Butterfly's Shadow (9 page)

‘And do you always wear your uniform?’

‘Oh, sure. That’s how people know who we are.’

‘When I grow up, I want to join the navy and go to sea.’

‘Well why not? The wide blue ocean. Nothing but sky around you. Beats an office any day. Welcome aboard, Jack!’

He shook the boy’s hand, smiling, unaware he was participating in a commitment ritual.

Ben’s parents did not attend the wedding. Where Louis and Mary had seen the boy as an unexpected grandchild, the Pinkertons saw only an alien offspring. On the one occasion they met him, they watched Joey for signs of otherness. Okay, he had the Pinkerton colouring, but wasn’t there something about the boy’s eyes? Something different. Something . . . foreign? They noted his politeness, his graceful movements: he could sit cross-legged on the floor without difficulty. All these were signs of his Japanese blood, they told each other. Without drama, they withdrew. And in any case, Ben and Nancy were relocating, further away.

A new home in a new town meant making new friends. Neighbours were welcoming but Nancy felt alone. Here, it was taken for granted that Joey was her son. When tricky questions came up she grew skilled at covering the moment of hesitation, the beat while she reached for the ‘right’ answer. Nothing was simple any more.

This was brought home to her one morning over breakfast. As she poured the coffee she asked Ben if he had heard yet when he was due back on board for the next tour of duty.

Carefully he ladled maple syrup over a waffle. He said, ‘Well now: you’ll be seeing more of me in the future, Nance.’

He concentrated on chewing and swallowing. He picked up his coffee cup, studied it for a moment, and put it down.

‘Here’s the thing.’

It was difficult not to have it sound like a rehearsed speech: how he had realised it would be tricky for her to be alone, now. How it seemed like the right time for a change, what with the kid . . .

The kid. The problem. The burden. When he saw Nancy washing Joey’s clothes, tidying away toys, cooking special stuff, he was swept with guilt. Here she was, stuck with the kid. His kid. At some future point they’d produce their own, of course, but at the right time, not now. The kid had changed everything. He said none of this to Nancy.

He said, ‘I’m looking at a garage, showroom attached.’

‘Can we afford that?’

‘I’ll get some help from the bank. You know what they say: the automobile is the future of America.’ He laughed self-consciously.

‘Ben, that’s wonderful.’

She tried to make her voice sound as it should, but it came out breathless, not quite the genuine article. Because she recalled how Ben used to talk about the navy, the freedom, the unbroken horizon, the moment when a hint of land blurred the rim, the way the sky blended into the sea at night, the darkness seeming to turn the water to ink. It had stirred her, it was part of why she fell in love with him. Now it seemed he was brushing all that to one side.

‘You’re sure about this?’

‘Oh, I’m sure!’ Hearty.

Well. What was it the preacher had said a couple of weeks ago? A problem is just another name for an opportunity.

Ben said, ‘It’s an opportunity!’

She was aware that the horizon had shrunk for both of them. It was goodbye to a teaching career: she had a child to care for now. One who was special. He could kick a ball around; at first sight no different from the other youngsters. But difference there was: older than his years, he looked at things mindfully, with a curious intensity, as if searching for something. One day, walking in the park, he stopped beside a flowering shrub. He smiled with delight and touched a pale bloom with his fingertips.

‘
Ajisai
flowers!’ he exclaimed.

‘No, Joey,’ Nancy corrected him. ‘Those are hydrangeas.’

Then she realised they probably were whatever it was he had called them, but in another place, another language, another life.

‘Let’s go!’ she said brightly. ‘We don’t want to be late now.’

But when she glanced back he was still beside the hydrangea bush, his small hand cupping a bloom. He looked up at her questioningly.

‘When can I see my mother?’

She stared at the child, head suddenly emptied of words, excuses, possibilities.

‘Well now, Joey. We’ll talk about that.’

She took his hand.

She was a mother, a wife, a homemaker, and she worked at it, keeping the house shiny bright, her hair sleek and bouncy, and welcoming Ben home from work each day with a kiss.

