The Japanese Lover (15 page)

At the age of fourteen, Ichimei started going to secondary school. Since Takao was paralyzed by melancholy and Heideko could speak no more than a few words of English, Megumi had to be her brother's guardian. On the day she went to enroll him, she thought Ichimei was bound to feel at home, because the building was as ugly and the surroundings as barren as at Topaz. The school principal, Miss Brody, received them. She had spent the war years trying to convince politicians and public opinion that children from Japanese families had just as much right to education as all Americans. She had collected thousands of books to send to the concentration camps. Ichimei had bound several of them, and remembered them perfectly because each one had an inscription by Miss Brody on the title page. He imagined his benefactor as being like the fairy godmother in Cinderella but found himself confronted by a woman built like a tank, with a woodcutter's arms and the voice of a town crier.

“My brother is behind with his studies. He's not good at reading or writing, or arithmetic,” an embarrassed Megumi told her.

“What are you good at then, Ichimei?” Miss Brody asked him directly.

“Drawing and planting,” whispered Ichimei, without raising his eyes from the tips of his shoes.

“Perfect! That's exactly what we need here!” Miss Brody exclaimed.

For the first week, the other children bombarded Ichimei with the insults against his race that were common during the war but that he had never heard at Topaz. He did not know either that the Japanese were more hated than the Germans, and he had not seen the comics where they were portrayed as degenerate and ruthless. He accepted the jibes with his usual placidity, but the first time a bully laid a finger on him, he threw him through the air with a judo move he had learned from his father—the same one he had used years earlier to show Nathaniel what martial arts were capable of. He was sent to the principal's room to be punished. “Well done, Ichimei,” was her only comment. After that crucial feat, he was able to go through the four years of schooling without ever being attacked again.

February 16,
2005

I went to Prescott, Arizona, to see Miss Brody. It was her ninety-fifth birthday, and many of her ex-pupils gathered to celebrate. She is doing very well for her age, and recognized me as soon as she saw me. Just imagine! How many children passed through her hands? How can she possibly remember them all? She recalled that I painted the posters for the school parties, and that on Sundays I worked in her garden. I was a dreadful student, but she always gave me good grades. Thanks to Miss Brody I'm not completely illiterate and can write to you now, my dear friend.

This week that we have not been able to meet has been an eternity. The rain and cold have made it especially sad. And I'm sorry, but I haven't been able to find any gardenias to send you. Please call me.

Ichi

D
uring the first year of her separation from Ichimei, Alma lived in anticipation of his letters, but as time went by she grew accustomed to her friend's silence, just as she had done to that of her parents and brother. Her aunt and uncle did their best to protect her from the bad news from Europe, in particular about the fate of the Jews. Whenever Alma asked about her family, she was told such outlandish stories that the war sounded more like something out of the legends of King Arthur she had read with Ichimei in the garden pergola. According to her aunt Lillian, the lack of any correspondence was due to problems with the mail system in Poland, and in the case of her brother, Samuel, because of security measures in England. She told Alma he was carrying out vital missions for the Royal Air Force that were both dangerous and secret, and so had to remain in strict anonymity. Why should she tell her niece that her brother had been shot down with his plane in France? Isaac stuck pins in a map to show Alma how the Allied forces were advancing or retreating but did not have the heart to tell her the truth about her parents. Ever since the Mendels had been stripped of their possessions and forced into the terrible Warsaw ghetto, he had received no news of them. He sent large sums of money to organizations trying to help the people in the ghetto and knew that the number of Jews deported by the Nazis between July and September 1942 had reached more than two hundred and fifty thousand. He also knew about the thousands who died every day of starvation and illnesses. The wire-topped wall separating the ghetto from the rest of the city was not completely impermeable, for some food and medicine could be smuggled in, and the horrific photos of children dying of hunger could get out, so there were some means of communicating. If none of the methods he had employed to locate Alma's parents had met with any success, and if Samuel's plane had crashed, it was reasonable to assume that all three were dead, but until there was irrefutable proof, Isaac intended to spare his niece all that pain.

For a while Alma seemed to have adapted to her aunt and uncle, her cousins, and the Sea Cliff mansion, but at puberty she once again became the sullen child she had been when she reached California. She was an early developer, and the first hormonal onslaught coincided with Ichimei's indefinite absence. She was ten when they were separated, promising to stay together in their thoughts and by writing; eleven when his letters started drying up; and twelve when the distance between them became insuperable and she resigned herself to losing Ichimei. She fulfilled her obligations without protesting at a school she detested and behaved in the way her adopted family expected, trying to remain invisible so as to avoid questions about her feelings that would have unleashed the torment of rebellion and anguish she kept bottled up inside. Nathaniel was the only one she couldn't fool with her irreproachable behavior. He had a sixth sense for detecting when his cousin was shut in the wardrobe and tiptoed there often to persuade her to come out of her hiding place, speaking in whispers in order not to wake his father, who had sharp ears and was a light sleeper. He would tuck her up in bed and lie next to her until she fell asleep. He too was going through life walking on eggshells but with a storm raging inside him. He was counting the months he had left at school before going to Harvard to study law, because it had never occurred to him to go against his father's wishes. His mother wanted him to go to law school in San Francisco instead of vanishing to the other side of the continent, but Isaac insisted the boy needed to get far away, as he himself had done at that age. His son had to become a responsible, upstanding man, a mensch.

