Since no one had thought to detain us—Kevin and I quietly made our exit from the parade grounds.
Chapter Twelve
Peabody spoke in a strangled voice, as if his mouth were filled with hot potatoes.
“Now look here, Binny. I’ve reviewed that chicken project of yours, and I’m more convinced than ever that it’s not right for me. Let me assure you that my feelings have nothing to do with merit. As a matter of fact, I find the second stage of your procedure quite intriguing. But I know my capabilities, and I wouldn’t have the faintest idea of how to proceed with it.”
“I always felt the second stage is the one that needs work.”
“No, no, you’re wrong on that. The second stage is ingenious. I really got into it when I reached the second stage. But ultimately, it’s not for me. More to the point, you’re a darling man. I adore working with you and can hardly wait to see you. When do you leave?”
“On the first available plane.”
It was amazing. I had called Peabody from Japan to explain what had happened on the parade grounds and all he wanted to talk about was my procedure for eliminating northern fowl mites from caged layer hens. It was as if he had thought of nothing else since I’d left. Surprisingly, he hadn’t heard of the attack on Mr. Matsumoto, but as I filled him in on the details, he listened with little interest as if his mind was on larger issues.
“You didn’t happen to hire those fellows, did you?” I asked.
“Of course not, Binny. I’m surprised at you.”
Then, not surprisingly, he told me I could forget about the $250,000 fee I was supposed to receive. As to the money I owed the organization, he said I should just relax; he was sure they would make some kind of “arrangement.”
Reduced down to basics, what this meant as I prepared to leave Japan was that I was now some $50,000 in the hole. I tried to think of some good that had come out of the experience and consoled myself with the thought that I had at least been among the Japanese and had a sense of their way of doing things, which was so different from ours and easily accounted for the conflicts that kept springing up between our two great nations.
As an example, they were ashamed of almost everything they did—yet they went ahead and did it. Whereas if we were ashamed of some action of ours, we might think twice before proceeding. That type of thing.
Naturally, I would have preferred to stay a bit longer so that I could visit a few shrines and maybe catch one of their puppet shows. But as always, I was anxious to get back to Lettie.
I had a last drink with Kevin Kurosawa at the hotel and told him it looked like I would not get paid for all that work.
“I understand your feelings, Matthew, and believe me I feel for you. You’re hurt and I don’t blame you. But look at it this way. You’ve got your health, you’ve got your family, although it is tragic that you lost your wife, and believe me I feel for you on that, too—but the important thing is that you tried, which is all anyone can expect. I tried to make the networks, I came this close; there were certain people who were out to get me, but I did try. If you like, I’ll call Val and tell him you’re a credit to his organization. If you ask me—and I’m sure Sandy would agree—he should kiss your ass in appreciation of the job you’re doing.”
“I don’t need him to kiss my ass.”
“That’s your decision, Matthew, and I respect it. I’d also like to add that you made a terrific impression on the guys at the Parrot Club. They expected you to be a snob, but you came across as a modest guy and charmed the shit out of them.”
“Maybe I’ll come back and actually spend some time with them.”
“I wouldn’t do that. Sometimes it doesn’t work out the second time. You do have some flaws, you are a little sensitive. They might notice that on a repeat visit. I’d quit while I was ahead.
“Take care of yourself,” he said, giving me a farewell hug. “And if you happen to run into someone at one of the networks, I’d appreciate your putting in a good word for me. I can announce, Matthew. Believe me. All I need is a break.”
Though it was unlikely that I’d meet any network representatives in our community, I said that if I ran into one I would certainly tell the fellow about Kevin. Upon hearing that, he became emotional, and it was all I could do to get him out of the hotel before he collapsed in tears. Yet there was no question that I had made a new friend, whether I wanted one or not. A friend who would be there if I ever got into trouble, which I was in already.
Not that anyone would ever take the place of Little Irwin.
After seeing Kevin off, I returned to the lobby, and picked up an English-language newspaper, which reported in a front-page story that the police had apprehended the men who had attacked Mr. Matsumoto at the penis festival. They were identified as a group of turbine grinders who had become incensed when the work they did at the Matsumoto Company was farmed out to a shop in Queens that claimed it could do the job for half the price. Though the accused men acknowledged that Mr. Matsumoto was a decent man and had probably acted in response to the rising yen, they felt they had to bash in his head in order to make a statement.
So Peabody had not despatched them, after all.
Impressed as I was by the speed and efficiency of the Japanese police, their excellent work did not help my situation. It could be argued that I was in worse shape than when I had started out for Japan. Certainly this was true of my finances. Yet oddly enough, I did not feel in the least bit dejected. As Kevin had astutely pointed out, I had worked up to the full limit of my capabilities. Was it my fault that fate had intervened and sent an incensed bunch of turbine grinders to carry out my assignment?
As Lettie would say: I don’t think so!
