The Pearl Diver (15 page)

“Yes, actually.” I was stunned by Betty’s quick response.

“Your friend is her baby girl!” Betty’s voice rose. “Oh, I always wondered what happened to her! The police came to us after
Sadako-san disappeared to ask if anyone had seen her. Unfortunately we hadn’t. I always wondered how the husband and baby got along.”

“After Sadako disappeared, her husband put Andrea—the baby you remember—in foster care. She’s thirty now. We work together at Bento,” I said.

“She’s a very troubled girl,” Norie said in Japanese. “She doesn’t know if her mother is alive or dead. And she has no real family to care for her now.”

“It was a tragic situation,” Betty said, looking at a paper she’d pulled from a file. “We had a subcommittee of ladies who would visit all the war brides to make sure that they were all right. Sadako Norton was very resistant to help. I went a few times with them to see her—yes, here’s my name in a progress report.”

“What do you have there?” I moved close to Betty, to read over her shoulder.

“This is a progress report—we did them for all the people we visited, whether it was war brides or invalids. Most of them are pretty brief, but with Sadako, there was so much visiting and follow-up there’s a fairly extensive record. You can look at this one, if you like.”

I sat down at the table, across from Mr. Nagano, and examined the report written in ballpoint pen on a sheet of ruled paper so old that it had yellowed. It was a monthly report on the war brides visited, with a number of different women’s names, addresses, and phone numbers. Three women—Betty, Joanie Iwata, and Fumiko Sugiyama—had sprung a surprise baby shower on Sadako by arriving at her apartment in Arlington three months after she’d given birth to a girl. The basket they’d brought contained baby clothes, books, bottles, and diapering essentials, all paid for from the gift fund at WJFS. They’d also brought along sweet-bean cakes that Betty had made, and brownies from Joanie.

How kind they were, I thought as I read on. Sadako’s door had been chained, and she’d looked out nervously at the ladies, who’d spoken to her in Japanese, reminding her that they were her friends. At last, she’d unlatched the chain and let them inside. The apartment was sparely furnished but clean, and the baby named
Akiko slept quietly in a cradle.

“Akiko!” I exclaimed aloud. “Andrea doesn’t know she was ever called that. I wonder if it’s the same baby.”

“Yes, of course. We knew her real name was Andrea, but we went along with Sadako to make her feel better. A lot of us have Japanese and English names. I’m not really Betty, you know, but I’ve gotten used to it. Yuji’s just—Yuji. I can’t imagine him any other way.” Betty glanced fondly at her husband, whose ears pinkened.

“What else does it say?” Norie entreated, squeezing onto a chair next to me.

I continued my translation of the English-language document I was reading. “Sadako asked them to sit down in the living room, and she made tea to serve with the sweets. She thanked everyone for the gifts, and confessed that Akiko-chan had a difficult disposition. Her husband was disturbed by the baby’s nighttime crying.”

“I’ll tell you why. She wanted to breast-feed, but her husband was against it,” Betty said, shaking her head.

“Why on earth?” I asked, instinctively crossing my own arms over my chest. It felt slightly fuller. I guessed that was a by-product of my weight gain.

“At that time, there was still a debate about which was better, breast or bottle. To some, the breast was considered old-fashioned and backward,” Betty said.

Mr. Nagano’s chair made a loud scraping sound as he moved away from us. Clearly, we were embarrassing him.

“Would it be better if I just photocopied this and took it home to read?” I asked Betty quickly. I also wanted something to show Andrea.

“You know, the records really shouldn’t leave the office—especially this business because it’s such sad personal information.” Betty sighed. “But, it’s been interesting, living through this story again. This makes me think we should include some mention of the stresses war brides faced, not naming names, of course.”

“What were the stresses?” I asked.

“The girls who came with their husbands to America lost that Japanese family support, so it was like landing on a new planet. Not only would the women be dealing with an alien world, but their husbands were seeing them in a new way. The girls who had been so alluring now couldn’t navigate the supermarket or chitchat with the neighbors or drive a car or bake a casserole.”

“Just a minute!” Norie interjected. “Japanese ladies can drive, and we shop in huge supermarkets, and some of us have ovens—I do, for instance—”

“Obasan, she’s saying that thirty years ago it was different,” I said.

“Yes, and I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend anyone. It
was
different then. It was a hard, hard world for the women, and many times the husbands would be impatient or bored with them and file for divorce. Unfortunately, the war brides didn’t know about their right to alimony. So they lost everything after the divorce except for their children. That’s why we stepped in.”

“Now I am hearing this, I am worried about Sadako even more,” Norie said. “Will you read some more, Rei-chan?”

“All right,” I said, still feeling a bit tentative. “The ladies’ committee reported that someone in their group suggested that Sadako sleep with the baby in the baby’s room, the way it’s done in Japan.”

“Very correct,” Norie said. “I slept with my children until my daughter was six and my son eight. Males need more coddling, don’t they?”

Yuji frowned, and I looked down quickly to continue reading. “Sadako said that they had only one bedroom and her husband preferred that the baby sleep apart from them so his sleep wasn’t disturbed. So the baby stayed in the living room.” I raised my eyes from the paper and added, “At least she had friends to whom she could vent these frustrations.”

