A Gesture Life (27 page)

“Perhaps you’ll realize someday, Lieutenant, why I’ve been so hard on you,” he said flatly, no more avuncular than he ever was, or could be. “I say this not because I care what you think of me, or even for your sake. I cannot be concerned with you, as an individual. I think you well know this.”

I assented openly, for the first time feeling somehow equal to him, imminently free.

“Good,” he said, taking out a small case of etched silver. He offered a brown-wrapped cigarette to me, but I declined. He took it for himself and lighted it, smoking quickly and deeply. “You are not
an incapable young officer, Lieutenant Kurohata,” he said, exhaling the spice-edged smoke. “But you are gravely misguided, most all of the time. I fear I shall believe this about you to my death. You probably don’t care. But I know you believe I take you to task because of your parentage. I’ve always known of this, yes. But that never mattered to me. It’s for the weak and lame-minded to focus on such things. Blood is only so useful, or hindering. The rest is strong thought and strong action. This is why, Lieutenant, I find myself unable to cease critiquing you. There is the germ of infirmity in you, which infects everything you touch or attempt. Besides all else, how do you think you will ever become a surgeon? A surgeon determines his course and acts. He goes to the point he has determined without any other faith, and commits to an execution. You, Lieutenant, too much depend upon generous fate and gesture. There is no internal possession, no embodiment. Thus you fail in some measure always. You perennially disappoint someone like me.

“Right now, you want to speak to me about the girl in there,” he went on, pointing up the path to the homely building. “You wish to be resolute about something about her and yet I see nothing in your face or posture that will convince me of your desires. You sound as if you would trounce me, but I look at you directly and what is solid in you but your sentimental feeling and hope? Tell me, tell me freely, in any way you wish.”

“I think you have taken questionable liberties about the camp. With the girl, and then also with Colonel Ishii.”

“What exactly?”

“You have steadily usurped command, sir. Everyone knows how the colonel remains inside all day and night, how he is hardly awake anymore.”

“And what do
you
know?”

“That we are again out of certain anesthetics and painkillers, which I believe you are offering to the colonel too frequently, perhaps even with the intent to incapacitate him.”

“Why should I wish to do such a thing, Lieutenant, when I have always had the commander’s ear, on all matters? What pleasure or advantage would it give me?”

“I don’t know, sir. Perhaps you want complete control,” I said, amazed at my own directness.

“Over what?” he rasped at me. “Over this meaningless outpost? These stupid, backward herds of men? You are less observant than I gave you credit for. I accepted this posting because I was assured there would be steady fighting in the region, and that I could institute a first-rate field hospital and surgery ward. I expected there would be plenty of casualties, with constant opportunities for employing new techniques and procedures. At minimum there would be the regular exercise of autopsies. Of course there’s nothing now of any interest. It’s a cesspool of nursery maladies, insect bites and rashes. This is a situation that you might appropriately command, but not I. Colonel Ishii naturally understood my frustration and formally requested long ago that I be transferred, but his request has yet to be acknowledged. Meanwhile, I cannot optimally serve our cause, and my skills are no doubt eroding. The colonel, if you are curious, has chronic, severe pain from a shrapnel wound suffered in the early years of the war, in Manchuria, and he chooses to relieve himself of it. It is never my place to regulate him, unless his doing so affects the battalion, which it has not.

“About the girl, Lieutenant, I will say this. You have obviously taken an interest in her, which is of course unavoidable. She is most comely, though I say that not to describe her sexual attraction,
which in this forsaken place and to these men any girl or woman would possess, even that annoying shrew Matsui-san. But as for this girl, she has a definite presence and will and lively spirit. There’s clear breeding there, if you didn’t quite know. Unlike what you were probably taught in your special indoctrinational schooling, Lieutenant, there are indeed Chinese and Koreans of special and high character, in fact, of the same bloodlines as the most pure Japanese. There is a commonality between someone like her and me, a distinct correspondence, if one very distant. This is one of the reasons I’ve separated her—you could say as a means of acknowledging that relation, particularly with her sister having been killed. But you, Lieutenant, you can of course look narrowly upon someone like her, for private uses and pleasures, rather than the larger concerns.”

