At the start of a slow song—Dinah Shore’s “He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings”—I carried through with my plan. I walked over to where she was seated. Ken was hundreds of miles away, so I knew that there would be no competition.
“May I have this dance?” I asked. It was a little formal, but at least it was polite.
Lucy smiled up at me and then stood from her chair.
We stood like that for a few seconds until I realized that I needed to get the two of us out onto the dance floor. I stepped back a couple of steps, not taking my eyes off of her. I was aware that my chest was moving, taken over by a force far greater than anything I had ever felt before. I hoped Lucy couldn’t hear my pounding heart.
Still smiling, she followed me. Gently, she rested one hand on my back and reached for my other hand. The top of her head was just a few inches under my eyes. I slipped my arm around her waist and tried not to grip her hand too tightly.
As we slowly swayed to the music, my first thought was how nice this was. I was dancing with Lucy Yokota at last! I tried to breathe normally, tried to move as I had practiced in my jail cell, tried to concentrate on my feet and not tripping. I was dancing with Lucy. Yet as the music continued, it seemed to deliver the truth. And the truth was there, unavoidable. I knew. She was not mine. I could feel her thoughts, falling against my chest, all of them like tiny daggers tormenting me because none of them were about me; they were all about my brother.
The day my mother died was the worst day of my life.
The next worst day was when Lucy left camp. She did not say good-bye.
Days before she left, I was peeling potatoes in the mess hall.
The project director asked if I knew of any good recipes for cucumber chutney. “We have so many cucumbers,” he said. “The men and women working in the fields must be using some good fertilizer on those vines. We have more cucumbers than any local farm around here.”
I couldn’t come up with a recipe. I wasn’t sure I even knew what chutney was.
There was a rattle at the back door. I looked up from the mound of potatoes to see Lucy.
I asked the director if I could step outside for a moment. “It won’t be long.”
He gave me permission and I asked Lucy to follow me behind the mess hall so that we could talk in private.
But she was too eager to follow. “I’m leaving,” she said. “I got my papers to leave tomorrow.”
“You’re doing what?”
“I’m going to Manhattan.”
“So soon?”
“I told you that it was going to happen, Nobu.”
I felt betrayed, angry, and a dozen other emotions that I could not name. “Don’t speak to me again. Ever.”
“What?”
“Just go. But don’t come back crying. Or defeated. It’s a tough world out there.” I didn’t know why I said that or where I’d heard the expression, but I thought it sounded good.
She bit her lip, then took a little breath. “If that’s how you want it to be, Nathan.” And without another word, she turned and walked toward the rows of barracks, Heart Mountain before her.
I watched her go.
She didn’t look back.
The next day she was gone.
Ken had left to go fight for our country. Papa had been taken from us as had Mama. Aunt Kazuko said we could go elsewhere if we had an elsewhere to go. “We stay here at Heart Mountain,” she said as she nibbled on a raisin cookie. “We stay because we have no one to take us in, and I know I can’t sing to make a career.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. With Ken gone, Lucy was supposed to be interested in me. She was supposed to want to sit under the moon with me beside her.
That night, as the moon refused to slip out from behind the clouds, Tom and I went to the washroom to brush our teeth and fill a bucket with water.
As he squeezed toothpaste onto the bristles of his toothbrush, Tom said, “I am glad you are still here, Nathan.”
What did he think? A spaceship would come whisk me away with the evening wind?
I should be so lucky.
Chapter Twenty
On nights when I wasn’t scheduled to work in the mess hall, I got to sit with the others on our block and eat with my family and friends. Otherwise, I usually had to wait till after everyone was served to eat my dinner.
This particular night was still warm; breezes blew into the mess hall windows while we ate. Emi sat next to my aunt in a regular chair. Tom and I sat across from them. Charles, his parents, and his two sisters—twins with identical haircuts and rosy cheeks like Charles’—joined us. Aunt Kazuko was saying how nice it was that Emi could sit at the table, albeit on a thick dictionary, by herself. This freed up my aunt from having to hold her in her lap during mealtimes.
