Shivering with the weariness of the insomniac she has become since hearing that Cora might be found, she yields for a moment to a feeling of panic. If it is Cora, how will the child feel about being claimed by her? Chances are she feels let down, double-crossed, even. Maybe Satomi is keeping her promise too late to do either of them any good. If they had guessed Cora’s age right in the camp, she will be eight, nearly nine now. She will be different, just as Satomi herself is different. They have made separate journeys, after all.
“Fascinating,” she hears Joseph say to the realtor. “Don’t you think so, Sati?”
“Mmm.” She has no idea what they have been talking about.
“One last look,” she says, and turns from them.
Inside the house a more settled feeling overtakes her. It’s as though she has already taken possession of it, and it of her. She sits on the box seat in the hall below a row of wooden coat pegs, and listens to the dull crush of the ocean as it runs through the eelgrass and stirs up the shingle at the shore break. Framed by the open door, her view of the water is contained, so that the ocean seems barely wider than a lake. She hadn’t known there were so many shades of gray. In the distance the horizon shimmers, a pearly line of pewter tinged with mauve. Such tender colors that her heart begins to ache.
Joseph calls that it’s time to go. He is hungry, and wants to try the Nellie’s Inn oysters that are famous in these parts. And then they must get back to the city. He will introduce her to Leo, tell her she was right about the promise.
“No need to fret, dear girl,” he says. “You have found your home.”
Providence
In Eriko’s small but immaculate apartment above her shop, Satomi wonders how it is possible for them to have become so shy with each other. Manzanar had been their territory, of course, the familiar ground they had stood on, yet she had lived seminal years with Eriko, shared Tamura with her, shared too much to ever feel unknown by Eriko.
“I had forgotten how beautiful you are,” Eriko says.
Satomi looks out of place in Eriko’s family room, a polished not-of-her-world sort of woman. The kind of glamorous woman, Eriko thinks, that you read about rather than know. She even smells expensive. There is nothing visible of the camp girl left in her, not even that look that marks out inmates, the wariness that says it could happen again. The look she notices in her own mirrored reflection each morning.
“You don’t sell fabric anymore, Eriko?”
“There’s no call for it. People don’t dress-make much around here these days.”
She is in the work-clothes business now; cheap checkered shirts, thick cotton overalls, and her special line, the felt fedoras ubiquitous among men from the worker up.
“And Naomi’s gone.” Satomi hardly dares say it. “It’s hard to believe. I’m so sorry, Eriko. Dear Naomi, it hurt not to be with you when I heard. I know how hard it is to lose a mother.” She puts her arms around Eriko and can’t let go. In Eriko’s familiar scent, her comforting bulk, she is a child of the camp again.
“It’s just me, Eriko. Whatever you see, it’s just me,” she sobs.
“I know, Satomi. Of course it’s you.” Eriko is relieved. She touches her hair affectionately. “It was just in the moment, you know. I had you in my mind as you were in Manzanar.”
“And Yumi, and Haru?” she asks, finding it hard to swallow.
“Yumi is married. Can you believe it? She is far too young, but she is happy, even though they have no money and there’s a baby on the way. Haru teaches in a Japanese school near San Diego. He wants me to join him there, but I can’t leave Yumi.”
“And he’s married?”
“Yes, he is married, Sati.”
“Happy?”
“I think so. He works too much for the future, though, to enjoy the present.”
“I’m glad for him, Eriko.”
“Really, Sati?”
“Yes, really. I can see now that it would never have worked for us. We were children then.”
“Well, it seems to me that there’s no boy left in him now. He is all duty.”
Eriko makes tea, “real tea,” she says, and they share a look. They are waiting for Dr. Harper to arrive from the airport, and the thought of seeing him again excites them.
“What will you do if it isn’t Cora?” Eriko asks.
“Keep looking until I find her.”
“Good girl.”
Satomi feels sixteen again, happy to have Eriko’s approval.
“And your home, Sati? What is your home like?”
