Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (9 page)

The Commodore sent a sailor to find him, and then said, “Come help me get up off this infernal floor.”

Ace went over to him, but Manjiro stood there, in real shock over what could only be the deepest sort of misunderstanding. There could be no invitation to bring these two minstrels ashore. Not even Lord Abe could do such a thing without a consensus, the approval of the entire Great Council, and perhaps that is why, when two more lords came into the room, Manjiro was slow to grow alert. One of them was his father and the other was Tsune's renowned benefactor and Lord Abe's sometime rival, the man she had traveled to Edo with, Lord Tokugawa. Manjiro knew he was not to do so, that his job was to concentrate on the words alone, but he could not help looking at his father. His father glanced back at him, but far from understanding Manjiro's alarm, his look was one of pride. And when Lord Tokugawa saw that only one thin American was trying to help the Commodore stand, both he and Lord Okubo rushed forward.

“The Japanese way of sitting is impossible if you haven't been doing it since you were five,” said Lord Okubo. He thought his comment clever and hoped his son would translate it. He even looked at Manjiro and nodded, but by then Manjiro had moved over beside Lord Abe, determined to straighten things out.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” said the slowly standing Perry. “When I get back to my ship I'm going to make this country the gift of a few good chairs.”

“Sir,” whispered Manjiro, but Lord Abe, who had remained lost in thought all this time, suddenly saw that he was the only one still sitting, and sprang up. And just then the other musician appeared at the door.

“Don't get up on my account,” said Ned.

“Ah, good,” said Commodore Perry. “You, steward, bring more whiskey from my parcel. We'll all have a drink together while Lord Abe explains his idea. It's an odd one, to be sure, but vets my belief that in this business of countries coming together you never know what to expect, even when the negotiations are done.”

Now that he was standing again the Commodore grew more animated, massaging his legs and back. “Pour a liberal measure,” he told his cabin boy. “Come, my man, don't delay.”

He kept his gaze on Lord Abe until Lord Abe cleared his throat, and, waving away the Dutch interpreter, called Manjiro.

“Tell them what I say,” he whispered, “and use my words exactly.” He raised his voice again and said: “I think the Japanese people can learn more about your country from true human contact, from a week or two of fine entertainment, for example, than from a year of explanations, a year of treaties written down. Therefore I want to invite these two superb musicians into Edo to perform. After all, if we are to be nations who recognize each other, as the agreement we signed today clearly says we are, what better way to begin than through singing, through some kind of cultural exchange?”

His aide was standing beside him as he spoke, an eerie smile on his face.

It was Manjiro's voice the Americans heard, of course, but he had been concentrating so hard on using Lord Abe's
exact
words, that he had not caught their full meaning until after they were out. When he looked at his father and Lord Tokugawa again, however, he saw a reaction similar to his own. They had gotten everything from Lord Abe's original Japanese and were supporting each other behind Commodore Perry, as apoplectic as stroke victims.

“Your request is unexpected,” Commodore Perry said, “and my problem in accommodating it is that these men aren't quite the amateurs I may have hinted at before. They are civilians, I am forced to admit, entertainers that I rescued from some trouble in America and brought along on this sea voyage of ours because I thought their show would please you. Like everyone in the fleet they are under my command, of course, but I can't order them to do a thing like this. Unlike ordinary sailors these men have some amount of free will. I can't order them to visit a country with which we have just now negotiated a treaty. I cant…”

He hadn't finished, he was engaged in a tactic, building a plan of his own, but Ace interrupted him by saying, “I accept. It is just what I've been waiting for. I'd love to go.”

He had tried to say it casually, but his words came out like he was Daniel Webster himself, making a point from a pulpit.

Manjiro could see Commodore Perry's incredulity and knew at least that here was something the two countries had in common, that, just as it would in Japan, speaking up like that had violated American protocol. “I accept,” he said in Japanese. “I would love to go.”

“There, you see,” said Lord Abe, “if we can put political issues aside, men from one part of the world will want to visit men from another, nothing could be more natural.”