She was working at it right now, reaching for the cookie jar, setting out plates in the afternoon hush as the gingham curtains blew in a breeze that carried the sound of a creaking swing-seat from a neighbour’s garden:
crik-crik . . . criik-crik.
Saucers clattered on her new Formica worktop; the kitchen smelled of freshly baked cornmeal cake, and tears ran down her cheeks, dripping on to the golden crust as she took the cake from the oven. Oh, to turn back the clock. But to what hour and what day? And which decision?

She cleared her throat and called up the stairs to Joey to come down for his tea.

He heard her calling and stayed where he was, kneeling on the shag rug, rearranging the animals two by two outside his wooden Ark. Some of the animals had been new to him when he first got the Ark as a present for his sixth birthday – long-necked giraffes, stripy tigers, and there were others that Noah didn’t want on board that Joey decided should be included,
so he had created a pair of tiny origami cranes, two jumping frogs and a couple of dragonflies and set them down alongside the horses and the monkeys.

Shifting to reach for another animal he noticed that the strands of the rug had pressed into his knee, forming a pattern of deep lines. He ran his finger over the temporary scar, feeling ridges in his skin, almost like the tightly woven rushes of a tatami mat. He remembered walking along a seashore once long ago; he had stumbled on half-hidden rocks, their surface sharp as knives, but clinging to the rocks were tiny shells, satin-smooth, and seaweed like dark green lace. All those surfaces, those discoveries, were part of another way of life, like sleeping on a futon, not the soft American bed that sagged beneath him, softness he had now grown used to. Thick rugs instead of the tatami mat beneath his feet. What had seemed strange no longer surprised him.

But sometimes his head rang with words that turned into an endless song, words that added up to minutes, hours, days of a life that was growing fainter as he grew more at home in this huge, flat land planted with crops that people were always comparing to the colour of his hair. Sometimes, to keep the old life alive in his head, he drew pictures of rocks and waterfalls, of mist curling round pine trees like a white scarf; he drew snow cranes with scarlet crowns, and funny-looking chickens, different shapes and sizes.

Nancy kept chickens but they all looked the same, round, plump, as though they had been built in a factory. Not like the chickens he recalled, some with long feathers cascading over their shoulders like the paper streamers in street parades here, others black as tar and scrawny, stretched tall, menacing. And so many colours, the feathers glowing bronze, ivory, gold.

There had been fishing trips by the shore, watching for the fish that hid themselves without concealment, taking on the colour of the water they swam in. He missed the smell of fish, and he missed the rain, sometimes no more than a fine spray
that washed the leaves, then turning angry, hammering the hillside with such force it cut off the view like a curtain of steel rods.

Words and phrases filled his head, the past and the present jostling, the old familiar and the newly learned – baseball,
ikebana
, popcorn,
kamishibai
, movies,
onsen
, bubble gum,
sento
, Coca-Cola,
miso
, taffy, radio, steak, hot dogs, steak, hamburgers, steak . . . Meat. So much meat. In that fading, shadowy place inside his head he used to eat bean curd, rice, wild nettles, grass-shoots and dark
arame
harvested from the sea. Chopsticks transferred morsels from bowl to mouth. Here, meat covered the plate. People held a fork in their right hand and stabbed it into their food as though digging up plants from earth.

But beneath all the rest – the animals, the birds, the sound of the temple gong, the
kamishibai
man with his bicycle, handing out candies and telling stories of dragons and princes and demons who spirited children away from their homes – he endlessly circled the thing unmentioned, always unmentioned. He bunched the memories up close, tight, squeezing them together, and at the centre there was a blank, a hole, a gap, a nothingness where comfort and love and softness had been. He could draw this emptiness, this shape: a kimono, smooth hair, curved neck, but he kept the drawings in a box in the closet. Sometimes he took them out and held one up close to his face, trying to breathe in something, some hint of life, and then another sound took over – the sound of screaming – and he dropped the drawing and pressed his hands to his ears to shut out the noise, but of course it was there inside his head.

He tries, now, to remember how, long ago, in that shadow-time, he had been taken on to a big boat and told he was going on a visit to a place called America, to see his father. He thinks he remembers crying, but more and more he forgets – had he cried?

He recalls being pulled this way and that, to look at new things –

‘Isn’t this great? Isn’t this fun?’

