Chapter Seven
The man who would later be known as Micah by a family of mixed American-English, Christian-Jewish heritage was nineteen years old when he sailed from China with a shipload of his countrymen in 1877. Mai Long Kwo was an educated boy with an unfortunate interest in politics and the more unfortunate habit of allowing his hot blood to speak up when he should not. His family scraped together the fare and prayed that, by the time he had earned enough to return, his nature would have cooled and the memories of the authorities would have faded.
Long Kwo, known to his employers as Mike Long, worked as a paid slave for twelve years on the railroad and the docks, sharing rooms with other men in houses that had neither plumbing nor gas lighting. But because he did not gamble or drink, because he worked hard and had learnt to keep his mouth shut, his money belt grew thick, and by 1890 he had migrated to San Francisco and sent home for a wife.
It was a difficult time for a man to send for a wife. Five years after Long had arrived, the American government had established what it called the Exclusion Act, which reduced the numbers of Oriental immigrants effectively to none; after eight years, there was no sign of the Act being loosened. In the 1890s, this meant that the only practical means of bringing in a Chinese woman was on a smuggler’s boat.
It took Long a while to find a smuggler who could be trusted with both money and wife, and a while longer for Long’s family to locate a bride they could afford for their distant son. What they came up with was Mah Wan, a young woman who looked frankly like a peasant: tall and strong, with unbound feet, a plain face, and a questionable horoscope. However, she was known to be a hard worker, and her father was willing to risk her on the high seas. She sailed for Gold Mountain, as the land was known, in the spring of 1891, arriving on the tail of a storm that left her and the other would-be immigrants more dead than alive. They came ashore on a moonlit night in pounding surf, heaved bodily into the small boats and rowed ashore.
One of Mah’s companions took one look at the dark figures standing on the beach and cried aloud, and would have dissolved into hysterics but for the hard slap one of the sailors delivered. Mah herself, filthy, terrified, and weak from seasickness, nonetheless managed to keep her spine straight and her feet underneath her.
The figures moved forward and began to divide up the immigrants—six women, four men. In seconds, it seemed, they were scattering, and Mah looked at the man who was left.
“Long Kwo?” she said hesitantly.
“Yes,” said a voice, “come now, we must get off the beach before we are seen.”
Obediently, she followed, stumbling over something on the invisible sand and nearly dropping the precious bundle she had guarded all this way. He stopped, and to her immense surprise took the bundle and seized her hand, guiding her to the road.
A half-hour’s walk brought them to a dark house. Long Kwo led her to the back door and knocked quietly. It opened, and a small person let them in. When the door was shut again, the person lit an oil lamp, and Mah saw that it was a woman—a white woman.
This peculiar figure led them to a room, handed Long Kwo the lamp, and walked away.
He put the lamp on the room’s shaky wooden table, then turned hesitantly to face his bride.
He saw a thin, pale woman as tall as he was, her hair marked by threads of premature grey, with more intelligence than most men would care for looking out of her dark eyes. She in turn saw a man a little rougher, and older, than she had been told to expect. He was wearing a Western-style suit, but it fit him ill; looking closely, she wondered if he could indeed read and write as she had been informed.
“There is hot water and a bath,” he told her. “And cold rice and tea, unless you wish American food. I don’t recommend it.”
“Thank you.”
“Tomorrow we will go to San Francisco, and you can have some proper food.”
“Hot water is better,” she said, and to her surprise, his face lit up.
“I thought you might want it. I remember all too clearly my own trip, and that wasn’t with smugglers.”
The next day, clean and dressed in the unfamiliar Western clothing he had brought for her, Mah and her bridegroom continued their illicit journey to the city. Before the day was out, Mah had seen his worth and been reassured. This man she was bound to was unfailingly polite to her. When he spoke to the white man who drove them in the man’s own tongue, the driver, like the woman the night before, understood without a problem. And when they climbed out of the closed truck, she was in a place where the people had familiar faces and the air smelt almost normal.
