Phantoms

by Christian Kiefer

  “It’s the only way,” her sister told her. “I just can’t believe she did what she did. And now of all times.”

  “Well, it’s done.”

  “You’re a good mother,” Dottie said then. “It’s what a good mother would do.”

  Evelyn could only nod at this.

  “When’s she come home?”

  “I don’t know. A few days, I guess.”

  “Well, we’ll get over there to see her as soon as Tom gets home. Anyway, you did the right thing. Anyone could see that.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “Well, honey, it’s just that you look so sad.”

  “But I’m not,” Evelyn said, a sharp edge in her voice now. “I’m fine. I know I did the right thing. Helen knows it too. I think you’re the one who thinks different about it.”

  “I don’t though, Lynnie. You know I don’t. I’m always on your side.”

  “It sure doesn’t seem like it.”

  “Now wait a minute,” her sister said. “I opened my home to you and to Helen. I’ve done right by you both.”

  “All right, all right,” Evelyn said. “Fine. You’ve done right.”

  “Well, I have.”

  “I said all right, Dottie. Can I just sit here for a minute, please?”

  They visited Helen later that evening, the hospital’s halls filled with the muted confusion of murmured and indistinct conversations punctuated by muffled squeaks and clicks as if the long white spaces were filled not with human activity but with the movement and industry of insects.

  Helen’s room was on the second floor. Her aunt had given the girl a few issues of Movie Show and Life and Photoplay and she laid one of these aside as they entered the room. Rita Hayworth sucking a soda fountain drink through a pair of straws.

  “How are you feeling, honey?” Dottie asked her.

  “All right,” Helen said. “I’m ready to go home now.”

  “Is that what the doctor told you?” This from her mother.

  “Not yet.”

  “We’ll need to wait and see then,” Evelyn said. “Probably tomorrow. Depends on what the doctor says.”

  “I want to go home, Mama.”

  “I know. And we will.”

  How haggard her daughter looked. And how young. ­Evelyn had been twenty-three when Jimmy was born. Twenty-five when Helen herself had come. And yet even when she had been ­Helen’s age she did not think that she herself had been quite so fragile, not quite so childlike, not even at seventeen or eighteen. She herself had been—what was it?—more mature? Yes, more mature, and also capable of keeping her legs closed until her wedding night, vestal and intact. This last did not seem too much to ask, to keep the wandering hands of boys within certain regions of the body and to understand which actions would lead directly to the moment that had come upon her, not just Helen but Evelyn and Dottie too, upon the whole family. Shame.

  “Where is he?” asked Helen.

  For a long while no one spoke, both Helen and Dottie waiting for Evelyn to answer until it became clear that she would not or could not and at last it was Dottie who spoke: “He’s safe as pie, honey. On his way to a new family.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well I just do. Don’t you think so, Lynnie?”

  But still Evelyn did not answer. What she wanted more than anything was for the whole thing to be over, the entire scandal intolerable, at least to her. The fact that the people in this room knew—that Helen and Dottie knew, and that the staff of the hospital knew, and the nun who picked up the child knew—this was very nearly too much to bear, the idea of it like a fire that burned from room to room, spreading no matter what she did, even after coming all this way on the train from their little town in the orchard country to this far-flung northern clime with its dripping trees and wet heavy snow that seemed to come down in great globs like phlegmy spittle.

  The truth of it might never have come out had she not pressed, her daughter breaking down one afternoon in the kitchen to tell her the truth only after Evelyn sat her down and interrogated her. Still it had been, for Evelyn, a terrible surprise; she knew something was wrong with her daughter but she had thought, naïvely perhaps, that Helen was merely worried about Jimmy, the boy having signed up for the army without consulting either his mother or father and perhaps without even telling his sister about his intentions. If Jimmy knew about Helen and this boy—for they did not at the time know who she had been with—he did not tell anyone before he left for the Pacific. Had he been home, Evelyn knew she might have extracted the information from him, for he had always been her own, her dearest and the one closest and most open with her, this in contrast to Helen’s secrecy, her apartness, her willfulness. In truth Helen knew her daughter was more like her than Jimmy would ever be.

