The Majesties Read online

  Acquiring in that climate seemed like madness, so in hindsight it was clear why Opa was insistent. No one in the family had realized the extent of his condition. No one knew he had a condition at all. We mistook it for the same despotic obstinacy that had been his hallmark trait for as long as any of us could remember. And so, while all the other Chinese tycoon families tucked in their feelers and withdrew into their shells, Om Benny, acting on Opa’s orders, negotiated the purchase of the small silk-manufacturing company. Price wasn’t an issue: The Halim family was desperate to sell. Rumors raged nonetheless: How could Sulinado Group afford to acquire at a time like this? Everyone else was eyebrow-deep in foreign loans they couldn’t afford to pay off. What debts were we failing to service? What hidden offshore assets were we utilizing?

  As it turned out, even in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, Opa proved cleverer than all of us. When the worst was over and the ruins had stopped smoldering; when chaos retreated back into the dark crannies where it could be ignored; when the president had been replaced, and replaced, and replaced yet again; when Indonesia’s economy began to stabilize and business recommenced in earnest, Mutiara lived up to its name. A pearl. Insignificant in size, yes, but with strong fundamentals and a consistently decent profit margin. It had a secret patented formula for weaving silk thread of varying thicknesses, producing an exceptionally durable yet very fine weave. More importantly, under the Halims’ control, it had somehow acquired a contract with the federal government to supply silk fabric for all state and tourism bureau needs. Still more importantly, the contract had, by some miracle, retained its validity through each change in administration.

  Mutiara practically ran itself. And this had made it a perfect company for Estella to run upon her reentry into our family’s activities. Conveniently, the distant middle-aged relative we’d commissioned to oversee Mutiara had died suddenly of hemorrhagic dengue fever. It was the ideal situation for Estella, our mother reasoned to the rest of the clan. It would ease her into the business world without presenting her with any real difficulties. It was self-contained and uncomplicated in its operations. It was perfect.

  But also boring. And if the arrangement had been an ideal one at first, especially given the tragedy of Leonard’s death a year and a half into her appointment (what other business would have plodded indifferently along despite months of neglect?), it was plain to see that Estella could do with more of a challenge.

  More specifically, it was plain that Estella should be running Bagatelle with me. The glimmer in her eyes whenever I caught her up on company affairs, the flush of pride in her cheeks when I related its accomplishments—could anything have been more obvious? And yet here was the strange thing: No matter how many times I urged her to join me, she always refused.

  “I’d only hold you back,” she’d say.

  “No, you wouldn’t,” I’d insist.

  “I mean it. If I come on board, I’ll ruin everything. You need complete freedom.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Come on, it’ll do you good.”

  The debate and variations thereof would always end there, with her insisting that her noninvolvement was in Bagatelle’s best interest. She was happiest admiring my triumphs and living vicariously through my success.

  “Anyway,” she would add, “I’m not like you. Never have been.”

  This was a lie. She was once. Before marriage. But it was impossible to change her mind.

  Eventually, I stopped asking. I had my pride too. Bagatelle and Mutiara. They said so much about the different paths we had taken, even if we’d started out joined at the hip. Mine wound through a dark wood and up a solitary peak. Hers kept her confined to a garden maze walled by high hedges.

  We’d just finished eating when the mobile phone at Estella’s elbow shivered. It was Tante Margaret. She was en route to Opa’s house and wanted to know if Estella could meet her there—so my sister could pick up the photos for the slideshow herself and save Tante Margaret the trouble of sending them later.

  “That’s fine. See you soon,” said Estella, hanging up.

  “Why do you always do that?” I asked.

  “Do what?”

  “They tell you to jump and you ask how high.”

  “It’s called being accommodating.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I shot her a mischievous grin. “I’m not into that. Not anymore.”

  “True. You’re so unfilial these days, it’s positively unnatural.” She grinned back and shook her head. “It’s probably for the best.”

  “It is. It keeps me from going crazy. You, on the other hand, they’re driving completely mad.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t exaggerate.”

  “Well, you should set some boundaries.”

