The Color of Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  Max pinned the medal back into its box. He took a last look before he closed the lid. Holding the box against his chest, he appealed to me: “May I?”

  “Of course,” I said. He slipped the medal into his shirt pocket and finished his soup.

  After lunch, Jean-Paul and I left the others bent to their tasks and drove off with the load for the waste station—the toxic dump—in Martinez. I brought along the three boxes of slides I had found that Dad shot around the time that Mrs. B died. As Jean-Paul drove, I took them out one at a time and held them up to the light through the windshield.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  “Whatever I can find.” I dropped yet another picture of a perfect rose back into its box and took out another. Roses, roses, me, Mom, me again, me holding a rose. I was nearly to the end of the last box, dated the month after Mrs. Bartolini was murdered, thinking that there was nothing to see. At least, nothing useful. I pulled out the last two frames and held them up side by side.

  “What did you say?” Jean-Paul asked.

  “Did I say something?” I shrugged: had I? “Eureka, maybe?”

  “No. I think it was, ‘When is a rose not a rose?’”

  “The answer is, When it’s a man.” I handed him the last slide from the box. The previous frame showed Mr. Sato holding a deep red Chrysler rose by the stem in one hand and the neck of a beer bottle in the other. There was a man standing beside him, but Dad, interested in the rose, had cut him off so that all I could see was a hand with short, brown, calloused fingers wrapped around a beer bottle. The next frame, the last frame, was a risk shot taken after the thirty-sixth picture on a thirty-six-picture roll. There was only half a frame of film left before the beginning of the black trailer that wound the film on the spool. But that half frame was enough. Dad had captured the face of the man standing next to Mr. Sato. He wore a gardener’s wide straw hat and a wide smile. And I had never seen him before.

  “Do you like flowers?” I asked Jean-Paul.

  “Of course.” He gave the slide a quick look before handing it back. “Why?”

  “After we dump our load, I thought maybe we could go see some flowers.”

  “Is there time before the Hungry Ghosts party?”

  “The party goes on all day and most of the night, so we can show up at any time,” I said. “The ghosts will still be there when we get there. They always are.”

  Chapter 9

  I heard Jean-Paul’s sudden intake of breath when we turned onto the access road to Mr. Sato’s greenhouse. In front of us, spread across flat fields almost as far as the eye could see, an ocean of flowers in full bloom, their colors more vivid than film could ever capture. The perfume in the air was nearly overwhelming.

  At one time, this area south of San Jose was covered by flower nurseries. But over the years, piece by piece, the land had been sold to developers who replaced the nurseries with stucco housing tracts and boxy gray industrial parks and shopping centers. But nestled among warehouses and cinderblock fences, an oasis of commercial nurseries had managed to survive.

  Mr. Sato, perched on a canvas director’s chair in the shade of his greenhouse, was surveying what remained of his once-vast patch of roses through binoculars. When he heard the crunch of gravel under our truck tires, he turned the binoculars on us. Slowly, he got to his feet and directed Jean-Paul where to park.

  “Hey Maggie, you come to see my roses?”

  “They’re amazing,” I said, shaking his hand. “But we came to see you.”

  Introductions made, he offered us shade, chairs, and beer, in that order. We gladly accepted all three; it was at least twenty degrees hotter south of San Jose than it was in Berkeley.

  After some preliminary chitchat, I took out the two slides that had parts of the man I did not recognize and asked Mr. Sato to look at them.

  “Sure, sure,” he said, slipping his reading glasses back into his pocket and handing the slides back to me. “That’s Duc.”

  “Duck?”

  He spelled the name for me. “Vietnamese guy. Duc Khanh.”

  “Did he work with you?”

  “Yep.” He rocked forward. “Worked for me a couple years. Best helper I ever had. I was real sorry when he quit.”

  “I think this picture was taken around the time that Mrs. Bartolini died.”

  He reached for the slides again and held them both up to the light, the effort to remember apparent in his frown. After a moment, he nodded.

