Gift of the Golden Mountain

by Shirley Streshinsky

  Nancy, flustered, did not know what to answer, so I broke in. "As it happens, many of us disapproved of that executive order and some of us—" I paused to emphasize the next words—"white folks did what we could to fight it. In fact," I said, "Kit did as much as anybody. She was the one who got me into the camps to do the photos."

  Now Sam turned to Kit, his voice betraying a grudging surprise. "How did you do that?"

  For a long moment Kit concentrated on removing a large morsel of crab from a leg. She did not like to be the center of attention at these gatherings, and her answer was purposely vague: "I was working with a group who toured the camps regularly."

  "Toured?" Sam asked archly, "as in touring the zoo?"

  Unlike poor Nancy, Kit would not rise to his bait. "As in touring a prison," she said easily, "to see if the prisoners were being treated humanely."

  Sam shrugged but Karin, who had been listening intently, picked up. "What group was it, Kit? And how did you get involved?"

  "The Quakers. The Friends were about the only religious group who came out against the camps, and they did their best to help. I was just one of the volunteers. We weren't able to do all that much. Just little things, really. Once I got a special formula for a new baby. But I did get into the camps often enough to make some friends, and when Faith wanted to come in to photograph—to make a historical record, actually—they accepted her."

  I went on to explain, "Without Kit, I could never have done the most moving of the photos—the sick child on the cot, the teenage girl looking out through the barbed wire at the young guard, the tiny cubicle shared by a family of seven."

  "You didn't answer Karin's question," Sam said to Kit. "How did you happen to get involved?"

  Kit hesitated. "Initially it was because I had some friends who were sent to a camp."

  "Your gardener?" Sam prodded, "or maybe a housemaid?"

  "Cut it out, Sam," May lashed out in an exasperated tone, giving Nancy the courage to add, petulantly, "I thought this was supposed to be a discussion, not an inquisition."

  Suddenly Sam smiled, a wide and charming smile, and put up both hands in a gesture of surrender. "Sorry," he said, "I get carried away with the devil's advocacy stuff."

  Kit glanced at me. She knew Sam was not playing the devil's advocate, not this time. She also knew he was not going to be satisfied until he got an answer. I smiled in encouragement, she hesitated for a moment and then began in her husky, low voice:

  "Mr. Ishigo was no one's servant. He was already an old man when I first met him in 1930 and he was in his nineties when he died at Manzanar." She paused, remembering, and with a small sigh continued, "Mr. Ishigo was a craftsman, a builder of sailing ships in his younger days. In his age he had taken to making models of the ships he had helped to build. He did extraordinary work—beautifully detailed dragon boats, especially. He lived with his daughter and her family out in the Avenues."

  Sam pressed on: "How did you happen to come into contact with this old Father—I don't imagine he moved in your social circles."

  Kit took a sip of wine and studied him over the top of the glass. "My husband had drowned at Ocean Beach," she said evenly. "He swam there every day and one day . . ." she started to explain, then stopped herself. "So, every year on that day I would take a wreath out to cast on the water." She looked up and smiled, briefly. "And usually the wreath would wash right back in. So I had an idea that if I could put it on a little boat of its own, that boat could sail out to sea. And that is how I happened to meet Mr. Ishigo. I saw a newspaper article about the models he made, and went to see him and he didn't think my request was in the least peculiar. After that, every year Mr. Ishigo and I would go to Ocean Beach together to launch a beautiful little dragon boat filled with flowers. He would check the tide tables, and he knew just how to read a wave. At the right moment he would signal and we would wade into the water together—sometimes we got quite wet—and then we would go back to his house and his daughter would have hot miso soup waiting for us."

  For a moment Kit had become oblivious to the group. Her face glowed with the memory, and without realizing it she had crossed her hands over her chest in a gesture that was soft and touching. Then she caught herself, put her hands in her lap and finished in a tender voice, "We became good friends." She turned to Sam and added, "Mr. Ishigo would take no pay, and after the first time I did not ask. We did that every year until the war, when they put Mr. Ishigo and his family into a camp."

