Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  It was a party. The reason Naoko had made it suddenly for today was that the weather was a little warm, which allowed Mr. Kimura to sit out in the garden. He sat in a low chair with a sturdy back, sunk inside his most elegant kimono—dark blue trimmed with white and gray. He seemed almost too weak to lift its sleeves, but he nodded and gestured to each of them, and Naoko showed them where to kneel or sit. After Mrs. Kimura brought around a basin and a cloth for washing their hands, Naoko gave them each a bowl of tea.

  Margaret had been to the garden once, long before, but only briefly. Now she saw that the garden was Mr. Kimura’s masterpiece, small though it was, and in a rather crowded part of town. There was a hillock, a pond, a raked gravel area. The trees were small and neatly trimmed. But, evidence of his advancing years, the fence was leaning here and there, and a few slats had slipped—she could see the dirty alley beyond the green paradise. And it was very green, though there were few flowers in bloom. When it was her turn to greet the old man, she stepped up to the low chair, bowed as well as she could manage, and laid the roses on a low table beside him, along with the other gifts.

  Once they had had their tea, they were free to move about a little bit, first to approach Mr. Kimura and tell him, through Naoko, that the garden looked especially nice, and that he, too, looked well. In turn, he welcomed them and said that it had been far too long since he had seen them, and that he had thought of them many times with affectionate friendship. Then he gave each of them a small gift wrapped in paper and decorated with his personal stamp and an ideogram. The box Margaret received was about twelve inches long and four inches wide. The paper was yellow, and Naoko told her that the ideogram represented the word for “grace.” She was quite moved by this; when she made her small bow, she suddenly had tears in her eyes. She backed away, as she saw others doing, and then went over to speak to Mrs. Wareham, who, as the oldest, had greeted Mr. Kimura first.

  Mrs. Wareham asked her where Andrew was.

  “He came with me, but he didn’t come in.”

  “Andrew is well meaning, but he doesn’t seem to fit here, does he?”

  “Not really. I was a little afraid, myself, that he would crush everything that he sat on or touched. It would be very embarrassing for them.”

  “And you.”

  “Maybe. Though, if I found him embarrassing this late in the day, what would that signify?”

  Mrs. Wareham smiled.

  Margaret said, “Do you like my roses?”

  “They’re lovely.”

  There was no talk of the impending death. Mr. Chang invited her to his restaurant; Mr. Lloyd told her that, once he began carrying the papers that Mr. Kimura had wanted, he had learned more about paper than he ever thought possible. “I’m not even going to tell you how much he paid for the papers he wrapped our gifts in. You’d have thought they had gold threads. But he would have them.”

  “I’ll remember that when I open mine.”

  “Goodness’ sake, don’t tear it. Frame it.”

  “I will.”

  She also struck up a conversation with Miss Wolfe, who said, “I only have the bookstore to supplement my income as a poet, but I am having to let some of the collections dwindle. It seems sad when you can’t even put Dante on the shelves without raising a few eyebrows. Not to mention Goethe.”

  Margaret said, “What sort of poetry do you write?”

  “Light verse. Sometimes I draw a cartoon or two.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Not quite a year. I moved up here from Los Angeles.”

  In honor of the serious occasion, Margaret dampened her interest in this very attractive person. The party was short, but even so, Mr. Kimura’s evident exhaustion when Margaret stopped one last time to take his hand smote her, and as she stood outside the shop in the street, looking for Andrew, she felt lower than she had expected to feel.

  Andrew came down the street from the west, the direction of the library. He was late because he had gotten tied up looking at maps. He asked if she had had a nice time, and whether Pete had been there. That was when she realized that Pete had not been there.

  At home, she opened the package to discover one of Mr. Kimura’s brushes—it still smelled faintly of what must have been ink. She showed it to Andrew, who said, “Most probably squirrel hair.” She wrote her thank-you note at once, and walked down the street to mail it.

  Mr. Kimura died two days later.

  IN the fall, Andrew said to her over supper, apropos of nothing, “I could have told Joe Kimura years ago not to go over there.”

