Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (37 page)

Not long after that they entered a low grove of marshy pines where the ground was so soft that keeping the wagon level took all of their attention and they grew quiet for a while. Manzo pulled with all his strength, and their father pushed from the back, while Momo stayed with Einosuke's head, making sure it didn't roll off.

When they finally got the wagon on solid ground again it was easier than they expected it would be to get where they were going. So Momo began insisting that they slow way down, that they set a more funereal pace.

He didn't want to run into his new life quickly like this, but go into it with the proper decorum.

47
.
Knowable People

THE INNKEEPER AND HIS WIFE
had been up since dawn for several days running, as they always were when preparing for a visit from the Okubo family, and had grown so exhausted that when Keiki explained to them that Lord Okubo had mistaken him for the innkeeper and asked that a runner be sent to Ueno, putting off the meeting for a couple of hours, they not only thanked Keiki, laughing demurely, but began a long conversation with him about the difficulties of running an inn, about what could go wrong, and how pleasurable it was when things went right.

Keiki had brought young Ichiro with him when approaching the innkeeper—he had done so at Kyuzo's urging, to keep Ichiro away from Keiko while she was grieving—and both men were surprised to discover that it was an enjoyable thing, hearing about the inside workings of such a lovely inn as this one. Keiki liked it because he knew he had a great deal to learn about commerce if he was ever going to be an effective leader, and Ichiro remembered his father's parting words to him, that he should ensure his future by finding some sort of trade.

So since they had time on their hands before the beginning of the evening's troubles, and since neither of them were formally grieving, they decided to use that time not only to learn about inns, but also to help with the preparations. Keiki joined the innkeeper's wife while she lectured the maids, adding comments that made the maids blush, while Ichiro walked the halls behind the innkeeper as he checked to see that everything, everywhere, was in order. Keiki was good at talking to maids, his touch lightly humorous, while Ichiro truly did find the industry of the thing, the busyness of it, to be the perfect antidote to his last few months of self-doubt, worry, and unemployment. He found himself thinking that this was work with honor in it, work that would allow a man to sleep soundly at the end of the day, rather than stare at his empty palm before his face.

When the four of them paused under an archway on whose cross-beam hung the innkeeper's father's old samurai sword, Keiki told the man that he had been right to opt for commerce, giving up the warrior life some decade earlier, and though Ichiro agreed wholeheartedly, he also told the innkeeper that it was a fine-looking sword. Both Keiki and Ichiro knew that others might think it insensitive of them to enjoy these simple pleasures when the Okubo family was filled with wretchedness and rage, but in fact each man's character was such that he was not well equipped for moroseness. Both had faces that turned more easily into smiles than frowns, and personalities that wanted to get on with things.

“Having Lord Okubo and his family visit us is an honor that will be considerably diminished if there is a fight tonight,” the innkeeper's wife chanced saying. She had wanted to say it to Lord Okubo himself but, of course, could not. And so as she grew more comfortable with him, she said it to young Ichiro. Neither she nor her husband were quite sure who Ichiro was, but assumed, correctly, that his rank was low.

The inn was composed of two right-angled sections, with elegant rooms upstairs, with balconies overlooking either the meandering Inozawa River or the garden where Lord Okubo and Kyuzo had defeated the crows. The inn's ground floor rooms were smaller, some, like those given to the Americans and O-bata, even cramped, but their great advantage was a closeness to the inn's best attraction: its
sen-nin furo
, its one-thousand-person bath.

“People laughed when we first built our bath,” the innkeeper told both young men, “but they aren't laughing now.”

