Phantoms

by Christian Kiefer

  “It means to suffer in patience.” A pause. Then: “To endure what you cannot control.”

  All these years later that term has stuck with me because it seems to embody a kind of silence that I felt I could understand, a silence that Chiggers had touched on when we sat together on my grandmother’s porch in the night. I knew that what Mrs. Takahashi had told me did not really apply to my situation, for I had been a solider and had chosen to do what I had done, and yet the idea of it rang in my heart like a bell. To endure what you cannot control. That felt like everything I had returned to after the war. There are times today when it still does.

  Mrs. Wilson looked shaken as she sat in that room, although sometimes I wondered if that was more my imagination than anything else, for she also continued to hold fast to the same steely resolve that encased her always. I had taken my grandmother’s rattling sedan to retrieve her the moment my grandmother and Mrs. Takahashi fell into conversation, relying on my grandmother’s directions to the Wilsons’. What I found was a house much smaller than my childhood memories suggested, a somewhat tawdry Victorian in need of repair standing just at the top of Ridge Road in a grove of twisted pear trees of great age, between which the grass was high and unkempt. I was relieved to see the Pontiac parked there in the small gravel turnaround and I pulled my grandmother’s coughing sedan to a stop beside it and opened the door to find that Mrs. Wilson had already appeared, her figure upon the porch complete and ready as if she expected company, a state of preparedness she always maintained as a mark of pride, even in the relative country wilderness of central Placer County.

  “HELEN’S BABY,” MRS. TAKAHASHI said now. “That was why you didn’t want us to come back.” It was not a question. Mrs. Takahashi’s brown eyes peered across to where Mrs. Wilson sat, hands folded together upon her lap.

  My grandmother’s appearances and disappearances into the kitchen for refreshments had settled into the relative distance of the room’s opposite corner. She was not willing to absent herself from the scene as she had when Chiggers had come but was seemingly aware of the privacy needed. If Mrs. Wilson still cared about the fact that her secret was becoming, with each sentence shared in my grandmother’s presence, no secret at all, she did not express it, although once or twice I thought I might have perceived a slight glance in my grandmother’s direction.

  “Yes, that’s why,” Mrs. Wilson said.

  “I wish we would have known,” Mrs. Takahashi said.

  “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “Because we’re Japanese.”

  She said nothing in response, did not nod, did not even move, her stare unwavering.

  “We didn’t understand,” Mrs. Takahashi said now. “Hiro . . . he was so hurt.”

  “So was Homer,” Mrs. Wilson said then.

  “But Homer knew what was happening. He knew. Hiro didn’t. What was he supposed to think?”

  “He still felt terrible,” Mrs. Wilson said. “Tak—Hiro, I mean—was his best friend.”

  “This is how he treats his best friend?”

  Silence now, Mrs. Wilson looking first at Mrs. Takahashi and then to my grandmother and finally to me. “I didn’t come here to be abused,” she said then.

  She rose to her feet and I with her and it was me who asked her to wait, told her to. “She came all this way,” I said.

  “Then she wasted her time.”

  “No she didn’t,” I said. “Just wait a minute. Please.” I cannot explain why but I felt the first sharp wave of panic creeping into my heart, as if her departure from this house would have consequences detrimental to us all.

  “Evelyn,” Mrs. Takahashi said from the settee. “Please don’t leave.”

  “Well, you’re just . . . ,” Mrs. Wilson began, her mouth opening and closing and opening once more as she started over: “I can’t change what happened,” she said. “I just can’t.”

  “I know.”

  “We were all hurt by it, you know. Not just you.”

  “I know that too,” Mrs. Takahashi said. “Please sit with me.”

  Mrs. Wilson was reluctant but at last she did so, her frame lowering itself in a manner almost robotic, a slow fluidity that brought her back to the edge of the sofa, her hands once again together in her lap.

  “Will you help me?” Mrs. Takahashi said then.

  “With what, Kim?”

  “To find out what happened to my boy.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Wilson said. “Is that why you came?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That is why I came.”

  THE LETTERS SENT TO THEM in the camp were addressed to Hiroshi Takahashi, small envelopes containing a single sheet of plain white paper scribbled over in Homer’s blocky script and filled with misspellings and awkward untutored phrasings that sometimes passed so close to humor that Hiro would often laugh as he read them, realizing, perhaps for the first time, that his own English was better than that of his American friend. Hiro would read the words once or twice in silence while the rest of them waited, the girls with increasing impatience (although the letters rarely included anything of interest to them at all), Ray with some measure of despondency, and Kimiko simply watching her husband’s expression, the change between concentration and amusement and confusion that passed over his features like low clouds over the saltbush and sandy loam.

  Hiro would then pass the letter to his eldest for reading aloud and Ray, already standing, would do so carefully, in a voice just loud enough for them all to hear, although of course they knew that the Hosokawas were very likely listening from the other side of the wall that incompletely divided their living quarters from that of their neighbors.

