A Gesture Life (30 page)

“He’s shot himself,” I said. “Get the large bandages in the cabinet.”

Shiboru looked confused, but I pointed at the cabinet and he complied. I realized it was he who had executed Endo that day. He hurriedly brought the gauzes but when he gave them to me I told him it was already too late.

“How did this happen?” he said, not yet holstering his revolver.

“It was an accident,” I replied, picking up Ono’s gun. “He was playing with the girl. Doing tricks for her. He was switching hands when it went off.”

“What happened to you?”

I told him the captain had beaten me the day before, not explaining any further, and Shiboru naturally didn’t question it. He looked down at the captain’s body and said haughtily, “Only real soldiers should toy with such things. And even then. So I suppose you’re the base doctor now, eh, Kurohata?”

“If the colonel wishes it.”

“Oh, that he will,” Shiboru answered, nodding to the hall. “It seems the old man needs his medicine. He insisted on me coming here and getting the captain. Right off, too, with the needles and all. I suppose you’ll be by daily as Ono here was. I’ll let my men know.”

He snorted when I didn’t answer, and he said gruffly, “He’s in his house. You better go there now. The sentries will take care of this mess. She’ll come with me.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“She’s got no reason to be here. I know what was going on, Kurohata, like everybody else. The doctor, having it special. In fact, maybe you, too? But no more, eh? Everybody’s bored with just the three others. They’re nearly useless now besides. Fucking skeletons. Can’t you fix them up or something? It’s almost better with your own hand. At least you don’t want to throw up when you’re
doing it. But this one, she’s a doll. Skinny, but she’s a real beauty. Come here, doll. Come here to your big brother.”

I went to the storeroom to get the vials of the tincture, trying desperately to think of what to do. When I came back the guards were waiting to escort me to the commander’s house, but I stopped at the exam room to try to stall or convince him to leave her to me. It was strange, then, when I looked inside; I thought I saw her gazing at him almost tenderly, with a last human glimmer, and then I knew in an instant how terrible all the rest of it would be. She reached out with one hand and seemed to caress him, but he groaned instead, clutching one side of his face. When he let go there was a fine red line, from the corner of his eye down to his mouth. He started bleeding profusely. She had cut him, but not too deeply, as though she were trying only to mark him. She didn’t move away. Then he punched her hard enough on the mouth that some of her teeth flew out, like tiny white birds.

One of the sentries pulled me along, saying, “Don’t worry, the lieutenant has his certain way.” Outside, through the window, I could see that K had risen up again, bloody-mouthed, and he struck her again.

When I finally finished administering to the commander and returned to the infirmary there was no one there. I had injected him and sat with him as he requested but it still took nearly an hour until he fell asleep. Just before he did he suddenly realized that it was the first time I had administered his medicine, in place of Captain Ono. He wasn’t disturbed or even suspicious; he was already too deep in the thrall of the injection. All he wanted was that I sit beside him as he lay prostrate on his bedpad and gently pat him on the back with a slow, steady rhythm. After a few minutes he began half-humming a sentimental folk song, his faint voice breaking in beats
as I patted, so that he sounded almost like an old woman consoling herself at day’s end.

As soon as he was asleep I went directly to the comfort house, but there, too, it was quiet, being late in the afternoon, when the girls were allowed to sleep before the evening and late night. Behind their communal tent I found Mrs. Matsui, crouched over a dented washing pail of gray water, wringing undershirts. I asked if she had seen Lieutenant Shiboru, and of course, K.

She nodded.

I asked where.

“Aren’t you going there, too?” she said, wringing out an undershirt.

“No, where?”

“They’re at the clearing.” She picked at her teeth with her fingernail. She was angry and even a little upset. “A whole bunch of them. I told that bitch this would happen to her. Stupid little bitch. ‘You’re going to get yourself killed,’ I told her, if she goes on like that. Or worse. But now see how it is? It has to be worse. Something worse.”

I ran up the north path by the latrines, toward the clearing, as it was known, which was where Corporal Endo had taken K’s sister. But I wasn’t halfway there when I met them coming back, singly and together and in small groups. The men. It was the men. Twenty-five of them, thirty of them. I had to slow as they went past. Some were half-dressed, shirtless, trouserless, half-hopping to pull on boots. They were generally quiet. The quiet after great celebration. They were flecked with blood, and muddy dirt, some more than others. One with his hands and forearms as if dipped in crimson. Another’s face smudged with it, the color strange in his hair. One of them was completely clean, only his boots soiled; he
was vomiting as he walked. Shiboru carried his saber, wiping it lazily in the tall grass. His face was bleeding but he was unconcerned. He did not see me; none of them did. They could have been returning from a volleyball match, thoroughly enervated, sobered by near glory.

