A Girl Like You (32 page)

“I don’t have the clothes for anywhere smart.”

The moment she accepts the invitation she regrets it. It seems to her that Joseph Rodman is a man who expects perfection. He is so well groomed as to be intimidating, he smells of cologne, and he is obviously rich, coming from a world she can only guess at. Her father would not have approved, would hardly think him the kind of man for his daughter. And Tamura, who judged men by Aaron and found most of them wanting, would she have approved? Satomi’s mother would have been kinder than her father, of course, less willing to judge.

“Go,” Mrs. Copeland has encouraged, feeling herself
in parentis
. “Plenty of time to lie low when you’re old.”

“Remember, nowhere fancy,” Satomi warns, hoping it might put him off.

But he is stirred by the idea of it, of finding somewhere “not too smart,” of being out with the hat-check girl on an ordinary date.

You could start from scratch with a girl like her. He has found a Vermeer languishing in a cupboard, a delight of color and composition. All she needs is the right frame. Relief floods him. Things might work out after all.

It seems to Satomi that Joseph under his smartness has a good character, although he doesn’t give much of himself away. A frank smile and impeccable manners are hardly enough to go on. He’s conceited, that much is obvious in his head-to-toe neatness, the sleek cut of his hair, the perfect ovals of his nails. But are such things flaws? Perhaps that sort of perfection is natural for the rich, how would she know? She has noticed that in art, though, his eye is taken by the simple—a costly sort of simple, but still a taste she shares.

Joseph, despite his exacting style, has honed his taste to be the opposite of that of his widowed mother, Dulcibele, who revels in what he considers to be a vulgar sort of fondness for the overdone. His infrequent visits to her glittering white mansion on the shores of the Hudson are uncomfortable, the times they come across each other in town unwelcome to them both.

He blames his mother’s selfishness for not caring for his father, for the broken thing in himself that he’s finding hard to fix. She can’t be blamed, though, for the promise his father had extracted from him. A deathbed promise, he thinks dramatically, although it was given months before the old man died.

“You must marry, Joseph. It’s the right thing for you.”

“I don’t think I’m made for marriage, Father.”

“But it will make you happy, Joseph. I know it. Promise me. Promise me that you will.”

His son must make an heir to the Rodmans’ great fortune, just as he had done himself. It’s a duty not to be dodged. A man of Joseph’s tastes could too easily lose the way. At the very least, a wife on his son’s arm would put paid to the gossip. A pretty one might even switch Joseph’s taste to the more conventional.

With the promise given, the old man when the time came had let go of life with a deep sigh and a pleasurable sense of relief. Joseph, along with the Rodman fortune, was left with the pledge, and the novel feeling of being committed.

Unused to courtship, he fumbles through his now-regular outings with Satomi, pleased when she finds his jokes funny, flattered when he has her attention. He is already fond of her, charmed by how different she is from those smart uptown girls his mother has her eye on for him. Having a girl on his arm is odd, but not as unpleasant a sensation as he had feared.

Satomi feels more the Angelina girl than ever when she is with Joseph. Before him, she hadn’t thought herself to be so ignorant. But she’s learning, and she likes it. She knows now that wine is not for her, but she enjoys the bookish flavor of whiskey and the taste of a New York strip steak. It’s amazing to discover that she likes opera, amazing that she should even go to the opera. The linking of Satomi Baker with Joseph Rodman is so extraordinary a thing that she is tempted herself sometimes to repeat in her head,
a girl like you
. She loves the plays Joseph takes her to on Broadway, even though he often thinks them poor. It’s shocking to her how little impresses Joseph.

“What’s he like, darling?” Mrs. Copeland asks Satomi as they stand in their hallway together, looking down through the window at Joseph’s waiting cab in the street below.

“Um, he’s sort of fine, I guess. He makes me laugh quite a lot, and he’s rich, I think, but he’s not for me, really.”

“Are you sure, darling? The words ‘lucky girl’ come to mind.”