  Sam looked at Kit, but had nothing to say. Karin's eyes were brimming with tears, and I didn't trust myself to speak. It was May who broke the silence. With a puzzled look on her face, she asked: "Did my father know about the camps—what you did?"

  "Yes," Kit answered carefully, "In fact, you were too young to remember—you must have been about four years old—but I took you to visit Mr. Ishigo's daughter when she came back. I had sent them pictures of you and that day she gave you a little teak sampan that Mr. Ishigo had carved for you not long before he died."

  "I have it," May said, "my name is on it in tiny, tiny characters. I thought someone gave it to my father." The look on her face made me think that the revelation was not so much that Kit had been involved with the camps, but that Kit had been involved with her, with the child May, to have taken her to visit the Ishigos.

  The next day I found myself going through a box of photographs labeled "May: baby pictures. Age one to four." I was looking for something, I wasn't quite sure what. I can only explain it as a niggling in the back of my mind, a question unanswered—or never asked. I leafed through the prints. May and her grandmother, May and Sara, May and Emilie. The wide, searching look in the baby's little face. Suddenly it occurred to me to separate out all of the pictures of May and Kit together, and there it was, as clear as day. In almost every picture, May was touching Kit. Kit's face radiant, as she gave the baby her bottle, May reaching out for Kit's arms while taking her first steps, holding tight to Kit's skirt as a shy two-year-old, a tired three-year-old tilting her head against Kit's. And then an especially telling picture of Porter, Kit, and May a few days after Porter's return. He was strange to the child, still, and she was clinging for dear life to Kit! For the first four years of May's life she had trusted Kit completely, had loved her as a child loves, without question. Something had happened to erode that trust. The question was: what?

  I went to the letter file and pulled out the one labeled, May-letters, 1957-1960. I leafed through the pages filled with a girl's square hand, until I came on the one I wanted.

  Colworth Farm

  February 6, 1957

  Dear Aunt Faith:

  Thank you for all your letters (three since the last time I wrote you! Sorry!) You deserve a nice, long one back and today is the perfect day for me to write because I am home sick with a cold. Emilie has me all tucked in on the cot behind the wood stove in the kitchen. You know that cozy spot. It's my favorite place. Phinney gets up early and stokes up the wood stove so it is warm and cozy when the rest of us get up. It always smells like someone has just cooked a big pot of applesauce.

  On Saturday, Phinney is taking the twins to the hardware store with him so Em and I can do some shopping. That should be a scream, Amos and Annie loose in the store. Especially Annie. Phinney says, "I'll just flash my Phineas Colworth, Prop. sign at them and they'll know they better behave." He's very proud of the new sign, which was carved by an old man who used to work for Phinney's grandfather.

  Em has been helping me with my math. She says she doesn't understand how Daddy could have taught me Chinese and skipped algebra altogether.

  I miss him so much. I know you are right when you tell me that Kit misses him too. I suppose that's the only thing she and I have in common. You asked me to write her. If you say I have to, I will. I just wish you and the rest could understand that I don't feel the same way about her as you do. And I never will. Could we just not talk about it any more?

  I hope I haven't hurt your feelings. I miss you too, Faith
, but I am very glad I came to be with Em and Phinney and the twins, and to go to Colworth School. There is this sign in the main hall that says, "Founded: 1837 by Perseus Colworth." Phinney's right about his rock-ribbed ancestors rattling around all over the place.

  I can hear Em and the twins—they went into town for groceries, and they are storming in now, so I'll sign off.

  All my love,

  May

  I called Kit.

  "I've asked myself a thousand times what could have made her turn away from me," she told me. "For a long time I thought there must be a reason. Porter didn't know, either. He said she was 'moody'—but Porter was never much for introspection or trying to understand feelings. He was too intent on action. And in the meantime, May just seemed to drift away from me. I could actually feel her withdrawing. It caused an almost physical pain . . . it still does," she admitted, her tone implying that it was foolish of her, after so long a time.