Then they were all gone. I walked the rest of the way to the clearing. The air was cooler there, the treetops shading the falling sun. Mostly it was like any other place I had ever been. Yet I could not smell or hear or see as I did my medic’s work. I could not feel my hands as they gathered, nor could I feel the weight of such remains. And I could not sense that other, tiny, elfin form I eventually discovered, miraculously whole, I could not see the figured legs and feet, the utter, blessed digitation of the hands. Nor could I see the face, the perfected cheek and brow. Its pristine sleep still unbroken, undisturbed. And I could not know what I was doing, or remember any part.

HOW SHIMMERS
the Bedley Run pool in this flood of last August light, the groups of mostly mothers and children on this weekday crowded about the man-made shoreline where it curves in full beam of the sun. The whole town seems to be here. Thomas and I have set up our chairs on the sand down-shore, under the breezy shade of large maples, the part of the beach preferred by older folks and those concerned with overexposure to the rays, or others, like the handful of our town’s black families, who are enjoying their own lively, picnicking circle a few steps from us. Thomas has found them, or they have found him, and he plays with their children with a quiet, unflinching ease, something I have not seen in him until now, overexcitable as he often is. I have already given him the first lessons of flotation and breathing and treading, and as much as he was eager to try out the deeper water (with me at his side), he’s caught up now with his new friends, filling buckets of sand as they build a wall around their talkative mothers. I am happy for him, happy that I can sit close by and hover and let him do his
child’s good business. I am pleased enough, too, that Sunny and I have so far remained on decent and civil terms, no matter if they are ones eternally provisional. They shouldn’t be, certainly not if we were real father and daughter, but maybe even those who share blood and love believe only their devotions are unconditional, to be sustained through every crucible.

I’m on the lookout for Renny Banerjee, actually, who called me earlier this morning to chat. He sensed my less-than-ebullient mood, and thus determined to take the afternoon off to visit me. I told him that I would be at the town pool, which he gleefully misread as a romantic meeting (for I had gone there only once, for a town event with Mary Burns), but when I told him I was watching a friend’s boy, he was curiously unprobing, as if he knew the legacies of my complications. But he also mentioned something he was supposed to tell me concerning a woman named Hickey.

“Mrs. Hickey?” I said to Renny, hardly able to speak aloud the words. “Is it that her boy…is it something about him?”

“The boy? Oh, no, Doc. It’s not the boy.”

“Thank goodness. He has a serious heart condition, you know, Renny. He’s in the PICU.”

“I recall that now. No, Doc, it’s about his mother. Apparently she was brought in last night to the emergency room. I’m sorry to have to tell you this. A nurse there told me you sort of knew her, and that I should probably tell you.”

“Yes.”

“She was in a car accident last night driving home from the hospital. I guess the other driver was drunk. She didn’t really have a chance, that’s how fast he was likely going.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She died soon after the paramedics brought her in. I’m awfully
sorry, Doc. I don’t really know much more than that. Gee, Doc, was she a good friend?”

“No, not really. She was an associate,” I think I said.

“I’m very sorry.”

“That’s quite all right, Renny.”

“Listen, Doc, I’ll try to see you this afternoon. I have to go now. Will you be okay?”

“I’m fine,” I told him, and after some more chat we agreed to try to meet here at the pool. There was another thing he wanted to mention, but it wasn’t so important and could wait.

But later, as I drove on an errand before going to Sunny’s apartment in Ebbington to pick up Thomas, I began to find the information about Mrs. Hickey so profoundly untenable that for a few minutes I had to park along the side of the road with the engine shut off and the windows rolled up. The cars were steadily whizzing by me on the narrow two-way of Route 9, the muffled slingshot of their passing buffeted by the safety glass. I wondered which tight suburban road it was, if not this very one, that Anne Hickey should not have driven on late at night when everyone knows the saloon revelers would be speeding to the next place. I wondered why she hadn’t known to stay at home with her husband or in the intensive-care ward with her son, that good people like her should take the most extreme caution with themselves and practice wariness and avoidance for the sake of their beloved, and then, too, for the rest of us. And sitting at the wheel I became angry all at once, angry at her lack of care and circumspection, and if she had been in the passenger seat looking at me with her comely palish-pink face and sea-blue eyes, I would have scolded her as hotly as I wished to scold Sunny when she was a teen. But I found myself instead struggling
for breath, the simple draw of it, my still weakened lungs smarting with each gasp, and whatever life-spirit I possessed at that moment I felt desperate to abdicate, if but for empathy and the wish for a penance that would likely never come.

