Butterfly's Shadow (20 page)

Mary had written, ‘Nancy is devastated. There’s a rumor President Hoover never meant the operation to get out of hand to that extent but who can ever know the truth of these matters?

‘You should know, Henry,’ his sister wrote, ‘I was not happy about Nancy marrying Ben in the first place. What happened in Nagasaki, the child, it was not what I had hoped for my daughter. And this proves I was right to be anxious. Ben seems to have been of help to the men on that sad march, but he did not have to go, he had a family to consider. I do think he was a good father, in his way, but now Nancy is left alone to care for the child. We must all pray for him. God welcomes a repentant sinner.’

So what should he say to Cho-Cho, waiting now?

‘What was he really like? Well now, which of us ever knows the full picture? I can say one thing. He was a good father.’

He threw her a quick glance but her face was expressionless. He had no idea what she was thinking.

‘Anthropology? Where will that take you? Louis asked. ‘Will
anthropology
give you a foot on the corporation ladder?’

Joey shrugged. ‘Probably not. But I don’t want to work for a corporation.’

‘Young people today, they think college is a game. Jobs don’t grow on trees, Joey.’

‘Well they do if it’s a mulberry tree and you’re into silk.’

‘Don’t get cute with me, kid!’

‘Okay. You’re asking why anthropology. Well, Margaret Mead said—’

‘And don’t give me what the smart-asses say. That’s how they earn their bucks and their Pulitzers.’

Joey found it difficult to explain to Louis why the study of difference and similarity, social systems, alien cultures and faraway countries held a certain appeal. And in any case that was not the whole of it

‘Gramps, anthropology tries to show us what makes us human; the world’s full of people killing each other . . . Maybe that would be just a bit more difficult if we didn’t think of it as Us and Them all the time. If there could be another word, a word for the whole mix. What we have in common.’

He stopped. Inside his head, there was nuance and complexity. He was aware that what emerged was too simple, naïve.

Long ago, when he was a kid, Nancy had read aloud to him a story about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole and had
adventures. But she fell very slowly, so that she could take a look at what she was passing. Anthropology was a bit like that: falling into the past, but slowly, so that you could reach out and pluck things off the shelf of time and study them as you progressed. You immersed yourself in a strange world; you couldn’t change what you saw, but you could learn from it.

He shrugged helplessly.

‘You know: if you prick us do we not bleed? If you poison us do we not die—’

‘Oh, right,’ Louis said. ‘If we’re getting into that, I’ll tell you what I think of anthropology: Much Ado About Nothing!’

He punched his grandson affectionately on the shoulder. ‘Just kidding.’

From her rocker by the window, engaged on a seemingly endless piece of patchwork, Mary said mildly to Joey, ‘I remember, at the beginning, you didn’t know what it meant to squeeze a lemon. What a baseball mitt was. What I find fascinating is the way people can change.’ She glanced at Joey over her glasses. ‘But I’m not an anthropologist.’

Despite the growls and cartoon harrumphing, Louis was enormously proud of the boy, secretly supposing him the brightest kid at Oregon State – even if he
was
studying a load of hooey.

‘What I’m thinking about,’ he remarked when Joey had left the room, ‘is the war. I know the action’s a long way off, and there’s an ocean between us, but FDR’s cosying up to Winston Churchill like a long-lost cousin, which I personally find worrying.’

‘Nancy’s working for the Democrats and she thinks he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread—’

‘And
that
may yet turn out to be a flash in the pan. Well I don’t trust Roosevelt, the mealy-mouthed bastard, and I certainly don’t trust Churchill: it’s not enough to have an American mother.’

Mary picked up a new hexagonal patch and slipped a template into position.

‘If we’re drawn into this war,’ she murmured, ‘Joey could be drafted.’

‘You think I don’t know that? You think I want to see our boy brought home in a coffin?’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Roosevelt’s a smart guy.’

‘That’s what worries me.’

Cho-Cho had retained her slenderness. The body once childlike and weightless, later bony and undernourished, now flowed gracefully from nape to ankle, though her skin had lost its milk-white gleam and was shadowed with an ivory pallor. She was in her mid-thirties, but the ironic half-smile, the knowing look and fine lines around the eyes, gave an impression of someone older. Experience is an ageing process.

