Deep Purple (40 page)

CHAPTER 52

A
manda was miserable. Unlike the spider, she had entrapped herself in her own web. She wanted Nick, needed him, as much as her mother must have needed the opium when Taro rescued her from Ling Chuey’s. But this was a physical need, Amanda told herself, that could be satiated with the consummation.

The hunger of her soul fo
r the Stronghold was something else. And throughout the long, lonely night in her great-grandmother’s room she damned the Ghost Lady and her own mother for bequeathing her the hunger for something that would never be satiated.

The next morning Nick was alr
eady gone—riding, Paul told her. He himself was leaving later that morning to catch the next flight out of Tucson for Washington. Apparently Nick had said nothing to him of what had happened the night before, because at breakfast he said, “You have shadows under your eyes, Amanda. Didn’t you sleep well last night? This old house gets drafty at times.’’

“
I sometimes expect to meet a ghost whenever a draft does sweep through,” she joked as she spread marmalade on her biscuit. She looked up to find her father watching her, and she could tell, despite his usually inscrutable expression, that he suspected her nocturnal visit to Nick’s bedroom. She blushed, wondering if Paul also suspected.

She set her knife across her butter plate. “
The fact of the matter is,” she said, looking first at her father and then Paul, “Nick and I are making each other miserable. We each want what the other cannot give. Paul, can my father and I ride back into Tucson with you?”

Surprisingly, she thought she detected a look of admiration
pass over Paul's face as he replied that it would be no problem.

She was anxious to be gone before Nick returned from riding. She did not want to face him. He was as formidable an opponent as Elizabeth must have been. Amanda feared his strength of will ove
r her more than his physical or political power. If she was not careful, he would easily dominate her, her very thoughts, her soul even.

The admiration she had seen in Paul
’s eyes could not compensate for the deep ache that writhed inside her on the trip back into Tucson. As if sensing her agitation, Paul said, “You mustn’t think too harshly of Nick. His life hasn’t been that easy.”

“
I don’t think of him one way or another,” she lied, looking out the car window. Dammit, there was another one of those Joshua trees. Ugly, eerie things, no matter how romantic the tales told about them.

“
Amanda,” her father reprimanded from the back seat of Paul’s rented Packard. “Your rudeness is—”

“
No, please, Mr. Shima,” Paul said. “My stepbrother’s directness can be abrasive sometimes, which somehow seems to appeal to his constituents.

“
But in his defense I must say something about his life—well, really about my great-grandmother. Elizabeth was awfully disappointed when my mother kept bearing children who died in infancy. Elizabeth wanted an heir. By the time Mother gave birth to me, I think she was—worn out. And, quite frankly, I think she knew my father never loved her. I used to hear their arguments, though I never understood what they were about. And then every once in a while I heard my father arguing with Elizabeth. Good Lord, she had to have been at least eighty or more, but even then she was a domineering powerhouse.

“
Then, when I was a freshman in college, my mother died. The day after her burial my father moved out of the Stronghold and within six months married a widow carrying a posthumous child—Nick, or Dominic, as he named him. I think in honor of the original owner, your great-grandmother.”

“
A small bit of retribution," Amanda said thinly.

“
Anyway,” Paul continued, “my father and his second wife, Nick’s mother, Laura, were killed in a senseless auto accident when Nick was three or four, I don’t remember exactly. I was in France fighting.” Paul flashed her a small smile. "World War I, so that should tell you how much older I am than you.”

He returned his attention to the road. “
The courts sent Nick to live with Elizabeth at the Stronghold. When I returned from the war to finish college, I drove out to Cristo Rey whenever I could to visit Nick. It was obvious the old woman barely tolerated him. Oh, she saw that he was fed and clothed, as stipulated by the courts, but love—I don’t think she knew how to give it. Occasionally I took Nick into Tucson for a movie or a ballgame. But I don’t think Nick ever forgot the horror of his dependency on her. I think that’s why he’s determined to climb his way to the top. You know, when Elizabeth finally died, Nick refused to come with me to the funeral. For that fact, not many people did. Not even her granddaughter—my Aunt Abigail. My father’s sister hated everything about the Stronghold.”