There was still some time before I had to get to Sunny’s, and so I made a U-turn in the road and drove to Bedley Run, through town and then up the road past my house, and I kept going up the hill until the very end of the street, where there is a small Catholic cemetery, the pedestrian entrance to which is bowered by a delicate wrought-iron arch. It is pretty, and modest, like the well-tended plots inside the grounds. The elevation is high enough that from most every spot—at least on a clear day—you can almost make out the city skyline to the south, the high spires looming like the far parapets of a strange, empyreal country. And then, in the middle distance, when you view the dense overlay of towns and villages laid out in contiguous patches, the multiple strands of the interstates and the parkways running straight through the heart of some and bending deferentially around others, bounded and marked by the shimmering waterways and reservoirs and the gently sloped hills, you feel as though this place in which you stand is a most decent and comely kingdom, even as it is a solemn province of the dead.

The monuments are mostly severe and plain, and even the few miniature mausoleums are unadorned, dignified structures, squarish blocks of polished black granite fitted with engine-turned doors of patinated brass. As I gloomily thought of Anne Hickey and her unsettling, instantaneous end, I remembered, too, with a start, that it was in one of these tombs that the Dr. Bradley Burnses resided.

Mary Burns didn’t altogether favor the tomb her husband had pre-built for them. She would have preferred a simple set of headstones over any free-standing structure, but of course she was always typically dutiful and made sure to keep up its appearance. One spring day I accompanied her to help her plant several evergreen shrubs on either side of the tomb’s door. I called the owner of the local nursery to deliver the plants to the cemetery entrance, and Mary Burns and I each rolled a wheelbarrow up Mountview Street to pick them up. We must have appeared quite a pair, dressed in our heavy canvas gardening trousers and work shirts beneath our wide-brimmed sun hats, clodding along in black rubber boots like an odd pair of itinerant landscapers. Though part of me was distracted by the idea that our neighbors might be peering out their windows at us, wondering what the exact nature of our relationship was, I was also, to be honest, almost discomfitingly flushed with a sensation I had not believed I would ever experience again. For even as we set about the work of sprucing up her late husband’s gravesite, with all the typically complicated specters and notions attending such a task, I was in fact nearly giddy, and I believe she was as well. We were happily basking, as one might say, in the warm glow of our passion, our union still in the early, intimate weeks when there is not yet talk of past or future days but only the too-swift dwindle of the hours.

That day we walked up to the cemetery we didn’t go directly in, as the nursery truck hadn’t yet arrived with the delivery of shrubs. I sat on a bench to wait, but Mary Burns suggested we leave the wheelbarrows inside the wrought-iron gates of the entrance and take a brief hike on an old bridle path, whose almost completely hidden trailhead was a block or so back down the hill. I thought we should wait for the delivery, in case the driver was unsure of what
to do, but she tugged at my hand and cajoled and even pecked me on the cheek, and soon enough I agreed.

It was clear that the trail was hardly used anymore, if at all. Mary Burns said that many years ago there were a number of people in the neighborhood who kept horses, and that you could see them on the weekends strutting up Mountview, fathers and daughters in rustic dress setting out for a day-long ride. Over time the riders had fashioned a clear path, which went up over Bedley Hill and down the far side, where it meandered through several square miles of undeveloped county land. I was surprised to learn that Mary Burns often took solitary walks here for hours at a time, and that she hadn’t until now invited me along. I was also a bit concerned for her as it grew quite isolated the farther we went, the path narrowing steadily until it was no wider than a deer trail, with the ever-thickening underbrush tugging at our trouser cuffs. For even here in Bedley Run, something terrible could occur, in a place like this all cloistered and shady. A certain kind of man could happen upon her in her light cotton sweater and willowy walking shorts and think he was exempt from the prevailing laws, that everything in the domain was his to master.