Today she was engaged in an argument with Henry. They argued frequently and amicably; it was a conversation that had been going on for years, sometimes with fierce disagreement, usually breaking up in shared laughter.

Cho-Cho no longer covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed. As Henry said, ‘Those women have ruined your traditional charms.’

‘My dear, you are so
nihonjin desu-ne
.’ She shifted into Japanese.

‘“Traditional” is simply another way of saying “handed down”. And who does the handing down? The men. Confucianism told us a woman should obey her father as a good daughter, her husband as a good wife, his parents as a good daughter-in-law and her son as a good mother. Why should women be controlled by something so obviously against their interests?’ She added, in English, ‘Give me one reason!’

He threw up his hands in a comical gesture of self-defence.

Kneeling nearby, Suzuki listened as the other two talked on in their mingled stream of English and Japanese. Never
beautiful, with the years Suzuki had acquired a maternal serenity, her face unlined, her small eyes bright. She could understand most of what was said, and she enjoyed the verbal fencing from the sidelines. She provided Henry with the traditional marriage they were both comfortable with: her voice was not often heard, at least when others were present. She smiled indulgently now as her husband accused Cho-Cho of becoming increasingly westernised:

‘You’ll be cutting your hair next.’

‘You men are so unobservant: I cut it months ago – discreetly!’

‘And you spend too much time with Americans—’

‘I spend time with customers who come to my restaurant.’

‘To eat pot-roast and apple pie!’ He shook his head. ‘They should be trying eel and vinegar rice. You’re betraying your culture.’

‘Poor lonely
gaijin
, missing their home town; the last thing they need is peculiar foreign food!’ She mocked him: ‘You’re so naïve,
oniichan
! My restaurant is successful
because
I don’t serve eel and rice. They regard me as a mixture of an American momma and a geisha too mature to be dangerous. I provide them with stories to take home; I am exotic but safe!’

‘But how can you pass your time with these limited people?’

‘Because they amuse me. I don’t need your seriousness all the time. With you it’s all
wabi-sabi
, beauty in the sadness of things, the imperfect . . .’ She shifted into English for the wordplay she had learned from him, and he had learned from the Japanese: ‘I like to find the
fun
in profundity.’

She relapsed into Japanese: ‘It was once traditional for women to wear leather socks in bed – though I can’t remember why, perhaps it was to rub their feet smooth. Or perhaps to punish their husbands. Would you like Suzuki to be traditional with her nocturnal footwear?’

Henry said mildly, ‘What you’re really doing is proving the truth of the old Japanese view of male and female, that a man
is a child in a suit of armour, a woman is a velvet glove over a hand of steel. The gods protect me from steely women!’

Cho-Cho exclaimed in mock-despair, ‘Suzuki, how do you put up with him?’

‘Because he is the perfect husband.’ Suzuki, too, could engage in straight-faced response. ‘The Samurai believed a woman should look upon her husband as if he were heaven itself. Who could find fault with heaven?’

She rose to her feet. ‘Now, we will eat.’

Cho-Cho shook her head. ‘I must go in two minutes: I have a new man in the kitchen – he might poison the customers.’

Suzuki left the room, her plump body lent grace by her dark kimono, appropriate clothing for a married woman.

Henry had abandoned the Western uniform of suit and tie: no longer an American official, he had taken to wearing a Japanese robe. He displayed, as Cho-Cho teasingly put it, a chameleon quality. In the street he blended with the locals: a husband, a father.

‘Just another Nagasaki resident. What would your sister say!’

She glanced round the room but decided not to provoke Henry today by mockingly noting how traditional it was. This was where he spent quiet hours writing articles to explain the country he loved to the outside world; explanations that became increasingly difficult when the long, draining war with China flared into what the Japanese called incidents and the West condemned as massacres, war crimes, inhuman brutality. That, too, was part of tradition; the iron grip that held them prisoner.

He saw her to the door now and together they looked out at the view. The Sharpless residence was tucked into the hill-side not far from the Glover House, visible over treetops.

