The Garden of Dead Dreams (30 page)

Etta sat back, staring at “Cherry Blossom” until her eyes blurred. She met the old man’s eyes. “I don’t understand.”

“My father was William Thomas Buchanan.”

Etta brought her open palm down. The table shook, and the old man reached for his teacup. “Vincent Buchanan’s brother.”

“It was not such a lie. My aunt wanted nothing to do with me. Sakura was as close to a mother as I would know. Sakura was the one who taught me English and told me about the place were I was born. Sakura told me who my father was. She spoke of this place so differently than everyone else, and I dreamt of coming here every day, this place where my father was.”

“When did you come?” Etta asked after many moments of silence.

“I was nearly a man, almost sixteen years old. We forged papers saying Sakura was my mother. She hoped it would allow her to stay if she was the mother of a Nissei, married to her son’s white father. She thought marrying an American would protect her, and it did. It was only many years later that I realized it is never an answer to live in the dark.”

Etta sat for a moment trying to make sense of what he was saying. “So Sakura married Vincent Buchanan’s brother?”

“Oh no, deceit grows like moss on trees.” He drank from his teacup. “My father paid an older man who worked as a butcher in the store to become my father and marry Sakura. He bought the man a house near here and set up a vanity for Sakura, lined the closets with her clothing, hung pictures of us on the walls. I hardly knew this man. But his name is mine, Joseph Thompson, and on my citizenship papers, he is my father and Sakura is my mother. You must understand, I knew who my father was. He was a loving man. I knew it was his famous brother, whose loyalty made everything possible.”

For a second, Etta thought she saw the resemblance between Joseph Thompson and Vincent Buchanan, something about his eyes or his chin, but then it was gone. He poured more water in his cup and gazed down. “You might judge me—building a life on lies.” He met Etta’s gaze. “But sacrifice and fortune had always been my companions. Kyoto was spared the bombings. Only miles from us, Osaka, Nagoya, and Kobe were destroyed. Do you know, Kyoto was on the list of cities for the atomic bomb? Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Kyoto. Fate left Kyoto in splendor. Can you imagine such fortune?

“I never knew a mother’s love, never felt her breath on my cheek as I slept, never smelled her perfume. I never heard her sing. But I found my father. I finally found my father.”

He stared somewhere past Etta and grew silent again. She leaned forward, holding her breath, waiting for him to continue.

“In Kyoto after the war, school children were given black markers and told to mark out the part of the national history that may offend our new occupiers—anything about the military, about our proud Kamikaze spirit, about the brutality of the Allies. We were to ink it out of existence. Why couldn’t I also choose a new history for myself?”

He picked up the box, and for a second, Etta was sure he was going to pass it across the table to her. Her hands started to tremble. Then he set it down and folded his hands over it again.

“You can’t go back. Your children, your grandchildren, they become your lies. They do not know themselves. I have asked myself so many times, is this what I will leave for my grandchildren—a trail of false stories?”

He stared at the box, and silence settled between them again.

“We have more in common than you might think.” Etta’s voice trembled. “I just need to know. I need to know what Matthew Lowther left for you.”

Joseph Thompson’s gaze settled on the stack of papers and books in front of Etta. His eyes were glossy. “Oh yes. Mr. Lowther. He came to the store in the afternoon and walked around for a long time before he spoke to me, looking at things, holding them up and setting them down. Then he approached me and asked me if we could talk alone. It will sound funny now, but I thought he wanted to buy the store. I dreamt of selling it so many times. I could not, of course. It did not belong to me, even if my name was on the deed. It was my uncle Katashi’s. It was Sakura’s. As my father said, Nihonmachi was gone, but the Tanaka family was still here. But I was forcing my own son to work here instead of going to a university, instead of becoming his own man. If Mr. Lowther had offered to buy the store that day, I wonder . . .” His voice trailed off. He poured more water in his teacup, but he didn’t drink.

“I offered Mr. Lowther our finest tea, but then he began asking questions. Not about the store. About my family. He said he knew Sakura was not my mother. And he mentioned Vincent Buchanan’s name many times, which made me tremble. My father never wanted anyone to connect me to his famous brother. If he’d been alive, he would have been outraged someone was asking questions.” He lowered his head and picked up the tin box. “I gave him Sakura’s letters in this box.” His voice cracked. “I still don’t know why. He intimidated me. The way he talked, his eyes . . .” The old man set the tin box down and picked up the manuscript box, turning it over. The pieces of tape sealing the box were old, discolored—untouched.