They were standing in the bath's antechamber, and while he spoke his wife straightened the rows of straw clothing baskets, enlisting Keiki's assistance as she rearranged the stones and counterbalances of their modern new body-weight scale. And, indeed, the bath itself was larger and more elegant than any even Keiki had encountered before, almost as wide as the inn, with two long rectangular pools separated by a line of thick cedar logs. There was an outside section as well, surrounded by bamboo trees, stone Buddhas, lilies and chrysanthemums, all of it located above the largest confluence of hot springs on the entire peninsula. It was their masterpiece, this outside section, but the innkeeper and his wife were stopped from showing it to Keiki and Ichiro by the fact that the inside section was not empty, as they had expected it would be. Both of the foreigners sat in the tub near the anteroom door, bobbing like Ezo monkeys, with O-bata next to Ned and Kyuzo floating on his back, occasionally spouting water into the air like a whale.

For O-bata and Ned this was not the first time they had been in the bath together—due to the nearness of their room and the rigor of their recent activity they had bathed twice already—but it was the first time for Ace, who, embarrassed by such communal nudity, had submerged himself on the tub's far side without first washing. Ace's head rode above the water like Einosuke's did on that honey-bucket wagon, and in a certain way he was as out of things as Einosuke, too, as disconnected. He touched his face and looked at the others. His hand had been so constantly drawn to the spot where Fumiko's fingers had branded him that his cheek had become a little sore. At first he'd been perplexed by what she'd done, thinking he had run across some truly alien custom, but he had also been moved by an upsurge of feeling, a groundswell of emotion such as he'd never known before, and it unbalanced him as surely as if she'd struck him with a sword. He had looked for her that evening back in Odawara, to see if she might let it happen again, but had found her prone on the castle's floor, her body bent around such abject suffering that at first he'd thought she regretted what had happened between them. He hadn't shown himself, he'd only hidden and watched her, his desire welling up, until the others returned from procuring Ned's nose and he learned of her husband's murder.

Since then Ace had come to believe he was tied to Fumiko, anchored to her as surely as the American fleet was now anchored in Shimoda by something that had resided in both of them
before
he had come to Japan. Yet all he could do now was sit in his room or float in this tub, hindered as clearly as if she'd come to him and told him in English, by the knowledge that if he tried to go to her and declare himself, she would no longer welcome him at all.

When Keiki clapped his hands, delighted to have found them in the bath, and immediately sat down, and stuck his feet in the tub, Ace looked at him keenly, wondering if anyone connected to the family could possibly know of his feelings for Fumiko. Keiki, however, was staring directly at Ned.

“I hope you remember that we have met before,” he said. “At that time, too, we were bathing. You gave me your wonderful mouth organ, your ‘harmonium,' or whatever it's called, and I want you to know that I learned to play a tune or two before I left Edo. Maybe when this trouble passes you can give me a lesson. I would like that very much indeed. Great friendships have been based on less, you know.”

Keiki smiled. He remembered how Ned's long nose had terrified him, giving the impression of a giant standing rat. But even so he was sorry to see that the ruined face he looked at now held little of its previous offense. It looked, in fact, like the face of a desecrated owl.

For his part, Ned understood that Keiki was trying to be friendly, and so he smiled back and said, “Guess you noticed I had me an accident.” He'd been holding his prosthesis up in front of him and tried to lower it, to show Keiki what had happened. But O-bata stayed his hand. “No, you mustn't do that,” she said. “Not everyone is as pleased with your wounds as I am just yet.”

“What a half-baked idea a stick nose is,” Keiki told Ichiro. “It not only doesn't make him look whole again, but it takes away the use of a hand!” He made sure to keep his eyes on Ned. “I heard about your misfortune and want you to know that my father and I feel a personal responsibility,” he said. “Japan has far too many rogues these days, but we will see that justice is brought to those who did that to you. This very night, I hope.”

He spread his hands out and tried to remember just how long it had been since he and his father had looked down upon these same two men, from the spy room of that geisha house. Three weeks? Four? Back then, though they had truly been appalled by Lord Abe's plan, they had thought of the Americans as mere curiosities, exotic to look at to be sure, but more like a couple of rare birds than men with natures and personalities. Yet when meeting Ned in his father's courtyard, and again now, with the damage that had been done to him so hideous to behold, Ned and the other man, too, suddenly seemed like people who were knowable. Something was cracking inside Keiki, and he smiled again. Foreigners were knowable people! He looked at Ichiro, and then at Kyuzo, but it was the other American who looked back at him. He sat slightly higher in the tub, and spoke in a quiet voice.

