We were fighting our own war at home. I do not know why, when waging a losing battle, we never predicted the outcome. We were utterly unprepared. Grandfather no longer begged to be taken outside. He lay still under a thin cotton blanket, his long fingers resting on top. The days slipped past us one by one. Nothing changed but the names and dispositions of the visiting nurses.
One night I awoke around dawn, my eyes fixing onto a square patch of pale light shimmering on the wood floor. A monsoon breeze blew open the right-hand shutter on the casement window. It banged against the house. I looked outside, but whatever presence I had felt was not out there.
I made my way downstairs to Grandfather’s room, tying my robe around me as I went. The halls were lit only by flickering gas lamps. There was the sound of slippered footsteps. Danai turned the corner out of sight. I stood at the doorway of Grandfather’s room. He lay still in bed just as always, but Nei-Nei Down held his wrist to her ear, listening to it. Old Sanang stood behind her, one gnarled hand on Nei-Nei’s shoulder. When I came into the room, Nei-Nei, without looking up, laid Grandfather’s hand back onto the white coverlet. She scooted her little wooden chair closer to him and rested her head for a moment on his chest.
They say that the body loses seven ounces of weight upon death. I do not know if this is true, but Nei-Nei Down appeared to have shrunk to half her usual size. She came and gently pushed me out of the room, closing the door behind her. “I want you to remember him as a living man,” she said. “He would have wanted the same. Don’t cry.” She greatly resembled Grandfather at that moment, and I learned for the first time that when we lose the people closest to us, we tend to become more like them—as if to fill immediately the unbearable lack they have left behind. We take on their habits, their mannerisms, sometimes even their style of dress. From that moment forward Nei-Nei became more tender toward all of us.
She pushed my bangs out of my eyes. “I have always loved you very much,” she said. “Now I will have to love you twice as hard.”
Grandfather’s funeral was a large and well-attended affair. More Singaporeans than we had dreamed remembered Colonel Adam Coleman. He had been, at various times, a military leader, a businessman, a government representative. He had married a Straits Chinese woman in an era when such a match was almost unthinkable. (It had, in fact, ended his political career.) His height and bearing had made him a recognizable figure, and in his lifetime he had done hundreds of favors for Singaporeans. They came in droves to honor his memory.
I was grateful that my schoolmates had troubled themselves to attend his funeral, as had my female co-workers from the newspaper and the staff from Kahani’s. Even the stiff-faced Sahhdie—the dragon who was always straightening my skirt and sending me to the ladies’ to fix my hair—now patted my back and gave me a hard peck on the cheek.
The elderly minister who had performed the marriage ceremony for British Grandfather and Nei-Nei almost forty years earlier conducted the funeral service in the same church. He came from the Malays to perform the service.
St. Andrew’s Cathedral, built by my grandfather’s ancestor, George Drumgoole Coleman, had gone through several incarnations, and had faced such woes as angry Singapore spirits and lightning strikes, in true Singapore style. When the minister rose to deliver the opening prayer, I thought for one instant that it was British Grandfather coming to the pulpit. He was unusually tall and thin, like Grandfather. His long white hair fell over his boyish forehead in just the same way. For that second, I thought that Grandfather had returned to deliver his own eulogy. It would have been like him to provide his own funeral service, lead the hymns, and cater the meal afterward, so as to spare the rest of us any trouble or expense.
Geoffrey Brown turned up at the funeral, as I knew he would, standing at the back of the church, and even at the cemetery, where Nei-Nei arranged for Grandfather to be buried, not cremated as she would have preferred. Grandfather’s coffin was draped in the tricolored flag of England, and he was lowered into the ground while a member of the British Guard played “Last Post.”
Brown stayed seated inside his car during the graveside ceremony. He emerged only at the end, to pay his respects at the grave. How I longed to push him into that wide-open grave! But Grandfather deserved better company. Luckily, I was surrounded by family at every moment. And I did not have to feign the grief that kept my head down.
