The Souvenir (23 page)

I wept for my dead father. I wept for Sam Wengrow lying in the American Cemetery, and for Melvin Smith, who died in Umingan. I wept for all those souls haunting Balete Pass. And, yes, I wept for Yoshio Shimizu, who never made it home to Suibara.

Then together, my husband and I used the night for what it was meant for.

O
N THE VERY
last day of 1945, my parents heard each other's voices for the first time in over two full years. The next morning, my father recorded his reactions in the same way he had done almost every day during that separation: he wrote a letter home.

It was the 474th letter he'd written since leaving for the Pacific front—and the last. After this letter, my father left no record of how he felt from day to day—no record of what he did, what he read, to whom he spoke. Writing letters had been his way of bridging distance. After the war, there was no longer any physical distance to bridge; my father lived a mostly sedentary life. Given a choice, he preferred to stay home.

A
S WE RETURNED
home from the Philippines, I began to wonder what it had been like for my father to begin life over again. California had been his promised land during the war—if he could just make it through, back to my mother, then they would be able to build a new life together.

I thought of a story my mother told me about my father not long before she died. It was March 1946. The war was over. Hiroshima was in ruins. On Sycamore Street, in a quiet neighborhood in the heart of Los Angeles where they had recently settled, the young couple who were not yet my father and mother strolled hand in hand. Recently reunited, these two were in love.

Leafy sycamore branches cast mottled shadows on the sidewalk. Tawny trunks, new bark peeking out under patches of the old, reflected the glaring southern California light. The street was lined with solid duplexes and triplexes in a variety of architectural styles: red-roofed Spanish, Moorish fantasy, French chateau, faux
Rococo. Inside those apartments on Sycamore Street, housewives ironed, clipped grocery coupons from the newspaper, heated formula, set macaroni and cheese on the table.

My father, then thirty, was still lean and muscular from combat in the Philippines, but he walked with the slow deliberate step of the stockier, softer man he would later become. His army buzz cut had grown out and his blue-black hair waved upward from his brow like Van Cliburn's. His young blue-eyed wife wore her bangs short across her forehead. Her step was more exuberant, but she restrained herself in deference to her husband's more dignified pace.

My father had waited two and a half years for this: to walk down a safe sun-dappled street in civilian clothes, holding his wife's hand. The long separation—the jungle fighting, foxholes, bloated corpses—was only a nightmare. My father was determined to forget all that, or at least that's what he claimed.

On that late afternoon in the early spring of 1946, he pulled his wife closer to him, inhaling the sweet smell of her hair. As they approached the corner of Sycamore Street and Beverly Boulevard, he noticed a trim soldier emerge from the canopied walkway of the most elegant apartment building on the block. Not just any soldier, but a soldier wearing the distinctive shoulder patch of the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division: a red taro leaf emblazoned with a yellow zigzag, the insignia of “Tropic Lightning.”

Without hesitation, he dropped his wife's hand and sprinted toward his presumed comrade. In his rush, he failed to notice the cables, the klieg lights, the director's chair. Before he could reach the handsome soldier, two burly security guards lunged forward and tackled him to the ground. Their job was to prevent reality from intruding on illusion.

Dazed, he lay on his back looking upward through sycamore leaves toward blue sky. “Who the hell are you?” growled one of
the security guards. “Norman Steinman,” my father sputtered back, gesturing toward the uniformed soldier. “I was just demobbed from that outfit.”

The guard stepped aside and my father now looked up into the anxious face of the man he'd been racing to embrace. “Let him go!” the soldier admonished, extending his hand. Warily, my father grasped the proffered hand and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. Only then, looking the man square in the face, did he recognize the actor Frederic March. My father, the just-returned GI, had stumbled upon the set of William Wyler's
The Best Years of Our Lives
, what would become the classic American film of GIs returning home from World War II.

My mother, in her high heels, was still four houses from the corner when she saw him go down. Arriving on the scene, she watched in astonishment as her favorite leading man dusted off her husband's gabardine slacks. Frederic March offered him a crisp salute as the grips and gaffers cheered. “You must forgive me,” he said in a grave tone of apology. “I'm just a powder-puff soldier.”

Frederic March had not spent nights shivering in his foxhole. He had not buried his buddies, or walked for days in wet boots, or watched kamikaze pilots fall from the sky in brilliant clouds of fire. He was right to offer apologies to my father for the indignity of being tackled to the ground.

