The Gardens of Kyoto

by Kate Walbert

  “I bet they did,” I said. Even then I knew I sounded stupid. I wanted to say something important, something that might match his discovery. But all I could think of was the dark, and the way the candlelight made us long shadows. I pulled my legs beneath me, still cold, and pretended to read the numbers. After a while, aware of his inattention, I looked up. He was bent over, holding the needle close to the candlelight, sewing, it appeared, the hem of his pant leg with a concentration I had only witnessed in his reading.

  I leaned in to see. RB, he had embroidered, and now he stitched the straight tail of the P.

  He startled. I’m not sure we had ever been that close to one another, eye-to-eye, my breath his breath. The candlelight made us look much older than we were, eternal, somehow: stand-ins for gods. “I thought I’d take him along,” he said, by way of explanation.

  • • •

  We remained in the slaves’ hiding place until supper, sitting knee-to-knee, trying to count the numbers. We gave up. Randall read some advertisement for Doctor something-or-other’s cure-all, which worked on pigs and people, and we laughed, then he took the stub of a pencil he always kept knotted in his shoelaces and wrote three numbers across the advertisement—5, 23, 1927—the date and year of his birth. He stared at the numbers a minute, and then drew a dash after them, in the way you sometimes see in books after an author’s name and birthdate, the dash like the scythe of the Grim Reaper.

  “Don’t,” I said, licking my finger and reaching to erase the line. I may have smeared it a bit, I don’t know. At this point Randall grabbed my wrist, surprising me with the strength in those fingers. It was the most wonderful of gestures. He brought my hand to his cheek and kissed my palm, no doubt filthy from crawling around on that floor. He seemed not to care. He kept his lips there for a very long time, and I, as terrified to pull away as I was to allow him to continue, held my breath, listening to my own heart beat stronger.

  • • •

  There was one other after that. Visit, I mean. The morning Randall came through Philadelphia on his way out. He was going to ride the Union Pacific, in those days a tunnel on wheels chock-full of soldiers stretching from one end of the country to the other—some heading east to Europe, others heading west to the Pacific. Your grandmother would tell me stories of worse times, during the early days of the Depression, when she said that same train took children from families who could no longer feed them. She said she remembered a black-haired boy walking by their farmhouse, stopping with his parents for a drink of water. They were on their way to the train, the orphan train, they called it, sending the boy east, where someone from an agency would pick him up and find him a new place to live. She said it was a terrible thing to see, far worse than boys in bright uniforms heading out to save the world from disaster. She described children in trains, sitting high on their cardboard suitcases to get a view out the window, their eyes big as quarters, their pockets weighted down with nothing but the few treasures their parents had to give them—first curls, nickels, a shark tooth, ribbons—things they no doubt lost along the way. That, she’d say the few times I tried talking to her of Randall, is the worst thing of all. Children given up for good.

  But I don’t know. I remember the look of Randall stepping off the train. His big, drab coat, his leather shoes polished to a gleam shiny as those fingernails. It was a terrible sight, I can tell you. Mother and I had driven to meet him at the station. I believe it was the only time I ever saw him when I wasn’t in an Easter dress. You would have laughed. I wore a pink wool skirt and a pink cashmere button-down, my initials embroidered on the heart. A gift from Rita. I was so proud of those clothes, and the lipstick, Mother’s shade, that I’d dab with a perfumed handkerchief I kept in my coat pocket.

  But the look of Randall stepping off the train. He had grown that year even taller, and we could see his thin, worried face above the pack of other soldiers. The morning was blustery, and it felt like there might be snow. Other girls were on the platform slapping their hands together, standing with brothers, boyfriends. We were a collection of women and boys. Mother stepped forward a bit and called out to him, and Randall turned and smiled and rushed over to us, his hand extended.

  But that was for Mother. When I went to shake it, he pulled me into a hug. He wore the drab, regulation wool coat, as I have said, and a scarf, red, knotted at his neck, and I tasted that scarf and smelled the cold, and the lilac water, and the tobacco smoke all at once.

  “Look at you,” he said, and squeezed me tighter.

