Ernest cleared his throat. “The Chinese called them mui tsai. The Caucasian girls had other, less interesting terms for ladies who were caught up in that line of work. Your mother was what they called a karayuki-san. And while she only worked for a brief time, it had a lasting effect, as you well know, mental, physical. Sometimes the girls were lucky, they only worked as maids—domestic servants. But others…”
“Yeah, that,” Juju said with an exasperated sigh. “It’s hard to sort it all out. Though I did find this article.” She unfolded a newspaper, a yellowed, brittle copy of the Seattle Times from 1901. She pointed to a small headline about Chinese and Japanese children sold as domestic servants. She’d highlighted the line
These women, these children were auctioned off like cattle for four hundred dollars each, with discounts for buying in quantity.
She tapped the newspaper. “This was big business. Almost forty years after slavery was abolished, this was still going on. Here I am trying to write about the world’s fair and cotton candy and roller coasters and cosmonauts, now all of a sudden my story leads directly to the seedy underbelly of the Garment District, to the Tenderloin. And to other places.” She shuddered. “From what I’ve gathered the whole mui tsai system was spotlighted by…” She looked down at her notes. “Winston Churchill. He railed against the selling of people as servants and prostitutes. And then the whole thing collapsed. The circus of that odious business was dismantled by the League of Nations. You could say that was one of the fringe benefits of the Great Depression—too many workers, even in red-light districts. The demand dried up. No profit. So no more supply from overseas.”
The waitress reappeared, and Juju ordered a bowl of clam chowder. Ernest ordered a red Reuben and watched in silence as Juju paged through her copious notes.
“And now no one talks about it,” he said. “It’s as though…”
“It never happened,” Juju finished.
“So are you still going to write about me? About your mother?”
“I’m not sure I’m the right person to write anything,” Juju said. “I know I barreled in here like a bull in a china shop, but now it’s obvious why you were so reluctant to talk. It’s very personal. I need to turn in something for my deadline, though.”
Ernest nodded.
“In the meantime,” Juju said. “I do have one other question. Something that’s been bugging me ever since I started digging around. I mean—I have friends who work in City Hall, good friends, people who can get me old records. So I’ve been pulling on loose threads, trying to track down every detail about you and Mom.”
“You’re worried,” Ernest said, “that I’m not telling you everything. You think I’m covering for Maisie—the great widowed heiress, Margaret Turnbull. She’s a popular Seattleite now, a society page regular. She’s in the news almost every day…”
Juju looked up from her notes. “Well, yeah. That too, now that you mention it. But actually, what I’m trying to figure out—and it’s something silly, but I’m curious…because I can’t seem to find a record of you and Mom ever getting married.”
Ernest smiled and finished his tea. “That’s because we’re not.”
Juju coughed and then reached for her water glass.
“What do you mean you’re not married? I’m looking at your wedding ring.”
Ernest regarded the bit of gold he wore. He thought about the matching band on Gracie’s ring finger. “We told everyone we were married. Back in the day. The fiction of being married was a necessity at first—the only way anyone would rent us an apartment. Most landlords demanded to see a marriage certificate, but we managed to fudge it. A few years later we were basically living as a young husband and wife, and I proposed—believe me, I did—again and again, but your mother is quite stubborn.” Ernest drummed his fingers on the table. “She decided that we were as good as wedded, even though there’s no common-law marriage here in Washington State. And, well, as the years turned into decades, it seemed too late. If we had gotten married, the legal announcement would have been in the paper, right next to the police blotter and the obituaries.”
“You’re serious,” Juju said.
“Then everyone would know we’d been deceiving them—they’d have questions and we wouldn’t have suitable answers. It was easier to just leave well enough alone.”
Juju closed her notebook and set down her pencil.
“But it was more than that.” Ernest smiled, though he felt like crying. “I think she felt unworthy of the sanctity of marriage, somehow. It was a way for your mother to pay some kind of sad penance for her former life. None of it was her fault, I should have done more to protect her—every day I wished I had, but we were just…teenagers. When she went to the Tangerine, I was fourteen, your mother seventeen. We were complicit, willing participants, and our lives were wonderful and they were horrible and everything was painful and true, the good, the bad, together.”
“So…to this day…”
He nodded. “To this day…”
“You’ve been living together.”
“In sin?”
Ernest looked into his daughter’s eyes—Gracie’s eyes, Fahn’s eyes, Madam Flora’s eyes, his mother’s weary, desperate eyes, the eyes of the little sister he’d known for only two days. “Parents always have a story that their children don’t really know,” Ernest said. “I guess this is mine.”
—
AS ERNEST AND his daughter walked up the wooden stairs to his apartment at the Publix, Juju kept going on about how she couldn’t believe that she and Hanny had been born out of wedlock. Their whole adult lives, their mother had chided them about how they should settle down, get married.
“After a while, marriage just didn’t matter,” Ernest said. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Well, it matters now,” she said. “What if Mom does something crazy again? What if the doctors find out? They won’t let you make medical decisions on her behalf…”
“Dr. Luke has treated patients in this neighborhood forever,” Ernest said as they passed strangers in the hallway. “He understands.”
As Ernest reached for his keys he noticed that his apartment door was ajar. Hanny was standing inside, coat and purse in hand. An audience on the TV was laughing.
“Hello. Sorry we’re late.” Ernest glanced about. “Where’s Rich?”
“He said he had a late-night meeting. Rich is always on the go, he said he was pitching a new client who might do business in Nevada. So, where’s Ma?” Hanny looked around wide-eyed; she opened the bedroom door, peeked into the bathroom.
“What do you mean, where’s Ma?” Juju said as she double-checked the tiny bedroom, opened the closet door. “She’s supposed to be here with you.”
Hanny smiled and cocked her head as though she thought her sister was teasing. Then she grew serious. “Wait, she didn’t go out to dinner with the two of you?”
MEET ME AT THE FAIR
(1962)
Hanny telephoned her hotel and left a message for Rich. Then she immediately set off for Juju’s house on Queen Anne Hill. If her mother wasn’t there, she planned to call the police and report Gracie as a missing person. Then she’d sit by the phone. Meanwhile Juju had left to canvas the Betsuin Buddhist Temple, the Japanese Baptist Church, the sento beneath the Panama Hotel, Ruby Chow’s, and any other place she could think of where her mother might have wandered. That left Ernest to visit the nearby train stations and the Union Gospel Mission, where the Tenderloin used to be. They’d check, then call Hanny and leave messages, doing their best to coordinate their search.
A part of Ernest suspected where Gracie was really headed, though, even before Pascual met him in the hallway. A woman Ernest vaguely recognized from the Black and Tan hung on his friend’s arm, smiling.
“Kuya, what’s up? We popped by earlier and Gracie was heading out, all alone. I knew that probably wasn’t a good idea, but she seemed—you know—pretty well put together. I tried to stop and talk to her, but she wouldn’t listen. She just handed me this note to give to you and boom, out the door. I figured maybe one of your daughters was waiting for her downstairs. From the look on your face, I’m guessing I was wrong.”
Ernest unfolded the note, which read:
Dear Ernest, I’ve gone to the fair. It’s been too long. I’m going to make things better now. Go to the Space Needle and you’ll understand. Yours, Gracie.