“It’s simple, clean, not enough furniture yet. The breeze from the ocean blows through it, front door to back, just like the house I shared with Abe. You would like it, I think. It won’t be a home, though, until I have Cora. I need to see her grow up, see her happy to be an American.”
“And are you happy with being an American now?”
“You know, I guess I am. But then, it’s easier on the East Coast, so many nationalities that I hardly stand out at all. And they seem to have won a different war than the one we fought. People there hardly know about the camps.”
“How is that possible?”
“It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? Quite wrong that they are never spoken of.”
“I’m as much to blame as anyone for that, I suppose,” Eriko says. “None of the Japanese left around here speak of them much. We are ashamed, I think. Yumi says that she won’t tell her children, that there’s no point in making them afraid. She wants them to grow up fearless, like Haru.”
“But the shame is not ours, Eriko. We must never let it be ours. You should tell Yumi as much.”
They pause for a moment in their talk, both thinking of Yumi as the child she was in the camp, plump and naughty, one of the new breed of disobedient daughters.
“I miss your mother still,” Eriko says. “She is the one I miss most in life.”
She leads Satomi downstairs to the shop, which has a CLOSED sign on its door. The air there smells of felt and disinfectant.
“Roaches everywhere,” Eriko says. “Just like Manzanar.”
“We should keep a lookout for Dr. Harper.” Satomi goes to the window. “He is a stranger to this district.”
“It was brave of you to come alone,” Eriko says. “And flying too”
She hadn’t wanted Joseph to come with her. Cora doesn’t know him, after all, it will be enough that Satomi is there with Eriko and Dr. Harper.
In any case, Joseph is caught up with Leo, and hates, these days, to be parted from him for long. It turns out that Leo is a count after all, the genuine article. He is new to the city but has found old friends among his fellow émigrés in New York, and has been embraced by the Russian Nobility Association. According to Joseph, new blue blood is rare, and is to be feted among his fellow exiles.
“We are a novelty,” he says. “The latest distraction.”
She has never seen him less cynical, or so openly happy.
“We are always at some ball or other,” he says. “There are at least a hundred dates that must be celebrated with the most extravagant parties that you can imagine. Anything and everything demands a celebration, Peter the Great’s victory at Poltava, Gogol’s birth, Romanovs visiting from Spain, things I never knew about before Leo. It’s quite extraordinary.”
Russian nobility, it seems, has the good manners not to pry into their friendship, their particular arrangement.
“We dance with the girls for form’s sake,” Joseph says. “But the truth is that I’m the nearest thing that Leo is going to get to an heiress.
She is relieved not to feel responsible for Joseph’s happiness anymore. Leo is a good match for him, an artist at heart, and the most perfect of traveling companions. Maybe among the disposed Russians Joseph will at last find a place where he can settle.
“And you, Sati,” Eriko breaks into her thoughts. “You have been married and widowed since I last saw you. It seems astonishing to me.”
“Oh, Eriko, I wish you
could have known Abe.”
“So many gone.” Eriko sighs. “To lose your man so young.” She reaches out and pulls Satomi to her.
The tears that come are nothing like those she had shed in the months after Abe’s death. They fall warm and soft, without the accompanying urge to howl.
“I took a strange journey after Manzanar, Eriko. My mother would have loved Abe, but she wouldn’t have approved of my choices before he came along.”
“Maybe, but I never heard her judge anyone. Tamura understood how life can overtake you.”
Dr. Harper has been counting the days since the letter from Satomi came. And now the time is here, he is on his way and will see for himself the circle completed. He is hopeful now that the child is Cora. The photo that came is grainy, blurred at the edges, showing a shy-looking girl, older than the Cora he remembers, of course, but something in her stance seems familiar to him. He is ashamed to discover that in their dark-eyed, soft-featured prettiness, all Japanese children’s faces look alike to him. He imagines that all white, gray-haired old men look the same to them too. It’s no comfort.
