Secrets of the Apple (46 page)

Kate took his fingers from the keys and led him to the sofa, her modest tenderness melting through the last of his control, releasing the terrible pressure, building since São Paulo, four a.m. Kate held tight and he sobbed like a child.

When he was finally quiet, he lay motionless in her arms, listening to her heartbeat and the ticking of the antique grandfather clock. He looked at the clock, trying to make out the time in the dim light, but as he squinted he was overcome with dizziness and vertigo, accompanied by a strange even rhythm beating softly at the edge of his consciousness. He covered his eyes with one hand taking deep breaths until the world righted itself and the dizziness cleared. But afterwards the comforting rhythm remained, more in his heart than in his mind, as though trapped in his blood, the soft, soft ticking of his own mortality.

W
hen the clock struck eleven Ryoki flinched at the first chime, startling Kate from a semi-doze.
Ching
she moved an arm,
ching
she scooted away,
ching
she planted both feet,
ching ching ching
until she was standing next to the sofa talking about bed and sleeping. Bed, of course, very tired. Ryoki stood too, but one of them commented on the beauty of the service, or was it the smell of the flowers, and they talked standing up for twenty minutes, shifting from foot to foot until one sat down again, and then the other, Ryoki on the sofa, Kate on the loveseat, days of pent-up words overflowing the banks and streaming over the floor, two friends, whatever else they might be, still friends with things to say, neither of them noticing when the conversation drifted off into REM state.

His mother discovered them early the next morning, the creak of the door waking Ryoki as she entered the room. Blinking, it took him a full minute to orient himself, country, city, time, circumstance. His mother waited patiently for him to stretch out of his awkward sleeping position before silently beckoning him to follow. He arranged an afghan over Kate and met his mother outside the door.

“Well,” she said when they had both settled in the hallway, “are you engaged?”

Ryoki stared, senses still sluggish, trying to comprehend how she could pick that moment for such a question.

“I suppose not,” she said wistfully. “I know I’m rushing things, but you looked so peaceful together. I hoped, well… You ought to marry sooner rather than later. Especially now—” She broke off, biting her lip. “At work people will trust you more if you’re married.”

Ryoki had been studying her face and hardly heard her, thinking the sedative she’d taken had been a good choice, softening the haggard edges. But she still looked pale and fragile, her eyes large and hungry for happy news.

“Come with me,” she said, slipping her arm through his and guiding him to her office where she began rapidly flipping through two of the dozen or so file boxes that had been pulled from her walk-in storage closet. “I’ve been going through some things these last few days,” she muttered. “Maybe I already got them out. I was thinking I wanted to show them to you. Things have been so—” Her voice hitched and several old letters flipped out and slid to the floor. “Will you look in the center desk drawer and see if you see two photos?” she asked, clearing her throat.

Obediently Ryoki opened the drawer. Though he found no snapshots, he did find a recent newspaper clipping, a familiar tabloid photo of Kate, one of her loose summer dresses caught in the breeze, billowing out in front of her, with the caption
WHOSE BABY IS IT?
printed underneath, the source of the mysterious website picture solved. He held it up, deep furrows plowed between his eyes. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

His mother’s mouth crinkled in disgust. “Just throw that away. A friend brought me that to let me know you’ve got a talkative maid. You’re a famously eligible bachelor and the tabloids here have a nice little love triangle going, starring you as the innocent hero, Kate as the American seductress, and that boyfriend as her scheming lothari—Oh, here we go.” She set aside two photographs and began haphazardly scooping loose ends and fallen memorabilia back into the box without looking at anything. “I’ve been meaning to sort through all this, get it all into albums, and now that I have more time …” Again she cleared her throat, scraping over the emotion camped so perilously near the surface. She pushed the first photo toward him. “Do you remember this at all?”

Ryoki recognized himself as a young boy, fast asleep, tangled around a small sleeping girl with light reddish brown pigtails askew, grass stains on her shirt, and a Band-Aid on her knee. He recognized the nursery in Brian Porter’s house, the muraled walls painted a cartoon jungle with trees, flowers, monkeys and birds in vibrant greens, yellows, reds and blues. Filled with toys, it was a paradise for children. With his fingernail he traced the rope hanging from the ceiling, thinking of all the times he and Tom had swung as high as they could, screaming
Ah-eyah-eyah-eyah-eyah!
and flying off into a pile of bean bags.

