by Owen Thomas
“I’d say it’s high time,” he said it with all seriousness.
“Funny,” said Susan, obviously misinterpreting him. “So what is this contraption in the living room?”
“It’s a workout… thing. Muscle training.”
“Honest to Pete,” she said in exasperation. “Given any thought as to where you’re going to keep this thing that you will never, ever use?”
Hollis slowly shook his head.
“No. I’d have sent it back in the box. David put it together while I was away.”
“Yes and where exactly have you been? David said Phoenix. I tried calling. I know that I’m no one to point the finger since I just took off and did my own thing… but I assumed … I thought that you were going to be here with Ben.”
“I had to help out someone in a fix.”
“A fix. Is that what it was? A fix? David said it was something criminal. What friend? Bethany? Is that the friend?”
“It’s not what you’re thinking.”
“What am I thinking?”
“You’re thinking that I slept with her. I didn’t.”
“We’ve been over this, Hollis. I don’t care if you’re sleeping with Bethany.”
“I’m not.”
“Fine. Good. What was the emergency?”
“Long story. She got arrested. She needed someone to bail her out.”
“And she called you? In Ohio? To bail her out of a Phoenix jail? Hollis… that’s just… I don’t even know what to say. You left Ben with David so you could go bail Bethany whatshername out of a Phoenix jail?”
“MmmHmm.”
“Well if she won’t have sex with you after that, then it’s just not going to happen.”
“We didn’t have sex.”
“What did she get arrested for?”
“Is it important?”
“I don’t know, Hollis. Is it?”
He sighed. He knew it was unavoidable.
“Destruction of property. Assault.”
Susan’s eyes widened.
“Assault? Bethany? Who’d she assault?”
“No one. Or, at least, they didn’t end up charging her.”
“They didn’t.”
“No.”
“So you went that whole way for nothing. You didn’t have to bail her out.”
“No. I didn’t. Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
“She got into a fight with this guy. At a party he was having. There was some … property damage.”
“I’m not following. Oh… you mean you had to pay the bill … for the property damage…before they let her out of jail, is that it?”
“More or less.”
“How much?”
“Mmmm… about fifteen or so.”
“Fifteen…”
“Thousand.”
“Fifteen thousand dollars! You paid fift… plus the airfare?!”
Susan’s face was flush and her words were inflated with incredulity and anger. One at a time her hands massaged her forehead and then worried through her hair. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and back again. Crossed and uncrossed and re-crossed her arms. He watched her reaction unfold and bloom and take on new color and volume. All he could think was how alive she seemed. She filled his imagination. She was new to him in a wonderfully old way. She had been reborn in his mind.
“Yes. It was the only way…”
“The only way? Hollis, you could have let her sit there.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“You could have called her father. He could have wired the money from Japan. He’s a banker, for Chrissakes.”
Hollis watched the realization that Akahito Takada would be providing reimbursement, or, perhaps, that he had already done so, play across her expression like a banner. He saw her emotion reigning itself in, pulling backwards, suddenly aware of the possibility that she had over-reacted.
“He is going to reimburse us, isn’t he?”
Hollis shook his head.
“No?! Why the hell not? She’s his daughter!”
“No,” he said. “She isn’t his daughter.”
“She… Hollis…”
Susan pressed her lips together and stared at him as though all of her remaining options involved some form of violence. And yet the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes were, to him, like deer trails to mountain lakes.
“Okay.” He held up his hands in surrender. “Here is what I know.”
He told her the story as best as he had been able to put it together. His understanding had been stitched together two days earlier sitting in an empty row of seats on his long flight from California to Ohio. As he flew, unable to sleep, aborting his fruitless effort to find his daughter in Hollywood in favor of his urgent need to find his wife on the Kent State campus, he had rearranged the scattered facts in his head until they fit. Until he understood.
That patchwork understanding was largely based on the sober conversation he had had with Captain Wycoff of the Phoenix Police Department and the inebriated conversation he had had the next night with Izume Takada as he sprawled on his bed in a spinning hotel room in the heart of Blythe, California, which had been a very long ways from everywhere.
He tried his best to relate the basic facts to Susan dispassionately, without any of the emotions that had accompanied their discovery.
Akahito Takada was not Bethany Koan’s father. Bethany Koan did not have a father. In fact, there was no Bethany Koan. Bethany Koan was a fiction.
The Bethany Koan that he knew was actually Lynnette Moss from Yonkers. Unlike Bethany, Lynnette did exist and did have a father. Lynnette’s father was Bret Moss. A minor league ball player. An alcoholic who lost his battle with the bottle early.
Lynnette Moss also had a mother, name unknown. Presumably, she had a name, but Izume Takada had not known what it was. Izume called her, simply, the mothel by which, correcting for pronunciation difficulties, she meant, the mother.
Akahito Takada met the mother one summer in the mid-1970’s when Akahito was still a mid-upper-level functionary at the Hyakugo Bank of Japan. His ascendance to the presidency of that bank was still a dozen or so years away.
