Silent Honor (37 page)

“It's Daddy,” she gasped as soon as she got there, and Hiroko took the baby from her and handed him to Tadashi. “He's sick.” But deep in her heart, she knew he wasn't. He wasn't sick at all when she left. He was gone, and she knew it, but she couldn't face it.

Reiko and Hiroko flew back down the road to him, with Sally right behind them, and Tadashi coming along as fast as he could, holding the baby. He put his own coat over him so he wouldn't catch cold, and when he got to the house, Reiko was working on Tak, but it was way too late, and she knew it. His heart had given out, and his spirit long before it. He couldn't hold on anymore. It was too much for him. And peace-fully, without a murmur or a sound, or a good-bye, he had left them.

“Oh, Tak,” Reiko said, sinking to her knees beside him. “Oh, Tak …please …don't leave me….”It was so unfair, it would be so lonely without him. And they had just lost Ken. Without them, what did she have to live for? But she knew the answer to that, she had to go on for Tami and Sally. Her fate was not to be the luxury of giving up, or even dying. She had to keep going for them. She was forty years old, and a widow. And she knelt there, with her face in her hands, crying for the husband she had loved so much, and lost forever.

Hiroko put her arms around her and helped her up, as Sally stood sobbing, watching them, knowing she couldn't live without him.

“Daddy,” she whispered as she cried, and Tad handed Toyo to his mother and took her gently in his arms. He just held her and let her cry, as Hiroko put a coat on Toyo and went outside to wait for Tami. It was only minutes before she came back from school, and Hiroko closed the door from the outside as soon as she arrived, and took her on a walk and told her as gently as she could about her father.

“Just like that?” She stared up at her cousin wide-eyed. “No one killed him or anything? But he wasn't old,” she said, trying to understand it. It wasn't easy for any of them to accept, and she and Hiroko both cried as they walked along and talked about it. And when they got back, the others were waiting for them outside, and Tadashi was standing next to Sally. And as she looked at them, Hiroko understood something that she had never seen before. It explained everything, and she nodded.

Reiko went for a walk with the girls, while Tad and Hiroko went back to the hospital to get two pallbearers and a gurney for Takeo. They didn't want the children to see him carried out, but they had seen it before, with others. It was just too painful, with their own father. An hour later, he had been taken to the morgue, and Tadashi was back again. They all sat in the tiny living room that night, talking about him from time to time, but mostly stunned into silence.

Eventually, Hiroko went back to work with Tad. Reiko's shift was long over by then, and they walked slowly back to the hospital, talking about what had happened. He was so young to have died, but there were others like him who had been disheartened. And in many cases, particularly among the men, it had killed them. Despite their lack of physical strength, the women seemed stronger, and better able to withstand the disappointments.

“Poor Reiko.” Tad said, with real emotion for her. His own father had died when he was young, and he knew how hard it had been on his mother. And then Hiroko said something odd under the circumstances, but they were so at ease with each other that she treated him like a brother.

“My cousin is in love with you,” she said quietly, and he looked at her in horror.

“Reiko?”

“No, you idiot.” She felt disgraceful for laughing, but she couldn't help it, and it relieved the agony of the moment. “Sally. I was watching her this afternoon, standing next to you. And I finally realized she's crazy about you. Maybe that's why she's been so mad at me. She thinks I'm trying to steal you.” It certainly explained all the nasty comments about “going from one man to another.”

“I think you're wrong,” he said, looking embarrassed. He had noticed it too, and he had always liked her. But it had never occurred to him that she had a crush on him, or that he might pursue her. He had been far too involved in his feelings for Hiroko. And what she said now startled him, but it didn't displease him. But Sally was very young, she was only seventeen, and he was seven years older. It didn't seem like a suitable match to him, and he was sure Reiko wouldn't think so either.

