Murder on the Cliff (21 page)

“I remember,” said Charlotte. “One of my big early films was
I
Married a Vampire
. I hated the title too.”

They returned to the living room, where Aunt Lillian showed Charlotte to an armchair next to a table heaped with magazines: the Sierra Club bulletin, the
National Review
and
The Nation
, Japanese newspapers and magazines. A recent issue of
Japan Times
had a photo of Okichi-
mago
on the cover page.

Aunt Lillian clearly kept her mind active, and her choice of magazines indicated wide-ranging, if not downright conflicting, interests. Charlotte looked around the room. Scattered among the junk were some lovely things: a magnificent pink jade Buddha, a beautiful Chinese landscape painting.

“I see that you have some beautiful souvenirs of your travels.”

“Not much really. Considering that this”—she waved a frail arm at the contents of the room—“represents a lifetime of traveling. I’ve given a lot away, of course. But I never really had all that much; we were always on the move. Never wanted much either. Didn’t want to be encumbered by possessions. That
tansu
was the one piece of furniture I ever coveted.” She pointed to a low Japanese chest made of a light-colored wood, with a branch of wisteria blossoms inlaid in multicolored woods across the front.

“It’s very beautiful.”

“Yes. It reminds me of sitting out on the veranda at Shimoda when I was a girl. I used to spend my summers there with Lavinia. The wisteria growing on the veranda there is the oldest specimen of Japanese wisteria in the country. Uncle Townsend grew it from a cutting he brought back from Japan. Paul’s had his eye on that
tansu
for years. He wants it for Shimoda. I’ve practically had to chain it down to keep him from walking away with it. If there’s anyone who loves beautiful things, it’s Paul.”

She was interrupted by the whistle of the teakettle.

“There’s the teakettle,” she said, rising. “He wants me to leave the
tansu
to him, but I’m not going to. No reason—just contrary, I guess. I figure its my contrariness that’s kept me going for so long.”

Charlotte started to get up, but Aunt Lillian laid a restraining hand on her knee. “Stay here, my dear. I wouldn’t want to wear out one of my young visitors.” Her blue eyes twinkled. “I’ll be right back.”

While she was gone, Charlotte surveyed the room, which was out of another century. Not the restored and sanitized century of Shimoda, but a faded, crumbling, and peeling century. The uneven plank floors were covered with an old braided rug; pots of African violets stood in little pools of sunshine on the windowsills. The room was shabby, but it had an aura of peace and refinement; Shawn would have called it
wabi
.

Aunt Lillian returned in a moment with the tea tray, setting it down between their chairs on a cracked leather ottoman which was stacked with books and magazines. Then she poured the tea, and passed a cup to Charlotte.

“I love your house,” said Charlotte, as she stirred some honey into her tea with an old silver spoon, ornate and heavy, that looked as if it hadn’t been polished in the last fifty years.

“I know it’s decaying,” said Aunt Lillian, as she munched on a piece of cinnamon toast. “But so am I. I figure we’re a good match.” She offered the cinnamon toast to Charlotte and then took another piece for herself. “I have a good appetite,” she said. “I take it as a sign I’m not going to die soon. Pity,” she added with a little smile. “I feel as if I’m about ready.”

Charlotte smiled, and returned to the subject of the house. She’d had enough of death for the moment. “I had a dream about a house like yours once.” She proceeded to tell Aunt Lillian about the dream.

“Well!” said Aunt Lillian when Charlotte had finished. She leaned back in her tattered chintz armchair, the glow on her face like light shining through a piece of old parchment. For a few minutes, she sat silently. Only the very old could be as still as she was, Charlotte reflected, as if all haste and striving were over and done with, and all that was left was waiting for death and meditating on the divine fate that had brought her to these ends.

Charlotte had had some reservations about recounting the dream to Aunt Lillian. She was afraid she wouldn’t understand, but she had understood perfectly. Why shouldn’t she? She had chosen the temple fifty-six years ago.

“Did you choose the temple?” asked Aunt Lillian.

Charlotte hadn’t told her how it turned out. “No,” she replied.

