China Dolls

  “And I’m going to stay home,” Irene added. Listening to her, I couldn’t tell if she was happy or sad about it. “It will be a circus at home, I guess.”

  “I’ll go on alone tonight,” Jack said. “If you’d like, you can leave Tommy with Irene and the kids here at the hotel.”

  My heart raced like hummingbird wings. “I’ve never left him alone.”

  “He won’t be alone,” Irene said. “He’ll be with us.”

  “All right. Just this once.” I forced a smile, but I noticed Grace and Ruby regarding me as if I were pathetic. They weren’t mothers. They couldn’t possibly understand.

  Ruby, Grace, and I left the hotel a little before six and walked through streets already teeming with sailors. Catcalls. Whistles. “Hey, baby, want to join me tonight?” It was nothing new. We entered Pieces O’Eight, which was down by the docks. A busboy pointed the way to the dressing room. I went through the door first so I could open Ruby’s trunk and get straight to work setting things up for her. I’d barely crossed the threshold when I came to an abrupt stop. A Western Union telegram, taped to the mirror. My heart dropped. Eddie. Monroe. But I wasn’t the only one who had someone to lose. In the mirror’s reflection—around that tiny yellow rectangle—stood three women whose faces had drained of blood. We approached the mirror together. The telegram was addressed to Ruby. Relief cascaded through me. I wouldn’t be a double widow, and my brother was still breathing.

  Ruby peeled the envelope off the glass and held it in her hands for a few agonizing moments before ripping it open. In cold official language she was informed that Yori had been killed. Grace put a hand on Ruby’s arm.

  “I … I … I need to get ready,” she stuttered. “Helen, where are your sponges? Hurry along now.”

  I could only repeat again and again how sorry I was and respect her wishes. We got ready in silence. Ruby kept her emotions hidden under an icy-white enameled shell. I thought about Eddie and my brother. I’m sure Grace was thinking about Joe.

  “Curtain! Five minutes!”

  We did our usual three shows, but the news about Ruby’s brother had affected everyone. Grace was a clumsy wreck, Jack was inept, but Ruby gave the most beautiful and entrancing performance of her career. The bubble seemed to float before her. When she did her fan dance, she looked like a swan skimming across the smooth surface of a pond.

  As the headliner, Grace had the last routine of the evening. When she returned to the dressing room, I was trying to convince Ruby to let me remove her body paint before leaving the theater.

  “No, no, no!” Ruby pushed me away and then caught Grace’s eye in the mirror. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Grace jumped at the chance. She hurriedly changed out of her costume and threw on her skirt and sweater. We emerged onto a street that vibrated with activity—all those men on leave, swaggering in little groups, buddies in war and onshore. They’d been drinking for a while now and were even more rambunctious and unruly than they’d been earlier. More catcalls and whistles. Some had women on their arms—girlfriends, Victory Girls, no-no girls, a sister or mother here and there.

  Ruby led the charge, swaying down the sidewalk. The lights from neon signs gave a festive glow to her skin. Her limbs swung like a doll’s broken arms. She dragged us into a bar at the end of the block.

  We Chinese have a blood understanding of yin and yang. When a good thing comes, it comes in a pair; but bad things never walk alone. She had placed us in a situation as precarious as stacked eggs.

  “What’s the house drink?” Ruby demanded.

  A few minutes later, three Mandalay moons sat before us. The combination of white rum, white crème de menthe, sugar, and lemon juice was sickly sweet. Ruby drank hers before I had my second sip. She ordered another round and proceeded to gulp down all three drinks. Of course, Grace and I tried to stop her. Of course, we tried to comfort her. But she ignored us, favoring the hardened sailors who gathered around us, sniffing like dogs.

  I paid the bill. Grace and I—united for the first time since San Francisco—pulled Ruby out of there. The scene on the street was wilder still. To any catcall, Ruby grinned and waved. A couple of the men from the bar had followed us and tried to chat us up. Ruby shimmied before them. Grace and I kept drawing her forward.

  We were a block away from the hotel when a van braked at the curb next to us. The door on the passenger side opened, and a policeman bounded out.