The rooms he took her to were clean, if sparsely furnished, and held a surprisingly large number of books in both Chinese and foreign writing. And he might appear rough, but he was in fact so gentle as to be almost shy, and she found herself telling him that she was able to read, a little, forgetting momentarily that her mother and father had been adamant that she was not to let slip the admission until the marriage had been legally formalised.
Both were relieved, and satisfied, and the two strangers set about forming a partnership.
There was much work to be had in San Francisco, if one did not mind sweat and dirt. The city was growing so fast it seemed to be tumbling over itself, and Long Kwo’s mastery of the white man’s language meant that he was often chosen to supervise the crews of workmen.
Mah was slower to learn English, but learn she did, and work she did. The money was steady. They bought a house, a building with a shop on the ground floor to give an income, and they made themselves a part of the tight community of Chinatown.
The only thing they did not have was a child.
After nine years of marriage, not one of Mah’s pregnancies had spent more than three months in her womb. She had been sad and angry at first, and frightened that her husband would put her away. But Long seemed honestly not to mind, and gradually she became resigned to their state.
And then in the closing weeks of the Western year 1899, a woman in their apartment building died, leaving her seven-year-old son an orphan in fact where before he had been one in practice. The woman had no relatives, and her dead husband, too, had been alone in this country, but still, had the boy been a more attractive proposition, he would have been welcomed in any of several homes. However, the child was small and bent, scrawny from neglect, and he looked at a person strangely—in part this was his habit of squinting, but also a sort of aloof manner, as if despite his unprepossessing exterior, he looked upon the adults around him and found them wanting.
But Mah rather liked the child. He was well mannered, other than the look of superiority, and intelligent. Which, she reflected, might account for the look as well.
They talked it over, went before the community association responsible for orphans, and offered the boy a home. Their friends argued with them, saying that there was something very wrong with the child, that the boy must have attracted the evil eye somehow, to be so consistently cursed, and that he would bring his disastrous heritage with him. Mah’s soft heart could be understood, but surely Long could see that the best place for the child was a nice anonymous orphanage? His friends’ arguments, however, fell on ears that had been deafened by the faint ring of hope in his wife’s voice. Long determined to go ahead; his friends and neighbours shook their heads, saying that his weakness for injured creatures would get him into trouble.
With spectacles, the boy’s squint went away; with affection and stability, the superior gaze faded. Nothing much could be done about the boy’s stature and crooked back, although good food, corrective shoes, and a regimen of traditional exercises helped, but in the end, it did not matter. He was very bright, and with a little luck and a lot of planning, he might not have to depend on manual labour for a living.
School was easy enough, for the teachers in the Chinese school appreciated a student who did his work and more. And with care, the family savings would stretch to teacher-training college, and the boy would teach others, not carry loads like his adoptive father or scrub floors and iron shirts like his mother.
Four years later, the gods decided to intervene in the family fortunes.
Divine whim being by its nature both capricious and deceptive, the intervention began with catastrophe. One foggy morning in June 1902, when Long was working with a gang of brick-layers on the third story of a new building, the prophecy concerning his disastrous susceptibility to small, weak creatures was fulfilled. For some reason, a mother cat had decided to shift her litter during the night. And since cats, like ants, have a habit of tracing an impossibly labyrinthine path to their goal, this one had wound her way up some planks, dropped into a half-finished chimney, and come to a rest inside a wall that was due to be bricked in that day. The man with the brick in one hand and a laden trowel in the other had heard the rustle and faint mewing sound, and paused to peer in.
No one particularly wanted to leave the cats inside the wall, but stopping work to dig them out risked getting them all fired. The brick-layer went on with his job, but slowly, sending his hod-carrier to fetch Long who, while not exactly a boss, had a margin more authority than the man with the brick in his hand.
