by Lee Langley
‘Ma’am? I’m looking for someone in the name of Pinkerton.’
‘I’m Mrs Pinkerton.’
‘Ma’am, we understand you have an alien resident as part of your household.’
Nancy stared at the man in puzzlement. She had no idea what he was talking about. Alien resident? Did he mean a foreign visitor? They had no foreign visitor. She shook her head.
‘You must have the wrong house.’ Holding the tray, she was closing the door with her knee.
‘Ma’am, we have the documentation—’
‘Well then, there must be some mistake. This is my parents’ home. There’s just the two of them, and me and my son.’
‘Your son.’ His pen hovered. ‘Would that be a Joseph Theodore Pinkerton?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Ma’am, our records show that Joseph Pinkerton was born in the town of Nagasaki, Japan, maternal parent Japanese. That makes him a resident alien—’
She stopped him. ‘Wait here, please. My mother needs her breakfast.’
She left the door open, and went cautiously up the narrow stairs, taking care not to knock the tray against the wall. Two minutes later she was back in the hall, confronting the dark-suited man with his weasel features, his sharp eyes, his claw-like hands . . . She realised she was demonizing an innocent messenger.
‘You were saying?’
He talked on, in a flat, expressionless voice, his words blanked out by the noise invading Nancy’s head; a roaring that came like a pain.
She broke in. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that. Could you say it again?’
He seemed to be repeating everything word for word, like a record when the needle jumps, steel skidding on shellac, and this time she held on to the sense of it, the almost incomprehensible fact that because her son had a Japanese maternal parent he was required to register at a neighbourhood civil control station –
‘He should have registered already, like the others. West Coast Defense Command notices are up all over town.’
Nancy said, ‘Notices? I’m not aware of any notices. And why does he have to register?’
‘So that he can be allocated a number, ma’am.’
Once again she was losing the sense of it.
‘A number for what?’
‘For transportation. When he reports, he’ll be registered, numbered and tagged—’
‘Tagged?’
‘He’ll need a shipping label.’
‘What is he – a parcel? What d’you mean, shipping label? Where’s he supposed to be going?’
‘Ma’am, he’ll be put on board the bus or train to one of the temporary detention stations . . .’ He paused, adjusting his words. ‘To a residential centre, I should say.’
Nancy felt a freezing in her blood; her brain seemed out of reach, she found it impossible to bring appropriate logic to bear on the situation.
She stammered, ‘Joey can’t go, he has a college field trip coming up.’
The man handed her a flimsy leaflet. ‘Not any more, he don’t. Here’s where he has to go. Like the rest of the Japs.’
He added, ‘You could say he’s already broken the law, not registering like he should.’
Nancy, puzzled, said, ‘So you don’t go knocking on everyone’s door, to check. How did you know there was a – resident alien here?’
‘A neighbour gave us the information.’
He looked up and saw her face. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’
She closed the door and went slowly back into the sitting room, holding the leaflet, carefully, as if it were a dangerous object, which of course she realised it was.
Her father was in his chair at the kitchen table. He had an open atlas before him while he waited for his breakfast, though his eyesight prevented him from doing much more than poring over the pages with a magnifying glass, searching for a crescent-shaped scattering of islands in the Pacific Ocean.
‘Nancy? Was that someone at the door?’
She saw how frail he looked. She and her parents had swapped roles in this bitter comedy they were living through: it seemed she was now the guardian and source of reassurance.
She said briskly, ‘There’s obviously been some administrative mistake. It seems Joey is expected to register as a –’ Pause. ‘A resident alien.’
She made no mention of transportation or detention camps. Still, he looked concerned.
‘I could make some calls for you, try and find out more.’
‘It’s okay, dad, I’ll talk to Harry in the office; we’ll sort it out.’
She tapped the leaflet with her unpainted nails. ‘This can’t be right.’