  “Lynnie?”

  She spun on Dottie now, her words clipped and hard. “What is it?”

  “I was only asking if you thought the baby was off with his new family already.”

  “How would I know?” she said.

  “I’m just trying . . . ,” her sister began.

  “Oh I know perfectly well what you’re doing,” Evelyn said. “Can we just get through this? Is that too much to ask?”

  “That’s what we’re doing,” Dottie said.

  “Mama?”

  “What?”

  “I want to see him.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “But I want to.”

  Now Evelyn only shook her head. A kind of static seemed to float down over the room. Beyond the open door came the sounds of the insects again: their chittering, their snapping mandibles and claws, the fluttering of membranous wings. Her heart felt high in her chest, as if floating at the base of her throat, a hard, sharp muscle, beating.

  Helen had begun to weep now, a few tears and then a kind of gasp and then it was as if she had split open from the force of her grief, her body leaning forward and great hard breaths pulling between the sobs. “Mama . . . Mama . . . ,” she said between, her voice high and distorted like a radio fading on the edge of transmission.

  Evelyn stood watching as if from some great distance, as if the girl who lay in the hospital bed were no kin to her, but then at last she came forward out of that rocky ­topography of the heart and pulled the little metal stool closer to the bed and reached for her and held her, annoyed only that her daughter made no motion of response, not to lean in or to grasp her mother’s hand or do anything but weep and weep.

  “It’s for your own good,” Evelyn said. “You don’t want a baby now. Your whole life is in front of you.”

  “But I want to see him. That’s all. Can’t I just see him?”

  “It’s not a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s just not. That’s what they told me.”

  “Who?”

  “The people at the orphanage.”

  “What did they say?” These words coming in short brief gasps between the sobbing.

  “Just to make it as quick as possible.”

  “Did he look—what did he look like?”

  Evelyn did not answer at first. The question seemed to rake across her like a sheet of sandpaper.

  “Mama?”

  She shook her head.

  “Mama, what did he look like?”

  “You know what he looked like.”

  “No I don’t. I don’t,” she said. “I don’t know because I didn’t get to see him. I don’t know anything. He’s my baby. Mine!”

  “He looked like a Jap, Helen,” Evelyn said now. “Is that what you wanted to know? Does that help you get a picture?”

  “Why are you saying that?”

  “Because that’s the truth.”

  “I love him.”

  “You don’t know what love is,” Evelyn said.

  “Just get away. Just leave me alone and get away from me.”

  “Fine,” Evelyn said. She stood and smoothed her blouse and went to the chair where
she had draped the winter coat she had borrowed from her sister.

  “It’ll be all right, honey,” Dottie said from her station across the room. “You’ll see. It’ll be just fine.”

  “No it won’t,” Helen said, her voice tortured with emotion. “It’ll never be fine.”

  “Now you’re just being dramatic,” Evelyn said.

  “Get out of here!” This came at a volume that was surprising even to Evelyn, who had heard every screech and wail of the girl’s life, a kind of primal shriek that brought Evelyn upright in an instant, her hand flashing through the air, and the impact of her palm against her daughter’s face bringing with it a loud sharp crack.

  “You shut your mouth,” Evelyn said. “You’re being a baby. That’s why I had to take care of it for you. Because you’re not capable of doing it yourself.”

  Helen stared at her mother, eyes wide and brimming with tears, one hand held to her reddening cheek.

  Dottie had come up behind Evelyn, her own hand soft on her older sister’s shoulder. “Come on, Lynnie,” she said. “It’s time to go. Helen needs her rest.”

  “Not a word of thanks for what I’ve done,” Evelyn said, her tone flat.