  Kit continued to try, because she invited May and Karin and Sam to join us for a gala dinner at Trader Vic's before the opening of my show. Karin had happened to answer the phone, and accepted for all of them on the spot. It was a fatal mistake. Sam and Karin arrived without May, Karin obviously upset and Sam angry.

  "May is being a Class A shit," he said, disgusted. "She threw a fit when Karin said we'd come without checking with her and then she really went into a spin when we said we would go without her."

  "Sam, I really should have . . ."

  "Cut that crap, Karin," he came back, "May is being a bitch and you know it. Somebody needs to tell her that she is way out of line. I elect you, Faith."

  "You do?" I said, with as much sarcasm as I could muster.

  "Yes I do," he came back, "because you're the only one who can get away with it."

  He was right. It was up to me, and suddenly I felt enormously weary. As if I had been told to scale a cliff—I knew it was all but impossible, and I knew I had to do it.

  Kit disappeared into her public persona—superficially charming and distantly correct. At the show she retreated into the background. May finally appeared, late and distracted. She was wearing jeans and a black turtleneck, and looked as if she had just come from the lab. Between trying to be polite to mobs of people I didn't know, I watched her. She studiously made a careful circuit of the exhibit, stopping to read the captions on each photograph, careful not to let her eyes wander over the crowd. Karin and Sam saw her, and kept their distance—Sam, I suppose, waiting for me to set May straight. Suddenly, quite without warning, one of my capes slipped and I would have toppled had not someone caught me. A chair was brought, and the crowd that had gathered around me gradually dispersed. May, her face filled with concern, appeared next to me.

  "I need to talk to you," I said, in a voice that—to my utter chagrin—sounded desperate.

  "You need to get some rest," she cautioned me, "You've overdone. This has been too much for you, Aunt Faith."

  "About Kit and Karin, tonight . . ." I started.

  Anger flashed across her face like heat lightning. Struggling to control it, she closed her eyes for a long moment. When she opened them again, her eyes were empty of emotion. I shivered at it—the stifling of so much anger, pressing it down inside of her like that.

  "May, dear . . ." I tried again, but it was no use. Her face had closed tight to the world and I knew it was no good. I could feel the disappointment well within me. There was no easy resolution, and nothing I could do for the moment, nothing. I had been a silly old fool to suppose I could.

  I asked May to drive me home. I wanted so for the words to flow between us, I wanted an outpouring of feelings, I wanted to be able to ask the right questions, to say the right phrases that would unlock all the hurt, all the pain, and let it flow out forever. But the words would not come; I felt mute, struck dumb, frozen. It was as if a heavy, opaque screen had dropped between us and words would not go through. I knew it would take time and emotional strength to pierce that screen and I was too weak. I thought of Sara, who would not have been so weak, and a feeling of despair seeped through me.

  May helped me into the house and asked if there was anything she could do for me, but it was a perfunctory question, words to fill the emptiness between us. Then she kissed me on the cheek and left.

  I had no idea how angry she was at that moment, no idea that the anger would burst into flame the next day.

  The date is clear in my mind: Saturday, February 3, 1968. Ten days before May's twenty-fifth birthday. Had I been thinking straight, I might have read the signals, I might have been prepared, I might have spared us all the anguish.

  Or not. I can't be sure. It is possible that it had to happen as it did.

  My phone rang at exactly nine that morning and when I heard Karin's voice I knew she had been waiting for a decent hour to call me. "Is May there?" she wanted to know. "I mean, I don't need to talk to her—I just wondered if she spent the night with you."

  She had not returned to the house, and Karin was worried.

  "I imagine she took a room at a hotel." I tried to sound reassuring. "She was upset last night, you know that, but she seemed quite calm when she left here. I'd be willing to bet she just needed some time to think. I'm sure we'll hear from her soon."

  There was an anxious pause. "She was so angry yesterday," Karin said, "I've never seen her like that before. She was mad at me for accepting an invitation from Kit, but I think that was only an excuse. I think she was looking for a reason to be mad."

  "At you?" I asked.

