A Gesture Life (22 page)

“Well, let’s go see Tommy,” Kari announces. She and her friend bid us goodbye and march off to the Kiddie Kare.

“I should go anyway,” Sunny then tells me. “It’s not really fair to Sheila.”

“Yes, of course,” I say, though no part of me wants her to go just yet. For sitting right here, I think, is the daughter—considerate, fair, attentive—most anyone could be happy for. And I say, “You must return to your proud establishment.”

“It’s not so proud for long.”

“Why shouldn’t it be?”

“Business is terrible.”

“What do you mean? What about all those customers, all the fine merchandise?”

“It looks better than it is,” she says somberly. “It’s not at all good, really. The corporate office wants to close the store. I think they knew it when they hired me. It was a horrible summer. People in Ebbington don’t have much extra money to spend. No one else knows this yet, but we’ll be closing at the end of the month.”

“This month? But that’s less than three weeks from now….”

“I know.” She says softly, “On Monday I have to give everybody notice.”

“But what about you?”

“What about me. When there’s no store, there’s no manager. I’ve been looking around, but this whole town is in the dumps. Lerner’s doesn’t have openings anywhere else. I’ll have to be a salesclerk somewhere again. It doesn’t matter. I’ll get by. I always have.”

“But there’s Thomas. Who will look after him? I know that day care can be very costly. You must look harder. You must find another management position. I can help you. I still know a number of businesspeople in Bedley Run—”

“Please!” she says quite forcefully. “I’ve been
fine
all these years. Let’s not start. I didn’t send the card to you to start something like this. And you should know I won’t take one step in that town, and neither will Thomas. There’s no chance of that. So please don’t try to change my mind.”

“But I can help you with Thomas,” I tell her. “I’ll pay for a sitter, or for day camp. Whatever else he needs, I’ll provide. Please let
me do this, at least. Please, Sunny. It can’t hurt, to let me do this.”

And yet, invariably, we all know how it does. In a few moments Sunny leaves to go back to the store, and I decide to walk about the mall with the last of my tea. We’ve made a plan to speak once again, sometime next week, after which I’ll go to their apartment in Ebbington to pick him up for a short visit; we’ll take a fun shopping trip, for some new sneakers or toys. And now, though I half-promised Sunny I wouldn’t, I go past the Kiddie Kare once more, slowing my pace by the window, to see what he’s up to inside. I can find him too easily amid the plastic barrels and chutes; he’s by far the oldest and biggest, towering a bit too much over the other boys and girls, and I think how it is that Sunny was able to send that card to me, unsigned as it was, a message and non-message for the sole sake of her boy. And the idea entreats me once more, to wonder if something like love is forever victorious, truly conquering all, or if there are those who, like me, remain somehow whole and sovereign, still live unvanquished.

HOW I AM STILL UP SO LATE
and sleepless in this darkened, unwarm kitchen, after spending the entire afternoon with Sunny’s energetic boy, is an amazement to me. I must be rejuvenated, or at least somehow, for now, made over. Surely it is in good part Tommy’s presence happily lingering with me, the slightly dizzied, hyperactive romp of him, the constant, as if self-winding locomotion of his sturdy, pumping limbs. It seems to me I should be tucked away in my bed and dreaming of myself on younger legs, running after the boy with joyous, flowing ease, instead of sitting here at the table with shoots of a draft prickling my feet and a tepid cup of green tea cooling in my hands. I am certainly concerned that I might be rubbing Sunny the wrong way, encroaching too far and too fast into the wide territory she has set between us, which I have never thought ill of her for and have even looked upon with a certain measure of relief and gratitude; she has always been able to exercise her resolve, a trait that was difficult to handle when she was young but one I am beginning to appreciate more with each
passing day. So I am starting to think that the real cause of my restlessness is something that I saw this afternoon, which was most ordinary and trivial.

It was after I dropped Tommy off at the mall at the end of our appointed day together. He and I had thoroughly enjoyed a shopping spree along Route 3A, where we visited, in turn, the Toy Palace and the Sports Section and the old roller-skating rink, and then sat side by side on revolving stools at the ice cream counter of the Woolworth’s. It was a wonderful day for me, really, beginning at the toy shop where the stout little boy—whom I told people was my grandson—shed his initial shyness and healthy suspicion of me and suddenly bounded down the aisles touching and handling as many of the brightly packaged toys as he could. I told him he could pick out two things, though looking upon his desperate expression of trying to choose I weakened and said three, and soon enough I lost all resolve and it was five items he could have, then somehow seven. In the end he’d filled up the cart to the exact number, and I could tell he was fundamentally a well-raised boy because he picked out the smaller, modest things rather than some pedal-driven car or grandly boxed building set.