He smiled as he spoke and then hurried over to the two disgruntled lords, Manjiro's father and Lord Tokugawa. “Give me a moment here,” he whispered, “all is not as it seems. I know what I'm doing and you both know where I stand.”

But confusion and discord were everywhere by then. Lord Tokugawa and Lord Okubo stared furiously, the first at Lord Abe, the second at his son, while Commodore Perry kept both cold eyes on the wayward musician, Ace Bledsoe.

“I'm the negotiator here, young man,” he finally said, “and I will do the speechifying, if you don't mind.”

He then turned his attention to the second musician, Ned Clark, who still stood in the doorway.

“I want you to answer freely,” he told him. “Will you undertake traveling into Edo with our impulsive Mr. Bledsoe here, or are you disinclined,
as many men would be
, to leave our American vessels?”

But Ned no more understood the Commodore's message to him, the emphatic nature of
“as many men would be,”
than he would have had it been said in Japanese.

“Go along with Ace on a mystery tour?” he asked. “Suits me fine, your honor. I'm a bit of a homebody, but Ace is always sayin' that goin' where we ain't been before is life's elixir. So I might as well have a sip of it myself.”

Only a moment passed while the Commodore stared from one man to the other, but it seemed to both of them like an hour.

“Very well,” Commodore Perry finally said, “if you are decided, I will allow it.” And then he smiled his coldest smile of all.

After that each man wanted to get away, to go off by himself and think things over, but because of the full glasses of whiskey they couldn't do so. Commodore Perry solved the problem and at the same time gave another lesson in American democracy, or at least in how a man accepts a small defeat gracefully, by taking the tray from his cabin boy and delivering the drinks himself. Eight glasses went one each to the Japanese lords, the two minstrels, Manjiro and the Commodore and Lord Abe's aide. One glass remained untouched and when Lord Abe said it should be left alone, as a tribute to each man's ancestors, everyone, save Manjiro's father, found the ability to smile and bow.

For his part Lord Okubo decided that he could not be a party to such treason no matter how great the lord who organized it. That is why there was nothing for him but, with the perfect backward logic of fathers everywhere, to vent his anger on his son; both in their short ride home and as they burst through the door, almost catching Einosuke and Fumiko making love.

9
.
A Word Overheard Is a Word Forgotten

WORD OF LORD ABE'S
illegal invitation spread, with anger over it building and continuing for days, not only at Einosuke's house, but in the hallways of the Great Council chambers, in the gardens below those hallways, at Lord Tokugawa's Edo hunting lodge where Tsune had spent her first night in Edo, and in tearooms and geisha houses from deep in the heart of the Yoshiwara pleasure district all the way out to the fishermen's brothels not far from the now empty treaty house. Gossip! Gossip! Gossip! All over town people talked of little else.

Inside the Great Council meeting rooms Lord Abe's censure, and even his ouster, were called for—for 250 years no one had invited foreigners into Edo!—but Lord Abe, always impassive, weathered the storm. During the debates, necessary, to be sure, but as predictable as melting winter snow, Manjiro's father swallowed his anger and stayed true to Lord Abe, but it cost him dearly to do so. His dignity and his sense of propriety had once been as strong as Einosuke's, yet tempered, he liked to believe, with Manjiro's streak of independent thought. In other words there was a time when Lord Okubo would have counted himself among those dissenting lords who called for censure, and it irked him to find he could no longer do it, that a certain softness, a lack of the vital energy necessary for political outrage, had invaded his inner core.

But all that was later. On the morning after the invitation was extended, by the Western calendar April 1,1854, Manjiro, still in trouble with his father, and especially worried that Lord Tokugawa might not see him as a proper marriage candidate for Tsune, got up at dawn and went out into his brother's rock garden to think things over. The cold of the night before had produced a spring freeze, as unexpected as Lord Abe's invitation, so he wrapped himself in a heavy coat and found a fur-lined hat to wear. The hat was a relic from the days of his grandfather, and when he put it on it seemed to calm him, making him wonder what his grandfather would think of Lord Abe's chicanery.

