Butterfly's Child (34 page)

“Forgive me,” Mr. Kondo said, “but the son I remember was light-haired.”

What son? Benji felt like shouting. There was much to be said for American directness. Thinking of Mr. Matsumoto's lessons, he bowed and said, “I am blond.” He touched his dyed hair. “My effort to look more Japanese.”

“Ah so desu ka,”
Mr. and Mrs. Kondo said in unison. They looked at Mrs. Fukuda, who nodded and smiled.

“Benji-san, show them the picture,” she said.

His hands trembling, Benji took out the rice-paper box Mrs. Fukuda had given him, unwrapped layers of tissue, and laid his mother's picture on the table. Mrs. Kondo held it close to her face. “This is the woman I remember.”

“At last,” he burst out. “Someone who knew my mother. You're certain?”

Mr. Kondo looked at the photograph. “Yes, we have known her,” he said. He and his wife gazed at each other. There was another silence. Benji made himself wait.

“She lived just across the way,” Mrs. Kondo said.

“With you,” Mr. Kondo added. “The son.”

He leapt up. “Can we go?”

“Indeed,” Mrs. Kondo said. “Presently we will go.”

He sighed and sat down.

No one moved. There was to be discussion.

“You can't imagine my feeling,” Benji said. “Did you know her well?”

“Only slightly, I regret to tell you,” Mrs. Kondo said. “She was quite aloof—you and a maid were her only companions. Sometimes she would leave for the day or the evening, going to Maruyama, we supposed. Occasionally a gentleman came to call, perhaps once a month.”

“The man in the picture? My father?”

She shook her head. “I do not recall this man. He was not the visitor.”

“Who was the visitor?”

“An American—a businessman perhaps, rather distinguished-looking. He usually wore a tall hat.”

“I remember this man,” Mr. Kondo said, tapping a finger on Frank's picture. “One day he came to borrow a rake—his Japanese was very poor.
We didn't see him often. After he departed, I thought your mother would return to Maruyama—we both wondered how she managed on her own, especially after you were born.”

With a bow, Mrs. Kondo returned the picture to Benji.

“What was her name?” he asked.

“Midori,” she said. “Suitable for her—it means beautiful girl. She was quite beautiful,
ne
?”

Midori. Benji stared at the picture, attaching the name to her face.

Mr. Kondo suddenly began to talk. He had been in the garden pruning a rosebush on the tragic day, he said. It was late afternoon when he saw some Americans coming down the alleyway—a woman carrying a white lace parasol and two men. “One of them was the man in your picture, another the gentleman who sometimes visited. The woman I had never seen before. They went into the house.” He leaned toward Benji, his eyes wide, enjoying his story. “I remember … I had a feeling …” He looked at his wife.

“He did,” she said. “He had a premonition.”

“They were inside only a short while before I heard a cry,” Mr. Kondo went on. “Later I thought that must be you, the son. Soon the Americans left, carrying you, crying, wailing. We were perplexed what to do.”

“I thought we should go to the authorities,” his wife said. “We had some argument about it.”

“I regret I did not go into the house,” he said. “Perhaps I could have saved her.”

His wife shook her head. “Very much blood. She must have died immediately.”

“Did you … see the place?” Benji made himself ask. He was relieved when she said no.

“The authorities described the tragic scene to us,” she said.

“Before the authorities came,” Mr. Kondo continued, “some men carried her away. The little maid must have fetched them. Her body was wrapped in a dark cloth and placed in a cart.” He bowed toward Benji. “I am very sorry to tell you this,” he said.

Benji looked down at the picture, trying to turn his thoughts away from the shrouded body, the cart. “Did she ever mention any relatives? Or where she was born?”

“I am sorry to say that I did not inquire,” Mrs. Kondo said, “but she
seemed to desire her privacy. I remember she liked to sing and to play the shamisen.”

“You liked to frolic with your cat,” Mr. Kondo said. “Always you were chasing it. Once you climbed that tree in front of your house to fetch it.”

“Yes,” Benji said, with a laugh. “Rice Ball.” He had a sudden memory of the cat purring beside him on the futon, the warm body against his. “Could we possibly go see the house now?”

