Butterfly's Shadow (16 page)

It lay like an unexploded bomb on the table, carrying destruction within its innocuous exterior. Nancy reached out her hand and touched the pale, granular surface.

‘So who is it from?’ Mary asked, puzzled.

‘It’s from Joey’s mother,’ Nancy said, amazed that she could speak the words. ‘Her name is Cho-Cho.’

‘But she’s dead!’ Mary exclaimed. ‘She’s dead!’

Nancy thought back, to that first day in Nagasaki. The disastrous revelation: the not-really wife, the child. And hidden in the undergrowth of the past Nancy discerned a snake hovering between a man and a woman. Across the years she heard the hissing words offering an insidious solution, and the voice was hers. She stood alone, the guilty one.

‘But I thought she was dead!’ her mother said again, vehemently. ‘Didn’t you?’

Nancy cast about for a reply –
The woman on the floor; the frightened child
–

Mary reached for the letter and read it aloud: it brought the news that her brother had died. A peaceful death surrounded by his wife and children—

‘Wife!’ Louis exclaimed. ‘Children?’

‘Henry had a Buddhist funeral, traditional Japanese, as he had requested, carried out with full ceremony,’ Mary read on. ‘Crying is felt to be appropriate at our funerals and sometimes people are hired as professional criers. This was not necessary on this occasion as everyone loved Henry and wept because they missed him. In this part of Japan, in Kyushu there is a custom of placing a stone called a pillow-stone on the fresh earth covering the coffin. I placed a stone on your behalf, his surviving sister.’

There was more: an affectionate description of Henry’s life as a successful journalist writing about the land he had adopted as his own. His sister, the letter continued, would of course be aware of how much he had done to try to increase understanding between his two countries at a difficult time. She was enclosing a snapshot—

‘What snapshot?’ Mary exclaimed. ‘There’s no snapshot.’

‘Look in the envelope,’ Louis suggested.

Inside the envelope was a small photograph, a family group: Henry Sharpless, his wife and three small, perfect girls.

‘The wife’s Japanese,’ Mary whispered into the room.

‘Henry’s wearing Japanese clothes!’ Louis said. ‘If you ask me, he
looks
Japanese.’

‘He looks happy,’ Nancy said.

Mary studied the square red seal, the signature. ‘Cho-Cho.’

She added, ‘Joey must be told.’

Must he? Must he really?
Nancy imagined an alternative: she would simply tear up the letter, put it in the incinerator. No further action needed. Joey would continue his life, an American boy in America, happy. There were the nightmares; she was aware of the nightmares when he woke screaming, stammering jumbled words. But they were infrequent now, and she soon soothed him back to sleep, stroking the fair curls that reminded her of Ben.

She too had her nightmares, but hers involved water and mud and drowning; and she would wake gasping for breath.

‘Who will tell him?’ Mary asked.

From the hall, Joey’s voice: ‘It’s okay. I heard it already.’

Nancy spun round.

He stood in the doorway, holding his schoolbooks, nodding slowly, as though listening to unspoken words, his face expressionless. Then he turned away and went up the stairs.

‘The house is too small!’ Louis groaned. ‘No privacy!’

And Mary said, distractedly, ‘Oh, that’s too bad, the boy should not have heard it unprepared.’

Nancy was already halfway up the stairs. The house was, indeed, too small for three adults and a growing boy, but what alternative did they have, with her at work all day, and Joey to be cared for after school by Mary and Louis? Her own space was as cramped as a closet, but it was somewhere to gather herself together away from the sandwich-like pressures of her parents and her child. And at least here Joey had a room with a real door, not a curtain.

She knocked and waited. After a few moments she knocked again on the attic door.

‘Joey?’

The door opened and he stood, holding on to the handle, a questioning expression on his face, as though answering a call from a visiting tradesman. It had not occurred to her, till now, how much he had grown: at fourteen he was as tall as she was. Waiting, he looked her straight in the eyes.

‘Can I come in?

‘Why? To tell me more lies?’

He released the handle and stepped back with sullen courtesy to allow her to enter. She went in regularly to clean the room and tidy his things, but now she looked at it differently, with the eyes of a stranger. The storage boxes had been moved into the cellar, and Louis had put up bookshelves, and built a makeshift closet on one wall, between the sloping ceiling and the floor.

