Chris said, “Macy, if I’d known . . .”
“Don’t you apologize. You’re the only one who told me the truth. Everybody else lied.”
Aunt Ida told Chris quietly, “Leave her to us, dear. She’ll get through this. She has a strong spirit.”
“Go,” Macy told him. When he left, glancing back, she called after him in silence, Stay.
“Strong and sensible,” Uncle Emory said. “Macy, when the government men took Yoshio Toyama away, I said, ‘Great! Get that Jap fellow out of here.’ It took you to bring back memories, to remind me of the good man he is.”
Macy heard what he was saying, that Mr. Toyama had nothing to do with the war but was blamed because he was Japanese. Like Betsy Oshima and her family at home.
Like Miss Tokyo.
But the Japanese had torpedoed Nick. And killed Hap. A battle raged inside her. She wanted to listen to reason, but she kept picturing Nick’s ship, like one they showed in the movie theaters just as a torpedo hit.
“You should burn those tools marked with Japanese writing,” she said, reluctant to let go of the fury that had driven her across the street with the doll.
“No, I’m not going to burn them,” Uncle Emory said. “Your anger with the doll is like a mirror to the way I’ve been seeing the world around me and just as narrow-sighted. I’m going to take special care of those tools. If Yoshio comes back, I’ll see that his tools are all waiting in top-notch condition.”
“Will you give it a week, dear,” Aunt Ida asked Macy, “before you do something that can’t be undone?”
“I’ll tell you what,” Uncle Emory said when Macy hesitated. “If you still want that doll destroyed by the end of school on Monday, a week from tomorrow, I’ll light the bonfire.”
“Emory!” Aunt Ida exclaimed.
Macy saw him wink and knew he was telling Aunt Ida, Macy will change her mind by the end of the week. She wouldn’t, though. The Japs were the enemy, and the enemy had to pay for Hap and Nick. Miss Tokyo was the only one close enough to punish.
She looked at Uncle Emory. “A week. Then a bonfire. A big one.”
All through that long week, Miss Tokyo stood near Uncle Emory’s shortwave radio in the Farrells’ front room. Macy felt the doll watching as she ate her puffed rice, but she refused to imagine the doll’s voice in her head.
She took out her journal, but couldn’t write in it and put it back.
Uncle Emory began discussing the news with Miss Tokyo. “Your side took a beating at Midway back in June,” he told the doll. “Still think you can win this war?”
“She doesn’t know about the war,” Macy said.
“What, doesn’t she listen to the broadcasts?”
“He’s teasing, dear,” Aunt Ida warned. “Pay him no mind.”
“Well, I think that doll’s smirking,” Uncle Emory said. “She’s not convinced yet. Maybe I should turn up the sound.”
“She can’t smirk,” Macy said. “She’s just wood.”
“Hmm, if you say so.” But he turned up the radio anyway. Maybe he wanted to hear it coming in louder.
Macy said in disgust, “She just stands there, dumb and doll-like.”
Aunt Ida’s eyebrows rose. “Well, dear. She is a doll.”
Miss Tokyo was more than a doll, as much as Macy wanted to deny that now. Miss Tokyo had always been more than just a doll, from the day she arrived in this country before Macy was even born. “Papa says she was an ambassador of peace when she came here. When they bombed our ships, I guess her country forgot about that.”
“War’s a lot more complicated than a doll carrying a message,” Uncle Emory said.
Macy dug into her puffed rice. Miss Tokyo wasn’t a symbol of peace anymore. She had become a symbol of the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor. Who made Hap become a hero and die. Who torpedoed Nick’s ship.
It was all too much. She shoved her bowl away and lowered her head to her arms.
“Wars are brutal,” Aunt Ida said quietly. “There’s not a doubt in my mind that women and children in Japan and Germany and Italy are grieving for their losses just as we are.”
“Monday after school,” Macy said, raising her head, refusing to be soothed. “Bonfire. Poof!”
Grief and anger drove her every day. She pushed the rattan buggy through town and collected more tin cans than anyone else, along with fat rendered from meats in people’s kitchens and rubber soles from shoes they didn’t wear anymore.