“What are those, Captain Ono?” I said sharply. “Will you inform me, sir, as I have little idea.”

The doctor grinned, the corners of his mouth tight, half-appreciative of the acuteness in my voice. “What are they indeed, Lieutenant! What do you think the Home Ministry has been promoting all these years, but a Pan-Asian prosperity as captained by our people? Do you understand what that really means? I can see you don’t. We must value ourselves however and wherever we appear, even in the scantest proportion. There can be no ignoring the divine spread of our strain. You, it is obvious, are helplessly concerned about the girl—that one female body, there in the infirmary. There is something to this, no doubt. But I am not confined to such thinking. I don’t care about
her.
She is not of any consequence, except as a kind of rare vessel of us, to be observed and stewarded. For the present time she is important to me, and when
she is no longer I shall give her over to you, to do with her what you wish, whether you would bed her or journey the world with her or drown her at the shore. But as long as you see the banner there, Lieutenant, you shall keep to the duties I’ve set out for you and retain her in the manner I command. I raise it for you and you alone, and you will heed it without hesitance or prejudice.”

“I cannot promise such a thing, sir,” I said stiffly, stepping forward slightly. “And I cannot let you visit her tonight, or on any future day.”

He stared at me incredulously, searching my face, and then laughed, surprising me, as I thought he would rage and explode at my insubordination.

“You are an immense fool,” he said. “I almost feel sorry for you. What do you think you are doing, protecting her honor? I suppose you imagine she’s your maiden, and you her swordsman. You do, indeed. And you also think that I’ve been saving her these last few days in anticipation of some memorable evening?”

“She said you had not visited….”

The captain shook his head, grinning again, though he was not amused. “The girl is telling stories, and you are believing them. Did she tell you how much she thought of you, too, how much she loved you?”

“She never professed such things.”

“Perhaps she suggested how she would like to meet you again, after the war?”

When I didn’t answer, the captain scoffed and said grimly, “Shut up now. Or better yet, go away. I can’t stand to look at you. Your presence is demoralizing me.”

“I will not let anyone else go to her, sir.”

“No more of you, Lieutenant!” he shouted, waving his hand. “You had permission to address me freely but now you will silence yourself and leave me.”

“I wish her to be my wife. I will marry her when the war ends. I have already decided this.”

The captain stared at me with an expression of pure disgust, as if I had violated every law and code of his living. “You have ‘decided’ this, Lieutenant? So you have already had your sweet trifle with her, I suppose; you have taken her there on her dirt bed?”

“I will love her,” I said as fiercely as I could, though the words immediately rang shallow and distant. “No matter what you say.”

He laughed terribly. “Even if I tell you she is pregnant? Oh indeed, yes. I suppose she must have tricked the commander about her menses. It doesn’t matter now. I’m letting the pregnancy go, in fact, to see how long she’ll stay that way, once she begins servicing the whole of the camp. She was pregnant before even I was able to take my pleasure. Before anyone here had her. Who knows who her real master is? The commander and I certainly aren’t. So now you can fancy yourself to be her foster lover, her foster groom, as it were. And then stepfather to her child, if it ever comes to be….”

But before he could finish speaking I tackled him square in the gut and the force of the blow knocked the wind out of him. He lay for a moment beside me trying to get back his breath, then rose slowly to his knees. I wanted to get up to strike him but my right shoulder seemed to shear like wet paper when I put weight on my hand, and I knew it had completely separated. The pain was severe enough that it didn’t feel like much of anything when the captain punched me in the belly. I watched, numbly estranged from myself, as he unholstered his service revolver and struck me again, once or twice or several times. He then pulled back the hammer and placed
the cold ring of the barrel end to my forehead. He seemed very close, as if he were peering into me. He had no malice or rage in his face, simply a plain expression of purpose. I passed through then to another reach of bodily suffering, the pain already become a thing memorial, an insolvent fever in the tissue and bones.