“We regret …” Mr. Kondo said with a bow. “The original house has been torn down. Another has taken its place.”

“Oh, no.”

“Perhaps you would like to go into the yard,” Mrs. Fukuda said.

Benji couldn't speak. So much searching, then hope, then nothing.

“Could you introduce us?” she asked Mrs. Kondo.

“There's no need—the owners are away at present. We will accompany you.”

They left the Kondos' house and went across the alley. Mr. Kondo opened the gate and Benji stepped into the yard, the others behind him. He looked around at the patchy grass; a stone lantern, slightly askew. A maple tree but no pond. “I thought there was a pond,” he said, “with lotus and frogs.”

“I believe it was filled in,” Mrs. Kondo said. “We have trouble with mosquitoes here.”

He gazed at the tall, dark house where his had once stood, erased by this one. He could remember only a sliding paper door at the front and pink flowers by the entrance. There were no flowers by this house, and the windows were square and ugly. In his room there had been a round window—the moon window, his mother called it.

He turned from the house to the tree, looking up at the smooth stippled trunk, the large crotch of limbs. He had sat there; it
was
his tree. That seat must have been lower when he had climbed up; maybe his mother had boosted him. He ran his hands along the trunk, held a leafy branch against his cheek.

The others remained by the gate, talking in low voices while he walked the perimeter of the property. His yard. His mother's yard. He gathered a handful of dirt and put it in his pocket, along with a pebble from the ground. Before he left, he took a leaf from the maple tree and placed it in the box with his mother's picture.

*  *  *

When Rinn came the next Saturday, Benji told her about the visit as they lay entwined on the futon.

“Midori,” she said. “A bit unusual—perhaps that may help us trace her, though we cannot know for certain if this was her geisha name or true name.”

“Two names! We'll never find out about her.”

“Don't be so gloomy. A geisha mother might have known Midori, I believe, whether it was her performance name or personal one.” If they could find the geisha mother, Rinn thought, perhaps they could learn where she came from, the name and location of her family, since most of the geisha houses kept records. Megumi was quite willing to make inquires all over the district when she could, and Rinn promised to come the moment there was news.

For several weeks Benji was in a state of agitated excitement, glancing up each time a customer entered the shop, in the evenings listening for Rinn's voice at the entrance of the house. Sometimes at twilight he walked through the streets of Maruyama, carrying his mother's name in his mind as he looked at the geisha houses and stood beside the fox in the Umezono shrine. He found a withered plum beneath one of the trees there and added it, along with his prayer, to the vat of sacred plum seeds.

Summer turned to fall and Megumi learned nothing. It could be that his mother's geisha house was no longer in existence, Rinn said; there was a fire in Maruyama a few years ago, she told him, that had destroyed several of the houses. “But it's more likely,” she said, “that any geisha who might remember her has chosen to remain silent. The geisha world is a closed one, as you know, and Megumi is perhaps too young to penetrate it. They might not want to speak of a suicide performed under ignominious circumstances.”

Benji and Rinn sometimes wandered through the temple graveyards near Maruyama, looking for his mother's grave. Although they found two stones with the butterfly crest of a geisha etched into the base of the monuments, the names were Tsuru and Hana. There was no Midori.

One evening, he returned alone to the graveyard at a temple where he'd met a sympathetic priest, climbed the steep steps past row after row of gravestones, and stood at the top of the hill, looking out at the water shining in the last light and the dark shapes of the mountains that surrounded
the bay. It was a commanding view. He would have a monument made for her and put it here.

He arranged with the priest to buy a space beneath a sheltering camphor tree; the priest also agreed to find an appropriate stone marker. Benji took the picture of his mother and Frank from the box and carefully cut out her image, then tossed Frank's picture into his desk drawer; later he would decide how to dispose of it. Mr. Tsuji introduced Benji to a maker of Arita ware, who was able to set his mother's portrait in porcelain, like the one of Keast's wife, and fix it to the stone.

