Phantoms

by Christian Kiefer

  Were it not for my grandmother’s kindness, I have no idea what might have happened to me. It is not inconceivable to imagine myself dead somewhere or destitute and sleeping under a bridge. When she answered the door of her quiet Newcastle home upon my arrival, it was immediately clear that my letter to her had not arrived—as it turned out it never would arrive—and yet her face beamed with happiness as I stood on the porch. How this woman of goodness and grace had given birth to my own mother, a stern and earnest grammarian and taskmaster whose values boiled the entire world down to a strict equation of right and wrong, has never become clear to me. Perhaps my father’s own sense of rigid moral clarity changed my mother somehow. In any case, my grandmother’s smile and her tears brought on my own as she pulled me into the shade of her little living room and sat me down and handed me, of all things, a cup of tea and a stale cookie. “You’re home now, John,” she told me. I asked her if I could stay for a few days, just a few days, and she told me what I knew I would hear, that I could stay just as long as I wanted. Those words made me break down all over again and she patted my back, repeating, “You’re home now,” and “You’re safe now,” and “Everything’s going to be just fine,” so many times that I almost came to believe her.

  Over the next few days I managed to get through the worst of the sickness that comes with sobriety, that razor-backed horror washing over me with no one around to help but my grandmother, a woman who presumably thought I had brought some fatal illness back from the jungles of Vietnam and who summoned the town’s doctor to my bedside, his face, in the fever dream of my hallucinating mind, shaking to pieces each time I looked at him. But that terror dissipated. Maybe I healed in the end. Such things are difficult to pinpoint when you are taking inventory of your own heart.

  The moment I was able, I set up my battered typewriter on a small table under the window in the closet-like spare bedroom of my grandmother’s house, a tiny but charming single-story Victorian sandwiched between two similar homes near the center of what had, perhaps, once constituted the town, although the freeway had done away with much of its small bustling life by the time I came to live there. From my grandmother’s front porch, I had opportunity to watch the sporadic passing of those few remaining citizens across what seemed the town’s central square. It was, even to my cynical gaze, the kind of life one might have seen in a movie from the preceding era. The view from my grandmother’s porch was of a vacant lot, recently paved, lined on the side opposite by a long low building, its slanting roof the color of very old rust. My grandmother told me it had been a fruit-packing shed, a railroad spur ­apparently having once sidled directly up to its broad, open doors. Why there was no evidence of this industry today I did not ask, for at the time the local color mattered to me only in that it was not the darkening twilight shadow of the mangrove-choked rivers of the Rung Sat, where my division had stalked the jungles in search of the invisible enemy and to which I still returned almost every night, the forest more nightmarish even than the reality had been, the thatched-roof homes ever-ablaze. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that America had become, to me and maybe to every soldier returning to its soil from Southeast Asia, an alien place, as if the men and women I saw from my grandmother’s porch were simply acting out a role given them by someone else, sent to wander in limitless and ignorant bliss in the clean white avenues of a clean white America. That this world and the world from which I had come could both exist simultaneously and without apparent contradiction was a fact that I could not reconcile.

  My grandmother was a quiet woman accustomed to her own routines, and so when I was not staring at a blank sheet of paper and failing to type the sentences I still hoped would help me make sense of where I had been and what I had done, there was little to occupy my time. Many days I would spend wandering up and down the country lanes on foot, my only aim being to fill the hours, and this was how I stumbled into my first postwar job.

  Across the freeway to the east, the ridge turned in a kind of bulb that was known—according to my grandmother—by the absurdly genteel name of Chantry Hill, at the base of which stood a tiny cinder-block filling station. The station looked dark and cool and had a Coca-Cola machine out front, and one hot summer afternoon I found myself afoot, rummaging in my pockets for the necessary dime and then watching the bottle roll down its metal ramp until it lay cold and wet in my hand. It was then that I saw the HELP WANTED sign in the window.

  “Hot enough?” In the shadowed doorway stood a balding, middle-aged man in a sweated-through white shirt.

  “Sure is,” I said in response, levering the bottle cap off with the opener screwed into the side of the machine.

  The man introduced himself in a way that was meant to elicit some information and, because I could think of no reason not to, I told him about my grandmother and indicated roughly where she lived, thumbing over my shoulder toward town.

  “You a vet?”

  “A what?”

  “A veteran.”

  I had heard the question the first time but I could not understand why he would ask me such a thing, although after a moment I indicated that I was.

  “Thought so,” he said.

  “Why’s that?”

  He gestured to my hat, which, of course, I had forgotten about: an olive-green floppy-brimmed boonie that I had worn in-country whenever I was not out actively humping the bush in my brain-baking helmet.

  I was relieved that he asked nothing further about my military service, although his next question, if I was looking for work, surprised me all the same.

  I must have taken a long moment before answering because he began on a long line about how the younger generation, by which he seemed to mean people younger than me, although as I have said I was but twenty-one at the time, had little respect and no sense of work ethic and so on. It was a line I had heard in various forms many times from my father, and yet something about this man’s earnestness and his willingness to hire me made me ask him about the pay (marginal at best) and responsibilities (slightly less marginal than the pay) and soon enough I had been hired.

