Sometimes at night he would squeeze his eyes shut and imagine how it might be to marry her. It did not seem so farfetched to him that they might move to some other place in the world where this would be possible. He liked to think about being with Hatsue in some place like Switzerland or Italy or France. He gave his whole soul to love; he allowed himself to believe that his feelings for Hatsue had been somehow preordained. He had been meant to meet her on the beach as a child and then to pass his life with her. There was no other way it could be.
Inside their cedar tree they spoke of everything in the intense and overwrought manner of teenagers and he found that she had many moods. There were times when she went cold and silent and he felt her distance from him so completely that it seemed impossible to reach her. Even when he held her it seemed to him there was a place in her heart he couldn’t get to. At times he worked himself up to discussing this, gradually revealing to her how it hurt him to feel there was a part of her love she withheld. Hatsue denied that this was so and explained to him that her emotional reserve was something she couldn’t help. She had been carefully trained by her upbringing, she said, to avoid effusive displays of feeling, but this did not mean her heart was shallow. Her silence, she said, would express something if he would learn to listen to it. Yet his suspicion that he loved more deeply than she did nevertheless remained with him, and he worried about it perpetually.
Hatsue, he found, had a religious side he had only sensed when they’d been younger. He drew her out in conversation on this matter, and she told him how she tried to keep in mind certain basic articles of her faith. All of life was impermanent, for example – a thing she thought about every day. It was important for a person to act carefully, for every action, Hatsue explained, had consequences for the soul’s future. She confessed to experiencing a moral anguish over meeting him so secretly and deceiving her mother and father. It seemed to her certain that she would suffer from the consequences of it, that no one could maintain such deceit for so long without paying for it somehow. Ishmael argued at length about this, asserting that God could not possibly view their love as something wrong or evil. God, replied Hatsue, was personal; only she could know what God wanted from her. Motive, she added, was very important: what was her motive in concealing from her parents the time she spent with Ishmael? This was the question that worried her most: determining for herself her motive.
Ishmael, at school, feigned detachment in her presence and ignored her in the casual way she gradually taught him to use. Hatsue was a master of the art of false preoccupation; she would pass him in the hallway, in her plaid blouse with its neat tucks, puffed sleeves, and ruffled collar, with a bow in her hair, pleats in her skirt, and books hiked up against her breast, and move on with an apparently artless indifference that in the beginning painfully astonished him. How was it possible for her to feign such coldness without feeling it at the same time? By degrees he learned to enjoy these encounters, though his indifference always appeared more studied than hers and he was always anxious, in a barely concealed way, to meet her gaze. He even said hello to her now and again as one element in his pretense. ‘Hard test,’ he’d say at the end of a class. ‘How’d you do, anyway?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t study enough.’
‘Did you do the essay for Sparling?’
‘I tried. It’s about a page long.’
‘Mine, too. A little longer.’
He would move on, collect his books, and leave the room with Sheridan Knowles or Don Hoyt or Denny Horbach.
At the Strawberry Festival in 1941 he’d watched while the mayor of Amity Harbor had crowned Hatsue Strawberry Princess. The mayor had placed a tiara on her head and hung a sash over her left shoulder. Hatsue and four other girls made a promenade through the crowd and tossed strawberry-flavored candy to the children. Ishmael’s father – owner, publisher, editor, chief reporter, photographer, and printer of the San Piedro Review – had a special interest in these proceedings. Year after year they provided a lead story, complete with a portrait of the crowned and comely maiden, candids of picnicking families (‘The Maltons of Protection Point enjoy Saturday’s strawberry festival’), and a beneficent editorial or boilerplate column approving the efforts of local organizers (‘ … Ed Bailey, Lois Dunkirk, and Carl Heine, Sr., without whom none of this would have been possible … ’). Arthur wandered the picnic grounds in bow tie and suspenders, a porkpie hat pulled low over his forehead and the enormous weight of his camera slung from a thick leather thong around his neck. Ishmael stood beside him while he photographed Hatsue-he winked at her when his father put one eye to the camera, and she gave back the faint trace of a smile.
