When the Emperor Was Divine (11 page)

“Gassed,” we'd heard one man say.

“Addicted to morphine.”

“Ran into him just the other day at the Safeway. That man's shell-shocked. Doesn't even know his own name.”

“It's
Daddy,
” we imagined little Anna Cavanaugh whispering furiously into her father's good ear.

“
What? What was that you said?
”

Then we remembered our own father, who had been taken in for questioning in his bathrobe and slippers on the night of Pearl Harbor, and we felt ashamed.

Is the Emperor a man or a god?

If a Japanese battleship is torpedoed in the Pacific do you feel
happy or sad?

Which side do you think will win the war?

IN NOVEMBER the last of the leaves turned from yellow to brown and blew down in drifts from the trees. The nights were long and cold now and our money had almost run out. Most evenings for supper we ate cabbage and rice. Once a week, on Saturdays, we ate sardines from the bait shop. We used the same napkins for several days in a row. On the nights that we bathed we used the same bathwater. Our mother counted out every penny, every nickel and dime. She made up new rules. Change out of your street clothes the minute you come home from school. Don't let the water run while brushing your teeth. Whatever you do, don't waste. Save that bread bag.
I'll use it to wrap up your sandwich tomorrow.
Save that piece of string.
I'll add it to my lovely string ball.
Finish your carrots.
Remember, there are children starving in
Europe.
Don't throw away that rubber band. That tin can. That drop of fat. That sliver of soap. When our shoes began to wear thin before we had grown into them she fitted them with pieces of cardboard and told us to avoid any puddles that might lie in our way. The next day she began looking for work.

The ads in the papers all said
help wanted, will train,
but wherever she went she was turned down. “The position's just been filled,” she was told again and again. Or, “We wouldn't want to upset the other employees.” At the department store where she had once bought all her hats and silk stockings they would not hire her as a cashier because they were afraid of offending the customers. Instead they offered her work adding up sales slips in a small dark room in the back where no one could see her but she politely declined. “I was afraid I'd ruin my eyes back there,” she told us. “I was afraid I might accidentally remember who I was and . . . offend
myself.
”

The following week she found a job in a shirt factory sewing on sleeves but was fired after one day.
Couldn't
keep my seams straight.
She left an application at the neighborhood drugstore.
I thought the owner might remember me.
Finally she began cleaning house for some of the wealthy families who lived up in the hills. The work, she insisted, was not hard.
You just smile and say yes ma'am
and no ma'am and do as you're told.
If she was asked to scrub the floors she got down on her hands and knees and she scrubbed the floors. If the leaves of the miniature indoor tree needed dusting she picked up a damp rag and dusted the tiny green leaves one by one. If the lady of the house was lonely and wanted to talk our mother put down her rag for a moment and listened. “I know what you mean,” she might reply. Or, “That's a shame.” She was friendly, she told us, but not too friendly.
If you're too friendly they'll think you think you're
better than they are.

On her days off she took in washing and ironing to make a few extra dollars. She strung up clotheslines across the backyard and whenever we looked out the window we could see the private undergarments of people we did not know—the lonely shipping heir, the jovial bachelor doctor, the glamorous war widow whose young husband had died on Omaha Beach (“Introduce her to them!” we'd suggested to our mother as she hung up their things side by side, to which she had replied, “It's too soon”)—floating ghostlike between the bare black branches of the trees.

With the money she earned our mother bought new lace curtains for the windows that faced out onto the street. She polished the rusty brass knocker. She set out a welcome mat on the steps by the front door. Little by little, she accumulated things. One of her employers gave her a set of dishes and a camel's hair coat that looked as though it had never been worn. Someone else gave her two silver candlesticks, which she took to the pawnshop the very next day. At the Salvation Army she bought us our own dressers and beds and from that day on we each slept alone—our mother, downstairs, in the bedroom she had once shared with our father, and the two of us, by ourselves, in our old rooms upstairs.

THE TELEGRAM WAS DELIVERED on a foggy wet morning in December.
Leaving Santa Fe Friday. Arrive
Sunday, 3 p.m. Love, Papa.

For the next several days we did nothing but wait for the hours to pass. We went to school. We came home. We stared at the clock.
He's in Albuquerque now. He's in
Flagsta f. He's crossing the Mojave. . . .
Our mother cleaned and she cooked. She carried the telegram with her, in her pocket, wherever she went—to work, to the post office, to the market to buy bread. Sometimes, in the middle of supper, she pulled it out and examined it under the light just to make sure that the words were still there, or that they had not mysteriously rearranged themselves, while she was not looking, into some other message.

“What if it's not real?” she asked us. Or had been delivered to our house by mistake? Or sent to us, as a joke, by the same man who called up in the middle of the night to tell us where we could go?

It's real, we told her. No joke.

ON SUNDAY, near dusk, our father's train pulled into the station. A light rain was falling and the windows of the train were streaked with water and soot and all we could see on the other side of the glass were dark shapes moving. Then the train came to a stop and a small stooped man carrying an old cardboard suitcase stepped out of the last car. His face was lined with wrinkles. His suit was faded and worn. His head was bare. He moved slowly, carefully, with the aid of a cane, a cane we had never seen before. Although we had been waiting for this moment, the moment of our father's return, for more than four years now, when we finally saw him standing there before us on the platform we did not know what to think, what to do. We did not run up to him. We did not wave our hands wildly back and forth and shout out
Over here!
to him. And when our mother pushed us gently, but firmly, from behind, and whispered,
Go to him,
all we could do was stare down at our shoes, unable to move. Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father's place.
That's not him,
we said to our mother,
That's not him,
but our mother no longer seemed to hear us.

He put down his suitcase and looked at her.

“Did you . . . ” she said.

