Maybe he’s hoping I’ll join him for a night out on the town, Ernest thought. He knew he should answer the door, but he didn’t feel much like socializing.
In fact, he’d considered moving someplace nicer, but whenever he was woken by chatter in the hallway—greetings in Chinese, Japanese, and Tagalog, some polite, some stern, a few happy, rambling voices that slurred from too much drugstore screw-top wine—Ernest realized that he felt strangely comfortable here. At this pay-by-the-week purgatory, the rooms were tiny, the floors were warped, the bathrooms shared, and the old floral wallpaper was perpetually peeling, but the bar for achievement was remarkably nonexistent, and he was fine with that. Because the Publix was an old workingmen’s home, a tobacco-stained hideaway where lost individuals found solace. Where the elderly tended to their gardens on the roof, and the children of the few families who lived here played basketball in the basement. And for Ernest the hotel was also mere miles from all the people he’d grown up with and cared about.
Ernest was about to make a fresh pot of tea when he heard footsteps again, this time the unmistakable rap-tap of a woman’s heels on the wooden floor outside his door, and a knock.
“Dad, it’s me. Open up.” The voice in the hallway belonged to his daughter Juju. Ernest had been so busy driving people to and from the fair that he’d ignored the small stack of pink While You Were Out messages that had piled up in his mailbox downstairs, courtesy of the hotel’s front desk manager. Now he guessed they were from her.
Juju switched to an innocent singsong. “Da-aaaad, I know you’re in there.”
His daughters always worried about him, especially in the years since Gracie had fallen ill. Even Hanny, who lived in Las Vegas, which seemed like a world away, called at least once a week, long-distance charges and all. Ernest rubbed his eyes as he looked in the chipped mirror on the wall. He finger-combed his thinning, salt-and-pepper hair and straightened his well-worn sweater, which had only one button left.
He cleared his throat and donned a smile as he opened the door. “Juju!” he said, wide-eyed. “Come in and get warm. I’m so sorry I haven’t returned your calls. I’ve been so busy these days—running people around town. Your mom okay? Have you eaten?” As he gave her a hug and she kissed his cheek, he realized that he hadn’t shaved.
His daughter loosened her raincoat and stepped inside, groaning as she looked around. She pointed to a patch of old paint blistering on the ceiling and a leaky pipe that dripped into a mop bucket on the floor. “Dad, if they’re not going to fix this place up you should at least let me do it for you. Seriously, how can you live like this? Oh, and I’m pushing forty, so feel free to call me Judy anytime.”
“Hanny doesn’t seem to mind—”
Juju interrupted. “Hannah also wears a three-foot headpiece with ostrich plumes that glitter and struts around in a sequined G-string for money. Her name doesn’t go on a byline like mine does.”
Ernest smiled and tried not to roll his eyes. He couldn’t help but be proud of his daughter, a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She’d started off at the Northwest Times, then landed a job at the big daily, covering the Ladies Garden Club and meetings of the Women’s Auxiliary of the King County Library. But somehow Juju (Ernest couldn’t bring himself to call her Judy) had fought her way up to a regular beat covering Chinatown, the Central District, and Rainier Beach. Sure, she’d probably landed the assignment because she was ambiguously Asian—and more to the point, because no one else wanted to cover the colored neighborhoods. But her region was also riddled with racial tension, and dubious development deals on every corner and vacant lot—fertile journalistic soil for someone with a sharp, eager plow, and a shoulder for hard work.
Ernest was proud of Hanny too, but it would be an understatement to say that her vocation as a Stardust showgirl (and occasional magician’s assistant) had always struck too close to home. He didn’t care for her profession the way Howard Hughes didn’t care for reporters, or the way Elvis didn’t care for the army. Ernest told himself that he was happy that Hanny was happy. And honestly, he was impressed that his younger daughter had gotten the job given that she was half-Chinese and didn’t look like Jayne Mansfield or the cookie-cutter showgirls he’d seen on postcards. But Hanny was extraordinarily tall (she called it poised) and royally confident (she called it refined) and he guessed that had carried the day.
Occasionally, Ernest worried about her working at places like the Sands, which had made Nat King Cole eat alone in his suite rather than be seen downstairs in the restaurant. But the times were slowly changing. And Hanny seemed immune to controversy. She was Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, practically gushing, “Oh, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there in Las Vegas! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people as Frank Sinatra in’t!”
Ernest was less impressed, though he had to admit that he loved to hear about Hanny’s run-ins with Billy Daniels and Peter Lawford, even if he had to turn a deaf ear to stories about the drunken marriage proposals she seemed to receive on a nightly basis.
Ernest offered Juju an orange Nesbitt’s soda and sat down in his favorite reading chair. He watched as she drank half the bottle in one long swig. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and took a seat on his lumpy vinyl chesterfield.
“So what brings you here?” he asked.
“Well,” said Juju, “I think I found a way to finally get my byline on the front page of the paper. It has to do with you and Mom—but mainly you—”
“Is she okay?” Ernest asked. “Has she had a relapse? Let me get my shoes on—”
“No, Dad—she’s fine. She’s, you know, pretty much how she is. She still thinks I’m her nurse half the time, a maid the other half. She’s happy, pleasant, in and out of her own world, no nightmares lately,” Juju said with a resigned shrug. “Better than ever.”
“Then what’s the problem?” Ernest asked as he sat back in his chair.
Juju looked at him, one eyebrow raised. “Oh, it’s not a problem. It’s just that I convinced my editor to let me write a then-and-now piece about the grand opening of the new world’s fair, seen through the eyes of some old-timers who happened to attend the original Alaska-Pacific-Yukon Expo, fifty-something years ago. Granted, that story angle isn’t particularly unique, but along the way I dug up some details that could make my story stand out above the rest. And since I’m on deadline, I was thinking that I’d fact-check with you about some of the details. Because I remember you talking about how you went to that first expo as a little kid.”
Ernest nodded politely. “Oh, I don’t remember all that much, really.”
“Well, do you remember anything like this, by chance?” Juju reached into her handbag and retrieved a small stack of newspaper clippings. She handed one to her father, who donned a set of reading glasses.
The article was from The Kennewick Courier circa 1909 and read:
Seattle—A boy, the charge of the Washington Children’s Home Society, was one of the prizes offered at the exposition. His name is Ernest and maybe he will have a surname if the winner, holding the proper ticket, comes to claim him.
Ernest opened his mouth to speak. Closed it. And then opened it again. “That’s interesting…I mean…they gave away a lot of peculiar things at the fair…”
“Dad.” Juju pointed to the name in the article. “It says Ernest. Was this you? I mean—you once told me how you ended up at the Washington Children’s Home after you came here from China. And you said you were given a job as a houseboy after the world’s fair. You told me that’s where you met Mom.”
Ernest tried to laugh. “Why would you think that? Ernest is a pretty common name—Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Shackleton, Ernest Borgnine, Ernest—”
“Oh my God, it is you.”