Christmas Pie Page 3

  Polly had to take a deep, steadying breath before she could speak without stammering. “I really don’t have much to do with him, Mother. I just type legal briefs for the associates.”

  “Well, he appeared to be a very nice man, at any rate.”

  “Yes. Yes, he did.”

  And that fact astounded Polly, who had never seen James Drayton be anything but cold and businesslike. She’d heard he had a reputation as quite a rake among the upper echelons of San Francisco’s society, too. Small wonder, she decided, if he was as charming to the rich and pampered as he had been to her.

  Wrenching her thoughts from James Drayton, she observed, “You seem quite chipper this evening, Mother. Are you feeling better? This morning your poor legs were predicting rain, and they were right.”

  “Oh, I feel much more the thing now, thank you. Mrs. Plimsole brought me a dose of salicylic powders, and my legs don’t ache nearly as much as they did earlier in the day.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Yes. One doesn’t like to be dependent on medicines, but they certainly do help one on occasion.” Mrs. MacNamara patted Polly’s hand and said, “Now, wheel me into the parlor, Polly darling. There’s a surprise for you there.”

  “A surprise?” Mercy. Polly couldn’t recall the last time she’d received a happy surprise. Most of the surprises in her life had not occasioned the pleased lilt she detected in her mother’s voice this evening.

  When Polly stepped into the parlor and saw her mother’s surprise, a smile lit her up inside.

  “Oh, my! Wherever did that come from?”

  # # #

  James felt an odd combination of pleasure and discomposure as he drove back to Chinatown to meet Raymond Sing, his friend and translator. The weather had turned once more and instead of snow, rain slashed through the darkness. He drove slowly, not merely for safety’s sake, but because he wanted to do some thinking.

  Oh, it was true he’d noticed Polly MacNamara in the office before. He couldn’t help it. She would stand out in any company. Particularly in the society of her fellow type-writers her special quality shone.

  Not only was she a remarkably lovely girl, with gleaming auburn hair and lustrous, cinnamon-colored eyes, but she possessed a grace, an elegance, unusual in a person of a type-writer’s social standing. Yet she never appeared to consider herself superior to her fellows; far from it. She exhibited a charming reserve and seemed to shrink from putting herself forward. Indeed, she was endowed with a rare quality, unique to herself.

  He understood her air a little better, now that he’d heard her story, and wondered why he hadn’t suspected something of the sort sooner. So her family’s fortunes had once been much larger, had they? It was a pity, that. And to have one’s assets lost in such a dreadful accident must have been especially hard on her and her mother.

  James’s thoughts took an abrupt turn as he neared his destination. There was Raymond, punctual as ever. James smiled to see Raymond’s slight figure hunched against the driving rain, his hat pulled low over his forehead. James leaned over and opened the door as he pulled up to the boardwalk.

  “Evening, James,” the young Chinese fellow said as he climbed into the vehicle. “Sorry I’m dripping on your fine new upholstery.”

  “Don’t worry about the seats, Raymond. Did you manage to find a suitable institution?”

  “Sure did. It’s an orphanage run by the Order of the Sisters of Benevolence, on the corner of Grant and Rampart. Through your ‘Businessmen’s Trust,’ you’ve been supporting them for years, although you probably haven’t been there or anything.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, they’ve been around for fifty years or more. The orphanage was established first. Now they run a soup kitchen for derelicts next to the orphanage and another one on the docks. Get a lot of riffraff from the wharf, I understand.”

  With a big, satisfied sigh, James shot a conspiratorial grin at his companion. “Sounds like just my kind of place, Raymond. Just exactly my kind of place.”

  Raymond grinned back and gave his head a little shake, scattering sparkling water droplets over the carriage seat. “Nobody would ever guess, James. You know that don’t you?”

  With a wink, James said, “And that’s exactly the way I intend to keep it, too.”

  Chapter Two

  “Oh, Mother, where did this come from?” Polly stared, delighted, at the huge steamer trunk sitting open on the parlor floor. The trunk’s contents lay folded in intriguing stacks of undiscovered mystery, a treasure waiting to be exposed. Polly couldn’t wait to dip into those tidy piles.

  “George brought it over. One of the wealthy ladies on his milk route gave it to her maid to give to him.”

  “Good old Cousin George.”

  Long gone were the days when Polly and her mother would shrink from taking gifts from George. Although neither lady would dream of accepting charity from anybody else on earth, they felt no such qualms with Cousin George. His milk route encompassed the most elegant neighborhoods in San Francisco, and his cheerful disposition and honest good heart had earned him friends everywhere.