  “Did you ever meet Joe Kimura?”

  Andrew shook his head. “I should have. For his sake, I should have.”

  Margaret decided to ignore this remark, and said, “What was he to do here? Live in a room with his brother for the rest of his life, and never marry or have a family? Yes, he apprenticed to Dr. Matsumi in Japantown, but there weren’t enough people in Japantown to support two dental practices. He did well in Japan for a while. Well enough to find a wife.”

  “How often do they hear from him?” He put a crumb of bread on the tip of his finger and held it out to Stella. She walked over to him in a dignified way and took it, then sat.

  “I have no idea. I think Lester hears more often, since they’ve always been close. But it’s true, Joe might be forced into the military and find himself stuck in Burma.”

  “Why do you say Burma?”

  “I don’t know. Naoko said her greatest fear was that he would be impressed into the army and find himself in the tropics.”

  “To my knowledge, China is far from tropical.”

  “Well, that’s what she said. The geography is hazy to me.”

  He gave Stella another bit of bread. “You know, there are Japanese spies everywhere.”

  “We aren’t at war with them, though.”

  “What they do is find these boys who are on the outs with the navy, or down and out, and they give them money, and these kids get them what they want.”

  “What do they want?”

  “Codebooks. Operational manuals. Descriptions of ships. Almost anything, really.”

  “But we’re neutral. They don’t want to be at war with us.”

  “Do they not? They’ve signed the Tripartite Pact with the Germans and the Italians.”

  This had happened about four days before, and had been much talked about in the papers. Margaret thought, So this is what he’s getting at. She said, “Even so, being at war with us would make no sense.”

  “Perhaps they think we will soon be at war with Germany, and then they can enter through the back door.”

  “Roosevelt knows—”

  “We are the back door,” interrupted Andrew.

  She stared at him.

  “My dear,” he said, “I have something I would like you to read. It is of my own composition, a rough draft. I improved this version a bit before I sent it off, but the gist is the same. I’ll get it.” He stood up and went into his office. He came back with a sheaf of papers of the sort she recognized only too well—small handwriting (though readable), written from edge to edge and top to bottom, numbered in big slashing numbers in the top left corner, one to twenty-four. He handed them to her and turned on his heel, went to the coat rack, took his coat, and went out, leaving Stella with her. The papers were addressed to President Roosevelt, the Commandant of the Base, and the Secretary of the Navy.

  In her hands was a diary of Andrew’s activities for about two years—from the late winter of 1938, just after the Panay incident, through that year, and into January of 1940. What he had recorded were his observations from all sorts of vantage points around the bay and on the other side of San Francisco, as far west as Ocean Beach, along the shore of Golden Gate Park, and Lincoln Park, across the Golden Gate Bridge, and up into Marin County. He had been all around the bay: Oakland, Emeryville, San Pablo, Pinole, San Rafael, Corte Madera, Tiburon, Sausalito, San Mateo. In all of these places, he had stared out at th
e water with his binoculars. He had seen a number of suspicious things, like “Oriental-looking fishermen disembarking in a secluded spot, then huddling together and talking eagerly among themselves,” or “the ripple on the surface of the water that could be evidence of a submarine beneath.” He had observed a great deal of fishing activity around the shipbuilding yards on five occasions, and had observed that the fishermen in the boats “looked Oriental.” He had seen others looking at the ships in the yard “too minutely and longer than tourists would do” on six occasions. He had seen a man writing things on a pad. When he approached the man, the man “hastily” put away his pad and “hurried off.” On several occasions, when he was walking down the beach, cars above him on the side of the road “hurriedly drove away” as he scrutinized them. Everything was scrupulously dated, including time of day and weather conditions. Given his vindication about the Panay incident, she couldn’t help feeling unsettled by his observations.