Long came, and saw that, short of tearing down the previous day’s work, the only way to reach the litter was from the scaffolding on the outside of the building. And being the tallest man on the crew, his long arms were the clear candidates for the rescue operation.
Mother and two kits were soon in a burlap sack. He was stretching for the third, fingers out and brushing the tantalising softness that was hissing furiously from a niche just beyond his reach, when the board of the precarious scaffolding jerked, trembled for a moment, then slid with a sickening airiness into space. Arms flung out to catch at the framework of lashed-together boards scrabbled briefly at the fog-slick surfaces, then gave way, clawing a path through the intervening structure until Long finally smashed down on a surface that did not give. He lay on his back, staring up at the faraway faces of his horrified coworkers, at the slowing sway of the traitorous scaffolding, at the grey of the sky above, wondering if this was what the transition into death was like.
He waited for the shock of injury to drift away into the afterlife, but it did not. And then he heard the yowl of the mother cat, fighting her terrified way out of the bag, and somehow the noise told him that no, he was not yet dead.
The fall hadn’t killed him, miraculously enough, or even crippled him. It hadn’t snapped his spine or crushed his skull or ruptured some vital inner organ. It had dislocated three fingers and broken six bones—both those of his left forearm, one in his right ankle, two ribs, and his left collarbone—but the healer who pressed the expensive herbs on Mah assured them that he would heal.
And he did, slowly, although it was a month before he could hook a pair of crutches under his arms and hobble from one side of the apartment to the other. And two months before his leg enabled him to negotiate the stairs and stand on the street again.
Mah worked all the hours she could, and twelve-year-old Tom, strong despite his stature and the twist in his spine, was hired by the downstairs grocer to make deliveries all that summer. Still they went into debt to the money-lender. When the school year started up again, Tom demanded to keep working for the greengrocer, but Long was even more adamant that the boy needed to be in school, and his edict carried. Tom did work after school and on the weekends, but only on condition that his homework got done as well.
In October, Long began to look for employment, but building crews wanted the able-bodied and offices the formally educated. He picked up a few hours a week keeping the grocer’s accounts, and tutored some men in English, but it was not enough. The money-lenders bit deep, and deeper.
The rains came, and if California in November was not as cold as China had been, nonetheless the air in an underheated apartment chilled the bones, especially bones that had been broken eighteen weeks before. On the days he did not have work, Long often walked, with an idea that he was building his strength. He also kept his eye out for potential jobs, along the docks or in the industrial edges of the town, although he was wary about the shopping centre, and avoided the residential areas assiduously: A forty-four-year-old man with a gimpy leg would be easy prey for a gang of toughs.
One Saturday in late November, Tom came upstairs from the greengrocer’s and told his father that he had been asked to deliver a crate of exotic vegetables clear the other end of the city, all the way out at the western shore. The boy was both excited and apprehensive about the lengthy expedition, and Long offered to accompany him. In fact, he even convinced the grocer to throw in a second cross-town street-car fare, to ensure that the produce would arrive without mishap. The month before, another, older delivery boy had been set upon by a gang of white boys, leaving the fruit he had been carrying crushed and worthless. Even limping, Long’s presence might serve to deter the vandals.
The trip went smoothly, other than a few disapproving glances. And the restaurant at the end of the world was so pleased at the freshness of the crate’s contents that the cook gave Tom a dime tip and two thick sandwiches. Father and son took the food down to the beach at the foot of the cliffs, settling in against the sea wall for shelter.
It was a cold afternoon, the wind fitful from the previous day’s storm, the waves erratic against the cliff. Although the Playland carnival rides were going full-strength, there were few other beachgoers that day to object to a Chinese boy. Tom happily stuffed the remnants of his sandwich into his mouth and ran off to see what the waves had thrown up. He stopped regularly to swipe his glasses clean on his shirt-tail, and squatted occasionally to examine some treasure or other.