After we’d hiked a quarter mile or so, I said, “You don’t find it a little dark back here?”

“Are you trying to scare me, Franklin?” she said lightly, her eyes archly narrowed. “Because you should know I don’t frighten easily.”

“I’m not trying anything of the kind,” I answered. “It just is very much removed here. Our street seems already to be miles away. There aren’t any sounds but ours.”

“That’s why I like it.”

“How far do you usually go?”

“I don’t know,” she said, continuing to lead us. I was following
closely behind her, the faint scent of perfume trailing her in the damp, spring air. “I don’t keep track, I guess. But don’t worry, I know where we’re headed to.”

“I don’t mind, Mary. Wherever you take us…”

“I’m glad,” she said, suddenly turning about. She put her hands up to brace herself but I ran straight into her. She went down with a crash, instinctively grabbing a branch of a sapling that snapped and tore along the trunk as she fell. I felt awful, even as she was fitfully laughing, and I knelt to examine her. She had a trickling nosebleed, and her eyes were teary, and I had her lean against my shoulder, her head tipped back.

“My goodness, that was a surprise.”

“I’m so sorry, Mary. It’s my fault.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said, her hand around my knee. I could feel her letting all of her weight ease back into my chest. “Brainy me did the about-face. Will I be getting two black eyes now?”

“I’m sure you won’t. Does this hurt?” I gently pressed my fingers against the bridge of her nose. She didn’t flinch. The blood was still coming, though in tiny rivulets, and as I had nothing to stanch it with I unbuttoned the cuff of my work shirt and she nodded that I go ahead. We stayed a minute or so that way, her face nestled into my forearm, and had someone come upon us in the narrow path, with the bright blood soaked into my sleeve, they might have thought I was attempting to snuff the life out of her. And the strange thing is that I kept having the thought that I was, or at least imagining the horror of it, for even as every cell of me was reaching toward her with utter tenderness and warmth and the drug of an amorous bloom, it seemed I could just as easily summon the harshest want in my hands, the tightness and pressure that might have no
bound. And if some keenly sick man could have committed the act in a flash, for reason of mere possibility or nihilistic whim or curiosity, a man like me would have done so for the avoidance of a future day, whose complications—whether happy or not—might simply overwhelm.

But she tightly embraced me then, turning her face into my neck. She cupped my cheek and she kissed me, deeply, with an instant fervor. Her fingers ran through my hair, along the back of my head. Before this we had held hands and hugged each other after a dinner out or a movie at the village theater, and I’d only politely kissed her good night, despite her clear willingness to linger in the car or before her front door. She would invite me in but I always made the excuse of having to go home to Sunny, which was true enough, though not because I was needed there. In those first weeks with Mary Burns I was still hoping to provide my daughter with a complete family life, and while it was obvious how nearly perfect Mary would be as a mother, how well she could run a house (even mine), I began to wonder if I were up to the tasks of being a worthy partner and husband. I worried whether I knew what to do, like any pubescent boy might be concerned, for honestly it had been quite a long time, long enough that I was as fearful as I was anxious and expectant. But that afternoon, on the impromptu hike, she held me tight and wouldn’t let me go and at some point I began not just to relent but to kiss her back, and with a sudden, spurring ebullience that caught us both off guard.

“You’re such a surprise,” she said, when we finally ceased for a moment. “Come with me.”

She got up and started walking the path again, in the direction we had been hiking.

“Where are you going?”

“Where we were headed.”

“But what’s there?”

“You’ll see. Just come on.”

She was going more quickly than before, almost running, and soon enough we found ourselves in a silly bit of a chase, her slowing down until I could reach and touch her and then rushing forward again, the two of us acting a third or perhaps a tenth of our years. She disappeared around a turn and when I reached the spot, she was no longer ahead of me. I called out and she answered, and when I looked down I saw a small opening within a thicket.

“Come inside,” she said.

“Shouldn’t we go back? The nursery man must be there by now.”

“Please, Franklin. Don’t be a spoilsport.”

I got on my hands and knees and crawled in. It was a small place, open to the sky, a lair that must have been used by deer. Mary Burns sat on the tall, matted grass.

“I think high-school kids sometimes come here at night,” she said. “But don’t worry. I sit here all the time, and no one has ever come by during the afternoon. Today’s a school day, you know.”