His records of Manzanar are packed in boxes, piled up in his garage, ready to send to Satomi when she is finally settled. His heart has been rocking a bit lately, giving him a warning or two. He suspects that if he hoards his little archive for much longer, it will end up as kindling for his wife’s fire when he is gone.
It’s an unconventional documentation, he knows, a strange collection, but telling all the same. The time is surely coming when the Japanese will fight for compensation, when they will insist on the longed-for apology. He is convinced that Satomi’s spirit, her strong open heart, will make her part of that fight.
He asks the cabdriver to stop across the street from Eriko’s shop. He needs a minute or two to compose himself. The journey from Lone Pine in the single-engine plane had been something he had looked forward to as eagerly as a boy, but the excitement of it has stirred old ambitions, present regrets. Looking down on the landscape as the little craft battled the wind, seeing woods and rivers, a tiny dot of a boat on the ocean, he was filled with self-reproach. He should have done more with his life, had adventures, been braver.
He watches the women behind the window talking animatedly, waiting for him to come, two where there should be three. It’s strangely hurtful. He feels like sitting down on the sidewalk and weeping. Oh, why couldn’t Tamura be there waiting too? He shakes his head, takes out a handkerchief to dab at his moist eyes. His recently acquired varicose veins thump uncomfortably in his legs. He hates the look of the raised blue tracks that run along his white liver-spotted skin. He can’t remember when he last looked at himself with any satisfaction. His wife is right, he is vain for his age.
To his old man’s eyes Satomi looks the same. Eriko is only a little fuller, her dark hair streaked with gray now, that’s to be expected, after all. It’s good to see them in the real world, good to have Manzanar behind them. Since they left, the place has reverted to wasteland, a picked-over plot he averts his eyes from when driving past.
It had been awful seeing off the last of Manzanar’s inhabitants, the old ones who had to be forced out. Painful to observe the women watching their homes demolished, and the old men wondering how they were meant to provide now, how they could feel proud of anything. He thinks that there are too many kinds of impotency to wound men.
And to add insult, those awful lectures, compulsory, so that it was hard to feel like the free men they were told they were now. Inmates, it was insisted, must learn how to behave in the outside world, how to get along with their fellow Americans. The sermons had done little to ease their bewilderment. Having suffered the loss of everything that had been theirs before incarceration, they had wept at their separation from the known. Those old boys were a lost tribe he couldn’t feel optimistic for, no matter how much he tried.
It was astounding to him to read that some in the House of Representatives were still angling for their repatriation to Japan. It made him sick with shame. He wrote as much to them, but they never replied.
It’s a joyful reunion, a hug for Satomi, a clasping of hands with Eriko.
“It’s been too long,” Dr. Harper says. “And so much has happened, especially to you, Satomi.”
She smiles at him, registering the tremble in his hands, noting that his eyes are a little paler than she remembers, his step slower. She wonders how many times she will see him again, and it comes to her that she loves John Harper. That he means too much to her to let his work be forgotten. She puts her arms around him, lays her head on his shoulder for a moment.
“I’m ready for it now. Send me your archive,” she says softly. “I won’t let it go to waste. I promise.”
Of course, she and Tamura and their kind were not the only victims of the war. There are victims of all kinds all over the world, she knows. Yet still she feels there is a need for justice, for someone to admit that at worst the incarceration had been a wicked betrayal, at best senseless. She doesn’t want to see the Japanese inmates’ story cleaned up, rewritten, as she and Tamura had rewritten Aaron’s story. She wants to be part of the reconciliation, to be around for the longed-for apology. She may never escape her ghosts, but her memories are lighter now and she is healing, she knows.
“We should go,” Dr. Harper says. “Put an end to Cora’s waiting.” The Sisters of Charity are housed in a three-story red-brick building. There are bars at the windows, no curtains, smudges on the glass. The place looks shabby, halfhearted, uninviting.
The three of them pause in front of the rusty playground gates as if by order, and Satomi pushes the bell, which immediately creates a hissing of white noise.