‘Neighbor girl,’ his father said. ‘South Beach ought to be proud.’
He followed his father that afternoon, and they joined in the tug-of-war and the three-legged race. The strawberry floats, festooned with staghorn ferns, zinnias, and forget-me-nots – and with the royal court of the Strawberry Festival draped theatrically under cherry sprays and spruce boughs trained to wire guy lines – passed like ships before the somber eyes of the Strawberry Festival Association, which included the mayor, the chairman of the chamber of commerce, the fire chief, and Arthur Chambers. Again Ishmael stood beside his father while Hatsue, on board her float, passed by waving to everybody majestically with her crepe paper scepter in hand. Ishmael waved back and laughed.
September came; they were high school seniors. A gray green stillness settled into things, and the summer people left for their city homes again: soft overcast, night fog, low mists in the dips between hills, road mud, vacant beaches, empty clamshells scattered among rocks, silent shops folded in on themselves. By October San Piedro had slipped off its summer reveler’s mask to reveal a torpid, soporific dreamer whose winter bed was made of wet green moss. Cars slumped along the mud and gravel roads at twenty or thirty miles an hour like sluggish beetles beneath the overhanging trees. The Seattle people passed into memory and winter savings accounts; stoves were stoked, fires banked, books taken down, quilts mended. The gutters filled with rust-colored pine needles and the pungent effluvium of alder leaves, and the drainpipes splashed with winter rain.
Hatsue told him, one fall afternoon, about her tutelage under Mrs. Shigemura and the directive she’d been given as a girl of thirteen to marry a boy of her own kind, a Japanese boy from a good family. She repeated that it made her unhappy to deceive the world. Her secret life, which she carried with her in the presence of her parents and sisters at every moment, made her feel she had betrayed them in a way that was nothing less than evil – there was no other word for it, she told Ishmael. Outside, the rain dripped from the canopy of cedar boughs down into the under-growth of ivy. Hatsue sat with her cheek against her knees, looking out through the opening in the cedar tree, her hair a single braid down her spine. ‘It isn’t evil,’ Ishmael insisted. ‘How can this be evil? It wouldn’t make any sense for this to be evil. It’s the world that’s evil, Hatsue,’ he added. ‘Don’t pay it any mind.’
‘That isn’t so easy,’ said Hatsue. ‘I lie every day to my family, Ishmael. Sometimes I think I’ll go crazy with it. Sometimes I think this can’t go on.’
Later they lay side by side against the moss, looking up into the darkened cedar wood with their hands folded behind their heads. ‘This can’t go on,’ whispered Hatsue. ‘Don’t you worry about that?’
‘I know,’ answered Ishmael. ‘You’re right.’
‘What will we do? What’s the answer?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Ishmael. ‘There isn’t one, it looks like.’
‘I heard a rumor,’ Hatsue replied. ‘There’s a fisherman who claims to have seen a German submarine just off Amity Harbor. A periscope – he followed it for half a mile. Do you think that can be true?’
‘No,’ said Ishmael. ‘It isn’t true. People will believe anything – they’re scared, I guess. It’s just fear, is all. They’re afraid.’
‘I’m afraid, too,’ said Hatsue. ‘Everyb
ody’s afraid right now.’
‘I’m going to be drafted,’ answered Ishmael. ‘It’s something I just have to face.’
They sat in their cedar tree thinking about this, but the war still seemed far away. The war did not disturb them there, and they continued to view themselves as exceedingly fortunate in the particulars of their secret existence. Their absorption in one another, the heat of their bodies, their mingling smells and the movements of their limbs – these things shielded them from certain truths. Yet sometimes at night Ishmael Chambers would lie awake because there was a war on in the world. He would turn his thoughts toward Hatsue then and keep them there until at the verge of sleep the war swam back to spill forth horribly anyway in his dreams.
