Moloka'i (58 page)

Rachel didn’t, not really, but had to. “Where did they take you?” she asked.

Ruth took a swallow of her vodka tonic. “Tanforan Racetrack outside San Francisco had been turned into a temporary Assembly Center. Our ‘apartment’ was an old horse stall, ten feet by twenty feet. The dirt floor was covered with linoleum but it still stank of horse manure, no matter how much you cleaned it. We were given old Army cots and told to stuff burlap bags with hay for mattresses. We had to use communal latrines, with commodes side by side, no stalls—you’d sit there trying to relieve yourself with someone right next to you straining to do the same. The horses had had more privacy!

“We were there a year before we were transferred to a permanent relocation camp. In Oakland they put us on a train, the windows blacked out, I guess to spare the populace from seeing so many Japanese. Two soldiers in each car, armed with rifles and bayonets. We got off at a train station in Lone Pine, in Inyo County.

“The first thing I remember seeing was the mountains—the eastern wall of the Sierra Nevadas. Mount Whitney rising almost two miles from the desert floor. We were put on buses and taken to our new home. Manzanar.”

She stared into space and frowned, as if seeing it again in a mirage. “Barbed wire fence, guard towers along the perimeter. Machine-gun nests pointed
inside
, not out. Seeing those guns pointed at us as we entered the camp was when even the
Nisei
—who thought of ourselves as Americans, not Japanese—realized we weren’t ‘evacuees,’ we were prisoners. Criminals who’d committed no crime.

“The Sierras were like bulwarks between Manzanar and the rest of California,” Ruth remembered. “Every day you’d look up at them and be reminded of how the world needed to be shielded from the likes of us.”

Rachel asked numbly, “What happened to your father?”

Ruth sighed.

“Question 28 happened to him.” She looked as if she’d rather not elaborate, but did. “At Tanforan the authorities circulated a questionnaire to determine whether you were a loyal American who might be eligible for ‘parole’—to work farms in the Midwest or go to school back East. Question 27 asked, ‘Are you willing to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States?’ Question 28 asked, ‘Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government?’

“Now, my father was a foreign national—legally prohibited from ever becoming a naturalized American! This question seemed to ask him to renounce his Japanese citizenship, but without becoming an American, either. Papa feared he’d be a man without a country. And he was almost sixty years old; he couldn’t possibly have served in the Army. So he answered ‘no’ to both questions.

“But to the War Relocation Authority, anyone who answered ‘no-no’ to those two questions was disloyal, a potential threat. So they were segregated—sent to a high-security camp at Tule Lake, California.”

Ruth glanced down, as if the sunlight were too bright or too hot and she couldn’t bear to look into it. “My father was sent there in ’43. Conditions were bad—overcrowding, poor food, virtually no health care. No antibiotics. Papa caught pneumonia. He died without ever seeing any of us again.”

When after a moment Ruth looked up again, Rachel was in tears.

She could no longer stop them, the emotions that had been building up inside her finally venting: pain, horror, despair, anger, all fused into one terrible alloy. She tried to hold it in but found she was little more than a broken vessel, ruptured by sorrow, released of grief.

Ruth instinctively reached out and took Rachel’s hand, her right hand, trying to stem her tears:

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I shouldn’t have told you all this—it’s okay,
we’re
okay, really—”

“It’s not right,” her mother said, the words almost lost in between sobs. “It’s not fair.”

“It wasn’t right. But it’s over.”

Rachel shook her head. “No. No.” She reached deep inside and found the words:

“You were supposed to be free,” she said in a whisper. “You were never supposed to know what it was like to be taken from your home—separated from your family—to be shunned and feared.” Then, so softly Ruth could barely hear, “That was all I had to give you.”

She wept even more fiercely. Ruth went to her without hesitation. She folded her arms around her, holding her as she would a frightened child, rocking her like the baby Rachel had not been able to cradle. And in cooing, consoling tones she told her, It’s all right. Everything’s all right. It’s all over, she said. I’m free. You’re free. It’s all right, Mother. Everything’s all right.

R

uth called her Mother, but didn’t mean it; not yet. As she took the shaken Rachel back to her room, her mind was a jumble of emotions: pity for this woman’s tragic life; pleasure at seeing herself in Rachel’s face and voice and complexion; and guilt that by taking any pleasure at all in Rachel’s presence she was somehow betraying her real parents, the ones who’d raised her. Unable to reconcile her love for them with her growing, traitorous affection for this woman, Ruth invented somewhere she had to be. After reassuring herself that Rachel was all right she made her apologies, started to say her goodbyes . . .

