Butterfly (13 page)

“Don't be silly,” she said wearily. “You're making a fool of yourself.”

“I don't care! Kate, can't you see that I love you beyond anything I can say? I know how wretchedly I've behaved, I know I can't hope for your love, but don't drive me away like this. Anything, Kate, but don't banish me from your sight!”

Kate only shook her head. She tried to pull her hand away, but I held on tightly.

“This is ridiculous. Let go. You're being extremely tiresome.”

Ignoring her, I went on, carried along by a flood of pent-up emotions. “Kate, take me for your slave, yes, your slave! I beg you!” The words made me tingle with shame and at the same time a peculiar gratification; drunk upon their exorbitance, I embraced her knees and let my cheek slide down until it lay against her boot. And between my lips, trembling still from the taste of leather, the word slipped out, half a whisper, half a sigh: “Mistress!” As a prayer uttered after a long aridity calms the heart, the word brought a sudden sense of peace mixed with awe. But I knew that my life had been staked.

“You don't know what you're saying,” Kate said as she tried to free her feet from my embrace. My protests she at first refused to heed, but in the end she conceded. “Listen, you have no idea what it is to be a slave. Try it if you must, and we'll see what kind of slave you make. It's just possible that you're born to be one. But go home first and think about what slavery means, and if you're still mad enough to want it, come back at four o'clock tomorrow. Don't come though unless you're sure. You'll have to be ready to obey to the letter and to submit absolutely. And be warned: it won't amuse you! Now let me pass.”

38

(Letter from Lisa to Pinkerton dated May 17, 1937, found among Pinkerton's papers. Internal evidence suggests that it postdates the Nagasaki manuscripts.)

Dear Henry,

They say that before you die, you should lay down earthly concerns. But mine still weigh so heavily, and I have little time left. I shall not regret leaving this life, yet my heart is burdened by regret.

I should have written to you long before this. I have thought about doing so ever since I learnt that she was dead. But you know that I am stubborn. It hurt me so much to see what she had done to you. Thinking about it was too painful, so I preferred to have no news. At this moment, I do not know where you are, or even that you are alive, though I assume I should have been told if you were not.

For a long time I felt very bitter toward you, for letting her do what she did. I could not reconcile what you had become to the brother I had known and loved, perhaps too dearly. And perhaps, too, by blaming you, I lightened my own guilt, which otherwise would have been unendurable. My guilt, yes—because I am responsible for all that happened to you. It is to confess this that I am writing, and to ask your forgiveness.

I do not allude to my bringing you together. My conscience is clear on that score, and I still sometimes think that if you had married her when you should have, all
would have turned out well. But for what I did later, after your return from Japan, I cannot forgive myself. Oh, if only you hadn't gone! Did you know that Dad had her investigated and found that her family was not quite what she had given it out to be, and that was what set him and Mother against your marriage? I was so furious when I found out. What difference does it make, I shouted at them. Of course they patronizingly informed me that I was too young to understand. The worst part was that they turned out to be right. Only it wasn't a question of age, because today I am an old woman at the very end of her life, and I still don't understand how she could have been like that.

I acted in innocence and with the best of intentions (the road to Hell, as the saying goes . . .); but this you surely never doubted. What you probably do not know—unless she has told you—is that I put her up to it. Well, Mother and I; Mother might even have suggested it by asking about her, though I needed little prompting. I was so sure you were made for one another, and we were all horrified that you had married a Japanese. So I wrote to her and the three of us met and agreed that she should try to get you back. Her only condition was that she be given a free hand, with no questions asked. Her insistence on this point seemed a little curious, but I thought nothing more of it at the time, and even later, when things turned bizarre and I became uneasy, I still had no idea. I simply could never have imagined where it would lead. I still can't.

Was it because I did not want to know? Possibly. She had warned me against inquiries, but there was more to it than that. The more worried I became, the more I tried to turn away. You coming home wounded, however, was almost the last straw. I was tempted to throw up everything then
and there but persuaded myself that it was in a good cause. Yet my intuition of danger was so strong that several times I was on the verge of going back on my decision.

