Saving Graces (6 page)

Serene Sundays were spent on the sacred island of Miyajima. It was much changed from a century before, when—because they could not walk on the holy soil—Japanese worshippers would enter on boats through the huge
torii
that appeared to be floating in the water and make their way on docks and bridges to the temples. By the 1950s, American children could and did hike in the foothills around Mt. Misen, climb wizened trees, and hope to catch sight of the sacred god-deer. We would roam and play while my mother sketched, and when she was through, we would pull her to the red-painted stall outside the five-story pagoda where we would buy oats for what we believed was the Emperor’s white horse, and maybe it even was. I have seen a picture of that stall as it stands today, in which a statue commemorating the white horse now stands. If you had had the good fortune to feed the stout, square-muzzled horse we knew as children, you would be hard-pressed—even in that same stall—to recognize the sleek rendition. I hope to be remembered as favorably.

We would add new places to our list of weekend haunts as Mother would discover them, and she discovered many as she drove throughout southern Honshu. Mother had a secret list of junk stores and antique stores where she knew all the shopkeepers, their wives, and their children by name. And in those shops she spent her time and her money, shopping for herself and for the Red Door.

The Red Door had been a charity project of the base wives. They collected and sold used children’s clothing, but once, when my mother was back in the States at my grandfather’s funeral, the wives donated the entire inventory to local Japanese families who had been devastated by a typhoon. In 1959 the Red Door reopened, but instead of selling used clothes to raise money, it sold Japanese antiques, and Mother was one of the buyers. Twice a week or more, Mother and another base wife, Peggy Boettcher, would leave the air station in our Ford station wagon and head to Hiroshima or Kure or Yanai or just some rural store Mother had heard about. Or out to see a farmer who had a few things he was willing to sell stored in the treasure room behind his house. Mother and Mrs. Boettcher would be back—at first to unload at the Red Door and then home with the things she’d bought for herself. She brought home so many antiques that my sister was convinced we were terribly poor. All Mother ever bought were old used things.

Mother became such friends with one shopkeeper that when we left Iwakuni in 1960, she gave him a number of prized American items, including—for his daughters—the dress clothes Nancy and I had outgrown. The family came to see us off, and in a gesture of appreciation, the daughters were wearing some of what we had given them. You would think that with a father who would dance in a pink bikini nothing would embarrass us, but let me assure you that Nancy and I wanted to melt into the sidewalk when the girls arrived wearing, as sundresses, our white cotton slips.

Mother would drive us everywhere in search of Japan for us and, for her and the Red Door, more antiques. She would pile Jay, Nancy, and me into the backseat of a terrifically ugly two-tone flesh and white station wagon and compete for road space with bicycles and oxcarts. During our sojourns and treasure hunts, we would drive by women squatting in the rice paddies, wearing flat straw hats, their kimonos pulled up around their thighs as they worked. We’d see silk drying in the fields after being dyed, huge banners of blues and reds billowing from enormous racks. Crowded into the rear-facing seat, we watched a lot of Japan through that back window. Jay would spot Japanese children playing in the streets and yell to them, “Baseball,
ne
?” Baseball was enormously popular in Japan, and the children would always scream back, “Baseball! Baseball!” and wave excitedly and chase the car a few hundred feet. Jay was just beginning to do something our parents had taught us. He was reaching out and making connections with everyone around him, even those children we only passed on a dusty road, using as connective tissue what they had in common.

My mother would sit and talk with a Japanese farmer, or the Admiral’s wife, or the maid Toyo-san, and her demeanor was never different. She once told me that if I could talk about the news, about soap operas (when in the States, of course), and about sports, there were very few people with whom I could not have a conversation. It has turned out to be true.

My father didn’t even need that. He would reach for the hands of strangers. He would corral teenagers at a table and ask them what they liked. He would tell the nurses in the clinic how pretty they were. Every little girl he passed he’d say, “Could she be? Well, she must be. Here’s a princess. Imagine that, a princess, right here in the mall!” He would chat with cashiers as if he knew them, complimenting them on their hair or their eyes or the speed with which they worked. By the time they left, my father would know the life stories of the family in the next lane at the bowling alley. Why not pass the time with the cashier? You’re not doing anything anyway. Why not make friends with the bowling family? Hey, we were a bowling family, too.

My father was doing something most of us do or want to do—reaching for connections. Now, he was, and still is, an extreme example. And, probably as a consequence, so am I. I’m not likely to change either, because the connections I have made have enriched and sustained me; they have strengthened me by holding me up when I needed it, and they have strengthened me by letting me hold up my end when it was needed. My life is immeasurably better because I know that although we may say grace differently, or not know how to say it all, we still need one another.

Because of the way I grew up, because time and again I had to walk into a classroom where everyone else knew one another, I had to find a way to make enough connections to make my life work. I understood early in life that I needed them. So I thrust my hand out. Like my father had taught me. And I found out what they liked and talked about that. Like my mother had taught me. We just had to recognize the sameness among us and build on that for our community. We didn’t have to be the same; we just had to recognize what a great blessing we could be to one another. Like April taught me.

