Triumph (26 page)

"I knew a Japanese boy who lived a few doors from us," she answered, obliquely.

"When I was very little, I used to call him what the other kids did: 'Monkey face.'

'Monkey man.' One day, after we'd all screeched that at him, I happened to find him in his family back yard, behind a big, stone garden lantern. Crying! So I kissed him. And never called him names any more."

"Quite a lotta us Japs do look like monkeys," George said.

"Some," she murmured, "are very, very handsome, though."

"Look, Lodi--!"

"Yes, George?"

There was a long, long silence. Ben, moved deeply by this effort to bridge an ancient prejudice, a thing he compassionately felt, peered shamelessly around the entry.

They were kissing, kissing ardently, the lovely Lotus on her toes, head back, dark hair showering over the slightly taller George's pressure-whitened hands. They broke apart suddenly, yet reluctantly. Ben ducked back into the dim passage, ashamed of himself, yet held magnetically and unable to slip away.

"Lodi--I--" George hardly made words, for a moment--
"Lodi,
I've never been a guy to fall in love. I mean, the real thing. So much that you want the girl day and night, and no one else ever, and forever--and you're sure, and that's it! Not me, Lodi! I was somebody who always liked girls--sexy girls, for sexy me! I never cared about what kind-

-white, brown, colored, Chinese, Japs, Filipinos--just as long as they were full of passion, and very pretty, and wanted me. And me, them. I was that way, Lodi. I think it used to make me feel a little less like--like a monkey man--to know that, almost always, if I could get a first gleam from a pretty gal, I could get the gal. But now--!"

"I know all that, George." There was laughter in the voice.

"You do! But how--?"

"Women talk! Faith has told me all about you.
George!
I have long wondered this: why haven't you made a pass at Angelica? She's gorgeous! And dying for almost any man here, except two. Three, counting Paulus. Some man to offer to take her on a goodnight stroll. I mean--"

George chuckled. "You needn't say! Angelica's one of those girls who isn't living unless some guy's wild for her, and they are being wild together.
Sure.
She made it plain enough. Is that, Lotus-baby, very sinful, in your book?"

The Chinese girl replied, doubtfully, "Well--it is--kind of--unchoosy."

Ben heard a cigarette lighter snap, papers rustle. They would be sitting on her desk then, smoking. And he knew he ought to go. But he couldn't. If he tried, he rationalized, they might hear him: he was probably shaken enough to be that clumsy. If he came in now, he'd break up something . . . some relationship as near to what Ben would call "sacred" as any act of which people are capable. And to shatter that would be, for Ben, "sin," in truth. So he stayed.

"Unchoosy?"
George now repeated her word, questioningly. "I think not. I think--

and I guess I've seen more of the seamier side of life than most people here, because, after all, I worked on freighters, summers, to help with the college tuition, and I spent two high-school summers with a road gang out West, and besides I also spent a couple of my early years with Dad and Mom, in an internment camp for nisei. Not pretty! We were there, even though two of Dad's younger brothers joined an American Japanese regiment that won a ton of medals and was all but wiped out. Both my uncles were, in Italy. Wiped out, I mean."

"I never knew that!"

He laughed gently, disarmingly, "Why should you? The Hyama family was big."

He was silent. Spoke again. "I'm glad my mother didn't live to see this! And I hope my father got it quick, with Mrs. Davey, down in Fenwich!" He again paused. "Why talk about them? Thinking is bad enough!"

"Did they come here from Japan?"

"My father and his brothers? Heck
no!
Their grandfathers did. To help build railroads across the United States. They sent to Nippon for 'picture wives.' I mean--"

"I know what you mean. Girls picked out, in their home towns, by relatives who mailed pictures."

"Sure. That. But my granddads--and Dad, and my uncles--all married American-born, Japanese girls!" He said it with such pride that she laughed. His retort was heated:

"What's wrong with that, for goodness sake?"

