Jewel of the East (8 page)

“Are you all right?” Pearl asked him.

“He’s fine,” Maisie said knowingly.

Pearl threw her arm around Felix’s shoulder. “Just wait,” she said. “Amah always buys the candy Mother forbids me from having. You’ll love it.”

Once again, Felix tried to meet Maisie’s eyes. And once again, Maisie ignored him completely.

Telling stories marked the days with Pearl. Wang Amah, Mrs. Sydenstricker, and even Pearl herself were all masterful storytellers. Maisie and Felix loved to sit out on the veranda in the morning and hear their stories about life in China and Chinese legends and myths. At night, Felix wrote down the stories he’d heard to take back to Lily Goldberg, who so desperately longed for information about her culture.

They spent a lot of time in the kitchen, too, where Chushi, the cook, fed them salted fish, pickled vegetables, tofu, and—to Felix’s surprise, his favorite—the crunchy rice from the bottom of the pan. Never before had he liked anything
crunchy, but this rice changed his mind about crunchy food. Chushi told them stories, too. He loved to read, and every day he would act out parts he’d read the night before from Chinese novels. Tall, with a thin, long face and graceful hands, he imitated birds flying and oceans rolling.

Pearl translated, and Maisie and Felix sat, transfixed, eating and listening.

The story Pearl asked Chushi to tell again and again was “The Dream of the Red Chamber,” a kind of Chinese Romeo and Juliet story about star-crossed lovers from warring tribes.

“Ah,” Chushi always said, shaking his head, “you are a romantic, Zhenzhu.”

In the afternoon, the children often went to Horse Street. Wang Amah gave Maisie a hat like Pearl’s and tucked her mop of hair beneath it, muttering in Chinese as she did.

“Don’t eat that candy,” Pearl’s mother always ordered as they left the house.

Mrs. Sydenstricker seemed to have an unusually strong obsession with germs. Every day she washed the walls and floors of the house with a strong-smelling chemical. She fretted over Pearl and baby Grace, feeling their foreheads for fevers, listening to their chests, and watching
them closely as if they might disappear.

One day as they ate the forbidden candy from its paper cones, Maisie asked Pearl why her mother didn’t want her to eat it. The candy was just crystallized sugar, like the rock candy Maisie and Felix liked to get at the little candy store in Cape May when their family went on vacation.

“She thinks it’s dirty,” Pearl said with a shrug.

Felix forced himself to swallow what was already in his mouth.

“Dirty?” he asked.

“She thinks everything in China is dirty,” Pearl said sadly. “My father doesn’t. If he were home more, I wouldn’t have to sneak like this.”

So far, Felix and Maisie hadn’t even met Pearl’s father. He was too busy trying to convert people up north to bother coming home for a visit.

“She worries about you a lot,” Felix said.

Pearl hesitated before she answered. “My father says we’ve had a cup full of sorrow. My sisters Maude and Edith and my brother Arthur, all of them older than me, went away too soon.”

When she saw the puzzled looks on Maisie’s and Felix’s faces, she added, “They died.”

“Died!” Maisie said, shocked.

“As did my brother Clyde,” Pearl said sadly.

“But how?” Maisie managed to ask.

“Mother blames China. The summer heat, the lack of hospitals.”

Felix blinked back tears. Four children? All dead? No wonder Pearl’s mother was such a worrier. For the first time since they’d arrived in China last week, when Felix looked at Maisie, she returned his glance.

“You can’t die from the heat, though, can you?” Felix said. As a worrier himself, and a bit of a hypochondriac, the idea that heat could actually kill you started a panic in his chest.

“Well,” Pearl said. “They died from diseases.”

Felix swallowed hard. The taste of the candy had turned sour in his mouth.

“Diphtheria, cholera, malaria…”

To Maisie, these sounded like diseases from novels, terrible but unreal.

Felix wondered if his vaccinations would hold up here. Every year when their mother took them to the pediatrician, there always seemed to be another booster shot waiting. Were any of them for cholera?

“Poor angels,” Pearl said.

Later that afternoon, when Pearl took her daily turn of rocking Grace on the veranda and
Mrs. Sydenstricker joined them there, Felix understood the sadness that marked her face.

Still, as she sewed a ruffle on the bottom of new curtains, when Pearl begged her, Mrs. Sydenstricker readily agreed to tell them her story about how she saved her home and children from a gang of men who believed Westerners’ presence in the valley had brought on the drought.

“This was in August,” Mrs. Sydenstricker began, “ten years ago. We went so long without rain that the rice withered in the fields. Absalom—Mr. Sydenstricker—was away from home as usual, when the men appeared beneath our window with knives and clubs. I heard them discussing how to break in and kill every last one of us.”