“Wait,” Rachel interrupted her, a bit desperately, “just a minute. Please. I . . . have something for you.”

She took a suitcase from the closet, lifted it up onto the bed, and asked Ruth to open it.

With some trepidation—as if she were opening an inverted Pandora’s Box that might suck her and her love for her parents forever inside—Ruth opened the suitcase.

Whatever it was she expected to see, it wasn’t this. The suitcase was filled with gift boxes—dozens of them, in a diversity of shapes and colors. There was one the size of a pillbox, wrapped in pink and crowned by a bright red bow almost bigger than the box itself; a rectangular package, in lavender wrap, ornamented with a yellow ribbon teased and curled into something resembling a flower; and a large box wrapped in light blue foil that shimmered like the sky on a hot August day. Too many to take in all at once. Christmas had never been celebrated in her parents’ home, but Ruth imagined this must be what it would have felt like, sneaking downstairs on Christmas morning to be overwhelmed by a glittering pile of gifts under the tree.

Rachel seemed to take great pleasure in saying, “Happy birthday,” and when Ruth could manage no coherent reply she prompted, “Open them, if you like.”

One by one Ruth opened them. How could she not? Each gift, she discovered, was modest yet chosen with impeccable taste: a baby’s rattle that might have captivated her attention as an infant; a Raggedy Ann doll she would surely have loved when she was three; an elegant fashion doll that a six-year-old Ruth would have proudly shown off to her friends; a set of combs and hair brushes for a thirteen-year-old’s vanity table; and more. Thirty-two years, thirty-two presents.

Ruth unwrapped the last one—a copy of
Tales of the South Pacific
by James A. Michener—and held it in hands that were suddenly trembling.

On every birthday since she had learned, at the age of eight, that she was adopted, Ruth would find herself wondering whether there was someone, somewhere, thinking of her. Now she was presented with proof that there had been, and she was speechless with emotion. She told herself not to cry, and her eyes filled with tears.

She did not leave for home. She stayed with Rachel in her room, listening to a life’s story that was, she discovered, richer than it was sad. She heard of her birth father, Kenji; her grandfather, Henry, and grandmother, Dorothy; learned of Rachel’s
h
nai
aunt, Haleola; Uncle Pono and Catherine and Sarah and Leilani and the rest of Rachel’s cherished
'ohana
. She learned what
'ohana
meant, and that she was part of it. She began to understand that none of this could replace or usurp the family she had always known, but enriched what she already possessed. With wonder and a growing absence of fear she realized, I am more than I was an hour ago.

T

he next day, after consultation with Frank and an explanation to Donald and Peggy, Ruth brought Rachel home to their two-story house on Fifth Street, where Rachel met two bright, lively youngsters delighted at the notion of having a third grandmother—and one from faroff Hawai'i, no less. Frank Harada was affable and easy-going, but most gracious of all was Ruth’s
ok
san
, Etsuko, a woman of great charm who put Rachel immediately at ease with her questions about Hawai'i and what it was like these days. She reminisced about her days in Waim
nalo and Honolulu in the early years of the century, and turned what could have been an awkward afternoon into a delightful one. It was Etsuko who solved a nagging problem of nomenclature by inquiring of Rachel, “What is Hawaiian for Mother?”—and henceforth as Etsuko was
Ok
san
, Rachel was
Makuahine.
This pleased Rachel for many reasons.

She stayed in California for two weeks, playing Go and other games with her grandchildren; Ruth, watching them play, caught hints of the mother she might have had, even as Rachel glimpsed, not without some pain, the mother she might have been. One day Ruth packed everyone up and drove to San Francisco for some sightseeing: they corkscrewed down Lombard Street, strolled along the Embarcadero, ate fish and chips on the Wharf, and rode cable cars not so different than the trolleys of Old Honolulu. It was a grand day, one of the grandest in Rachel’s long life.

Soon Donald and Peggy were asking their parents when they could go to Hawai'i to visit their new grandma. Frank smiled and said, “Several thousand dollars from now,” and as quickly as Rachel’s hopes fell they were kindled again by Ruth, who told the children, “If we can’t get to Hawai'i, maybe Grandma Rachel can come visit us again.” Rachel happily assured her grandchildren that she would.

At the end of the two weeks Ruth helped her
makuahine
aboard the
Lurline
, tipping the porters and making sure she was properly settled in her tiny cabin. They walked the length of the ship together until fifteen minutes before the scheduled departure time of four o’clock, when the ship’s horn sounded two blasts—final call for all visitors. Ruth hugged Rachel, kissed her, and said, “Thank you. For giving me life, and health, and freedom.”