  “Just leave me alone,” this phrase repeated twice and then a third time as Dottie’s hand pulled gently on her sister’s shoulder and Evelyn at last allowed herself to be turned from the hospital bed. From behind them a nurse entered the room, her bright voice announcing her presence even before she appeared in the doorway, and Evelyn spun to that sound, her mood changing all at once to match. “Why yes that is good news.”

  Helen continued to snivel quietly from her attitude of recline upon the heap of rubbery pillows, as fragile and insubstantial as a bundle of twigs.

  “BUT YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND,” Mrs. Wilson was saying, “that I thought I was doing what was best for my family. You have to understand that.”

  “Mrs. Wilson.”

  “She was just a little girl. Seventeen years old. She didn’t know what she was doing, not really, and it was her whole future out ahead of her.”

  “Mrs. Wilson.”

  “What would you have done had it been one of your own daughters? What would you have—”

  “Evelyn.”

  My eyes had been bouncing back and forth between them as if I were watching a tennis match but now Mrs. Wilson stopped speaking, the flow of words clipped off and the living room ringing with silence.

  “I don’t understand what you’re telling me,” Mrs. ­Takahashi said.

  “Why, I’m trying—I’m trying to tell you about the baby.” Her eyes flashed around the room, bright and wet.

  “Helen’s baby.”

  “Yes, Helen’s, but also . . . oh God, Kim. Oh God how can I say it?”

  I could see it in her eyes then, Mrs. Takahashi’s, the dawning of understanding. First disbelief and then the whole of those years flooding out before her from those days of simple distrust in Newcastle to the night of the stillborn child to the buses on that May afternoon to this moment in her own living room twenty-seven years later, a life I did not even know or understand yet, but which would remain with me in the years to follow, the pieces sometimes coming unbidden and filling in the gaps and details until the whole of it seemed to rest upon my heart: the seeping slats of their barracks room in Tule Lake, the peaches and plums and pears, the long days she had spent in Oakland and finally San Jose, her daughters growing, marrying, her husband still working at the grocery where he had worked since the days just after the war, all of time shifting and moving and turning under her, and that one thing, that one event seeming to rush in across that great spinning disc all at once. She had not said his name in years and years, not out loud, instead keeping it like a soft warm sphere inside her body, intoning it when she chanted with the other practitioners at the church—Namu Amida Butsu Namu Amida Butsu—and which she sometimes heard ringing in her heart. Now it felt as if it had simply been rotating upon time’s great disc all the while and now had come to swing in under her, the name rising through her feet and legs and belly and heart so that when it came to her voice at last it exhaled out of her in a long, quiet breath, its sound seeming to come independent of her throat but alive unto itself: “Raymond.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Wilson said.

  “Raymond’s child. With Helen?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you—” She felt the room tightening now, its walls seeming to draw inward even as her breath caught in her throat, her own room, her own living room with its furniture, with its plastic fruit on the coffee table and the block print of Mount Fuji upon the wall. “You gave the baby away?”

  “To the nuns at the Catholic orphanage. In Seattle. But that’s why I came, Kim. That’s why I came here. Because I need you.” Evelyn’s voice had risen now, not becoming emotional but simply becoming louder, clearer, like a bell ringing in the empty sky.

  But when Kimiko spoke next, her own voice was almost silence itself. “Please leave my home,” she said simply.

  “Kim . . .”

  “Get out of my home,” Mrs. Takahashi said.

  Mrs. Wilson said nothing now and for a long while neither she nor I moved, the room around us choking down until it felt as if all the oxygen had fled, leaving us with our mouths agape as if fish flung up from the sea. Then Mrs. Wilson came to her feet, her mouth closing and her lips forming a thin hard line, her entire body rigid. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. And then, before I could even stand, she was out the door, the broad white shape of it closing hard behind her.

  I set my delicate cup upon the coffee table and stood, still not quite knowing how to behave. “Thank you for the tea,” I mumbled, nodding and then half bowing, embarrassed by that latter action but not knowing what else to do or how to excuse myself, but if Mrs. Takahashi noticed me at all she made no indication of it until I was at the door, my hand upon the knob.