I wasn’t sure what I would do the next time I met Geoffrey Brown alone. Would I throw myself at him with my nails and teeth bared, like some feral cat? Would I just crumple and collapse? Anything, I thought, oh, anything but that.
Until I could plan how to stop him in his tracks, I just had to avoid him. That was easy enough, at first. I sent a note around to his rooms, explaining that I was sick and contagious. That felt true enough.
Bridget tried to buck me up. “The bravest are those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.” Thucydides again. You can count on the ancient Greeks.
We cheered ourselves with elaborate plans of revenge and plotted Brown’s demise a dozen times. “You could shoot the badger,” said Bridget, “and then roll his body into the Geylang River. I will help you.”
“Why the Geylang?” I asked. “Why not the Singapore? It’s deeper.”
“The Singapore River is not a true river,” said Bridget. “It lacks the three tributaries.” Bridget was full of this kind of information. “Besides, the Geylang is already full of bricks.”
“Maybe no one will ever love me for myself alone,” I said.
“Oh, applesauce!” cried Bridget, giving my shoulder a shove. “I never liked that man. I tried to flag you off.”
It was true—she’d had dozens of nicknames for him, none of them complimentary. “He’s just a Mulligan in a new uniform,” she’d say. “He’s a tough egg. Smiley. Mr. White Teeth.” She acted friendly to his face on the rare occasions when they met, but she’d never warmed up to him—nor him to her.
“I’m a poor judge of men,” I said.
“Who isn’t?” she answered. “I hope you get him back but good.”
Brown was dangerous. He was utterly determined in everything he attempted. I knew this better than anyone. He had taken to wearing green shades; because he worked such late hours, his eyesight had been endangered. One eye, he confided to me, was nearly blind. “I will keep working even without one eye.” And, “If anyone goes blind in the name of progress, I will be the first.” Even Nei-Nei had no idea how close Geoffrey Brown had come to winning the Kampong Glam from Grandfather.
I lived in perpetual dread of my former suitor moving his oily self onto our property. Everything I’d found attractive in him now turned my stomach. The unnatural color of his eyes. His wavy yellow hair, which was probably dyed. The idea that he might have any claim against us made me ill. But I steeled myself for the confrontation that was coming. He would not simply skulk away, I knew. He had made inroads, in the name of Progress. He had his one good eye on the Kampong Glam, and I would have to have foresight to keep it from him.
A few weeks after Grandfather’s funeral, I posted a sign by our front door that read: RING FIRST. NO TRESPASSING. I did this only after our steady stream of Singaporean friends and relations had slowed to a mere trickle and then finally ceased. Our comforters had left behind flowers and more food than we could possibly consume. They had cooked buckets of chicken rice. We shared our bounty with the beggars of the Kampong Glam. But soon, the white irises and lilies began to die, exuding their sickly sweet smell.
My timing was right, for the very next day Brown came by. He was the only man foolish enough to read the sign and ring our doorbell. No true Singaporean would have done either.
“Have people been bothering you?” he asked, jabbing toward the sign with his cane. He was dressed formally for this sympathy call. The cane, which I’d once thought so charmingly d
apper, now struck me as a terrible affectation. A disguised weapon. His white smile looked like a grimace. I had not anticipated the waves of nausea that rolled over me at the sight of my former suitor.
“That sign is meant for you,” I said, as coolly as I could manage. “And if you ever trouble me or my family again, I will do something terrible to you. I know exactly who and what you are.”
Now the smile did indeed devolve into a grimace. I watched his mobile face go through several emotions in sequence: surprise, dismay, disbelief, dislike. It landed, finally, on contempt. He looked down upon me from his considerably superior height with something like amusement.
“And how, precisely,” he asked, “do you propose to keep me away?”
I had tried to prepare myself for this moment, this very scene,—and had always come up empty-handed or with something ridiculous, such as bashing him over the head with an umbrella. So I can only call what followed a moment of inspiration.