‘Remember, so long ago, when you brought me up here to show me the Glover estate? How silly I was . . .’

‘Why silly?’

‘For wanting an American garden, for one thing.’ She looked out at the green landscape Henry and Suzuki had created; the rocks and moss. ‘This is perfect. Youthful wishes can be silly; part of being young, I suppose.’

Unspoken: she had wanted an American garden to go with her American husband, and her American son. She had had them all – for a while.

In the room behind them there was the sound of children’s voices; the girls coming to the door to say goodbye to their favourite visitor. Cho-Cho embraced them in turn. She lingered for a moment with the tallest.

‘How is my clever Mayu? What are you reading?’

The girl had inherited Henry’s fine bones and Suzuki’s calm, slow smile.

‘The book you brought me, about the girl from the sea.’

‘Ah! The Little Mermaid. Well,
she
made a bad choice, poor girl. We’ll talk about that next time.’

Shortages were announced almost daily, patriotic sacrifices demanded. Now Cho-Cho was presented with a batch of government leaflets to hand out to her customers, encouraging austerity: ‘
Luxury is antipatriotic
’.

For someone trying to run a restaurant, this was not an attractive idea.

‘They might as well tell me to send the customers home,’ she complained to Henry. He shrugged.

‘The national love affair with America has gone sour. Germany seems seductively
disciplined
.’

Worse was to come. When Henry called in for his daily coffee, he found Cho-Cho distraught.

‘They’ve banned political meetings. Provocative assemblies, they call them – and of course women’s gatherings are provocative, unlawful.’

Henry began to sympathise, but she waved a dismissive hand at him. The law was unjust; so they had decided to ignore it.

‘I’m leaving the waitresses to take care of the restaurant this afternoon. I’m going to a meeting.’

When the troops arrived at the doors of the lecture hall the women envisaged a confrontation; perhaps some noisy intimidation – enough to discourage a normal female congregation. But the army had more specific instructions: arrest the speaker, drag her out, throw her in a wagon. When the audience protested, the soldiers moved in to break up the meeting by force.

Driven out of the hall like cattle, the women poured into the street. Their cries mingled with the shouts of soldiers who were thrown off balance by this unruly throng – some women in flapping kimonos, others in Western dress displaying arms and legs to an alarming degree. The men bawled abuse at the unnatural creatures, penning them in, the bright colours slowly crushed within the tightening barricade of khaki uniform.

Pinned against the wall, arms flung up to protect her face, Cho-Cho fought fiercely, defending herself, sensing a giddy moment of reunion: she too might be struck by a baton or a truncheon, be thrown into the river. The Urakami flowed past, just the other side of the street. She would sink through the green water, weighed down by her clothes; the swirling river uniting her with Pinkerton.

The crowd surged, there were shrieks; wet blood in the street fed the panic of the mass. Dimly she thought, can a crowd make decisions? Who will take control here?

Then she was knocked aside, fell to the ground and the pullulating organism flowed on. Hours later she stumbled into Henry’s house and Suzuki’s soft arms. How foolish to imagine she could mingle, one river with another, one soul with another. This time she wept for herself.

When the bruises healed, she got back to work: there were new instructions for the cook.

Political friction and sabre-rattling had segued into untidy conflict; the long, stumbling war with China dragged on, and the Americans tightened sanctions. Cho-Cho adjusted her position: the menu was global now, with a hint of northern Europe, as Henry noted.

‘No more apple pie, I see. Well, it makes a change from wasting Kobe beef on hamburger addicts.’

As always, the conversation continued with Henry provoking her and Cho-Cho demolishing his arguments with the affectionate ease of years: parry and thrust, sharp words that never cut too deep, though to a silent listener they could
cause unintended pain. Occasionally Suzuki wept. No one witnessed these moments of weakness and she was firm with herself, making sure she displayed no outward signs of sadness. Why should she? She had no cause to be unhappy: Henry loved her as much as any wife could reasonably expect. She had her daughters. At a time when she could have been sharing the harsh and growing poverty of the people, she had servants. She was privileged, protected. It would be ungrateful to indulge in unhappiness; to want more.