13
Hatsue Imada was standing in the foyer of the Amity Harbor Buddhist Chapel, buttoning her coat after services, when Georgia Katanaka’s mother told the people gathered there the news about Pearl Harbor. ‘It’s very bad,’ she said. ‘A bombing raid. The Japanese air force has bombed everything. It is bad for us, terribly bad. There is nothing else on the radio. Everything is Pearl Harbor.’
Hatsue pulled her lapels more closely around her throat and turned her eyes toward her parents. Her father – he’d been busy helping her mother into her coat – only stood there blinking at Mrs. Katanaka. ‘It can’t be true,’ he said.
‘It’s true,’ he said.
‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘Find a radio. Just this morning. They bombed Hawaii.’
They stood in the reception room kitchen with the Katanakas, Ichiharas, Sasakis, and Hayashidas and listened to the Bendix sitting on the counter. Nobody spoke – they merely stood there. They listened for ten minutes without moving, their heads down, their ears turned toward the radio. Finally Hatsue’s father began to pace and scratch his head and then to rub his chin, long strokes. ‘We’d better get home,’ he said.
They drove home and listened to the radio again, the five Imada girls and their parents. They kept the radio on all afternoon and late into the evening, too. Now and then the telephone would ring, and Hatsue’s father, in Japanese, would discuss matters with Mr. Oshiro or Mr. Nishi. More than a half-dozen times he made calls himself to discuss matters with other people. He would hang up, scratch his head, then return to his seat by the radio.
Mr. Oshiro called again and told Hatsue’s father that in Amity Harbor a fisherman named Otto Willets had put up a ladder in front of Shigeru Ichiyama’s movie theater and unscrewed the lightbulbs in the marquee. While he was busy at it two other men had steadied the ladder for him and yelled curses at the Ichiyamas, who were not present. Otto Willets and his friends, on discovering this, had driven out to Lundgren Road and sat in front of the Ichiyamas’ in a pickup truck, where they pounded on the horn until Shig came out and stood on his porch to see what they wanted. Willets had called Shig a dirty Jap and told him he ought to have smashed every light in the marquee – didn’t he know there was a blackout? Shig said no, he hadn’t known, he was glad to have been told, he was thankful to the men for unscrewing the marquee bulbs for him. He ignored Otto Willets’s insults.
At ten o’clock Mr. Oshiro called again; armed men had posted themselves around Amity Harbor out of fear of a Japanese attack. There were men with shotguns behind logs along the beach just north and south of town. The defense of San Piedro was being organized; there were men meeting right now at the Masons’ lodge. The Otsubos had driven by at eight o’clock and seen at least forty cars and pickup trucks parked along the road near the Masons’. Furthermore three or four gill-netters, it was said, had left the harbor to patrol San Piedro’s waters. Mr. Oshiro had seen one drifting on the tide, its engine cut, its running lights out, below the bluff near his home on Crescent Bay, a mere silhouette in the night. Hatsue’s father – he spoke in Japanese – asked Mr. Oshiro if in fact there were submarines and if the rumors of an invasion of Oregon and California were factual. ‘Anything is possible,’ answered Mr. Oshiro. ‘You should be prepared for anything, Hisao.’
Hatsue’s father took his shotgun from the closet and set it in the corner of the living room, unloaded. He got out a box of squirrel loads, too, and slipped three shells into his shirt pocket. Then he turned off every light but one and hung sheets across all the windows. Every few minutes he would leave his place by the radio to pull back a corner of one of these sheets and peer out into the strawberry fields. Then he would go out onto the porch to listen and to search the sky for airplanes. There were none, but on the other hand the sky was mostly overcast and a plane would not easily be seen.
