by Lee Langley
She led them round the curving paths, past the glowing flower beds, then paused at a small statue:
‘Mr Glover’s wife.’
Whispers among the ladies, expressing astonishment. They stared at the statue, glancing surreptitiously at the living woman who was their guide – Mr Glover had married a Japanese woman! Cho-Cho’s expression remained impassive.
‘And now we will visit a craftsman who does very fine cloisonné work, silver and gold.’
She thanked Henry for the introduction. ‘It was kind of you.’
He shook his head. ‘I was simply being devious – in the Western, not the Japanese way.’
She looked puzzled.
‘It’s a way of altering your perception of me. So that you will perhaps not hate me.’
‘I don’t hate you, Sharpless-san. You are a part of life’s pattern, and I have learned to accept my part in it.’
‘I had hoped I was a friend.’
She smiled and offered no contradiction.
It was then that he suggested, diffidently, that she might address him by his Christian name.
She tried it out, cautiously: ‘Henn-u-lee.’ She frowned. ‘Not an easy name to say.’ She gave a nod. ‘But I will persevere.’
Later, Henry reflected on the law of unintended consequences: if he had not given Cho-Cho the parcel . . . if she had not read the contents . . . but he had and she did and a shift occurred.
She took the neatly wrapped parcel with a bow of thanks.
‘Just some journals, and a book you might find of interest,’ Henry murmured.
She turned a few pages. ‘Ah: the outside world! To take my mind off my empty life?’
She was mocking him, but she accepted the gift, and the next time Henry saw her, the outside world had elbowed its way into her secluded existence.
She greeted him, eager with questions:
‘Have you heard of someone called Ichikawa Fusae?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why have you never told me about her, about what has been happening?’
‘My apologies. I didn’t realise you were interested in the Women’s Suffrage League.’
‘I am a woman.’ A sad shake of the head. ‘Do you know what that means? What it really means?’
Henry felt a sense of unease. ‘Those women are courageous, but possibly foolhardy.’ Unspoken: their actions could prove dangerous – for themselves and for anyone else involved. ‘An inexperienced swimmer should approach the ocean with care. Turbulent waves, strong currents—’
She broke in. ‘Do you recall that day you brought Pinkerton to the house? You were there to witness the transfer of an object, a commodity from one man to another. Women had no voice, we have no voice. Now, I am reading about a woman – about women – who are trying to do something about that.
‘I feel shame, that until Suzuki went into the factory I knew nothing about the horrible conditions, the hours they work, the crowded dormitories. Those women are prisoners.
‘If they are not workers, they are prisoners in their homes, as they always have been. Do you know why women are not allowed to vote? Because that is the way it has always been.’ Her voice was bitter. ‘Tradition!’
She picked up a newspaper and held it open like a precious scroll. ‘Thank you for sending me this.’ She read aloud: ‘. . . “We maltreat and insult our women to a graver extent than any other country on the globe.” At least here’s one man who has the courage to speak the truth.’
It was the beginning of Cho-Cho’s acquaintance with ‘those women’, as Henry continued to call the campaigners. When they won the right to attend political meetings, Cho-Cho hovered across the street, outside the lecture hall. The following week she slipped in timidly at the last minute. The next time she was bolder.
Henry, increasingly anxious, noted the change.
‘We have a voice!’ She was excited. ‘Women are being heard!’
Usually Henry responded humorously, with the reactions expected of him, grumbling about the rising power of ‘those women’, but today he was subdued. She noticed immediately.
‘What is it? Do you have bad news from America?’
She had been following events since the Wall Street crash, though when Mary sent him gloomy letters he had softened the family situation somewhat.
‘Yes.’
‘Is it about Sachio?’
‘No.’ He paused. ‘Well, in a way . . . No, no, it’s not about Joey.’ He sounded reassuring, though his expression remained grim. ‘It’s about Pinkerton.’
