“Oh, don’t remind me!” Lucy cried in English, and then explained, “Tranh sinsàang, my mother is a-I can’t think of the word in Gwóngdùngwá-she is a guard against evil people, so perhaps one of these may try to hurt her, or me. So she warns me to be careful. She will think that one of these has taken me.” Tears began again, and Tranh handed her a clean wipe rag. Then he placed a quarter before her on the counter and indicated the pay phone on the wall.
“Take this and call your mother right away, and let her know you are safe.”
Lucy hesitated. “Oh, but she’ll be so angry.”
“Yes, afterward, but first she will be very happy. There is nothing worse than losing a child. What made you do this wicked thing?”
“I told you, sir. I failed at my lesson and was afraid of disgrace.”
“You failed? So? Did this not make you work all the harder so that you would not fail?”
Lucy hung her head. Tranh said, “Listen to me. You are a clever girl, and things come easy for you. Therefore, when you need to work hard, you don’t know how. Thus you disgrace your family by failing, and disgrace your teacher by running away. But you owe everything to your family. Without a family you are a ghost person, nothing! Understand? Rather than disgrace them you must study until blood pours from your eyes. Go, call your mother, now!”
Marlene’s knees gave way when she burst into her office and Sym said, “Lucy called.”
“Oh, Jesus, thank you!” Marlene gasped and flopped onto the couch. “Where is she?”
Sym told her. Five minutes later, Marlene was walking through the door of the noodle shop, thunder breaking around her brow. Lucy was sitting at a table sipping a Coke. Marlene nodded to Tranh and then sat down opposite her daughter.
“Well?”
“Guilty,” said Lucy, “with an explanation.”
“I’ll hear it.”
Lucy explained about long division and Mrs. Lawrence and the shame and what followed. Marlene lit a cigarette. Tranh brought her a grande crème. “Well,” she said, “guilty with an explanation is a plea on a misdemeanor, like not doing homework. This is a felony. This is felony stupid, Lucy! You realize what could have happened to you?”
“Yes. I said I was sorry. I’ll never, ever do it again.”
“You bet your-you bet you won’t, my girl! Now, this is what’s going to happen. This weekend, instead of you going ice skating with Janet and Marie, and instead of having a sleepover-”
“Mom-mm!”
“Don’t you dare ‘Mom-mm’ me! Don’t you dare! Instead of doing those nice things, I was saying, you and I are going to be locked in a room together working on this math business, and we will not come out until you are on top of long division.”
“What about your clients? What about the twins?” asked Lucy in a snotty tone that made Marlene want to wring her neck. She gritted her teeth and glared at her daughter. The child looked away in shame, for Lucy was aware of Mr. Tranh watching them and sending rays of Confucian disapproval, which for some reason had a more powerful effect on her than her mother’s ire.
“I will take care of that,” said Marlene tightly. “Daddy can handle the twins with Posie, and the clients will just have to look out for themselves. You are not going to fail in school. I may have to kill you, but you are not going to fail. Now, put on your coat. I’m going to take you back to school.”
Marlene got up, her heart pounding, her mind grappling with a confusing mix of anger, fading fear, and burgeoning guilt. She shuddered and went over to the counter.
“Thank you, I … am glad you helped my daughter,” she said to Tranh, speaking slowly and distinctly.
Tranh smiled and nodded. “Is okay. I like … I like her … and I foud … feeled …” He shrugged and threw his hands wide in a gesture of frustration. This gesture, however, attracted Marlene’s attention to what was in one of his hands, which was a worn paperback book with a dirty white cover and red lettering on the spine. Marlene had a similarly worn copy of just that book on her bookshelf at home, had owned it for over twenty years. She gestured at it and said, in French, “Monsieur, I observe you are reading Baudelaire. Is it also the case that you speak French?”
Tranh’s face was at first blank with amazement and then curiously transformed: a wiry intelligence appeared to flow into it, as from a pump. “But of course I speak French, Madame. I am a Vietnamese, am I not? And I was five years a student in Paris. But I am astonished to find that you do as well. Although it is less remarkable, one supposes, than that your daughter speaks Cantonese. I have heard her speak it on the street. This was how we communicated, you see.”
“Of course,” said Marlene. “As for me, I was four years with the Mesdames of the Sacred Heart, who insist on accomplishment in French.”
“So I have always understood,” said Tranh, smiling broadly. “But surely they did not insist on Les Fleurs du Mal. Surely you proper young ladies did not read, let us say, Métamorphoses du Vampire under the watchful gaze of a nun.”
“I am afraid we proper young ladies did much worse than that, monsieur; at least I did. My four hundred blows were unusually vigorous, I fear. And you may regard my daughter to prove it to yourself: we are two of a kind. It is the wages of sin.”
“Come, Madame, it is not as bad as that. She is a brave girl, if overly proud. But you have warmed her ears, and I doubt she will repeat the offense.”
“One hopes,” said Marlene. She looked at her watch. “A pity, but we must go.”
Tranh inclined his head and intoned, “Horloge! dieu sinistre! effrayant, impassible, dont le doight nous menace et nous dit, Souviens toi!”
Marlene laughed, “You have it, my friend. Oh! I have forgotten to pay you for the child’s soup, and for the phone call.”
She reached into her purse, but Tranh held up his hand and said, “Dear Madame: I had not had a real conversation in five years; I had not had a conversation in French for ten years; and I had not had a conversation in French with a beautiful woman for thirty years. This brief moment has been worth a cauldron of soup, and a phone call to Tibet.”
“Then, Monsieur,” said Marlene with a slight bow of her head, “you have my most profound gratitude.”
Outside, in the car, Lucy said, “I like Mr. Tranh, although he’s sort of hard to understand. He’s not a Guóngdùngyàhn-I mean, he’s not Cantonese, is he?”
“No, he’s a Vietnamese, educated in France-probably an official of some kind. The commies must have given him a hard time when they took over-he looks like he’s been through it. Uh-oh, what’s this?”
Lucy looked out the car window and said, “Those are those gangsters from the other day, I think.”
Four oriental youths had just jumped from a Mercedes sedan and entered Tranh’s shop. They leaned across the counter, and one of them started gesturing violently and yelling at the older man. Another unscrewed the top of a sugar dispenser and poured its contents on the floor. A third kicked over chairs and upset tables.
“Shouldn’t we help him?” asked Lucy.
“Yeah, if he needs it. But I have a feeling that he may not.”
In fact, Tranh was speaking calmly to the youth who appeared to be the leader of the gang. Marlene could not see very clearly through the steamed window, but it was obvious that whatever Tranh had said was not something to be lightly borne. The gang leader pulled out a butterfly knife, snapped it open, and leaped over the counter. He grabbed Tranh by the front of his shirt, waving the butterfly knife under Tranh’s nose. Marlene could not see what happened after that: there was a sudden movement, a brief struggle, and the young man was somehow turned around, with his thick hair grasped in Tranh’s left fist. Tranh was holding a thin boning knife in his right hand, the point of which vanished into the kid’s ear. Everyone else was frozen. The kid dropped his butterfly knife. Tranh said something; the kid said something. The other three players began to pick up the upset chairs and tables. Then they backed out, stumbling against one another in the narrow doorway.