Gift of the Golden Mountain (8 page)

     Still, I believe that change is possible. I believe that love—that strange act of courage—can be surprisingly tough if well rooted, can lie dormant under the leaves of many seasons. I believed, I fervently hoped, that if I could find where it lay buried and bring it to the light, it could flourish and grow. And so, the fortnightly crab and sourdough sessions.

     I explained this to no one, Kit least of all, but I expect she knew. Little ever missed Kit's notice.

     There were times when I thought my plan might actually work, times when even Kit must have felt a flicker of hope. The Friday that Sam Nakamura came was such a time. That evening I had invited two young photographers who were studying at the Art Institute. They had been working on a show the Institute was mounting of my photographs taken in the early years of the war, of the Japanese-Americans who were interned in the so-called relocation camps for the duration under Executive Order No. 9066. It was May's idea to ask Sam, who had been born at the camp at Tule Lake.

     When I found myself alone with May in the kitchen she said, "I'm glad you noticed Sam's finery. He's been planning his wardrobe all week. It's all calculated to make the rest of us feel slightly uncomfortable. That's because he doesn't feel very comfortable with tonight's subject."

     I nodded. "I would expect Sam to be angry."

     "He is," she answered. "Prepare for fireworks." She gave me a light kiss on the cheek and a pat on the shoulder before rejoining
the others, and it occurred to me that May was looking forward to the fireworks.

     Kit came in a few minutes later, carrying a plastic shopping bag full of Dungeness crab and apologizing for being late. She is as trim at sixty-one as she was at forty-one, I do believe—she looks too young for gray hair. With that husky voice and trim style, she somehow reminds me of Lauren Bacall. There's something glamorous about Kit. Always has been.

     Sam introduced himself before the girls had a chance, saying, "I finally get to meet the fabulous Mrs. McCord."

     "Fabulous?" Kit laughed. "What a nice thing to be called on a Friday night." Turning to me she added, apologetically, "I had to wait for Frank to crack the crab. I rushed him so he didn't do a grand job. I think I'd better repair to the kitchen and finish up."

     "Let me help," Karin said. May frowned into the magazine she had been leafing through. Kit smiled and stage-whispered, "Thanks, but I think I'll enlist Sam. Maybe he'll pay me another compliment."

     It was May who started the discussion that night. "Tell us about Faith's show," she asked a young photographer named Nancy Caravello, who proceeded to launch into the kind of rhapsody that is embarrassing. I intended to interrupt as soon as I decently could but Sam got there first.

     "You don't have to describe the pictures, we all know them," he said brusquely, and asked me, "what I want to know is why you took them."

     Nancy's face flushed a bright red, and I wanted to reassure her, to take the sting out of his rebuff, but Sam spoke with such urgency that I could only think to answer him.

     "It was a terrible time," I began. "Innocent, confused people—civilians, many of them citizens—were being herded into detention camps. Concentration camps, for the first time in this country's history. It was a human tragedy, an American tragedy, and I wanted to record it."

     After that awkward opening, the conversation moved easily around the table, everybody eager to take part while the bowls in the center of the table gradually filled with empty crab shells. The photography students entered the conversation, drawing on the research they had done in connection with the show. Their enthusiasm for the subject was greater than their grasp of the facts. The more the two expounded, the more agitated Sam became.

     "The war hysteria was part of it," Jeff, an intense young man, ended a monologue. "You have to remember that people actually believed the Japanese were going to invade California."

     Sam's patience gave out. "That is not what I have to remember," he said, "and besides, who believed that? Certainly not all those white folks who moved in to take over Japanese properties at five cents on the dollar."

     "I'm not saying it was right," Jeff muttered.

     Sam came back, "Then what the hell are you saying?"

     Nancy, her voice shaking with emotion, rushed in, "What Jeff meant about war hysteria was that you have to put it in the context of the times." Then she added, "And I think it's important to remember that being locked up wasn't the worst thing that could happen. Our people were being killed." Giving Sam a look of quiet triumph, she finished: "My father was killed, by the Japanese, on Guadalcanal."

     Sam stared at her steadily for a moment, then said in a tone that was almost conciliatory, "Your name is Caravello. Italian, right? Your father was probably an American citizen. So was my Uncle Hideo. He was with the 442nd Battalion, which was all Japanese in case you didn't know, and he died in Italy at the Gothic Line. Do you think the local Italian community should be held responsible for his death?"

     Nancy, flustered, did not know what to answer, so I broke in. "As it happens, many of us disapproved of that executive order and some of us—" I paused to emphasize the next words—
"white folks
did what we could to fight it. In fact," I said, "Kit did as
much as anybody. She was the one who got me into the camps to do the photos."

     Now Sam turned to Kit, his voice betraying a grudging surprise. "How did you do that?"

     For a long moment Kit concentrated on removing a large morsel of crab from a leg. She did not like to be the center of attention at these gatherings, and her answer was purposely vague: "I was working with a group who toured the camps regularly."

     "Toured?" Sam asked archly, "as in touring the zoo?"

     Unlike poor Nancy, Kit would not rise to his bait. "As in touring a prison," she said easily, "to see if the prisoners were being treated humanely."

     Sam shrugged but Karin, who had been listening intently, picked up. "What group was it, Kit? And how did you get involved?"

     "The Quakers. The Friends were about the only religious group who came out against the camps, and they did their best to help. I was just one of the volunteers. We weren't able to do all that much. Just little things, really. Once I got a special formula for a new baby. But I did get into the camps often enough to make some friends, and when Faith wanted to come in to photograph—to make a historical record, actually—they accepted her."