A thin layer of ice had formed on the branches of the neighbor's nearest tree, where it peeked over Einosuke's wall. Its leaves were too heavy to do anything but sag, and as Manjiro smiled at the idea that his brother, at least, would find relief in the unseasonable weather, he suddenly saw Einosuke, standing at the far side of the garden, gray as the dawn.

“My poor brother,” he said. “Are you not frozen? Should I bring some tea or a coat?”

To be sure he had been concentrating on the events of last night, but it was extraordinary not to have seen Einosuke earlier. Einosuke's hands were encased in the gloves that went with the hat that Manjiro wore, so it seemed as though both brothers had retreated into the old and better-known world of their grandfather. Einosuke's garden was properly raked again, he had removed the last of the leaves and smoothed away the evidence, the glorious mess he and Fumiko had made of things, even before the first streaks of dawn woke Manjiro.

Einosuke had an ingenious little charcoal brazier which he had salvaged from a broken
kotatsu
the year before. He had put the brazier in a large-mouthed pickle jar and packed the excess area of it with dying coals. From the time of the construction of this new room the brazier had sat on the porch above his garden, always ready with new charcoal. So when Manjiro sat down, Einosuke hurried around the side of the house to the kitchen for fire. With the nation in such turmoil he thought it would be grand, the two sons of Lord Okubo, each in a piece of their grandfather's clothing, sitting around a hot brazier on the newly built porch.

While Manjiro told the story of Lord Abe's invitation, Einosuke grew calm. No one knew better than he the degree of their father's frustrations, or that the importance of their father's opinions, in the eyes of the Great Council, had heretofore been small. For a decade Einosuke's job had been more like that of a secretary than the representative of an influential lord. He knew also, deep in his heart, that men like Lord Abe were solicitous of his father now for two reasons alone: First because Shimoda, the town where the American presence would soon be felt most strongly, was on the Izu Peninsula and thus near his father's jurisdiction; and second, irony of ironies, because the only man anyone could find who spoke English was Manjiro.

Einosuke waited until Manjiro finished his story and then said, “Maybe you know that I have not been called upon to work very hard during my years in Edo. Ours is a small fiefdom, my brother, unimportant and without a strong voice in national issues, especially in times of political calm.”

When he'd come outside Manjiro had at first been sorry to find Einosuke there ahead of him, but now he was glad. Einosuke's comment was refreshing in its candor, and so bold that, as with his speech of yesterday, Manjiro knew he was about to hear from a brother he had rarely heard from before.

“It's a trick, you know,” Einosuke said of the invitation, “nothing more than part of Lord Abe's design. Such thinking is what makes him our most dominant lord.”

“He did ask father and Lord Tokugawa to give him time to explain,” Manjiro said, “but more time did not prove enlightening and, as you must have heard when we came in last night, father wasn't pacified.”

Einosuke cranked a gloved hand through the air as if manually making his voice low. “I can enlighten you if you like,” he said. “I have a story of my own to tell.”

Since he had no hat and Manjiro had no gloves, the hands of the younger brother and the head of the elder had slowly come together over the fire, as if they belonged to a single man. “Do not misunderstand. I have done my duty over the years, representing father as well as I could,” said Einosuke, “but my opinion was almost never sought and I kept finding myself with extra time. Some days I would stay in the Great Council antechamber sleeping or writing letters or talking with those in the same boat as myself, but other days, I confess it, I would seek variety by strolling the nearby roads, learning the various byways of Edo.”

Manjiro tried to speak, to say that anyone might have done likewise, but Einosuke stopped him. “One evening I happened to see Lord Abe walking ahead of me. I was surprised because I thought he was inside the rooms I had just left, but I was also surprised because he was alone, with no accompanying samurai and not even that turnip-headed aide of his, Ueno. So, almost by accident, I followed him. I did so at first, I think, because I supposed it was not Lord Abe after all, and I simply wanted to satisfy my curiosity.”

“You didn't greet him?” asked Manjiro. “You didn't wish him good evening on behalf of our father?” Manjiro was unencumbered by fidelity to the past in political ways, but was unfailingly polite, more attached to good deportment than Einosuke.