The immaculate floors were so polished that my pitiful worn heels slid as I approached a guard standing by a bronze bust of a man. walter l. newberry, the statue read, and I figured that he must have been some incredible big shot even though I had never heard of him before. The guard directed me up an impressive staircase—I swear that I felt like Cinderella before she was transformed. My heart almost stopped beating. After sleeping in dilapidated wooden barracks and suffering through sandstorms, I couldn’t quite reconcile that I was inside a place like this. And to think that I might even be working here. I came close to stumbling on those stairs a couple of times.
I finally reached a large open room with dozens of wooden desks, light streaming through long rounded windows. There was a reception desk where a man was checking in his briefcase with a blonde woman about my age. She wore a sky-blue dress, and her hair was the color of corn silk.
When it was my turn, I handed her the paperwork. She studied me curiously and asked me to wait as she consulted with her co-worker, a black woman carrying a stack of books, her glossy hair arranged into two rolls atop her head. She wasn’t shy about giving me a once-over, either. At the produce market I had been around whites and even some blacks, but they had all been men who hadn’t paid me much mind.
The hakujin woman made a short phone call, then returned to the receptionist table. “Wait a minute, okay?”
The supervisor in charge eventually appeared, a middle-aged man wearing a light-colored suit. Mr. Geiger had an easy smile. He asked me a few questions before he announced, “You’ll be working here under Mrs. Cannon. Her other assistants will be training you. You’ll start on Monday. Nine o’clock. Don’t be late.”
And with that I was hired.
I could have headed north back to the apartment, but returning to that dreary place didn’t seem appealing after moving through the expanse of the Newberry Library. Across the street was the park—what the young Nisei man had referred to as Bughouse Square. I was curious about these “wackos,” as I had seen my share of men mumbling to themselves on the streets of Skid Row next to the produce market in Los Angeles.
As I crossed the street, I felt normal for a moment, like I used to feel walking around my neighborhood in Tropico. A butterfly flew by. A squirrel scampered to an oak tree. I almost forgot that Rose was gone—that is, until I started thinking that I wanted to bring Rose to the park. I was overwhelmed again by sadness, an emptiness that would never quite be filled.
A long row of wooden benches wrapped around a fountain. I picked a spot and sat for I don’t know how long. Political speakers took turns stepping up on the soap box or standing on the lawn, talking about the evils of fascism and how the Socialist Workers Party was being victimized by the government. Some merely recited recent headlines about the Allied forces winning back Cassino, Italy, from the Germans. My eyes started to flutter. I didn’t want to be seen dozing on the bench like a common vagrant, so I stood up and straightened my dress.
I surveyed the park to make sure no one I knew had spotted me. Sitting on the other side of the fountain was the same strange hakujin man from the funeral, taking notes again. I felt the blood leave my face. What was he doing here? Maybe he was some kind of spy, keeping tabs on us Japanese Americans for the FBI. I felt a need to get out of Bughouse Square pronto.
I was walking at a fast pace down Clark when I heard someone behind me call, “Hey, hey, you—”
I turned to see the blonde reference assistant, breathing hard in her dress. I noticed that she was wearing flats, which was a relief. I couldn’t imagine retrieving and carrying around stacks of books in high heels.
She obviously didn’t know my name, so I introduced myself. Her name was Nancy Kowalski.
“So what are you? Chinese?”
I lowered my eyes. “No, Japanese. I’m a Nisei.” I wasn’t sure if Nancy would understand that term. “Born in America to Japanese parents.”
“My friends are out in the Pacific, fighting the Japs. But I know that you aren’t one of them. I’ve heard about you. The ones on the West Coast who were put in camps. The Tribune has been running all these stories on you. That we shouldn’t be scared of you.”
As she spoke a mile a minute, she gestured frenetically. I didn’t know how to respond to all that she said.
“You’ll like working here.” She looked me up and down. “You seem like you’ll fit in. Problem with me is I like talking so much. Sometimes I get in trouble for making too much conversation with the patrons. I put my foot in my mouth a lot. I’m constantly offending the other girl, Phillis. By the way, you spell her name P-H-I-L-L-I-S, without a Y. If I say something I shouldn’t, tell me, okay? And I’ll apologize in advance. I’ve probably said something offensive already.”
I shook my head. “No,” I lied. “You’ve been kind. And very helpful.”
“And how do I say your name again? Achy?”
“It’s Ah-key. It means autumn in Japanese.”
“Autumn, I like that. I could call you Autumn—no, forget I said that. Achy. I got it.”
I was walking on Clark when I saw Hammer kneeling by Rose’s apartment stoop, throwing a coin against the wall. He had two cigarettes coming out of his mouth, as if one would not be enough.
I hugged my purse against my chest and tried to speed up, hoping that I would not be noticed. Of course, Hammer had a sixth sense about women walking by him.
“Hey, Manzanar.”
Darn it. I could have been rude and ignored him, but I didn’t want him to pursue me. I stopped and turned around. “Aki, remember? And I’m from Tropico.” I didn’t want to be identified by the concentration camp that had held me.