But Satomi doesn’t so much feel lucky as false. Despite herself she can’t help judging. Joseph is far too extravagant, too wasteful. To see him leave food on his plate, wine in his glass, is painful to her. He buys things just to try them, a new brand of cigarettes that he throws away after one drag, books that he likes the cover of but will never read, and so much cologne that it makes her dizzy.

Yet the sense that Joseph, like her, is dislocated in some way draws her to him. And there is something of Dr. Harper’s warmth and wit about him that she likes. She wonders what it’s like to be him, to never have to worry if there will be enough money at the end of the week for food, to never question your good fortune or deny yourself anything.

Oh, money,
she can hear her mother say.
It isn’t a child of your own, or even a fresh-laid egg
.

I wish I could be like you, Mama
, she replies in this conversation in her head.
You always knew the path to take
.

In Joseph’s efforts to charm Satomi, he tells himself that art is the thing. If he can’t seduce with his manliness, he will do it with art. So they stroll the long arcades in the hushed atmosphere of New York’s galleries, gazing at the glorious paintings of battles, of lush naked women, and of misty landscapes. She can recognize now the pure light of a Raphael, the sweeping brushstrokes of a Gauguin.

It pleases the teacher in Joseph. He hopes the passion on the canvases will satisfy enough to deflect for a while what he imagines must be Satomi’s expectations of him.

He takes her to those restaurants that have an intimate atmosphere, but where he doesn’t have to be alone with her. He is saving himself from those moments when a different man would take the opportunity to make his move, those moments that could lose him the game. In its own way it is a romantic sort of wooing, he thinks.

Satomi, though, is confused as to what she and Joseph are, exactly. It seems to her that he is more teacher than boyfriend. There’s something about him that she can’t get a hold of. Perhaps it’s the sense she has that Joseph is in hiding, she wishes she knew from what. Whatever it is, though, it doesn’t feel like a regular boy-girl thing. She’s relieved that he hasn’t made a move, but she can’t help thinking it strange, asking herself questions.
Why doesn’t he kiss me? Why is taking my arm to cross the road the nearest he gets to touching?

Aware that he is not pulling off the boyfriend thing, he steps up what he thinks of as treats for her. He takes her on a tour of his New York. They pound the streets, and visit the grand buildings of Lower Manhattan. He points out ornate ceilings and reels off dates.

“This is New York classical,” he says, trawling her to the Cunard Building to marvel at its great hall. “Nothing much left of New Amsterdam these days, but the American Renaissance style compares with Paris, with Rome, even. It’s marvelous, don’t you think?”

It’s a step too far, but she can’t help laughing.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Joseph, no more, please. Let’s get some coffee. I can’t face another museum, another bank, another set of Corinthian columns.”

Buildings are not her thing and she is bored, reminded of those times in Mr. Beck’s class when her mind had wandered, when she and Lily had caught each other’s eyes and raised them to heaven.

“It’s the worst thing, to be bored,” Joseph says. “Sorry, Sati, I’m a fool. What would you like to do?”

He is glad that she speaks up for herself, that she is not in his thrall. It would feel more like cheating to him if she was.

“I’d really like to visit the Statue of Liberty, and I want to ride the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building.”

“Really! You know it’s twelve hundred and fifty feet above the ground up there?”

“Are you scared of heights, Joseph?”

“No, only of tourists.” They both laugh.

If only they could agree to be nothing more than friends, she would be able to enjoy his company better. Joseph makes the best of friends; he is good at listening when she needs to talk, easy with her silences when she doesn’t. But though it seems to her that they are playacting the man woman thing, though nothing of what they are to each other is spoken about, she senses that he is aiming for something different than friendship. So, as though she is cheating, she feels guilty when she goes with someone else on a date without telling him.

“Only to save his feelings,” she says to Mrs. Copeland.

“Really?” Mrs. Copeland shrugs her shoulders, raises one eyebrow.

Knowing nothing about Joseph, Dr. Harper’s cousin Edward, in a matchmaking move, had set it up.

“Pete Elderkin. A nice guy,” he said. “I think you’ll hit it off.”

And he is a nice guy, sort of. Fresh out of the Army, with a crew-cut bullishness about him, Satomi can tell he is the sort of man who takes life on the run. He had grabbed himself a job in a big cross-state delivery business, in the same week of his demobilize from the Army. Competition doesn’t bother him, only standing still bothers him, he says.