  This was not the first time George had been given something by a wealthy society lady through her household staff, nor was it the first of those gifts he’d shared with Polly and Lillian. The people on George’s route knew he’d find a worthy home for their discards. If one had to endure poverty, Polly often thought, it was nice to have relatives who possessed kind hearts.

  “He dropped it by this afternoon, dear. I haven’t looked inside, but saved it until you came home.”

  “Oh, how fun.” Polly grinned at her mother. “Let’s eat first, and then bring our tea in here. We can savor the trunk’s contents without our stomachs getting in our way.”

  “That sounds like a fine scheme, Polly,” her mother said in a voice Polly knew was meant to sound cheerful.

  In spite of her happy tone, a look of great sadness passed over her mother’s face. Polly saw it and was disheartened. Oh, how she wished things could be different.

  For some reason, Polly thought of her strange new trinket and pulled it out of her coat pocket. It felt warm between her fingers; she liked touching it. Quickly, she bent and kissed her mother’s troubled brow.

  “I’ll just run and change, Mother, then we can eat and go through the trunk.” As she dashed off towards the stairs, she called back, “And I was given something today, too. I’ll show it to you over supper.”

  # # #

  Lillian MacNamara held the coin up to the flickering light of the candle separating her from Polly as they sat at their small dining room table. They had just finished the soup course, prepared earlier in the day by their cook, Mrs. Ragsdale.

  Although the cook would have been an expense they could ill afford, Mrs. Ragsdale insisted on working for Polly and Lillian half time, for no wage. Over and over again she declared she wouldn’t allow Polly to earn her bread and cook it too. After all, Mrs. Ragsdale said, she had worked for the MacNamaras for decades; she wasn’t about to leave them just because they’d fallen on hard times.

  “I’m retired now, young lady, and can do as I please. If I please to cook for you and your sainted mother, who are you to deny me the pleasure?”

  Polly had argued as much as she dared, but Mrs. Ragsdale was inflexible on the point.

  “My goodness, what strange designs,” Lillian murmured as she peered at the coin.

  Polly thought it looked dull and lusterless in the older woman’s fingers. Funny. Before when she’d inspected it, the coin had seemed to possess a luminescence of its own. She shrugged. “I can’t tell if the designs are Chinese or not, although I suspect they are. A Chinese lady gave it to me.”

  A quizzical look from her mother made Polly, who never thought to dissimulate, wish she’d remembered to make up a good story to explain the coin. She couldn’t very well say she’d been buying her mother a Christmas present.

  “I—I stopped into a shop in Chinatown on my way
home, looking for—for some gloves.” There. It wasn’t a deft lie, but it would do. Her mother seemed satisfied.

  “It’s a cold little thing, too, isn’t it?”

  Surprised, Polly looked up from her empty soup bowl. Cold? It had felt warm to her. Maybe that’s because it had been in her pocket.

  “I wonder what kind of metal it’s made of?” Lillian squinted hard at the coin.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it’s a curiosity, at any rate. It’s actually quite lovely.” Lillian handed the coin back to her daughter.

  Polly took it and rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger. She liked feeling it; liked having it. “I’m glad the lady gave it to me.”

  # # #

  “Well, Mr. Drayton, there’s no doubt we can use the help, but I’m not altogether certain criminals are the answer.”

  Mother Francis Mary’s voice was dry as chalk dust and her dark eyes glittered with amusement as she stared across her cluttered desk at James. The Mother Superior’s face was an interesting map of wrinkles, and James suspected each one of them could tell its own story.

  He placed a sheaf of papers back into his leather satchel and smiled at the nun. She was a first-rate lady, Mother Francis Mary, he decided as he took note of her twinkle.

  “These people aren’t lawbreakers, ma’am. They’re Chinese boys who haven’t been given justice by our criminal system. Basically, there is no justice for the Chinese in our country. For the most part, these boys are barely more than children, used by the tongs for their own felonious purposes and picked up by our law to be prosecuted and deported as though they were hardened hatchet men.”

  “And you’re telling me they’re not hardened anything, is that right?”

  “That’s right.” James took out one of the papers he’d just shoved away. “Just take another look at this one. Soong Lee. Why, he’s only sixteen years old. Barely speaks English. His only crime was to take a quarter and a message from a boo-how-doy to Charley Fong. The poor boy can’t even read. He had no idea what the message said or that Charley Fong is a hired killer. Why, he—”

  James realized the Mother Superior was holding up her hand. He stopped his impassioned plea, faintly embarrassed. The long-remembered and -resented voice of his father rose up in his brain and chanted, “Strays and misfits! Why the devil are you so interested in strays and misfits when you don’t even care about your own family?”