He had never been entirely certain how Cho-Cho now felt about Ben Pinkerton. She maintained a coolness, a distance, if his name entered the conversation, restricting herself to questions about the child. But, as he well knew, that was the Japanese way. Now her composure was to be tested.
‘He went on a march, with some war veterans – homeless ex-servicemen.’
She waited.
‘It was to make a protest. Like your women.’
She waited.
‘They gathered in Washington and the President brought in the army to clear them out.’ There was no easy way to say this.
‘He’s dead.’
So total was her lack of reaction that for a moment he thought she had not heard.
Then she asked, ‘How? How did he die?’
‘He drowned. In the river.’
‘But that’s impossible! He loved to swim, he used to go down to the sea and swim for hours, far out from shore, diving like a dolphin, he would float on his back and wave, his arms gleamed in the sun when he waved –’ She stopped, lips pressed together.
‘What happened?’
Henry said, ‘The soldiers were driving them off their campsite. I think he was struck on the head by a rifle. He fell into the river . . .’
She seemed to shrink, crumpling into herself. She said, ‘Please go now.’
He turned at once to leave. As he reached the door he glanced back and saw her collapse slowly on to the ground, bent over, forehead resting on the floor, and he blundered from the room, recalling the last time he had seen her destroyed. As he left he caught the trace of a sound, a low moaning, a lament of inconsolable sorrow.
After Henry had gone she remained in the room without moving. All sensation seemed to have drained from her body and only her mind was alive. How long had she been here, lying, crumpled, breathing the grassy smell of the tatami mat? She became aware that the woven strands had pressed deeply into her cheek. The sun had dipped below the hillside. She sat up, smoothed her hair. She allowed herself very tentatively, as though touching a wounded place, to examine how she felt, and she realised that she was facing her real farewell to Pinkerton. Since she had returned to painful life in the hospital bed she had dwelt often on that last sight of him leaving the house with the American woman; she had begun to nurse the secret fantasy that one day he would reappear, holding Sachio’s hand, and that happiness would return.
She knew now that it could never be.
She forced herself to explore the area of pain; to think of him as he was: beautiful, golden, lazy. In the bath, his body contained by the watery tank like some pale creature from the deep, he wallowed, submerging himself, then surfacing, shaking water from the wet-darkened curls. His growing tenderness – with time he learned to undress her more gently, she learned how to respond. Small moments of sweetness – ‘Here you go, Mrs Butterfly, surprise for you,’ – Portuguese castella cakes from the market, a piece of fine silk, the cloisonné bracelet she had not worn since he left her . . . at those moments she had permitted herself to dream, to believe that one day he would return.
Now he had really left her, sinking, choking, lungs filled with green slime, and she too was choking, throat clotted with tears, lungs heaving, and though she knew that one day life would return to her limbs, she would walk and talk quite normally, still she sensed a withering. A part of her had died.
*
Some time later, when she could safely speak his nam
e, she talked to Henry about Pinkerton, and wondered which of them could say they knew him, ‘What was he like, really?’ And Henry debated what to say: could he tell her Pinkerton was a selfish bastard without a sensitive bone in his body – but what did he know, in fact, about the man who died that night, fished out of the Anacostia river, his body laid on the earth alongside an ex-serviceman shot by a trigger-happy trooper?
Mary had written, ‘Nancy is devastated. There’s a rumor President Hoover never meant the operation to get out of hand to that extent but who can ever know the truth of these matters?
‘You should know, Henry,’ his sister wrote, ‘I was not happy about Nancy marrying Ben in the first place. What happened in Nagasaki, the child, it was not what I had hoped for my daughter. And this proves I was right to be anxious. Ben seems to have been of help to the men on that sad march, but he did not have to go, he had a family to consider. I do think he was a good father, in his way, but now Nancy is left alone to care for the child. We must all pray for him. God welcomes a repentant sinner.’
So what should he say to Cho-Cho, waiting now?
‘What was he really like? Well now, which of us ever knows the full picture? I can say one thing. He was a good father.’