  “Boy or girl?” she said then.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was the baby a boy or a girl?” She sat forward in the chair, her hands upon her lap, unmoving, not looking at me, not looking at anything.

  “I don’t know,” I said simply. Then I opened the door and passed into the bright clear summer sunlight.

  6

  WE DID NOT SPEAK ON THE DRIVE BACK FROM SAN JOSE and I was left to wonder just what I had overheard, the story of that birth in Seattle, Mrs. Wilson and her sister, Dottie, and the baby and Mrs. Wilson’s daughter, Helen. And Ray Takahashi of course, whose name I had not heard before that afternoon.

  Something of the story stayed with me that night, after we had returned to my grandmother’s home and Mrs. Wilson had driven away into the early evening, the sun low and the oaks casting long shadows across the golden summer grasses. My grandmother could hardly understand my questions, although she confirmed that Helen Wilson was, indeed, Evelyn Wilson’s daughter.

  “I didn’t even know she had children,” I told her.

  “A daughter and a son,” my grandmother told me. “Helen married someone from out of town. Maybe Chicago. Or ­Minneapolis? Sales, I think. Must have been twenty years ago now.”

  She was able to fill in some of the details of Mrs. Wilson’s life, for my grandmother had never left Placer County and had the narrative advantage of that constant stream of old-timers passing through the living room nearly every day of the week, bringing with them a rich and colorful variety of local gossip. Perhaps it was for this reason that I did not tell my grandmother the specifics of what I had heard in Mrs. Takahashi’s living room, offering instead a vague rendition comprised mostly of the small talk that had begun the visit, Mrs. Wilson’s asking about the health and well-being of Mrs. Takahashi’s husband and so on. Of course Mrs. Wilson herself had asked me not to speak of what I had heard, an admonition delivered as I pulled to a stop in front of my grandmother’s house. She handed me thirty dollars in cash, more than twice what I made at the gas station during a full eight-hour shift and which I tried feebly to refuse. />
  “John,” she said to me after that transaction was complete. Her eyes had met mine and for the first time that day her focus was fully turned toward me; I could feel her gaze like heat on my face. “I don’t know what you think you heard and I can’t really ask you to keep a secret for me, I mean you don’t owe me anything, but I’d appreciate it very much if you’d . . . if you could, I mean . . .”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Wilson,” I said. “I don’t know who I’d tell anyway.”

  She seemed to glance behind me toward the house in which my grandmother was, even now, peeking through the screen.

  “I won’t say a word,” I said.

  She nodded, her mouth once again a tight line.

  In a way, my silence was a strange thing to agree to, for as Mrs. Wilson herself had pointed out, I had no reason to feel any particular loyalty to her at all, apart, I suppose, from the notion of our being related in some distant fashion. And yet I knew I would not tell my grandmother what I had heard in Mrs. Takahashi’s living room, knew it even before Mrs. ­Wilson asked for my silence. I cannot explain why except to say that it felt private to me, perhaps almost holy, and that even holding this information in trust marked me as a member of what I already assumed was a tiny circle: myself and Mrs. Wilson and Helen, if she was even still alive, and Mrs. Wilson’s sister and now Mrs. Takahashi. It was clear even from listening in utter silence that no one else knew at all.

  And of course I understood why Mrs. Wilson had taken her daughter north to Seattle, why she had removed her daughter’s changing shape from the prying eyes of gossiping neighbors, just as I understood why it was that she did not want me to mention a word of it to my grandmother. Who knows what excuse she gave at the time? Perhaps she simply said she was off to visit her sister. And would anyone have paid a scrap of attention to such a claim? It was a time not unlike that in which I sat later with Chiggers on my grandmother’s back porch, when the names of local boys appeared in the newspaper with regularity, and with them a slowly twisting feeling that death had come with his scythe to waltz among the oaks.