  “Dear Tak and family,” Ray might read. “We are fine here, but we miss our . . . fiends . . . oh, friends, he meant friends,” and Hiro would chuckle. “We hope you are well. The peaches are all picked now and the pears too. We hired some people from Oklahoma who came through town. Most of the orchards had to since there are not enough pickers to go around now. It’s hard to be a foreman. I’m sure you’re not surprised to hear me say that,” the vague, pointless chatter proceeding apace for a paragraph or so before dwindling and finally dying out like a lamp wick scorched down to its brass burner.

  There was a lightness to the letters and it was that lightness that brought a smile to Hiro’s face, but there was another facet which only Kimiko herself seemed aware of—the effect each had on her only son. She had long felt that something was bothering him, some constant darkness somehow more apparent each time a letter appeared from Newcastle. These were the moments in which he seemed to struggle the hardest to hide his heart, the play of that faint secret torment drifting over his features like the leaden clouds that sometimes came flooding over the desert, blackening the sage and pressing down upon Castle Rock. Sometimes she would watch him watching his father silently read through Homer Wilson’s words and, were he to notice her watching him, his expression would change into a kind of mask. What had been—she was almost sure of it—deep and impenetrable sorrow would become, instead, a kind of stoniness, as if he had pressed whatever he had been feeling down into the well of his own heart and had, at least for the moment, managed to lock it away. It was something she herself had learned to do, but she was thirty-nine and was a wife and mother to three children and he was but nineteen. Hiro and the girls had been quick to adapt to the situation. Only Ray seemed to hold fast to the bleak truth of it. And herself. She knew, of course, that she too had trouble letting go.

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” she said to him one night, during a rare moment when they were alone in the little room. A typically bland letter had arrived from the Wilsons (or rather from Homer, for none of the others ever sent any word to them at all). The girls had gone out soon after the reading and Hiro had wandered out in their wake, already tapping his pipe against his palm. She knew that Ray too would leave the room in a moment, following them into the failing day, the light planing down to
such an angle that it seemed to skate along the blasted surface of the desert like a stone skipping on the flat of a pond. She wondered where he went, her eldest, her only boy, his thoughts already an enigma to her. Had that always been the case or had she lost him somewhere along the way?

  “I’m fine, Mom,” he told her.

  “I know you,” she said. “I know when you’re fine.”

  He did not say what she thought he would, did not tell her again that he was “fine” or “all right” or “okay” or any of the other bland Americanisms that made her feel like she was talking to the radio rather than her flesh and blood. “It’s just that . . . ,” he began, pausing for a moment and then saying, “It’s just that I kinda thought Jimmy and Helen might, you know, write to us too once in a while.”

  “You miss your friends,” she said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Maybe their father doesn’t want them to?”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  She shrugged. “Embarrassed. I don’t know.”

  “Why would he be embarrassed?”

  “I don’t really have to answer that for you, do I?” she said.

  “But she’s—” He cut himself off, starting again with a kind of choking that his mother did not recognize at first but then saw for what it was: her son (her grown son, a man) was on the verge of tears. “I mean they’re, you know, my best friends.”

  “You said she,” his mother said then.

  “What?”

  “You said she at first. That’s what you said.”

  “I just meant both of them.”

  “Did you?”

  Then he said something so quietly that she had to lean in to catch his words and even then, when he repeated them, they were but a blur of sound.

  “I want to go home.” Then he was up out of the chair and out the door.

  She called his name but he was already gone and she was alone again. She pulled out one of the chairs and sat at the edge of the table, one callused hand on its surface, the other in the lap of her worn dress. August. They had only been in the camp for three months, three months in which she had tried to grow accustomed to the fence and the shared toilets and meals in the dining hall, her life suddenly part of a communal whole with women she hardly knew or did not know at all, the dividing wall not reaching the ceiling so that every conversation of the neighboring family, the Hosokawas, could be heard, word for word, every argument, every discussion, even those rare moments of their lovemaking late at night. In the toilets she had to do what her body demanded seated next to whomever happened to be there, divided only by a flimsy cloth sheet hung on a drooping line so that the sounds and smells from the woman beside her mingled with her own. Each time the experience was horrifying and demeaning. Once she heard the sound of weeping from beyond the cloth sheet and through the gap could see an elderly woman whose name she did not know, her stained underwear pooled around her heels as her naked buttocks strained against the seat. Kimiko said nothing, for what could she say, instead moving past that woman and past another and lowering herself in disgust and shame.

  She tried, a few days later, to talk to her husband about the shade that seemed to have entered their oldest child and which, as the days and weeks and months continued, would darken and coalesce into a kind of half-light, grim and silent. She did not actually believe Hiro might affect some change in the boy, or even that he was capable of discovering exactly what was on Ray’s mind. She simply did not want to feel so wholly alone.

  When she first introduced the topic, Hiro answered her with a proverb, a tactic he employed whenever he wanted to avoid a real conservation, and which never failed to irritate her. This time it was, “The caged bird dreams of clouds.”

  “Please be serious,” she said in response.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Just talk to him,” she said, an edge to her voice now. “Find out what’s wrong. Maybe there’s something we can do.”