  "Yes," she answered, pulling out the word slowly, "at all of us . . . all of us who care about her, I mean. It's as if she has to hit out. Kit's the main one, you know that. The target. But she's angry at all of us, and that's what I don't understand."

  I was made dizzy by the clarity of her statement. Of course she was right. Of course May was angry with us all. I took a deep breath. "What a wise girl you are."

  "No," she said solemnly, "if I were, I would know what was going on with May. And I don't know."

  "It's a puzzle we have to put together," I told her, and promised to call as soon as I heard from May.

  The day stretched before me, interminable. To pass the time I went through the files again, all the letters May wrote in the years she was in the east. It was not until her second year at Mount Holyoke that she wrote Kit, to ask if Karin might be included in the invitation to spend the summer with us at Kit's place in the south of France.

  At four that afternoon Kit appeared at my door, unannounced, her face ashen, all the pain in the world reflected in her eyes.

  "May came to see me," she said, breathing erratically, and then she repeated herself, as if the words were stuck in her throat and she had to force them out: "May came, just now," she said, with little gasps in between the words. "And I know . . . know what it was . . ."

  "Quiet now," I said, and made her sit down. I held her hand and told her to take a deep breath and to tell me. She did exactly as I said, resting her head on the chair and closing her eyes, and my own eyes played tricks on me: Suddenly she was thirty again, her face smooth and unlined, even then a woman touched by sorrow.

  The doorman had explained that Kit had a guest—the son of an old friend had dropped by for a drink, a man in his thirties who was between jobs and who hoped that Kit would help him out. May told the doorman it was all right, that Kit was expecting her.

  As soon as Kit saw her she knew that something was terribly wrong. Her skin seemed to be stretched tight across her face, and her eyes were almost translucent in their anger, as if light was reaching them from some great depth. Kit attempted an introduction, but May brushed it aside. The visitor, sensing a crisis, said he had better go, and Kit thanked him for coming, which was a way of saying yes, please leave, using the social formalities to mask confusion.

  May stood waiting in the big living room: feet apart stridently, in the middle of the room, the wide view of the Bay in the big plate glass window behind her.

  "Yo
ur male companions just keep getting younger," May sniped.

  Kit did not answer.

  "I know what you are doing, and I want you to stop," May finally said, the words sharp and hard and knotted.

  Kit let the sound float out into the room and settle before asking, in as level a tone as she could manage, "What is it that I am doing?"

  "What are you doing?" May mocked, and then told her: "You are trying to win Karin over, you are trying to manipulate her and take control, and I'm not going to let you do it, not this time."

  At the periphery of Kit's vision the walls seemed to waver, to shimmer, and she reached for the back of a chair. "This time?" was all she could think to ask.

  "This time," May spat back, her voice thick with resentment. "You know what I'm talking about, you know exactly what I am talking about. Don't play dumb. That's one thing you aren't. You are as shrewd as they come, God knows, Cousin Kit."

  May began to prowl about the room, stopping to pick up a picture in an old-fashioned, heavy silver frame. "Ah, Porter and Kit Reade. The twins. That's what they called you, didn't they? Inseparable. Like twins? And of course she was no match for you, was she? Not some little Chinese war bride."

  Kit was frowning now. "I don't know what . . ." she began, but May cut her off.

  "That's not true, Kit. You do know. You know exactly what you did. You got rid of my mother. You made her life so miserable she had to leave. Oh, you covered your tracks, you're good at that, aren't you Kit? You wanted things to be just the way they were before, you and Daddy, inseparable. You wanted him all to yourself, and you would do anything . . ."

  Kit stood staring; she could not think what to say, where to begin, she had lost the power to speak.

  "No," was the word that formed in her mind, but even that would not come out.

  "How do I know?" May asked the question Kit could not, her eyes so black with fury that Kit could not bring herself to look into them. "I know. I've always known. I grew up knowing. I knew for certain a long time ago, a long time. I knew as soon as I was old enough to figure it out. My father told me all about my mother, about how good she was, how full of life and love. He never said one bad thing about her, never, except that it wasn't her fault, that I shouldn't blame her."