  Mother knew of a diner nearby, and we went, though we had to stand some time waiting for a table, the room swamped with boys in uniform. I became aware of Randall watching me, though I pretended not to notice. I had come in to the age of boys finding me pretty, and I felt always as if I walked on a stage, lighted to an audience somewhere out in the dark. Mother chattered, clearly nervous in that big room with all those soldiers, waiters racing to and fro, splashing coffee on the black-and-white linoleum floor, wiping their foreheads with the dishrags that hung from their waists, writing checks, shouting orders to the cooks. Yet all the while I felt Randall’s gaze, as if he needed to tell me something, and that all I had to do was turn to him to find the clue.

  But there wasn’t much time. Too soon that feeling of leaving descended upon the place. Soldiers scraped back their chairs, stood in line to pay their checks. Everyone had the same train to catch. Mother smoothed her skirt out and said she believed we should be heading back ourselves. Then she excused herself, saying she’d rather use the ladies’ room there than at the train station.

  Randall and I watched her weave her way around the other tables, some empty, others full. We were, quite suddenly, alone.

  Have I told you he was handsome? I didn’t know him well, but he had red hair, red as mine, and a kind, thin face. He might have had the most beautiful thin face I have ever seen. I should have told him that then, but I was too shy. This is what I’ve been thinking about: maybe he wasn’t waiting to tell me anything, but waiting to hear something from me.

  I may have taken another sip of coffee, then. I know I did anything not to have to look at him directly.

  “On the train up I sat next to a guy from Louisville,” he finally said. “His name was Hog Phelps.”

  “Hog?” I said.

  “Said he wasn’t the only Hog in his family, said he was from a long line of Hogs.”

  I looked at Randall and he shrugged. Then he laughed and I did, too. It seemed like such a funny thing to say.

  • • •

  I received only one letter from Randall after that. It was written the day before he sailed for the Far East, mailed from San Francisco. I remember that the stamp on the envelope was a common one from that time—Teddy Roosevelt leading his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill—and that Randall had drawn a bubble of speech coming from his mouth that said, “Carry on!” I opened the letter with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. I was too young and too stupid to understand what Randall was about to do. I imagined his thoughts had been solely of me, that the letter would be filled with love sonnets, that it would gush with the same romantic pablum I devoured from those movie star magazines. Instead, it described San Francisco—the fog that rolled in early afternoons across the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge and how the barking sea lions could be heard from so many streets, and the vistas that he discovered, as if painted solely for him, on the long solitary walks he took daily through the city. He wrote how he seemed to have lost interest in books, that he no longer had the patience. There was no time, he wrote, to sit. He wanted to walk, to never stop walking. If he could, he would walk all the way to Japan by way of China. Hell, he wrote (and I remember the look of that word, how Randall seemed to be trying out a different, fiercer Randall), when I’m finished with this I’m going to walk around the entire world.

  I tried to picture him writing it, sitting at a large metal desk in the middle of a barracks, like something I might have seen in Life. I pictured him stooped ov
er, with a reader’s concentration, digging the pen into the regulation paper in the way he would have, if we were talking face-to-face, stressed a word. I saw him in civilian clothes, in the dress pants he wore every Easter. The same ones, as far as I could tell—a light gray wool, each year hitched up a little higher and now, leg crossed across one knee, entirely ill-fitting, the RBP far above the ankle. He might have, from time to time, put the pen down and leaned back to think of a particular description, fingering those initials he had stitched in red. It was clear to me even then that he had worked on the letter like a boy who wants to be a writer. Certain words broke his true voice, were tried on, tested for fit. They were a hat too big for him—the Randall I knew interrupted again and again by the Randall Randall might have become. The Hell, as I have mentioned. A line from some dead poet—I would think of a thousand things, lovely and durable, and taste them slowly—I had heard him recite in his room a hundred times, and other words I recognized as words still left to learn. It seemed he wanted to cram everything in.

  Still, it is a beautiful letter. I have saved it for years. It finds its way into my hands at the oddest times, and when it does I always hold it for a while. Teddy shouts Carry on!, and I curse him. All of them. Then I pull out the paper, one creased sheath, and unfold it as slowly as I would a gift I’d never opened. My fear is that somehow in my absence, his words have come undone, been shaken loose, rearranged; the letters shuffled into indecipherable forms.

