What patience my grandmother had was elicited only by surrender. Because she had great reserves of tenderness for orphans and strays, both human and animal, I suspect she loved me all the more for having effected my abandonment. At the time of my birth, my parents were eighteen and had been married for six months. As soon as my mother brought me home from the hospital, my grandmother hired a baby nurse, engaged a diaper service, and launched a campaign to oust my father. My father himself planned to be a preacher, and a preacher, she argued, would never be able to support my mother in the style to which she was accustomed. Furthermore, if they remained together, she’d cut my mother off without a penny.
Having raised a spoiled, dependent daughter, my grandmother knew the threats to frighten her: no pretty clothes or picture hats; no ironed pillow slips; no chaise longue in the shade of the jacaranda, no tray of cool drinks perspiring on the patio. She exhorted my grandfather to forget that he’d once been a poor boy and scripted the farewell speech for him to deliver.
Perhaps it was easier to kick my father out of the garden than out of the house; my grandfather led him outside, among the tangerine and lemon trees. ‘Go back home,’ he told him, and he released my father from the burden of child support, and from the privilege of visiting me.
Even if I didn’t articulate it to myself, I recognized danger at the hands of someone so potentially ruthless as my grandmother. I eavesdropped on my mother’s fights with her mother and, afraid that someday I, too, might fall from grace, I ended by making myself my grandmother’s servant: safe by virtue of being useful. But that was later. First I was her pet, and her audience.
‘Tell me a story,’ I’d beg. ‘Please!’ The world my grandmother created was so expansive and exotic that as a young child I didn’t, like my mother, feel imprisoned in her home. Nana’s memories of Shanghai were vivid, and her youth had included such adventures as traveling from Harbin, China, to Paris on the Orient Express. She’d married late, at forty-two, in Las Vegas. But I didn’t want to hear about that, the wedding that went off, small and seemingly incidental as compared to the ones that did not.
‘Tell me about the dress!’
‘What do you want to hear about that for?’ my grandmother would say. But her protests were perfunctory. She liked to tell stories of how she had spurned suitors.
‘Well,’ she relented, smiling, ‘as you know, the dress was the worst of it.’ She always began with her most memorable transgression, the engagement she broke when she didn’t show up at the altar. ‘The dress and the gifts.’ She set the teapot on the table and sat down next to me on the sprung sofa.
If I closed my eyes I could see my grandmother as a young woman, her hair falling dark and heavy down the back of the white gown. I pictured her alone on a wide avenue, triumphant and huge in her wedding dress, as big as a parade float and moving determinedly away from the synagogue that held the expectant groom and congregation.
I can’t remember the would-be husband’s name, but I know all about the gown. It had a six-foot train and was made to order by Lanvin, in Paris. Along with my grandmother’s entire trousseau, it was packed in layers of tissue paper and shipped to Shanghai.
‘What happened to it?’ I asked.
‘They auctioned it off at a benefit for the fever hospital. Or maybe it was smallpox. Something dreadful.’ She couldn’t, after all, return a couture wedding dress. ‘I did keep the underclothes,’ she said, sighing with pleasure at the thought of them. The lace on her lingerie was made by nuns. Handwork of virgins, it adorned knickers, brassieres, chemises, and negligees: everything as white as cake icing, ready to be stripped away on the wedding night.
Born in 1899, my grandmother grew up in a society that arranged its marriages. Most young women accepted this as inevitable, but she never made peace with the custom. When she tried to comply, her efforts were short-lived, the results disastrous.
Gifts for weddings that didn’t take place had to be returned, of course, each with a letter of apology. I asked my grandmother what she wrote in those long-ago letters, how she explained that instance of what was, she led me to believe, a habit.
She shrugged. ‘Sorry, I suppose. I told them I was sorry.’
How many men did my grandmother jilt? Her first engagement was to Lawrence (later Lord) Kadoorie, with whom she had played as a child. Their fathers were business partners, and their families neighbors in Shanghai’s International Settlement. It was assumed my grandmother would marry Lawrence, but she escaped that betrothal before a wedding date could be set.
‘You did like him,’ I’d prompt.
‘Yes,’ she conceded.
‘So what happened?’
She shrugged and sighed and shook her head. ‘We went out to dinner and he added up the bill on his sleeve. Lawrence Kadoorie, with all his millions, used a pencil on his shirt cuff to check the addition. He licked its tip and bent his head over his wrist and I thought, Well, I won’t spend my life with a man like that.’
When Lord Kadoorie died a few years ago, his obituary in The New York Times was of a length befitting a billionaire philanthropist, but my grandmother, who knew of the steady rise of his fortunes, never expressed any regret at not being the wife of a man of fabulous, fairy-tale wealth. Unless I asked her to tell the story of the shirt cuff, she spoke of Lawrence only as a boy, and most often her memory returned to one afternoon during the monsoon season, when they had run together over the windy, wet lawns, each pursued by a scolding governess.
I have a photograph of my grandmother at seventeen, the age at which she was promised to Lawrence. She smolders in the portrait. Against her smooth throat lies a string of pearls her father gave her, one that I inherited. My grandmother wore that necklace every day of her life. She took it off to bathe and then put it back on again.
‘Why do you wear your pearls to the market?’ I asked her once.
‘You have to wear pearls every day,’ she said. ‘They have to be against your skin.’ She touched them. Now that she was old and thin, they hung lower than they had in the portrait. ‘If you don’t wear pearls,’ she said, ‘they die. They go gray and dull.’
It sounded fanciful, but maybe my grandmother was right. I haven’t worn the pearls, and recently I discovered that the white luster of a few of the larger ones has vanished. I think, though, that the reason my grandmother guarded the necklace so literally close to her heart was that it was a gift from her father, who loved her extravagantly and whose love she returned in like measure. Was it because she felt no other man lived up to the father she adored that my grandmother didn’t marry until after he died? She thwarted him, though. She rejected every match he made for her, and she did it flagrantly. ‘Poor Rube,’ she’d say. ‘Poor David.’ She’d shake her head, but I could tell that the gesture was one of manufactured sympathy, a tenderness she’d been taught to express.
The year after the wedding dress was sold – its seams perhaps opened and resewn to fit another bride – my grandmother’s father took her to California. He bought her a chestnut horse on whose back she liked to gallop through the orange groves of Pasadena, and he managed to secure an invitation for her to ride that horse in the 1919 Rose Parade. My grandmother reported such indulgences with a relish undiminished by time. Now, years later, I find myself wondering if perhaps my great-grandfather loved his daughter too jealously. Did he offer her husbands he knew she’d refuse?
‘I didn’t want a husband, I guess,’ she’d say, shrugging.
‘But you married Bop,’ I said.
‘Because I did want a baby.’
In 1942, three years after her father’s death, my grandmother might have been sufficiently modern to consider single motherhood, but she knew that society would still penalize a fatherless child, so she married. She chose her husband for his meekness, and she kept