  “Ladies.” He seemed welcoming as he gestured to us to come to him.

  I thought he was there to help us, but once we reached the van he roughly shoved us into the back, where another eight women sat. We’d been caught in a vice sweep. Grace and Ruby sat across from me. Grace’s face was sickly green. Ruby tried to talk to the other women, but they were too terrified, too busy crying, or too bored to listen to her.

  When we got to the jail, we were herded into a holding cell, which looked like it should have held about twenty-five people, but we had to be almost seventy. The walls were lined with benches, and the floors were covered with stained mattresses and filthy blankets on which dozens of women sat. One toilet—totally exposed—occupied a corner. One disgusting toilet for seventy women. And the smell! From the toilet, from the heavy perfume, and from sanitary pads worn too long. I pushed my way through the undulating mass of women to the bars and tried to get the guard’s attention.

  “There’s been a mistake,” I called. “My friends are performers.”

  “I bet they are.” He laughed scornfully. “And what are you?”

  I straightened my shoulders. “I’m Princess Tai’s dresser.” But I doubt he knew what a dresser was. I tried again. “My son is at the hotel. I need to get back to him.”

  “Did you leave him alone?” he asked.

  “He’s with a friend,” I answered.

  “A ‘friend,’ in the hotel?” He’d heard it all before. “Then you have nothing to worry about.”

  “Can I at least make a phone call?” I asked.

  “Later, honey, later.”

  I squeezed back through the others until I found Ruby, who was too drunk to realize the seriousness of the situation. I sat next to Grace, who stared at the floor in despair. “My father always said I’d end up in a place like this. Picked up like a goddamn whore.”

  Every few minutes, a group of three to five of our cohorts was called from the holding cell. “Where are they going?” I asked a woman, who let’s just say had been around the block a few times.

  “You know how it is,” she drawled, road-weary. “We have to be tested for the clap and whatever else they’re looking for.”

  I sat back, horrified. Grace began to weep. A girl of about sixteen wailed, “I got separated from my brother. You have to help me find him.” The guard showed no sympathy, and Grace and I were too scared about ourselves to console her.

  “Don’t worry,” Ruby slurred. “Sit by me.” She scooted to her left, creating enough space for the girl to squeeze in beside her. “Try smiling. Maybe they’ll let you out.” She seemed dazed. “If that doesn’t work, you can start a letter-writing campaign. It may take months, years even, but you’ll get out of the camp eventually.”

  There’s nothing like a loquacious but confused drunk.

  After a couple of hours, a guard came to the cage. “Hey, you three,” he grunted. “Slant-eyes, your turn.”

  Grace and I helped Ruby to her feet, and we wedged ourselves through the warm hips, pillowy breasts, and perfume as thick as cheese. We were taken to an examination room. A table with stirrups sat in the middle of the room, as ominous as a torture device run by demons in the afterworld. I tried to explain our situation to the doctor, but I was thrown off by Ruby, who had a hand on her hip, her drunken chatter silenced, her whole being ominously still.

  The doctor glanced at his chart, then back at us. “What you’re doing is unnatural for women. You should be married—”

  “I am married,” I spoke up. “My husband is in France right now.”

/>   “And this is how you behave?” He gaped at me as though I were the most repellent creature on earth. “The surgeon general has called venereal disease the number one saboteur of our defense, and I agree.”

  “We aren’t like that,” I objected.

  He harrumphed and shook his head. “You gals are finished. When I find what I’m looking for, you’ll be sent to an institution to be treated. Now who’s first?”

  Grace and I stared at the table with the stirrups and then at each other. I’d given birth. It wouldn’t be the first time a doctor had poked around down there.

  “I have nothing to be afraid of,” I volunteered in a shaky voice.

  I slipped off my step-ins, got on the table, put my heels in the stirrups, and then used my hands to hold my skirt in place. The doctor lowered himself onto a stool with wheels and rolled between my legs until his head was all the way under my skirt.

  “Well, I guess we’ve proved it once and for all,” he snickered. “Your slant-eyed twat goes in the same direction as every other.”