“Every day,” he replied. Then he got down on his knees and he took us into his arms and over and over again, he uttered our names, but still we could not be sure it was him.

OUR FATHER, the father we remembered, and had dreamed of, almost nightly, all through the years of the war, was handsome and strong. He moved quickly, surely, with his head held high in the air. He liked to draw for us. He liked to sing for us. He liked to laugh. The man who came back on the train looked much older than his fifty-six years. He wore bright white dentures, and he'd lost the last of his hair. Whenever we put our arms around him we could feel his ribs through the cloth of his shirt. He did not draw for us, or sing songs for us in his wobbly, off-key voice. He did not read us stories. On Sunday afternoons, when we were bored and could think of nothing to do, he did not tie pieces of bent tin onto twigs and put on shadow plays for us from behind hanging white sheets. He did not make us stilts.

Of course, our mother was quick to point out, we were too old now for stilts, too old to be read to, too old for shadow plays from behind hanging white sheets.

Yes, yes, yes,
we replied,
and too old to laugh!

He never said a word to us about the years he'd been away. Not one word. He never talked about politics, or his arrest, or how he had lost all his teeth. He never mentioned his loyalty hearing before the Alien Enemy Control Unit. He never told us what it was, exactly, he'd been accused of. Sabotage? Selling secrets to the enemy? Conspiring to overthrow the government? Was he guilty as charged? Was he innocent? (Was he even there at all?) We didn't know. We didn't want to know. We never asked. All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget.

IN THE BEGINNING he wandered slowly from one room to the next, picking up objects and looking at them in bewilderment and then putting them back down again. “I don't recognize a thing,” we heard him whisper. In the afternoon he lay down on the couch and let himself drift off into sleep only to awaken, moments later, with a start, not knowing where he was. He sat up and shouted out our names and we came running. “What is it?” we asked him. “What's wrong?” He needed to see us, he said. He needed to see our faces. Otherwise he would never know if he was really awake. On the train, he told us later, he had dreamed again and again that he'd fallen asleep and missed his stop.

He wore the same loose baggy trousers every day and was convinced that someone was watching the house. He did not like to use the telephone—
You never know who
might be listening
—or to eat out in public. He rarely spoke to anyone unless he was spoken to first.
Why go
looking for trouble?
He was suspicious of everyone: the newspaper boy, the door-to-door salesman, the little old lady who waved to us every day as we passed by her house on our way home from school. Any one of these people, he warned us, could be an informer.

They just don't like us. That's just the way it is.

Never tell them more than you have to.

And don't think, for a minute, that they're your friend.

Little things—the barking of a neighbor's dog, a misplaced pen, an unanticipated delay of any sort—could send him into a rage. One afternoon, after a long wait at the bank, he pushed his way to the front of the line and began pounding on the floor with his cane. “I don't have all day!” he cried out. We turned away and pretended not to know him. None of the other customers in line said a word. “You think they care?” he shouted at us as we slowly made our way toward the door. We covered our ears with our hands and kept on walking.

HE NEVER WENT BACK to work. The company that had employed him before the war had been liquidated right after Pearl Harbor and there was no job for him to return to. Nobody else would hire him: he was an old man, his health was not good, he had just come back from a camp for dangerous enemy aliens. And so he stayed at home, day after day, poring over the newspaper with a magnifying glass and scribbling down words in a little blue notebook. Sometimes he went out into the yard and watered the grass, or he swept off the front porch. And every afternoon, when we came home from school, he fixed us a snack: jelly and crackers, or a plate full of apples carefully peeled and sliced.

He always seemed happy to see us. “So tell me the news,” he called out to us the moment we walked through the door. We sat with him in the kitchen and talked about school. The weather. The neighbors. The same things we'd talked about before the war. Nothing more. He leaned forward in his chair as though he were listening but no matter what we said—
a moth flew into
Miss Campbell's ear during dictation, Donald Harzbecker
has been grounded for life
—his response was the same. “Is that so?”

Always, it seemed, he had something else on his mind.

Maybe he was thinking of our mother. Maybe he missed her and was hoping she'd come home from work soon. Maybe he was trying to imagine her, at that very moment, as she gazed back at her own reflection for the hundredth time in the toilet bowl of some stranger.
Still
there?
Or perhaps he was remembering the promise he'd made to her, years before, right after they'd first married—
You'll never have to work
—and he felt bad that he hadn't come through. There were heavy blue veins around her ankles now, and her hands were red and rough, and every evening when she climbed up the front steps her feet seemed to move more slowly than they had the evening before. Or it is possible he wasn't thinking of our mother at all. It is possible he was troubled by something he'd read in the paper earlier that morning—
Lend Lease Diapers Used as Turbans by African Sheikhs!
or
Jap Emperor Repudiates Own Divinity!
—and he'd had about as much news as he could take for one day.

BIRDSONG GREW FASTER, and shriller, and the chill slowly lifted from the air. Our mother rose early every morning and made us breakfast, then tied a white scarf over her head and hurried off to catch the next bus. She wore a shapeless black dress, sensible shoes, no lipstick. In a large brown shopping bag she carried an assortment of brushes and rags.
Got to make it all shine.
She moved briskly and did not complain. “Be good,” she called out to us on her way out the door.

It was a relief, she told us years later, to wake up every morning and have someplace to go.

As the days grew longer our father began spending more and more time alone in his room. He stopped reading the newspaper. He no longer listened to Dr. I.Q. with us on the radio. “There's already enough noise in my head,” he explained. The handwriting in his notebook grew smaller and fainter and then disappeared from the page altogether. Now whenever we passed by his door we saw him sitting on the edge of his bed with his hands in his lap, staring out through the window as though he were waiting for something to happen. Sometimes he'd get dressed and put on his coat but he could not make himself walk out the front door.