"Nothing," Lodi replied, very gently. "It's just that I always felt, till we got down here, so American,
too!
I know exactly why you spoke that way! My father and his father were merchants in Honolulu. But
their
parents came to Hawaii to do field labor. I found that out in old records, in Territorial files. But I never let on. Because Dad had always told us a myth about our being descended from a long string of mandarins, very powerful, rich, and wise. Only lie he ever told. I suppose he did it, partly anyway, to make us kids live up to his hopes."

"Golly!"

"Is that
till
you have to say about such silly pride?"

A pause. George answered. "Yup!
'Golly!
No further comment." Her laughter was like sleigh bells, sweet, high, and beautiful.

"George!"

"Yo!"

"You were trying to tell me, you
love
me!"

"Was I?"

"Weren't
you?"

Another pause. George spoke, then, in his flattest and most measured voice, the one he used only under great stress. "I was trying, Lodi, to ask if you could believe that it is true, I love you. My past doesn't make it look very likely."

She said then, with a sultry, taunting voice that reached Ben almost as a shock after her laughter: "It must be mighty difficult for all you men here--except Vance, of course, and maybe Kit, who is at least
engaged
to Faith--to go around being so
noble!"

"What you call 'nobility,'' he responded carefully, "seems, for one thing, to be a sort of unspoken house rule. For another, Lodi, though I love you, I never even tried, before, to know what a woman's really like. Except for Mom and my sisters, maybe. But you I've watched in all the scares here! And doing math--I never could! Talking with Ben, almost as an equal! And learning, so quickly!, to be damned near a master machinist! Yet remaining a lady, even when you were grease-smeared and running a lathe, with hot steel curling all over your little mitts! If you had ever started to help some guy here to be 'not noble'--well, I'd have been mighty depressed!"

"Suppose the guy was you?"

"Why me?"

"Suppose, George, I felt the way you do?"

"About me?" George let a long moment pass. Then he whistled softly. Next, judging from the silence, he kissed her again. And afterward said, "What do we do now, child?"

"Child?
I'm twenty-two."

"But you're no female confection like Angelica! A woman used to men being at least enough in love to answer some desire of the moment! You're no hungry lady wolf!

You--"

"I grew up, remember," she said softly, "in
Hawaii.
It is not the most blue-nose region on earth! By Polynesian standards--and all of us Hawaiians sort of inherited them-

-I'm middle-aged and ought to have six kids already. Even by American standards, as they've been adapted to Hawaiian customs, I'm not exactly--"

"Say nothing!" It was a sharp order. "To me, you are as pure as your name. A flower. A
lotus!"

"And so are you, George, to me."

He clearly tried to divert their rising emotion. He said, "Now, with Angelica, I think I understand. But you may not. Any man, just about, that's presentable, if nobody more glamorous is around, is for her. Even though, inside, that little brain has one different, but very determined, aim."

"What?" George thought over that question. "Every watch Angelica with Dottie and Dick?" "She's wonderful with them! She adores them! And they do, her!"

"They adore you too, Lodi," George said, almost as if it were long since noted and even taken for granted. "What I'm getting at is, Angelica's main motive, in all she is and does, is to catch some one man she likes enough to love, who can give her all the pretty things she never had till she got them the one way she knew, and to marry that man. H

she had ever managed to do that, I'd bet a world she'd have been the most faithful wife you ever heard of! She's really a good person, born to a not-so-good way of life."

Lodi mused on that. "I guess you're right. Anyhow, there's something very lovable about her, in spite of her obvious, perpetual--well--hunger, for a man. Any man."

"That's what I mean."

"You don't believe all girls can yearn that way-at least, for some
one
man?"

"Not yearn like guys, they don't! Guys--!"

"I know," she said, and went on, not unkindly, but with satire in her tone: "Men just are different
biologically,
and they simply cannot 'stand around forever, chaste but content,' as women are supposed to be able to do! A lot of rot!"

"Is it, Lodi?"

"Yes, it is! Every time I look at you--"

"Me, too." Ben heard him drop lightly from the desk, pace a few steps away, and back. "Look, Lodi.
I
didn't start this!"

"No.
I
had to! Because I wished you would for so long--and you newer did--that I was simply forced to! If
that
confession sounds like a female taking over one of your touchy 'male roles,' why, go be-upset!--by this one, loving, but modem, woman!"