  “Yep, I think you’re right,” he said. “The other day you asked me about my helper back then but I couldn’t quite pin it down, you know? But now I see this—” He flicked the corner of a slide frame. “That’s the good thumping my rusty old brain needed. Yeah, Duc was working with me then.”

  He took another look at the slides. “Chryslers, you know, after they flower in the summer they have a short bloom again in the fall. That year, though, this rose just kept going till Christmas. Not a few pissy little late roses, but big, beautiful ones. So red they were almost black on the ends. And the perfume. Jeez, knock you out. Soon as that one went dormant, me and Duc pruned it and took cuttings.”

  I had to smile. My dad would sequence events by the way his roses performed during a particular year, or the stages of their bloom when something happened. Like Dad, Mr. Sato would remember the roses that year more clearly than he would lurking strangers.

  “Did Dad ever talk to Duc about that day?”

  He shook his head, unsure. “But now I remember why I fired the guy who worked for me before Duc.”

  I asked, “Why?”

  “Let me run it down, see if I can put it all together.” He scratched his chin, thinking. “The kid I had working for me for a long while—Fernando something, good worker, too—got picked up by Immigration and sent back to Mexico. I was in a jam, lotsa work to do. Your mom turned me on to a list of refugees needing jobs. That’s where I found a guy named Van. He was a good enough worker when he put his mind to it, but he kinda thought he was above mowing lawns, you know? Always calling in sick. I had to take on Duc part time to fill in; found him on the same list. Like I said, Duc was the best helper I ever had, learned real quick. So when Van said something that bothered Mrs. Bartolini, I told him to take a hike and I hired Duc full time.”

  “Do you remember what Van said to her?”

  “No. But I got the idea it had something to do with the old country. Her father, maybe.”

  “Do you have any idea where Van or Duc are now? I’d really like to talk to them.”

  He grinned at me. “You’re still my nosy girl, Maggie.”

  “Can’t help it,” I said.

  He turned to Jean-Paul. “Better watch yourself, boy. Don’t ever try to sneak one past our Maggie.”

  “Wouldn’t dare,” he said, laughing out loud.

  “Van? I don’t know what happened to him. But you wanna talk to Duc?” Mr. Sato raised an arm and pointed to the south. “There’s Duc.”

  I followed the trajectory of his arm, but all I saw was the commercial nursery on the far side of his greenhouse.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Next door. I used to have six acres here,” he said, pulling out his telephone. “Now all I got’s this greenhouse. Duc bought me out a long time ago.”

  He hit speed dial on his phone, had a quick conversation, and put it away. “He’s there now. Go on over. Said he’d like to meet you.”

  The office of Khanh Wholesale Nursery was a freshly painted red barn, perhaps left over from the area’s rural past. Except for the koi pond moat around a Zen garden with a Buddha in a pagoda in the middle, it could have been a barn anywhere in America. In front of the Buddha there was an ancestor offering of fresh fruit and a giant bouquet of pristine white roses.

  We walked inside, happy for the air-conditioning. I recognized Duc from the slide as he walked across the reception area to greet us. He was older, of course, but his smile was unchanged. He was a small man, weathered to a nut brown by year
s of working outdoors, wearing crisply pressed chinos and a green polo shirt, with work boots on his feet. The skin on the hand he offered me was as hard as the handle of a hoe, but there was a gentility about Duc’s speech and carriage that suggested a formal upbringing.

  “So, you’re Al’s girl,” he said by way of greeting. “How’s your ­mother?”

  After assurances that Mom was just fine and introductions were made all around, he said, “I want to show you something.”

  He led us out through the back into the open nursery fields. There were plants of all sorts, but more than half the land we saw was covered with roses arranged in tiers by color and variety, some in the ground and some in pots. Maybe a dozen workers were on duty pruning, harvesting, moving irrigation drip lines, and pulling weeds that dared to intrude through the well-manicured soil. It was an impressive, bustling operation.