Another family was making its slow way up the beach in their direction. They were white people: a tall man with that yellow hair some of them possessed and, behind a pair of gold spectacles, the peculiar blue eyes that often went with the hair; a woman with dark eyes and tendrils of normal-coloured hair blowing out from under her warm hat; between them, half hidden between the woman’s dark red skirt and the father’s tall legs, toddled a young child. The father had taken off his hat and tucked it under his arm against the wind. The man and the woman, both of them warmly bundled, were talking and watching the ground. The woman, too, bent from time to time, holding up whatever small thing she had found to show to the man or the child.
They did not see Tom; Tom did not see them; the two paths were set to coincide. And although Long did not worry that this man would perform any act of actual violence against the boy, he did not want his son’s day ruined by a white man’s crushing remark. So he got to his feet, as if his limping gait might actually interrupt the meeting.
To his relief, however, the progress of the trio was broken when the child’s small foot caught on a length of kelp and she was sent sprawling face-first into the sand. Both parents lifted her, brushed her off, comforted her. The father held her to his chest and seemed to be engaging her in conversation, which made Long warm to him: White men so seldom talked with their children. And then the father turned away from the sea, carrying the child to the shelter of the sea wall. Long could not hear her, but he could tell when she laughed, and he was smiling himself when the father sat down with his great arms wrapped around her slim, well-padded body.
The woman, meanwhile, had been distracted by the approach of Tom. Long’s face twisted in concern and he strode as quickly as he could out onto the damp sand, but half a dozen steps and he slowed again. The woman said something to Tom, but whatever her greeting, it had been friendly, and Tom answered her by holding out something in his hand. She leant over to examine it, and the two discussed it for a while. She must have asked where he had come upon the object, because Long saw his son’s arm go out to point up the beach towards the rocks. The woman straightened to look, and then she nodded at the boy. They both continued in their original directions, Tom down the beach, the white woman in the direction of the cliffs; in a minute she was passing between Long and the water, greeting him with a polite nod before her eyes returned to the rocks.
It happened so fast that, if Long had paused even an instant to consider his actions, he would have been too late. The long-skirted figure strolled around the spit of boulders, comfortably above (or so she thought) the waves that broke and sank into the sand eight or ten feet away from her boots. But on this sea, the waves were unpredictable, and turning one’s back on the water invited that seventh wave, or seventieth—the big one. The woman had bent to study something in the lee of the boulder or she might have noticed the uncharacteristic retreat of the waters, sucked back to feed a growing swell like the lungs of a man preparing to shout. The husband saw the danger—Long heard the man behind him, his call faint and snatched away by the wind. But the woman remained oblivious, the wave built and swelled, and Long stumbled into a run, ignoring the pain in his leg.
“Miss!” he screamed. “Miss, come away, oh—”
But the great wave was already surging on, its summoned waters rising, cresting to hurl itself at the shore. Its ridge began to show white, the cap dwarfing the woman even as she stood upright, stared in alarm at Long with his lurching run and flailing arms, then whirled to see what threat lay behind her. The monster wave leapt at her like a falling wall, like the slabs of pavement at the base of the scaffolding. It pounced and scooped her up and hurled her over the small spit like a twig—a booted foot and a swirl of red skirt above the white foam the only signs of her as she skidded over the rocks and onto the sand, then turned, tumbling and gaining speed as the weight of the water sucked her down to the bowl of the ocean.
Long saw only a flash of red in the turmoil of foam and launched himself at it. The fingers of his right hand met only liquid grit and the bite of rock; his left felt the tease of wet fabric darting rapidly past them and he grabbed hard.
