Please Enjoy Your Happiness (8 page)

Those maps were my escapes, I suppose, from a world in which I was not content. I thought that over the years I had obliterated these memories, Yukiko. But when I reached for them this week, there they were like noxious bubbles from the swamp of childhood.

You remember this little story, I am sure: my account of the horror I felt the first time my father took me to visit the hospital ward in which my mother was confined. I could hear shrieks and screams coming from dark places as we climbed the concrete stairs. I was gripping my father’s hand as tightly as he gripped mine. Fear of dark places still haunts my dreams. My father, always frank when he was anxious, gave me a detailed description of what he called ‘The DTs’ – the
delirium tremens
of alcoholics experiencing withdrawal. He spoke with contempt about drunkards. But he did not mean my mother. My mother was not an alcoholic. I am not sure what ailed her. I have read about depression from time to time. Maybe what she suffered from was depression. You asked me several times about my mother. You said I looked sad. I tried to explain but I did not know exactly what to say, and you had trouble understanding me. I believe that the first time you held my hand was during one of these discussions. You listened closely. You spoke softly. I could see tears welling in your eyes.

Here are a few lines from one of my letters read by me this month for the first time since I wrote them. I must have been about eleven because I had just passed the Eleven Plus exams.

How strange it is now to hear me talking like a British kid. A blinking fiddle: that sounds so quaint.

My sister Mary and I talk only infrequently about my mother, Yukiko. We do so out of curiosity. It probably sounds cold, but for all three of her children, including me, my mother is a mystery woman. Mary is warm-hearted and is capable of the greatest empathy. She took care of my mother in her final years when she had Alzheimer’s disease and she knew her best.
If I sound remote when I talk about her, it is because she remains an enigma. I know, for example, that in the United States she worked with the poor, she joined a circle of psychics, her interest in the occult was mentioned in a couple of books, she changed religions several times, and she struggled with a loveless marriage. All of this she kept locked up inside. She was not like you, Yuki. You were vulnerable but you did not conceal that fact from me. My mother was vulnerable, but her children did not know that. All we knew was that she was ill, that she was sad, that she was in hospital, or that she was at her brother’s place or with her mother. She was unavailable. That is my view. She was a beautiful woman who was desperate, needy, disappointed. It was all tragic.

I was estranged from her at a very early age. I remained that way into my adult life, treading carefully around her because I never knew what to say. She could be cutting sometimes. If her children were truthful with her about difficulties in their lives she would say something like, ‘Just get on with it!’ Maybe she did that because of her lack of happiness. That was your interpretation, I clearly remember, Yukiko.

Sometimes when my mother attempted to hug me, I would pull away. I have a box of journals she kept but I have not had the nerve or the will to read them. Most people might find this difficult to understand. Other people would treasure notebooks like these. But not me. My younger sister’s husband burned the journals that came her way when my mother died. He made the mistake of reading, I was told, and he did not like what he saw. I could not summon up the courage to go to my mother’s burial. I did go to a memorial service which several inner-city people attended. They gave thanks for her involvement in their
lives. They described her as sensitive and caring. I was surprised, but I am sure it was true. My mother is long gone now. On quiet Sunday mornings in my red room full of paintings and hundreds of books, I sometimes attempt to talk to her. I need to say ‘sorry’ because I am aware she was in pain. I need to feel something I may have denied myself.

‘It is terrible for a mother to lose her children,’ you told me with such a troubled face, after I said I was not close to my mother. ‘It is terrible for the child also, Paul.’ It was one of the few occasions on which I saw you cry. ‘Please learn how to love everyone,’ you said. ‘I was born in
mutsuki
, the first month of the year according to the old Japanese calendar. We say that
mutsuki
is the month of affection, of harmony and warm feelings. You were born in the seventh month –
fumizuki
. That is the literary month, the month of letters and books. Your July is the month when young people write poetry.’ You looked at me intently and in a sudden gesture gently closed my eyes with your hand. ‘Poor boy,’ you said sweetly. ‘Poor boy! Boys are really little men and men are really little boys who need their mother’s love forever.’

I have tried, Yukiko. I have tried to love everyone. It is not easy or simple. I am truly a
fumizuki
person. I have a house full of Buddhas but I am not religious. I spend hours inside books, inhabiting them as if they were dwellings. New topics thrill me. For me, my mother is a ‘topic’. She is more of a topic for me now when I am old than she was when I was a young man or middle-aged. I was talking to Mary today and I asked her why we rejected Mother. She was in such need of affection, Mary said, that she crossed a kind of mother–child boundary of comfort in pursuit of love. My father loved her, but not in the
way that would give her comfort. It was not a gentle love. He was not a romantic. He may have worshipped Beethoven but he was no intellectual. She complained about being ‘raped’ her entire life.

In her teens and twenties she had been a kind of golden girl. People would stop and watch my mother and her brother John on the dance floor because they were so sleek and good-looking. My father did not dance. My mother read widely but my father thought that poetry was ‘sissy’, my sister said. When I phoned home from university in 1966 to tell my parents that I had won the Academy of American Poetry prize given to students, my father ridiculed the news. My father and I fought viciously with our fists in the months before I enlisted in the navy. Mary remembers him chasing me round the kitchen table with a knife because I questioned his authority. I have always said I joined the navy to escape my family. ‘I’m going to murder you’ was an epithet he sometimes used when he wanted to intimidate. But did I distance myself from my father? No! Why? I can’t give a coherent reason. But I do know that my skin crawled when my mother sang the lullaby ‘All the Pretty Little Horses’. I was afraid that in her care I might never wake up.