  She turned the page. She read, “Other Matters.” The first page of this section read:

  In addition, I have come to believe that my wife, Margaret Mayfield Early, has become the center, certainly unwitting, of a nest of spies that are cultivating her acquaintance (and have been for some time), as part of an effort to get access to me and to my papers. Primary among these foreign agents is a Russian man who goes by an Irish name, Peter Moran, and purports to be an investor. I believe that he was hired by the Japanese government when he was working and living at Tanforan Race Course. He speaks fluent Japanese and Russian, and semi-fluent Chinese. According to his own report, he also speaks fluent French and some German (not to mention his original language, which, I believe, is a Ukrainian dialect). Sometime about 1900, as a young man, Peter Krizenko (for that is his previous name, though whether that is the name he was born with, I don’t know) lived for a period in Japan. I have been unable to ascertain what sort of connections he made at the time. He may also be working for the Russians, but I doubt it, as I do not believe he is or ever has been a Bolshevist.

  I believe that Mr. Krizenko’s most important contact is a member of a family living in Vallejo who own a shop. Their name is “Kimura.” Father—Sei, mother—Kiku, daughter—Naoko, son—Joseph, son—Lester. I have not made up my mind which of these is the agent. Mr. Kimura is very old. (Note—has now died.) Joseph moved to Japan in 1936 (not a time when any realistic young man would have chosen to seek his fortune there). Joseph is in constant communication with the boy Lester, who works on the wharf, but from what I have seen of Lester, Lester is not gathering the information—too busy and a bit dull. Both the daughter and the mother work as midwives, and therefore travel a great deal about the countryside. My guess is that one or the other or both of these women are gathering information about food, other crops, harvests, workers’ movements, trucking, and other essentials of day-to-day American life on the West Coast. I have seen no evidence that they are observing the shipyard or have been seen on the island.

  Margaret laughed out loud in disbelief, but could not have said whether the laugh was at the absurdity of Andrew’s speculations or their cruelty.

  On the second page of this section was a list of dates and times when Andrew knew she was meeting either Pete or one of the Kimuras, a list of dates and times when he knew that she had received or placed telephone calls to any of them, and a separate list of dates when he knew she had gone to Japantown “to eat in restaurants and look at galleries.” He went on:

  I believe that my wife’s interest in Japantown is solely motivated by her love of Japanese art and artifacts, but it may be that she is serving as an unwitting courier for messages from these gallery owners to the Kimuras, as she usually shares her finds with them. Old Mr. Kimura is an artist. I have not been able to ascertain his reputation—whether these artistic efforts are part of a cover-up, or undertaken in a sincere pursuit of his craft.

  After this, there was another section entitled “The Underlying Scheme.” This was a relatively short section, because he had addressed the topic in some previous communication to the President, the Secretary of the Navy, and the Commandant of the Base. It went:

  You will note that I have sent two previous reports to you. One of these concerned my investigations into the Panay incident and the contemporaneous slaughter of Chinese civilians in Nanking by the Japanese military, in December, 1937 and January, 1938. The second of these, which I believe is more germane to this nest of spies that I have discovered, concerns the activities of Dr. Albert Einstein in and around the naval base and in Vallejo. I have seen Dr. Einstein in Vallejo eight times. On four of these occasions, I had the opportunity to follow him about the town. It is my belief that he recognized me on three of these occasions, and so my investigation of his activities was aborted. Persons reading my previous report may know that Dr. Einstein is well aware of me, since I have been a persistent critic of his patently ridiculous theories about the nature of the universe for some twenty-five years or more. At any rate, on one occasion, owing to a very thick fog, I was able to follow Dr. Einstein for sixty-six minutes. My detailed report on that investigation is to be found in my earlier communication, dated February 5, 1940. The gist of what I had to say is this. I believe that Dr. Einstein is also serving as an agent for a foreign power (no doubt Germany) and that he is haunting the island in order to find out something. Given Dr. Einstein’s interest in physical phenomena, my guess is that weapons systems are his goal—perhaps those carried on submarines. He may, indeed, be connecting with Pete Moran (Krizenko) and passing information to him.