  Ruby went next. She looked so bad she could have scared the ass off a brass monkey. Her hair was a mess, and her makeup was streaked. One of her false eyelashes had peeled half off her eyelid. To me, she was a woman in terrible grief; the doctor took her for our ringleader.

  “I don’t even need to examine you to know what I’ll find.” The corner of his mouth curled in distaste, but his tone conveyed sickening pleasure. “Someone who’s as infected as you’re bound to be is facing forcible detainment until the end of the war.”

  “So what?” Ruby smoothed her hair and tried to straighten her wilted gardenias. “I’ve been detained before. It’s nothing new.”

  What she said and how the doctor heard it were two different things. The result was bad. He roughly examined her, probing and prodding with his instruments. Again and again, Ruby cried out in pain. By now, Grace and I were a puddling mess of tears. I was frantic to get back to Tommy; Grace was petrified to be next. She sobbed as she pulled down her step-ins. She got on the table, and the doctor rolled his stool across the floor.

  “V in Morse code,” he observed, noting the pattern on Grace’s favorite skirt. “V for Victory Girl! Ha! Haven’t seen that before.”

  “V for victory,” Grace mumbled as his examination began.

  WE WERE REQUIRED to be held for a minimum of seventy-two hours, when our test results would come back. More women were thrown in the cell with us. Grace kept going on about how courageous I was, saying, “You’re so brave, Helen. Brave!” Well, I’d had experience. After eight hours, Ruby started to come around, although she had a terrible hangover. I knew she was back to herself when she asked, “Have you offered a bribe yet?” Crackerjack, our Ruby. And it only took ten dollars for the guard to let me call the hotel. Ten minutes later, we heard Jack Mak arguing with the sergeant at the front desk, who asked, “You their pimp, or what?”

  Jack slammed out the door and returned a few minutes later with Irene, their kids, and Tommy. “Those women are traveling with me. They’re my responsibility.” (First I’d heard of it.) “Here’s our playbill for the run we’re doing at Pieces O’Eight. How do you expect me to do three shows a night without them?”

  “Shout all you want,” the sergeant said. “No legal procedures exist to get these dames out of the fix they’re in.”

  Later that afternoon, around the time I should have been having dinner with Tommy, a guard came through to tell us that he’d just heard on the radio that Hitler had committed suicide. The news rippled through the ninety or so of us in that crowded holding pen but just as quickly subsided. We had our own concerns. The next morning, several women were released, but a dozen or so were declared infected and carted away to a detention facility. They had no way to fight back, no legal recourse. Jack came to tell me that Tommy was fine, bring us food, and update us on all he was doing to get us out. He even brought the manager of the club to talk to the officer in charge, but “rules are rules,” and we had to wait. Grace bore up remarkably well, considering, but Ruby was in a dark mood. She still hadn’t cried about Yori’s death nor had she once tried to flirt with a guard to get out. I worried she might be infected.

  That night, new women were brought in, some of whom claimed, like us, to be completely innocent. “I’m here to visit my son before he ships out.” “My fiancé will go mad when he hears what you’ve done to me.” We also heard, “I got separated from my brother” several times, too many times perhaps, so it came as no surprise on the morning of our fourth day that the sixteen-year-old girl we’d met on our first night was pronounced infected and sent away for the duration. We, fortunately, were released.

  “Make sure you keep clean down there,” the sergeant at the front desk cautioned as we pushed out the door, “and don’t come back to Norfolk.”

  We went to the hotel and took long baths to clean the grime, germs, and the memory of the doctor’s hands off us. I hugged Tommy and promised never to let him go. He buried his face in my neck and cried. Ruby wept in her room, beginning, finally, to deal with her brother’s death. Grace jammed her V for victory skirt into the trash bin under the desk. I considered myself to be the tour manager, but Grace picked up the phone and called Sam Bernstein to cancel the rest of our bookings.