  “A bit late for that now,” she retorted, a twang of bitterness in her voice.

  I placed my hand over hers. “It’s not, you know. You’ve oriented yourself around family your whole life—us, Leonard, your in-laws. You’re only thirty-three. It’s not over yet.

  “Join me at Bagatelle,” I almost said, pulling back in the nick of time. She’d rebuffed me already, too many times to count.

  “I know, I know,” she said with a sigh. “But it’s not easy to break away.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “And that’s a good thing.” Then, in response to my puzzled look: “You not seeing, I mean. I think I have the opposite problem, Doll. I see too much. How things could be, you know? How things once were, how they might be again. It makes it hard to detach…”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, but I made a decision. “I’m coming with you to Opa’s,” I declared.

  “You don’t need to. I’m sure you have a lot of work to do.”

  She was right. Two leaning towers of Bagatelle-related documents were waiting for me back at my apartment.

  “It’s no trouble at all,” I said with a wave of my hand.

  This was part of our routine, the dynamic we had settled into in recent years: Estella playing the protective sister, and me mirroring a similar protectiveness back at her, staying by her side in an effort to pry her from the family’s clutches. Consequently, I visited my parents and attended family gatherings far more than I would have otherwise. I wanted to remind her by my presence that she didn’t have to let others run her life.

  “Well, if that’s what you really want,” she said. Her fingers hovered over her phone. “My car or yours? Or should we go separately?”

  “We’ll go in your car,” I said. “I’ll tell my driver to meet us there.”

  OPA’S HOUSE BOTH was and was not Opa’s house anymore. The home we remembered from our childhood had been capacious and cluttered—an abundance of high-ceilinged space portioned into an endless series of rooms and alcoves and passages, diminished only by the innumerable objects they housed. Our late grandmother had loved material possessions, innocently, as only a rich merchant’s daughter could.

  When Oma was still alive, she would tell us grandchildren about exploring her father’s shipping warehouses as a little girl. Her father hadn’t seen the point of schooling his daughters, but he was generous with allowing them freedom when they were out of the house. As a child, she would spend whole days at the wharf, wandering amid piles of tobacco-leaf bundles and burlap sacks filled with coffee beans, sugar, and nutmeg. She would drape chains of tiny freshwater pearls around her neck and admire her reflection in propped-up panes of polished granite. She would press her cheeks against the cool of jade carvings and bury her face in folds of bright silk. Then, woozy from sniffing bottles of sandalwood oil and worn out from clambering up and down the rice-wine barrels stacked in pyramids, she would doze off. The laborers would find her atop an open flat of down pillows or curled up in a nest of packing straw. They would carefully convey her back to their boss’s office, her head resting against their bony brown shoulders.

  “Feelings, ideas, philosophies—they’re reliable as the wind,” Oma would tell us grandchild
ren as she sat with us in the garden or as she pottered around the kitchen, baking cakes. These were her father’s wise words. She’d repeat them tenderly to us while tucking flowers behind our ears or depositing blobs of batter on our outstretched fingers and tongues. “Gold, on the other hand, and land. A roof over your head and food on the table. They keep you and your loved ones healthy and alive.”

  Her father was right. It was material wealth that ensured his survival and that of his family during the Japanese Occupation, and afterward too, during the tumultuous years of the country’s struggle for independence from the Dutch. She recounted how her father had to draw often on those deep pockets of his: to purchase mercy from authorities, hoodlums, and anti-Chinese mobs; to keep beatings and insults to a minimum; to request that the plundering remain civilized and destruction restrained.

  Having made it to adulthood on the strength of worldly goods, Oma lavished her possessions with affectionate gratitude. Although I can only speculate, perhaps it was why she didn’t object to her father orchestrating her marriage to Opa, who was then an industrious but penniless clerk in her father’s employ—an ambitious individual whose extraordinary shrewdness Oma’s father trusted to put his daughter’s inheritance to good use in order to provide for her and any offspring. I could imagine all too well young Oma marrying young Opa on compassionate grounds: How terrible for a promising young man to be poor, she must have thought. If she could furnish him with the means to achieve worldly success, then why shouldn’t they be happy together?