Even with two of them struggling, even with four legs and two sets of arms digging into the sand and clawing at the rocks, the ocean nearly had them. Long’s heels dug in first, came to rest with a jolt against a half-buried outcrop of rock, and the sudden jar of the woman’s weight shot a bolt of hot pain up his arm. The half-healed collarbone snapped; he cried out, but he did not let go, his fingers clenched into the wet fabric as he prayed that the seams did not give way, that his muscles not fail, that his bones … And then the predatory water turned its back on its prey, retreating into the sand; out of its foam appeared a tangle of red skirts and undergarments, a moving tangle as the woman choked and pushed herself upright against the immense weight of her sodden clothing. Long staggered upright, curled his right arm around her waist, and hauled her up into the air and away from the greedy fingers of the waves.
They collapsed onto sand that was damp but not wet, the woman retching and crying, blood and hair casting red-and-black fingers across her face as she fought to free her arms from the ripped and constricting garments. Only when he saw that she was safe did Long sink to his knees, gagging up quantities of sea water.
The husband was there then, the little girl in his arms screaming with alarm at their startling flight across the sand and the state of her mother and this strange man, both of whom were bleeding and making frightening noises. After a minute, Tom arrived, stark-faced, bending over his father, dabbing at Long’s bloody hand with his schoolboy handkerchief.
Slowly, the woman’s vomiting passed, to be replaced by deep shudders of cold and shock. The husband, satisfied at last that her bleeding was superficial and her skull and bones unbroken, dashed tears of relief from his eyes and lowered the child down to her mother’s lap, where the two clung to each other. He glanced over his shoulder to measure the distance to the road, then looked at his wife’s rescuer; taking in Long’s pinched expression and the care with which his right hand was cradling the other elbow, the pale eyes shifted from relief back into alarm.
“You’re hurt.”
English was an effort, but Long managed to retrieve the words. “Old injury, sir. It will heal.”
“You must see a doctor. Do you live around here?”
Tom answered. “We live in Chinatown.”
“Then you’ll have to come with us in the car.” Long tried to protest, but the man was already speaking to the child, his voice measured and reassuring. “Mary, my brave girl, I need you to help me. Your mama’s all wet and cold and she needs me to carry her to the car. This nice man here hurt himself helping Mama; can you take care of him and his boy? Do you think you can bring them to the car for me?”
The child’s pale eyes considered the situation, and then she clambered out of her mother’s sodden embrace and extended her hand to Tom. The man swung his wife up easily, waited until Tom had got his father upright, and led the way across the sand.
It was Tom’s first ride in a motorcar, and he was torn between the softness of the upholstery and the hisses his father let out, like a prodded kettle, every time the car bumped and swayed. At the end of the ride, the white man pulled into the drive of a house so grand Tom wondered if he was the mayor. He turned off the motor and trotted around to lift his protesting wife out of her seat and carry her to the door, which opened an instant before they reached it. They vanished inside; a stern-looking white woman peered out of the doorway, and appeared to be coming out until a command from within made her hesitate. She said something, at which a voice so sharp it could be heard from the car made her turn and retreat inside, leaving Tom, his father, and the little girl seated in the car.
Child and boy looked at each other in the silence, self-contained blue eyes meeting apprehensive black ones.
“What’s your name?” she asked. Behind the piping lisp of youth, her voice sounded like her mother’s, some kind of accent, Tom thought.
“My name is Tom.”
“Mine’s Mary. Is your papa okay?”
“He hurt his shoulder in a fall a while ago. I think he’s hurt it again helping your mother.”
The pale gaze travelled from the cradled arm to the Chinese face. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Long had to smile at her seriousness—he did not know young children well, Tom having come to him half-grown, and the size of Western infants always confused him, but despite her fluent speech he didn’t think this one could be older than three. “It will be fine, missy,” he reassured her.
“Does it hurt?”
“A little, yes.”
“My papa will make it better for you,” she said, without a doubt in the world. “Would you like to come in?”
“I think your father will have someone take us home,” Long said. He couldn’t afford any more doctors, and in any case there was little to do but strap the shoulder and keep it still. He just wished the man would hurry; the sun had gone and his clothes were soaked. He stifled a shiver, then grunted at the effects the motion had on his grating bones; the child saw, and frowned.