Beside the dormer window was an old armchair; in the centre of the room, where Joey could stand upright, a small
desk and a chair with curved, slatted back. A shag rug.
The floors in the house with the electric kitchen were softened with shag coverings. That warm smell, like sheep in a field . . .

On one shelf were a number of small objects: a cylindrical seashell patterned with purple whorls; the tiny skeleton of a fish with every needle-sharp bone intact; a spray of dried seaweed as delicate as carved jade. She had touched these objects, moved them when dusting, without ever really looking at them. She saw now that they were all surviving evidence of past life: a creature had inhabited the shell; a fish had clothed the skeleton; the seaweed had once bloomed in salt water.

There was one last object, man-made, not growing in nature: a wooden spinning top, its paint so worn with time that it had returned to monochrome simplicity, the surface giving no more than a hint here and there of what had once been brilliant red and yellow.

She reached out and touched the battered toy with her fingertip. Her voice thick with tears she said, ‘Oh, Joey, the spinning top, you went back for the top. If only you hadn’t gone back, if I hadn’t gone after you . . .’

And once again she was stabbed by the ugly, racking pain of guilt, of regret – that old lament: Oh, to turn back the clock. But to when? Which moment?

‘That day,’ she began, ‘when I heard you call out . . .’

She had raced back into the paper house and seen the woman crumpled on the matting floor, Joey crouched next to her, his small hand tugging at the white scarf that was slowly dissolving into crimson. A moment of nightmare. Nancy knew what she was looking at: one of the passengers on the ship had explained the Japanese tradition of suicide. Head whirling, holding back panic, she scooped up the child and the gleaming wooden toy beside him, and fled.

Later she had rationalised her act: the boy’s mother had already agreed that Joey was to go to his father. With the woman dead on the floor, what would be the point of subjecting
them all to unanswerable questions? An official inquiry could deny them custody, deprive the boy of his one remaining parent, lock him away in an alien institution. But had she been certain that Joey’s mother was dead? She could have looked more closely, tried to get help. What kind of a person was she, to have snatched up the child and run from the house? Overtaken by a sort of madness, she had abandoned her humanity.

That day the gates clanged shut. All ease left her. A Catholic could have turned to confession; Nancy had only her silent prayers, asking forgiveness of her sin. Her sins: there was more than one to acknowledge. Abandoning a young woman to die alone was only part of it.

Joey said, ‘But if you were unsure, why did you tell me she was dead? You could have checked, found she had survived; you could have told me then.’

And risked losing him. She recalled the day she became a mother, a lifetime ago, collecting Joey from school and he leapt into her arms, clutching her around the neck, almost strangling her. A passing parent glanced, startled, at the child wrapped so tightly round the fair-haired woman. Joey had called out to her, ‘This is my mom!’ and the woman nodded, moving on, looking away, taken aback by the vehemence of a rather obvious statement.

But Nancy had held the small body close against her shoulder and said, silently, and with amazement, ‘This is my son.’

She could have made enquiries, discovered that Joey’s mother was alive. Yes, she could have. But would it have been better? Might he, perhaps, have said he wanted to go home, to his real mother? ‘Perhaps’ is a dangerous word; who knows which way things could have gone.

As it was, Nancy took on the thankless role of survivor. Nancy had permitted him to grieve for a perfect, lost mother, a clean grief from which new shoots could grow.

Now, grimly, he confronted a different version of the past. ‘So she just gave me away. She didn’t want me—’

‘She wanted what was best for you, and for your father.’

Well, that was the truth; a version of the truth, not the whole truth.

And what now? she wondered. Would Joey write to Cho-Cho, tell her he wanted to come ‘home’? To his real mother, the one who had suffered the agony of birth, had created a child, a pearl from within her own tormented flesh, Nancy merely an arid simulacrum. Nancy cried out, silently, across the vibrating air and ocean, I did my best! I always did my best for him. I loved the child. She looked at him now, frowning, angry, the close-cut golden pelt, the blue eyes, the tall, skinny boy, and felt her heart turn in her breast like a somersaulting swimmer. He saw the involuntary movement she made and said, ‘Are you okay?’ And when she shook her head, unable to speak, he reached out and enfolded her in an awkward, unexpected hug.

