by Lee Langley
Unspoken: she had wanted an American garden to go with her American husband, and her American son. She had had them all – for a while.
In the room behind them there was the sound of children’s voices; the girls coming to the door to say goodbye to their favourite visitor. Cho-Cho embraced them in turn. She lingered for a moment with the tallest.
‘How is my clever Mayu? What are you reading?’
The girl had inherited Henry’s fine bones and Suzuki’s calm, slow smile.
‘The book you brought me, about the girl from the sea.’
‘Ah! The Little Mermaid. Well, she made a bad choice, poor girl. We’ll talk about that next time.’
30
Shortages were announced almost daily, patriotic sacrifices demanded. Now Cho-Cho was presented with a batch of government leaflets to hand out to her customers, encouraging austerity: ‘Luxury is antipatriotic’.
For someone trying to run a restaurant, this was not an attractive idea.
‘They might as well tell me to send the customers home,’ she complained to Henry. He shrugged.
‘The national love affair with America has gone sour. Germany seems seductively disciplined.’
Worse was to come. When Henry called in for his daily coffee, he found Cho-Cho distraught.
‘They’ve banned political meetings. Provocative assemblies, they call them – and of course women’s gatherings are provocative, unlawful.’
Henry began to sympathise, but she waved a dismissive hand at him. The law was unjust; so they had decided to ignore it.
‘I’m leaving the waitresses to take care of the restaurant this afternoon. I’m going to a meeting.’
When the troops arrived at the doors of the lecture hall the women envisaged a confrontation; perhaps some noisy intimidation – enough to discourage a normal female congregation. But the army had more specific instructions: arrest the speaker, drag her out, throw her in a wagon. When the audience protested, the soldiers moved in to break up the meeting by force.
Driven out of the hall like cattle, the women poured into the street. Their cries mingled with the shouts of soldiers who were thrown off balance by this unruly throng – some women in flapping kimonos, others in Western dress displaying arms and legs to an alarming degree. The men bawled abuse at the unnatural creatures, penning them in, the bright colours slowly crushed within the tightening barricade of khaki uniform.
Pinned against the wall, arms flung up to protect her face, Cho-Cho fought fiercely, defending herself, sensing a giddy moment of reunion: she too might be struck by a baton or a truncheon, be thrown into the river. The Urakami flowed past, just the other side of the street. She would sink through the green water, weighed down by her clothes; the swirling river uniting her with Pinkerton.
The crowd surged, there were shrieks; wet blood in the street fed the panic of the mass. Dimly she thought, can a crowd make decisions? Who will take control here?
Then she was knocked aside, fell to the ground and the pullulating organism flowed on. Hours later she stumbled into Henry’s house and Suzuki’s soft arms. How foolish to imagine she could mingle, one river with another, one soul with another. This time she wept for herself.
When the bruises healed, she got back to work: there were new instructions for the cook.
Political friction and sabre-rattling had segued into untidy conflict; the long, stumbling war with China dragged on, and the Americans tightened sanctions. Cho-Cho adjusted her position: the menu was global now, with a hint of northern Europe, as Henry noted.
‘No more apple pie, I see. Well, it makes a change from wasting Kobe beef on hamburger addicts.’
As always, the conversation continued with Henry provoking her and Cho-Cho demolishing his arguments with the affectionate ease of years: parry and thrust, sharp words that never cut too deep, though to a silent listener they could cause unintended pain. Occasionally Suzuki wept. No one witnessed these moments of weakness and she was firm with herself, making sure she displayed no outward signs of sadness. Why should she? She had no cause to be unhappy: Henry loved her as much as any wife could reasonably expect. She had her daughters. At a time when she could have been sharing the harsh and growing poverty of the people, she had servants. She was privileged, protected. It would be ungrateful to indulge in unhappiness; to want more.