Aunt Lillian nodded knowingly. “I had a similar dream, years ago. A man I’d known and admired for many years had proposed marriage. I dreamed that I was on a rock in the ocean. The waves were crashing all around. My two married friends were on shore. I could have joined them, but I decided that I liked the excitement of being out there all alone on my rock. The rock was painted white, just like your temple.”

“Did you ever have any regrets?”

“No, I didn’t. Though it got pretty scary out there on my white rock sometimes, especially during typhoons.” She looked up. “But I don’t think it’s about your temple that you came to see me, my dear.”

“No, it’s about Paul Harris.”

“Oh, yes. What about him?”

“At the reception this afternoon, you told me that there was an error in my speech, that Paul hadn’t just met Okichi-
mago
last year, that he had known her for many years. I wondered what you meant.”

“Just what I said, my dear.”

“When did he meet her, then?”

“I don’t know exactly. It must have been twenty-five years ago.”

“Twenty-five years ago!”

“Yes. He didn’t just meet her, as you said in your speech; he created her.” She went on to relate the story: “As you know, he’s been collecting art in Japan for years. One year, he heard a story in a Kyoto geisha house about a little girl named Okichi who was supposedly a descendant of a child that was born to Okichi and Townsend Harris.”

“How old was she then?”

“About six or seven. When he came back, he came to me about it. When I taught school in Tokyo, I did quite a bit of research on Uncle Townsend’s stay in Shimoda; it’s not far from Tokyo, you know. Paul asked me if I knew anything about a baby. I had heard rumors, but I was never able to confirm them. Most of the mixed-blood babies born to Japanese women were put to death: there was even a clandestine burying, ground for them there, a cluster of little gravestones next to a stream in a remote valley. I assumed that if there had been a baby, it had been put to death too.”

Charlotte listened in fascination.

“But I did know quite a bit about where he might look if he wanted to pursue it further. The Japanese are a nation of reporters. They keep records of everything. The Shimoda town office had a whole warehouse full of old diaries and daybooks. If there was a baby and if it had survived, there would be a record of it somewhere. On his next trip, Paul went to Shimoda and tried to track down the records. It became an obsession with him, documenting the authenticity of this rumor. Every time he went to Japan, he’d get a little farther.”

“It turned out to be true, then?”

“Oh, yes. Okichi was supposed to have put the baby to death, but she gave it to a relative to raise instead. She probably wanted to keep it, but she was already a pariah; to admit to bearing a child of mixed blood would have meant even further ostracism. I always thought that her guilt at giving her baby away might have been one of the reasons she was so miserable in her later years. Paul found Okichi-
mago
living in the country with her grandmother, who was the granddaughter of Okichi’s baby.”

Charlotte took a minute to figure out the relationship.

“So Okichi-
mago
is Okichi’s great-great-great-grand-daughter,” she said finally.

“Yes. Three greats.”

“What do you mean he created her?”

“Like Pygmalion created Galatea. From the day he found her, he managed every aspect of her life. She was his ivory image. The grandmother died not long afterward, and he arranged for a guardian to bring her up. He supported her, he sent her to the best schools, he paid for her lessons—singing, samisen, flower arranging.”

“The idea being, presumably, to turn her into a famous geisha?”

Aunt Lillian nodded. “The most famous geisha of her time. He studied the careers of the most famous geishas of the twentieth century and orchestrated her career accordingly; it was Paul who arranged for her to meet Tanaka, with the idea of his becoming her patron. He thought the patronage of a rich and famous businessman would enhance her career.”

“It’s just like Hollywood,” said Charlotte, thinking of the many starlets who had been plucked out of obscurity and groomed for stardom by one movie mogul or another, including, to some degree, herself.

“Yes. Well, the geisha is to Japan what the Hollywood star is to America. Right down to being the subject of endless gossip.”

“Was her romance with Shawn orchestrated too?”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Aunt Lillian, her eyes sparkling. “I think she did that on her own. Would you like more tea?”

Charlotte said yes, and Aunt Lillian poured her another cup.

“Why has Paul never married?”

“Because of his mother. He lived with her until he was nearly forty. She was a woman of exceptional grace and beauty. She had a lovely house, on Sutton Place in New York. Why should he have given up such a gracious life? I know what people say about such relationships, but there was nothing the least bit Freudian about it. If more men had mothers like Eleanor, fewer would ever marry. No one else could ever have measured up to her. Except, of course, Paul’s own creation.”