Sunny was somewhat cross with me when we arrived at the store, me bearing the bulging bags of his things and Tommy, drooling and gregarious, methodically aiming his special noise-and-light-making pistol at the Lerner’s customers. But I could see that she was taken, too, by the lightness of his feet, his giddy, errant leaps and twirls, and maybe, as well, with the way he kept circling the racks of clothes and then returning to me, to shoot me square in the belly, clicking away again and again. Sunny didn’t say much except to tell Tommy that he should thank “Mr. Hata,” and then nodded to me with a lukewarm smile and a wave of her hand. But she was not
being unkind. She had given her employees the news of the store closing a few days earlier, and the mood on the floor and among the staff was decidedly somber, all the more distinguished from Tommy’s brusque, overpleased activity.

And then, surprisingly, I was caught off guard by my own stirring, at least the sudden thrum-thrum in my chest as I shook his small hand goodbye, which was a sensation one might usually describe as both sweet and bitter but to me was also squarely, terribly rueful, as I realized how brief and few my times with him might be in future days. It seems curious, all these years alone and my rarely thinking twice of the larger questions, perhaps save certain reconsiderations in the last few weeks, but now the simple padding touch of his boy’s fingers seemed to have the force of a thousand pulling hands. It was everything I could do to heed his mother’s unspoken (though readily clear) wishes and keep a dignified face and uneventfully leave him until our next time together, which was as yet unarranged.

So I went out from the Lerner’s feeling as though my spirit was being loosed into the expansive, dusky caverns of the mall, wafting upward against the bank of skylights whose grimy filter recast the bright autumn sunshine into a hazy, gauzy glow. I felt lacking, of course, bereft in the thought of my adopted daughter and her son simply staying behind in the store, as they must do at the end of every afternoon and with hardly a thought of missing anything or anyone. And I thought if I were the boy, what would I know tonight except that a silver-haired man with wiry fingers had taken me around and bought me things and seemed to know Momma well enough and had plenty of the money she did not? What would I remember by the next afternoon, except for his old man’s voice like a soft bellows, the strangely slow shuffle of his feet, his high, weak cough?
For who was I to him, really, or to his mother, for that matter, but a too-late-in-coming, too-late-in-life notion of a grandfather, a sorry, open-handed figure of a patriarch, come back hungry and hopeful to people he never knew?

As such, I wouldn’t have blamed Sunny if she couldn’t help but make a scene and denounce me in front of all. Perhaps I would have welcomed it had she thought twice about my reappearance in her life and flashed me those hard eyes from her youth; that way, at least, I might not have come back to this house of mine sensing that it had grown even vaster—and me that much smaller within it—in the wake of the easy, joyful hours I spent with her son. And then my having the companion feeling, too, that my life had all at once become provisional again, the way a young man’s might be, open to possibility and choice and then vulnerability as well, a state of being I have always treated with veritable dread. For it is the vulnerability of people that has long haunted me: the mortality and fragility, of the like I witnessed performing my duties in the war, which never ceased to alarm, but also the surprisingly subject condition of even the most stolid of men’s wills during wartime, the inhuman capacities to which they are helplessly given if they have but ears to hear and eyes to see.

In my car in the parking lot, I sat for a few minutes with the engine running before I drove away. A particular sight was arresting me—and not of Tommy or Sunny. Rather, it was an otherwise insignificant notice: that group of Middle Eastern men who had opened the temporary Halloween store just the week before were already dismantling their modest, homespun window displays before Halloween had even arrived, stripping the shop. I was on my way out but stopped to watch them for a moment. They did not appear too upset or disturbed, just went about their work the same
steady way as they had begun it. I felt badly for them, of course, knowing that they must be losing a decent amount of money, and that they were presumably stemming their losses with this very quick closing. They were again out in front of the place with ladders, unsticking the paper banners and signs, and I noticed inside the store a teenaged boy and girl sitting at chairs and working beside each other, the girl folding up various-sized squares of black cloth, Halloween table linens and napkins, and placing them in boxes. The young man wasn’t as serious as the girl (his twin sister?), in fact he was clearly enervated by the task and was effortfully closing up each small box, fitfully running a tape dispenser across the tops. He was talking to her, but it seemed in a haranguing sort of way, his jawbone working continuously. There was a short stack of the taped boxes beside him, which he kept kicking lightly with the side of his foot. The girl, a slender young woman with high, wide-set eyes, wouldn’t be annoyed by his attitude. She steadily made her way through a heaping, messy bin of the dark fabric. She would take each piece and shake it free of its haphazard folds and smooth it down flat on her lap, then begin to fold it again from corner to corner. The boy finished sealing a box and, having no others, watched her diffidently. She was picking another square of cloth from the bin and beginning her procedure, when he reached over and meanly picked at it, causing it to fall to her feet. She paused, then retrieved it and started over. But again he messed up her work. This happened twice more until finally the girl took the cloth and shook it open and placed it over her own head. The boy was confused. She sat there with her face covered in black, and he yelled at her once and then rose abruptly and left her.

The girl remained there, under the veil, unmoving for some time. And as I sat parked in the mostly empty lot in the long shadow
of the mall, I felt I understood what she was meaning by her peculiar act, how she could repel his insults and finally him by making herself in some measure disappear. As if to provide the means of her own detachment. It was because of this notion—as well as the simple cloth itself, similar enough to the swath Sunny once found in a lacquered box in my closet—that I remembered the girl again, Kkutaeh, the one I came to call simply K, and the events in our camp in those last months of the war.