  “My friend Tosh says you have some questions,” he said as we walked through ranks of white roses. The sun beat down on our bare heads; heat came up through the soles of our shoes. Duc and Jean-Paul seemed unaffected; I wished for a hat.

  “I’ve seen your program, of course,” Duc said. “Your father and Tosh wouldn’t forgive me if I hadn’t. Are you working on something for television?”

  “Not for television, no.” I looked to Jean-Paul, hoping that a plausible excuse for asking the man questions that were truly none of my business would occur to me. I sighed: where to begin? How much to impose? In the end, I said, “To tell you the truth, it’s personal.”

  He cocked his head, looked at me expectantly, and waited for more.

  “It’s about Tina Bartolini—Trinh,” I said.

  “Ah, Nguyen Trinh, yes.” He dropped his eyes for a moment, a private smile on his face. When he looked up, he said, “A very long time ago, your father asked me what I saw in the neighborhood on a particular day. Is that what you want to know from me?”

  “Yes, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’ll tell you what I told Al: I saw nothing out of place. No strangers, no wandering ninjas, no black-hooded gangsters. Just grass and flower borders and mulch.”

  I smiled, a bit chagrined for having asked. “Thank you.”

  “But that isn’t the only question to ask, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe I can help: Did I know Trinh?” he said. “I did. Our families came from the same village. It was Trinh who introduced me to your mother, and it was your mother who enrolled me in the refugee employment program where I connected with Tosh. Later, when I wanted to start my own nursery, Tosh took me to your father, who helped me get a small business loan. And here we are.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “I never knew exactly what it was that my mother did at the refugee center.”

  “One mitzvah after another,” he said with a slight bow. “And so?”

  “I heard Trinh’s father was a food broker in Vietnam,” I said.

  “That’s one way to describe what he did,” Duc said. “Once again, one thing led to another. During the war against Japan, he made sure that supplies from the western Allies got to the resistance troops, chiefly the Viet Minh, who were fighting Japan. After the war, the French colonial government came back. They took over the Allied supply network, except now they were using it to fight the Viet Minh who were then fighting against the French for independence. No matter which side Trinh’s father chose, he would create enemies. I don’t know anything about his ideology, but he chose the side that offered the greatest economic security for his family.”

  “The French,” I said. “And after them, the Americans.”

  He nodded.

  “A man named Van worked for Tosh before you,” I said. “Did you know him?”

  “Thai Van, yes. Not very well, but yes.”

  “It was because of something Van said or did to Trinh that Mr. Sato fired him,” I said. “Do you know what that was about?”

  We had reached the division between pink and yellow roses. When Duc stopped and took small clippers from his pocket to snip off a perfect yellow rose, I wondered if I had asked one question too many, or ventured into a sensitive territory. But after Duc ran the stem through a thorn stripper, he handed the rose to me with a little bow and a sad little smile.

  “I don’t know what happened between Van and Trinh,” he said. “I can’t believe that she would have been happy to see him so near her family, even if he said nothing to her.”

  “Why?” I smelled the rose and passed it to Jean-Paul. I asked Duc, “Was Van dangerous to her?”

  “Dangerous?” Duc said as we walked on. “I can’t say. Van was a bitter man, like his father. But dangerous?”

  “Who was his father?” I asked.

  “Thai Hung, a nationalist leader,” he said. “During the world war, Hung was an organizer in the resistance against Japan. After the Japanese defeat, he led a faction that opposed not only France but also Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh. Thai Hung believed Ho was trying to replace one form of European oppression, the French, with another, namely Ho’s Moscow-bred Marxism. To his way of thinking, Trinh’s father, at one time or another, was complicit with all of the oppressors of the people of Vietnam. That is, he was an enemy.”

  “Did Van agree with him?”

  He held up his hands; who knew? “Like his father, Thai Van was a committed nationalist who lost his country but would not give up his cause. Last I heard, he was part of a group that thinks it is the legitimate government of the Republic of Vietnam, in exile. They’re down south in Orange County somewhere. Little Saigon, probably.”