Etta lifted her gaze to the old man’s. “You never opened it?”

“I knew my uncle Katashi was a member of Kempaitai and the Black Dragon Society. I knew my father and uncle had secrets. But who was I? I wasn’t sitting on the Tokyo Tribunal. These men were my family, my ancestors. They had given me everything I’d ever had. How could I pass judgment on any man’s choices during a time of war when I was a boy at home with the women? How could Mr. Lowther judge? He did not watch the refugees with burned faces and crying babies trudge in from Kobe and Osaka. He did not wait every day for a bomb to fall. He did not see the hunger in his cousins’ eyes when the rations ran low. You think Vincent Buchanan was a traitor? A monster? Never forget, he loved my uncle Katashi. He loved Sakura. He loved me. To us, his loyalty was as wide as the Pacific.

Etta nodded, watching as the old man ran his hands over the box, flipping it over again and again.

“Not long ago, I asked my young katakana to type Mr. Lowther’s name into that computer of hers. She insisted she could find anything. She read me a story about him, and I understood for the first time why he did not return. Someone didn’t want him to publish this. I still wonder if my wishes were answered that day, or if I was cursed.”

A chill rose up Etta’s spine. The old man pushed the box toward her and stood. “A brave family should not live in shame.” Etta rose to her feet too. The old man looked so sad that she wanted to grasp his arm, but she reached for the box instead. The cardboard was brittle.

The old man shuffled through the maze of boxes then turned and looked at Etta, the light from the windows catching his white hair. “Soon, I will see Sakura again. Perhaps she sent you from the heavens to bring my family from the darkness.”

Ten months later.

Olivia’s dark gaze sweeps the crowd, and no one seems to breathe. She leans forward, wrapping her willowy fingers around both sides of the podium advertising the Strand’s eighteen miles of books. She’s framed by the narrow window behind her, a black sliver between the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Her hair is short and layered around her face, and her cheekbones are more pronounced than they were a year ago. Her scarlet scoop-neck dress reveals hollows beneath her clavicle. Finally she looks down and continues reading.

Etta finds a place to stand at the back of the crowd. She can tell that the reading is nearly over by the way Olivia’s voice is building to a crescendo. People lean forward, swallowing her words. For the first time since Etta moved to the row house on Havemeyer in Williamsburg, she worked up the courage to catch the L train into Manhattan. She usually walks across the Williamsburg Bridge and catches cabs, her eyes darting away when she passes the dark subway stairwells.

Tonight she was running late and convinced herself to board the train. But as it rocked back and forth beneath the East River, she thought of how Olivia’s father died, and her throat tightened. She elbowed her way off the train many stops too soon, sprinting up the station steps and gulping in the breezeless July air, as busses and cabs sped up Fourteenth Street.

The metal folding chairs are full; people are squeezed into the aisles, plastered against the shelves, squeezed on every side of Etta. Sweat rolls off Etta’s forehead; her hair is damp. But just the thought of Olivia’s foreword sends a chill through her. Etta has reread Matthew Lowther’s book twice since its cover graced the front page of the New York Times on the day of its release last month. And she’s read Olivia’s foreword so many times she could recite it word for word:

On a drizzly morning last March, I stood on the grounds of the most eminent writing academy in the country in a dilapidated pioneer cemetery watching a team of FBI agents brush dirt from my father’s bones. It occurred to me then that my father probably had something in common with the Oregon settlers entombed beside him. You see, before heart rate monitors and embalming made the line between life and death definitive, countless people were most likely unintentionally buried alive.

My father too was buried alive—except what happened to him was no accident.

On a December night in 1985, my father’s mouth was sealed with duct tape, his clothes were stripped from his body, and his hands were bound behind his back. Then he was left to asphyxiate in the pitch black of a wooden box six feet beneath the ferns.

Everything I know about my father, I’ve learned in the last two years. His name was Matthew Lowther. He was an adjunct literature professor at the University of Rochester. He was thirty-two-years-old the summer he moved to Oregon to attend the Buchanan Academy.