On a Sunday afternoon in mid-October, Benji and Rinn stood at the memorial with the priest for a ceremony of blessing. It was a fine but melancholy day, the sky deep blue, the trees ablaze with their final color, in the air an undercurrent of cold that intensified the fragrance of the camphor tree beside the monument. The priest recited a sutra. Benji and Rinn put chrysanthemums in the vases on either side of the stone, and he stood looking at the picture, thinking of the day he had found it sewn into his kimono, the tin box he had carried it in, traveling with it all the way to this moment. His mother's eyes gazed back at him, cool and mysterious, revealing nothing. He turned and led the way out of the graveyard, and after bidding goodbye to the priest, he and Rinn went to a restaurant that overlooked the bay. They sat, their knees touching beneath the table, talking and drinking sake while it grew dark and lights came on in the ships at anchor and in the houses across the water.

She could not
remember her face. There were no mirrors in the asylum, the nurses said, because someone might cut herself. It had happened before, they said. Kate looked for her face in every surface that might give it back to her: the steel icebox in the kitchen, the glass door of the cupboard. At night, in the lighted parlor, a window with the dark behind it reflected her shadowy image.

She cupped her hands over her forehead, nose, mouth, and tried to recollect herself, but could not. She was fading.

She asked Norma Brinkley, a new patient who occupied the next bed in the ward, to describe her face. “Sweet,” she said. “Tired.”

“Are my eyes blue?”

Norma peered at one eye, then the other. “I believe so,” she said.

Norma was a large woman with an opulence of flesh beneath her chin. Her eyes, dark and quick, took in everything. She had no doubts about her solidity. There was nothing wrong with her, she said, except she no longer bled and her husband didn't want her any longer.

Kate needed to bask in the sun, Norma said, and her face would freshen up. If she would go to occupational therapy instead of lying on her bed all day, they might let her go outside, on parole. Maybe they could go together. Norma would be granted parole soon, she was certain.

Kate was assigned to work in the kitchen. Her first day, she scrubbed potatoes until her back ached. The next day she did laundry, with a washboard just like the one at home, the same boiling and rinsing and wringing. She thought of the kitchen in Plum River, the oilcloth on the table, the milk pitcher with a rooster on it, Mrs. Pinkerton's shoes misshapen
by bunions. She saw Mary Virginia's little blond head as she stood beside her, cutting out biscuits with a thimble, and began to cry, a quiet sluice of tears sliding into the water, but no one noticed; the other laundress was wiping her face too, wet from perspiration.

The next day she was the cook's assistant, gutting a rabbit, peeling potatoes and rutabagas. An attendant came to watch. “You're making progress,” she said, and a few days later Kate was granted parole.

She went out with Norma and several other women and a man who worked on the wards. The sun bathed her arms and face, and she drank in the fragrance of fresh clover. At the back of the property, Kate found a litter of kittens beside a fence. She took one without asking and put it beneath her shawl on the sore place in her side.

Beyond the fence was a hill that cut steeply down into woods; past the trees, on a rise, were fields of corn. They marched back along the edge of the property and looked at the asylum farm, the barnyard beside the fence. She stared at the unpainted barn, the hay spilling out of the mow, a well with a pump handle, the overhead roof of the well rotted away. There was a chicken on a mule's back, piled sacks of grain, a wooden chair lying on its side.

It was a mirror of the life she'd left, cruel in its accuracy.

She thought of the children, the dirt beneath their toes, Franklin and Mary Virginia running after fireflies. The babies.

They would have missed her at first but not now. What would Frank have told them? Perhaps that she was dead, thinking it the kindest thing. She squeezed the kitten so hard that it clawed her arm and dropped to the ground.

Franklin was old enough to know. They should all know. She felt a splinter of excitement, looking at the barnyard. They should all know she loved them.

Later in the evening she slipped out alone. It was almost dark. Invisible in her brown dress, a kerchief over her hair, she moved across the lawn. She walked along the fence to find a gate that would open to the farm, a stile perhaps, like those in nursery rhymes she had read to them, but there was none. She lay down near the barnyard, pressed against the fence. When morning came she was still there, the nurse striding across the wet grass to capture her.