“Yes?”
“It’s Dr. Harper and Mrs. Robinson,” Dr. Harper says in the strongest voice he can muster. Since his school days he has felt uneasy around the religious. When he was young it had to do with guilt for his boyhood sins, he supposes. Now he thinks it’s most likely the fear of a day of reckoning.
“Come through the yard and ring the visitors’ bell on the front door. Someone will come for you.”
Satomi is the first to enter the bitumen quadrangle. She takes a deep breath and sends Eriko an anxious smile. In place of flowers, litter is caught up in the tufts of needlegrass that grow at the base of the high wire fencing enclosing the playground.
“To keep the children from the road,” Eriko says quickly, as if to reassure Satomi. “At least it doesn’t turn in at the top.”
They are all thinking of the fencing at Manzanar, and look around nervously as though seeking gun towers, guards. A chalked map of hopscotch on the ground is fading under the sun. Garbage cans are lined up against the building, spilling over with refuse.
“It’s horrible, horrible,” Satomi says, feeling the sweat pooling under her arms and in the palms of her hands. The awful realization that Cora may be here feeling, herself forgotten, panics her.
“It’s not so bad, is it, Eriko?” Dr. Harper says. “The street is nice enough.”
“No, it’s not bad at all,” Eriko says. “Not bad at all.”
“She’s as fenced in here as she was at Manzanar,” Satomi says, not willing to be comforted.
Whenever she had thought of finding Cora, her imaginings had been kinder than the sight of this place. They had included lawns and flowers, trees to shade the child from the sun. She realizes now with shame that they were nothing but pretty pictures, good only for soothing herself.
There is a choice of bells on the black-painted door, a foot-high polished brass crucifix nailed to it. Satomi pushes the VISITORS bell and hears a faint ringing from deep in the house’s interior. It reminds her of the one in Mr. Beck’s lodgings.
Inside, on the checkered linoleum that runs the length of a narrow hall, so narrow that they have to walk in a line one behind the other, they file behind a nun, who has not spoken, only indicated that they should follow her. Something soapy sticks to the soles of their shoes as they walk, making them squeak.
There’s a sickly scent of cheap beeswax, the trace of past meals in the air.
“It smells like the mess halls,” Eriko whispers.
“Institutional,” Dr. Harper says. “Mess halls, hospitals, they all smell the same.”
In the Mother Superior’s large and comfortable office, Sister Amata, a fluttery sort of woman in a brown habit, who coos somewhat like a pigeon, is sent to find Mary.
“She doesn’t know you are coming,” she says excitedly as she leaves the room.
The Reverend Mother too is a pale bird of a woman, hawk-nosed, with small brown eyes that Satomi fancies are seeking out quarry. But when she speaks, her voice is soft, her stance kind.
“She has no idea that you have been in touch,” she tells them. “She may not be the right one, your one. She came without papers from an orphanage that was being demolished. They called her Coral there, but she could have been Cora, I suppose. Coral did not seem to us a suitable name, and we wished to spare her teasing, so we named her Mary. On the whole she is a helpful child, but she doesn’t speak much, and is subject to temper tantrums at times.”
Satomi wants to yell, Of course she is. How could she not be? The cost to Cora of being left, unloved, she is sure has been a terrible one. But a sudden dread stops her from speaking. Her chest feels heavy, her mouth dry as ash.
“Was she originally at Manzanar?” Dr. Harper asks, anxious now that he has projected Cora into the blurry photo, glad that he had decided against showing it to Satomi.
“I have no idea. I’ve never heard her speak of it.”
“So you have never asked her about the camp? Never wanted to know about her life before she came here?” Satomi, finding her voice, can’t keep the criticism out of it.
“No, we have been advised not to talk to the children about the camps. The Japanese children here are in the minority, it would set them apart from their fellows. In any case, all that’s better forgotten, don’t you think? The important thing here is that we are all Catholics, children of God.”
A Girl Like You Page 34