Who would want to harm him? What did he do to compel such an act of horror to be inflicted upon him? These questions took me to the Buchanan Academy last June. Eight months later, many of the answers have come to light. Criminal trials have ensued. Edwin Hardin and Uriah Winston Mills, two of the three people responsible for my father’s death, are in prison.

I know one thing for sure: my father was a hero. He gave his life to exposing the truth about Vincent Buchanan, a traitor who masqueraded as a patriot while he shared our secrets with the enemy.

I will probably always have nightmares about the way my father died. They wake me in the middle of the night, leaving me nauseous and sweating, my heart palpating, my chest squeezed so tight I can’t catch my breath. I’ve been prescribed a rainbow of pills—Zoloft, Paxil, Klonopin, Xanax, and propranolol. But I’ve come to realize that I’ll never understand such evil, just as I’ll never again be able to sleep in the dark.

That’s the part of the foreword where Etta usually has to stop and put the book down to catch her breath. But Olivia is not reading from her foreword this evening; she’s reading the part of Matthew Lowther’s introduction where he writes about going to Kyoto to research Kitashi Tanaka. Lowther finds Miki, Sakura’s youngest sister, living in Tokyo. She is in her sixties and remembers Vincent Buchanan’s visits. She tells Lowther that Buchanan visited Kyoto three times when she was a child and stayed with her family each time.

When Lowther is trying to trace Buchanan’s movements in Kyoto, he discovers that another American in his twenties named Peter Morrison visited around the same time and attended meetings of the Black Dragon Society in 1932. Lowther recognizes the name Peter Morrison immediately as a minor character in “The End of the River,” one of Vincent Buchanan’s early short stories, which was published in a posthumous collection.

Lowther returns to the United States and travels to Portland to conduct more research into Buchanan’s life. He finds an old article about Tanaka Grocery in the
Oshu Nippo
, Portland’s Japanese American newspaper. It lists some of the employees’ names, and Lowther tracks down Joe Ochikubo, a Japanese American who was relocated with his family to the Granada relocation center in Colorado in 1942 and moved to Denver after the war.

Lowther visits Ochikubo in Denver and learns that Kitashi Tanaka and his family returned to Japan in 1929 because they were scared for their daughters’ safety as the West Coast became an increasingly hostile place for Japanese Americans. After they left, a white man took over ownership of the store. “We all knew him. He delivered meat to Tanaka Grocery for many years,” Ochikubo tells Lowther. It was Vincent Buchanan’s brother William.

According to Ochikubo, while the grocery store stopped direct trade with Japan in 1941, they continued a limited exchange of goods through a shipping outfit in Buenos Aires.

That’s when Matthew Lowther begins to suspect that Peter Morrison was Vincent Buchanan, and that Buchanan spied for the Japanese by transmitting the sensitive information he learned while researching
The Western Defense
to his friend Kitashi Tanaka, an officer in Japan’s secret service Kempeitai. He did it through Tanaka Grocery, now managed by his brother.

But Matthew Lowther needs more proof before he goes public with his theory, and he’s eager to look through Buchanan’s notoriously inaccessible archives. He decides the only way to do that is to apply for admission to the Buchanan Academy.

Lowther’s writing seems to grow darker once he’s at the academy, more direct and urgent, almost panicked. Etta can only imagine how terrified he was by the time he delivered a copy of his manuscript to Tanaka Grocery to give Joseph Thompson two weeks to prepare for the storm that was about to descend on his family.

When she thinks about what it must have been like for Lowther the night he was killed, she can almost feel herself suspended in Hardin’s office window, the shards of glass under her feet, rain pelting her flesh, nowhere to go but down. But Etta forces it out of her mind, because Olivia is in front of her, leaning on the podium, her face periodically illuminated by camera flashes. Her voice is just as Etta remembered. Etta can almost imagine her friend’s face widening into a smile, her voice easing into her loose laughter.

When Olivia finishes the introduction, her eyes pierce the crowd again. Many of the details in the book have trickled out over the past ten months in the international press with headlines like, “American Patriot Outed as Traitor,” “Legendary Author Spied for Japan,” and “Buchanan Committed Treason.” But still the crowd seems to be stunned into silence by the full weight of the revelations.