"I'm not upset." There was a final pause. "I guess you know that I had to learn something new, for me: you're the only woman I ever said I loved, that I meant it for." He laughed. "Or
have
I said it, yet?"

"I've believed, before now--" her voice was reflective, but unsteady--"two or three times, that I really was in love! It always turned out though, George, I was mistaken. And glad to learn the error, even though I'd tried hard to make each such crush the real thing.

You deserve to know
that
about my past. It helps me, though, to understand you really love me. And that you finally gather I truly love you. So there is only one more thing. Do I have to bring
it
up,
too?"

George said huskily, "That's okay. I can bear it easy, darling, till the day we get out of this dungeon!"

"But that's not what I meant!" She said it nervously. "Just the opposite! We can't get married down here, of course! I'd be crazy to have a child here! But there's no need of that, and hasn't been, for years! I
meant--"
She hesitated. "Well, suppose the radiation levels outside keep dropping only at the apparent rate? Will we ever get outside? If we do, how long will we last?
That's
what I meant! Sort of."

The longest silence yet, followed Lodi's words. George finally murmured, "I see."

Then, in a high, taut voice, he continued, "Such being the case, what the hell are we sitting around a
machine shop
for?"

They didn't kiss again, but came toward the passage, hand in hand, flushed--

almost transfigured, Ben thought, as they saw him in the doorway.

Ben said, "Sorry, kids! I eavesdropped. Couldn't help it! Maybe if you think
why
I did it, you can forgive me."

Lotus Li was unabashed. It was George who flushed and stood speechless for a moment. But he presently smiled a little.

"It was none of your business, Ben," he said coldly.

"No, George, it wasn't.
Isn't!
You kids
beat it!
I want to make a few sketches."

They started. George turned. "You don't hold me to be--?"

Ben half shouted over a shoulder,
"No!"
And Lodi pulled George away along the passage, saying, "Don't you understand, ape? Ben is Jewish. He feels our feelings!"

Ben found his hands shook too much then to use the drawing implements. He lighted a cigarette. He reflected that mankind, long ago, ought to have realized--as Lodi and George just had, for each other--that the "differences" made by race and religion are superficial.
Environment, and the attitudes of other people to anyone, or to any minority
group, regarded as "different"--and, of course, in consequence, as inferior--make the
only important differences that exist. And all of that .
. .
illusion.

A dozen branches of science, in thousands of unanswerable tests, had shown no special quality or superiority in black man or white, red, brown, or yellow; Jew or gentile or Moslem or Hindu. But most human beings, and the arrogant white man in particular, had refused to examine the evidence and accept the truth; and in that rejection of known reality, they now had lost . . . everything.

For their sins?

Ben considered.

The white man had colonized, subjugated, and exploited all the others, ruthlessly, for centuries, calling them "lesser breeds," in Kipling's irredeemable phrase. They'd enslaved Africa. Spain's Cross and sword had decimated the natives of Latin America.

New Englanders and other European-derived pioneers had swept away the North American Indian as if red men were animals. Asia had been the grab bag of the white world, till India won independence for itself, and China, by merciless Communist force, had been "liberated"--for a more bitter slavery.

The same "white men" of Europe, Ben mused, had kept his forebears in ghettos for a thousand years, because of a different belief, and without even noting there was no such thing as the alleged "Jewish race."

Attitude--mere arrogant, wrongheaded belief--had inflated the white peoples with their mercilessness and their "righteousness." The very words they revered in their Christian faith and the words they wrote into their "free-world" constitutions, they honored by besmirching: freedom, equality, brotherhood, mercy.

And now, save for a subequatorial remnant, the white man was gone . . . the world-conquering Europeans, the Americans, the world-aspiring, once-Greek-Orthodox-Christian (or Catholic) Slavs--gone.

Ben smiled sadly as he recalled how the Old Testament Jehovah would have spared Sodom or Gomorrah had either contained even one virtuous person. Now, the white man's world, along with the helpless islands of the Japanese people and their world-conquering aspirations, had committed suicide. The millions who were innocent of prejudice, along with the bigoted billion!