  “I don’t give a damn about penalties,” she said into the receiver. “I’ve got money. I’ll pay the penalties.” She listened to Sam, nodding. She glanced in my direction so she could communicate to both of us at the same time. “You’re telling me Charlie still says the weather isn’t good?” she asked, which meant that the show kids hadn’t forgiven her yet and didn’t want her around. She sighed. “Doesn’t matter anyway. We can’t take Ruby to California.” Then, without asking me, she announced, “We’re going to Miami to rest for a couple of weeks and get Ruby back on her feet. Then you’re going to find a gig for just Ruby and me.”

  Later that day, we said goodbye to Ming and Ling. Then we saw Irene, Jack, and the kids off at the station. An hour later, we boarded a train to take us south. In Miami, we found a nice hotel right on the shore, checked in to a two-bedroom suite with a shared living room, ordered room service, and vowed to keep life as simple as possible for a while. After lunch, we walked to the beach, sat under an umbrella, stared at the ocean, and let Ruby grieve. We watched Tommy dig in the sand. We let the sound of the waves wash over us. The warmth helped us to heal. The soughing of the palm trees soothed like a mother—shh, shh, shh. A few days later, Germany surrendered. Now all that remained was to finish off the Japs, but how long would that take? I pushed that out of my mind and concentrated on planning our future.

  BAD LUCK MAY have brought us to Miami, but all we found there was good luck. After a month of rest, Sam booked Ruby and Grace into Winnie’s Riptide. On opening night, a well-heeled rubber king with vast holdings in Singapore sat in the audience. Ruby performed with her fans, expertly manipulating them until she threw caution—and her feathers—to the wind and stood there, quite unashamed, dressed only in her blue spotlight and that single tiny piece of silk. After that, Ruby and Grace took turns topping the bill each night. The next thing we knew, the rubber king hosted a party for us. The Club Bali—“with South Seas charm and toe-teasing tunes played by two orchestras”—hired Ruby and Grace away from the Riptide. Sam got them substantial raises, and Ruby increased my salary. Six weeks later, they got a gig at the Colonial Inn.

  The rubber king bought Ruby a white ermine fur worth thousands of dollars, which she wore for grand entrances. He gave her diamonds—and rubies, of course. He had his chauffeur polish one of his cars—a prewar Cadillac convertible, mint green with white-wall tires—and presented it to Ruby to drive for as long as she liked. Tommy spent his days playing on the beach. Things were going so well that we decided to take the summer off and stay with the rubber king in his mansion in Coral Gables through Florida’s quiet months. I was relieved to see Ruby so happy. Was she “in love”? Hard to say, but she was back to her old self—giggly,
chatty, flirtatious, always with a pair of freshly cut gardenias tucked above her left ear. We lazed, danced at parties, shopped, and drank icy daiquiris.

  Then, at the end of the first week of August, the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We studied the photographs of the mushroom clouds with a mixture of awe and horror. I thought the Japs deserved what they got, but I didn’t say that to Ruby. Japan surrendered a week later, on August 14. In Miami, people flooded the streets and carried on all night—making love, breaking windows, and overturning cars and trash cans. Church bells rang. Strangers hugged each other. Confetti fell on us like snow, and fireworks lit the sky. Eddie would be coming home soon, and so would Joe. Over breakfast on the veranda, Grace read to us from the letter she’d written to him. “ ‘I’m so looking forward to seeing you, kissing you, and making love to you.’ ” Two weeks later, she received his response. The envelope didn’t have a return address, but the postmark showed that it had been mailed in the United States.

  “He’s home already!” Grace said excitedly as she tore open the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of folded paper. She began reading aloud. “ ‘Dear Grace, You’ve tried hard these past months to keep me interested, but it’s finally come time for me to be frank with you. I can’t see you. Please stop writing to me. Joe.’ ”

  It is difficult for a snake to go back to hell when it has tasted heaven. That night, I caught her stuffing clothes into her suitcase. I woke up Ruby and together we stopped Grace from running away. She’d been there for me when I found out I was pregnant, and now Tommy and I let her sleep in our bed, where I could keep an eye on her. Grace had helped Ruby through her grief by taking her to Miami after Yori died, and now Ruby sat with Grace on the beach for hours on end as she stared out at the ocean so still under the hot and humid sky. The world was at peace again, and the three of us had reached our own truce.

  RUBY