It was a September night, but not just an ordinary one. It was an anniversary; it had been a year since we’d arrived in camp. I was thinking about the long train ride we had taken from Santa Anita to Wyoming and how Mama had felt sick for the majority of the ride. We had tried to make her comfortable and even rubbed her swollen feet. I had wished that she wasn’t pregnant, that she could be like the rest of us, not encumbered by her shortness of breath and bouts of weakness. If only I had gotten her more water when she complained of thirst, I thought. If only I had given her a pillow or ginger root or—
“Mekley’s gone,” a boy from a nearby table said through a mouthful of carrots.
I dismissed my thoughts and paid attention.
“He’s not here anymore,” said another boy at the adjacent table where he sat with his parents and siblings. “He’s gone. Make sure that Nathan knows.”
Charles poked me. “Did you hear? Mekley’s gone.”
No wonder I hadn’t seen him in a while. “Maybe he got fired?” I said. And, oh, I was so guilty of hoping that this was the case.
“Can the army fire you?” asked Tom.
I didn’t want to gloat. But maybe the truth had caught up to him. Perhaps the army realized he was a thief and had discharged him. I ate my carrots, chicken, and rice with a sense that justice had been done.
“What happened to Mekley?” I leaned over the table and looked at Charles.
Charles seemed to know everything. Perhaps it was because he wore glasses. “Mekley was transferred overseas,” he said.
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Yep, he’s now fighting the real Japs. You should be happy.”
Overcome with horror I said, “Don’t use that word.”
“Happy?” Charles looked confused.
“No, that other one.”
“What word?”
“You know.” I couldn’t repeat it. Saying it was as bad as breaking one of the Ten Commandments and taking the Lord’s name in vain. “Just don’t. They are Japanese.”
“But they are Japs. They’re our enemies.”
Anger boiled through my veins. “No, they are where we are from.”
“I’m not from Japan. I’ve never even been there.”
“Our ancestors, Charles. Some of us still have family over there.”
“But we aren’t them.”
I let it go. My aunt once told me that I needed to let some things go. Mr. Kubo told me that bitterness is one of the worst emotions. I ate the rest of my dinner in silence.
As I sat on the steps in front of our barracks that night under a crescent moon, the toad in the crate next to my feet, I was glad that Mekley was gone. He was the only one that I was glad to be rid of. I would never have to see his smirking face again.
On weekends, the men sat around playing chess and listening to the radio. They smoked cigarettes sent to them from friends. They talked and argued. But mostly, they hoped that this wretched war would end.
I did, too. We were nearing our third year at Heart Mountain and I was beginning to believe that this was going to be our permanent home.
“The war is going to end soon,” said Mr. Kubo as he read our Heart Mountain newspaper, the Sentinel
. “The editorial here by Fukuyamasan says he feels it will be only a matter of months.”
“How does he know?” I asked, trying to avoid eye contact with the paper. Nearly two years ago, Mr. Fukuyama had written a non-flattering piece about me and the watch, and since then the camp paper gave me indigestion.
“He’s a history buff,” said Mr. Kubo. “Have you seen his library of books? Since he’s been here, he’s written a manuscript on the Battle at Gettysburg and a biography on Robert E. Lee.”
I didn’t care about Mr. Fukuyama’s accomplishments. “Will we be allowed to return to California?” I asked.
He paused, looked up from the paper and gave me a pensive look. “I think so.”
“Will you return?”
“I might go east.”
And then it happened. Three months later, it was announced that the United States had bombed Hiroshima. That threw me into a panic, and I didn’t want to eat for a few days. I feared for my aunts, uncles and cousins—all on Papa’s side. A few had come over to California with him and his parents in 1919, and I knew that his three sisters had later returned to Hiroshima to get married. Had Papa heard the news? Who was comforting him as he worried about his kin?