I've watched Wyler's film many times by now. There's one scene that always holds my attention: the first morning home for Sergeant Al Stevenson (Frederic March) after three years of combat in the Pacific. Still in his pajamas, Al sinks into his favorite armchair and rests his feet on a hassock. He's not yet at ease in the lap of comfort. How can his loving wife and children who gather around him possibly imagine what Dad's been through “over there”? Next to Al's chair is his worn army duffel. He reaches into it and pulls out a three-foot-long Japanese samurai sword. Without saying a word,
he unsheathes it from its scabbard and hands it to his bewildered teenage son.

The war hero reaches into his duffel bag a second time and pulls out a Japanese flag with characters written all over it. “I got it off a dead Jap,” he says brightly. “The writings on it are messages of good luck from the soldier's family and friends.” He offers this also to his son, who handles it cautiously, as if it were contaminated.

Al Stevenson has a daughter as well, but he does not consider offering his war trophies to her. Perhaps he brought her a kimono or a doll, but the distribution of the
real
spoils of war are usually patrilineal. War is considered the province of men and, just as mothers presumably share the secrets of childbirth with their grown daughters, it is a father's prerogative to tell his son about his experiences in war.

Just before they were shipped home from occupied Japan in November 1945, the Twenty-fifth Division drew war trophies. My father wrote that he'd received “a fairly nice saber. Very good blade and mediocre scabbard and handle—but I'm satisfied.” He had no intention of bequeathing the sword to his still-infant daughter. “You're probably thinking now what on earth are we going to do with it—another thing to keep out of little Ruthie's way. Well it's just like any other trophy—just to hang over the mantelpiece—or show to our son many years hence.”

When we were children, when our parents weren't home, my older brother, Larry, and I dared each other to take the sword out of the closet. We crawled underneath the soft hems of our mother's rayon dresses to excavate the heavy metal shaft from its obscure corner.

Larry drew the sword out of its scabbard. Through the louvered windows of our parents' bedroom, turquoise light shimmered off the surface of the swimming pool, illuminating the fine Japanese
steel. We lightly ran our fingertips over the golden chrysanthemum embossed on the hilt. We carefully tested the edge of the razor-sharp blade.

My father was always planning to have a son, and in time, he was blessed with two. He intended to give his first son the saber, but he never did. He kept it hidden away in the back of his closet for fifty years.

As for Yoshio's flag with the black-inked calligraphy and the rust-red speckles? He never intended to bequeath that to anyone.

Suibara

I
TIPTOE ACROSS
the lobby, dimly lit by fluorescent vending machines. I'm the first guest up. At the front desk, the gap-toothed night watchman obligingly hands me binoculars. “Hakchyo?” he asks. “Swans?” I nod vigorously. Yes, 4,658 of them by yesterday's posted count. I step into my boots, pull down my earflaps, and head outside into steady snow.

It's December 1998 and I've returned to Suibara. Since our brief visit three years ago, I'd been yearning to see the Shimizus again, to deepen my understanding of what life was like in Yoshio's town before, during, and after the war. And of course, I remembered the Swan Uncle's invitation—to see Lake Hyoko during swan season. On this trip, with Lloyd working on a project in Los Angeles, I have traveled alone.

Outside, in the predawn dimness, I walk away from the inn and into a medieval landscape painting: pure white swans rousing themselves on an ice-fringed lake. Lake Hyoko reverberates with a glorious dissonance. The morning greetings of thousands of whooper swans—plus assorted mallards, widgeons, teals, and grebes—sound like a hundred orchestras tuning up simultaneously in the same concert hall. Sunlight leaks over the nearby Ise mountain range. The mighty five-foot-tall birds begin their takeoff, actually “running” on the water to gain enough speed to lift
their heavy bodies into the air. It's a thrilling spectacle: thousands of birds rising en masse then skimming over the lake toward the sun.

Before coming to Suibara, I met with Masako. We'd been corresponding these past few years and by now we felt like old friends. She had continued to be the go-between between the Shimizus and me, ferrying messages and gifts. “I called the Shimizus to tell them you were coming, I spoke to Suezo,” she said. “He told me, ‘I just dreamed of Louise-san last night.' As if he were expecting you.”