He threw her a quick glance but her face was expressionless. He had no idea what she was thinking.
PART FOUR
28
‘Anthropology? Where will that take you? Louis asked. ‘Will anthropology give you a foot on the corporation ladder?’
Joey shrugged. ‘Probably not. But I don’t want to work for a corporation.’
‘Young people today, they think college is a game. Jobs don’t grow on trees, Joey.’
‘Well they do if it’s a mulberry tree and you’re into silk.’
‘Don’t get cute with me, kid!’
‘Okay. You’re asking why anthropology. Well, Margaret Mead said—’
‘And don’t give me what the smart-asses say. That’s how they earn their bucks and their Pulitzers.’
Joey found it difficult to explain to Louis why the study of difference and similarity, social systems, alien cultures and faraway countries held a certain appeal. And in any case that was not the whole of it
‘Gramps, anthropology tries to show us what makes us human; the world’s full of people killing each other . . . Maybe that would be just a bit more difficult if we didn’t think of it as Us and Them all the time. If there could be another word, a word for the whole mix. What we have in common.’
He stopped. Inside his head, there was nuance and complexity. He was aware that what emerged was too simple, naïve.
Long ago, when he was a kid, Nancy had read aloud to him a story about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole and had adventures. But she fell very slowly, so that she could take a look at what she was passing. Anthropology was a bit like that: falling into the past, but slowly, so that you could reach out and pluck things off the shelf of time and study them as you progressed. You immersed yourself in a strange world; you couldn’t change what you saw, but you could learn from it.
He shrugged helplessly.
‘You know: if you prick us do we not bleed? If you poison us do we not die—’
‘Oh, right,’ Louis said. ‘If we’re getting into that, I’ll tell you what I think of anthropology: Much Ado About Nothing!’
He punched his grandson affectionately on the shoulder. ‘Just kidding.’
From her rocker by the window, engaged on a seemingly endless piece of patchwork, Mary said mildly to Joey, ‘I remember, at the beginning, you didn’t know what it meant to squeeze a lemon. What a baseball mitt was. What I find fascinating is the way people can change.’ She glanced at Joey over her glasses. ‘But I’m not an anthropologist.’
Despite the growls and cartoon harrumphing, Louis was enormously proud of the boy, secretly supposing him the brightest kid at Oregon State – even if he was studying a load of hooey.
‘What I’m thinking about,’ he remarked when Joey had left the room, ‘is the war. I know the action’s a long way off, and there’s an ocean between us, but FDR’s cosying up to Winston Churchill like a long-lost cousin, which I personally find worrying.’
‘Nancy’s working for the Democrats and she thinks he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread—’
‘And that may yet turn out to be a flash in the pan. Well I don’t trust Roosevelt, the mealy-mouthed bastard, and I certainly don’t trust Churchill: it’s not enough to have an American mother.’
Mary picked up a new hexagonal patch and slipped a template into position.
‘If we’re drawn into this war,’ she murmured, ‘Joey could be drafted.’
‘You think I don’t know that? You think I want to see our boy brought home in a coffin?’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Roosevelt’s a smart guy.’
‘That’s what worries me.’
29
Cho-Cho had retained her slenderness. The body once childlike and weightless, later bony and undernourished, now flowed gracefully from nape to ankle, though her skin had lost its milk-white gleam and was shadowed with an ivory pallor. She was in her mid-thirties, but the ironic half-smile, the knowing look and fine lines around the eyes, gave an impression of someone older. Experience is an ageing process.
Today she was engaged in an argument with Henry. They argued frequently and amicably; it was a conversation that had been going on for years, sometimes with fierce disagreement, usually breaking up in shared laughter.
Cho-Cho no longer covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed. As Henry said, ‘Those women have ruined your traditional charms.’
‘My dear, you are so nihonjin desu-ne.’ She shifted into Japanese.