  Margaret threw down the papers with such vehemence that Stella jumped off her lap. Here he had evaded her attempts to control him, and very cleverly, too, by boning up on all those movies and manufacturing himself as a movie fan, while all the time doing surveillance of the city and the bay. She was angrily impressed by his enterprise in getting around—a man who could not drive! He must have used trains and streetcars, and of course walked considerable distances. She called Stella back to her and patted her. Through her coat she could feel that the dog was muscular and physically fit. And he had conjured the Kimuras and Pete into a “nest of spies.” Poor Mr. Kimura, to have his artistic aspirations so cavalierly dismissed as a cover-up for espionage! And poor Mrs. Kimura, a woman who had witnessed as much daily horror as anyone! Andrew imagined that she was noting down harvest dates, and estimating crop sizes (peaches? cherries? roses?) as she was driving from delivery to delivery. Naoko had visited their house on the island, and come to several knitting circles. Did Andrew think that when the ladies weren’t looking the girl was going into his office and rifling through papers for information on the Aether? Or, alternatively, sneaking about the ship factories, writing things down? Evidently, he did.

  Yes, Pete was a shady character. All of Pete’s attractions grew out of the fact that he was a shady character whose credentials were not in order, and whose stories could never be proved or disproved. The only things she knew about Pete were that he had in his possession some Japanese works of art, that he had shown her some horses at the racetrack that he said were his, and that, for now, she liked him. Very much. He was kind, observant, and enjoyable to talk to. Aah, Pete, she thought. Andrew was right to be suspicious of Pete, because Pete made a career of acting suspiciously, but the thought of his suspicions made her tingle with rage.

  She got up from the chair, turned out the light, and went into Andrew’s office. She laid the papers in the center of the desk, where he would be sure to see them, then she put a shawl over her shoulders and took Stella out into the yard. The dog did some investigating, and then they went back into the house. She left Stella in the kitchen, where he would find her, and went upstairs to her room, where she closed the door, changed into her nightgown, and got into bed. Sometime later, she heard Andrew come in, then come up the stairs. He did not knock on her door. He went into his room, then the bathroom, then his room again. After that, there was silence. She fell asleep.

  In her dream, she didn�
��t know whether she was frightened for Andrew or of him. Sometimes he was a figure stumbling through the sand, and sometimes he was a figure coming toward her, large and threatening, but overall what frightened her was the space around him, a vastness that seemed to indicate that anything could happen. She woke up from this dream and fell asleep again, into a different dream, in which the word “spy” itself was what frightened her. At first Andrew was the spy (as indeed he was), seeming to look at one thing but really looking at another. Then he was supplanted by other figures, none of whom she could recognize, who were also spying, though not, in particular, on her. Though they seemed innocent enough—rather like the figures of children running about—her dream self was filled with waves of horror that she could not escape or reduce, waves that might be tossing her about in the surf, just below the Golden Gate Bridge. At the end of this dream, just before she woke up, she thought the words “Agent Keene,” and those words stayed with her and repeated themselves over and over through the next uneasy dream, which was about men coming to the house. In this dream, she kept going to the door and opening it, and seeing a figure on the doorstep. The roses like those she had cut and carried to Mr. Kimura also figured into this dream—she was afraid that the person on the doorstep would see her cut the roses and know whom they were for, and take them away from her. But she didn’t actually dream about the Kimuras or Pete.

  Toward morning, she woke thoroughly. The room was dark, the sky was lightening, so she lay there for a few minutes, breathless and with her pulse sounding in her ears. Her whole life seemed just then to be so unfamiliar as to induce a sense of vertigo. It was as if she were a child again, and had dreamed about everything that was to come, as if she knew to her very bones that she could not manage or handle what was to come. She had to remind herself several times that what seemed as though it was going to happen had in fact already happened, and she had managed it, or, at least, she had survived it. But she continued to tremble. And this feeling evolved into a more frightening one—she was herself, old, sixty-two, and her mind was so full of everything that she had seen and done and imagined that she didn’t know what to make of any of it, how to think, what to do, how to live.