She bought defense stamps with every penny that came into her hands. If she saw a war poster coming loose from a nail, she made sure to fasten it back, especially the ones that said Loose Lips Might Sink Ships.
Had someone talked at the wrong time, maybe over a shortwave radio, and let the Japanese sub know where Nick’s ship was going to be? She used one of her shoes to pound a loose nail harder into a poster.
She tried not to look at the doll still standing in the Farrells’ front room, but her heart wrenched the day she saw tears on Miss Tokyo’s face. How could a doll cry? She tiptoed closer. The tears were just reflections from raindrops on the window. Macy breathed a sigh of relief. She knew the doll wasn’t real. But sadness lay just below her anger. Even cutting out Christmas decorations for the classroom windows didn’t help. Snowflakes had nothing to do with the way she felt inside.
Linda and Chris stopped walking to and from school with her. She was too distracted to talk with them. She didn’t care. She liked walking alone, and she didn’t need Chris saying he was sorry but she had to find out sometime. Or Linda saying matter-of-factly, like they weren’t talking about Nick, “My father says when the Japs sink a ship, their subs surface and shoot any survivors.”
Macy had walked away, too stricken to say anything. She was vaguely aware of Chris telling Linda she talked too much.
Mr. Oakes walked to the highway with Macy on Thursday, saying he was going up to catch the Greyhound bus to Tillamook and the bookstores. “What do you like to read, Miss Macy? I’ll be happy to pick out a good book for you. Maybe a funny story to bring back that pretty smile?” He hesitated. “Call it an early Christmas present.”
He was being kind, but she didn’t want to read anything. Christmas this year would be just another day. She didn’t want to be distracted from collecting scrap and listening to news and pushing Miss Tokyo’s voice from her head. Even the funniest book couldn’t keep her from remembering her promise to Mama and Hap to keep Miss Tokyo safe.
She tried not to think of Papa’s sorrow. If he had trusted her enough to tell her about Nick’s ship sinking, they could have grieved together. But he didn’t trust her. He had sent her away. So he had to feel bad all by himself. And so did she.
On impulse, she startled Mr. Oakes by hugging him fiercely before turning and running toward school. He might have been the only good friend she had left.
Sunday evening as she set dishes around the table for Aunt Ida, Macy looked over at the doll and remembered standing beside Mama’s chair while Mama talked of the beautiful pictures in the book she held open on her lap. She had loved Japan and its people in a far gentler time. Miss Tokyo and the book of pictures had linked the two countries in Mama’s mind and heart. As they had in Macy’s.
Mama didn’t know that Miss Tokyo’s people would sink Nick’s ship.
“Well.” Uncle Emory broke into her thoughts as he came through the front door. “Tomorrow’s the big day. Shall I start planning a bonfire?”
“Maybe.” Where had that answer come from? A huge hot fire was what she had wanted all week. It was what she wanted for tomorrow. Wasn’t it? She couldn’t look at Miss Tokyo while she thought about raging flames.
Monday might as well have been a school holiday. Macy sat through every class without hearing anything except the thoughts churning noisily through her own head. The doll had to burn. Japanese sailors had torpedoed Nick’s ship. I’ll feel better when I see their doll in flames.
The image made her shiver. Would she feel better? Could she even w
atch? The geography book she was supposed to be studying blurred before her eyes.
After school, Chris surprised her by falling into step with her. “I heard about plans for a bonfire. I want you to know, whatever you decide, that’s okay with me.”
She almost said, You don’t get to choose. But she had snapped at people all week. Nick and Hap wouldn’t approve of the way she had mostly ignored Chris and Linda. Mama would have been disappointed in her, too.
She swallowed her first words and said instead, “Thanks. That means a lot.”
The smell of wood smoke reached them before they passed the last of the trees that lined the road from the highway. When they reached the clearing with their two houses, they saw a big bonfire blazing where Uncle Emory usually burned trash.
“Wow,” Chris said. “I didn’t think he would do that.”
He wasn’t looking at the fire. He was looking at the rattan baby buggy pulled up nearby. Miss Tokyo stood inside, propped up like a prisoner waiting for execution.
Mr. Oakes called from his front porch. Chris started toward his uncle, but Macy didn’t look around. She couldn’t move at all. She simply stood on the gravel road, trying to hate Miss Tokyo, trying not to imagine Mama sitting in her wheeled chair beside the buggy, looking sad.