“Are you cold?” she asked, and without waiting for an answer, stood and pulled herself over the front seat, balancing over the seat with her feet dangling free while she stretched down, then slid back clutching the corner of the plaid travelling-rug the man had wrapped around his wife. Ignoring Long’s protests, she arranged it over him, tucking the thick, soft wool around his knees in a child’s imitation of adult nurturing. “There,” she said, admiring her handiwork, and then looked up at an approaching figure.
It was the stern woman from before, come to snatch her employer’s child from the wicked Orientals. She yanked the car door open and, without sparing the Longs a glance, pointed one finger at the ground by her feet.
“Come out here.” Her command brooked no argument, but to Tom’s astonishment, the infant’s chin came up and her eyes narrowed.
“Papa said to take care of them.”
The woman’s eyes flashed and she reached over Long’s knees for the child. “Your father didn’t intend for you to sit in a dark motor with a pair of heathen—”
“Miss MacPherson!” The male voice from behind her gave the woman pause; with a glance at the wide-eyed faces of Tom and his father, she stood back from the car door.
“The child—” was as far as she got.
“We’ll be fine, Miss MacPherson. Perhaps you could go and heat some water for the doctor, and see if Philips needs any more warm bricks for my wife’s feet. Thank you.”
The woman hesitated on the brink of insubordination, then thought the better of it and stalked away. The blond man laid one arm across the roof of the car and leant inside, his unruly hair falling forward onto his high brow.
“Sorry about her,” he said. “She becomes a bit mother-hennish. Let’s get you in and comfortable. The doctor will be here in a minute.”
Long tried to protest, but the man already had his hands on Long’s legs to swing them to the ground. He seemed to sense which motions would be difficult for a man with a bad shoulder, and his supporting hand was there to help. In moments, the man was propping his damp, sand-clotted Chinese guest on an immense leather sofa before a fire and giving succinct orders to the servants who appeared.
The fire was built up and a hot drink fetched. When the doctor arrived, although he was allowed upstairs to check on the woman first, he was soon retrieved and told firmly to patch Long together. When the re-snapped collarbone had been securely if excruciatingly strapped and Long’s wet clothing replaced by ridiculously long but dry substitutes, a thick soup was brought, oddly flavoured but restorative. And at the end of it, a car arrived to take Long and Tom home, not a taxi, but commercial nonetheless.
“You’re not to take any money from these people,” the blond man told the driver. Then he moved to the back window and took out a slim bill-fold.
“Sir, please,” Long protested. “I hope you are not offering me payment.”
The man hesitated, glanced briefly with his peculiar blue eyes at Tom’s heavily worn, too-small shoes, and stood uncertainly, slapping the bill-fold against his hand. “You saved my wife’s life.”
“As you would have done for mine,” Long replied firmly.
The look the two men exchanged seemed to go on a long time, and said a great deal. Would this tall, beautifully dressed white man have thrown himself into the waves after the wife of the short Chinese man with the much-mended trousers? Most would not. But this one?
In the end, the man slid the bill-fold away into his breast pocket, and held out a hand to Long.
“Thank you,” he said. And then he closed the door of the car, which negotiated the streets from the heights to Chinatown. The driver stopped before the greengrocer’s, even getting out to hold the door for them as if they were white, or rich. A very worried Mah bustled onto the pavement, coming to a dead halt at the sight of the uniformed driver. The man tipped his hat to her, got into his vehicle, and drove away before Long could search his pockets for a tip.
The next afternoon, while Tom was off with a delivery for the grocer’s and Mah was scrubbing shirts at the laundry down the street, there came a knock at the door of the apartment. Long, who had ached all day as if all his broken bones had come to pieces instead of just the one, laboriously got to his feet and answered it. The blond man filled the door-way.
“The driver gave me your address,” he said to Long. “How’s the shoulder?”
