Radiance (7 page)

He took the photographs to the Associated Press office, and his boss paid him six dollars, part of which he spent at the automat for coffee and pie with cheese. He drove a cab for what
was left of the day—stopping for an hour to see if he could get a last photo of Keiko leaving the party. At nightfall, driving back to Brooklyn, her face still glowed in his mind, lit by the purple light, emerging out of shadow.

When he got home, his landlady, Mrs. Gordienko, was sitting in the back room watching
Winner Takes All.
She had carpeted the back room, once a sunroom, and put in a brown couch and folding metal TV table. The tray showed two Indian wigwams on a sandspit, in front of a mauve lake. The air smelled of sauerkraut and sausage—Mrs. Gordienko’s dinner. She patted the sofa, inviting him to sit, but he shook his head. He asked for a pencil and a piece of paper, and she said to check the hall drawer. There was a stub of a pencil in there, and some stationery from a motor hotel in Atlantic City.

Tom’s attic room contained a single bed with a green chenille bedspread and a small desk, which had belonged to the landlady’s son. You could still see where he had gouged his pen into the groove of the wood. He had died in Okinawa, shot dead instantly in shallow water as his division landed on the beach.

Tom wrote:

    FOX CHILD

K
EIKO’S GRANDFATHER TOLD HER STORIES
about foxes: foxes in graveyards, foxes that turned into women, foxes with licorice lips, nothing faces. There were names for different colours of fox, different potencies. Kitsune—common fox; yako—field fox; genko—black fox; shakko—red fox; reiko—ghost fox. Then there was the bakemono. Keiko told Daisy about the bakemono towards the end of her stay. It took human form, and looked and seemed like a woman, though it was from the spirit world. This fox frightened Keiko, and by the time she left it frightened Daisy as well.

Keiko’s grandfather once told a story about a bakemono who married a farmer. They lived happily for seven years. But one day the farmer looked out the window and caught a glimpse of his wife crossing the yard. Something was strange. At first he thought it was the way she moved, but then he realized that she wasn’t casting a shadow. He knew at once that she was a bakemono, and so she had to flee, back to the world of ghosts.

Keiko told this story to Daisy as though it explained things.

There was a twist to the ending. The farmer had been a good husband—easily frightened but good—and so the fox wife had left a kerchief full of money on his pillow. Spirit creatures often had access to secret riches and, according to Keiko’s grandfather, they weren’t afraid to share.

When Keiko first told her about the fox women, Daisy pictured prints of the floating world, which she had seen in an art book at the library: women of Edo with long white faces, fingers strangely plump at the knuckle, feet erotically swollen, tiny passive mouths, eyes that gave nothing away. But Keiko, who had heard these stories as a child, saw the women differently, with wild hair down to their knees, ululations like wind passing through darkened teeth.

Little one,
her grandfather said.
I met a woman in the graveyard the other day. Would you like to hear the story?

Oh, the chill Keiko got hearing those words, remembering the graveyards they had passed on the train from Tokyo, the graves on the steeply raked hillside like rows of teeth, like the
ihai
markers in the family shrine. They passed graveyard after graveyard at the entrance to every village, and between the villages the bamboo forests flashed by, green and yellow rain. So many of the ancient dead had been forgotten, which was why they were so dangerous, their names never whispered, their gravestones fallen over.
I passed through such a graveyard,
Grandfather said.
Keiko, I walked so quietly.

Go on, Ojii-chan.

People needed the old stories, her grandfather thought, just as they needed the ancient shrines, though government officials had dismantled many. Still, a wrong turn down a cobbled alley, a set of stone steps, would still lead to a secret Inari shrine, or a weather-beaten statue of Jizo, surrounded by stones, each set
there by a grieving parent to ease a dead child’s passage. Yes, the shrines were still there, in shadowy back streets, squeezed between noodle houses, in overgrown thickets along the river, behind the great military warehouses.

The two of them sat on the veranda together, his prized
shoji
screens of cypress wood opened to the garden, where it rained. He could hear the frogs singing, and the ringing of the oyster sellers’ bells as they poled their way upriver, selling to the houses that faced onto the Ota. On a clear day he could see the black walls of Hiroshima castle rising above the trees on the other side of the river. He could smell the tatami, and the rain on the gravel pathway, and also the vague bathroom smells from the back of the house.

Go on, Ojii-chan.

Give me a second to remember.

Tell me about the ghost. The ghost in the graveyard.

And get in trouble with your mother and Yoshiko?

Tell me.

She pulled his sleeve.

He took a moment and then he began his story, and as he spoke, the child grew silent, frowning, her beautiful eyes narrowing. She looked as though she was hoping to detect an error, but Keiko’s grandfather knew better: people looking for errors in stories listened from their heads, but Keiko was listening from deep inside. Her heart was listening.