Just once did Henry catch her crying, but she found reassuring words: it was, she reminded him, traditional for women to weep. The old expression tsuyu meant not only ‘women’s tears’ but also ‘dew’ – a naturally occurring event. Did he believe her? Certainly he wanted to: Suzuki was an essential part of his own happiness; it would be unthinkable for her to be unhappy.
31
As a child Nancy had waited impatiently for the Advent calendar to be placed on the mantel; it was her privilege to lift the covering cards and reveal the picture beneath, each one leading her closer to the final, glowing Nativity. She had been surprised to learn that some children in her class got chocolates and candy on Advent Sundays; Nancy’s Methodist family had never been party to such self-indulgence.
In the school Nativity play she usually played an angel, a benign bit-player, except for one thrilling year when she was chosen to play Joseph, with a grey wig and beard. Christmas was important to her and she wanted it to be special for Joey: carol services, the crib glowing with light . . . even in the worst days she had managed an Advent calendar, a small tree and some lights. Presents, however modest, were wrapped in thrillingly shiny paper.
Busy in the kitchen on a chill December day, she had forgotten this was the second Sunday of Advent. She had a number of things on her mind: her mother’s failing health; Joey at college, another letter from Nagasaki, with a photograph, about which a decision had to be made. She was living simultaneously in the past and the future, bypassing the present.
This was not her usual way of dealing with an imperfect life: usually she got on with things, that was her style. But just occasionally, as when she studied an envelope bright with foreign stamps, tapping it on the table, putting it away in a drawer, she thought of how things might be different, if . . .
She could see her father by the radio, sitting close, doing his usual thing, harrumphing when he disagreed with the announcer, humming along to the tunes he approved of. When the music stopped in mid-phrase he tapped the veneer radio casing, irritably. ‘Darn’ thing.’
But the radio was functioning perfectly. A moment later the silence was broken by the announcer’s voice – a news bulletin: Japanese planes had bombed Honolulu.
Afterwards, when Lois thought about that December Sunday morning, retelling it, reliving it, the scene came up like something out of a movie: a series of dreamy dissolves, houses with curtains drawn, a calm day waiting to unfold, untroubled folk drifting in their dreams. Pearl City jutted out into the harbour parallel to the naval base of Ford Island. Navy ships were tied up to piers on the east and west side of the island, and the south end of the peninsula. The sea placid, the ships, too, seemed to be sleeping, like gulls at rest, like Lois and Jack, deep in the untroubled slumber of the young and blameless.
When Jack Pinkerton married Lois, he decided against sending an invitation to Nancy. He thought it might remind her of another wedding: her own; of another groom, young and bright-faced in white naval uniform. He sent her a letter with a snapshot.
Before marrying Jack, Lois had been a very small cog in the burgeoning movie industry, working in downtown Hollywood and living in the valley. It seemed to her at the time that California was full of Germans, some of them unable to write in English, which struck her as a drawback for people creating scripts. Later she found they were Jews, refugees from Nazi persecution. She was assigned to one of these, a lowly member of the studio chain gang. According to Personnel she was his secretary; she considered herself rather more: she corrected his English before she typed his letters, and learned to live with the smell of garlic sausage emanating almost visibly from his filing cabinet draw
er.
Marriage took her away from all that, and sometimes she missed the exotic underpinning to her office surroundings – the men who came and went carrying manuscripts and groceries in string bags, the chessboard and piles of old books; tea with lemon, drunk from tall glasses. Very different from the all-American offices of those they called goyim, the clean-cut young men with their Ivy League shirts, fresh from Berkeley and UCLA. Very different from her husband.
With marriage to Jack came life as a naval wife and anxiety about the spreading war in Europe. Jack’s father had a cousin Charlie who had fought in World War One and never came back from France. The move to Hawaii reassured her: the naval base with its palm trees and beaches seemed a safe backwater to the main flow of action. Hawaii was a good place for a Californian newly-wed couple.