Paul glanced at her. "Perhaps I
’m stepping out of bounds, saying all this. But I feel it needed to be said. I don’t want anything standing in the way of our friendship.”

Amanda expected her life to return to normal after that. Resolutely she put Nick from her mind and concentrated on her studies, which had suffered some in the time she had been seeing him. She had a letter from Paul the week after he returned to Washington, telling her how much he enjoyed meeting her and her father and that he hoped all was well now. She tried to read between the lines, but, of course, Paul was probably too much the diplomat to reveal anything other than the polite exchange demanded of a social letter.

She did not see or hear from Nick, with the exception of his name on the radio or occasionally his photo in the newspaper. And then anger at him and her own weakness would flood her, and she would swi
tch off the radio or flip the page of the newspaper. At least the arrival of her period brought the good news she was not carrying the brute’s child. But that damnable hunger for Nick persisted, a burning thing that was difficult to ignore.

Then early in D
ecember something happened that wiped all thought of Nick from her mind. She was fixing Sunday dinner— mashing the potatoes—when the radio announcer interrupted "Kaye Kaiser’s Music Hour” with the report that Japan had destroyed the naval and air bases at Pearl Harbor and Hickham Field in Hawaii.

When the news commentator, H. V. Kaltenborn, reported minutes later that the battleship Arizona had been sunk in the bombardment, she dropped down on her knees next to her father.

The news of the sneak attack by Japan continued to cut in on regularly scheduled radio programs the rest of the day. She and her father remained rooted to the radio cabinet. Each time an announcement was made, they looked at each other ominously, saying nothing, feeling only a great sense of shame.

Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, newspapers blared out that the FBI had arrested selected enemy aliens, including 2,192 Japanese. She secretly hoped that would be the extent of the government
’s operations against the Japanese in America.

But the peace that was supposed to come with Christmas died out by the year
’s end. After that things had the quality of a nightmare that began in fear and continued in hysteria.

At work Larry showed her a copy of the
Los Angeles Examiner
in which a syndicated Hearst columnist, a Henry McLemore, had written, “I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. . . . Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry. Personally I hate Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”

Very few Japanese lived in the Tucson area, although there were quite a few Japanese farmers outside Phoenix. She and her father began to hear and read about department stores, gasoline stations, and restaurants refusing to serve Japanese. The Chinese e
ven took to wearing buttons proclaiming, ‘‘I am Chinese.”

Then the next week the Arizona legislature passed a bill forbidding Japanese to buy anything but food, not even a bar of soap.

She experienced little trouble with the prejudice because she did not look Japanese; however, on campus, where her identity was known, she several times heard calls of “Buddhahead!” Once someone threw a tomato that splattered at her feet. But there were so many students around her when this occurred that she was never certain who was responsible. It made no difference; it did not bother her. But she did worry for her father.

She knew that he would be refused service if he ventured outside the
Barrio Libre
. Inside the
Barrio
, life continued as normal, as normal as could be expected under the wartime’s abrupt conditions . . . the gas rationing and belt tightening, housewives lining up for ration coupons and their sons standing in queues outside recruiting stations. In the
Barrio
, though, there was no racial prejudice, and she, therefore, assumed her father was safe from persecution.

Then, on February 19, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to establish military areas in the West Coast area and to exclude from them any and a
ll enemy aliens. Her father, an
issei
, a Japanese emigrant, had never qualified for citizenship, since he had been too old to serve in the armed forces in World War I. He was therefore an enemy alien!

The “
enemy alien’’ edict could have meant Italians, Germans, or Japanese. But then came Public Proclamation No. I.

She sat in the campus
’s cantina, shaking her head as she read about it on the front page of the Arizona Daily News. General John DeWitt, as western defense commander, had set up the western half of three West Coast states and the southern third of Arizona as a military area—from which all persons of Japanese blood were to be removed, even those American-born, known like herself as
nisei.
This applied to anyone having as little as one-eighth Japanese blood.