Alma took Nathaniel's decision to go to Harvard as a personal affront and added her cousin to the list of those who had abandoned her: first her brother and her parents, then Ichimei, and now him. She concluded it was her destiny to lose everyone she loved most. She was still as attached to Nathaniel as on that first day at the quayside in San Francisco.

“I'll write to you,” Nathaniel assured her.

“That's what Ichimei said,” she replied angrily.

“Ichimei is in an internment camp, Alma. I'll be in Harvard.”

“That's even further away. Isn't it in Boston?”

“I'll come and spend all my vacations with you, I promise.”

While he was preparing for his departure, Alma followed him around the house like a shadow, inventing excuses for him not to go, and when that didn't work, inventing reasons for loving him less. When she was eight she had fallen in love with Ichimei with all the intensity of childhood passions; with Nathaniel it was the calm love of later years. The two of them fulfilled different roles in her heart, but they were equally indispensable: she was sure that without Ichimei and Nathaniel she wouldn't survive. She had loved the former vehemently; she needed to see him all the time, to run off with him to the Sea Cliff garden, which was full of tremendous hiding places where they could discover the infallible language of caresses. After Ichimei was sent to Topaz, Alma was nourished by her memories of the garden and the pages of her diary, filled to the margins with all her sighs and regrets written in tiny handwriting. Even at this age she gave signs of her fanatical tenacity for love. With Nathaniel on the other hand, it would never have occurred to her to go and hide in the garden. She loved him devotedly and thought she knew him better than anyone else. In the nights he had rescued her from the wardrobe, they slept together holding hands; he was her confidant, her closest friend. The first time she discovered dark stains in her underpants she waited trembling for Nathaniel to come back from school so she could drag him off to the bathroom to show him the evidence that she was bleeding down below. Nathaniel had a vague idea of the reason, but not of the practical steps to take, and so he was the one who had to ask his mother, as Alma didn't have the courage to do so. He knew everything she was going through. She had given him copies of the keys to her diaries but he had no need to read them to know how she felt.

Alma finished secondary school a year before Ichimei. By then they had lost all contact, but she regarded him as still being with her, because in the uninterrupted monologue of her diary she was writing to him, more out of a habit of loyalty than any sense of nostalgia. She had resigned herself to never seeing him again, but as she had no other friends she fed a tragic heroine's love with the memory of their secret games in the garden. While he was working from sunup to sundown as a laborer in a beet field, she reluctantly consented to the debutante balls her aunt Lillian insisted she attend. There were dances at the Sea Cliff mansion, and others in the interior courtyard of the Palace Hotel, with its half century of history, its fabulous glass roof, enormous crystal chandeliers, and tropical palms in Portuguese ceramic pots. Lillian had assumed the responsibility of making sure she married well, convinced it would be easier than it had been to marry off her own rather plain daughters, yet she found that Alma sabotaged all her best-laid plans. Isaac did not like getting involved in the lives of the women of the family, but in this instance he could not remain silent.

“This hunt for a husband is not worthy of you, Lillian!”

“How innocent you are, Isaac! Do you think you'd be married to me if my mother hadn't lassoed you?”

“Alma is still a child. There ought to be a law against getting married before you are twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five! At that age she'll never find a good match, Isaac. Everyone will be taken,” said Lillian.

Her niece wanted to go and study far away, and Lillian eventually gave in. A couple of years' higher education won't do her any harm, she thought. They finally agreed that Alma should go to a girls' college in Boston, where Nathaniel was still studying. He could protect her from the city's dangers and temptations. So Lillian gave up presenting her with potential husbands and instead began to prepare her wardrobe with frilly skirts and outfits of fashionable pastel-colored angora tops and sweaters, even though they did little for a big-boned young woman with strong features like Alma.

Although her aunt was desperate to find someone she could trust to accompany her east, Alma insisted on going on her own. She flew to New York, intending to take the train from there to Boston. When she disembarked, she found Nathaniel waiting at the airport. His parents had sent him a telegram, and he had decided to come and meet her so that they could travel together by train. The two cousins embraced with all the pent-up emotion of the seven months since Nathaniel had last been in San Francisco, and hurriedly brought each other up to date with family news as a uniformed black porter loaded all her luggage onto a cart to follow them to the taxi. Nathaniel counted the suitcases and hatboxes and asked his cousin if she was bringing clothes to sell.

“You're not one to criticize, you've always been a dandy,” she retorted.

“What are your plans, Alma?”

“What I told you in my letter, cousin. You know I adore your parents, but I'm suffocating in that house. I have to make myself independent.”