“It is nothing.”
“The doctor said you’d broken it last summer, along with a couple other bones.”
“That is true. They healed, this will too. I trust your wife is well?”
“She’s fine, thanks to you.” He simply stood there, leaving Long no option but to invite him in. The house, as always, was spotless, but having sat on the man’s leather sofa and drunk soup from the man’s gold-rimmed bowls, Long knew that the man would see nothing but the poverty.
But to his surprise, the man’s surveying glance betrayed no distaste. If anything, he seemed appreciative of the simple ink drawing on the wall, and of the soft quilt lying across the chair which Mah had laid over her husband’s legs before she left that morning.
“Would you care for tea?” Long offered.
“Thank you, I’d like a cup.” The man seemed curious at the pale beverage, which reminded Long that Westerners polluted their tea with sugar and the milk from cows’ udders.
“Would you like me to get some milk?” Long offered, wondering where on earth he would find the stuff in Chinatown.
But the man shook his head. “Don’t worry, I sometimes take it black.” And when he had taken a sip, he added, “Actually, this is nice without milk. Refreshing.” He drank the cup, accepted a second, and when it was cradled in his big hands, he got around to the reason for his presence.
“Mr Long,” he started, then paused. “Am I saying your name right?”
“Yes, that is fine,” Long reassured him, surprised. It was a question he’d never been asked before—and indeed, it was close enough, considering that the man’s tongue was unaccustomed to a tonal language.
The man nodded and went on. “My wife and I are responsible for your injury. She, not being native to these shores, has never fully realised how potentially treacherous the Pacific surf can be, and yesterday I neglected to renew my warnings. Had you not been there, had you not been willing to risk your life for hers, she would have drowned. I do accept that one cannot pay a man for acting a good Samaritan, but one can at least reimburse him for the losses he incurs.”
Long had no idea what a Samaritan was, good or otherwise, and a number of the other words were not in his vocabulary either, but his English was sufficient to follow his visitor’s general meaning. What was crystal clear, and of far greater importance, was that this stranger referred to Long, a person whose eyes and skin made him less than human to most of the city rulers, as a man, and moreover one whose dignity was a thing to be taken into consideration.
Unwittingly, Long’s chin came up and he met the pale eyes as one man to another.
“Sir,” the tall Westerner said, “I would like to offer you a job.”
It was the Sir more than anything else that clinched the deal.
Long came to work for the Russell family the following day, walking up the hills to the grand house each morning, descending home again to Chinatown in the afternoon. At first, his work was one-armed and somewhat pointless, but with the second healing of his collarbone, he took over responsibility for the grounds, and discovered in himself an unexpected quiet pleasure in working the earth and growing flowers and lettuces. Within the next year, Mah came as well, to work inside the house, helping in the kitchen and slowly absorbing this odd Western style of cooking. When the cook fled the city after the events of April 1906, Mah took over, and the Long family ran the Russell household, inside and out.
Unlike the Scots nanny, who had left the establishment soon after their arrival, the Longs never lived in the Pacific Heights house. The Russells offered, but did not press after the refusal, because both sides knew the problems the neighbours might raise. Instead, Long would clean his spade and tidy the walks, leaving the house in the afternoon so he might be home when young Tom was let out of school. Often as he walked, Long took with him some book or another that one of the Russells thought their gardener might enjoy. And during the periods when the Russells were away, in England or on the East Coast, one or the other of the Longs would go to the house every day, to be sure all was well.
When Tom went east to university in 1909, a Russell gift allowed him to take up somewhat more comfortable rooms than his parents alone could have provided. And when the deep aches that had settled into Long’s bones made his work in the garden more difficult, it was Russell money that kept the family from having to approach the usurious money-lenders of Chinatown to create the bookstore.
Theirs was a symbiotic relationship of two species, different yet alike, that might well have lingered into old age, but for a car going off a cliff, some miles south of San Francisco.