The bank had dispatched a team of bankers and lawyers to the glinting canyons of the Empire State where it was negotiating the purchase of the smallish tower of glass and steel in which it would ultimately staff its presence in the United States. Poor Izume had no information as to the particulars of Akahito’s encounter with the mother. It would have to be enough that they met somewhere, under some circumstance, under some degree of intoxication or another, and that the mother was all of seventeen years old.
What Izume did know, because she was there to see it, was that within a month after Akahito returned home to Tokyo, the police were at the front door, politely asking him to come in for questioning. Akahito had left and come back within a matter of hours, brushing away his wife’s questions and telling her that the car he had rented for several of them to go out and see Niagara Falls – Niagla Farrs, Izume had said, Niagla Farrs, again and again and again until Hollis, trying to will the alcohol out of his system, had finally understood – had not been returned to the rental agency. The American authorities were concerned it had been stolen. It was all, Akahito had insisted, a very big mix up involving similar-looking rental agency logos and dishonorably impolite New Yorkers who gave bad directions.
But what Izume had come to understand over the decades, because Akahito had confessed enough for her to deduce as much, was that Akahito and the mother had not parted amicably. The New York authorities were reaching out to their Japanese counterparts, and not about missing rental cars.
Izume recalled that Akahito had spent the next several weeks in an agitated, decidedly non-Zen frame of mind. He spent most of his time at work and when he was home, he mostly kept to himself and behaved in such a manner that his self-imposed isolation was perfectly okay with Izume.
Akahito returned to New York within the m
onth, purportedly on business. When Izume picked him up at the airport several days later, he seemed back into his old calm confidence, like a man who has rediscovered a favorite chair.
Izume did not have any particular suspicion about the modest but sudden crimp the family budget. At least, not for many years. Money management was not a part of Izume’s marital purview. As a physician, she was in control of all things medical and health related. Plus food. And clothing. Home maintenance. Gardening. Social engagements. Parental care and relations. And raising, Fukima, their daughter. Akahito, the banker, was in charge of all things monetary.
So when Akahito announced one day that he would be participating in another – that is, an additional – retirement investment program sponsored by the bank, she did not think to question it. In fact, Akahito was rising so fast through the ranks of his employer, that he soon received a raise that more than compensated for the drop in income.
Many years later, in a great spasm of impertinence caused by Akahito’s typically imperious declaration that, for financial reasons, Izume would not be permitted to make further renovations to the lotus garden without his permission, Izume had asked to see the records of their investments. An argument had ensued in which Akahito revealed that the special investment account had been discontinued and, in fact, that it had ceased to exist so long ago there were no longer any records to show her. He was adamant that he had told her about it.
I believe him! I was a foor, Mr. Hahrris. A stupid foor!
Nor did Izume think to question her husband’s interest in participating in a new program that the bank had adopted to sponsor Japanese students living abroad. She had not been aware at the time of this sudden enthusiasm, that Akahito, as head of the bank’s public outreach committee, had largely created the program all by himself and then collaborated with colleagues until no one really remembered whose idea it had been in the first place. It became a very popular program that the Hyakugo Bank of Japan wasted no opportunity in its dealings with the public to tout as emblematic of its forward thinking, globally-minded and, yes, patriotic business model. If Akahito needed any further boost up onto the presidency track, the enormous popularity of the Blossoms in the Wind Student Sponsorship Program was that very boost.
Leader that he was, Akahito was among the first of many officers and shareholders who participated in the Blossoms in the Wind program by nominating Japanese students living abroad to receive a stream of monthly stipends intended to offset educational and living expenses. As the result of a public campaign, Japanese students all over the world were nominated, including many in European and African countries. Most of the nominations were of young men and women attending schools in the United States.
Akahito nominated a young woman in New York City, Suki Yoshida, an orphan from Okinawa, who was attending New York University with aspirations of some day becoming a diplomat.
“Suki?” Susan interrupted. Hollis nodded.
Suki was a spirited, high-cheeked, white-toothed, sparkly-eyed little thing that Akahito had met on one of his trips to New York before the police had knocked on the door and he had stopped going to New York altogether. Izume had recalled the prideful display with which Akahito hung young Suki’s photograph on the wall next to their daughter, Fukima. She was standing up against a railing, wearing a white t-shirt emblazoned with an American flag, beaming from ear to ear, with Lady Liberty rising up in the background as if just having lit the sun.
Hollis had remembered that photograph well from his visit to Akahito’s home. That was Suki. That was Akahito’s daughter. He was sure Akahito had referred to her as his daughter. Although, when he really thought about it, he did not know how he could be sure Akahito had not been referring to the girl in the other, smaller photograph. He had assumed that the photos, hung so centrally in the home and in such proximity to one another, represented sisters. Akahito’s daughters; plural.
He did clearly recall that he and Akahito had talked long into the evening about daughters and about how headstrong they can be. They had talked about the duties of fatherhood including the importance of securing a good education for one’s children. They had talked about education in America and education in Japan. Hollis had gone on at some length about the quality of higher education in his own state of Ohio, boasting freely about the Ohio universities, public and private, with which he was the most acquainted and the people, many of whom he knew personally, that were responsible for ensuring the high academic standards for which those institutions were known.