They were jolted awake when the first explosion rocked the harbour, rattling windows and sending roof tiles crashing to the ground, the dreamy montage savaged by planes diving out of a cloud-filled sky to the roar of engines, the boom of deafening explosions. Then the shock editing:
Planes fall like birds of prey on to the ships. Cut! Bombs! Cut! Sailors racing to man anti-aircraft guns, Cut! Civilians running scared. Cut! A ship explodes in flames. Another. And another.
Through the window Jack saw a line of planes approaching in tight formation, moving in and out of the thick cloud hanging low in the sky. Then planes were roaring overhead at treetop level. He glimpsed an emblem painted on the side of one fuselage: a Rising Sun. The Japanese were attacking Pearl Harbor.
Above the sound of shrieking ships’ sirens he yelled at Lois.
‘Get the hell out of here, now!’
Minutes later he was on his way to Ford Island, pulling on his uniform as he ran, and she was in the car, heading for the hills.
The road was choked with cars, women and children fleeing the waterfront. As she swung uphill Lois heard the drone of the planes behind her, the thud of explosions, the quick coughs of gunfire. Women leaned on their horns as though the concerted sound would somehow get the cars ahead to move. Behind Lois, a woman with a child clutched to her breast leapt from her vehicle and began to run, leaving the door hanging open behind her. Over her shoulder, as she passed Lois, she screamed:
‘Machine guns! Get off the road!’
Lois felt panic break out like prickly heat over her body; she fought the handle, flung open the door and sprinted for the side of the road as the planes roared louder, the gunfire chasing her.
The pain seared her legs, agony shot up her body. She thought: I’ve been hit, Jesus, I’ve been hit, expecting to fall, crippled. Then she saw that she was running through pineapple fields, the razor-edged leaves lacerating her legs and thighs, shredding her skin. Blood drenched her cotton dress. She stopped, crouched low between plants and looked up at the sky. The planes passed overhead, their bullets raking the road, piercing the metal of the cars. They banked, turned and headed back towards the harbour.
Caught unprepared, the fleet lay helpless as planes dropped their load, swung round and came in for another strike, bombing and strafing the airfield and the vessels lying at anchor. From one – the battleship Arizona – a column of dark red smoke rose high into the sky, then there was a blast and a column of fiery black as the powder magazine exploded. Ships canted at alarming angles began to settle in the water as they burned, white-hot steam scalding the men desperately swimming away from the flames.
Jack, aboard a small motorboat, criss-crossed the turbulent water, searching among the burnt and the drowned for men still alive. The frail craft rose and fell, flung violently into the high waves by the force of explosions as Jack tried to keep out of the path of bullets sprayed by the planes, strafing the bay.
Then, quite suddenly, it was over. The Japanese squadron made one last circuit, banked, and flew, glittering, high into the sun above the clouds, leaving the American fleet – five battleships, three destroyers, three cruisers and almost two hundred planes – destroyed. Over two thousand men dead.
And everything was changed. The calendar twisted out of shape; the day lost its anonymity: 7 December became Pearl Harbor.
Interrupted by crackling, the announcer stated the facts. Something between fifty to a hundred planes from a Japanese aircraft carrier . . . bombs . . . ships sunk . . . civilians machine-gunned from the air . . .
And after the news bulletin, clutching on to normality, back to the programme: Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust’ filtering through the speaker.
Louis stood up. ‘I’ll just tell your mother. She feels left out, up there.’
‘Dad?’
He turned back. Nancy gestured towards the radio.
‘I guess this is it.’
He looked suddenly tired. ‘Oh yes, I guess so.’
Through the day news bulletins interrupted the programmes: we bring you the latest from Pearl Harbor . . . And now back to ‘Paradise in Waltz time’ . . . heavy damage and loss of life in Hawaii . . . And next, an André Kostelanetz selection . . . three ships sunk including the USS Arizona . . . a medley of Southern airs on the banjo . . . When the music faded, normality ceased to exist: Japan announces she has entered a state of war with Britain and the United States from dawn today . . . President Roosevelt is dictating a message to Congress.