  But there! My name in salutation, the sweetness of the attendant Dear. I’m again as I was, as he may have pictured me when— writing at that desk beneath the window, the metal newly polished, the air fresh, eucalyptus-scented, the sea lions barking—he signed Love, Randall, and underlined it with a flourish as elegant as a bow.

  2

  I heard a story once, told on a radio program by a Japanese soldier who had participated in the battle for Iwo Jima. It must have been an anniversary, or some significant day. I don’t know. I happened upon it by chance.

  The soldier was talking about a group of Japanese kindergarten children from the other side of the island, Iwo Jima, who had been taken, weeks before the invasion, to view a cave known to be the breeding place of a particular blue-winged butterfly.

  The butterfly mated at a certain time of year and always chose this part of the island, this cave, in which to do so, the soldier said. The children had become very interested in these butterflies due to a certain teacher who had apparently brought a book on the subject into his class. The students had read about butterflies all year. Of course, the teacher knew that this was wartime, and in wartime nothing is secure, but he had checked the necessary persons and been given the clearances to gather his kindergarten class at dawn that morning and herd them into a boat.

  A picnic was planned and the children carried their bento boxes close to them and walked in straight and even lines when instructed and did not bicker in the way that all children, Japanese, American, what have you, will bicker. They were happy to have a trip planned and a place to go. I tell it this way because this is the way I remember the Japanese soldier telling it.

  Once on shore, he said, the children ran around the rocks before gathering at their teacher’s command. The teacher told them not to bother the Japanese soldiers who were trying to do their job. He told them to follow him and stay in a straight line. He told them to keep quiet. Then he led the way down the long path that wound around the shore edge through the caves and stony underpasses.

  They walked in a deep fog and the path proved difficult. The teacher stopped from time to time to wipe his glasses and to let the children rest. Their excitement flagged. It was hot on the island, and for as much as they wanted to see the blue butterflies they also wanted to sit on the ground and eat their lunch and return home; they were children, after all. But at last they reached the butterfly cave, marked, as the teacher had read it would be, with a small pyramid of stones. The teacher turned and announced the end of their journey with some fanfare as the children applauded.

  The teacher entered the cave, slowly, carefully, aware that the sound of his own heart pounding competed with what he barely discerned as the rush of tiny wings. It was there, though, like a burst of water, or some invisible woman catching her breath. He lit the lantern he carried and held it high, and the children stood behind him at the mouth of the cave, waiting to be told what to do next.

  The blue he had not imagined! He had seen the butterflies in books and once in a glass jar in his professor’s office, but never like this, so close. The teacher took off his glasses and polished them again. He blinked a few times. The blue reminded him of the blue used to slick the cue in billiards. Not a dark, water blue, but a blue that could hold light.

  The butterflies pressed against the walls of the stone cave, forming a pattern of sorts with their wings, trembling wings, the whole cave rumbling as if a train passed over them, a great rumbling roar, and then the teacher realized that wings alone could not make such a horrible sound, and that something, something terrible, was happening above them. He called out to the children to come inside fast and to squat with their heads between their legs and their arms crossed over their necks as they had been instructed in school for air raids. The children gathered around their teacher as close as they could, their bento boxes discarded at the cave mouth; above them the blue butterflies fell from the cave walls and batted their wings in ways ungraceful.

  This is how the Japanese soldier put it: In ways ungraceful.

  He found them there soon after the onslaught had begun, the relentless bombing before the invasion. He was not afraid to admit it now, he said, but he himself had been looking for a place to hide and had stumbled into the cave where they squatted, a mother hen and so many chicks. The teacher and the children were very brave, he said, and his voice hitched up a bit. They promised him they would not move and would stay in the cave though the noise would be unbearable until he returned for them. But the soldier had been wounded soon after and carried off the island in a boat bound elsewhere with men dying. He had been knocked unconscious, he said. By the time he regained himself the battle had been lost and no one, it seems, had seen the teacher or his children.