Thank you for listening to me then, and now, Yukiko. I write vignettes and short stories for fun. I showed you my early attempts. You told me to write more. I am still writing. My
mother would have almost certainly approved of that, I know. But would she have been able to show such pleasure? I related to my mother best when I read a four-page account she wrote – something not from her journals – about how happy she was on Sundays as a child. ‘Being the youngest,’ she wrote, ‘I would be the first to climb the stairs to bed, and through the open door the fire would be glowing, and the lamps lit upon the table where the family would be talking earnestly. I can see them now, watching me, smiling at me, as I climbed the stairs with the music of Chopin still hanging in the air and my bed waiting for me in the frightening shadows above and my whole world there in the warm, rich circle below.’

One good thing my mother did was defend my refusal in my teens to study to be an engineer. She fought hard – feeding me a special diet of plaice and codfish and glucose tablets to ‘increase’ my brain power – to make sure I made it to Ashford County Grammar School, an experimental place for bright, university-bound boys and girls; where I did not really excel, as I was always a year or two younger than my classmates and I was socially inept. I did not have many adult mentors. No one prepared me to be a man in this world. Maybe you remember a certain story I told you. You sat back in your chair at the Mozart and applauded with a delight that surprised me when I told you that I grew bored and depressed at school and created a scandal by jumping off the bus and becoming a truant. The bus I took to school always made a stop at Henry VIII’s Hampton Court Palace. I would get off the bus there and spend the day strolling around the astonishing gardens, reading books in convenient alcoves, and talking to the elderly men who served as guides about King Henry and all the women he loved. Billie, one of the men, once quoted a passage from
William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’. ‘Now, son,’ he said in a kindly manner, ‘live your life well, and enjoy remembering this when you grow old.’

I told you, Yuki, that when the school wrote a letter to my parents saying I had been missing for a couple of weeks, my mother went with me to meet the headmaster, Mr D. N. Atkinson. He actually let me off without any penalty because her tale of how I passed my time at the palace was not what he was expecting. I remember he said to her, ‘There was no crime here. Your son is not a delinquent. I can’t really disapprove of a young boy who likes art and history and does something about it.’ In fact, he wrote a strong letter of support for me when I was enrolling at Freeport High. God knows what the American school principal made of it. I still have a copy of that letter.

‘Paul has a tendency to be independent and unconventional, but not in a harmful way,’ Mr Atkinson wrote. ‘He could go far in life, given proper direction.’

America. America! The United States was not my father’s first choice. He was an admirer of Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett, the single-minded British explorer who vanished in 1925 somewhere in the jungles of the Amazon where he was searching for the supposed lost city of ‘Z’, a Latin-American Shangri-La. Dad’s destiny, and hence mine, lay in Brazil, he decided in the mid-1950s. He was frustrated by the fact that his working-class background prohibited him from rising further
in managerial positions at big British electrical engineering companies. At our house, suddenly there were books and pamphlets about Fawcett and Brazil. Eventually, however, the prospect of having to master Portuguese killed that ambition and my father tried his luck in Canada. I am not really sure what happened there. But soon we were making plans to emigrate to America. We sailed aboard the luxurious SS
United States
where we were served astonishing things like iced water and chocolate milkshakes. As we were preparing to dock in Manhattan I became seasick within sight of the Statue of Liberty. Dad was soon able to land a first-class works manager job with the Minneapolis-Honeywell plant in Freeport. His destiny was now set.

But my destiny was not defined. I languished. I had no identity. I was, in reality, an unwilling immigrant. I escaped by enlisting in the navy after a stint working illegally as a file clerk with Standard Oil in the gigantic city of Chicago. I could have ended up as a man of absolutely no consequence. But you were so sure of what I could become, Yukiko. You pointed the way.

6

Man Like a Bear

The
Shangri-La
left Yokosuka on 14 May and did not return to Yokosuka harbour until 13 July, ten days before my twentieth birthday. The ship had made port during that period in Okinawa, Manila, Hong Kong, Okinawa again, and finally in Sasebo, a smaller navy town in southern Japan. Yokosuka was hidden in a fog. I left the ship with a two-day pass. I was a little older and wiser. During the cruise I had volunteered to go out on a US Marine Corps night-training mission in Okinawa that involved firing lots of live ammunition. I woke up at dawn dotted with scores of phenomenally itchy mosquito bites, which I manfully ignored. My fingers were blistered because I had been stupidly gripping the steel barrel of the M-1 rifle I was firing at the moon. I did not like the idea of firing at human silhouettes even if they were just printed on cardboard.

Do you remember when I came back from Hong Kong from a fight at the famous Suzie Wong bar with the drops of blood on the cover of my copy of
An Outline History of China
? It was printed by horrible enemy forces in Beijing – or Peking, as it was known in the West in those days. I was trying hard to be older than I was. You reminded me that I was still a boy but you listened intently almost as if (I realize this now) I was your son and you were the mother I never had. A sailor with muscles tried to grab the book. Red Downs, my good-natured shipmate, moved quickly to get in the way. The sailor’s many friends surged towards the table where I sat with Red and James L. Fowler, a pale thin kid from Kansas City who was often called ‘Little Russia’ by embryonic Tea Party partisans infuriated by contrary thinking. I struggled with the sailor, who was consumed with bone-cracking rage. I ended up with a long scratch on the side of my face but I had been able to give him a slap and a fat lip. Members of the shore patrol burst into the bar, pushing aside girls wearing tight, slit, silk cheongsam dresses that buttoned to the neck, accentuated their bosoms, pinched them at the waist, and exposed their legs all the way to the top of their flanks if they chose. The shore patrol began hunting for miscreants. I promptly sat down on the
History of China
and avoided arrest by adopting a nonchalant pose, which allowed me to enjoy the sight of the shore patrol dragging the sailor who hated books out onto the street.