Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  “He told me. Or, rather, he sent me a letter.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Well, there were three of them. One asked for my help in finding out what Albert Einstein is doing with that nest of Nazi physicists whom your husband has been onto for more than twenty-five years. I wrote back and said that I was not privy to any physicists’ plots. He wrote back and said that he considered all of German physics, which seems so theoretical, to be mere preparatory ground for their real goal, which is to construct an unprecedented weapon of some sort, to be used against Britain, though a submarine carrying the weapon and getting into New York Harbor or up the Potomac was, is, also a possibility. That letter I didn’t answer. The third letter listed eleven suspicious sightings he had made around the bay, and asked what I thought about them. I was impressed at how active he is at his age.”

  “Andrew is very suspicious of everyone’s loyalties, including mine. His, of course, are evident, because, although he’s never been to sea, he’s a retired captain of the navy.”

  “And he always thinks of such things in a very direct way. That’s his nature. But this protracted commencement of the war means that other people’s loyalties are still in suspension. He’s right about that. Look at that fellow Mosley. He could play around a bit with Hitler, and do so in a public way, but he didn’t do that after ’39. When the war comes to us, loyalties will solidify.” By his tone, they could have been talking about any old thing, but he gave her a glance, unhappy, naked, rare. She said, “I am so full of dread.”

  “We all are,” said Pete.

  Margaret stared at him, wondering if he was thinking of Stalin and Hitler, or of something more personal and tragic, but as always, she could not bring herself to pry. She glanced away, then said, “But when you talk to me about things, they make sense, and when Andrew talks to me about things, they make no sense. That’s the terrifying part. I know what I think, and then he tells me something, and what I think collapses into bits and pieces. That’s the kind of dread I mean.”

  Pete smiled at last. He said, “Not mere death, then.”

  Somehow, this was reassuring.

  That evening, she asked to see Andrew’s letter recanting his accusations. When he brought it out, she said, “Tomorrow morning, I am going to type this, and then we are going to walk to the post office and send it together.”

  He agreed, and they did. His letter read, in part: “I now believe that in the heat of present political and military circumstances, I have misinterpreted things I have seen around me as signs of something larger, when, actually, they are signs of nothing. I now believe that Mrs. Kiku Kimura and her daughter, Naoko Kimura, and her son, Lester Kimura, are not guilty of any activities that might be of interest to the military authorities, and I now believe that Mr. Pete Moran (or Krizenko) is an innocent party also.” He apologized for his “overzealous patriotism” and admitted that he was an old man. It was Margaret who was left to wonder, though only about Pete, and only in the way that she had always wondered about him.

  DORA returned from Europe, in trouble with her paper for being too outspoken. She was giving talks, and the gist of her talks was that Europe was no place for Americans, and that even the British weren’t worth helping, because they were “mealy and corrupt to the core.” As for the French, they had “swooned” without a fight, and now everyone was fleeing into the countryside, “and what will they find? The farmers and the villagers will have hidden their food and fuel, and they will simply cross their arms, keep their mouths shut, and watch their countrymen and -women die.” Pouring money and aid into Europe was simply “flushing it away”—“How can you prop up those who refuse to stand?” All of Europe had been rotted from within by “recreational communism” on the part of the privileged classes. She was violently anticommunist when she wasn’t violently anti-Nazi, and her tour gave her the pleasure of “breathing air unpolluted by ideology, sweetened by the practical effects of self-reliance.” Her letters to Margaret went on and on in the same vein. She was slated to speak in Sacramento.