  The filling station was to become my lifeline that summer. There was, of course, a period of adjustment—trying to reset my sleep rhythms so that I rose before eleven o’clock—but I managed. Each morning my grandmother would tell me to have a wonderful day and I would tell her the same and then I would push out into the bright cool crisp air, the repurposed fruit sheds silent and closed and locked, the lot between empty of cars, the whole town quiet but for the hiss of occasional traffic passing on the freeway. A quick slope downhill as the road curved past the bank and the post office and ran alongside one of the town’s last surviving Victorian mansions, a tall, stately affair situated on the corner of the old highway and the edge of the interstate overpass. Sometimes I would stop on that overpass and watch the cars whiz underneath me on their way to ­Sacramento and on to San Francisco. Sometimes I wanted nothing more than to walk down to the on-ramp and stick my thumb out and to hitch a ride to the Haight, but although I came close to doing just that many times I never did.

  My aunt’s appearance came just a few weeks thereafter. I had been reading William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner that summer, my pencil periodically underlining or making a checkmark or scribbling, almost unconsciously, some note in the margins, Styron’s prose so enrapturing that I almost did not even look up when I heard the car roll to a stop beside the pumps.

  The truth was that I had more or less forgotten that I had any relations left in the area apart from my grandmother, and so when I saw the woman through the open window of the car I did not, at first, realize who she was. We chatted briefly as I began the process of filling the tank of her Pontiac. She was perhaps a decade younger than my grandmother—mid-sixties, if my guess was right—and seemed, even via my limited view through the window, to be more fashionably arrayed than I might have expected given the town’s size and relative isolation. Her hair was covered by a thin veil of light blue and her eye
s were hidden behind sunglasses that in those days still seemed exotic. Indeed, had it not been for the modest automobile I might have wondered if I was indeed catching sight of some film star of another era swung off the freeway for a tank of gasoline, an idea that seemed bolstered by her very familiarity. But then I realized that my memory of that face came not from the silver screen but from my own childhood, and before I could stop myself, I said the name by which I remembered her: “Aunt Evelyn?”

  I had finished refilling the Pontiac and stood by the window now. Her face was tilted toward me, those great sunglasses vaguely insectoid. “You must have me confused with someone else,” she said simply.

  I might have excused myself then, getting her change from inside and letting her drive off and returning to my book, but for some reason I told her my name and then my grandmother’s name.

  “Oh my,” she said. “You’re Cousin Jenny’s grandson?”

  I nodded as she removed her sunglasses. The face behind them was older than my memory but just as strikingly beautiful: thin and finely featured, her nose aquiline and her eyes light blue as if lurking in her genealogy was some distant ­Scandinavian ancestry.

  She asked if my parents had moved back to the area and when I told her they had not she seemed somehow relieved. “You’re staying where?”

  “At my grandmother’s,” I told her.

  “Ah,” she said. “Well, nice to see you. Let’s have you and your grandmother over sometime.”

  “Great,” I said, unhappy now that I had identified myself at all, for I had no interest in such a visit.

  A few more words and then she pulled away and I returned to the shadowed interior of the office, mopping my sweating face before settling into my chair once more. Through the window I watched the Pontiac cross over the freeway, turning north before that big ­Victorian that marked the edge of town. The bumper of the car flashed once just as it disappeared into the high shadow of the fruit sheds, a bright blooming of sunlight reflecting across the open space under which the freeway sped unceasingly. Then she was gone, that apparition of my own lost childhood, and I was once again alone with Nat Turner and the growing rage of his troubled mind.

  I HAVE SINCE PONDERED that moment in great detail, for had I said nothing to her, had I simply filled the tank of the Pontiac and let her drive away, I would never have stumbled into the story of Ray Takahashi and his ghost would never have come to ride upon my heart the way it has. In 1969 I only managed to write that single chapter, but my failure to continue his story was not because it had lost its hold on my imagination but instead because I could not see my way around writing about Evelyn Wilson and Kimiko Takahashi and the rest of them, not while they were still alive and their stories still belonged to them, although it is easy enough to see the opposite of that point of view, that they deserved—especially my Aunt Evelyn, or rather the woman I am calling Evelyn Wilson in this book—to see the bare, bold truth printed in black permanent ink.

