Bridge for Passing (6 page)

I opened my eyes in Tokyo the next morning at five o’clock, widely awake, totally aware. I had been summoned in some way, not by a voice or at least I did not hear a voice. I was simply conscious somehow of having been summoned. The room was neither dark nor light. Night had ended but dawn was not yet come. I lay motionless in my bed, listening, waiting, convinced that someone was trying to reach me. Slowly the impression faded away and I was alone again, yet not as before. There was still something to come. I must be ready for it.

At quarter to six o’clock the telephone rang. I knew immediately what the message would be.

“Overseas call, please,” a voice said. “From the United States, please, Pennsylvania calling—are you ready?”

“I am waiting for it,” I said. I knew now that I had been waiting for an hour.

“Stand by, please,” the voice said.

I had been standing by for an hour and I continued. In seven minutes, my watch on the table under my eyes, my daughter’s voice came to me over the thousands of miles of land and sea between us.

“Mother?”

“Yes, darling.”

“I have to tell you something. Are you ready?”

“Yes, darling.”

“Mother.” The clear brave young voice faltered and went on resolutely. “Mother, Dad left us this morning in his sleep.”

“I thought that was what you had to tell me.”

“How did you know?”

“I just—knew.”

“Will you come home?”

“Today—on the first jet.”

“We’ll meet you in New York.”

“I’ll cable as soon as I know the flight.”

“Everybody has come home. We’re all here. We’ll take care of everything until you come.”

“I know.”

We exchanged the few private words, heart spoke to heart, and I hung up. For a moment there was the longing, oh, that I had never left, oh, that I could have been there when he went. I put it aside. I had discussed this very moment thoroughly with our family physician. Years ago he had said in answer to my question, “It may be many years away, it may be tomorrow. You must continue to live exactly as you have. His heart is strong, his digestion is perfect—I think he will live a long time. But remember, whenever it comes, however it comes, you can have done nothing to prevent it. Even I could not, though I might be sitting at his side.”

He had hesitated, then continued. “The brain is severely damaged. Of course you must expect a total change in personality—we don’t know—”

That brilliant brain, responding so quickly to my every thought—yes, there had been a change in personality. The man I knew so well, the wise companion, became someone else, a trusting child, a gentle helpless infant, whom no one could help loving. We were fortunate, even so. When the brain fails and only the body is left, it is true that there is sometimes a terrifying change in the personality. The Chinese believe the human being has three souls and seven earthly spirits. When the souls depart, only the earthly spirits are left, the person becomes evil and cruel in unpredictable ways. It was not so with him. His earthly spirits were all of a piece with his three souls. He continued what he had always been: lovable, patient, unwilling to cause trouble, as always, except that slowly there ceased to be communication. Language was lost, eyesight failed, the brain ceased to live except in sleep.

It was too early to wake anyone with the news and there was no one, in any case, who could have shared my thoughts or my memories. How quickly, in one instant, years of happy life become only memories! The long slow preparation of the past seven years was now complete. The day I had dreaded had come. The final loneliness was here.

There was no concealing the news. Someone in the telephone office told someone else. Within an hour the telephone was ringing and friends were at my door. None of it seemed near or real. I heard their voices asking. I heard my own replies. Yes, it is true and I must get the first jet home. No seats were available but again friends managed to get one for me. Someone gave up his place when he heard. But the first jet was to leave at midnight and I had the whole day to live through somehow. The kindness, the rising sympathy, became too much to bear. I knew that I must get out of the city, into the country, away from telephones, and where no one could knock on my door.

At that moment Miki said, “Come to my house for the day.”

Miki, my friend, lives about two hours from Tokyo. A good train service takes one there swiftly and in comfort—Japanese trains are excellent—but we went in her car. When we reached the little town near which she lives, we drove straight through to the foot of a steep hill that is not quite a mountain, and the gate opened to admit us.

“From here up you will have to walk,” Miki said briskly.

There was comfort in that confident, practical voice, relief in knowing that Miki would conduct herself exactly as though I had merely come to spend an ordinary day. I had never, as a matter of fact, seen her home. She had been to my home in Pennsylvania more than once. I knew about her work for the half-American children born in Japan. She is unique among Japanese women. Why do I say Japanese? She is simply unique. I have never known a woman like her. She is modern to the last cell of her brain, but her blood is ancient and highborn Japanese. She belongs to one of the great families of Japan and her husband has held many honored posts. She has lived in Europe and she visits the United States once or twice a year. She wears western dress because she can move more freely in it, but anywhere in the world she could only be Japanese. She laughs at her own looks and calls herself “pumpkin-face,” and it is true her face is round, but she is handsome and her eyes are lively and her air that of a person accustomed to being listened to. Her own story as she tells it herself is something like this:

One day, during the most rigorous period of the war, she entered a train to go to the country and hunt for food. The train was crowded, and she took the last seat. As she sat down a bundle fell into her lap from the baggage rack above her head. It was wrapped in newspaper and the papers were loose. She unwrapped it in order to wrap it again more tightly and there before her horrified eyes was a little newborn baby boy. He was dead. At that moment military police came into the car to search for black marketeers. They saw what she had on her lap and immediately arrested her for trying to dispose of a dead child. They thought the child was hers. She had a bad few minutes until an old farmer spoke up for her.

“It is not her child. A young woman came in and put that bundle up on the rack and went away again.”

The police were finally convinced and she was saved. But, as she tells it, she never forgot that little dead baby. “I feel the weight of that dead baby on my knees forever,” she always says.