“Not as much as she needed,” Betty said. “I remember, we tried so hard to get her to join our young mothers’ group, but she said she couldn’t. It was the time before the Metro connected everything, and, of course, she couldn’t drive. And I seem to remember
that she was nervous about the American buses. She thought she wouldn’t get off at the right place and she’d be lost forever. Not that we could help her anymore. I recall that when we attempted to visit her two months after that welcome-baby call, her husband wouldn’t let us in.”

I shivered. “What did he say?”

“She was resting. It could have been true, or maybe not. But we never went out there again because he’d been so unpleasant and some of the ladies became nervous.”

“And if she was afraid to get on buses, she would have been virtually trapped at home.” I shook my head. “It’s such a strange perspective for someone from Japan, where there’s so much public transportation.”

“She was from the sea, not the land. That was why she was afraid,” Mr. Nagano spoke up, surprising me.

“What do you mean? I heard she was a pearl diver, but I didn’t believe it,” I said.

“Maybe she was an
ama-san
,” Norie suggested.

“Yes, yes, that’s what she did. She was an
ama-san
,” Mr. Nagano said.

“What exactly is an
ama-san
?” I asked both of them.

“
Ama
means ‘sea,’” Norie said. “So an
ama-san
is a woman sea diver—someone who dives for things like oysters and abalone. There are some still working in Ise and other areas.”

“Andrea’s mother was supposed to have come from Ky
sh
.” Now I felt sorry that I’d so quickly dismissed Andrea’s belief that her mother had been a pearl diver. She had been a diver, all right, but probably for something like abalone.

“She was from a small place, she told us once,” Mr. Nagano said. “Her town still has several hundred women divers. They can earn, in a single day, what a woman would have to work all month to earn as a shop clerk. The men might row the boats, but it is the women who do the underwater harvesting. They work with a female partner, from after the tide goes out in the morning to two in the afternoon. In the old days, they used to just work in
summer, but now, with wetsuits, they can work year-round.”

“It sounds as if you know about the town,” I said. “Do you recall its name?”

“I’m sorry. And actually, it’s hard for me to remember what it was that she told me and what I just remembered from growing up in Japan.”

“I can understand that challenge.” I was totally discombobulated sometimes, between my old life in Tokyo and my new life in Washington. “Anyway, it sounds like the life of an
ama-san
beats the daily grind of a salaryman slaving in an office, doesn’t it?”

“Well, because the women are so valuable, they are only allowed to marry men who are born into sea-diving families as well. The men usually drive the boats. It’s a matter of tradition,” Mr. Nagano said.

“There are reasons for that tradition,” Norie said. “Women simply find things more quickly than men. Underwater, while holding her breath, a diver must locate a mature abalone quickly, and then pry it off with a knife without killing any of the baby abalone growing nearby. That sensitivity is a woman’s special touch.”

Betty was nodding enthusiastically. “That makes perfect sense. And now I feel ashamed of myself for assuming that Sadako had been in the water trade.”

“But she was in the water,” I said, before realizing that the Japanese word Betty must have been thinking of was
mizu-shobai
, which meant prostitution and bars.

“Bars were where a lot of girls met their military husbands. We didn’t ask them, and they didn’t tell.”

“So she was a woman who was used to hard, honest work, and earning her own money. This transition to America, where she became a wife under the thumb of a man who was the sole provider, must have been very difficult—” I broke off, realizing that it sounded as if I was describing my own life.

“I remember that she’d never gone to a dentist, and refused to go, even though she now had all those military benefits,” Betty said. “Getting her to the doctor when she was pregnant was
pretty hard. Someone either drove her or rode the bus with her, to make sure she really went.”

“Walter Reed Army Hospital is where Andrea was born,” I said. “And you know, on the day that Sadako disappeared, she was supposed to have had a doctor’s appointment. I wonder if she’d gone back to Walter Reed to see a psychiatrist or psychologist. Her life with her husband sounded pretty depressing.”

“I really wouldn’t be sure about that,” Betty said. “That visit we made was when the baby was only three months old. Andrea was already two when Sadako vanished, and two is a much easier age to cope with.”

“It is?” I was doubtful, thinking back on my chaotic moments in the restaurant with Kendall’s twins.

“Yes, Rei-chan! When you have a baby, you will see.”

“That’s right, you should be getting married soon.” Betty turned a warm smile on me. “And how is your fiancé, Henry, or—”

“Hugh,” I said. “He’s doing well. He was sorry to have missed the last dinner, but he should be there for Children’s Day.”

“I am organizing the wedding,” Norie said. “Without me, I fear it will never happen.”

“Is that so? How lucky for Rei.” Betty winked at me, as if she understood that this was a mixed blessing. “How many days will you be here, Shimura-san? I would like to visit with you again.”

“How kind. I will have plenty of time, as I plan to stay through the wedding,” Norie said.

I had to stop myself from gasping. Until the wedding? She’d be here for months. I’d never be able to keep up the ruse that Hugh’s apartment was mine, and he lived somewhere else.

Betty was opening the file drawer again, and Yuji Nagano mumbled something that I couldn’t quite make out.

“I’m sorry, could you repeat that again, sir?” I asked.

“I said that you should bring Sadako-san’s daughter to meet us, at our home,” Yuji Nagano said.

“I’ll talk to her about it. Please be aware that she’s a little—prickly. All those years in foster care, I guess, left a permanent
mark.” I began gathering up my bag to leave.

“We should have helped her,” Yuji Nagano said. “We should have returned to make sure she was all right.”