In the summer of 1960, Dad’s squadron moved to Atsugi Naval Air Station, in the region nearer Tokyo, where my father had been stationed on our first tour in Japan. We were moving to a much larger place, with many more children, but for once the whole squadron, all of VQ-1, nearly my whole class, moved at once. That meant there was not enough housing on the air station at Atsugi for all of the families, so we moved to the large American complex in Yokohama, on the bluffs above the high school. Not knowing any better, going from Iwakuni to Yokohama seemed like moving from a Japanese community to an American one. Sure, in Yokohama we went shopping in the cramped stores on narrow Motomachi Street, and we still rumbled down dirt back roads, my brother shouting “Baseball,
ne
?” the whole way. We took lessons in
sumi
—ink drawing—and
ikebana
—flower arranging. But to us, Yokohama might as well have been America. It had a complex that resembled a strip mall, where the Navy Exchange, a snack bar, the theater, the bowling alley, even places I didn’t need like the package store and the Teen Club, were located all together with a big mall-like parking lot in front. When we weren’t at the Officers’ Club having the best chocolate sundaes made, we were getting hot dogs at the snack bar and walking back to the baseball field behind the package store. Our daily dose of Japan was paying the Japanese vendor in front of the Navy Exchange a hundred yen—then less than thirty cents—to open an oyster we picked from his pail. He would take the chosen oyster, push his wooden-handled knife deep into it, and twist until the shell popped open. If there was a pearl in it, he would hand it to us, tossing the shell into a cotton bag. If there was no pearl, we could reach into the pail and pick out another oyster, but they were cultured, so there was always a pearl.

When a submarine came into port, many families would travel to Yokosuka just to see it, and we would crowd the second-floor roller rink on the base. We gathered for Yo-Hi football games or bowling league, but by far the best-attended community events were when we had to turn in our MPC. MPC were Military Payment Certificates, pastel paper money about the size of Monopoly money on which there were drawings of regal and beautiful women. We had MPC for every denomination of bill and coin except pennies. Periodically, everyone had to turn in their MPC so that their aqua-colored fifty-cent papers could be exchanged for light green fifty-cent papers. I am sure there must have been some convenient place for soldiers and sailors to convert their MPC, but not for dependents. The windows where we exchanged MPC for yen would have long lines of wives and children on the day of the exchange. The day was always a surprise, and after that date the aqua-colored fifty-cent papers would be worthless. The day was celebrated in our house in the same way it was celebrated in the quarters around us: we turned every pants pocket inside out, emptied every purse, and scrambled through every junk drawer in search of dying MPC. MPC and reconstituted milk were the reminders that despite the roller rink and the movie theater, despite the mall-like parking lot and the football games, this was still Japan.

It was 1960, and my sixth-grade class ran a mock election for the elementary school between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. One side of the class was assigned to be the campaign staff for each candidate, and as it turned out, I was assigned to campaign for Richard Nixon. Kennedy’s Catholicism was as big an issue to the military—if judged by the letters in the overseas military newspaper,
Stars and Stripes—
as my mother’s Methodism was to Nana. But the usual argument that Kennedy’s allegiance would be to papal decrees instead of the Constitution was not going to win over fourth and fifth graders to Nixon. We needed something concrete. Thinking about the Catholic schools at the time, the Nixon side of the room found just the opening we needed. Donald Segretti, Nixon’s later dirty-tricks guru, was not in our class, but he might as well have been. The campaign for Nixon consisted of a few posters in the hallways and a calculated, oft-repeated rumor—in which I was as culpable as every other student on my side of the class—that, as a Catholic president and commander in chief over our dependents’ schools, John Kennedy would send us all to school on Saturdays. Nixon won the mock election at Kinnick Elementary School by a landslide.

Normally a tour of duty is over in the summer, but my father got assigned to a six-month tour at the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk beginning in January 1961. We were leaving Japan early. And we were leaving three days after Christmas. Mother had to plan Christmas for fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, go to Christmas parties and school and church pageants, pack all our belongings—some marked for storage, some for use in our smaller Norfolk quarters—pack traveling clothes for all five of us for a seven-thousand-mile trip, and be ready to leave by ship on December 28th. It was a testament to the flexibility of the military family, or at least the military mother. We had a tree decorated entirely with paper ornaments we made. It had the advantage of being entirely disposable—we tossed it out, still fully decorated, after Christmas—and while my brother and sister and I were making ornaments, it allowed Mother uninterrupted time to pack. Somehow she got everything done. And on December 28th, the five of us went aboard ship and headed back to the States.

It wasn’t until a couple of days later that Mother realized she hadn’t gotten everything done and, in fact, had forgotten something important. On December 30th, my father gave her a lovely pearl pin for their thirteenth wedding anniversary. Their wedding anniversary? She looked so forlorn that my sister and I went to the tiny ship store and bought some handkerchiefs and thread. We spent the rest of the day embroidering my father’s initials on her only gift to him. She gave it to him, and he acted pleased. The next morning Mother awoke, certain she had nothing left to be done. Except that we had crossed the International Date Line, and it was December 30th again. My father had figured this out before the trip, so on their second thirteenth anniversary in as many days, he gave her a mink stole. My sister and I went again to the ship store and again bought and sewed. And again he acted pleased. Maybe he was, but one thing I am certain of is that my mother was relieved to wake up the next morning with no extravagant gifts awaiting her.