“I will write about you in the newspaper,” I said.
His smile disappeared.
I pressed on. “Remember that I write a social column,” I said. “There is a great deal I could say. I might even include you in my Singapore Style page, as a recipe for the perfect sneaking, thieving, sniveling, deceiving villain. We are,” I concluded, quoting Brown himself, “as others see us.”
“You’re insane,” he said at last. “The whole lot of you. Living in this broken-down shell of a palace. Thinking you can hide in the past. Well, you can’t. I’m not sure it’s worth the cost of the repairs, but one way or another, the future is coming. It’s coming for you as well, Agnes. I was willing to rescue you from that.”
“I’ll take my chances on the future,” I said. “But not on you.” And I swung the door closed in his face.
I waited in the front foyer, breathing hard. Perhaps he would try to break down the door. In the aftermath of that encounter, my body began to tremble and shake, as if I were caught in an earthquake. Brown did not ring the bell again. After a bit, I heard the crunch of gravel, and his Pierce-Arrow shot off, spitting stones behind it. We were safe, for the moment. Still, I continued to shake. I lay down on the floor, right there by the front door, and closed my eyes and folded my arms tightly across my chest, as if rehearsing for my own death.
When Nei-Nei Down stepped into the hall, I opened my eyes and propped myself up on my elbows. I did my best to smile gaily.
My grandmother stooped down and helped me stand. She patted my hair into place, a familiar gesture I found soothing. “You did well,” she told me. “Your grandfather would be proud.”
Guilt and shame did not vanish overnight. I still thought of myself as the author of Grandfather’s death. I had written his death warrant when I begged him to save Wei at any cost. I had aided and abetted the enemy. I had fallen prey to vanity. I had loved foolishly an unworthy object.
I felt ashamed and aggrieved and angry—a poisonous recipe, as I discovered. But I could not afford to wallow in despair. I thought of myself as the head of the family now—a presumption that Uncle Chachi would have resented, had he known. Yet it did me some good to think so. It forced me back on my feet. For I determined to walk myself out of the depths. I could not stay under, since everything, I felt, depended on me.
I was not alone in my delusion. In fact, I think the only member of our household who did not believe that our fates now rested solely on their shoulders was little Danai. She was so bereft without Grandfather that Nei-Nei permitted her to adopt a little striped tabby cat, whom Danai named the Colonel, in Grandfather’s honor.
The rest of us struggled briefly for control, like children playing at tug-of-war, pulling the rest of us off-balance, first in one direction, then the other—even Dawid, who had been in India when Grandfather died, and who, despite his great efforts, had not arrived back in Singapore until a few days after the funeral. We could all see how he suffered over this, and given his nature, I am sure he believed his absence was to blame for Grandfather’s death. He was the sort of person who could never fall asleep in a streetcar, in the secret conviction that his watchfulness kept it from running off the rails.
Dawid’s way of taking ownership of the palace was very touching. After the rest of us had retired in the evening, leaving the tea things until morning, Dawid would tidy up the place, even washing the dishes, so that when we woke, the kitchen was shining, and everything had been put into its proper place. Old Sanang grumbled at first, as she did at even the slightest change, but after a time she began to refer to Dawid as “the evening shift,” and this she could accept for she, after all, worked the early morning shift.
Nei-Nei Down attempted to run everything as she always had, by shouting orders and working twice as hard as anyone else. But a new foolish fondness had entered her personality, which gave these orders a comical aspect. “Straighten your coat!” she would bark at Uncle Chachi, but then she would smooth it herself, with fingers unexpectedly soft and trembling. “Go to bed!” she would command and then offer me a glass of cheng teng made with sea coconut, or a bowl of congee.
Uncle Chachi, of course, presumed he was always in charge, and so he did not alter his behavior noticeably, though he seemed to be making an effort to dress a bit more smartly as the head of the family, putting away his beloved scuffed slippers, for instance, in favor of European-style loafers with tassels. He even polished those loafers, late into the night, taking pains to look well.