At first she was enraged. Not the Americans of Italian or German ancestry, only the Japanese! Kathy and Larry were just as angry. “
They won’t do it,” Kathy assured her. “A hundred and ten thousand Japanese on the West Coast—where would they put them all?”

“
It has nothing to do with the war!” Larry said. He hit the table with the flat of his hand. “It’s those California pressure groups!”

“
You know how they feel about the cheap Oriental labor, that it threatens them,” Kathy tried to console. “Not everyone feels that way.”

“
Really?” Amanda asked bitterly. “Listen to how Governor Clark of Nebraska feels. ‘The Japs live like rats, breed like rats, and act like rats. We don't want them in our state.’

She knew that for the most part, what Larry had
said was true. In California, 1942 was an election year, and the labor unions and the various farmer associations were putting pressure on the politicians.

To her dismay at least one politician spoke out on the mass evacuation of the Japanese. A small para
graph quoted Nick as saying, “The Japamericanese are just as much American citizens as those whose ancestors came to this country via the Mayflower” She knew that one paragraph would probably be the only communication she would ever have again from Nick. They had both made it clear they wanted nothing further to do with each other; yet Nick was supporting her and her father indirectly.

Living in the Barrio as they did, and with her lack of obvious Japanese features, she figured she could manage to avoid bei
ng interned in one of the fifteen assembly centers appointed to house Japanese aliens and citizens until war relocation centers (or concentration camps, as she heatedly called them) could be constructed.

But her rage slowly altered to fear as little by lit
tle over the next few weeks the world began to close in on her father and her. It began with Mike’s announcement that he would have to let her go. “It’s not that I want to, you understand,” he said, looking everywhere but at her. “But, doll, word’s gonna get out we’re employing a Japanese, then we’re gonna be in trouble.”

Fine! she thought. No money, no food. What her father made in his laundry business was not enough to feed and house them and keep her in college. She would have to draw out a portion of he
r meager savings to tide them over until she found another job—using an alias this time!

She left the Casablanca and walked the three miles to the bank she used. She waited what seemed an inordinate amount of time for the teller to return. At last the youn
g woman returned. Her face was flushed. “I’m sorry. Miss Shima,” she mumbled, “but the Treasury Department has frozen your account.”

At that moment Amanda ludicrously thought that the teller
’s face had to have looked more stricken than her own. She was simply stunned. Slowly she treaded back to the nearest bus stop only to halt zombielike before a poster affixed to the brick wall of a building.

INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF

JAPANESE ANCESTRY LIVING

IN THE FOLLOWING AREAS

Dazed, she read on.

A responsible m
ember of each family, on Friday, May 2, between the hours 8:00 A M and 5:00 P M., will report to the Civil Control Station where they will be:

1.
              Given advice and instructions on the evacuation.

2.
              Provided service with respect to storage or other disposition of property.

3.
              Transported with a limited amount of clothing to new residences.

Riding home through the darkened streets, she vowed she would not report to the Civil Control Station to be penned like a cow
—or war prisoner, which was what she actually would be—in a concentration camp.

When she walked in the door that night her father
’s face told her that he had already heard about the latest mass-evacuation order. She did not have the heart to tell him about their frozen bank account right then.

“
We must keep our faith in the ultimate good of American democracy,” her father counseled, unable to hide the deep sorrow that clouded his eyes. “By voluntarily complying with these orders we will prove beyond doubt that we are loyal American citizens.”

She turned on him, forgetting he was her father. “
Next you’ll be believing that they're incarcerating us for our own good—to protect us from public sentiment!”

She grabbed up the newspaper and held it out to him, her hand trem
bling with her anger. “Look! Do you think the U.S. government truly gives a damn about us? Read what General DeWitt feels about us. Read it!” She began reciting the statement attributed to the General. “‘A Jap’s a Jap, and their American citizenship is only a piece of paper as far as I’m concerned.’”

“
If you still have faith in American democracy, you’re a foolish old man," she cried.

For the first time in her life her father struck her, slapping her cheek. They faced each other, tears streaming down both o
f their faces.