“Okay, Tropico then.” The cigarettes he had held in his mouth were not lit because he stuffed one behind each ear. He was wearing the same mustard-colored suit and it was starting to smell in this humidity. Maybe that was why he used so much cologne.
“You look happy.”
“I got a job.”
“Where?”
“The Newberry Library.”
“That fancy-pants place across from Bughouse Square.” He rubbed his nose with the side of his hand. “Makes sense. You’re so prim and proper. Ito-san’s daughter.”
“Do you know my father?”
“Worked in the produce market for a little while. Before I was fired.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“I’m not the type to wake up at the crack of dawn.”
I was sure he wasn’t. A couple of Nisei women walked past us, exchanging knowing looks. They probably suspected Hammer and I were an item, but that wasn’t going to stop me from talking to him. “Where are you working now?” I asked.
“I’m in between jobs, you might say.”
A wad of bills was stuffed in his top shirt pocket, causing the fabric to sag.
“Seems like you have plenty of money for someone between jobs.”
“A man has to live.” Hammer grinned, revealing a rotten eyetooth. “And no one is going to help us Japs. We gotta help ourselves.”
“Where are you from?”
“Here, there, and everywhere.”
“Stop being like that. Seems like you know plenty about my family and I know nothing about you.”
Hammer rolled his tongue in his mouth as if he were sucking on hard candy. “How about I tell you one fact about me,” he finally offered.
“Okay. But it can’t be silly like what color socks you’re wearing.”
Hammer straightened, tossing the coin into his palm. He said nothing for a while and I turned to leave.
“I’m an orphan.” He said it to my back, like he didn’t want me to feel sorry for him. But I immediately did. I wondered if he might have been in that Manzanar orphanage, the one we called Children’s Village. I didn’t know what to say, so I stopped in my tracks and turned around to at least acknowledge th
at I had heard him. Apparently that was the right response because he grinned again.
Hammer was a bundle of contradictions and I didn’t know quite what to make of him. Since he had made himself more vulnerable to me, I pushed forward with my inquiry. “What did you mean by what you said to Roy Tonai at the funeral? Something about you treating Rose better than Roy had.”
“Ah, nothing.”
“No, really, I want to know.”
“Tonai has a short fuse. I don’t know if you knew that about him.”
I had seen Roy in all types of situations at the produce market. One time a grower from Long Beach tried to sell some soft cucumbers to my father and claimed that Roy had approved the transaction during a poker game. My father sent me to find Roy. When Roy heard what the farmer was claiming, I thought that he was going to blow his lid. He nearly pushed the farmer and his crates off the loading dock.
“So that’s it? Are you saying that you saw him get mad at my sister?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Hammer was hiding something and I was getting nowhere with him. The sun was going down; my parents were probably wondering where I was. I couldn’t wait to tell them that I had found a job. Maybe it didn’t pay that much, but it was a lot more than the twelve dollars a month that I’d been making in camp. And it was someplace gorgeous, less than a mile away.
“Well, I have to go. My parents are waiting for me.” I hoofed it down the sidewalk.
I was a few yards away when I heard him yell out, “Tropico, I like your new hairstyle.”
Chapter 8
There are some wild nightclubs here in Chicago. There’s one with a Hawaiian name that many Nisei men like to go to. Women—Caucasian, black and Japanese—loiter out front in their low-cut dresses, practically daring passersby to enter. It’s common to see men lying down in their own vomit on the sidewalk from overdrinking. Mom would find it so disgraceful.
After my first week at the Newberry, Nancy was still calling me “Achy,” but I didn’t correct her. She was trying her best, and under the circumstances, her best was more than enough. Phillis Davis, the other assistant, kept her eyes on me constantly. It was as if she had never seen a Japanese person before. Then again, maybe she hadn’t.
Both of them were good at explaining what our duties were. We checked briefcases in and out, answered the telephone and went into the stacks to retrieve books and ephemera that were ordered by the reference librarian on behalf of the patrons.
The patrons were mostly older hakujin men who might have been professors at the local colleges. Not all of them, though. One woman regularly checked in a large lattice bag filled with parcels from local department stores. I knew in fact that she was the mother of a young child, because once she told me that time had gotten away from her and she was going to be late picking up her son from the school across the street. Another patron, a sharply-dressed black man, arrived with a different pocket square every visit.
There was a room where we could take our breaks, but I preferred to sit outside in Bughouse Square. Our lunchtimes were staggered so that at least one person would be working the desk.
Near the end of my first week of work, I was finishing a butter sandwich when Nancy joined me on my bench. I was a bit disappointed for my lunch sanctuary to be discovered but smiled at her nonetheless.
“So this is where you go off to. I sometimes take photos over here.” She pulled out her own paper-bag lunch. “Kielbasa; have you had it?” Wrapped in wax paper was a long sausage in a roll. “Here.” She broke off one end and handed it to me.
The boiled sausage looked so delicious; I couldn’t turn it down. And sure enough, it was salty and meaty. I hadn’t had anything so tasty in quite a while.
As we ate, we watched a few people rant and rave on the grass. One was a regular—a grizzled, shrunken man about my height who warned against the evils of American fascism. While I’d heard him repeat the same message twice already, today his scraggly red beard was shaved off, making him look twenty years younger.