He would have fun in America, Nancy kept telling him, life was great in America. There was everything you could want. But when he got to America –
look, Joey, ice cream, look, cookies and roller skates –
what was missing was his mother. His dad arrived, and soon they were living in a house with an upstairs and a couch and a yard. But when he asked when he was going home they told him this was home now, his mother was dead. His dad didn’t wear a white uniform any more, and they saw Charlie Chaplin at the movies, but nobody wanted to talk about a place called Nagasaki and the woman who took him walking by the shore.

It was the first time a friend from school had stayed overnight. Nancy brought in a folding cot and made up a bed for Frank, and they pestered Ben until he showed them how to calculate depth and distance on a sea chart, for Joey’s school geography project. Frank was impressed with Joey’s father and with Joey’s train set, and the medal that had belonged to Ben’s big brother Charlie who didn’t come home from the war. They were allowed to stay up and listen to a broadcast on the new radio.

Later, in the bedroom, when Frank was looking at Joey’s toys he picked up the red and yellow wooden spinning top – the paint now chipped and worn – and asked why Joey kept such a shabby old thing.

‘It’s from Japan,’ Joey said.

‘What’s that?’

‘A place. The other side of the ocean.’

‘So, what, your dad brought it home for you?’

‘No. I was there with him.’

‘You went to
Japan
?’

‘I was there already. That’s where my mom was.’ He could tell Frank was losing his way and added helpfully, ‘Nancy isn’t my real mom, she brought me back here from Nagasaki – from Japan.’

Nobody in Frank’s family had been outside the state, let alone the country; the idea of some place the other side of the ocean and an extra mother was beyond his understanding.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘So the spinning top came from this . . .’

‘Japan.’

‘From there. Right.’ A pause. ‘So where’s your real mom now?’

‘She died,’ Joey said. That’s what they told him. He began suddenly to feel anxious. ‘I think I’m going to sleep now.’

Next day in the playground Frank and some of the class clustered in a corner, whispering. Joey, kicking a ball around, saw that the others were looking his way. Then Frank called him over.

‘You know you told me that stuff about your mom being dead and all . . .’

He could have just said he didn’t want to talk about it. But one of the girls told him it was sad, and he began to feel maybe he did want to talk about it. And then one of them said if his real mother came from a foreign place –

‘Japan,’ Joey said.

– then what was she called?

He should never have told them her name.

‘Butterfly?
Butterfly?
What kind of a name is that? Nobody’s mom is called
Butterfly
.’

In a moment everything changed: they stared at him, boredom pricked into alertness; indifference sharpened into curiosity.

Often he had dreamed of arousing their interest, finding himself at the centre of the group. Now it had happened and he wished himself elsewhere. He could have simply said his mother was dead, played the orphan. Too late now.

Perhaps if he had looked foreign, if he had exhibited signs
of otherness, they would have been prepared, but here he was with the blue eyes, the yellow hair. American. It threw them.

They clustered round him, wanting to know more about this mother, about this woman with a name like no other, but what was there to tell? She was a girl. And then she married his dad.

And then?

The school bell rang, saving him.

She married my dad. And then?

He could have said her name was Cho-Cho, but something told him these kids would find that wasn’t even a word, let alone a name. He knew one or two of the others had families who came from faraway places: Germany, Sweden – there was a boy from France called John who had started out spelling his name Jean when he arrived, but at least Jean didn’t sound freakish when the teacher read it off the register; there were Americans called Gene. So Joey translated Cho-Cho into Butterfly
.
But nobody’s mom was called Butterfly.

He pressed his hands over his ears now, but through the roaring in his head he could hear Nancy calling from below: ‘Joey! Come down now. It’s your favourite cornmeal cake.’

He was seven and had disliked cornmeal cake for years.

Nancy’s father asked Ben, from time to time, how he was doing and he always replied, ‘I’m doing okay, Louis.’

He felt he had arrived at a precise and accurate assessment: he was keeping up the payments on the house; the business was building, slowly. Automobiles were the future, so his own future, and Nancy’s and the boy’s, would be secure. They were doing okay; they should be happy. He wished she smiled more; she used to smile easily and laugh, wrinkling her nose in a way he found sweetly arousing. But life rubs away at a person and after a while it seems harder to laugh. Harder to talk.