Flames from the bonfire leaped higher as pitch caught in one of the logs. Macy’s eyes stung from smoke drifting past. The crackle of burning wood sounded louder and louder. How would it sound while the flames burned the doll?
She should say, Go ahead. Throw her on there. But her voice was as frozen as her feet. She couldn’t move or speak.
“Macy?” Uncle Emory asked.
She swallowed hard, wondering what had happened to her voice. The smoke, she decided. It stung her eyes and stopped her voice from working. She should step to the side into clearer air.
Miss Tokyo’s people torpedoed Nick’s ship. She should die for that.
Macy took one step toward the buggy. Then another. She reached for the doll.
Macy!” Chris shouted. “Wait! Uncle Del found a letter. It’s for you . . . from your mother!”
“What?” Her voice unfroze. So did her feet. She spun around as Chris ran to her. “A letter from Mama. How could your uncle have a letter from Mama?”
“It must have been in the doll’s kimono.” Chris held out a yellowing paper folded into a square. “He found it on the closet floor.”
Aunt Ida and Uncle Emory came closer. “All this time,” Aunt Ida marveled. “You’ve been carrying a letter from your mother without knowing it was there.”
Macy held the folded paper, hardly daring to open it. What if they were wrong? What if it was just packaging to keep the kimono straight? She couldn’t stand to have her heart break again.
But Mr. Oakes had said it was a letter. And the paper had a waxy feel, as if Mama had used candle wax to fasten it to the doll beneath her kimono. And there was her name on the front: Macy, in Mama’s pretty handwriting. Suddenly Macy couldn’t wait another moment. She forced herself to open the folds carefully so the old paper didn’t tear.
At the top, she saw her name again. Tears filled her eyes. She blinked, trying to make out Mama’s writing through the blur.
“ ‘Dearest Macy,’ ” she whispered, hearing her mother’s voice as she read. She blinked hard, but her eyes kept filling with tears until she couldn’t see through them.
“Want me to read it to you?” Chris asked.
Should she trust him? Part of her said no, and she rubbed furiously at her eyes with her sleeve. It didn’t help. New tears blurred. She realized that Aunt Ida was waiting for her to decide who should help her read the letter and surprised herself by shoving it toward Chris.
She saw him glance over it before raising his head to look at her. “Your mom thought war was coming. Listen, this is what she says. ‘You found this letter, so you have moved Miss Tokyo. You would not have done that unless she was in danger.’ ”
Macy rubbed her coat sleeve over her eyes again. “She still is.”
“Here’s the part about war coming.” Chris read on as if she hadn’t spoken. “ ‘As I write this . . . the Japanese emperor is attempting to expand his empire. I am afraid he will eventually draw our country into war. I fear for the gentle people of Japan whom I knew as a child and who warmly welcomed your father and me when we traveled there after our marriage.’ ”
Macy said fiercely, “I told you everyone in Japan doesn’t want war. Mama knew that.”
Chris had paused several words back. Had he skipped something? She leaned closer and saw that Mama had actually written, As I write this, my darling . . .
Boys probably didn’t like to read mushy parts.
Almost smiling, she said, “That doesn’t sound like Mama. She always added ‘honey’ or ‘sweetheart’ or ‘my darling.’ ”
Chris scowled. “You can read that part for yourself. Do you want to hear this or not?”
“I want to hear it.”
He watched her for a moment, looking suspicious, before turning back to the letter. “She goes on. ‘Even more . . . Macy . . . I fear for you.’ ”
He’d substituted her name for something sweeter. Macy couldn’t hold back her smile this time. She would learn what Mama had really called her when she read the letter herself.
“ ‘In wartime,’ ” Chris read, “ ‘passions run high. Remember, although you and I pretended to hold conversations with Miss Tokyo, she is only a doll made of wood with oyster-shell paste to make her face and hands look real. As much as I cherished our game, the doll does not think or feel. She cannot be blamed if war breaks out between our countries. Miss Tokyo has never been alive.’ ”
“That’s true, you know,” Chris said. “You’ve been getting yourself into a lot of trouble for a piece of carved wood in a kimono.”