In the office she debated how to handle the subject. She had never deliberately concealed Joey’s background; it had simply not come up. So now she kept things impersonal; took soundings. They were all good, hard-working Democrats, concerned with liberty and justice, surely this went against all they stood for? Where did this idea come from anyway? Finally she raised it with her boss.
‘Harry? This . . . Executive Order – 9066. It can’t be legal, surely?’
He was brisk. ‘Entirely. What it really means is that anyone considered to constitute a danger must vacate their home –’
‘So – what, some kid with maybe a Japanese mother is dangerous?’
‘After Pearl Harbor anyone with Japanese connections is considered a threat – a possible spy. I was talking to a guy in the San Francisco office yesterday; he’s on the board of governors of a Catholic orphanage. The Father who runs the place called up the State Department, got through to some guy in Relocation and told him they have children of Japanese ancestry, some half Japanese, others one-fourth or less. So he says to this Major Bendetsen, sarcastically, “which children should I send?” And the guy says “Any that have one drop of Japanese blood in ’em.” I guess this will affect around a hundred thousand people.’
Nancy stared at him. ‘Who signed this thing, this order? Who the hell approved this document that’s putting innocent people in prison?’
‘Well, the President, of course.’
‘Roosevelt?’
‘Strictly between you and me,’ he said, ‘I hear the White House is panic-stricken, Eleanor’s in a rage about the whole thing but they’re stuck with it. Security. Safety of the Nation.’
He became aware of her distress. ‘Nancy? What is it?’
‘My son –’ Her voice had gone dangerously high. She stopped. For the first time she was not at ease here, not safe; a line had been drawn and she was on the wrong side. Even among friends.
‘My son has a friend whose mother was Japanese . . . Could this affect the family?’
‘I hope not, but I have to tell you it doesn’t look good; they’re running around like headless chickens in Washington spouting stuff about the enemy within and alien spawn of a fiendish empire.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s fear.’
She went back to her office and closed the door.
Later, she called Joey.
‘Can you get home for a few days? Something’s come up.’
The line crackled but his voice was clear. ‘Ma? Is this about Order 9066?’
‘How d’you know about that?’
‘Are you kidding? They’ve been all over the campus, picking up people. They took someone out of the dorm yesterday.’
‘Come home, Joey. Right now. We’ll go down to the registration place together and clear this up.’
He was home by nightfall, and went straight up to Mary’s room. He bent down and hugged her gently, feeling the weightlessness, the twig-like bones beneath her knitted bed-jacket, breathing in the familiar lavender and talc smell of her.
‘Joey dear . . .’
‘How’s my best grandma?’
My only grandma, he added silently. How grateful the Pinkertons must be that they had rejected this alien child right from the start. No chance they might find themselves tarnished by association, now.
After Louis had said goodnight Nancy and Joey stayed
up, talking quietly. There were ways of getting round the exclusion order: people who could find a sponsor were allowed to move out of the area, to the east. She knew someone who knew someone –
He reached over and took her hand. ‘Have you read the newspapers? The Fifth Column traitors? The Yellow Peril. Walter Lippmann in the New York Herald Trib said a million Japs are poised ready to take over the whole Pacific coast.’
‘Where is this million-strong Japanese horde?’
‘Search me. But apparently I could be one of them.’
‘Anyway,’ she said dismissively. ‘Lippmann? A man who’s warning us sabotage is about to explode because there’s no sign of it? Please.’
Joey said, gently, ‘A couple of department heads at college did some calling around last week, to see if they could fix relocating their students outside the zone. They got some interesting reactions: nothing personal, but the message was, if these people are too dangerous for the West Coast, we don’t want them moving in on us.’ He shrugged. ‘And you want to go down there and tell them your son is different. The problem is he’s not actually your son, is he? His mother’s a Jap.’
She was crying now, filled with a guilt he would never understand. How could she have failed to see where things were going? She could have quit her job, moved east, out of reach of West Coast panic. And now it was too late; her mother bedridden, her father frail. She was stuck.