  By the time Dora got to Sacramento, her farthest point west, the Luftwaffe had bombed Dublin, the Germans had invaded Russia, and American men were registering for the military draft. Margaret drove over there to see her in time for lunch on the day of her talk in a hall that had been rented by several ladies’ organizations. She waited in the lobby of the hotel. Across the small rotunda, she saw the elevator doors open. Out stepped three people, a young man with a little girl by the hand, and a fusty old woman in what looked from a distance like a calico dress from fifty years ago—high neck, sleeves that were puffy around the shoulders, skirt with no drape at all, and very little waist. The skirt was long, and the woman had on low heels. Margaret thought of the song “Sweet Betsy from Pike” and realized that this throwback was Dora, costumed as an American pioneer. She laughed one laugh, but it was the dress, above all, that persuaded Margaret of Dora’s sincere conversion—not only had the always trim Dora thickened, she had also gone back to her early habit of designing her own clothes. She was smiling. She hugged Margaret. Her hair was white. She said, “Recognize me, darling?”

  “No.”

  “Vanitas vanitatum.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, ‘Vanity, thy name is Europe.’”

  “It does?”

  Dora took her elbow and propelled her into the restaurant. She may have gotten old, but her grip was as strong as ever. They sat down, and she ordered a T-bone steak with a baked potato, and a wedge of lettuce with Thousand Island dressing. Dora said, “Darling, you’re gawking.”

  “It’s—”

  “Just a steak.”

  “But you’ve never been a big eater.”

  “I have a new plan. I am going to be a fat old lady living on my farm in Missouri—”

  “In Missouri! You hate Missouri.”

  “Yes, right outside of Gumbo. I bought a hundred acres that back up onto the river. Lovely open country, and you can see the bluffs on the St. Charles side. Least of evils, in a way, but, darling, I’m so old now, all my local nemeses have passed on.” She ate a big bite of her steak. “I closed the deal last week.”

  “What about the newspaper?”

  Dora shook her head. “They’re with Roosevelt all the way. He’s going to force them into this war. Eleanor is behind it, her and her commie friends—”

  “Mrs. Roosevelt isn’t a communist!”

  “—her and her commie friends. And so I am retiring to the middle of the country and writing my book and raising my chickens and hogs, and I’ll walk around the place every day with my shotgun and kill rattlesnakes, and every time I get one, I’ll shout, ‘Take that, Ickes!’ ‘Take that, Hopkins!’” She laughed.

  Margaret said, “You are joking, then.”

  “I’m laughing, but I’m not joking. How are you?”

  Instead of telling her, Margaret said, “Everyone around here is convinced that the Germans and the Japanese are spying on our every move.”

  “But they are wrong. Hoover has been beating the bushes for spies for ten years, and the most they’ve come up with is two deadbeats who couldn’t find jobs. They’re going to talk about spies until they’re blue in the face, just to get you suckers out here in California worked up and ready to fight.” Dora waved her hand.

  “Andrew thinks the Japanese want the Philippines and Hawaii.”

  “Maybe they should have them. And maybe the Germans should have Austria and the Italians should have the Balkans. What difference does it make? No one can answer that question, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Dora!”

  “Yes, if they decide they want Mexico, let’s stop them. Or Alaska. But they aren’t going to decide that.” She leaned forward and stared at Margaret. “They are not going to decide they want Catalina Island.”

  “Of course not, but—”

  “I’ve had a dose of Europe and Europeans to last me the rest of my life. You never saw so many people s
o quick to run to some squirmy little fellow and kneel at his feet and say, ‘Tell me what to do, Duce! Tell me what to do, Führer! Tell me what to do, Comrade Stalin!’ Gives Roosevelt goose bumps. You can see it in his eyes.”

  About every issue she had an opinion, and her opinions were expressed with some wit, but always a note of stridency, as if she knew she was losing the battle but she intended to fight it anyway, no matter what. When she got up to leave, Margaret felt that Dora barely noticed she was going, so wound up was she about what she intended to say to the ladies’ groups at six that evening. The next day, Dora took the train to Reno, and after that to Arizona and then east.

  ANDREW maintained that planning the attack on Pearl Harbor was what had brought Albert Einstein to the West Coast. But he insisted to Margaret that he had made no “report.”

  The day after the attack, she called Mrs. Kimura twice in the course of the day and Pete three times, but no one answered the phone. The next morning, she took the early ferry, and she was at the Kimuras’ by eight o’clock. She had been there once before, in the summer, on the way back from a visit to the new botanical garden in San Francisco.