“Wow, an atomic bomb. Wonder how they got it inside the plane?” Tom pondered aloud as he sat on his rock.
“It destroyed the city,” I said. “Innocent people died, people like you and me.”
But Tom didn’t let the weight of my words make him remorseful. With a smile, he grabbed his pen and started to scribble in his notebook. Now, at age thirteen, his stories were far superior to those he had written when we first arrived in Wyoming, but they were still about aliens.
Three days later, Nagasaki was bombed and then we heard the inevitable news: Japan had surrendered.
There was a different feel to the camp then. Had our nearby mountain been a soldier, he would have saluted. A few puffs of clouds accumulated over the mountain’s flat peak, clouds that, when you used your imagination, looked like they could be victory confetti.
I left Tom to his creations and walked down our block of barracks to where men were engaged in chess.
“The war is over, but we will never be the same,” said Mr. Kubo as he moved a knight across the chess board. He and Lucy’s father were in the midst of a game, tea cups at their elbows.
“We have lost so much,” said Mr. Yokota, gripping the edge of the table so that his tea cup rattled. In a voice that sounded more like it belonged to a child than to a grown man, he said, “We have lost too much.”
The next big announcement was that we were free to leave camp. All of us. We could head back to California, pick up the pieces, make a living, and a life.
“Where are you going?” I asked Mr. Kubo when I found him seated outside his unit’s door on the porch he had made. Today he was seated in one of the two chairs he’d carved, one was for his wife, and one was for him.
“We plan to go out east.”
“East?”
“Yes.” He lit his pipe. “I have a friend in Durham, North Carolina.”
“Is that near New York?”
He laughed. “South. Way south.”
Perhaps my geography still wasn’t the best. My teachers had let me know over the years that I needed to spend more time with world maps.
“Who is your friend?”
“His name is Shorty Olson. He works at Lucky Strikes.”
“He makes cigarettes?” I’d never thought about actual factories that produced those items Papa liked to smoke after his bath on a Saturday night.
“Yes, he does. Once I can convince Mrs. Kubo to head east with me, we are going, Nathan.”
“I wish you both the best. I hope your wife will like North Carolina.”
“Thank you. How about you?”
I had had lots of time to think about the future when I was in jail. But I reminded myself that I trusted no one now. “Oh, yes, I have some plans.” When Mr. Kubo looked at me with an apprehensive expression, I said, “When we get back to San Jose, I think Aunt Kazuko should give English lessons.”
I was glad to see Mr. Kubo laugh. I was afraid he might think I was being rude or unkind, but I guess he could see through my teasing and knew my heart. My aunt was one of the best advocates I had. If I weren’t careful I just might let on that, deep down, I adored her.
Well, almost.
PART II
San Jose, California
Chapter Twenty-one
Six months after our return, San Jose was balmy, full of sunshine, and well-manicured flower gardens. Yet it was not the same hometown that we’d left three years ago. It was true when they said that war changes people and places. It was true that life never fully gets back to the way it once was.
Papa’s old fish market he’d rented was now a Chinese restaurant called Golden Pagoda, and a neon sign with the “G” burned out flashed against the glass in the window—olden Pagoda. Once the interior held bass, mackerel, and other catches from the Bay of San Francisco. Now it belonged to a Chinese woman who had married an Italian. Hadn’t we been at war with the Italians, too? Yet it seemed either people forgot, didn’t care, or had decided that the Italians here in this country were fine folk after all.
This was not the case for us. If you walked further south down Eleventh Street, the windows in the shops held signs that read: No Japs. No work for Japs! No Japs Wanted! Along with the written words, verbal words of hatred were spoken in many of the streets. It wasn’t just the painted slogans on the sides of buildings and boarded up houses—homes once occupied by Issei— it was the attitudes and actions of people that made me queasy.