A vast swathe of smoke hung over the harbour. There was a smell of burning wood and something metallic, stinging. Rescue teams moved charred bodies from water to land, carrying them ashore, laying them carefully in long lines by the side of the bay, to be identified by colleagues or relatives. Lois, frantic, searched for Jack. His boat had been washed ashore, empty.
Years later, when war gave way to peace and the nation went wild with celebrations for the safe return of its boys, Lois waited to welcome Jack home, with the flags and ticker-tape and the bands playing, and remembered that other day, as she ran between the lines of bodies in a hangar, racked with the terror of loss, searching the faces so similar in death, smoke-blackened, drenched. Jack’s mother had told her family stories about ill-fated Pinkerton men, one drowning in the liquid mud of a Flanders trench, another sinking to the bottom of the Anacostia river in a Washington riot, and she had prayed, her heart squeezed in dread, that the waters of the blazing harbour had not claimed her man.
And then the shock, the leaping relief as she caught sight of Jack, not among the bodies but walking towards her, and she ran headlong into him and held him so tightly that he laughingly cried out, warning her he had bruises and some burns, as he wiped away her tears.
Monday morning, and Nancy at her desk confronted a pile of letters and paperwork that had overnight become irrelevant. Newspapers carried the unforgettable images of the day: bombers snapped by amateur photographers, ships smashed and burning, columns of smoke, flames. The headlines were a Greek chorus of lamentation: the attack was a violation that left a nation in shock.
Down the corridor she heard raised voices, the ringing of telephones and the sound of hurrying footsteps. A girl from the typing pool called through the door as she passed, ‘The President’s on the radio!’
This was 8 December 1941 and the President was speaking to the nation to tell them America was at war with Japan. And beneath the sound of his voice, those patrician Roosevelt syllables, Nancy detected another sound, something resembling a train just beginning to move out of a station, getting up speed – a thousand trains, a million; a slowly building cacophony of assembly lines, machines whirring in workshops turning out uniforms, the roar of munitions factories, transports, the movement of men, the packaging of provisions, the grinding of tank tracks, the whir of propellers, the sound of a country preparing for war. The Depression was well and truly over.
32
Nancy had taken to an occasional bourbon – ‘I’m not drinking,’ she told Louis, ‘it’s medicinal.’ A Lucky Strike after work also helped calm her nerves.
In her bureau drawer lay a letter stamped Nagasaki, but America was at war with Japan. There would be no further cland
estine correspondence between two mothers. With war, life was put on hold.
As for Joey, he had wiped Cho-Cho, his uncaring, unnatural natural mother from his mind after the first letter arrived. Or so he told Nancy.
In her accustomed chair beneath the reading light she took a sip of bourbon and thought about the page she had just read: a long-dead French aristocrat suggesting that fear does strange things to a man. Sometimes, he said, it gives wings to his heels, sometimes it nails them to the ground. And – she would have underlined the words but for the respect she had for the printed page – there is no other passion which sooner carries away our judgement. Nancy took another sip.Well Pearl Harbor had certainly proved his point.
First came the reality: America was at war. Next the panic, the questions: would cities be blitzed? Would firebombs rain from the skies, shells be launched from the surrounding seas? Fire drills were practised, gas masks demonstrated, though not distributed, barrage balloons assembled, blackouts proposed, rationing discussed. She had seen the newspaper pictures, the wrecked ships that sat in the foreground of the nation’s vision, evidence of an unimaginable vulnerability. Paranoia whispered that the enemy was everywhere.
Nine years earlier, when Nancy’s hero was sworn in as President of the United States, in her careful copperplate she wrote out the words of his inaugural address and pinned it to the kitchen wall. Like most people she was unaware at the time that Roosevelt, a great borrower, was paraphrasing Thoreau. She knew now, from the page before her, that Montaigne had said it first: The thing I fear most is fear.
The knock came as Nancy was about to carry her mother’s breakfast tray up the stairs.
She opened the front door, balancing the tray precariously on her arm. A man in a dark suit, carrying a sheaf of papers, raised his hat.