“Are you saying that he was in love with his creation?”

“Yes, but not in a romantic way. He was in love with her as he is with his restoration of the Temple of Great Repose. I was wrong when I compared him to the Pygmalion of Greek legend, who fell in love with his ivory sculpture. He was more like Henry Higgins in Shaw’s
Pygmalion
. For Paul, transforming ah impoverished Japanese orphan into a beautiful and famous geisha was less a labor of love than a scientific exercise or a technical challenge.”

“‘I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe,’” said Charlotte, quoting from the Shaw play, which was based on the Pygmalion myth. She had played Eliza Doolittle in her younger days and the redoubtable Mrs. Higgins in a Broadway revival only last year.

“Actually, Okichi-
mago
was very much like Eliza Doolittle,” said Aunt Lillian. “She didn’t sell flowers, but at the time Paul found her she was selling little folk dolls that her grandmother made …”

“Aunt Lillian, Paul Harris wrote the speech that I delivered this afternoon. If he’d known Okichi-
mago
since her childhood, why was he perpetuating the idea that he had only met her last year?”

“He was creating a legend, my dear,” she replied as she helped herself to another slice of cinnamon toast, and then offered the plate to Charlotte. “Does the Hollywood mogul who is creating a star reveal her taking diction lessons, having her eyebrows plucked, going on a reducing diet? No, he unveils her full-blown, like Minerva from the brow of Jupiter.”

She was right. She remembered Paul talking about Okichi-
mago
’s mysterious benefactor.
He
had been the benefactor, the one who was pulling the strings of the marionette.

“She was his secret project,” Aunt Lillian continued. “Paul is a very secretive man, despite his active public life. He kept his relationship with her locked away, like he does his spicy pictures.”

Had Aunt Lillian seen his pictures? Charlotte wondered.

“Oh, yes,” she said, answering Charlotte’s unspoken question. “I’ve seen them. People tend to think of old ladies as being shocked by such things, but the truth is that if you’ve lived long enough, you’re too old to be shocked by anything much, especially by something as silly as spicy pictures.”

Charlotte smiled. “He showed them to me the other day.”

“You should be very honored. He doesn’t show them to everyone. I think they’re quite amusing myself. I especially liked the one called ‘The Phallic Contest,’” she said, her eyes twinkling. “I tend to think of it in the oddest places, like lawyers’ offices and public meetings.”

Charlotte threw back her head and laughed. The print was one of the earliest of the
shunga
. It showed a group of men with enormously enlarged penises sitting in a semicircle; it was a competition for who had the largest, the judges being the delighted women.

“I’d add producers’ offices to the list.”

For a minute, they giggled together at the joke.

“I’ve helped him keep his secret all these years, but I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore now that she’s committed suicide,” Aunt Lillian continued, once they had stopped laughing. “I really don’t know what prompted me to tell you about it at the reception.” She shrugged. “Just my contrariness, I guess.”

“She didn’t commit suicide. At least, the police are quite sure she didn’t commit suicide.”

“I see.” Aunt Lillian nodded her kerchiefed head. “That’s why you’re here. I wondered. I thought maybe I’d forgotten, why you were here. My mind is getting to the point where it plays tricks on me sometimes. I have to be twice as sharp to keep up with it.”

“Did you know Paul planned to make Okichi-
mago
his heir?”

“No, I didn’t,” she replied. “But it would make sense.” Her blue eyes squinted in concentration.

“What is it?”

“That’s why he called the family together for the geisha party! I wondered what he was up to. He hasn’t gotten the family together in fifteen years. If Okichi-
mago
was his Eliza Doolittle, then the geisha party was her debut at the ambassador’s garden party, the place where he would announce to the relatives that he was making her his heir.”

Marianne had been right after all. He
was
going to blow them all up—figuratively, of course. By telling them he had made Okichi-
mago
his heir. “But he didn’t make any such announcement,” Charlotte said.

“No, he didn’t. Maybe she turned him down. Maybe she was tired of having him manage every last detail of her life. I know I would have been, under the same circumstances. She was a modern young woman, after all.”