This Scorching Earth (28 page)

His wife, sitting across from him, had never forgotten. Every evening at six, not yet entirely recovered from a habitual solitary tea at four and a nap after it, she thought of the old days of her youth and of those civilized suppers at eight. Eating directly after work had been the custom of the poor whites and of the Negroes. Now she sat toying with her fruit cup, one hand feeling blindly for fugitive wisps of gray-brown hair, disarranged by the nap. Her eyes were red with sleep, and her lips were puffy. The spoon rang against the plate as she put it down.

"You're not hungry, dear?" asked the Colonel. He always asked this and had asked it for years.

"Not so very much, dear," she replied, smiling. "I had a slight headache this afternoon and took a little nap. It is quite better now, however."

"I'm pleased to hear it," he said.

The Japanese maid removed the fruit cup and brought in the soup. While his wife stirred hers, the Colonel added cream and wondered what they could talk about. Every evening his mind was furiously active during the meal, but he said very little. He was forced to be careful not to speak too much of his work nor, particularly, of the Japanese.

His wife, though she had never said so, disliked Japan very much. If he happened to mention something he had seen on the street or something a Japanese had told him, her lips became straight and she drank water or looked searchingly into her dessert. This somewhat limited their conversation.

"Did anything occur today of special interest, my dear?" he asked, as he always did, and she, as always, smiled, made an effort, and appeared to consider.

"No, I don't believe so," she said, as though she had mentally reviewed a busy day and had smilingly decided that it had been, after all, quite ordinary.

It had been ordinary, for all her days were identical. She did nothing. She seldom left the house: it was the only thing she liked in Japan. It and the huge compound of American homes of which it was one. It was quite possible for an American housewife to spend her entire time in Japan inside the high wire fences of the compound, buying in the Commissary and the local PX, seeing films at the Washington Heights Theater, and reading the
Stars and Stripes,
which was delivered daily. This was just what the Colonel's wife did. Except for the maids—and they both spoke excellent English—she might never have known she was in Japan.

More and more often now she spent her days in the house, never once glancing in the direction of the outside world. They had not been to a movie for months. Anything which drew her from her house and garden she more and more disliked. When she was forced to leave the house, she sheltered herself behind dark glasses, which she had formerly never worn. And on the few occasions when she had to leave the compound and speak with the Japanese, she was so exquisitely polite that she was often quite incomprehensible.

"No ... I can't think of anything . .. except the garden, of course." She smiled again, and one maid removed the soup, while the other brought in the pork roast, which the Colonel began to carve. They often talked about the garden.

"Would a slice like this one do, my dear?"

"Oh, heavens, that's far too large—perhaps half—and no applesauce, please."

"There—is that better?"

"Yes, just right. Thank you, dear."

Yes, it would be the garden. Even in the snow she was there. And it was such a pathetic little garden, just a backyard like all the others. The others were cluttered up with bamboo lawn furniture and make-it-yourself barbecue pits, while hers was fenced in and cluttered up with a honeysuckle trellis from which hung no honeysuckle, a boxwood hedge, and a little pond in which all the fish had died.

Back home she had had a pavilion set among dwarf-magnolia trees. She wanted one here too, but the earth in which flourished rice and fir and pine and chrysanthemum would not nourish the alien plant, at least not the earth of the former parade ground on which Washington Heights had been built. He had watched the trees fade, while she, in a kind of panic, ran among the withered saplings—he had had them sent over two years before as a surprise—followed by the Japanese maid, making little cuts here and there, uttering little cries of dismay, pruning drastically.

In the same way that the one and only bloom, pale with promise, had died and turned brown, so too had she, the girl whom he remembered with a skin pale as ivory and dark Southern eyes, become a querulous matron who bit her lips when the maids slammed a door.

"This is excellent pork, my dear."

"Why, thank you very much, dear. But I really don't deserve the credit. It is the girls. They are most talented, you know."

"Yes, but it was you who taught them, if I remember rightly."

She smiled, pleased, and it saddened him to realize that this was probably the first time she had smiled with pleasure that day. He could not blame her un-happiness, for she had tried very hard to like Japan and the Japanese. She had tried—and miserably failed. From Virginia, like himself, she had been used to an affectionate disregard of servants and could not now help believing that she lived in a nation of servants, servants moreover whose insubordination was always potential. Of course, in their life in the Army she had followed him to many places besides Virginia, but to none quite so remote, quite so alien.

And still, she
had
tried. She'd given little teas for the wives of Japanese officials, those men with whom he'd found it necessary to work. She'd had little watercress sandwiches, ladyfingers, and three kinds of tea—one Indian and two Chinese. He could imagine what those teas had been like—everyone sitting in a small circle with nothing to say to each other and no way of saying it. The wives had stayed the expected hour, and later each had invited her to her own home. She had refused all the invitations, and after that had not been invited again.

Thereafter her teas had become solitary, and she often fell asleep over her orange pekoe and ladyfingers. The girls would promise to awaken her, and she, with a smile, would lie straight in her Army bed and sleep until just before her husband returned. At first she had tried to meet the other Army wives on the post, but they soon dropped her, and she them. They were most impolite young ladies who were rude to her at the Commissary and talked behind her back. She never quite realized that it was those same unsuccessful teas for the Japanese ladies which had made her guilty in their eyes of "fraternization," nor would she have been able to understand how a word which she understood to mean "brotherhood" had come to signify a crime.

At first she had meekly refused to judge her countrywomen and would often say that, well, it was just that she wasn't used to Northern ways, or later, that it was just that they were so young. But when she finally condemned them, she said nothing about it to her husband. She never mentioned them again.