  Always, with the Kimuras, she tried to be more polite than she was naturally, because they seemed more sensitive than most people—Naoko responded to a whisper the way her other friends responded to a declaration. So she stood quietly in their entryway for about ten minutes, occasionally knocking very lightly and one time ringing the bell. Finally, she awakened from her reverie and knocked three times quite briskly. The door opened. She stood there with both hands on her purse, and then she pushed it farther, and stepped into the room. She shouted, “Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo! Mrs. Kimura? Naoko?” But there was no answer.

  The front room was not in disarray, but an envelope and two pieces of paper lay on the floor, a pair of shoes had been dropped willy-nilly in the middle of the room. She went out into the hall and saw that their newspaper from that morning had been kicked aside by someone passing through the entryway. She picked it up. She returned to the apartment, into the kitchen. Yesterday’s paper was sitting on the kitchen table, unread. Beside it was a cup of tea, full, and next to that was a half-peeled orange. She went back out into the entry, then she went down the stairs and outside. She sat down on the front step and waited.

  The street was empty. Every conversation, every radio broadcast, every newspaper article was now about the war, but on the front step of the Kimuras’ apartment building, all was quiet. Up and down the street, the shops were closed and the lights were off. It was eerie, and moment by moment, her feeling that she was waiting for Naoko and her mother dissipated, and then she simply waited for something unknown that would tell her why the tea was not drunk and the orange was not peeled. After about half an hour, she got up and walked down the street and around the corner. The whole block was shut—the cleaners, the grocery, three restaurants, a doctor’s office, a seamstress’s shop. She had turned three corners and gotten almost to the fourth when she came to a small tobacconist, a shop only twice as wide as its own door. Inside, an old man sat behind a counter covered with cigarette displays. She greeted him and asked if he spoke English. At first, she had no idea whether he heard or understood her, so she said, “I am a friend of Mrs. Kiku Kimura, from Vallejo.” Immediately he began shaking his head. Then he got up and went past her out the door. She was wondering what to do next when he came back with a young man. This young man smiled and dipped his head. She said, “I’m looking for my friend Mrs. Kimura. Maybe you remember that they came to—”

  “I am so sorry tell you, ma’am, that your friends have been taken yesterday.”

  “Taken!”

  “Yes, ma’am. All three. The boy, and then the lady, Miss Kimura, and then also the old mother.” He dipped his head again. The older man said something, and the young man said, “My father hears they have been arrested.”

  She went to a telephone booth and called Pete. The phone rang ten, then eleven, then twelve times, and she had begun to fear that he had been arrested, too, but he picked it up. His voice was sleepy; he woke up when she told him about her morning. He said, “I did hear about a man being arrested down in San Jose, but he was a prominent businessman and a member of JACL. He’d bought a lot of land through his son, who was born here, and has been agitating for repeal of the Alien Land Acts. I can see how the local authorities down there would take this opportunity to silence that fellow, but—”

  “Just to silence him?”

  “And to get hold of his land. But I don’t see how that operates in this case.”

  “But, Pete,” she said, “Andrew denounced the Kimuras as spies. He sent letters to Roosevelt himself—top-secret, of course—and to the Secretary of the Navy and the Commandant of the Base. They were full of ridiculous claims, and he wrote them all out by hand so no one could doubt that he had composed them. I made him send a retraction, but, honestly, would anyone pay a bit of attention?”

  Pete was silent. Aghast, she thought.

  “He told me that Albert Einstein was coming to Vallejo repeatedly in order to meet up with Japanese agents and develop a weapon of some kind that would wipe Americans off the map and leave their natural resources to be developed by enslaved Chinese workers.”

  Pete’s laugh at this was welcome, but it was not a guffaw, more of a chuckle. She told him about Agent Keene and Agent Greengrass. She said, “Agent Keene came by ages ago, and no one ever investigated after that.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because it was so crazy. Talking about it made him sound so …” She paused. “I thought if he wrote a retraction …”

  Pete gave a deep sigh.