  “Sorry, Mother Francis Mary,” he mumbled.

  Raymond Sing, sitting stiff and straight in the chair beside James, said, “It took a good deal of persuasion on Mr. Drayton’s part before the judge would agree to this proposal, Mother. He said that only if a suitable institution could be found would he allow the experiment to continue.”

  A look from James silenced Raymond.

  “These boys want to work, Mother,” James said, feeling the need to fight this battle on his own. “They didn’t come to the United States with the idea in mind that they would be used for criminal activity. With the help of Raymond here, I’ve interviewed each one of them. I only took the ones I trusted implicitly.”

  Mother Francis Mary’s smile contained what looked very much like maternal affection. James felt his embarrassment rise and heat his cheeks.

  “Tell me, Mr. Drayton, what is your interest in downtrodden Chinese immigrants? I can’t quite fathom the connection.” She folded her hands on a stack of papers and sat up straight in her big chair. She looked as though she had all the time in the world.

  A small woman, one who looked as though her many years had shrunk her, her head barely showed over the pile. In her stark black-and-white habit, she gave James the impression of a celestial judge, and he had the feeling he was being examined shrewdly.

  He cleared his throat. “Let’s just say I have a personal interest in the damage done children shipped to the United States to be used as chattel by greedy businessmen.”

  A smile played on Mother Francis Mary’s wrinkled lips and the sparkle in her eyes became more marked. “Your father is J. P. Drayton, owner of the Pacific-Orient Shipping Lines, isn’t he, Mr. Drayton?”

  James looked up, surprised. The Mother Superior’s clear, glittering eyes betrayed only benevolent amusement. James guessed it wouldn’t do to fib to a holy sister, so he nodded and murmured, “Yes.”

  “And was it by way of your father’s shipping business that your personal interest in these exploited children arose, Mr. Drayton?”

  “Yes.”

  “And is your father a philanthropist, as well, Mr. Drayton?”

  Stiffening, James said, “No, Mother Francis Mary, he is not.”

  The Mother Superior gave James a benign smile. “Ah, I begin to understand.”

  James eyed her hard. Every time he thought about his father and his father’s shipping business, he felt his guts tighten into a hot, strangling knot. He hated talking about the old man. But tonight, caught in the sharp, knowing gaze of this little nun, he suddenly found himself telling the truth.

  “My father is a brilliant businessman. His shipping business is fabulously successful. The fact that his success has been built on the broken backs of thousands of people like this boy, Soong Lee, doesn’t seem to matter to him at all.”

  James paused to suck in a breath. His voice held a sharp edge when he continued. “I, on the other hand, care a great deal. I’m not as wealthy as my father but have risen in my profession—on my own and by my own efforts—so that I now possess a tidy fortune. In my own way, I’m trying to help; to rectify in some small manner the evil he’s done through the years.”

  “Evil is a very strong word, Mr. Drayton,” Mother Francis Mary said gently.

  James suddenly felt like a little boy again, trying to grab his father’s attention and make him care. “Puling about the yellow devils,” his father would have called it. James’s gaze dropped in spite of his determination. He didn’t know what to say.

  “I’ve often noticed,” the nun continued in a dreamy tone, “that a person’s background often predicts his future behavior. You grew up with plenty, no doubt.”

  “Yes, I did. My father provided well for his household, financially.”

  He didn’t add that when he was a little boy, his father’s presence was so rare in the home, James used to dread J. P. Drayton’s infrequent appearances. Such appearances were invariably accompanied by much fussing and bothering and dressing up of a boy who felt more like an ornament than a child. Little James was infinitely more comfortable with his sweet Chinese nanny than his dynamic, overbearing parent. James didn’t even remember his mother, who had died shortly after giving him life.

  “Yes.” The Mother Superior’s twinkle softened. “Well, you see, it’s always been of interest to me, as one whose entire adult life has been spent among the underprivileged, to observe how children of rich folks go on in the world. So many children who grow up surrounded by great wealth become listless and idle as adults. They spend money like water in frivolous pursuits, and fritter their time away, caring for nothing but their own amusements. Yet others, people such as yourself for example, feel compelled by guilt to try to rectify the disparity between the rich and the poor.”

  James had to make an effort not to frown. “Compelled by guilt?”

  The nun nodded. “Your father, as I understand it, came here from Ireland and made his own fortune?”

  “Yes.”

  Hours of James’s adolescence had been spent in his father’s study, listening to lectures about how John Philip Drayton had arrived in the United States with nothing but the shirt on his back and had made his own way. The little boy who could have used a father’s attention became a young man who hated the very thought of those lectures.