ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND AND SIXTEEN PEOPLE read the Daily Mail on 10 February 1914, and had she cared, May would have had the satisfaction of knowing that after only a week in the most important city in the world she was already famous to many of its inhabitants as an “exotic singsong girl,” and a “celestial slave-owner.” As it happened, though, Alice’s aunt did not buy the paper, and as the staff of Claridge’s was professionally uninterested in all of the hotel’s guests, only two representatives of May’s new public announced themselves to her.
The first was an American named Terrence Lown, whose outsized calling card included the title Theatrical Producer. He left this card with the hotel concierge, along with an invitation for May to meet him that afternoon at four in the hotel’s ground-floor tearoom.
“Where are the boys?” he asked, looking disappointed as May approached the table alone and slowly, on her own feet.
“I beg your pardon?” she answered, standing, waiting for him to pull out her chair. It took a moment before he understood, and then he jumped quickly to his feet.
“I guess they’re just for outdoors? Shopping, et cetera.” He pushed in her chair, a little too tightly, she had to wriggle it backwards from the table.
“Ah, the Fortnum Mason débâcle,” May said.
“Do you speak French?”
“Naturellement.” May felt that already she disliked this man. Well, what can you have been thinking, she chided herself, theatrical producer, and an American! “How did you hear about the riot?” she asked coolly.
Mr. Lown looked astonished. “Didn’t you see the papers?”
“No.”
Mr. Lown moved aside the tiered tray of sandwiches so that he could look directly into May’s eyes as he offered to take her back with him to the United States. In New York she would complete his Ten-in-One, comprising (1) a fat lady, (2) a bearded lady, (3) the Living Skeleton, (4) Hortence, the three-legged, fifteen-toed woman, (5) Alligator Boy, (6) a midget, (7) Celine, the sword swallower, (8) a snake charmer, and (9) Jaganathan, an Indian Hindu born without hands or feet and aged thirty-five years who spoke and wrote seventeen foreign languages. Lown wanted both May and her boys; he would build a golden chair for them to carry her in.
“I’ll give you a title. Royalty, whatever you like. Princess. Queen. Queen Consort—is that one? Empress of Asia—”
“But what do I want with snake charmers and handless polyglots?” May interrupted. “I have a home. I have a husband.”
“What’s he like?” Lown asked.
“I beg your pardon. What can you mean?”
“Is he like you? Are his feet like yours?”
“Certainly not. He’s … He has big feet.”
“He’s not Caucasian, is he?” said Lown.
“Yes,” May said. “He is.”
“Oh.” Mr. Lown sighed. “We don’t need that. People won’t like that.”
“No,” May agreed. “They often don’t. But, truly, Mr. Lown, this is not the sort of offer I’d be likely to—”
“Will you excuse me a moment?” Mr. Lown said, and he retreated in the direction of the water closet.
After twenty minutes, during which he had not returned and May had overseen the replacement of the sandwiches by a platter of petits fours, she asked the waiter to please charge the tea to her account and to be so kind as to provide her with pen and paper. He peered with suspicion at the black characters flowing up and down from the nib, then picked up the missive gingerly, as if it might be instructions for assembling explosives.
“Please.” May smiled. “If you would ask the concierge to deliver this to my suite of rooms.”
He bowed, the concierge complied, and within minutes Boy and his sweet-toothed brother had come down for cake, their long braids swaying behind them, reaching to the backs of their blue-trousered knees.
THE OTHER READER of the Daily Mail was Miss Robeson, who, alerted to the article by a complaint from a parent, discussed the matter of the Benjamin girls with her mother. She paced five times around her parlor, her Pekingese trotting nervously after, getting underfoot and tearing the lace on her petticoat.
The Fortnum and Mason incident, it was the last straw, it confirmed every fear she had about the Benjamin sisters, especially the younger one. Hot baths, Alice’s inability to remain in her own bed—these had proved rather lucrative concessions, occasions for delicate extortion—but riots caused by foreign women dressed as courtesans were another matter entirely. If other parents heard of the wanton Oriental aunt (and they would, they would, it was not a matter of if but when), they would withdraw their daughters from Robeson Academy. Miss Robeson and her aging mother would be left in the lurch: high, dry, and penniless.
She promised the distraught parent that the situation would be rectified immediately and instructed Miss Clusburtson to pack the sisters’ belongings back into their two blue steamer trunks and deliver them, along with Cecily, to the impossible aunt at Claridge’s, where both of them could await Alice’s convalescence. Or they could go up hill and down dale in a wheelbarrow, for all she cared.
She wrote a diplomatic letter (such communications were one of her talents) to Mr. Dick Benjamin, who received it two and a half weeks later in Shanghai and held his head in his hands.
“Now, I ask you, who besides Arthur’s wife could cause such a scandal!” He refolded the newspaper clipping that accompanied his daughters’ expulsion from Robeson Academy and passed it across the table to Dolly, who read it and lapsed into a long silence.
“Well,” she said at last, “you had better cable May to bring the girls home posthaste. It’s a shame she can’t be trusted to engage a good governess as long as she’s there.”