AROUND THE TIME
that Tommy was likely born, I began to entertain a certain waking nightmare. Sunny was of course long gone, having departed many months earlier without leaving a forwarding address or phone number. I knew she had taken up with Lincoln Evans, living with him (and probably others) in a squalid flat down in the city, though I no longer had either cause or interest in finding her. I didn’t care to see what was becoming of her. I was saddened, of course, but also in good measure angry, hurt by the completeness of her departure, as if she were a night’s guest at any roadside inn, the room hastily checked out of with that rumple of early morning disorder and abandon. I had offered her all that I possessed or could muster, the run of my house and my business and the willing graces of my town, which I must say is what it felt like in those last days just before I sold to the Hickeys. The streets and sidewalks of Bedley Run truly seemed as much mine as any person’s, their almost affirming solidity underfoot, bouncing me along on my diurnal way.

The dream, if I can call it that, would come to me at the end of the working day, in the last hour between six and seven when there were never any more customers or calls from salesmen and I was hungry and enervated and in a state that must be a kind of retail beatitude, a mind of placid emptiness and vulnerability. Somewhere in my thoughts I knew that Sunny was close to term, sustaining herself in whatever unhealthful and meager manner, and I summoned an image of myself as a physician, old and wise and sure, who ran a tiny free clinic on the ground floor of a tenement building in the city. Each day until dusk I would treat the ills, both trivial and grave, of the modest neighborhood folks, attending with patience and close application every complaint of cough and rash and ache, gently and somberly addressing the more serious indications, my corner windowed office known all over as a kindly haven, the seat of good Doc Hata of Whatever Street.

And so on a typical day of full appointments with the sick and injured and scared, who should walk in but an adolescent girl, unescorted, safeguarding with one hand an immense belly in that tender, cupping way, asking if she might see me immediately. My beleaguered but generous-spirited receptionist would try to explain the tight schedule, indicating the overflowing waiting room, but I’d come out in my white coat and her sallow face would brighten, the simple sight of me enough to lend some calm and relief. But just then the girl would shudder, momentarily swoon, and tip like a felled tree into the arms of the nurse, saying weakly that her water had long ago broken. We rushed her into the back room and laid her down, and when I lifted her long skirt the baby was already showing itself, not by its crown but with a tiny, perfect foot, unwrinkled and pink. I was alarmed but not nervous, as I was a doctor of long experience, having turned many a breech fetus and
safely delivered a near-equal number. And yet this time I felt myself faltering, the little body inside somehow unfathomable to me, unreadable, my hands stricken with a sudden numbing weakness. I thought then to attempt a breech delivery, but here, too, I seemed to forget the delicate procedures. I still couldn’t sense the baby’s contours, the hip, the shoulder, the orientation of the head, and when my nurse warned that the foot was turning color, grayish blue, a hard tick of panic set off in my chest. The girl was writhing in pain, unable to listen to me and pushing too much, pushing when she shouldn’t have been, and as the precious minutes passed, the foot grew grayer and bluer and I knew I would have to open her up and lift the baby out. The girl was now delirious with pain. The nurse placed in my hand a shiny blade, and I realized then that it was a travesty and I was not a surgeon, that I had never cut into living flesh. That I was a fraud and a coward and should not have coveted and accepted as I had done the confidence of people, their singular regard and trust.

At that point my conjuring would cease, and I would close up the store, go home as I did every evening, to a long swim and dinner in a bowl and a pot or two of tea. Of course it doesn’t require a psychologist or guru to figure the significance of my fantasy, and I don’t recount it here to suggest anything but the most simple truth. I felt guilt about Sunny, no doubt. But I know I was also truly concerned for her, and taken hold of by the worry a real parent must have, the kind that reaches far down into the gut, that wakes you from sleep and constantly breaks your thoughts and keeps you from sitting still. As much as I had hoped to, I never quite felt that way when Sunny was living with me, not when she fell down once and chipped several permanent teeth, not when she went off to sleep-away camp for the first time, not even when I let
her drive alone to the city in my newly delivered Mercedes-Benz coupe. I was uneasy at those times, quite thoroughly concerned, but never gravely ill-feeling, never infected to the marrow as I assumed a real father would or should be, lying there in bed inconsolably perturbed, unable to think, to read, even to drink calmly from a glass. And though I never thought I would desire such a set of sensations for myself, in the days and weeks after she was gone from my house, in those cycles that seemed to pass like fast-turning epochs, as if I were some inconsequential rock hurtling past the warm blue sphere of human time and history, yet unseen and unknown, I finally wished I might remain in the sickness I was developing when I was sure Sunny was about to be a mother. It was not pleasant at all but somehow distinctly worthy and inhabitable, a nightly pool of deep worry and remorse and unexpected comfort that I could wade into and do my long-distance crawl, for once not forgetting who I was, for once not blacking myself out.