“I’ll make it up to transport manager in no time,” he tells her. “I pretty much run the place on my own now. Wouldn’t surprise me if I end up owning the whole damn thing.”

It wouldn’t surprise her either, since he has that bounce-back thing about him. Nothing is going to keep him down.

They walk in the park and she feels small beside the bulk of him, she was used these days to walking with Joseph, who is slim and only a couple of inches taller than her.

Pete tells her about his time in the Army, about the war, about the German concentration camps he has seen. He believes that America has single-handedly set the world to rights.

“God, those German bastards,” he says. “Europe’s had it. It’s the most decadent place on earth. Thank God for America.”

America this, America that, he is in love with his country; nothing bad about that, she supposes, it reminds her of Haru. But he takes it too far, until she wishes he would stop crowing about the US of A, as he calls it. It feels to her like preaching, like one of Haru’s lectures.

“We live in the most decent country on earth,” he says. “You’d know that if you’d seen what I’ve seen.”

“I was in a camp too. An American one,” she ventures. “I wasn’t thanking God for America then.”

He looks away from her, gives an embarrassed laugh as though she has made an inappropriate joke.

“Sure, Edward told me. But hell, it’s not the same thing at all.”

“No, maybe not. Still, it was a camp. It was imprisonment.”

It wasn’t the same thing, she knew that. She had read about those concentration camps, the inhuman things that went on in them. Mrs. Copeland often spoke of it, had periods of depression about it, cried for her lost relatives, and thought herself lucky as a Jew that she was also an American. You couldn’t compare Manzanar to
those malignant places, yet still she thought it wrong to judge the camps against each other. It occurs to her that there is a ranking of what it was okay to talk about in these postwar times. Germany’s treatment of the Jews, fine; America’s of the Japanese, not.

“Things happen,” he says. “Long as they work out well in the end, I guess.”

“You can’t just dismiss innocent people losing their homes, being caged, Pete. What if it had been you?”

“Yeah, I kinda see your point, but …”

“Really?” she senses that he hasn’t seen her point at all. “I don’t think you can bear to think about America being in the wrong about anything.” She wants him to know that just because things had been worse in Germany, she wouldn’t be silenced about the camps in America.

“Well, I’m not sure that’s—”

“There were deaths, some would say murders, in Manzanar. Boys shot, an old man killed for refusing to halt at the guards’ command. And plenty who didn’t survive the conditions. Did you know that orphaned babies were imprisoned there?”

“Look.” He is in a conciliatory mood. “I guess I didn’t think it out. Let’s not talk about it, huh. The war’s over, after all. We’ll make a proper night of it next time, shall we? Start over.”

It was unforgiving of her, she knew, but she couldn’t help herself. “No next time,” she said lightly. “I don’t think we’re going to work out.”

Pete Elderkin was never going to think it out. His blind love of country, what seemed to her to be his denial of what went on in the American camps, played on her mind for a few days until a letter from Dr. Harper arrived, which put things back in perspective. She hadn’t been making too much of it. It was cheating yourself to love in ignorance, to love what you didn’t know, and wherever it took place injustice was injustice.

I hadn’t realized I had collected quite so much. It’s a bigger archive than I had at first thought. When you are ready I want you to have it. I’m not expecting you to do anything with it, but I’m shocked by the silence of our leaders, the lack of an apology. Perhaps the time’s not right yet, but someday you might be pleased to have it, if only to show your children.

She isn’t sure that she does want it. His reports on sick inmates, the personal things he has collected, the photographs and the journals that will surely include Tamura’s life, her death, might be too much for her. He might as well be handing over the earth of Manzanar, her mother’s grave, the dead riot boys, the skin and blood of the camp’s inmates. She is afraid of Dr. Harper’s archive, of the pain it will cause her to go through it.

I’m still trying to trace Cora,
he assures her.

I’ve written to various orphanages. They take their time replying, but none so far know of Cora. I think it means that she must have found a family, which would be the best news if only we could be sure of it.