Do you remember the day you went to see her when you had barely recovered, and came back exhausted? You were as uncommunicative as you always were during that time, but despite my resolution to stay out of it, I had to ask how it went. You only answered that you were to go back the next day, but you had such a strange look. Something gripped my heart at that moment and I nearly cried out to protest your going. Without knowing why, I distinctly felt you shouldn't, and all evening long I argued with myself. I prayed for guidance, for some sign, but got nothing, nothing at all. It made me resentful, and I think from that moment on I began to doubt God. The following day I still did not know whether I should try to stop you.

But when I heard you announce that you had changed your mind and now wanted to catch the next ship for Japan, I was shocked, and horrified anew at the thought of you leaving, for I had mindlessly assumed that missing the first boat meant you would stay. Was it the Devil who incited me to ask about the trip to Creighton and to push you into going back? That moment weighs on me more than everything else together, because before I was innocent but by then I knew somewhere deep inside that I was acting against my better judgment. And that visit decided your fate, didn't it? Because after that you went to her daily and never again spoke about going to Japan.

Looking back now on my life, it all seems like one big mistake—or a grotesque joke. Sometimes I imagine it unraveling so that I can start over again. But would I be sure of doing better? (Though it does seem impossible to do worse.) The house is empty but for the servants and an
occasional visitor: one or two old friends, a cousin now and then, the doctor, the lawyer—no children or grandchildren, no beloved ghosts; no priest, no God. I cannot believe a God can exist that would make such a mess of people's lives or allow them to do it.

But somewhere on this earth I have a nephew or niece, and a sister-in-law and a brother. And if I still have one desire left, it would be to see them and tell them of my repentence, and ask for their forgiveness and their blessing. Alas, I have waited too long.

My heart is bitter, but the bitterness is not toward you now. Certainly, I was more directly at
fault than you, and I hope that, knowing this, you will forbear from rancor against

Your unhappy,

LISA

39

(The Nagasaki ms.)

Exhausted from my excursion, I went to bed after an early supper and slept fitfully through the night. I awakened to a room bright and cheerful from the morning sun.

Lying cosily between the sheets, I thought of the meeting with Kate. Everything about it felt unreal and far away. My words and behavior seemed preposterous: who could have taken me seriously? The remembrance by turns embarrassed and excited me. Would I really consider becoming her slave? One moment I almost laughed aloud at the absurdness, but the next I thought of Kate and of not seeing her, and turned cold. Though ludicrous while not in progress, the game was deadly earnest.

But what was I doing playing such games? I, a grown man with a wife and a newborn child, responsible for a household and a large fortune. It crossed my mind that my daughter's name day was in two weeks and that I had never seen her or even acknowledged her birth. All at once and for the first time, the child took on a real existence for me. I could envision her puckered face and wriggling body, I could hear her laugh and cry.

Memories flooded into my consciousness: Butterfly waking me and cradling my head; the exquisite movements of her hands preparing and serving food; the magical fascination of her rounding form and the conversations about our child inside. It was as if the progression of my days, temporarily torn out of the Nagasaki calendar, had suddenly been restored. Seized by a sense of urgency as immediate as that of an infant crying to be fed, I jumped out of bed.

At that moment my mind was made up: I would depart for Japan on the very next boat. Without taking time for breakfast, I set about calling to arrange a passage and to settle the most essential business matters. I knew I would have to be on my way without delay, the very next day even, for at any moment my resolve might crumble.

I waited until lunch was over to announce my new plans. The two women were thunderstruck. After the initial shock, my mother contented herself with a pinched expression and a sardonic remark, but Lisa became belligerent.

“You're expected in Creighton this afternoon, you had said—are you going?”

My answer in the negative brought a look of bitter reproach. Casting down her eyes, she said in a low but emotional voice, “So you're going to desert her again, without even saying goodbye.”

I believe I turned quite pale. “That's a very nasty thing to say,
Lisa,” I blustered. “I'll thank you not to make things harder for me than they are.”