Though I knew my daughter was too old for toys, I found one at the airport that I could not resist buying. It was a little Japanese fellow with a pointy hat and a pointy nose who would trot up to the side of the counter, look down, decide it was a bad idea to jump down, then turn around and somersault over to the other end of the counter to see what the situation was there. And so on. He was the most intelligent little mechanical fellow I had ever come across, one more example of Japanese ingenuity.
I’d hate to be around if they ever decided to start another war.
I took a last look around and then boarded the plane, anxious to see my daughter and to return to the country I would never forsake, which is not to say that I wouldn’t consider returning to Japan for a couple of months if, for example, someone offered me a grant.
If nothing else, I could tell them about chickens.
Chapter Thirteen
Lettie was waiting for me with some questions she had stored up, and as usual they were hard ones.
She wanted to know about thunder and lightning. I took a stab at lightning, saying it had something to do with electricity in the clouds. As to thunder, the best I could come up with is that it followed lightning, which she knew. Then I got a little fancy and said that thunder might be the gods’ way of roaring their approval of lightning. She wasn’t so sure about that, but my speculation did lead her into inquiring about our family’s position on God. I said we more or less believed in him, but only informally. The case that he existed was only circumstantial, but it was a strong one, as evidenced by the trees and the flowers and the freckles on her nose—which obviously didn’t just get there.
And I made sure to say that for all we knew it could be a woman up there.
“I think it’s a man. But what about the devil?”
“He’s just there to balance things out so that we don’t have too easy a time of it. And besides, he’s fun.”
“Why do bad things have to happen?”
“The best explanation I ever heard on that is that God is a novelist, and he has to think of exciting new plot developments to keep the story going. Sometimes he forgets that there are flesh and blood folks down here playing his characters and having to act out his scenes.”
“Maybe he should have an assistant to remind him.
”
“I think he should. But he’s probably on a tight budget.”
I got a laugh out of her on that one.
Then she said: “I don’t see why I have to go to school when I could stay home with you and learn just as much.”
Though I was flattered by Lettie’s confidence in me, I did not feel there was much in the way of formal knowledge I could pass along to her. Inspired by my father’s interest in literary matters, I had signed up at the local junior college for an English program, thinking there might be a place for me at some point in the burgeoning field of communications. But my hopes came crashing down when a substitute English teacher accused me of plagiarism in a book report. What I had written was that in 1940 “the black clouds of Nazi oppression hovered over a sleeping Europa.”
“No freshman could come up with that,” he had said, waving my paper in the air and embarrassing me in front of my classmates, several of whom happened to be cute girls. (One of them was really cute and kept crossing and uncrossing her legs, offering up a slice of panties, and driving me to distraction.) As a result of his attack on my integrity, I fainted and had to be slapped awake by the botany instructor.
I felt I had no choice but to leave school, even though the head of the department said I could continue if I was careful in the future about stealing other people’s descriptive passages.
That ended my college studies—a classic case of a promising student (and let me blow my own horn here) cut down by a cruel and frivolous accusation. Who knows what heights I might have attained had I been permitted to continue at school. Should we put such power in the hands of mean-spirited so-called educators (no doubt with their own private agenda) who with a careless and unthinking whim can snuff out the dreams of a young man, be he gifted or not? (And why has no one in authority come forth to ask that question?)
Despite the setback, I continued along, and, of course, I soon developed expertise in poultry distribution. But beyond that, I could not honestly offer more to Lettie than scraps of information I had picked up along the way through my personal reading. I could recite a few lines of Shakespeare—“I can summon spirits from the vasty deep”—that type of thing—and I had some knowledge of historical figures, if not the forces that determined history itself. For example, I knew that Helmuth von Moltke had defeated the French in 1870 by using an ingenious railroad system that enabled him to get his troops to the front before the enemy arrived. I could also hold forth on the Schlieffen Plan and how the Germans, if they had paid strict attention to it, might have emerged victorious in the Great War. And of course there was my theory of the prostate gland and how it had affected historical decisions to a much greater degree than people realized.
So I could tell Lettie about von Moltke and Schlieffen and the prostate gland (I hadn’t yet and was waiting for the proper time to salt all of that in), but I was aware that she would need much more in order to get ahead in life.
And of course there was another concern. Considering the work I had been doing for Peabody, could I claim to have the moral credentials to teach a young child? I’m not even going to touch that one.
“You’re better off in school,” I told her.
Then we got ready for dinner at Peabody’s hotel. He had asked me to join him and said he’d be honored to have Lettie come along this time.
“Is it a dress-up affair?” she asked me.
“I don’t see why not.”
She raced into her room and took about forty seconds to get into her white party dress.
With her big brown eyes and her long brown hair, still wet from the shower, she looked like a young French girl from the Loire Valley or some place like that, waiting to be discovered as a Hollywood actress.
“You look beautiful.”
“All fathers say that.”
“I know they do. But I’m right.”
Chapter Fourteen
Peabody greeted me as if he were standing on the White House lawn and I had just come back from a tough negotiation in the Middle East.