He said, ‘She never wrote to ask how I was, never asked for a picture. She has her life, I have mine. Let it rest. It’s all in the past.’

Later, when the others were busy in the kitchen, he went downstairs, treading carefully. The letter lay on the table, the snapshot next to it. He picked it up and looked closely at the family group: the thin, pale man, the comfortably plump wife and the three small daughters, all dressed formally in kimonos, hands folded, looking into the camera.

These girls were family; cousins, just as Jack, who dreamed of a life in the navy, was his cousin. Caught in the mirror above the fireplace he saw himself: a younger Jack. But within him lay buried seeds that were part of another family tree.

‘It’s all in the past,’ he had told Nancy. But the past is a movable continent.

*

The old town at Portland’s North End connected Burnside and the park blocks. Between there and the Willamette river lay territory new to Joey, a foreign country: the neighbourhood known as Japantown –
Nihonmachi
to its own people. Threading his way through its streets, he found it baffling, with its enigmatic street signs, its posters and placards in exotic characters that looked more like angular drawings than writing. Everything was unfamiliar, odd: the grid of streets that stretched to the waterfront, old shops shaded by narrow canopies, tall windows filled with strange goods; unrecognisable food; drifting from doorways, smells that repelled him because they, too, were unrecognisable. And then, on a corner, a surprisingly grand building with rows of arched windows: the Merchant Hotel, looking out of place, like a beached whale.

As he crossed and turned into narrower streets there were old posters for unfathomable events illustrated by bloated wrestlers, masked fencing couples, lantern parades. The streets were filled with figures moving quietly but purposefully. And they too were ‘different’, small and dark and dressed with unnatural neatness. Swerving, sidestepping, they overtook him as he wandered: these people had work to do.

He had done his best to be ordinary in a new world: troubling threads trailing from a lost life had been severed one by one. Home. Mother. Language . . . Wrenched away, transplanted, he had behaved correctly, kept his thoughts to himself. He had tried to hold on to fragments, moments, but gradually they faded, dimmed. The American flag was big and bright. Slowly he became part of the new landscape. He played baseball, read the funnies on Sunday; went to the movies, learned the words of popular songs on the Hit Parade, thumping along with Fats, using a shoebox for a keyboard. Early on, when Bing crooned his soft, blurry syllables from the radio speaker Ben would sing along, humming, attempting a scat, following the master, ‘
Where the blue of the night meets the gold of the day . . .
b’b’booo . . .’
Joey had learned to do that, copying his dad. Ben was gone but Bing was still around, still warbling.

There had been moments,
the curve of a neck, a pale kimono
, a puzzled question – ‘Your mom was called
what
?’ – but for years now the situation had not arisen. His mother’s name was Nancy, his father was Ben and once upon a time Ben had been a swimming champ and a sailor but then he died. Serious faces. Sympathy. It must be real tough to lose your dad. Safe territory.

He looked around him: the streets seethed like an anthill and he had no part in it. He was an outsider here, an American.

When Nancy appeared at the consulate, Cho-Cho’s child cradled in her arms, his face smeared with tears, Sharpless was disturbed by her appearance: she looked distracted. Speaking too rapidly, like a bad actress delivering lines, she said she had come to say goodbye. An agreement had been reached with the child’s mother and she was taking him to America.

‘You’re
sure
you understood her correctly?’

He was convinced this was an impossible outcome, but it seemed his niece had no time to tell him anything more – the liner was due to sail.

‘And Lieutenant Pinkerton—’

‘He had to get back to his ship.’

Sharpless leaned towards the child, who looked ready to dissolve into fresh tears. His embroidered kimono was crumpled, grubby.

Sharpless said gently, ‘
Sachio?
’

‘What are you saying?’

‘That’s his name—’

‘His name’s Joey, and I need to buy him some clothes. Right now.’

She was stroking the child’s head in a repetitive, soothing gesture, holding him close. Sharpless noted how pale she was, almost grey in the face.