“Are you afraid to see her again? Is that why you're going to sneak off on her?”

“No, I'm not afraid! Why should I be afraid of her?” I tried for a bravura that I did not for a moment believe.

Lisa looked at me steadily. “You
are
afraid, because you're running away. And because you're a coward, that's why—like Dad aways said!”

“Shut up, Lisa!” I shouted. “I won't be spoken to like that. You should be quite about things you don't understand. Why, if you had any idea . . . If you cared for me at all, you wouldn't be so wrapped up in your schoolgirl fantasies, and you wouldn't try to meddle in what you cannot comprehend.”

I regretted my words even as I said them, and I looked on helplessly as tears started to streak down her cheeks. “If I cared for you . . . ?” she sobbed. “Hen, who has ever cared for you if I don't?”

My mother's inept attempt at consolation only made Lisa cry harder, and my words did not calm her either. I was angry and exasperated, and sorry for her as well; resisting the impulse to stomp out, I went around the table to where she sat and, putting an arm over her shouldere, spoke as soothingly as I could. For a time she kept herself aggressively turned from me, but in the end she looked up; her voice was cracked and her eyes were puffed and full of tears.

“Will you go and see her one last time, Hen?”

I looked at her and could not refuse. But as I kissed the tear-stained face she held up to me, my breast was tight with foreboding.

40

He recognized her as soon as he caught sight of her, even though there were two of them and at that distance he could barely make out their features. They said good-bye at the corner; he watched her come down the street alone.

His heart, he thought with a certain wistful amusement, had never beat so wildly for her mother. The resemblance was unmistakable, though a stranger might have been struck more by the differences. Etsuko was a good bit taller, and her face might have been modeled by European hands upon a Japanese prototype. But something in her expression and in the way her fine head sat on the delicate neck made him think irrepressibly of Butterfly. It amazed him that such things could have been passed on by a mother lost in infancy. A mother he had robbed her of.

She abhorred him, Sachiko had said. Well, why shouldn't she? Because of him, she had had neither mother nor father. And had he ever given her anything? Besides, that is, the unwanted foreign touches in her face, another cause of hardship. It had pained him to learn how she suffered from this; yet he was gratified to discern a remote resemblance to Lisa.

It was fairly dark already, and he, half-hidden by a utility pole, turned to the wall as if urinating, so that she passed without a look. During these maneuvers, he lost sight of her for only a moment, but even that seemed unbearable; his eyes continued to strain after her long after she had disappeared into the house.

He was absorbed in wonder. It seemed a miracle that their daughter could have become that girl, who in another few years would be as old as Butterfly had been when they met. And in her own way she would be as lovely—one could see that even now in spite of the drab black-and-white school uniform designed to
smother importune charms. Her beauty, not yet a woman's and no longer a child's, was like still-enfolded petals peeping out from an opening bud. It was beauty at its most touching, for it appealed to the imagination rather than the senses, and aroused a desire not to possess but to nurture and to watch.

But he would not see it unfold, he thought with a pang. That was the penalty for having wantonly cut short Butterfly's life and thrown away his own. It saddened him unspeakably to walk away without an embrace or even a word. Yet he was grateful to have seen her; grateful to see that he had not destroyed all. The chain was unbroken, life continued to propagate from seed to seed, and each spring would have its new blossoms. A melancholic thankfulness settled upon him, merging with the damp evening chill: he had wreaked havoc with his idolatry, but he was still in God's world.

41

(The Nagasaki ms.)

I rode to Creighton at a fitful pace, sometimes drawing back in doubt and sometimes feverishly spurring on. It would be absurd and dishonest of me to say that I only went to humor Lisa, though I might indeed not have gone had she insisted less. All along the way I felt myself assailed by conflicting forces greater than myself. “I'll stop at a tavern,” I would say to myself; or “I'll turn back.” But I kept going. I also tried to fool myself by thinking that nothing obliged me to go in once I got there. When the house came into sight, I even gained a moment's composure by telling myself that I would not.