Last Night at the Telegraph Club(19)
“What ideas?” Lily asked indignantly. “I only went to a picnic. One picnic! They played volleyball, that’s all.”
“That’s how they do it,” her mother shot back. “They make you think they’re harmless and then they brainwash you.”
“Grace,” Lily’s father said warningly.
Her mother’s mouth pressed together into a thin line, but she subsided. Lily crossed her arms angrily. Fantasizing about rocket ships. Her heart pounded as if she had been running.
Her father took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, then sat down at the kitchen table. “We can’t be sure what their motivations are, but it’s best to steer clear of the group.” He put his glasses back on and gave Lily a look that was surprisingly frank, as if she were an adult rather than his daughter. “I don’t believe you had any bad intentions. You’ve never shown any interest in politics, but the things you do can reflect badly on others. We’re living in a complicated time. People are afraid of things they don’t understand, and we need to show that we’re Americans first. Do you understand?”
The seriousness of his tone scared her. “Yes, Papa,” she said, although she didn’t entirely understand.
A couple of years ago, during the Korean War, she remembered Chinatown kids marching in the Chinese New Year parade holding signs that declared DOWN WITH COMMUNISM. Eddie had been one of them; she had cheered him on by waving a miniature American flag from the sidelines. She remembered her father and Aunt Judy watching the parade with such odd expressions on their faces, as if they were both proud of Eddie and a bit frightened by the spectacle. Now she was confused, as if she’d been reading a book that had several pages removed, but hadn’t realized the pages were gone until this moment.
Her father still looked concerned, so she said, “I didn’t even want to go to the picnic, Papa. I didn’t mean to . . .” She trailed off. She wasn’t sure what she had done.
He nodded and said, “And you won’t go again.”
“What about Shirley? And Will?”
“We’ll talk to their parents.” Her father stood, pushing his chair back. “And now I have to go back to work. You should go do your homework. Your mother will be home the rest of the day, so you don’t need to pick up Frankie from Chinese school.”
Lily had more questions, but her parents were standing, sorting out dinner plans, moving on. She felt as if she had been ejected from a movie theater in the middle of the film. Disconcerted, she left the kitchen, picked up her book bag, and took it back to her room. She opened her math book and sat down on her bed to look over the problem sets that had been assigned, but the numbers and letters swam in front of her eyes. A couple of minutes later she heard her father leaving, his footsteps receding down the stairs. She thought about Shirley and her interest in Calvin, and wondered whether that would end now.
“Lily.”
Her mother was standing in the doorway. She came into the room and sat down on the foot of the bed, and the mattress sank toward her so that Lily’s pencil rolled across the coverlet and lodged itself against her mother’s hip.
“What?” Lily said a bit defensively.
“Your father didn’t want me to tell you, but I think you’re old enough to know the truth. The FBI took his citizenship papers.”
Lily sat up, and her math book slid off her lap onto the bed. “Why would they do that?”
Her mother’s face was pale, her lipstick too red in contrast to the whiteness of her skin. “They wanted him to sign a statement admitting that Calvin—his patient is a Communist, but your father wouldn’t do it.”
Calvin. Her mother had clearly not intended to say his name. She seemed a bit nervous now and fiddled with the name tag still pinned to her uniform. MRS. GRACE HU, R.N.
“Your father would never comment on a patient without their permission, and he refused to lie to the agents. So they took his papers as punishment.”
“But why would the FBI punish Papa for—for not lying?”
“They aren’t looking for the truth. They’re looking for scapegoats. Your father should know this. He should have just told them what they wanted. Now he’s protecting a boy he barely even knows—all because he refuses to tell them what they want. And that has put your father in danger, which means it’s put you and me and your brothers in danger.”
“How is he in danger? He’s an American citizen. He was a captain in the army!”
“They’re using these investigations as an excuse to deport Chinese,” Lily’s mother explained. “They took his papers, so now he has no record of his citizenship. And he has family in China—you have family in China. You’ve never met them, but that doesn’t mean anything to the FBI. And you were at the picnic, even if you had no idea who the Man Ts’ing are. It doesn’t look good.”
“But . . . they’ll give him back his papers once they realize he hasn’t done anything wrong, won’t they? They can’t deport him, can they?” Even as she asked the question, she knew the answer. Every so often Lily overheard talk in Chinatown about how so-and-so had been interrogated by the immigration service, or was about to be sent back to China because they had come here under false documents. And she remembered Aunt Judy talking about how the FBI had detained the Chinese-born founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab under suspicion of Communist ties, even though he had supported the United States during the war.