I read the story to my mother, who understood English, though she seldom spoke it. She was breathless with pride at my accomplishment. (Her breathlessness had another meaning I did not understand.) I insisted she call me Psyche, as some of my classmates had nicknamed me. She used the name as an honorary title symbolizing my literacy.
I too was intoxicated by my new status, by the excitement of learning, too intoxicated to notice the changes in my mother. Our walks down to the shrimp docks had become fewer even before I started school. More often I ran down alone to get a bucket of shrimp. My mother spent less time in the garden and no longer hauled manure to it. I cannot remember the first day I came home from school and found her in bed. I soon took her lengthening afternoon rest as casually as her more frequent spasms of coughing.
The summer after my first year of school I built a clubhouse on the beach with my school friends. We swam out to half-sunken derelicts, paddling back with scraps for our construction. My brief reign as leader-translator was over. They had all learned English. The only mark of superiority I kept was that, when they were called home for meals, I could go on wandering alone for as long as I wanted. No one called or searched when I stayed out late. I ate shrimp dropped from the drying screens, wild plums from the trees, carrots ripped from anyone’s garden.
My sister Sophie had returned home after her husband and three children died in a typhoid epidemic in Montana. I told myself I stayed away from home because Sophie was always crying, but that was not the reason. My father stayed away more than usual too, probably for the same unspeakable, unthinkable reason.
In the fall Sophie somehow got me into shoes and sent me back to school. But now I had a different teacher, one without the subtle skills and deep understanding of Miss Harrington. This one shouted like a martinet for the benefit of the principal but was actually lax, lazy, and ignorant, a pretty girl who was waiting for her fiance to return from Panama and rescue her from this noisy crowd of children. School had lost its magic, and something terrible was happening at home.
I left home each morning but often skipped school, hiding from the truant officer in a little outcropping of rocks on a high slope overlooking the Bay. There I read or played alone. Sometimes I pretended that this was the cliff from which I, Psyche, would be carried by the wind to the beautiful palace of the god. Sometimes I dozed and dreamed that the water goddess had captured me, Mei-li, but would not name the tasks I must complete before I could be reunited with my mother.
As in the dream, our reunion in real life never took place. One day I came home to find Sophie crying more loudly than usual and the house full of neighbors who had never spoken to my mother preparing her dead body for urial.
My first clear images of my father and my sisters date from my mother’s funeral. My. father at fifty-three was still handsome. He wore a dark, conservative suit and kept his sandy, graying hair and moustache clipped to a more restrained length than the looser western fashion. He still looked very much what he was not, a man of resource and reserve who was to be trusted. He made no expression of deep grief, kept only a distant and dignified solemnity, such as a gentleman might show at the death of a distant relative or a faithful servant. Yet I noticed in his face—around his mouth, under his eyes—a hollow, caved-in look, like the sudden evaporation of tissue that had held his features rrrm. In his eyes, as he sat near my mother’s coffin to receive the guests who never came, I saw flashes, then longer and longer looks of astonished, hurt emptiness. His look reminded me of our older immigrant neighbors, those who had come too late in life to learn a new language.
He had, after all, lived with Dilly for eighteen years. She had cared for his two daughters and had borne him a third one. She had always been there when he chose to come home, had used what he chose to give her, had managed with her garden and surplus fish when he gave nothing. Silent but not subservient, merry as a child with her own child, happy with what he saw as a disaster—a halfbreed daughter. Though rescued by him, she had never really depended on him. On the contrary, over the years he had become unconsciously dependent on her. There might even have been between them something my father could never have acknowledged, a spark of real passion bursting through his shell of indifferent superiority, his haughty generosity. In any case, it was at Dilly’s death that his drinking changed from a frequent overindulgence to a constant necessity.
Sophie, who wept continually at the funeral, looked much older than twenty-five in her heavy black mourning clothes. She had lost handfuls of hair in pregnancies and in grief. Thin, wispy brown strands fell loose from the roll gathered at the nape of her neck, drifting across her plump, sallow cheeks.
Her naturally soft and sentimental character had been strained almost to the breaking point by the deaths of her husband and children. She came home to Hunters Point when they died because she had nowhere else to go, and her widow’s pension was not even enough to feed her. She had nursed my mother tenderly in her absentminded and confused way. She told me over and over, tears streaming, that Dilly had begged her to take care of me, that Sophie had promised, and that I should see her as my new mother. Then she would talk of my mother joining Sophie’s husband and children “on the other side,” where they would watch over us until we joined them. She tried to tell me stories of her childhood with Dilly, but I refused to listen. I did not want to think of my mother dressing and feeding and playing with Sophie as she had with me. Every time Sophie embraced me, I squirmed loose.
Among these three strangers who now claimed to be my family, and worse, claimed to have known my mother longer than I had, the one who interested me was my sister Erika. She stood tall and slender like my father. Her thick auburn hair was piled high on her head. She had clear, white skin and the blackest eyebrows I have ever seen, sweeping like raven’s wings above her large eyes. Her nose was delicate (even my mother, who privately referred to white people as ai bai “big nose,” would have accepted it) and her pink lips opened to show regular, white teeth, not common in those days even in women of twenty-six. Her dark clothes had the unfussy, unobtrusively good fit that cost money. Among our neighbors she stood out with the elegance of a lady far above our class. She was by that time, of course, a prostitute, and she freely gave the family a summing up of her career.
Her liaison with Father’s friend had ended after three years. Other men were interested in her, but none had enough money to make her total devotion worthwhile. She accepted an offer from the madam of a famous house of pleasure. “My clients,” she said, “are the men they name the streets after.”
When Sophie began to fuss and burble and weep, pointing at me, Erika only laughed. “She had better learn early what her mother was and what her own choices are.” Then she went on to say that she was making excellent contacts, was saving her money, and hoped by the time she was thirty to start some other kind of business. “Maybe a bookstore.” When she was not working, she said, she spent most of her time in the public library. She read in every free moment. During the two days before my mother’s funeral, she read the book of mythology Miss Harrington had given me, the only book in our house. When she read the Psyche and Eros myth, she looked at me and said, “A bit erotic for a little girl.” She refused to call me Psyche, as Sophie had begun to do in her efforts to win me over. Erika called me May, as my father did.
It was Erika who cut through confusion and made arrangements for my mother’s burial. First, she got rid of the two Italian neighbor women who had swooped in like vultures, patting and petting me, their avid eyes gathering material for six months of gossip. She dressed my mother, ordered a coffin, and laid my mother, coffin shut, in the bedroom. “It’s not good for May to be looking at that body all day. She knows her mother’s dead. That’s enough.” For those days, when children were less protected from the stark sight of death, hers was an unusual and brave position to take.
No one knew what kind of funeral service to have. Dilly had taken Erika and Sophie