Felix gasped. His eyes drifted to the fields beyond the house as if he might be able to see bandits waiting there, too.

“The night was so hot,” Mrs. Sydenstricker continued, “that perspiration dripped down my forehead into my eyes and the children’s nightclothes grew wet.”

She paused for a moment, and her eyes got a faraway look. Felix wondered if she was remembering those four children she’d lost.

But then Mrs. Sydenstricker grew animated again. “The air was still and thick. The closest
Americans who could help were almost a hundred miles away, and the mob was ready to enter.”

“Tell us what you did, Mother,” Pearl said excitedly, even though she knew the story well.

“I picked up my broom and swept the floor clean.”

“You cleaned the house while right outside the door men were planning to murder your family?” Maisie asked.

“That’s right. And then I mixed the batter for my best vanilla cake, and I put it in the oven to bake. I set the table with our best teacups and plates and lit the lamps and waited for my guests to arrive,” Mrs. Sydenstricker said.

“Guests!” Felix said, staring at Mrs. Sydenstricker as if he had never seen her before. Right before his eyes she was transforming from a sad and anxious mother into a superhero.

“Weren’t you terrified?” Maisie asked.

“Yes,” she admitted.

Pearl was beaming up at her mother proudly. “So when the men broke down the door—”

“When the men finally broke down our front door, they found me playing with my children and ready for a tea party.” Mrs. Sydenstricker laughed. “Well, they didn’t know what to make of this scene. The meanest one of all, the leader, accepted the
cup of tea I offered him and then motioned for the others to do the same. We all had tea and my delicious cake, and then they left.”

“They left?” Maisie said. She, too, was seeing Pearl’s mother as someone completely different.

“You are so brave!” Felix blurted.

“I was trembling, Felix. Trembling the entire time,” Mrs. Sydenstricker said. “I think I trembled for a week afterward.”

“And then what?” Pearl asked.

“And then, like magic, the rain came that very night.”

Maisie and Felix fell into the rhythms of these days easily. Slowly, Maisie’s anger at her brother began to melt away. For the first time in their travels, neither of them felt the urge, or the panic, to get back home. There were days when Maisie thought she could live here forever, listening to Wang Amah and Mrs. Sydenstricker and the cook telling stories, sitting on the veranda watching the boats on the Yangtze River.

When homesickness struck Felix, he calmed himself by remembering that no matter how long they stayed, when they returned home they would still be at the VIP Christmas party and Lily Goldberg would be standing right there in The
Treasure Chest where they’d left her. Felix had that small, jade box in his pocket. Sometimes at night, he opened its lid and touched the dark dirt inside, wondering why regular dirt would ever matter to Pearl. He knew that someday he would know when to give it to Pearl. And that was when it would be time to go home. But for now, except for occasional pangs of missing his own mother and their apartment in Elm Medona, he, too, was happy. He liked to play with the paper lanterns shaped like animals that they bought on Horse Street and to sit in the warm kitchen with everyone, and of course, hear their stories.

Days passed in this way. And then weeks.

Walking together down Horse Street one afternoon, Maisie said, “Felix, do you think that no matter how long we stay here, when we go back no time will have passed?”

“Ye-es,” Felix said thoughtfully.
What is my sister trying to do now
? he wondered miserably.

“Then why go back?” Maisie asked. “I mean, we could stay here until we get older and still be able to pick up right where we left off at the Christmas party, right?”

“I don’t know,” Felix said. “And I don’t care because we aren’t going to stay here for years and years.”

The noise and action and smells on Horse Street—the vendors and the letter writers and the men cooking in the woks—all felt familiar to Maisie and Felix now. And this familiarity combined with what Maisie was saying made Felix’s chest tighten. He didn’t want to grow up here. He wanted to be back in Anne Hutchinson Elementary School with Jim Duncan and Lily Goldberg and Miss Landers.

“But why not?” Maisie said.

They had reached the man who sold the candy in paper cones, and Maisie rooted around in her pockets for a coin to buy some.

“Don’t, Maisie,” Felix said.

She looked at him, surprised.

“Maybe Mrs. Sydenstricker is right and we shouldn’t eat it. Maybe it’s full of… I don’t know… cholera or something.”

Maisie found a coin and dropped it in the candy man’s hand. “Don’t be silly,” she said, taking a bite of candy. “Nothing bad is going to happen to us.”

“You don’t know that!” Felix said. “What if you got one of those diseases that killed Pearl’s sisters and brothers?”

Maisie chewed her candy, considering. “I guess you’re right,” she said finally.

Felix sighed. “Maisie, as much as you don’t like it, we have a life back in Newport.”