  I don’t know what Oma’s taste in furnishings was like when she was younger, but the Oma of our childhood had a weakness for the heavy, ornate, and downright garish. Giving such objects space in her house was her version of doing good, like adopting stray animals. “I never saw anything like it,” she would say of each new acquisition once it had been delivered and unpacked. “It seemed a pity not to bring it home.”

  Every room was furnished in dark mahoganies and teaks. Tables and chairs lurked everywhere; in the obvious places, of course—the dining room and the kitchen, the sitting room and the veranda—but also in corridors, like guests at an overcrowded party, and behind doors as if waiting to pounce. Less prolific, but still numerous, were the glass-paned cabinets and squat sideboards, covered in reliefs and edged with flourishes and spires. Bureaus and dressers of all sizes dominated the bedrooms, their drawers either bulging with rarely used bed linens and batiks, or practically empty save for random objects kept solely because there was no reason to throw them away—marbles, rubber bands, playing cards, screws.

  The ornamental items were ten times as overwhelming, unable to hide behind any ostensibly practical purpose. Dark, ponderous paintings of stormy mountain ranges, brooding forests, and thundering horse herds—all framed in intricate gilt—covered every wall, interspersed with enormous Balinese friezes depicting ceremonial processions and battles. Sculptures in marble, wood, resin, jade, and stone, ranging from the size of bowling balls to the size of full-grown men, occupied whatever free space remained. Chinese lions, horses, and ingots; moonfaced Buddhas and serene Mother Marys; locally made replicas of famous classical and Renaissance art modified for modesty’s sake—Michelangelo’s David in a fig leaf and Venus de Milo in a toga with arms added. And there was the favorite of us grandchildren: a wooden statue of a smiling old man about half a meter tall with an enormous bulging head and a long trailing beard. In one hand he carried a knobbly walking stick, in the other a plump peach.

  “He’s the god of long life,” Oma would tell us. “The peach represents immortality.” We were technically Christian, Oma’s father having converted from Buddhism in his youth. Still, Oma would insist, “We Chinese believe in him,” whenever we would ask, which was often because, like all children, we enjoyed hearing stories again and again.

  “We Chinese…” The phrase betrayed both solidarity and distance: a faint but steady sense of kinship with an ancestral land and people whose customs and philosophies danced through our lives like shadows, rustled our daily and annual routines like delicate gusts of wind.

  We grandchildren pretended we had an ancestor who looked like the statue, and developed a custom of rubbing the statue’s bald head when we passed by—our childish way of honoring his memory and ensuring our own longevity. By the time Estella and I had reached our teens, the bulbous head had been burnished black by the oils from all our hot, eager palms.

  The statue was gone now, along with Oma’s other possessions: sold off or donated to charities and less well-to-do relations in order to make room for Opa’s second wife. “New Oma,” Estella and I called her. The renovation and redecoration of the old house constituted the one and only request she ever made. We resented her presumption at the time—Oma’s body was barely cold in the ground—but in hindsight, I suppose we couldn’t blame her. What bride, however docile in temperament, would want to spend the rest of her elderly husband’s life languishing among the bric-a-brac of her deceased predecessor? And so, as a marriage present, Opa had graciously consented to the complete remodeling of his home.

  It was almost cruel how the house so conspicuously symbolized everything wrong with this latest, final stage of his life. Gone was the clutter, the richness, of the old days, the old wife, even the old memories. New Oma liked “modern” things, and was also a fervent believer in something she called “minimalism”—something she picked up at the questionable interior design school Opa had paid for her to attend when she was only his mistress, when Oma proper had still been alive, and when none of us had the faintest idea of her existence. We only found out what exactly these aesthetic creeds meant after she had applied them to the house. Furniture could only be black, white, gray, or fire engine red, and had to be fitted with rods of metal. A work of art couldn’t depict anything recognizable, or use more than three colors.