They went to bed; nobody slept. In the morning, on the school bus, Hatsue looked directly at Ishmael Chambers as she passed him on the way to her seat. Ishmael looked back and nodded at her, once. The bus driver, Ron Lamberson, had an Anacortes newspaper tucked underneath his chair; at each stop he flung the door open with a flourish, then sat reading a section of the paper while the children boarded in silence. ‘Here’s the deal,’ he called over his shoulder as the school bus wound down Mill Run Road. ‘The Japanese are attacking all over the place, not just Pearl Harbor. They’re making raids all over the Pacific Ocean. Roosevelt is going to declare war today, but what are we gonna do about these attacks? The whole fleet’s been destroyed out there, is the deal. And they’re arresting Jap traitors in Hawaii and other places – the FBI’s in on it. They’re getting them down in Seattle right now, in fact. Arresting the spies and everything. The government’s frozen Jap bank accounts, too. Main thing, there’s a blackout ordered for tonight all up and down the coast. The navy figures there’s gonna be an air raid. Don’t want to scare you kids, but could be right here – the transmitter station at Agate Point? The navy transmitter station? Your radio is gonna be off the air from seven tonight until tomorrow morning so the Japs don’t pick up any signals. Everyone’s supposed to put black cloth on their windows and stay inside, stay calm.’
At school, all day, there was nothing but the radio. Two thousand men had been killed. The voices that spoke were cheerless and sober and suggested a barely suppressed urgency. The young people sat with their books unopened and listened to a navy man describe in detail how to extinguish incendiary bombs, and then to reports of further Japanese attacks, Roosevelt’s speech before the Congress, an announcement by Attorney General Biddle that Japanese fifth columnists were being arrested in Washington, Oregon, and California. Mr. Sparling became restive and bitter and began to talk in a desolate monotone about his eleven months in France during the Great War. He said that he hoped the boys in his class would take their duty to fight seriously and that furthermore they should consider it an honor to meet the Japs head-on and do the job of paying them back. ‘War stinks,’ he added. ‘But they started it. They bombed Hawaii on a Sunday morning. On a Sunday morning, of all things.’ He shook his head, turned up the radio, and leaned morosely against the blackboard with his arms seized against his narrow chest.
By three o’clock that afternoon Ishmael’s father had printed and distributed the first war extra in the history of his island newspaper, a one-page edition with a banner headline – ISLAND DEFENSE SET!
Only a few hours after the outbreak of hostilities between Japan and the United States, San Piedro Island late last night was prepared – temporarily at least – for an air raid bombing or other serious emergency.
A meeting of the local defense commission was called promptly by Richard A. Blackington, local defense commissioner, at the Masons’ lodge yesterday afteroon and attended by all defense commission lieutenants. An air raid blackout signal system, details of which can be found elsewhere in this edition, was established. It will rely on church bells, industrial plant whistles, and automobile horns.
Defense leaders, taking the attitude that ‘anything can happen,’ warned islanders to be on the alert to black out electric lights on extremely short notice.
Island watchers for the Interceptor Command will be on duty on a twenty-four-hour basis. Meanwhile members of the island’s Japanese com
munity pledged their loyalty to the United States.
Guards were trebled at the U.S. Navy’s Agate Point radio transmitter station and at the Crow Marine Railway and Shipbuilding Company. The Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company and the Puget Sound Power and Light Company indicated steps would be taken to guard their facilities here.
Arrangements were being made to bring summer fire-fighting equipment, stored for the winter in Anacortes, back to the island today.
Ensign R. B. Clawson, representing Comdr. L. N. Channing of the Agate Point radio transmitter station, addressed the defense commission meeting. Military and naval intelligence units, he said, have the situation well in hand and are taking proper local steps to guard against saboteurs and spies. ‘The transmitter station went on prearranged war alert status immediately upon news of the Pearl Harbor attack,’ added Ensign Clawson. ‘Nevertheless, island civilians must do whatever they can independent of naval and military aid to safeguard their homes and businesses against sabotage or bombing.’
The following lieutenants of the defense commission were present at yesterday’s meeting:
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