Siren Queen(2)
It was Romeo and Juliet as performed by Josephine Beaufort and George Crenshaw, two of the last silent greats. She looked like a child compared to the man who had loved the Great Lady of Anaheim, but it didn’t matter, not when she filled up the screen with her aching black eyes, when his lip trembled with passion for the girl of a rival family.
Their story was splattered over the screen in pure silver and gouts of black blood. First Romeo’s friend was killed, and then Juliet’s cousin, and then Romeo himself, taking a poison draught that left him elegantly sprawled at the foot of her glass coffin.
When Juliet came out, she gasped silently with horror at her fallen lover, reaching for his empty vial of poison. She tried to tongue the last bit out, but when no drop remained, she reached for his dagger.
It wasn’t Juliet any longer, but instead it was Josephine Beaufort, who was born Frances Steinmetz in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She might have been born to a janitor and a seamstress, but in that moment, she was Josephine Beaufort, bastard daughter of an Austrian count and a French opera singer, just as much as she was Juliet Capulet.
The entire nickelodeon held its breath as her thin arms tensed, the point of the dagger pressed not to her chest where a rib or her sternum might deflect it, but against the softest part of her throat.
Her mouth opened, and a dark runnel of blood streamed down her unmarked white throat. She paused, long enough to build empires, long enough for a dead lover to marvelously revive. Then her arms tensed, her fingers tightened, and the dagger disappeared into her flesh, all that white destroyed with a river of black blood. It covered her breast and her white lace gown, speckling her round cheeks and marring her dulling eyes.
She slumped over the body of George Crenshaw and the camera pulled back, back, back, showing us the spread of black blood over the chapel floor before finally going dark itself.
My sister set up a wail that was lost in the chatter of the other patrons.
“She died, the lady died,” Luli sobbed.
I took her hand, squeezing it like I did when I was trying to nerve us both up for another day beyond the safety of our bedroom, but my mind was a thousand miles away.
“No, she didn’t,” I said with absolute certainty.
II
You might say my family is in the business of immortality.
My father came from a long line of apothecaries and sorcerers. There were no imperial appointments, nothing as grand as a jade seal or a French house in Beijing, but they did well for themselves, ensuring a kind of small immortality for magistrates and county governors.
Even after he came to the United States, he kept with him a tortoiseshell cabinet that was second in reverence only to the family altar. It gleamed black and calico with thirty small drawers on the front and at least fifteen secret ones hidden throughout. It contained a continent’s wealth of dinosaur bones, mercury captive in small vials, powders and tinctures of all kinds.
Once in a while, an old man would come from Chinatown, bent and with all of his weight carried by the two hands clasped at the small of his back. There would be a hurried conversation with my father in the alley in back, which we shared with a Polish tailor.
These old men sat stoically on the rickety wooden chair we kept in the back while my father reached for his cabinet. He would grind and pour, slice and drown, and at the end, there would be a little green paper packet of immortality for the old men, cunningly folded to be tucked into a sleeve or a jacket.
My father spoke often of our ancestor Wu Li Huan, who had given the governor of Wu eight hundred years.
“Not a speck of gray in his hair, not a tremor in his writing hand,” my father said.
The old men came for my father’s potion two times, three or even four, but they never came after that. My father was no Wu Li Huan, and instead of centuries, he sold months and weeks.
My mother was the second generation to be born to the golden mountain, her English perfect, her Cantonese stilted. Her people hadn’t even hoped to serve regional officials while they were in Guangzhou, which my father called home and she never did.
Her immortality, what tiny scraps of it she could claim, was in the trains that raced from coast to coast. Her father worked on the Chinese crews that broke ground for the iron tracks, sometimes only six inches a day through the frozen mountains. She told us he was an enormous man, bearded and broad with a face that was turned red by the cold of Montana.
He bellowed and bullied and coaxed so well that he sent money home, and in return was sent the ambitious village beauty.
To everyone’s surprise, they loved each other and would have kept going on together forever if a premature blast had not dropped a mountain on his head, his and his crewmen’s.
Forty men, and by then the exclusion acts had barred the way, so she was the only widow.
With her little daughter in tow, she went to live in Los Angeles where there were other Chinese, but she had had enough. When my mother could take a job at the Grandee Hotel at fourteen, her mother left for China, ready to be home.
Sometimes, when the wind blew just the right way, we could hear the trains whistling to each other from the yards, shrill cries of I am here, and do not stop me. When my mother heard them, her hair blackened slightly from ash to soot and the lines on her face grew just a little less deep.
Like we understood to make wide circles around the drunks on the streets and how calico cats were the luckiest of all, we understood immortality as a thing for men. Men lived forever in their bodies, in their statues, in the words they guarded jealously and the countries they would never let you claim. The immortality of women was a sideways thing, haphazard and contained in footnotes, as muses or silent helpers.