‘I’ll come to the interview with you,’ she repeated. ‘I can talk tough. They’ll listen.’
He grinned. ‘You’re about as tough as baked custard. I’m a big boy, I’ll go alone. Anyway, they’ll probably take one look at me and decide somebody’s pen slipped.’
She rubbed her cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘Exactly. Who ever heard of a blue-eyed, blond enemy alien?’
‘Unless you’re talking Germans, of course.’
At least he could still make her smile. But they weren’t rounding up Germans.
*
Next day, trying to get his bearings in this subtly changed world where the ground was shaky underfoot, he went back to the old town, hoping to learn how others were dealing with the situation.
The whole neighbourhood had become a ghost town; shops shuttered and locked, blinds drawn, some with signs in English: ‘Evacuation Sale’.
The streets were empty; a few elderly locals hurried past with bowed heads, stepping out of his way. As before, he was a foreigner here, but a word on a piece of paper had locked him into confraternity with these outsiders.
He returned home in a dark mood, long-forgotten images clouding his mind, an echo of distant voices inside his head, words whose meaning he no longer understood. In the mirror an all-American face looked back at him, but it belonged to a stranger.
Nancy had a school-friend who had married her childhood sweetheart and moved to Wyoming. The two had kept in touch – birthday and Christmas cards, an occasional letter. Hilary had often added a line to her cards: ‘Why don’t you and your boy come visit?’
Wyoming was outside the exclusion zone. Nancy made a call.
Hilary’s voice was bright with pleasure and the usual questions followed: how was Nancy? And her parents? And Joey?
And here the conversation left the tracks as Nancy for the first time gave her old friend the facts about her son. And then. ‘There’s a loophole. If he can find someone to take him, outside the military area, he’ll be allowed to go.’ She took a breath: ‘Hilary? Will you take him in?’
Afterwards Nancy wondered who was more wretched: she, with dashed hopes, or her old friend who closed the loophole; who explained that if it was up to her, of course . . . but local feeling was so strong the Governor (with re-election in mind) had announced that if any Japs were found wandering free in his territory they’d be hanging from a tree next day.
33
Only the twitchy speed of her movements showed that Nancy was frantic. Most of the time she managed to keep up her usual front of brisk efficiency. Now and then she dropped her guard, imploring Joey one more time to let her come with him to the station. Even now, though he was registered, she held on to the notion that if she could just get to speak to the right people they would realise that he should not be here; they would remove him from the list.
He rubbed his shoulder reassuringly against hers, like a cat, an old gesture from his childhood.
‘Thanks, Nancy, but I think I’ll stick with my people.’ Heavy irony on the last two words.
She noted with a pang that she was Nancy. No longer Mom. Understandable, since the Japanese mother was defining him now.
She packed the bag with quick, efficient movements. They read the instructions together: he was allowed to take only what he could carry ‘in his hands’, as the form put it.
How else would you carry something? he wondered. On your head, like an Indian porter, or on your back, mountaineer-style? (But of course the instructions were aimed at not-quite-civilised people, weren’t they; who could tell how resident aliens might carry things?) And what did a person take with him, when the duration of the trip was uncertain? On that at least the instructions were clear.
Evacuees must carry with them on departure for the Assembly Center, the following property:
a) Bedding and linens (no mattress) for each member of the family.
b) Toilet articles for each member of the family.
c) Extra clothing for each member of the family.
d) Sufficient knives, forks, spoons, plates, bowls and cups for each member of the family.
e) Essential personal effects for each member of the family.
NO PETS.
Two words to sum up a thousand moments of heartbreak: cats, dogs, canaries, white rabbits . . . to be given away or put down before departure.
‘Okay,’ Nancy said. ‘Clothes, spare shoes, soap, toothbrush, toothpaste.’ She picked out cutlery and found enamel plates – lightweight, unbreakable.
‘Books,’ he said. ‘I guess they’ll allow books – unless they think they’re in code and confiscate them.’ A few weeks later he found one of his textbooks being studied suspiciously, the camp bureaucrat puzzled by mysterious digits – ‘What are these here little numbers next to the words?’
