Last Night at the Telegraph Club: Prologue–Part I

Onstage, the girls were walking across one by one. They sashayed in their heels, causing their hips to sway back and forth.

When she reached the far side she paused, bending one knee and glancing back over her shoulder coquettishly.

There was something about her posture that felt subtly masculine.

Now she had her own tiny hideaway, into which she had crammed her narrow bed, an old bureau with drawers that never closed properly, and several tall stacks of books that created a precarious nightstand for her bedside lamp.

Tommy was handsome, debonair.

She’d surreptitiously left a nickel on the library’s circulation desk as if that might make up for her defacement of library property.

Lily cast a glance of furtive sympathy at the girl before she stepped out of the elevator.

“If Miss Marshall is preparing a fitting room for you, she could bring this ensemble too.”

There was a succession of brown and gray dresses and skirts, with pale pink or baby blue cotton shirtwaists featuring demure round collars or cuffed three-quarter-length sleeves.

Her mother was a real American wife and mother, not a China doll in a cheongsam, relegated to operating the elevator.

“Was that your dream too?” Shirley asked, her tone faintly condescending.

Kathleen’s eyebrows lifted slightly at the curtness of Shirley’s tone, but she didn’t comment on it.

She smiled benignly and asked, “How are you doing? Any questions?”

After school, Shirley waylaid Lily at her locker and asked, “What are you doing Saturday?”

Thus began their somewhat confusing relationship, which veered from Maxine setting up Patrice with new men, to strangely suggestive conversations between the two women.

She sidled over to the next rack—science fiction—and pretended to peruse the books.

A placard tied to the barriers was printed in both Chinese and English.

On Monday at school, Shirley seemed more distracted than usual, as if she were constantly being dragged back to prosaic reality from some much more interesting place in her imagination.

And then, to make matters worse, he looked her in the eye, and she saw a startlingly poignant hope in them.

A question hovered in the back of her throat, tangled up with the paralyzing sensation of being on the cusp of connection.

Today they had broken free from those prescribed grooves, and Lily was acutely aware of the unprecedented nature of their new friendliness.

She seemed a little abashed; a shyness flickered across her face, which turned the palest shade of pink.

She had been happy to accept this delicate distancing because it absolved her of having to give him an answer.

A wistful expression came over her face, and Lily followed Kath’s gaze upward until she spotted an airplane flying overhead.

Kath snapped her fingers, the excitement of the memory suffusing her face in a rosy glow.

Lily felt as if the newspaper clipping and Kath’s acknowledgment that she had gone to the club made an invisible chain linking her and Kath together, and every once in a while she heard the chain clink like silver against glass: a faint, resonant ring.

He studied her almost clinically, and she paused a few steps from the top, wondering for a terrifying moment if somehow he knew she had been thinking about that book.

“What ideas?” Lily asked indignantly. “I only went to a picnic. One picnic! They played volleyball, that’s all.”

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.

After a few more minutes of banal conversation, Reverend Hubbard excused himself to continue on his rounds, and Mrs. Woo invited Joseph to join her and Grace.

They talked about her nursing program for a few minutes while Mrs. Woo watched the two of them cannily.

Grace imagined a mandarin wearing a round cap and sporting a long white beard, but then she chastised herself; he probably wore modern suits like Joseph.

Grace thought again about glamour, about Anna May Wong in Shanghai Express, her seductive silk gowns and coy dark eyes wreathed in cigarette smoke.

China had always seemed both impossibly distant and uncomfortably near to her, a land of silk-robed emperors in ancient palaces, but also of hardscrabble villages that lived on in her mother’s stories.

Their conversation continued in a stilted fashion, moving into and away from China, medicine, and San Francisco, the way so many first conversations went, but neither of them attempted to escape from it.

The caption beneath the illustrated melee declared: “It all started when Miss Cheng won the crown in a big popularity contest, whereupon the adherents of that radiant siren, Miss Wu, got mad—and the war was on!”

The caption beneath the illustrated melee declared: “It all started when Miss Cheng won the crown in a big popularity contest, whereupon the adherents of that radiant siren, Miss Wu, got mad—and the war was on!”

But the author of the article was most amazed by the idea that China, perceived as a rural backwater by most of America, had a film industry at all.

She tiptoed upstairs to her room, irrationally worried that one of her dorm-mates would see her and know by looking at her face that she’d been reading that lurid article.

She tried to dash the queer thought from her mind, but the feeling wouldn’t go away: a sick twist in her stomach, sour as vinegar, as she contemplated Americans’ prurient interest in things that should be private.