“I just thought you should know,” Hiroko said and he nodded, and they didn't mention it again, but she had wanted him to know it. She knew more than ever, especially since both Ken and Takeo had died, how precious life was, and how valuable every moment. And she knew too that she wouldn't have stopped loving Peter no matter what happened. It seemed particularly unfair to keep Tadashi hanging on for something that would never come. He was young, he had a right to more than someone else's crumbs, or someone else's wife and baby. It was time he started thinking of someone else. And she thought he would be perfect for Sally.

And that night, after she came home, Hiroko sat for a long time with Reiko, comforting her, letting her cry, listening to the memories and the broken dreams. And after that, she wrote a long letter to Peter. He and Tak had been such good friends that she knew the news would hit him hard, but she knew she had to tell him.

And it was a long time before she heard from Peter again, but when she did, he was devastated by the news of Tak's death. They had had his funeral by then, and laid him to rest in the graveyard that was already too full, with so many futile losses, people who might have been saved with better medicines, anesthetics, better living conditions. And perhaps a little hope might have saved them. Like Tak, who had just given up. He had just sat there and died, instead of surviving. It reminded her of the time Peter had said to her before she left, that she
had
to survive it, and she had promised.

Toyo's first birthday came six weeks later, and one of the nurses had made them a small cake in the infirmary kitchen. They gave it to him that night after work, and he dove into it with glee and made a total mess of himself while the women in his family watched him. Hiroko wished she could have taken photographs of him, but of course, there were no cameras. Tadashi had come to share the cake with him too, and he had made him a beautiful little wooden pull toy of a duck carrying an egg on his back, and Toyo loved it.

Tadashi seemed to have taken Hiroko's advice, and she knew that he had taken Sally out for several walks, and once he had taken her to his art class. But Sally was still in no mood to see anyone romantically. She was deeply upset about her father. But at least Tadashi was someone she could talk to. And ever since her father's death, she had been a lot warmer toward Hiroko.

In some ways, the tragedy of Tak's death had brought them all closer. And the closeness lasted. If anything, it grew more so, through another long, hot, dusty summer. If the winters were hard, the summers were harder. And beyond the barbed wire that held them captive, the world was changing all around them. The Allies were winning. The British and Americans were dropping a maelstrom of bombs on Germany, with considerable success, the Americans had landed in Anzio, and the Russians had entered Poland, as MacArthur drove his forces through the Pacific Islands. In April, U.S. planes bombed Berlin for the first time and caused enormous damage. And in June, the Allies not only entered Rome, but they set foot on French soil, and headed inland from Normandy. And Peter was with them. He was in France by then, and Hiroko heard from him regularly until August. He had been in a town called Lessay with General Hodges, and they were moving on toward Paris. And the very last letter she had said they had made it, and Paris was the most beautiful city he'd ever seen, even now, and he wished that she could be there with him. But after that, she heard nothing. She had no idea what had happened.

Things in the camp were tense again that fall too. The Nippon Patriotic Society seemed to lose control of the No-No Boys, and extremists came out from underground again. And by October they were in the press constantly, with demonstrations, and reprisals. They were just as angry about their incarceration as they'd been before. Possibly even more so, and they were even more violent this time, and made a great deal of trouble. For those families who were loyal, like the Tanakas, and countless others, the unrest they caused was a constant source of terror and aggravation. The loyals did not want to be caught in the middle between the various factions. People got hurt, outside their homes and in strikes and demonstrations. And now that there were no men in the family to protect them, Reiko was always worried. And more and more lately, she was grateful for the time that Tadashi Watanabe spent with the family, and with Sally. He was a fine young man, and he did everything he could for them. It always made Hiroko smile when she saw them together. Since the summer, he and Sally had been inseparable, and it was the best thing for both of them. They both seemed to be thriving.

“Guess I was right, huh?” Hiroko teased him one day when they were working, and he tried
to
pretend he didn't know what she was talking about, but she wouldn't let him off the hook that easily. They really were like brother and sister, or at the very least, cousins.

“I don't know what you mean,” he said vaguely, trying not to smile at her, but failing.

“Sure you don't, Tadashi-san.” She loved to tease him. She sounded completely American now at times, and her English was almost perfect. “I mean Sally.”