‘“Traditional” is simply another way of saying “handed down”. And who does the handing down? The men. Confucianism told us a woman should obey her father as a good daughter, her husband as a good wife, his parents as a good daughter-in-law and her son as a good mother. Why should women be controlled by something so obviously against their interests?’ She added, in English, ‘Give me one reason!’
He threw up his hands in a comical gesture of self-defence.
Kneeling nearby, Suzuki listened as the other two talked on in their mingled stream of English and Japanese. Never beautiful, with the years Suzuki had acquired a maternal serenity, her face unlined, her small eyes bright. She could understand most of what was said, and she enjoyed the verbal fencing from the sidelines. She provided Henry with the traditional marriage they were both comfortable with: her voice was not often heard, at least when others were present. She smiled indulgently now as her husband accused Cho-Cho of becoming increasingly westernised:
‘You’ll be cutting your hair next.’
‘You men are so unobservant: I cut it months ago – discreetly!’
‘And you spend too much time with Americans—’
‘I spend time with customers who come to my restaurant.’
‘To eat pot-roast and apple pie!’ He shook his head. ‘They should be trying eel and vinegar rice. You’re betraying your culture.’
‘Poor lonely gaijin, missing their home town; the last thing they need is peculiar foreign food!’ She mocked him: ‘You’re so naïve, oniichan! My restaurant is successful because I don’t serve eel and rice. They regard me as a mixture of an American momma and a geisha too mature to be dangerous. I provide them with stories to take home; I am exotic but safe!’
‘But how can you pass your time with these limited people?’
‘Because they amuse me. I don’t need your seriousness all the time. With you it’s all wabi-sabi, beauty in the sadness of things, the imperfect . . .’ She shifted into English for the wordplay she had learned from him, and he had learned from the Japanese: ‘I like to find the fun in profundity.’
She relapsed into Japanese: ‘It was once traditional for women to wear leather socks in bed – though I can’t remember why, perhaps it was to rub their feet smooth. Or perhaps to
punish their husbands. Would you like Suzuki to be traditional with her nocturnal footwear?’
Henry said mildly, ‘What you’re really doing is proving the truth of the old Japanese view of male and female, that a man is a child in a suit of armour, a woman is a velvet glove over a hand of steel. The gods protect me from steely women!’
Cho-Cho exclaimed in mock-despair, ‘Suzuki, how do you put up with him?’
‘Because he is the perfect husband.’ Suzuki, too, could engage in straight-faced response. ‘The Samurai believed a woman should look upon her husband as if he were heaven itself. Who could find fault with heaven?’
She rose to her feet. ‘Now, we will eat.’
Cho-Cho shook her head. ‘I must go in two minutes: I have a new man in the kitchen – he might poison the customers.’
Suzuki left the room, her plump body lent grace by her dark kimono, appropriate clothing for a married woman.
Henry had abandoned the Western uniform of suit and tie: no longer an American official, he had taken to wearing a Japanese robe. He displayed, as Cho-Cho teasingly put it, a chameleon quality. In the street he blended with the locals: a husband, a father.
‘Just another Nagasaki resident. What would your sister say!’
She glanced round the room but decided not to provoke Henry today by mockingly noting how traditional it was. This was where he spent quiet hours writing articles to explain the country he loved to the outside world; explanations that became increasingly difficult when the long, draining war with China flared into what the Japanese called incidents and the West condemned as massacres, war crimes, inhuman brutality. That, too, was part of tradition; the iron grip that held them prisoner.
He saw her to the door now and together they looked out at the view. The Sharpless residence was tucked into the hill-side not far from the Glover House, visible over treetops.
‘Remember, so long ago, when you brought me up here to show me the Glover estate? How silly I was . . .’
‘Why silly?’
‘For wanting an American garden, for one thing.’ She looked out at the green landscape Henry and Suzuki had created; the rocks and moss. ‘This is perfect. Youthful wishes can be silly; part of being young, I suppose.’