  Our footsteps echoed as we followed Tati, one of the maids, through the cavernous foyer and formal sitting room. I had the sensation of passing through a white void populated by drifting blocks of solid color, now a prismatic umbrella stand, now a shoe cupboard disguised as a concrete block, now a side table of barbed wire and an ottoman perched on scarlet high heels. They forced the mind to hallucinate in order to stay sane.

  As we crossed the larger of the two dining rooms and passed the table—all angles and glass and chrome—I couldn’t help but see in its place the enormous wooden oblong slab of the old days, draped in indigo-and-white batik, and laid end to end with platters of meats and vegetables and assorted fritters, basins of steaming broths and curries and stews, tiny bowls of sauces and pickles and paste, and, on a stool of its own near Oma’s seat, the gargantuan rice cooker from which she served each of us in turn.

  Tati showed us into Opa’s television room. He was slumped on a gray felt sofa, the transparent base of which made it look like it was hovering in midair. His eyes gazed blankly at the flat screen mounted on a wall. Tante Margaret was sitting next to him. Much to our amusement, they were watching a cooking show. Estella and I kissed him and Tante Margaret in turn, our aunt doing an admirable job of emitting disdain even as she submitted to the light peck I bestowed millimeters away from the surface of her cheek.

  “How are you, Opa?” asked Estella, more for the sake of form than to elicit an actual response.

  “Learning how to make croquettes?” I asked faux innocently, pointing to the screen.

  The good thing about his condition was that we could be more relaxed around him—irreverent, even. In the old days, my wisecrack would have earned me a slap across the face. Now my only punishment was a sharp nudge from my sister. Opa blinked several times and turned slowly toward us, as if awaking from a nap. How shrunken he was now, this stern giant of our youth. How diminished, even if amid the sagging ruins one could still make out the hard lines. He grimaced, either at the show, my joke, our sudden presence, or all three.

  “Margaret. She put this on,” he declared accusingly.

  “Stimulates the brain, Ba,” said
Tante Margaret in a slow, loud voice, as if he had trouble hearing. “Television’s good for you.”

  I could have sworn the opposite was true, but I held my tongue.

  “Why are you here?” Opa asked.

  “I’m helping Tante Margaret put together a surprise for your birthday party.” Estella tilted her head in the direction of our aunt.

  Even as Opa nodded, he lost interest, turning toward the images on the television screen, letting his gaze go vacuous the second he laid eyes on them.

  New Oma entered the room to greet us, the simpering smile on her face ill-suited to a woman of fifty-three. Deferential to the point of obsequiousness, she was never the materialistic slut our family had made her out to be when Opa first brought her home, mere months after Oma’s death. Her status as Opa’s secret concubine of twenty years constituted the only lapse in her virtue. She hadn’t even been cunning enough to lay claim to Opa’s wealth by bearing him any kids.

  When Opa introduced New Oma to the family, all his children snubbed her, and we followed their example—as much as we were able to without incurring Opa’s wrath. But she was of humble stock—a family of Chinese shopkeepers living in Medan—and so obviously intimidated by us that we found it hard to stay hostile for long. We settled on treating her as inconsequential. And she wisely continued to adopt a submissive manner around us, always averting her eyes and hardly saying a word. Admittedly, she was a good wife to Opa in those last days, though really she was more of a patient and devoted nurse.

  She kissed us on our cheeks—weak, clammy smacks—folded her hands in front of her, and lowered her head. “Tati’s bringing out some snacks. Would you like some coffee or tea?”

  When the refreshments made their appearance, New Oma retreated to the corner and sat mute in an especially uncomfortable-looking chair with wire arms and a plexiglass back. We sat sipping coffee, nibbling at slices of tapioca cake, and chatting—mostly with Tante Margaret about various safe topics: the logistics of Opa’s birthday party, gossip about families we knew, and fine dining. Even if my conversational contributions occasionally did tip toward the sarcastic, my sister did a consummate job of glossing over them and gliding us along. From time to time, Tante Margaret would dutifully try to involve Opa, who would either ignore her entirely or respond by closing his eyes.