“I know what you meant. You sure aren't subtle.” He looked at her, exasperated but amused. And he had long since understood how total her commitment was to Peter. He was grateful that she had been honest with him, and even more so that she had said something to him about Sally. She was young, and immature at times, but beneath it all was a sweet, gentle girl, who wanted the same kind of strong commitment her parents had shared. And in the months since her father had died she and Tadashi had fallen deeply in love. But it was too soon for them to get married because Sally was only seventeen and a half now. But his influence on her had been excellent. She had stopped hanging out with the No-No Boys, and her disruptive friends, and she had become once again the girl Reiko remembered.

Tadashi agreed to spend Thanksgiving with them that year.

It was going to be very painful for them, having lost both Ken and Tak since the last one. And Hiroko was nervous too. She still hadn't heard from Peter since he was in Paris in August.

“Maybe he ran off with a cute French girl,” Tad teased, but realized that Hiroko was beyond humor. She hadn't said much about it, but she was deeply worried. Three months was a long time, and people were still getting killed in Europe. And the war in Japan wasn't over either. MacArthur had gone back to the Philippines in October.

But at least Thanksgiving Day was a day without news, bad or good. They existed as they often did, suspended in the isolated unreality of camp life. And this year at least they had turkey. They all laughed hollowly remembering the baloney dinner of the year before, and the ghastly strikes and demonstrations. But there wasn't much to laugh about. It seemed like it was going to go on forever. Franklin Roosevelt had just been reelected, and apparently had ignored everything Ickes and Biddle had told him. Or so it seemed until December.

Hiroko had been walking down the road from their “house,” holding Toyo's hand, when two old men came running past her, shouting in Japanese. “It's over…. It's over…. We're free.”

“The war?” she shouted after them in English.

“No,” one of them shouted back. “The camp!” And then they were gone, and she went to find someone else she could ask. People were congregated everywhere, talking, and one of them was even talking to one of the soldiers. The guards were always there, watching them from the towers, and one forgot sometimes, but not for long, that they had guns pointed at them. For Hiroko, it had been one of the hardest things to get used to, but now she never even noticed.

But the soldier, in this case, was explaining that President Roosevelt had signed a decree and Major General Pratt, who had replaced De Witt, had issued Public Proclamation Number 21, which restored the rights of the evacuees to return to their homes or live wherever they wanted. And as of January second, there would be no such thing as contraband. They could have all the cameras and jewelry and weapons they wanted. But much more importantly, it meant they could go home now. The camps were being closed by the end of 1945. And the War Relocation Authority was urging everyone to leave as soon as feasible, which in many cases was more complicated than expected. But the headline was that the Japanese could leave the internment camps as soon as they wanted. And for Hiroko, because she had signed the loyalty oath, she would be free to go too, despite her alien status.

“Now?” she asked, unable to believe him. “This minute? If I wanted to, I could just walk out of here?”

“That's right, if you signed ‘yes, yes,’” he said.“It's finished.” And then he looked at her strangely and asked her a question she couldn't answer. “Where will you go?” He had admired her for months. She was a lovely woman.

“I don't know,” she said, looking startled.-Where would she go? The war was still on, and she couldn't go back to Japan to her parents. And Peter wasn't home yet. She tried not to let herself think of the more than three months' silence, and that night she and Reiko talked about what they would do now. They had very little money saved up, and Tak's money, what there was of it, was in Peter's bank accounts, which they had no access to. He had given them papers acknowledging it, but without him, it would be almost impossible to get to. And as long as he was alive, which Hiroko prayed he was, his family couldn't get to it either. It was an awkward situation. And they had no other relatives in California. Reiko had a cousin in New York, she said, and another one in New Jersey. And that was it. Nowhere to go, no one to go home to.

After all this time, and wanting out so badly, there was nowhere to go. And everyone else was having the same problem. Their relatives were either in Japan, or all with them. A few of them had relatives in the East, and the War Relocation Authority was still willing to get them jobs in factories, but none of them wanted to just go East without knowing someone when they got there.