“Binny, Binny, Binny,” he said, embracing me. “Welcome back. It’s tremendously good to see you.”
I said I was happy to see him, too, and the three of us sat down at the Garfield Hotel dining room table that he had reserved. There were chandeliers overhead, and the table was all set up with candelabras and long-stemmed wine glasses.
Lettie pulled her high-back chair in close and buried herself in the menu.
“She’s ravishing,” Peabody whispered to me, “but I don’t think she much cares for me.”
“She’s shy,” I whispered back, although he may have been right.
“You’re too kind, Binny,” he said, becoming disconsolate. “It’s been that way all my life. Women showing some mild interest in me and then suddenly disappearing.”
“It only takes one,” I said, trying to cheer him up and thinking of all the dating I had done before I ran into Glo at the hog auction.
“It’s too late,” he said, looking mournfully off in the distance.
Then he had one of his sudden mood swings.
“Actually,” he said brightly, “I’m having rather a decent time of it living alone.”
And he did look pretty good, as if he’d spent a lot of time on a treadmill and possibly under a sunlamp.
When the waiter arrived, Lettie asked me if she could have the chicken and a glass of milk. She was aware of how sensitive I’d become about anything having to do with poultry since losing my job at the distributor. And she always made sure to check with me before ordering a chicken dish. But now that I had branched out into another field, I was much less touchy about the subject and told her to go right ahead with the chicken.
When our food arrived, I trimmed the fat off Lettie’s portion of legs and thighs and then cut the breast into little pieces before sliding the plate back over to her.
Peabody acted as if it was the most amazing thing he had ever seen in his life.
“My God, Binny,” he said, almost choking on his salad. “You’re cutting up her chicken. Why on earth are you doing that?
“I’m not going to be able to do it much longer,” I said. “So I might as well do it now.”
“But don’t you see …” he said, and then his voice trailed off as if my actions had been so outrageous that any attempt to comment on them would be hopeless.
Then he settled down and looked at the two of us fondly.
“You’re so lucky, Binny. My family’s a bloody mess. And you have your wife … daughter …”
“My wife is dead.”
“Oh, yes, she is, isn’t she. I believe you mentioned that. And now you’ll probably never forgive me.”
“I forgive you. But I do like to keep it straight.”
“I can well appreciate that.”
Then he turned his attention to Lettie.
“So, Lettie,” he said brightly. “You’re a chicken fancier, are you. So are my daughters, come to think of it.”
Lettie nodded thoughtfully as if to absorb the fact that Peabody’s daughters enjoyed chicken. He asked her if she liked school and swimming and things like that, and she gave him one-word answers such as “yes” and “no,” which he responded to with a nervous giggle. I had probably told him that Lettie was interested in movie producing and he said he had various friends in London named Ian and Nigel who were in the film business, but he didn’t get too far with her on that score either.
There was a children’s arcade in the lobby, and when we had polished off our desserts, I gave her some quarters to go play in it.
“It isn’t that she doesn’t like me,” said Peabody, when Lettie had left the table. “She hates me.”
“It’s nothing personal. She’s the same way with me on the phone.”
“Yes, but we’re not on the phone,” said Peabody despairingly.
We ordered brandies and after we had taken a few sips of them, Peabody beamed at me and said: “So here we are, old friend. I can’t tell you what a pleasu
re it’s been working with you. You’ve got a tremendous knack for this sort of thing, and it would be a pity if you dropped it.”
“You mean we’re finished?”
“Well, yes,” he said, and then added wistfully, “although it does seem a bit incomplete, doesn’t it?”
“For one thing, I didn’t actually do anything.”
“You mustn’t feel that way. I certainly know what you’ve accomplished. I just wish Thomas Gnu was aware of it. I tried to get through to him and tell him about Dickie and Matsumoto, but he’s closed his office and gone off to Uzbekistan to see some woman. Imagine traveling all that distance for a blowjob.”
“You’d think he’d be able to get one closer to home.”
“You’d have to know him. Dreadful little man,” he shuddered. “But with regard to the work we’ve done, it’s as if there’s some ingredient missing in an otherwise excellent sauce. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but if I do, I promise to be in touch.”
“What about the money?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” he said, pulling a little packet out of his pocket and handing it to me. “Thanks for reminding me. I’ve given you a coupon book. You can mail something off to us each month. It doesn’t have to be substantial. There’s no need for you to put a strain on yourself. On the other hand, you don’t want to avert our eyes, so to speak.
“And I’d better go now,” he said, getting to his feet. “Say goodbye to Lettie for me. I’d stay a bit longer but I don’t want to become too emotional.”
And that was that and for all I knew it might have been the last I’d ever see of Valentine Peabody.
When we got back to the house, I took a look at the coupon book and saw that there were about three years’ worth of monthly payments that had to be made, with a penalty for being more than fifteen days late. The checks were to be made out to a company called Global Enterprises, Inc., and sent to a post office box in Karachi, Pakistan.
A Father's Kisses Page 14