So she sat home alone all day and did needle point until it was time for tea. Then it was time for supper, which was invariably excellent, and if she talked at all with her husband, it was about her girlhood in Richmond or her early life with him or to reminisce about some friend long dead. Then he would forget and tell her about his work, which was all he had to talk about, and she would bite her lip and often plead one of her sick headaches, and he would not see her until the following evening. It had been this way during most of their time in Japan

The maid removed their plates. She had not eaten her pork after all. When the salad was brought, her husband smiled at her quizzically before mixing it.

"Oh, yes, you know I love salad," she said and even attempted that old quality which, back then, had been called vivacity.

He helped her to salad, and behind him the enameled clock ticked on.

"Something occurred today," he began slowly. Then he stopped, for their eyes had met, and hers seemed to be pleading to be spared, to be left in peace. And how old those eyes looked. He could not continue. "But, actually, it was of no importance."

Her forehead became smooth and she smiled. "Oh, no, dear. What was it you were going to tell me?"

"General Kean asked me to see him."

"Oh, yes. Let me see—he's the head of your section, or division, or whatever, is he not?"

"Yes, we were in the Philippines together during the war."

"Oh, yes, I remember him well from the States—a most kind gentleman. He wears glasses, does he not, and—why, I remember perfectly now—we spoke several years ago—though just where does escape my memory. And—would you believe it?—we talked of nothing but dogs. Yes. That's right. Dogs. Imagine that. And he told me—why, I remember it as though yesterday—he told me that he owned a wolfhound that... what was it now? Oh, yes, of course—that the hound he owned was afraid of rabbits. Isn't that amusing, dear? Imagine—a Russian wolfhound, and it was afraid of rabbits." She laughed and tears of pleasure came into her eyes.

"No, dear, that was General Grady, and he died, you'll remember, about three years ago, just after that time you remember so well."

Her lower lip turned, both in pity and petulance. "Oh, of course. I don't rightly know what's the matter with me. I do so forget." She made an effort to collect her thoughts. "Of course—General Grady. Yes. And he's dead now. Yes.... Now, what about this other gentleman, dear?"

Again he lost the courage to continue. "Oh, we just talked about old times. That's all."

"Oh, that was nice. But, no—do tell me what you were going to say."

What could he tell her, he wondered, she with whom he had shared everything—or attempted to? Sorry as he was for her, he could not tolerate her having any pity for him.

"Come now," she said coaxingly. "I'm very interested in what you do—you know that, dear. Do tell me." And she smiled to show how interested she was. She blinked her eyes, and her head shook slightly. She was old—very old. Somehow older than he, though he was the elder, and her smile was that of a martyr awaiting the first blow.

"Well, he just called me, and we talked about the Service and all, you know," he began, then stopped and ate a few bites of salad. Whatever else, he must be honest with her. It was often necessary to lie, to color the truth, to exaggerate or to minimize, but he had always been as honest as possible with her, and if he erred, it was only that, rather than allow the truth to hurt her, he had shielded her from it by refusing to speak at all. But now, when the truth would so please her—that part of the truth for which she had so longed—he found himself unable rather than unwilling to speak, for with it must necessarily come the knowledge of his position, of his detractors, and the true reason they were going home.

"Well, you know, my dear, that I never asked to serve in Japan. But it became my duty—the duty of any soldier."

She nodded slightly, her head bowed. It was, he thought, as though he'd cultivated disreputable friends and insisted upon intruding them into his household. Her disapproval of his connections with the Japanese, though unspoken, was always apparent. Her father would never have asked his wife to entertain at tea the Negro wives of the plantation hands.

"Yes, dear," she said.

"But once it became my duty, then I resolved to do it as best I could. Originally the Japanese were no concern of mine, any more than of yours, but now my duty is dedicated to them."

"Yes, dear."

He started to speak again, but this was not the truth. The truth was that he wanted more than anything else to love the Japanese, those people to whom he was dedicated, just as he loved his fellow-Americans—most of them. And in that he had really failed. He had only succeeded in feeling kindly toward them, and this was wrong, because all men are worth being loved, slave or owner, Japanese or American—there is in all men an inherent nobility which loves and can be loved.

"Well, this is all actually beside the point, because when I saw Kean this afternoon, I learned ... I learned that..."

He hesitated so long that his wife raised her head and, after waiting for the girl to remove the salad and disappear into the kitchen, said: "Dear, it's not bad news, is it?"

He forced himself to laugh. "No, no. It's good news. Good. Just the opposite."

"Well, then ..." She stopped, because the other girl had brought in the dessert and coffee.

How could he tell her, he wondered. He could say that reports had reached Kean and that he, Colonel Ashcroft, was being investigated as a possible security risk. But that would never do, for his wife knew nothing of the world in which such things as this were possible—she was of the world where a man's word was his honor. Perhaps, then, he could temper it a bit. Kean had agreed that these preposterous charges were nonsense—but, after all, that's life, isn't it, and blessings often come in black-wrapped packages, and, every cloud has the silver lining. The result was what counted—the end, not the means. This way at least he could go home.. .. But, no, that would worry her, for she would then never understand what the charges had been and why, if men agreed a thing was preposterous, they should act as though they knew it were not. Finally, he might augment the truth a trifle. It was true that he was but five years from retirement. The Army changed, just as did life itself, and it was natural that a younger man, a major in his own offices, would be chosen, and really it was better this way because it was keeping it in the family as it were, the man in question knew the business of the section well, and ... No, that would not do either, for that caused the Colonel himself too much pain. And his wife would understand it not at all; she would ask if the major then would become colonel, and he would answer that it probably meant a downgrading in the table of operation, and she would find that very strange.