Papa had said pretty much the same thing, that Miss Tokyo was just a doll, but she was so much more than that. Macy wanted to argue, but she knew it wouldn’t change anything.
“Listen to this part,” Chris said. “ ‘I know you will wish to protect Miss Tokyo, and I love you for wanting that. But do not put yourself in danger for the doll. I pray you will take my words to heart. Above all, I wish you safety and happiness always.’ ”
Macy felt Chris look at her as if expecting her to agree about the doll not being important. She couldn’t, because the doll was important. Miss Tokyo represented the people in Japan who wanted to be friends, the people who didn’t want war. People here should know about them. When the war ended, friends on both sides would have a lot of work to do.
Chris held the letter out toward Macy. “Look, she added one of those Japanese poems. She says this about it: ‘Here is a haiku a friend in Japan sent to me years ago. It was written in 1926 and came in a letter from a girl named Lexie, who sent it with a beautiful Friendship Doll called Emily Grace.
“ ‘Emily Grace glows.
Her warm smile carries friendship.
Sunlight after rain.
“ ‘The poem’s belief in happiness following sorrow has comforted me, as I hope it will comfort you. Remember always to watch for sunlight after rain.’ ”
He looked up. “And that’s it.”
Macy leaned nearer to see the closing he hadn’t read: My love forever, Mama.
“Did you hear that, Miss Tokyo?” she asked softly. “Did you hear Mama’s letter?” She leaned into the buggy and pressed her cheek to Miss Tokyo’s smooth black hair. “Mama worried about us,” she said, her voice sounding shaky. “She guessed war would come and she worried.”
Macy stood straighter and tried to think. Mama wanted her to protect the doll. Most of all, Mama wanted her to be careful. Again, she imagined Mama in her wheeled chair beside the buggy, watching the bonfire and looking sad.
“So what’s it to be?” Uncle Emory asked. “The bonfire’s good and hot. Do we throw the doll on?”
A small sound came from Macy. It sounded like “No.”
Tears flooded her eyes
again. She wiped them with her sleeve. “No!” It came out louder this time. She grabbed Miss Tokyo and laid her flat in the buggy so she wouldn’t fall. In her mind, she saw Mama’s gentle smile.
“I know you didn’t start the war, Miss Tokyo. And you didn’t send that sub after Nick’s ship.” Her voice broke at the thought of Nick, but she curled an arm protectively across the doll. “I’m so sorry I said all those mean things about you. Mama loved you. I really love you, too.”
She turned to look at Aunt Ida. “She’s more than a doll. And some little girl posed for her. I just know it. That girl is grown now, and it’s like you said that day. She’s grieving over the war.”
“I’m sure she is.” Aunt Ida stroked Macy’s hair.
“When the soldiers in Japan crushed all those American dolls,” Macy added, “I just know that grown-up girl’s heart broke. Maybe she risked her life to hide one of the dolls. Maybe she saved Emily Grace.”
Aunt Ida said, “Just as you’ve saved Miss Tokyo all this time.”
“If she did save Emily Grace, she had to go against the soldiers.” Macy drew a shaky breath and looked at the big doll with her gentle near-smile. “That was lots more dangerous. All I have to do is say I don’t want Miss Tokyo to burn. And . . .” Her voice got stronger because now she was certain. “And I don’t.”
Mr. Oakes spoke, startling her. She hadn’t noticed him come over. “Hiding one of those dolls from Japanese soldiers would be exciting and dangerous, but finding the truth in your own heart can be even harder.”
“So,” Chris asked, “what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to let in the sunshine.” It was almost funny to see everybody look as if they didn’t understand but wouldn’t risk asking what she meant. Did they think she would change her mind if they did?
Then Chris said, “You mean like the haiku from your mother’s letter. It had that line about sunlight always following rain.”
“We’re not burning the doll?” Uncle Emory asked.
“No.” The word came out strong because she meant it. “Miss Tokyo has to go into storage until the war ends. Maybe she’ll have to stay there for a while after that. But someday she’ll stand in the museum with all her little lamps and tea sets to show everyday life in Japan again. Boys like Hap when he was little can show their friends that the lamp shades are made of real silk.”
Dolls of War Page 17