  And yet I have also come to understand that this story is not only a tragedy but a love story, not only Ray Takahashi’s but Evelyn Wilson’s too, who looked upon a child and felt within her some upwelling of emotion so surprising that she could hardly bear to breathe and yet still turned away, leaving that child in Seattle as if to leave him were to eradicate a whole swath of her history, not only from her own memory but from the memory of her family and perhaps even the town. No one yet knew the full story of what had happened—not even Evelyn Wilson herself and certainly not any of the Takahashi family—but she ensured that its pale phantom would never rise to haunt whatever sunlit days remained. And for two and a half decades it had worked, not only for my aunt but for the whole town, a place that believed in its own noble sacrifice with such fervor that its very history was made to serve that definition, certain facts remembered and others conveniently forgotten. Of the buses and the camps which are a fair part of the story to come: I do not recall ever hearing about them when I was growing up, not in school and not at home. We did not talk of what happened, of what we did, nor did we talk of the families who were taken away and who, with rare exception, chose not to return to Placer County. We banished them so completely that after a time they did not even come to our thoughts, not to the thoughts of the generations who had witnessed and experienced that removal and so not to their children’s. So it had been as easy for this place to forget Ray ­Takahashi as it had been to forget his family, his return only a lapse of a few weeks, his absence a kind of relief for our collective conscience. They were gone. That was all. They were gone by way of Executive Order 9066 and yet that order was only the most recent manifestation of a general feeling of difference and separateness held within.

  Even after everything that happened, there is no doubt in my mind that Mrs. Wilson would not have approved of me writing this book, despite my having gone through the usual efforts to obfuscate the facts while still keeping an eye on the truth: changing the names and a few pertinent details until no one can be blamed but me. The two of them are unlikely protagonists, she and Kimiko Takahashi, their coming together, once I understood it, seeming nearly impossible—that ­Evelyn Wilson would, two and a half decades after the war, in the era of ­Vietnam and in the terrible wake of the assassinations of ­Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and when she must have felt as if the very fabric of her country was coming apart at the seams, that she would return to Kimiko ­Takahashi’s side as if connected by some great and invisible thread, unbottling not only her own terrible history but the terrible history of the town itself. It hardly seems possible and yet so much had aligned: that I would be in the town at all, that I would be working that day at the filling station (or that I would even have a job at a filling station) and that the woman I knew or had once known as my Aunt Evelyn would arrive to fill up her Pontiac just at the right moment. She must already have been pondering how to get from Newcastle to San Jose and then came upon me as if by providence, something I did not yet know or understand until a few days later when a knock came upon my grandmother’s door.

  I was at my desk, staring at my increasingly dusty and disused typewriter next to which rested a small stack of note cards covered by a nearly incomprehensible cramped script which constituted what I still hoped would become my book. I heard first the murmur of my grandmother’s voice and then another voice which I did not recognize.

  I had no intention of stepping out of that room, assuming that the visitor was one of my grandmother’s friends, for the front room of the house was, in the afternoons, something of a meeting ground for Newcastle’s septuagenarian and octogenarian set. So I was surprised when my grandmother’s pale, thin knuckles rapped gently on my door and her dry voice called my name.

  The visitor, of course, was Evelyn Wilson. I was surprised to see her because I had assumed that her comment about having my grandmother and me over to her home was a kind of polite dismissal. I did not know the woman, after all, despite being in some very distant way related to her, the lines of connection so thin and stretched that it was unclear where they met, if at all. And yet here she was in my grandmother’s living room, seated on the little settee near the window, her knees close together and her handbag on the floor next to her feet. She rose when I entered the room and said my name and then extended her hand—palm down—which I took and did not know what to do with and shook awkwardly and dropped again. She smiled and nodded and for a moment we simply stood there, facing each other like shy awkward partners at some high school dance, until she told me, kindly but firmly, to sit.

  “I’m sorry if I seemed distracted at the filling station.”

  “Oh,” I said, “no, I didn’t think that at all. That you were distracted, I mean.”

  “I was just surprised to see you. That’s all.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I won’t keep you,” she said. “I just came by to ask a favor.”

  My grandmother had entered the kitchen and returned now with a tray upon which rested a small teapot an
d a plate of sugar cookies. Where the latter had come from I did not know for I surely would have eaten the entire package had I come across them during one of my forays into the cupboards. She entered the conversation now, and so it turned to news of Evelyn Wilson’s family and my own, that my parents were living in Southern California and that she, Mrs. Wilson, lived alone, her husband having suffered a fatal heart attack several years before.

  “That must be very difficult,” my grandmother said to her.

  “As you know, Jenny,” she said, “you get accustomed to it in time.”

  I had stopped wondering what favor Evelyn Wilson had been preparing to ask me, thinking that it must certainly be something very minor, like cutting her grass or doing some small repair to her home, or even taking a look at her Pontiac, since she had seen me employed at the filling station and might then assume, erroneously, that I knew something about the workings of automobiles. Her question, when it finally came, indeed seemed connected with just such an assumption, asking me, apropos of nothing, if I was a good driver, to which I replied that I supposed myself good enough.

  “I wondered if you’d do me a great favor,” she said then. “I have to meet someone in San Jose. I was hoping you might drive me.”

  “To San Jose?”

  “My eyes just aren’t what they used to be,” she said.

  I did not respond at first, if only because I was confused by the request; driving a distant relation I hardly knew to a town that must have been something like two and a half hours away was a significantly greater time commitment than I had anticipated. Not that I was particularly occupied with anything meaningful, although of course I still labored under the misguided impression that my book project was well under way.