Days later, as she was walking in her beautiful garden in the early morning, she noticed something moving under a big bush. It was, she thought, a rabbit. She stooped to see whether it was injured, and discovered a tiny baby. Some desperate young mother had left it there. She drew the child out and took him to the house and cared for him. From then on she has devoted herself to the half-American children born in Japan. What began with a small dead body has grown into a great living work for thousands of children, born of Japanese mothers and fathered by American men, black and white. She has organized an adoption agency of her own and has placed more than a thousand half-American orphans with American parents in the United States. The children are still being born and she is still placing them. But many of them live with her and will continue in her home until they are grown and able to take care of themselves.

On that day as I climbed the hill I heard their voices from above, shouting, laughing, screaming in play. The path, winding among great trees, was paved with stone, and stone steps led up the steepest slopes. The day was beautifully mild and the sunshine fell between the tree trunks upon the moss-covered earth. Far below us the village houses clustered together, their roofs of thatch and tile. I walked slowly, I remember, my usually strong energies sapped from within. I asked questions and heard her answers and all the time I was far away from everyone and near to none. It was as though I were suspended, weightless, in space. Mind and heart were numb, I realized suddenly that she was talking and I did not know what she had said.

“How many children have you here, Miki?” I asked, merely to have something to say.

“One hundred and forty-eight,” she told me. She was walking at her habitual brisk speed and she stopped, waiting for me to catch up.

One hundred and forty-eight! They were scattered everywhere in the fine old Japanese buildings and gardens of Miki’s ancestral home. She has built some modern houses, too, utilitarian for school and dormitories. In one of the dormitories I saw two little girls absorbed in the care of a rabbit and some field mice. The children were allowed to have their pets near them and each child had a special place for his own private possessions. Most orphanages are sad places but somehow Miki had made her huge establishment a home instead of an orphanage. About half of the children, I noticed, were the children of Negro fathers. The proportion born is, of course, much lower, but most of the half-white children have been adopted, and only a few of the half-Negro ones, for the simple reason that few Negro couples can afford the cost of adoption.

We wandered about the grounds, stopping here and there to look at some special point of interest. Miki’s great delight is the school, and she was working hard now for her senior high school building. She had been engaged in a neck-and-neck race for the last ten years on this business of school, keeping just ahead of her children. We looked at all the schoolrooms, I remember, and I noticed on each door a small map in bronze. Upon examination, each map proved to be that of a State in the United States, and Miki answered my question.

“Each year I go to your country and concentrate my appeal on one State. When the people there give me enough money for one more schoolroom I come back and add it to my school building. Then in thanks I put on the door a map of the State and on the map is engraved my appreciation to the people of the State.”

“But your maps are so different in relative size from the reality,” I said. “Rhode Island, for example, is quite big here, though actually it is our smallest state.”

She opened another door while I spoke and I looked into a tiny room, not much larger than a closet and much too small for a schoolroom. A storage space, possibly? On the door was a map no bigger than the palm of my hand. It expressed appreciation to the people of Texas!

Miki laughed at my astonishment. “Texas people like to keep their money for Texas,” she said frankly. “I thank them just the same for what they gave me for their half-Texan children, but you see Texas is very small here in our school house.”

There was not the slightest resentment in Miki’s cheerful voice. It expressed merely an acceptance of people as she finds them. She continued to lead the way amiably through the clean kitchens and the dining rooms. The children took care of themselves to a large degree, and everywhere children were helping, chattering and laughing as they worked. She made a few corrections here and there and the children listened with attention but without fear. When she speaks it is firmly and to the point and she is not sentimental. I thought I observed a secret fondness, however, for what she calls “my naughty boy” or “my naughty girl.” It is true that she appreciates, even enjoys, the mischief that expressed itself as often here as anywhere. She explained that she herself had been “a naughty girl” when she was small and now she laughs and at the same time administers the necessary scolding or punishment. She is not afraid of her children and they know she has them all in her heart. She herself sleeps, I discovered, in a room with the naughtiest and the newest.

“Sometimes a naughty boy wants to run away,” she told me. “He is used to wild freedom on the streets. When I think he will try to run away, I tie a strong string around his ankle that he cannot untie, and the other string to my own ankle. If he runs in the night I wake and catch him.”

Her greatest pride is in her theater and this she kept until the last as a final treat. Miki is an actress born, there is no doubt of it. Whatever she does is dramatic and strong. She admits that she loves the theater above all else. Therefore in the center of the place which is her life, she has created a beautiful little theater, modern and convenient, and here the children present plays and dances.

“After luncheon,” she promised, “my children will sing and dance for you.”

Yes, the morning which loomed ahead of me in centuries had already passed. The sun had climbed to zenith, and the gong was ringing for the children. They threw down their games and ran to the dining room. I had not once forgotten that I am alone in the world, but somehow the eternal knowledge had not penetrated deeply enough to me. All day Miki had been showing me life, she had made me walk from one center of life to another. And now, before we ourselves went to luncheon, she had one more gift of life for me.

“We will look at the babies,” she said.

We walked to the end of the garden and there, in a sunny house built for babies, we saw them, the tiny babies newly born, the little ones learning to sit up and to walk. Kind women were caring for them and the babies clung to them. It comforted me to see how the babies turned away from me, a stranger, to those who cared for them. Too often I have visited orphanages where the children ran to strangers and clung to us when we left.

“They will all go for adoption,” Miki said, “except this little one who is mentally retarded. I shall have to think of something for him. … This little girl goes to New York. This boy is leaving next week for San Francisco. I am taking them myself—eleven babies to their new American parents. I fly over North Pole.”

I looked at each little one closely and with love. They are always beautiful children, these who carry the East and the West in their veins. Kipling forgot about them when he said there could be no meeting of East and West. They have always met, as true hearts must meet, in love if not in politics. It is love that brings human beings together, many kinds of love, but only love. I left the little children with reluctance, for they brought me deep comfort. Love is stronger than hate and life is stronger than death.