This Scorching Earth (18 page)

Tentatively, she said: "The chrysanthemums are very full this year."

"So I have seen for myself."

"Might one bring you hot tea?"

"As one may notice, it has already been brought."

"May one inquire after the health of one's future parents?"

"One may. They are well."

"And of one's future husband."

"He also is well."

After a pause, he continued: "It is concerning the marriage that he comes to speak with you." He leaned back slightly, waiting for this pronouncement to have its full effect upon her. He had hoped for blushes and a lowered head.

Instead, she leaned forward on her elbows and said: "Good. I've been wanting to talk to you about it too."

"It is the husband's prerogative to speak with the wife. Not the other way about."

"I know. That's why I've been waiting." She folded her hands and waited.

Ichiro didn't like the turn the interview was taking. As always, she was aggressive. If he'd thought of it, he could have sent his mother, and she could have found out all he wanted to know through the female combination of maternal petting and quite objective poking and pulling. But he hadn't thought of this until now.

"The marriage is what our honored parents wish."

"Isn't that so, though?"

"And, upon proper consideration, I believe it neither possible nor good that we attempt to run counter to their wishes."

"Oh, I don't know about that. After all, it's not they who are getting married. It's us.... How do you really feel about it, Ichiro? Not too good, judging from the way you're acting."

Ichiro swallowed, then finished the rest of his tea. She was quite impossible, positively unladylike. It was because she was so Western. In spite of the servants' gossip he still believed her pure of body—but of mind, no. Her mind was corrupted. He was certain of that.

"My feeling in this matter, which you so kindly consider, is not entirely based upon personal considerations. I, not unnaturally, am also motivated by considerations for the future, the fact that our parents will come more and more to depend upon us, that our children will find in us that which we have found in our parents."

"Oh, I hope not," said Haruko, without thinking. "If you're anything like your father—"

A stern though scandalized glance from Ichiro stopped her.

"As I was saying, all of these considerations conspire to create within me a condition which you quite accurately noticed as troubled. I do not feel that a marriage between our houses is feasible until a certain obstacle is removed and until we ascertain precisely how much damage this obstacle has already occasioned." That, thought Ichiro, was very well put. Now at last he would be rewarded with a few tears and probably a blush as well.

"You mean the American?" asked Haruko. "Well, to be sure, he must be considered. For he, too, has asked for me as his wife, and, frankly, I don't know quite what to do. You must help me, Ichiro, because I'm just a girl and I can't decide things like this—important things, you know. And you can."

Her flattery did not even reach him. Ichiro was shocked, much in the way his father had been shocked by the Colonel's dragging business so indecently into the open and then heartlessly dispensing with it. The son had expected modesty and contrition. Perhaps, after several hours of conversation, the existence of the soldier might have been casually mentioned, there might have been more subtle references, so slight that if the other did not wish to acknowledge them, he—or she—need not do so. But this indelicate blatancy, and the further insult of asking for aid in a problem so uniquely her own—he was rendered quite speechless.

Haruko toyed with the insignia of his cap. "I suppose you think me impolite, but, really, Ichiro, this is far too important for both of us not to discuss it in full. I don't really mean to be impolite, but I am forced to be since you will not do me the justice of speaking about it openly."

"The fact that I am here proclaims that I am ready to do so," said Ichiro, feeling his honor at stake.

"It proclaims nothing of the sort. It merely indicates you are suspicious. You are here because you know the soldier was here last night. I suppose you want to know what happened. Nothing happened—that's what happened. Nothing but that he asked me to marry him. And he kissed me, which is, or so I hear, an old American custom meaning no more than shaking hands or bowing." She broke into tears.

Ichiro had indeed been hoping for tears—but these were born of anger and rebellion. Since they were not at all of the variety he expected, he was at a loss as to what to do in such bizarre circumstances. Frantically he searched for a model. In the Kabuki he would probably have dismissed the creature with strong words advising suicide. In the Noh he could have come back as a ghost and made life miserable for her. Or perhaps she would have come back and made life miserable for
him
—you could never tell about the Noh. What would Yoshitsune—one of his heroes—have done in the un-likely event he'd ever faced such circumstances?

Failing to find a model among Japanese sources, he thought abroad. Now what would Emma Bovary's husband have done? But, finding he could remember nothing whatever about Mr. Emma and very little about Emma herself, he decided, like Daruma, to put stones from the garden in his mouth, that he might never speak again. But at that moment he remembered Demosthenes had put pebbles from the beach into his mouth that he might speak the better. Momentarily torn between the rigid opposites of East and West, Ichiro did something he practically never did, something indeed which he virtuously fought against ever doing—he acted as he felt, said what he thought:

"There is nothing wrong in kissing, I'm sure. You should feel no shame. I feel no humiliation. You are, however, presented with a choice between us. It is otherwise of no importance, and you merely waste your tears."

Haruko raised her head, tears clinging to her lashes. "You are not angry with me, then?"

Ichiro decided he had gone too far. This is what always happened when you spoke as you felt—you were taken advantage of. "I don't say that," he said, attempting to regain some of the dignity he had so foolishly cast away, "but I will say that if you have done nothing that wrongs either your honor or mine, or that of our families, then the problem is simplified rather than complicated."