“A problem I've had all my life is that I've often affixed importance to something only to find out later I was wrong,” he said. “I've looked for too much weight in things, wanted to give too much promise to a chance meeting, or a word heard out of context…or a touch. But I've never been able to rid myself of the idea that a man's life ought to mean something, and that its meaning would come clear to him if he remained steadfast in his waiting, if he was patient and could listen well enough for God's plan…”

Ace stopped. He didn't want to talk about God's plan, he wanted to talk about Fumiko. He wanted to ask what it meant in Japan for a woman to walk into the forest with a man, for a woman to look at him, and touch him, and speak to his heart. Still, they were all staring at him like they knew he wasn't quite done, so he added, “I thought this visit to Japan might mean something in my life, but I guess I was wrong.”

The Japanese were all gripped by a fair amount of sadness. Kyuzo was so sure he had understood the sentiment behind Ace's words that it occurred to him that in speech, as with music, there was meaning in sound alone, and Ichiro, similarly, was thinking that melancholy was a universal trait. The innkeeper and his wife were miffed at having lost time alone with Keiki and Ichiro, and they were sad, too, but for a different reason; they knew they'd have to drain and scrub their tub once the foreigners were gone. Keiki alone would have spoken to Ace, if only to try out his theory that foreigners were knowable, but Ned croaked out another bit of gibberish, before he could think of something to say.

“Well, shoot, Ace,” he said, “ain't you the unlucky one, though?”

This time his stick nose slipped down a notch or two, until everyone could clearly see the hole in his face. Even those who had seen it before turned away.

“I know it ain't exactly pretty,” Ned said. “But you all listen to me. I've had mirrors at my disposal these past few days, so I know what I'm up against better'n anyone. Ace here always says that a man will know what his life's supposed to accomplish if he sits around listening for God to announce it to him, but I gotta tell you, that ain't true. A man's got to bear what burdens he gets. He can cry if he wants to yet in the end he better just keep on gettin' up every morning, since he ain't got no other choice. And if God's involved in what happened to me at all then I figure I owe him a great big thank you, for though he took away my good looks he gave me somethin' better at the same time. He got my nose, I got O-bata, and so far as I'm concerned it's a fair exchange.”

He hugged O-bata, to demonstrate what he was saying, and once again they all thought they had understood him. Ichiro and Kyuzo, who'd been there when he lost his nose, believed he was beseeching them to avenge him against their enemies that night, while Keiki believed with equal firmness that he was saying his nose was a small price to pay if the intricacies of the treaty between Japan and America could be worked out smoothly from then on.

And even Ace was more taken with watching Ned's lips and the various abstract expressions that the stick nose gave his face than with actually listening to Ned. In one way Ned looked to him like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, nose and mouth and eyes floating in various proximities to each other, while in another it seemed like Ned was removing, layer by intricate layer, a series of complicated masks, much like taking off his minstrel paint. It was strange, but the more Ace watched the weird configurations before him, the more he began to think of them as representations of himself instead of Ned. Whenever they had removed their stage makeup it had always been Ned who had quickly returned to himself, while Ace, no matter how hard he scrubbed his face, was always, always, still in disguise. He was the jigsaw puzzle, not the man who sat before him with a stick nose in front of his face. He was the man of a thousand faces—his father's, his music teacher's, Colonel Morgan's, Buford Holden's, as well as those of the myriad other characters he had created. And during those short periods of time when he hadn't had a stage to stand upon he had simply waited, taking other men's ideas as his own and gazing out to sea, whether on shipboard or at home with no water visible for miles. Until last week, that is, until Fumiko took him into the forest and touched his face.

So Ace brought as much contrivance to hearing Ned speak as the others did, and as with the others, he thought his own contrivance was profound.