And yet, eventually, this feeling passed as well. Routine triumphs over everything, as it always does with men like me, and I returned to the living of Bedley Run and its vested, untouchable ways. In truth I was beginning to understand my position after so many years, my popularity and high reputation, one that someone like Liv Crawford would say was “triple mint,” or “among the finest in town.” Because that in fact is what it was, and has been, and no doubt will be until I die. It was during Sunny’s absence that I finally awoke to this notion, that I was perfectly suited to my town, that I had steadily become, oddly and unofficially, its primary citizen, the living, breathing expression of what people here wanted—privacy and decorum and the quietude of hard-earned privilege. And so much so that my well-known troubles with Sunny were not a strike against me or a sign of personal failure but a kind of rallying point,
silently demonstrated by somebody’s solemn, shut-eye nod at the lakeside gazebo on the Fourth of July, or a lingering handshake out front on Church Street, or a light, friendly honk from a passing car I knew.

So why am I not fine now? I ought to be, for I’m unexpectedly driving over to pick up Thomas and bring him to the Bedley Run pool club, as the one in Ebbington has been derelict for several summers now, fenced shut and emptied of water. Sunny has relented on never letting him step back into my town, his eyes begging for a day in the water. The Bedley pool is actually a small man-made lake, chlorinated and filtered, and I’ve told Thomas I’ll teach him how to swim, a lesson a week until the season ends, and then indoors at the racquet club if he wishes to continue. I believe he likes me. He calls me Franklin now, and not Mr. Hata, after he asked what my full name was. I don’t mind at all. “Franklin,” he says, as though we have been associates for many years, “I think we ought to stop for a snack now.” He seems satisfied that I am a “family friend,” not questioning me any further.

One day after that first shopping trip, I took him down to the city, to the natural history museum, where we toured the longtime exhibits, and then a new one on the development of mammalian sea life, in particular the evolution of dolphins and whales. All he could talk about after I read the accompanying plaques to him was how he would like to be a fish but breathe air, so that he would be jumping out of the water all day and all night. He was focused on the joys of leaping, of course, but I was thinking of the endless necessity of having to leave one’s element for another and so depend on the resource of another realm, that no matter how automatic and natural it was or became there should always be the pressure of survival, this pointed, mortal condition of being.

I didn’t speak of this to Thomas, for obvious reasons. I didn’t tell him, either, of my other notions of the pastime, that in fact some of us longtime swimmers often wish for ourselves that submerged, majestic flight, feel the near-desire to open one’s mouth and relax and let the waters rush in deep, hoping that something magical might happen. Once, I will admit, during the very time I was thinking often of Sunny and her pregnancy, I attempted this, or let it occur, just a tiny inhalation, just a little taking in, and though my mind was clear and placid, every cell in my body at once objected, my limbs practically jetting me out of the water and onto the slate surround of the pool, where I lay on my side coughing violently. Did I wish to do away with myself? Did I truly wish to die? Or was I hoping for a transmogrification, complete and however strange, a wholly different heart and shell and mien that would deliver me over to a brand-new life, fresh and hopeful and unfettered?

