.
“Tails,” Ernest put in, “where were you last night?”
“How do you know I was anywhere?”
“Because Uncle Hua told me you came in at seven.”
“He did, did he? You’re a rascal, Ernest.” Thomas admired the boy; in a year and a half he had become agile enough at pidgin to rattle along endlessly with the locals, while Thomas had not learned more than a phrase or two of pidgin, and even less of Shanghainese or Mandarin, which were much harder. In fact, Thomas had not run into any American players in Shanghai who had more than a few words of Shanghainese or any of the other Chinese dialects.
Bright and enterprising though they were, the Higgins boys were too young to be alone. “Fellows, you can’t live in that house by yourselves. I think you should move in here with me.” As soon as he saw the relief on their faces, Thomas knew he was right. And he needed company, too. The house had too many empty bedrooms, and was oppressive now that the hot summer had set in. Zhu, the quiet man who in winter was the house’s master of heat, now opened windows and positioned fans to make the house comfortable.