  Duc leaned closer, as if to share a confidence. “There is an American expression: You can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I know in context the reference is to rural Americans when they go to the city,” he said. “But it could as easily refer to the inability of a man like Van to adapt to a new environment. When he saw how Trinh lived, he said that her willingness to become, if you will, an American, living with an American, the mother of an American, was a betrayal of her ancestors.”

  “We have another expression,” I said. “The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons.”

  He thought about that. After a moment, he said, “Flowers I understand. People, not very much.”

  Jean-Paul, still holding the perfect yellow rose, looked around at Duc’s flourishing little empire. He asked, “Were you a gardener in the old country?”

  “No.” Duc chuckled softly. “But when I came here, there were no openings in my chosen field. Gardener’s helper was the best job I could find on the refugee center’s help-wanted list.”

  “What was your field?” I asked.

  “In Vietnam, I was a flyer,” Duc said, stooping to pull a weed. “VNAF—Vietnam Air Force.”

  “What did you fly?” Jean-Paul asked with apparent interest.

  “F-5s for the most part,” Duc said. “Light fighters.”

  “Of course, American aircraft,” Jean-Paul said. “My father, when he was stationed at Nha Trang, trained VNAF pilots on the old F8F Bearcat. Single-engine, piston driven, but a good work horse. A bomber.”

  I turned to him. “Your father was in Vietnam?”

  “Bien sûr.”

  “When?” I asked. The man was full of surprises.

  “At about the same time your father was fighting communists in Korea, my father was fighting communists in Vietnam.” He slipped his hand through the crook of my arm. “He was there until maybe a year after Dien Bien Phu. I think he came home in 1955. The French left soon after, and then the Americans arrived.”

  In French, Duc said, “Before my time.”

  “And mine,” Jean-Paul said. “Do you still fly?”

  Duc shook his head. “In 1975, I left Saigon in a commandeered fighter jet with my wife and children buckled into the co-pilot’s seat. When I landed on the Midway, I hung up my pilot’s wings. Thanks just the same, but I now prefer
growing flowers to dropping bombs.”

  Duc stopped in the middle of an area planted with magnificent deep red roses and spread his hands.

  “Here we are, Maggie. Your father’s progeny.”

  “Chryslers,” I said.

  “This is where it all began for me,” he said. “Your father gave me cuttings from this rose, Tosh leased me a corner of his land and coached me, and little by little I went into business for myself. I acquired a field here, a field there, a bit at a time, and now I plant about forty acres.”

  Jean-Paul said, “In France, we have an expression: Petit à petit, l’oiseau fait son nid.”

  “Meaning?” I asked, as Duc laughed.

  Duc answered, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

  He walked us back to the office and offered refreshments. As warm and thirsty as we were, we needed to get home.

  “Thank you for showing us around,” I said. “What you have accomplished is very impressive.”

  “Yes,” Duc acknowledged as he walked us out to the truck. “But possible only because I had help. Now, if there is any way I can be helpful to you, I would be honored.”

  “Can you help me find Thai Van?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll make some calls and get back to you.”

  Two of his gardeners were waiting for us beside the truck. Each held a bucket full of long-stemmed roses, one white, one red.

  “You told me you’re going to the Bartolinis’ Vu Lan celebration,” Duc said. “Please take the white roses to Trinh’s son, in memory of his mother. The reds are for you, in honor of your lovely mother. White for the deceased, red for the living.”

  I glanced at the giant bouquet of white roses in the ancestor shrine in front of the office, then at Duc.

  He nodded; yes, his mother had passed into the next realm.

  During the drive home, Jean-Paul was thoughtful. I handed him a bottle of cold water from the cooler bag Lyle had sent with us. He drank half of it in a long gulp.

  “Tired?” I asked.

  “A little, sure. It’s very warm.”

  I checked the dash clock. “I think there’s time for a short nap when we get home.”