‘Those are footnotes,’ he explained.
He had decided to take some coursework. Nancy approved: ‘That way, when you get back to college, you won’t have fallen behind.’ He doubted that he would be back in college before the course was finished, but he packed the books anyway. Also pens, ink, pencils, notebooks. A photo of Nancy and his father, the picture faded to sepia, the corners crumpled. What else? Nothing fragile, nothing precious – apart from a battered wooden toy, an old spinning top, tucked into a corner of the bag, alongside a pair of socks.
He was about to close the bag when Nancy handed him an envelope, the postage stamps oddly coloured, the ivory paper grainy and rough-textured like some rare old book.
Inside was a photograph of a woman, pale-skinned, black hair cut short and severe. She wore a flowing dark dress, her hands resting in her lap, white as marble. Bleached out in the printing, her features were barely visible, but above the unsmiling mouth Joey saw that her eyes were almond-shaped.
‘It’s Cho-Cho,’ Nancy said. ‘It’s your mother.’
After the arrival of that first letter from Nagasaki, addressed to Mary, there had been furtive family conferences when Joey was out of the house. Mary felt betrayed:
‘To conceal his marriage, his family! Henry was not honest with us; we deserved better. And now this.’
Nancy thought the letter should be acknowledged, though it was clear Joey did not wish to revive the past: it seemed that Cho-Cho was indeed dead – to him. Louis felt unqualified to pronounce – this was women’s business.
Time passed. Then Nancy wrote back – briefly, ambiguously. Just how should a wicked stepmother pitch a description of a stolen boy’s condition? To say he was happy and settled might well seem callous, emphasising Cho-Cho’s lack of importance
to him. In the end she simply said the boy was fine, and doing well at school. She sent a snap of him at the beach, sunlit and gleaming from the sea, a thinner, younger Ben. She added that he now knew his mother was alive; a shock for the boy, and one he would need time to get used to, but – a tentative suggestion – perhaps Cho-Cho would like to send a photograph for Nancy to pass on to him?
There was no response, and she regretted writing, but much later, a second letter had arrived, containing a photograph, and a brief note: ‘I do not want to intrude into your lives. The past was a bad place, not to be revisited. The good that has come out of it is that my Joy – your Joey – is happy.’
*
Joey stared at the photograph now. He felt confused, betrayed. Where was the figure in the kimono he recalled, glancing over her shoulder, hair piled high, the graceful curve of neck and cheek? The woman he had tried to hold on to by covering sheets of paper with scribbled sketches, laborious drawings. Sometimes he had pressed the paper to his face, breathing in deeply, trying to retrieve her elusive fragrance through her image, trying to keep her fresh in his mind; the woman he had walked beside on the seashore, who had run out into the spring rain with him, face tilted up at the sky, laughing . . . This woman was a stranger.
‘She looks different,’ he said.
‘Different from what?’
‘From the way I remembered her.’
He replaced the photograph in the envelope and slipped it into his pocket.
He checked the bag one last time and his fingers touched the old spinning top. He pulled it out, balancing the battered sphere in the palm of his hand.
‘She gave it to me.’
Nancy, unaware that it was Ben who gave him the toy, that it was Suzuki who bought it, did not contradict his unreliable memory. Only Cho-Cho could have described the true scene.
He closed the bag. ‘I’ll say goodbye to Gran.’
In the wide bed Mary seemed insubstantial, barely disturbing the blanket.
She peered up at Joey. ‘You’ve grown so tall . . .’
She was plucking fretfully at the patchwork covering, angry with herself for being unable to ‘get down there’ and harangue the men in charge. This whole internment business was being mismanaged, in her view: why hadn’t the Church done something? The Quakers had protested, why had the Methodists not raised objections? She felt mortified. Raising herself from the pillows, she gripped Joey’s arms and kissed him fiercely.