     I went on to explain, "Without Kit, I could never have done the most moving of the photos—the sick child on the cot, the teenage girl looking out through the barbed wire at the young guard, the tiny cubicle shared by a family of seven."

     "You didn't answer Karin's question," Sam said to Kit. "How did you happen to get involved?"

     Kit hesitated. "Initially it was because I had some friends who were sent to a camp."

     "Your gardener?" Sam prodded, "or maybe a housemaid?"

     "Cut it out, Sam," May lashed out in an exasperated tone, giving Nancy the courage to add, petulantly, "I thought this was supposed to be a discussion, not an inquisition."

     Suddenly Sam smiled, a wide and charming smile, and put up both hands in a gesture of surrender. "Sorry," he said, "I get carried away with the devil's advocacy stuff."

     Kit glanced at me. She knew Sam was not playing the devil's advocate, not this time. She also knew he was not going to be satisfied until he got an answer. I smiled in encouragement, she hesitated for a moment and then began in her husky, low voice:

     "Mr. Ishigo was no one's servant. He was already an old man when I first met him in 1930 and he was in his nineties when he died at Manzanar." She paused, remembering, and with a small sigh continued, "Mr. Ishigo was a craftsman, a builder of sailing ships in his younger days. In his age he had taken to making models of the ships he had helped to build. He did extraordinary work—beautifully detailed dragon boats, especially. He lived with his daughter and her family out in the Avenues."

     Sam pressed on: "How did you happen to come into contact with this old Father—I don't imagine he moved in your social circles."

     Kit took a sip of wine and studied him over the top of the glass. "My husband had drowned at Ocean Beach," she said evenly. "He swam there every day and one day . . ." she started to explain, then stopped herself. "So, every year on that day I would take a wreath out to cast on the water." She looked up and smiled, briefly. "And usually the wreath would wash right back in. So I had an idea that if I could put it on a little boat of its own, that boat could sail out to sea. And that is how I happened to meet Mr. Ishigo. I saw a newspaper article about the models he made, and went to see him and he didn't think my request was in the least peculiar. After that, every year Mr. Ishigo and I would go to Ocean Beach together to launch a beautiful little dragon boat filled with flowers. He would check the tide tables, and he knew just how to read a wave. At the right moment he would signal and we would wade into the water together—sometimes we got quite wet—and then we would go back to his house and his daughter would have hot miso soup waiting for us."

     For a moment Kit had become oblivious to the group. Her face glowed with the memory, and without realizing it she had crossed her hands over her chest in a gesture that was soft and touching. Then she caught herself, put her hands in her lap and finished in a tender voice, "We became good friends." She turned to Sam and added, "Mr. Ishigo would take no pay, and after the first time I did not ask. We did that every year until the war, when they put Mr. Ishigo and his family into a camp."

     Sam looked at Kit, but had nothing to say. Karin's eyes were brimming with tears, and I didn't trust myself to speak. It was May who broke the silence. With a puzzled look on her face, she asked: "Did my father know about the camps—what you did?"

     "Yes," Kit answered carefully, "In fact, you were too young to remember—you must have been about four years old—but I took you to visit Mr. Ishigo's daughter when she came back. I had sent them pictures of you and that day she gave you a little teak sampan that Mr. Ishigo had carved for you not long before he died."

     "I have it," May said, "my name is on it in tiny, tiny characters. I thought someone gave it to my father." The look on her face made me think that the revelation was not so much that Kit had been involved with the camps, but that Kit had been involved with her, with the child May, to have taken her to visit the Ishigos.

The next day I found myself going through a box of photographs labeled "May: baby pictures. Age one to four." I was looking for something, I wasn't quite sure what. I can only explain it as a niggling in the back of my mind, a question unanswered—or never asked. I leafed through the prints. May and her grandmother, May and Sara, May and Emilie. The wide, searching look in the baby's little face. Suddenly it occurred to me to separate out all of the pictures of May and Kit together, and there it was, as clear as day. In almost every picture, May was touching Kit. Kit's face radiant,
as she gave the baby her bottle, May reaching out for Kit's arms while taking her first steps, holding tight to Kit's skirt as a shy two-year-old, a tired three-year-old tilting her head against Kit's. And then an especially telling picture of Porter, Kit, and May a few days after Porter's return. He was strange to the child, still, and she was clinging for dear life to Kit! For the first four years of May's life she had trusted Kit completely, had loved her as a child loves, without question. Something had happened to erode that trust. The question was: what?

     I went to the letter file and pulled out the one labeled,
May-letters, 1957-1960.
I leafed through the pages filled with a girl's square hand, until I came on the one I wanted.

Colworth Farm
February 6, 1957

     Dear Aunt Faith:

     Thank you for all your letters (three since the last time I wrote you! Sorry!) You deserve a nice, long one back and today is the perfect day for me to write because I am home sick with a cold. Emilie has me all tucked in on the cot behind the wood stove in the kitchen. You know that cozy spot. It's my favorite place. Phinney gets up early and stokes up the wood stove so it is warm and cozy when the rest of us get up. It always smells like someone has just cooked a big pot of applesauce.

     On Saturday, Phinney is taking the twins to the hardware store with him so Em and I can do some shopping. That should be a scream, Amos and Annie loose in the store. Especially Annie. Phinney says, "I'll just flash my
Phineas Colworth, Prop.
sign at them and they'll know they better behave." He's very proud of the new sign, which was carved by an old man who used to work for Phinney's grandfather.

     Em has been helping me with my math. She says she doesn't understand how Daddy could have taught me Chinese and skipped algebra altogether.