*   *   *

AFTER THE KILLING
, and the execution of Corporal Endo, it was unusually quiet in the camp. It was then that K was placed under my care. This under direct order by the doctor, Captain Ono. He determined that she was despondent and suicidal, and possibly dangerous to others, particularly to the other girls. I had no reason to doubt his appraisal as I hadn’t observed her or spent any length of time with her, nor would I have disagreed with him had I believed otherwise. He found me one afternoon doing paperwork and called me out into the small clearing behind the infirmary, where our medical wastes and other garbage were discarded. He said gravely, “I have determined that the girl (he always called her this, never referring to any of the others) is a risk and should be quarantined periodically. What will happen is that I will let the intervals be known to you, and under my authority you will remove her from her service and examine her thoroughly.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “But what shall I examine her for?”

“For infection and disease,” he said sharply, staring at me as if I were a total fool. “You will prepare and treat her if necessary. I expect her to be free of illness when she comes to me. Keep her and isolate her beforehand.”

“Here in the infirmary, sir?”

“Where else, Lieutenant! Come up with something, can’t you? For all I care you can use the surplus supply closet. In fact, that will do. You’ll lock her inside, of course. Do you understand, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir,” I told him, though not being completely certain of what he was actually ordering me to do. I stood waiting at attention, but he was silent. I could normally “remove her from her service” for medical reasons, with his permission, of course, but to select her out regularly, and only her, before indications of an illness or malady was unusual indeed.

“Resume your duties,” he muttered, turning to go back inside the infirmary. He paused at the door. “Another thing. About the sign.”

“Sir?”

“So that you know when to get her ready. I don’t want to have to speak to you every time. In fact from now on I want to minimize such contacts between us. I’m too busy to be supervising you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then what shall it be?” he said sternly.

I had no hint of an answer for him, and I shuffled my feet. He then looked somewhat pleased, while regarding me.

“Well, it should be that then.”

“Captain?”

“Since this will now be a critical responsibility for you, Lieutenant, perhaps it ought to be fairly obvious, so that you won’t have any confusion and waste my time.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In this spirit, then, you will look out each morning for a black flag.”

“Pardon me, sir?”

“A black flag. What do you think, Lieutenant? I will affix it on the front of the infirmary. I suspect even you will be able to notice this.”

“I believe I will see it clearly, sir, yes.”

He waited for me to respond further, as if he hoped to provoke me with his choice of sign. But I remained at attention, not meeting his piercing eyes, trying as hard as I could to imagine myself far away from him and this place, perhaps swimming in the quiet sea that lapped the shore of Rangoon. I had been thinking lately of that posting, which was mostly a last, brief R&R for us as we awaited transport to a more forward base. I remembered having the thought then in the glowing dusk on the beach that the war, oddly enough, was not so awful; that a young man uncertain of himself could find meaning amidst the camaraderie of his fellows working in such shared purpose, and that in fact there was no truer proving time for which he could hope. And yet it seemed everything fell away whenever Captain Ono addressed me, all my carefully built-up perception of things, and in the sorry depletion I could feel the searing, rising surges of what must be pure enmity. I have never quite shown this expression, and I did not then with Captain Ono.

“Look for it, Lieutenant Kurohata,” he finally said, and with a flit of his surgeon’s hand he turned and left me.

What he had determined as the sign, the black flag, was of course meant for me. Hata is, literally, “flag,” and a “black flag,” or
kurohata,
is the banner a village would raise by its gate in olden times to warn of a contagion within. It is the signal of spreading death. My adoptive family, I learned right away, had an ancient lineage of apothecaries, who had ventured into stricken villages and had for unknown reasons determined to keep the name, however
inauspicious it was. Captain Ono’s choice, of course, was intentionally belittling, though I could see, too, how the sign would serve to keep others away from the infirmary who would naturally assume there had been an outbreak. As there was no recent fighting in our area, the infirmary, was in fact empty and had been so for some weeks, and he could have a privacy there that was not possible anywhere else in the camp, even for an officer.

A few mornings later I rose before dawn and the morning call. I dressed and began my usual ablutions: a quick wash with a dampened rag, a fitful, pulling shave with a knife’s edge, and then a meager, rationed morning meal of barley porridge and tea from the officers’ mess. It was much the same as any other morning, but as I finished I realized, gazing out at the lightly fogged-in camp, how actually pitiable the condition of things had become. There was of course the threat of an enemy offensive looming about like a pall, but even that, too, seemed to be dissipating, the notion grown more enervating, somehow, than frightful. Soon enough, we would understand that the fighting had indeed passed us over, but we did not believe that then. There were various scatters of litter about the encampment, and all about the air was the fouled, earthy smell of the far latrines, which had filled up again and needed to be cleared. This was the unheroic state of our far-flung outpost, in fact one forgotten by both home and foe, and under the increasingly retiring leadership of Colonel Ishii, who was hardly to be seen anymore outside his house.