Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [188]
“Huh! Go with her? If the sun’s too hot, she gets a headache. If there’s a wind, her knee throbs. She can’t walk because her feet hurt. If it’s overcast, she can’t see where she’s walking and if it’s bright, the sun gets in her eyes. Look at Jenny. She’s growing up to be just like her mother, too fragile to touch.”
Kam Ho heard a slight creaking on the stairs. He had wanted to warn Mr. Henderson that his wife was on her way down but could not stem the outburst. Mrs. Henderson appeared behind her husband, and with a slight smile, she said: “I’m not really so delicate, am I, Rick? And I suppose Bridget was more robust than me?” Bridget was Mr. Henderson’s first fiancée, but she had died of heart failure before they married.
Mr. Henderson looked embarrassed, then laughed and said: “Don’t lock the door when Jenny’s playing in the garden.”
Mrs. Henderson did not reply. “Take Jenny to wash her hands,” she told Kam Ho, with a meaningful look at him. “It’s time to eat.” The glance meant that he should prepare drinks for them. Mr. Henderson’s job meant that he was often out in the evening and rarely ate with his family. When he was at home, his wife liked them to have a drink before dinner.
Kam Ho took Jenny to wash her hands and then fetched a bottle of ten-year-old port from the cellar. Mrs. Henderson’s taste for port, acquired as a young woman in England, had followed her to Canada. Kam Ho put two long-stemmed glasses down in front of them. Mr. Henderson frowned and glanced at Kam Ho. He did not like wine, regarding it as a lady’s drink. His tipple was whisky, sometimes on the rocks, sometimes straight. Anything else he did not dignify with the name of “a drink.”
In the eight years that Kam Ho had been with the Hendersons, the greatest skill he had learned was to read their expressions. The problem was that their expressions were often at odds, and Kam Ho found himself forcibly pulled to one side. Even when he understood what they each wanted, he did not know how to act. In the beginning, he often felt bruised by the conflict. Then he learned to interpose his own energy between their conflicting energies, making three forces instead of two. This protected him from being crushed.
Kam Ho imperturbably poured a glass of port for each of them and gestured to Mr. Henderson. “Ma’am wants to drink to your health,” he said, “and wish you a safe journey and a speedy return, isn’t that so, ma’am?”
Mrs. Henderson downed her port in one gulp and waved her empty glass at Kam Ho. He refilled it and she gulped it down again. She had had a severe headache all day. She had taken some opium juice but before she could settle down to a nap, Mr. Henderson returned home. She was still in her nightgown, as she often was these days: a crimson Japanese silk kimono embroidered all over with butterflies in shades of blue, green and pink. It reached to the floor but was cut low at the neck, revealing a hint of snowy-white bosom.
Kam Ho did not dare raise his eyes. He found that glimpse of white flesh electrifying. Mr. Henderson must have been crazy about her before she fell sick, he thought. How sad that he no longer felt affection for her. How sad that she kept trying to revive it. Mrs. Henderson treated her husband like a god, as Kam Ho well knew, and wanted nothing more than to cling to him for shelter. But her husband did not want anyone plucking at him or doting on him. This was obvious to Kam Ho but Mrs. Henderson still could not see it. She grasped desperately at any bit of him she could reach, until there was nothing left.
“Do you enjoy being away from home, without Jenny and me bothering you, Rick?” she asked now, waving her empty glass at Kam Ho.
Kam Ho looked at Mr. Henderson, not daring to fill it up again. Mr. Henderson took his wife’s glass from her. “That’s enough. You’ll frighten Jenny if you go on like this.” At his words, the flush on Mrs. Henderson’s cheeks rose upwards until even her eyes reddened.
“Just listen to you!” she said. “What a good daddy you are. Jenny, when was the