After a week or two, we stopped wrestling for control of the household, and things settled back to their usual communal chaos, in true Singapore style.
I have neglected to speak about my work at the Singapore Gate and at Kahani’s during this time. I took time off during the mourning period, and when I returned to the newspaper, at least, it was as if I had never been gone. While the family was formally in mourning, we kept busy entertaining guests, and when the official mourning period of forty days had ended, I went back to school and back to work wearing my band of mourning on my left sleeve. People treated me with kid gloves for a short time, with the welcome exception of Mr. Wms, who barked, “Where the hell have you been?”
I slipped back into my accustomed place at the paper. Strangely enough, I found it comforting to work with grown men who ignored me almost completely. Ink-stained, disheveled, balding, foul-mouthed, sweaty, heads down, they rushed from story to story, deadline to deadline. They were a grimly happy bunch, and when I spotted them carousing after-hours in the speakeasy across from the Gate offices—after-hours being very late indeed, sometimes first thing in the morning—they were a sloppily happy bunch and would no more have recognized me there than anywhere else. I simply did not exist for them. Only Mr. Singh and Mr. Wms acknowledged my presence at all. And Mr. Singh spent more time out of the office than in it—arranging for ads, I supposed.
Sometimes, on a city tram, I’d spot someone reading my columns—or at least the Society Page that featured my columns, and I would be overwhelmed by a feeling of wonder. The secret to those who write is that they come to the art simply because they cannot speak. Yet there were perfect strangers, reading what I thought about the newest fashion of low-heeled shoes, or taking in my advice on embroidery or snapshots or hiking the Bukit Timah. If I had been forced to speak about any of those things aloud, in front of strangers, I would have jumped off the tram.
I thought less often about Kahani’s Jewelry Emporium because things there were going so badly. It was not just the business slump—such declines were to be expected. Ron told me that sales fell off each year, a few days past Valentine’s Day, and didn’t pick up again till close to Chinese Valentine’s Day, on the seventh day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar.
One day, I noticed something wrong with Mr. Kahani himself. He had been listless for weeks, but now the circles under his eyes had become grayish. His walk had turned to a sleepwalker’s shuffle. No one spoke of it, but all of us felt it—no
one more keenly than Sahhdie, his dragon guardian at the front of the store. She never left off frowning and scolding the rest of us. Even Ron came under attack, and he bore it meekly.
“Is Mr. Kahani ill?” I asked one morning. Sahhdie nearly bit my head off.
“Why would he be ill? Pull your skirt down over your knees, and do your work for a change,” she snapped. Which was hardly fair, since I always did my work. In slow times, I’d invent things to do, shining the sterling silver, wiping strands of pearls with a soft cloth given for the purpose, cleaning the glass cases till they sparkled. I looked for things to do. So did Bridget, exiled to the other side of the store, in among the estate jewels. We could only wave across the aisles. We’d been expressly forbidden to come near each other during work hours, as if we were primary school girls who might wreck the store. I would have defied orders, at least while Mr. Kahani and Sahhdie weren’t looking, but Bridget needed the salary too badly to risk getting fired. She was saving up, she told me, for college. She was as determined to further her education as I was to end mine once and for all. I was counting the days left until high-school graduation.
Mr. Kahani was barely a presence in the store during this time. When he was there at all, he snuck into his office for longer and more frequent periods of rest. His stomach ailments had worsened; his complexion was the color of pale jade. His answers to everything were vague, sometimes nonsensical. And the men he kept company with were the lowest of the low. “He’s in a bad way,” Bridget would say, puffing on a cigarette in the alley between our store and the apothecary next door.
“Do you think he owes money to one of the secret societies? Or maybe to the Sun Yee On gang?” I asked. Chinese gangs had been involved in the jewelry business as far back as anyone could remember. They were powerful and ruthless, with a finger in every pie.