  Hiro did not look at her but instead cast his eyes out toward the little window with its uneven sheet of glass. “It’s going to be sundown soon,” he said, another evasion.

  “Will you?”

  For a long moment he did not move, but even in his stillness she knew he had heard her and when he nodded at last the action was so slight, so bare, that it was almost as if he had not moved at all.

  “Good,” she said. “Now go smoke your pipe.”

  He was a good man, her husband, but he was hardly a man to face a challenge head-on and in fact practiced a kind of active avoidance that she often found maddening even as she envied the skill. When they had first heard news of the ­Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hiro’s response had been to nod sadly, lift his coat from its hook, and set out on the path to the ­Wilsons’. She expected something from him in the morning at least, some acknowledgment that the world had changed, but he went out into the orchards as he always did and it was up to her to remove the little shrine, the photographs, the images and accoutrements of the life from which they had come, actions that she knew to be futile and yet what else could she do for her family but try to cover them in the pale paint of the country of their birth?

  At certain times she had come to think of Hiro’s steadiness as a kind of special power, for no matter what the situation he seemed unperturbed, perhaps even unperturbable. Even as they readied for departure to Tule Lake this was the case, his quiet sadness turning into simple resignation and to single-minded focus—they were leaving and had to prepare—a power that was constant during all the years she had known him, right up until that first September at Tule Lake when it broke all to pieces. It was the final communication from the Wilsons that did it, a letter not even from the family itself but from a law firm neither Hiro nor Kimiko had ever heard of before.

  Hiroshi Takahashi, the letter began. Your lease on the property of Homer Wilson is hereby terminated effective immediately. Furthermore, your personal goods stored at said location have been sold at auction to cover expenses and rent past due. The net owed is zero. You are hereby forbidden to contact Homer Wilson and his family in any way, shape or form. All communication should be conducted through this office at the address listed. Sincerely, Walter E. Shettley, Attorney-at-Law.

  Hiro did not tell her the contents of the letter the day of its arrival nor the next nor the next, and he did not tell Ray until the war was coming to an end and his return from Europe was imminent. Even then he only relayed that Ray would not find them in the hills of Newcastle but in Oakland, Hiro’s own incredulity and confusion having been slowly evaporated until what remained was simple endurance, gaman.

  He did not tell Kimiko for three days, writing a letter to Homer Wilson in the interim and posting it without her knowing, a simple document which was just as informal as any—we are fine, Kimiko is fine, Ray is fine, Doris and Mary are fine, letter arrived from unknown Walter E. Shettley, confusing, etc.—and dropping it at the camp’s post office and then thinking, believing, that when Homer’s reply arrived it would confirm what Hiro had decided almost immediately: that the letter had been intended for someone else, that the hakujin lawyer, unfamiliar with Japanese names, had meant it to go to a ­Takamoto or a Yamasashi, and while he could not determine what kind of error had placed his own name both on the envelope and in the letter itself he continued to believe that it had been an error. He could not stop looking at the document, unfolding it on the walks he sometimes made around the exterior of the grounds, the fence scrolling by on his left and the letter often clutched in his hand. He would occasionally nod at passersby, and some—men he knew from the camp—even asked what he was reading, what had drawn from him such an intense look of concentration. Each time he would make up some excuse or simply smile, say, “Nothing of interest,” and then ask them about their children, their wives.

  He told himself that the whole of the letter had been a simple error, and yet as the days passed he could not help but wonder how such a thing could happen, how a lawyer could make
a mistake that called both himself and Homer Wilson by name, an error which could not be waved away as a simple bureaucratic mistake. Then came the first warm flush of doubt, its surface as hard and rough as a peach’s stone pit. The light low in the west so that the fence’s shadow was written in a faintly wavering line against the colorless dust.

  He handed her the letter that night, the children gone from the room, his wife lowering herself into one of the chairs at the table, the letter in her hand, her eyes continuing to stare at its lines of type, at the signature of the lawyer, Walter E. Shettley.

  “It must be a mistake?” he said at last, the sentence curling up into a question although it was, in fact, no question at all but a kind of querulous statement of hope.

  “No,” she said quietly. “No mistake.”

  “But why?”

  “You trusted them,” she said.

  “He’s my friend.”

  And now, at last, she moved, her head snapping up from the table to stare at him, eyes bright and sharp and glaring. “Your friend? Your friend?”

  He nodded. “He is my friend.”

  “He’s hakujin,” she said.

  “He doesn’t think like you do.”

  “Like I do? You think I make him hakujin? You think I do that?”

  “Quiet now,” Hiro said then. He flicked his chin in the direction of the neighbors.

  “You’re a foolish man.”

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “I’m telling you the truth,” she said. Then she said his name. She did not say it often, using instead Otōsan, Father, to reflect his role in the family. But she said it now, “Hiro.” Then, “I know he was important to you.”

  “He’s my friend.”

  Her eyes went to the letter again, reading it through once more. Then she folded it back into its little square. “You should burn this,” she said.

  “You think it’s true?”

  “How could it not be true?”