And here, perhaps, it is. I turn up the steep drive to The Conifers, a rental condominium in what might be described as the “better” section of Ebbington, a string of modern attached units set in a sparse stand of evergreens, each with a carport in front and a private balcony in back, overlooking the humble town below. There is a guardhouse halfway up, though it’s locked shut and unmanned, and the only thing preventing me from going through unchecked is an old speed bump worn down to a nub. This is the sort of place that in Bedley Run would have a clubhouse for the tenants with a large-screen television, a wet bar, an exercise room and sauna, perhaps even a pool and hot tub and tennis courts, where Liv Crawford or Renny Banerjee might privately and conveniently reside until they settled down and began a family. But here at The Conifers you see tricycles and candy wrappers strewn outside; you see perennials and shrubs aplenty but all badly in need of sprucing and
pruning; you see the domestic cars and economy imports; you see the subtle and varied indications of both decency and decline. By living here it’s clear these folk are aspiring to a more privileged life, though perhaps it’s true that most will never see better than the West Hill of Ebbington, which by all rights should be as good as any place in what really matters, just as righteous, just as valued, but isn’t all the same.

When the door opens it’s Sunny, dressed in a smart-looking dark business suit and white blouse, fastening a string of pearls about her throat. The reason I have the chance to take Thomas swimming is that she has an interview in Stamford and two hours earlier was called by her sitter, who canceled for the afternoon. But I’m late when I needn’t have been, and I apologize.

“I do appreciate this,” she says tightly to me, not having to add that I am indeed her last resort. “I had to send him to the neighbors so I could get dressed in peace. He’s absolutely crazy that he’s going swimming. I’ll call over there now.”

While she rings for him I sit on the sofa in the living room, where she also has a comfortable armchair, and cocktail table, and mini-stereo on the mantel of the gas fireplace. There’s a small dining area next to the open kitchen with a pine table and four chairs, and then two bedrooms down the short hall in the back, the whole place perhaps just a bit larger than the family room of my house. But she’s painted the walls a creamy, warm peach and the trim a glossy white. There’s a nice rug here and under the dining table, and the kitchen is papered with Thomas’s handiwork, the career of his finger paintings and scrawls. A soft, sweet smell of lavender lingers from the bowls of dried flowers, and all throughout there is a sparkle to the surfaces, a steady gleam that goes straight to this old man’s heart, even as he knows it’s not in the least for him.

“He’s having lunch over there, so he’ll be a few minutes. Do you want something to drink?” Sunny says to me, poking her head around the kitchen opening. “I have soda and tea. You probably would like tea.”

“If there is time.”

“There really isn’t,” she answers, but I hear her running the water in the kettle anyway. She calls, “I don’t have green tea. Just black, and herbal.”

“I will have the herbal, thank you.”

“I thought you never had anything but green,” she says, bringing out a saucer with three butter cookies. I want to say thank you but don’t because I’m afraid of being ardent and scaring her off. But this is her place and she seems only slightly disturbed by my presence, the way she might be if a small, tame bird had somehow flown in.

“May I ask what you’re interviewing for?” I say, taking a cookie. “Is it in retail again?”

“It is,” she answers, sitting forward on the armchair. “It’s to be a manager. It’s a chain store for younger girls, teens and preteens. It’s not exactly what I know, but I guess selling clothes is selling clothes.”

“You’ll have to move out to Connecticut?”

“No, they’re just interviewing there. The chain is actually out in the west, in California and Arizona and Texas. They’re expanding, and they need experienced managers, which I guess they don’t have enough of out there. I haven’t said anything to Thomas, nothing at all, so I’ll ask you not to mention it.”

“I promise to be quiet about it.”

“I’m sure you will,” she says, her old Sunny-soundingness almost sneaking back into her voice. But she catches herself, or I think she
does, and she reaches over and takes a cookie, biting just the edge of it, a tiny nibble. It’s a nothing act but I’m taken back instantly, many years, when I would offer her those popular vanilla wafers and she would refuse, not because she didn’t want them but for fear I would think her greedy and selfish for taking more than one, this orphan girl. I would almost have to scold her to make her understand it was all right.

“I know Thomas is going to want to see you more after today. He asked about you a couple days ago. Out of the blue he said he wanted to go to ‘Franklin’s house.’ Did you tell him you had a pool?”