“That Grace was always so talented. She painted all that herself. Decorated her whole house, in fact. Always encouraged Kate to draw, taught her everything she knew, but couldn’t interest any of her boys. She wanted a daughter so badly.”

Something sparked in Ryoki’s head and he took another look at the little girl in the photo. Her hair was lighter, and her features less defined, but it was so unquestionably Kate that he should have recognized her at once. Looking intently, he thought he grasped the tail-end of a memory, a little gap-toothed girl with ears sticking out of her straight, wispy hair, but that could be the power of suggestion.

“We’d gone to visit the Porters. You were about seven, so Kate must have been about three. Her mother was having a rough pregnancy, so Grace snatched up little Kate and took her to San Francisco. She followed you around like a shadow that whole trip, and one day you brought her to me because she’d fallen and skinned her knee. She couldn’t stop crying because it was nap time and she was worn out. I could see you wanted to run back outside and play, but she turned stubborn and held onto your arm until you agreed to lay by her for a while. You always were a sucker for a little kid. A little later I found you like this and tip-toed out for my camera.”

Ryoki ran his fingers down the edges of the photo, trying to reclaim something of that day. His romantic bits wanted to believe he’d loved Kate even then, that it was all fate or kismet, whatever that was. More likely, as a child he simply loved more openly in general, before he learned to keep his affections sensibly sterile.

“Years later I met Kate again,” his mother said. “Sixteen years old, coming in to confess to a broken window and seeing your father’s smashed computer. He tried to wave her off.” Here his mother began to fidget as a tear escaped her right eye. “You know how he was. But you know, Kate pulled herself straight up and promised to replace that computer. And she did. Never called her father or her uncle, and they never jumped in. She handed over all her savings and arranged to work for us for the rest of the summer to make up the difference. You were twenty by then and I was starting to worry that you were choosing girlfriends to match your jackets, and here was Kate, everything you wanted and everything you needed, if only you would take a good look.” His mother held out her hands, fingers splayed as though showing all her cards.

“Except she was too young and too American,” Ryoki said.

“Oh yes, much too young, and the nationality was inconvenient, but as Brian’s adored niece, she would naturally exert a claim on you that these other girls couldn’t quite command. So I bided my time, kept up a weekly correspondence to help her improve her Japanese and expand her kanji. Once she turned nineteen, I started encouraging her to come here to visit, and invented reasons for her to visit you at school. I thought I was fairly clever and subtle—” Ryoki coughed. “But she stymied me at every turn. I didn’t realize how deep-seated her prejudice was.”

“Prejudice?” Ryoki looked skeptical. He’d never met anyone less prejudiced than Kate. His mother looked at him kindly.

“Son, she’s genuinely afraid of Japanese men. I don’t think even she recognizes it. For years I didn’t notice it because I knew how much she loved your father. But she apparently had a close relationship with that graduate student who taught her Japanese, spent a lot of time with her over a period of years. As she learned Japanese she was hearing all kinds of harrowing stories about her teacher’s abusive father and brother, and about the childishness of Japanese men in general. Kate was very young and her family had no idea. They’d hired the tutor to teach language, never dreaming how much influence she had. None of this came out until years and years later when she told me your father surprised her because she expected all Japanese men to have horns and pitchforks. She said it like she was kidding, but she was an adult by then and wouldn’t go anywhere near you. Early teaching is very hard to shake.”

Ryoki leaned forward, feeling sucker-punched, knowing himself to be every bit as culpable.

“I kept trying anyway, right up until she sent me this photo.” His mother handed him the second photograph, the one he’d seen in Salt Lake: Kate wearing his mother’s kimono, posing with the Blond Pirate. “Look at the back,” his mother said.

“
He asked me to marry him right after this was taken. Isn’t he cute!
” he read, written in Kate’s familiar scrawl.

“She got engaged in your kimono?” Ryoki turned the photo over three times before looking at his mother, who watched him with one corner of her mouth quirked in a smile.