"But what of tonight?" asked Haruko, her underlip trembling.

"What of it?"

"We're to be meeting for the first time. The go-between will be there to introduce us. The fact that we meet proves that we have intentions, that our parents approve. It is all but an announcement to the world."

"Oh, not at all. Why, many times parents take their sons or daughters to the theater, or to view the cherry blossoms at Ueno, or to Enoshima, simply to meet someone eligible who will be there too. And if the boy isn't interested, he simply doesn't make any further move, makes no attempt to see her again; then their go-between says the boy has pneumonia or has gone to Kyushu or something of the sort. You know all this as well as I do."

"But they know better—these girls and their families—about Kyushu?"

"To be sure, but they aren't going to have a public disagreement. And, when next they see each other on the street, the son and daughter simply pretend the other doesn't exist. It's very simple. In the same way this meeting tonight need have no great meaning."

This information irritated Haruko: she had been quite certain of Ichiro's affections. Besides, how could he treat so lightly this meeting which was to be the turning point of her life? Their lives had been so designed that it was mathematically impossible for them not to meet tonight, and if nothing came of it, it would be she who had disturbed the pattern, not he.

"Well," she. said, "if the meeting makes so little difference to you, perhaps we could well dispense with it entirely. I could get pneumonia and you could go to Kyushu, or the other way about if you happen to have a preference."

Ichiro looked at her with real annoyance. Her refusal to play her traditional role, the one already indicated for her, the one exemplified in all of her female relatives and friends, wounded him considerably. But, at the same time, he seemed to detect in her a disinclination for the meeting, the success of which he had for years taken for granted. And as soon as he realized that it might be possible that she did not wish the marriage, he began to want it more than he ever had before.

"My statement, if you will remember, was not that it made little difference to me, but that it did not necessarily compromise either of us. I think our parents would be most upset if we didn't meet this evening. Besides it's the opera about Madame Butterfly, and you like that."

Haruko smiled. So he remembered that, after all these years. She had had a phonograph record of the part about the one fine day, and had played it over and over again until poor Chocho-san sank, struggling, beneath the needle scratch. "Yes, I still like it," she said.

"Well, then," said Ichiro, "it's all settled. We'll meet this evening as planned and be introduced, which will be amusing, and then—about the other—we shall see."

"Yes," she said, smiling through her tears, "it's all settled."

He then realized that, indeed, it was. This was the ostensible reason he had come to see her—to arrange the evening. It was now all arranged, and he had no further excuse for prolonging the interrogation. There was no recourse but to stand and go. He began to understand how his father must have felt with the Colonel.

As he opened the fusuma, Haruko bowing low beside him in a sudden return to Japanese etiquette, he almost caught the old servant with her ear pressed to the door. She instantly began dusting the floor with her handkerchief, but not before he realized she had heard everything, had seen him come like a samurai and depart like a ronin. She would doubtless lose no time in running to the telephone and pouring out the news to the servant at his house.

The old woman bowed, but not so low as before. She was no longer so certain how the wind blew. If the soldier came back, thought Ichiro, he'd probably receive a bow equally low.

"Until tonight," said Haruko from the tatami.

"Until tonight," said Ichiro, bowing stiffly from the waist.

Then there was nothing left for him to do but leave the house, in a much different frame of mind from that in which he had entered it. He saw the husks of his determination scattered about his departing feet, and could only wonder, in chastened awe, at the inconsistency of life and the appalling fact that it was now he himself who was contrite.

A single leaf fell artistically from the maple tree. This was too much. A large tear rolled down his cheek.

After Ichiro left, Haruko remained alone, kneeling in the center of the room before the red-lacquer table. The cup, half-filled with cold tea, was on one corner, and in the alcove beyond, the untended chrysanthemums were gracefully dying, their leaves curling, their petals falling away from the closely packed heart of the flower.

She was presented with a dilemma. Her problem was so classically correct, so very Japanese that—had she not been so unhappy—she might have smiled. Since no one was watching, she slid sidewise from her knees and stretched her legs before her, the bottom of her kimono falling open. If her mother had entered at that moment and found her daughter sprawled on the floor, her legs open, she would have believed her quite demented. She would have thought Haruko had been very poorly trained.

But, of course, that was part of the problem. Haruko knew just what she ought to do, just as she knew, from years of training, that the well-bred Japanese girl did not sit otherwise than securely upon her feet. A good girl would not question her parents' wishes in the matter of marriage, but would willingly comply, would bow before her husband and be the perfect wife with unquestioning devotion and unswerving loyalty. In this many girls had succeeded before her and many would after her.

But, for Haruko, this was not enough. She had been to girls' school and had learned Civics and Home Economics and Biology. She spoke English a little and read it rather considerably better. No, she was plainly an individual, and must treat herself as one, particularly since no one else seemed likely to.

She did wish, however, that her problem were a bit more unique. To have achieved a problem was in itself no small triumph—lots of girls didn't even do that. But it was insulting to realize that the problem was the same old dilemma that had faced every Japanese girl from Townsend Harris's Okichi to the war brides she'd been hearing so much about. It was the classic choice between the Japanese way—self-abnegating, compliant, serene—and the new way—adventuresome, bold, romantic, the very selfish and quite American way.