This time he set his story beneath the bridge that spanned the river a hundred yards from their house. It was an eerie place, close to the Inari shrine, which he knew his granddaughter loved and feared—its vermilion gates opening to a tiny grotto, inside of which, on a small altar, gifts of sake had been left, and fried tofu in little bowls. Mothers came to this place to pray for their children. On the branches of a pine tree in the grotto they
attached slips of fortune paper,
omikuji,
on which were written blessings for their sick children, their unborn children. Other coils of paper shook on the sacred ropes stretched taut above the shrine—so many pieces of paper flapping dryly, like the wings of small insects. To the right and left of the gate, two stone foxes stood guard on their haunches. It stunk in the grotto, a fuggy smell of sweat. Sometimes beggars walked up the riverbank and entered the temple and ate the food. For this reason, Keiko’s mother had forbidden her to go there, though she often went herself, like most mothers, to pray for her daughter’s well-being.

“I was walking across the bridge,” he said. “And I heard a whispered voice calling from the fox shrine. I went to investigate. It was an old fisherwoman. She pointed at me as though she knew me. ‘You are the man who likes stories,’ she said. ‘I know many stories—and they all happened.’ To my astonishment, her eyes rolled back in her head. She flapped her hands wildly about her and sat down in the mud.”

“Why?”

“She was remembering.”

When the woman came to herself, she said that her husband had once been married to another woman. He was happy with this wife, and she was happy with him. Every day he came to the bridge to fish, and every day he came home with a good catch. The only bad part was that to reach home again, he had to walk by the Inari shrine. By day he didn’t mind, and even left food there, but at night the place frightened him.

But one night he was late for his young wife, and rather than circling the shrine, he cut through the grotto. He was almost out, just making his way up the stone stairs on the far end, when he heard the strumming of a beautiful instrument. He turned to see a woman sitting on a stone beside the fox statue, her head
bent over the strings of a koto. She was slender. Her long hair was done up in combs.

“Oh, most beautiful creature,” he cried out (forgetting his wife at home). “Let me come nearer.”

“Come as near as you want,” she called over her shoulder.

“Then I will come close.”

He took three steps towards her.

“Come nearer still,” she whispered. “Undo my hair.”

He reached out and slipped the combs from her hair.

“Unwrap my robes.” At that moment she turned to face him, and lo and behold she had no face at all: she was blank as the moon. Then she was on top of him, holding him down with great force, her breath foul and bloody. With all of his strength he pushed her away and ran—between the stone foxes, out the gate, losing his sandals in the process, running until at last he reached his house. Only at the sight of his wife seated by the fire did he slow down. She was bent over, cooking their dinner.

“Oh, wife! I have been accosted by a terrible creature!”

“I have never seen a terrible creature,” his wife said, stirring the pot. “Tell me what she looked like.”

“Beyond description. When I got close she was a monster.”

“And why did you go so close, husband?”

“She made me. She lured me.”

“She must have been very powerful.”

“Oh, she was.”

“I would never want to meet such a woman.” His wife looked up calmly. Her face was wiped clean of features, blank as the moon. He screamed and turned to run, but tripped over his own feet and fell to the ground. When he opened his eyes, the wind was blowing through the house, and everything was gone.

That—the old woman said—was the unfortunate end to her husband’s first marriage.

A
FTER THAT NIGHT AT
I
RENE
’
S
, Daisy did not see Keiko again for more than a week. The excision of the keloid had been uncomplicated, just as Dr. Carney had promised in his memo to committee members. “A triumph,” Irene enthused, speaking a little too loudly into the telephone so that Daisy had to hold the receiver away from her ear. “A triumph. Raymond is a very skilful surgeon.”

Daisy detected an edge in her voice. Irene was miffed, but at what Daisy couldn’t say.

The Monday that Keiko came to stay, Daisy rose early. The sky was neither dark nor light yet, the grass still wet from dew. She pushed open the back door, feeling the cool air against her skin. Fran Warburgh’s house was quiet. Daisy couldn’t see it from this angle—exactly parallel to her own, it was visible only from the side windows—but she could feel the lack of fret and business.

Standing still, she heard whistling in the laurel bush, and something calling from the maple tree across the back alley. Another bird answered from behind the house. Then they were everywhere, peeping and crying, crowing and cheeping. Robins pulled worms from the grass, looking picturesque. Daisy closed the door and put on coffee.

At seven-thirty she woke Walter and told him that he’d better shower and dress if he was going to get downtown on time. Mondays were the day he delivered his scripts, catching the
9
:
03
from Stoney Creek. To catch this late a train was almost disreputable: it was the train of the unemployed, women shoppers and the occasional person, like Walter, who
made his money from the arts. Most husbands caught the
7
:
23
or, at the latest, the
8
:
03
. On Tuesdays, which were rehearsal days for
The Whistler,
Walter left for work even later, but then he took the car and stayed away until after Daisy was in bed. Anyway, today of all days she didn’t want him lazing around. And she certainly did not want him standing on the front stoop in his cowboy pyjamas when Dean Atchity and Irene arrived with Keiko.