In all seriousness – stirred by the beauty of his surroundings, the prestige of his host, and the sweetly mellowing effects of the sake – Hollis had even waxed grandiloquently about his intentions to rejoin the world of academia, perhaps sitting on the Board of Regents of his old alma mater, simply out of the enduring sense of the importance of educating the next generation of Ohioans. It was all about giving back, he had explained. It was all a matter of personal honor.
And Akahito had found this to be an honorable and wise intention. Because he was also a father. And he too had a daughter. Suki.
Nooo, Mr. Hahriss. No daughter. Fukima is daughter. Suki is the mothel. Suki is the mothel!
By which, Izume meant that Suki Yoshida was a fiction. She did not exist other than as a name on a list of wind-blown blossoms in need of financial assistance. The assistance intended to educate and support some scrubby-cheeked Okinawan with dreams of world peace attending NYU, was actually purchasing the silence of the mother, a young woman who must have looked about as Okinawan as Marilyn Monroe.
Not attempting to hide her disgust, Izume had recalled the enthusiasm with which Akahito had recounted the letters of gratitude he had received from Suki whenever guests to the house would see her picture on the wall and, thinking she was one of two daughters, asked about her. He would correct them. Suki was not his daughter, but she was like his daughter. He thought of her as a daughter.
Izume had never seen the letters, of course. They were always conveniently at the office, since that was the address to which they had been sent. Fukima, their actual daughter, who was a few years Suki’s junior, rapidly developed a complex about the more attractive, more intelligent, more adventurous girl, Suki, whose photograph her father had hung so prominently on the wall and who seemed to have won her father’s esteem so easily. Fukima eventually took to a wounded brooding and embraced a degree of insolence and disrespect toward her father that was significant in her home. Fukima, who has long since moved away, has never fully repaired her relationship with her father, Akahito.
She awrays feel punish by his high honol. She feel judge.
Despite his inebriation, sprawled across the hotel bed switching the phone from one ear to another, Hollis had had the presence of mind to ask how Akahito had managed to convince the bank that the money was going to NYU rather than where it was actually going. Surely some verifying documents were required. Registrar attestations. Rental agreements. Textbook receipts.
The mothel make up. She have man she have many sex with at the correge NYU. He make believe she is student. He get money. And sex. The mothel have the sex with everybody, Mr. Hahrris. Sex, sex sex. She like witch casting sperrs.
Suki Yoshida turned out to be quite the dedicated student, graduating from NYU with distinction and enrolling almost immediately in an extended graduate program in diplomatic studies. With that intensification of academic effort, of course, came a certain intensification of expense. Her rent doubled. The book and educational material expenses tripled. But a blossom needs what a blossom needs, and the Hyakugo Bank of Japan would not dare let any of its blossoms wither. It was a matter of honor.
The bank did, however, eventually close the sponsorship program to new participants so that the program could be allowed to die a quiet and graceful death without having to cut anybody off. Partly this was because the costs of foreign sponsorship were proving to be far more expensive than anticipated. And partly it was because the bank had surfed the wave of pub
lic approval for the program as far as it reasonably could and the program had lost some of its initial marketing sparkle.
And partly it was because the program had begun to encounter the headwinds of a sentiment that perhaps the bank should be doing more to support worthy causes closer to home. After all, there were blossoms with the good and patriotic sense not to get airborne in the first place. More specifically, the officers, directors and management employees of the bank began to think that it might be a great idea if the costs of educating their own children might be defrayed before the costs of educating people who, while Japanese born, were far more likely to become the citizens of other countries.
Izume had explained that, not so coincidentally, Akahito had announced Suki Yoshida’s sudden death before she was supposed to have completed her graduate studies. She was flying in a small commuter plane to visit a friend in New Hampshire and, for reasons Akahito did not know, the engines seized. He also did not know how many other people died, on the plane or on the ground. Or where exactly the crash occurred. Or the airline.
Apparently grief stricken, in his strong and silent way, Akahito kept to himself for days. When he reemerged, he unceremoniously removed her photograph from the wall and placed it in a box in the bottom of a closet. He seemed to come to grips with the faux tragedy soon enough, rebounding back into the world of high finance, but he remained full of remorse that Izume had never been able to actually meet Suki. As the date of Suki’s graduation loomed, such a meeting had been Izume’s increasing expectation. She and Akahito spoke of it often. Suki’s return to Okinawa, with a special trip to Tokyo to visit her devoted sponsor and meet his family, had been in the early planning stages.
In retrospect, Izume suspects that the mother actually did die, although probably not in a plane crash, or that she was arrested for some crime and was sent to prison, thereby eliminating any further concern that she could destroy Akahito’s reputation as an honorable man, dutiful husband and promising new bank president. Somehow, some way, the threat had been neutralized.
Several years passed. Akahito relaxed into his new presidency. Izume continued on at his side as ever before, oblivious to his secret, hiring landscapers and builders to completely remake the lotus garden without objection from her husband, who wanted in life only what she wanted. Fukima resumed her rightful place as an only daughter, albeit too late to correct the trajectory of her relationship with her father.