  This is an odd story, he then said, of which I feel responsible my entire life. What secrets men keep, I thought at the end of it. And for an instant, I forgave them.

  3

  Not so long after we received Great-Uncle Sterling’s letter, a package came in the mail addressed in the same slanting, angry hand. Rita, as I have told you, was in California, and we’d receive packages from her from time to time. I’m so bored, she’d write, the letters looping and curling around the page, all I can do is sew these gosh darned things. The things of which she spoke were usually monogrammed skirts, or vests. She made Daddy a light jacket once, his name stitched in purple thread on the collar. It was much too fancy for Daddy, though I remember he wore it that Thanksgiving, the last time Rita came home after Roger had returned from Europe and the two were reassigned to Texas. That was a terrible visit, of which I’ll tell you more later, the point is, it was clear to Betty and me, slamming through the kitchen door that afternoon and seeing the package sitting on the kitchen table, that this was not something from Rita, nor one of Mother’s mail-order dresses.

  I held the package up to the light and said the writing looked familiar, though at the time I didn’t recognize it.

  We knew better than to open the package before Mother came home from the factory. We were latchkey children, but that didn’t mean we were undisciplined, as you might gather from latchkey children now. Quite truthfully, we were probably better behaved. We had certain parameters; certain rules we knew to follow. One being that we knew we had to wait for Mother to come home before opening anything addressed to her, and so we did, sitting at the kitchen table muddling over our homework, looking up, from time to time, at the clock above the stove, or, from time to time, feeling the package, again, to guess.

  Mother came home at five o�
��clock and usually headed straight up the stairs to her bath, but that day she indulged us and came in. She was a handsome woman, not pretty in the way women are today, but handsome in the way they were then, during wartime. She had black hair she curled in the style that was popular, and pale brown eyes that watered. She carried a handkerchief and would often sniff and say, my, my, my and wipe her eyes. We always tried to get her laughing so hard that her watering eyes looked like crying, though the few times I ever saw her cry were terrifying.

  She frowned when she saw the handwriting and then tore open the package. Inside, she found another package, one wrapped in thinner, brown paper. A card had dropped to the floor and she retrieved and read it quickly.

  This is more for you, actually, she said at last to me. Here, she said, handing me the card.

  I read it quickly. It said that Randall had always spoken a great deal about me. It said that Randall had had few friends. This is probably my doing, given the circumstances, Patricia, he wrote. And I remember how odd it felt to read my mother’s full name, as if I had somehow spied her as a girl my age, flirting with my father or sitting on a fence post, her legs swinging.

  It said that Randall had left this package behind in Maryland, and that he had requested it be sent to me in the event of the unmentionable. It said that he had respected Randall’s wishes and had not opened the package, nor would he ask that the contents be shown to him. He would, however, like to see us again, like to see me, again, because he believed we might be a comfort to him at this hour. He had decided to leave the old house and would return to his rooms in Baltimore. There would be an estate sale at the end of the month. I would appreciate the company, he wrote. It will not be an easy day for me. Then he had signed it, your loving uncle, Sterling J. Jewell.

  I did not realize that Mother and Betty were waiting for me to unwrap the package. I read the card again, then folded it as it had been folded. Mother had her handkerchief to her eyes and Betty drummed the table. I suppose, in hindsight, I should have examined the package more carefully—it was, after all, a package that had been prepared for me, the string pulled taut and knotted with me in mind—because I could not now tell you what kind of string it was, butcher’s twine or the finer white string we used to use for kites. No matter. I tore the string off and unfolded the sheaves of paper and there, bundled together in a handkerchief I did not recognize, were several of our familiar objects. I first picked up his extra pair of reading glasses, spectacles, he called them, with the cracked left lens. They were dusty, of course. They had come from that house, that room. I pictured the last place I had seen them: folded, stems down, in the first shelf of the book shelf near the window seat. He had lost the case, he said, and cracked them who knows how. I remembered how once he had put them on and pretended they were bifocals. I fingered the stems, brass, and so delicate I could not imagine the thin wire frames holding steady such thick glass. No wonder the crack, I thought, and slipped them in my pocket.