  She made herself say, “And he told them he thought you were a spy, too. He said that I was the unwitting center of a ‘nest of spies’ who were trying to get to him. When you weren’t at Mr. Kimura’s last gathering, right before he died, Andrew thought he saw you carry away a box of papers, down the alley behind the shop, and then drive off with them.”

  “Was he sure?”

  “Is he ever not sure?”

  “Is he ever not wrong?”

  “He was right about the Panay.”

  Pete said, “Well, go back up to the Kimuras’ apartment and look around.”

  “I locked the door behind me so their things won’t get stolen.”

  He said, “Darling, that was thoughtful of you, but I don’t think that’s going to do any good. I don’t know what all of this means in the long term, but …”

  “What does it mean in the short term?”

  “Well, you know …” His voice trailed off.

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a silence, then he cleared his throat. He said, “Roosevelt would possibly not go as far as gassing them in the forests. He might stop at camps.”

  “Oh, Pete!” She was truly shocked, the way you are when a thing that has not occurred to you is suddenly present.

  He said: “All-out war started Sunday, darling. The Japanese attacked Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippines, and Midway, as well as Pearl Harbor. If they attacked Midway, that means they want to put a refueling base there so that they can get bombers all the way to here. The Germans have taken Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov, and Rostov. And I’m sure the Germans will declare war on the U.S. any day now.” He fell silent, then said, more thoughtfully, “But I don’t think they would have come and picked up Kiku and Naoko personally if Andrew’s big arrow hadn’t been pointing at them….” His voice trailed off again, and then she ran out of nickels. When she had found some and got back to the phone booth, Pete did not answer. The next day, she tried to call Agent Greengrass, but he was long gone.

  THE Tuesday after Pearl Harbor, Andrew decided to stay home. When he had finished his breakfast, he asked for another cup of coffee, and when she put on her hat to go to her knitting group, he said, “My dear, perhaps you would favor me by not going out today.”

  “I want to go out. I have things to do.”

  “
Perhaps you would write me a list of those things.”

  She said, “No, Andrew. I am not going to—” But when she stepped toward the door, he was out of his seat in an instant, barring her way. She set her hat on the hall table and went up to her room. In the afternoon, she tried again, coming down to the foot of the stairs and saying, “Andrew, I am going to the store.”

  He came out of his office and said, “Let me get the leash for the dog. We can go with you.” And then he stalked down the street beside her, carrying her shopping bag and leading Stella.

  He did not come into her room, or even stand over her in the kitchen, but when she tried the back door, she saw that it was locked with the key and the key was missing. She didn’t need to try the front door. Perhaps it was more disturbing not to see him. When she was in her room, his heavy footsteps walked from the front of the house to the back, and the back to the front, sometimes accompanied by the click of Stella’s nails on the floorboards. Sometimes she heard a few steps that then stopped, and she would find herself concentrating on that sound, and when it would start up again. She could not read—even the books she had been saving for a free moment drew her in no way. Or she would start a task, like cleaning out drawers, and quickly abandon it.

  When she went downstairs, she would find him reading one of his newspapers. As soon as he saw her, he would say, “My dear, you will be interested in this,” and read something aloud. When an American oil tanker was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off the coast somewhere (unidentified in the article), he said, “Here’s something. What do you think of that? They saw the shelling from the town.” When American forces surrendered Wake Island just before Christmas, he said, “You will want to read this, my dear.” He stood up and handed her the paper, jabbing at the article with his forefinger. When Hong Kong surrendered, he said, “I suppose you will think it’s for the best.” When Manila was bombed, he suggested, mildly, that perhaps she wouldn’t believe that the Japanese had “bombed mere civilians,” but that, according to the newspapers, it was “indeed true. Their objectives, I would say, aren’t purely military. I’m sure even you will have to agree.” Her loyalties, she saw, were once more in question—her loyalties to him, to the navy, the U.S. In his mind, what was the difference, after all?