“What about you?” he asked. “Didn’t your mother leave Japan because of her father? I remember that story. So why did you risk marrying dad?” As the words came from his mouth, it struck him as odd that this question had never before entered his mind.

His mother shrugged one shoulder. “My mother had a love/hate relationship with her father. Lots of bad stories to tell. But there were good things too, like the color of the cherry blossoms, and the way her father liked to play bull and gallop around with the kids on his back. And your father was such a loving and gentle man, we thought we could face anything. But then he had to work such long hours and I was left alone in a strange world with a mother-in-law who resented my every breath. I’d have to say that in the first few years of my marriage I suffered a lot, until I had you. Having you was my trump card. Your grandmother practically worshipped you and I could withhold you if I chose. You made her mind her manners.”

“Why not have a whole arsenal of children, then?” Ryoki said, thinking regretfully of the lonely, quiet house of his childhood.

“There were complications and the doctor said another baby would be risky. And then we were so worried about your father’s health that I traveled with him a great deal, which would have been impossible with very many little ones. As you got older I started trying to split my time between you and your father. Somehow I always thought there would be more time down the road. Then I blinked and you were a teenager and didn’t seem to want me anymore. I started pushing to spend more time with you, but all I saw was you rushing in and out of the door. Somewhere in there I realized that you’d received two conflicting signals as you grew up. I was raising you to be courtly and honorable like my father, because that was what I knew. But your grandmother saw you as the golden prince. Your Grandfather Tanaka had the rough edges of the self-made man, and your father had a heart defect, but there was no taint of struggle, or disease or poverty on you, and you were always so bright and strong, such a leader among your friends, even as a boy. She intended to set you up as a king, because she has always wanted to play queen.”

“She was born a queen,” Ryoki blurted. His mother laughed, low and sardonic.

“Did you ever meet any of your grandmother’s family?”

“Of course not, she didn’t have any, because of the war. She told me.”

“Oh no,” his mother said, “they were quite a prolific race, but she escaped far away and changed her name.”

None of this made any sense to Ryoki, who had grown up listening to his grandmother lecture on the importance of family honor and dignity, her own behavior so stiffly decorous that even the bluest of his blue-blooded friends sat straighter when she entered the room.

“Her mother was a runaway Chinese serving girl and her father was a drunken fisherman and general good-for-nothing. They were the poorest of a poor village.”

Ryoki sat blinking, unable to conjure an image of his grandmother without her Hermès bag.

“Her village was remote and the other children teased her mercilessly. But she was born smart and beautiful and proud,
very
proud. And there was this boy who noticed her, the son of the richest man in the village, who began to secretly follow her around and tell her that he loved her. Then one day he happened to walk by as the other boys were mocking her, and she called to him. But he turned his head and pretended not to notice her at all. Later her parents were killed in a house fire and she was presumed dead as well. She hid in the woods and systematically stole money from every family that had mocked her. When she had enough, she came to Tokyo, changed her name and claimed to be that last of an obscure line of gentry that had been killed off in the war. Soon after that she met your grandfather, an older childless widower, who’d married the first time to please his family and decided to marry the second time to please himself. She was very, very good at covering her tracks. I don’t think he ever knew, or if he did, he never let on.”

“How could you possible know this?”

His mother looked at him steadily. “When your father was thirteen he was bullied by some schoolboys who pinned him into a corner and stole his money. Your grandmother was furious that he had let himself get bullied. She pulled him into an inner room and told him the whole story. Said that if she had backed down, she’d have died a beggar in her miserable village and your father would never have been born. Bragged how she’d never forgotten a single slight and used her position to bankrupt her first lover’s family. Told him to show those bullies who really held the power. He kept this to himself until fifteen years later when I went to him and said if he didn’t lock up the guns, he was going to lose either his mother or his wife. He took me for a walk and that’s when it all came out. He said that day fifteen years before was a turning point, that he’d looked at his mother’s face, all red and contorted with rage, and decided that if he was going to die young, he was going to die happy. So when his mother went to lie down for her nap, he took his bat and ball and went outside to run hard for the first time in his life. One of those young bullies now sits on your board. I won’t tell you which one, but he came three times a week to sit with your father once he was bedridden.”