We were not the enemy, and yet we looked like the enemy.
True, this was not the San Jose from years ago when I’d been a boy in school. People looked at me differently now. I overheard conversations while I waited in local banks to see about getting a loan to start our new venture.
“I see the Japs are back.”
“I wish those slanted-eyed yellow bellies would leave again.”
On my way to the bakery to get a chocolate éclair for Aunt Kazuko and a few cookies for Emi and Tom, I saw a familiar face. “Anna,” I called out to a girl who was looking into a clothing shop’s glass showcase.
Turning toward me, she smiled.
Yet the closer I got to her, the more confused she looked. Her smile disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.
“How have you been?” I faced her on the sidewalk.
“All right.” Nervously, she backed away from me.
“Are you okay? How have you been?” Perhaps she had lost someone in the war. I knew that hundreds of families had been given the horrible news that one of their sons had died in combat. Even I had feared that we would get that telegram from Western Union announcing the worst about Ken.
When Anna’s look of silent perplexity continued, I wondered if it was because she’d forgotten who I was. To help her out, I said, “I’m Nathan. Nathan Mori, remember?”
“I have to hurry.”
“Can’t dilly-dally, huh?” I smiled at my own choice of words. Aunt Kazuko seemed to have an effect on me no matter where I went.
“I have to go.”
I stood on the corner of East Taylor and Eleventh, unable to move. I thought of how I’d known Anna all through elementary school and middle school. We had sat together at lunch time. Once she shared half of her ham sandwich and a blueberry tart with me when I had forgotten my lunch and had no money to purchase food at the cafeteria. She’d played the flute in the band and I’d told her that she played well, was talented. I complimented her on being friendly, amazed at how everybody liked her and how nice that must feel.
Moments ago she hadn’t answered my questions. She’d just wanted to get away from me. The way she’d looked at me was as though my face were covered in manure.
Anger seeped through my veins as I picked up my pace. I took a left on Taylor and paused at the butcher’s shop. I peered into the window to g
et a look at my face. There was nothing on it—no stain, no crumbs from toast around my mouth. I was an American, American born. In camp, we had pledged allegiance to one flag, and to one flag only.
I thought of Mr. Kubo who said that he was going east. Was life better for Americans who had black hair and dark eyes in the eastern part of the country?
In a dress shop, next to a “Welcome Home Soldiers” sign, was a poster board with the words to the popular song: “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me till I come marching home.”
Now those words were painful to read, taking me back to a girl with a voice I had not heard for over two years. I stood on the side of the street as a few cars whizzed past and I wished for yesterday.
When I returned to our tiny apartment near Columbus Park, I was empty-handed.
“What?” said my aunt as she raised her head from a paperback with a cover of a woman gazing at a man. She took off her reading glasses, and cried, “Where are the chocolate sweets?”
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“You get our hopes up and you crush. You just crush.” She hit the book against her chair.
I had no response for her. I just kept silent.
We had lived in a house in Japantown on Seventh Street and now someone else lived in it. Some other family—Caucasian—with a white poodle and two children with bicycles. Each time I walked past that tan-colored home with the palm tree in the front lawn, it was as though my heart had been removed from my body and hung out to drip dry.
Walking near it brought the past back in full swing. In April of 1942 we had been told to pack up our belongings and place them in the middle of the living room. They would be sent to us, depending on where we were assigned to go. Our refrigerator, washing machine, toaster, and blender had to be sold immediately, and we got only half of what they were worth.
“What is this Executive Order 9066?” my aunt had asked, as she scurried around the kitchen, tossing containers of green tea and other personal items into a box. “Why do they say all people of Japanese ancestry must leave the west coast? We have done nothing.” We were told to pack one suitcase each. I thought of Papa who months earlier had not been allowed to pack a thing. Had it been that moment when men who claimed to be FBI carted him off that he had entered his dismal state?
Under the Silk Hibiscus Page 12