After he jumped off his apple crate, I finally summoned the courage to bring up something that had been on my mind. “I don’t think Phillis likes me much.”
“Oh, she’s like that. She doesn’t wear her emotions on her sleeve. I thought that she completely loathed me and then I’ve come to find out that she doesn’t mind me. I think that’s the best you can do with Phillis.”
“Does she live close by?”
“She’s on the South Side. You know, the part where most of the Negroes live. I’m over in West Town near the Polonia Triangle.” Nancy chewed quickly, a ball of sausage and roll expanding her right cheek. “Her brother is in the service. Army, I think. She won’t talk much about it. But she’s always sending letters to him. I see her putting the envelopes in the mailbox on the corner.”
I wondered what Phillis thought of me. Maybe I was the enemy in her mind.
Nancy went on to talk about her family, which seemed to multiply many times over during our conversation. I actually enjoyed her prattling trivia about who was married to whom and how many children they had. “Do you have any brothers and sisters?” she finally asked.
I didn’t know how to answer that question. Out of habit, my mouth said, “Yes, a sister. She’s three years older than me.” And then my head kicked in. “But she’s not here in Chicago.” I glanced at my watch and then got up abruptly, saying that my break was over.
I felt numb as I went to relieve Phillis. I think that she may have been annoyed that I was a few minutes late, but in that moment, I couldn’t have cared less.
When I got home from work, Mom was cooking. She had found a part-time job, cleaning a Clark Street barbershop operated by the Bellos, two Filipino brothers. With all the stray hair and dirty tools, the shop needed to be cleaned every day. Pop didn’t want her to go in late at night, so the Bello brothers and Mom struck a deal that she’d go in bright and early every morning around seven o’clock. With that arrangement, Mom was able to make dinner for us every night.
Using the electric burner in our kitchenette, she simmered scraps of beef and carrots in what smelled like a sukiyaki sauce. I wasn’t sure where she got the soy sauce and rationed sugar, but the sukiyaki wasn’t even the best surprise.
“We have gohan!” I exclaimed as Mom raised the cover of another pot, the steam lifting the stray strands of her hair.
Splendid rice—the sticky kind, not the type the hakujin ate with butter, all pasa-pasa, loose like sand. We had had rice in camp, too, but mess-hall rice was its own special creation. Sometimes it clumped together like some kind of swamp monster; other times, it looked okay but tasted like cardboard.
“Where’s Pop?”
“He was going to the WRA office. To see about a job.”
We waited for half an hour until six, but neither one of us could last longer than that. The meat was already getting overcooked, the sauce too reduced.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” I said, giving us permission to enjoy our first sukiyaki meal in our apartment in Chicago. I spooned the food onto two mismatched china plates, donations from the Friends. Before the sauce spilled over the lip of my plate, I was able to scoot some of the rice to absorb it.
Even though the sukiyaki didn’t quite taste like the kind Mom used to make in Tropico, it was the best meal that I’d had in at least two years. Enryo, self-restraint, was a Japanese cultural value that Mom emphasized, and it took as much enryo as possible not to eat Pop’s share.
Mom picked at her food, checking out the window for Pop, even though it was too dark to identify the people walking below.
I dragged my spoon on the surface of the plate to make sure that there was no remaining sauce. Because of Pop’s absence, Mom couldn’t settle down and fully enjoy her dinner. “I’ll check with Harriet. Maybe she knows something.”
I went downstairs to the second floor and knock
ed on Harriet’s door. I heard rustling, perhaps even low voices, before the door was opened an inch, revealing Harriet’s right eye.
“Oh, Aki,” she said.
I’d thought Harriet would let me in, but she positioned her body right in front of the crack in the door. I actually didn’t know much about Harriet—if she lived with her parents, was married or had a boyfriend.
“Ah, I was wondering if you saw my father in the office today.”
“I’m so sorry that it didn’t work out.”
I frowned and Harriet seemed regretful for revealing some information that she perhaps shouldn’t have.
“It’s hard to find a position for a man over fifty who isn’t a native speaker,” she explained. “The factories don’t want him. And housewives don’t want Issei men inside of their homes. You understand.”
“So he didn’t get a position?”
Harriet hesitated before admitting, “No.”
“He hasn’t come home tonight, so we were worried.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. He left the WRA about three o’clock, I think.”
That was more than four hours ago.
Harriet apologized that she needed to take care of something quickly and closed the door. “The milk boiled over,” I heard a male voice say. Who was she hiding?
When I returned to the apartment, I told Mom a white lie. I said that Pop had gone in for an interview.
“Maybe they hire him,” Mom said, lifting an overflowing spoonful of rice toward her mouth.
Later, as I washed the dishes, I tried not to worry. No matter how much I studied the Triple A map, I still didn’t understand Chicago. There were the special attractions by Chicago Harbor—the Field Museum, the lagoon, Grant Park, the Art Institute. And farther north, beaches and Lincoln Park, which had a zoo and golf courses. Everyone talked about the Loop, but I still didn’t have a clear understanding of what was loopy about downtown.
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