“I’m sorry, but what is Amache?” asks Isabel.
“They still don’t teach much about the camps in school, do they?”
“You mean the internment camps?” Isabel asks. “Of course. We read Farewell to Manzanar. It was incredible what this country did to their own people.”
“Yes, well, Amache was the camp in Colorado, and Mr. Yamada has never recovered from the winters there,” Mom says quietly. “That’s why he’s always cold. Always. Even in the middle of summer.”
As Mom turns onto a quiet street shaded with palm trees, Isabel looks at us.
“What?” demands Caleb.
“You really should read Farewell to Manzanar. I mean, it’s like your history, Ted. I thought all schools taught it.”
“Maybe we’re getting it this year,” I guess. “You know, Purisma isn’t some fancy private school.”
“I would have thought you’d have read it anyway. Over a hundred thousand American citizens put into camps during World War Two just because their parents came from Japan.” Isabel leans forward. “Was your family interned, Mrs. Gerson?”
“No, only the most powerful and influential, about two thousand out of the more than one hundred and fifty thousand Japanese Americans in Hawaii were interned. The rest of us were spared, but only because there were so many of us,” Mom says simply. “They were such a big part of the workforce that removing them would have ruined the economy, especially since there was so much recovery to do after Pearl Harbor. People on the mainland lost their homes, their businesses, everything. Most people in Hawaii…didn’t.”
My mom spots an open space a few houses down from where Mr. Yamada lives with his daughter and eases the car over to the curb. We kids get out and walk toward the big house on the corner, and she waits to make sure we get in okay.
As we approach the entrance, I hear the thrum of an expensive car rumbling behind us, kind of like the Archermobile. I quickly turn to see that it isn’t Mr. Archer at all. It isn’t even the same make of car.
This one is a cool black Jaguar XJ6 sedan, gleaming in the California sunlight, driven by a man with a narrow face and a thatch of neatly trimmed gray hair. He passes us just as we find ourselves at the door to the Yamada house, ringing the bell.
The front garden is like something in a park, with a pond in the middle. Swimming lazily in the water are bright orange-and-white fish, swirling and circling, just like in a koi pond you’d find in Japan.
Mr. Yamada’s daughter opens the door and greets us with a big smile.
“Hello, hello, hello!” she sings. “I’m Donna Yamada. My dad will be right with you! Come in! Come in!”
Everything about Donna Yamada is big. She’s got this large face with huge eyes and a round nose. I glance at Caleb and know that he is dying to draw her. He wouldn’t have to exaggerate anything. She already looks like a cartoon character.
“I’m so glad you made it,” Donna booms. “I hope the traffic wasn’t too bad!”
“No traffic at all, Ms. Yamada,” I reply. “I guess we came at the right time.”
Donna leans forward and looks at me, beaming. It’s like coming face to face with a giant Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. Unnerving.
“You have to be Ted. I can see your great-uncle in you.”
I want to say something along the lines that duh, I’m Ted, seeing as I’m the only one here who looks remotely Asian. But Donna is so nice (and hovering dangerously over me), I can’t imagine saying anything mean to her.
As she ushers us in, Donna points. “You see that plaque?” She glances at me. “As I’m sure Ted knows, those two Japanese characters”—she turns to Isabel and makes pointed eye contact—“or kanji, spell out Yama and Da. Our name! Yama means ‘mountain,’ and da means ‘rice paddy.’ ‘Rice paddy beside the mountain.’ Yama-da!” Donna says, wide-eyed and slowly.
“You wouldn’t by any chance…be an elementary school teacher, would you?” I ask.
Donna’s face brightens even more, if possible. “As a matter of fact, I am! Very good, Ted! I teach third grade at Gardena Elementary!”
Donna motions for us to follow her. She picks up a tray of glasses of ice water she set up in the kitchen. “My dad may not show it, but he is very excited that you’re here. Don’t be put off by him, okay? He’s kind of formal.
“Take these,” she says, motioning to the glasses. “You’ll need them.”
She leads us down a hallway to the back of the house. She opens a door, which leads to a small greenhouse attached to the back of the garage. As soon as she opens the door, the heat envelops us like a blanket. I see Caleb’s bangs go limp against his forehead. His glasses fog up and my shirt immediately starts clinging to my chest and back like a damp towel.
Only the eternally cool Isabel looks unchanged.
There is a man with his back to us, wearing a heavy wool sweater buttoned all the way up. He’s clearly involved in something that’s more important to him than a group of kids. Without turning around, he greets us.
“Thank you so much for this visit,” Mr. Yamada says in a formal tone I’ve only heard in movies.
Then he turns, and I see there’s a smile on his face.
Unlike his daughter, he’s small and compact. I guess you could say he’s elegant, in a way. Donna must have gotten her size from her mother’s side of the family.
His eyes crinkle into small lines as he smiles wider, and he bows to us.
For once, I’m glad Isabel knows how to talk to grown-ups so well. While I stand there awkwardly, Isabel starts simply. “Thank you so much for seeing us.” She makes this ridiculous formal little bow, which makes Mr. Yamada laugh out loud.
“I am guessing you are not Ted’s grand-nephew?” he jokes.
I step forward. “That would be me.”
“A great pleasure to meet you.” Mr. Yamada leans forward and examines my face for a moment. “Yes, I see…your uncle in you.”
“And I’m Caleb Grant, um…a friend of Ted’s,” Caleb adds, as if he needs to explain his reason for being here. He bows too.
“And this lovely young lady is?” asks Mr. Yamada, turning to Isabel.
“Isabel Archer, sir. Is that a bonsai?” On a worktable behind Mr. Yamada is a small dish holding a perfect miniature tree, with a series of metal tools and wires next to it.
His face lights up. “You know bonsai, Miss Archer?”
Isabel approaches the tiny tree and propping her elbows on the table, rests her head on her hands. “A little. I know that it’s a Japanese art of pruning and twisting trees so that they grow in a special way.”
Mr. Yamada motions Caleb and me over to join Isabel.
“It is that…and it is not that. Those are the techniques by which one turns an ordinary tree or a cutting into bonsai. But bonsai is much more.”
Mr. Yamada looks at the tree and slowly picks up a pair of beautiful silver scissors. He leans in and with great deliberation snips a tiny leaf from one branch.
“For the lover of bonsai, it is a symbol of something which brings us closer to nature, and to perfection itself, although we may never achieve it,” Mr. Yamada continues, looking lovingly at his little tree. “This is what is meant by the expression ‘heaven and earth in one container.’ ”
Right now, it feels like all the sweat in heaven and earth from one container has been absorbed in my shorts.
He points to the tree. “Tradition holds that three basic virtues are necessary to create a bonsai: shin-zen-bi, standing for truth, goodness, and beauty.” He turns and looks at me. “Your great-uncle possessed these virtues as well.”
I nod, not sure what to say.
“So my great-uncle was into this stuff?” I ask.
Mr. Yamada laughs, and I swear his whole body shakes.
“Ted? Bonsai? He used to tease me about my love for these things. He found it all very silly. Your great-uncle was a very practical man.”
“Can you tell me anything else about him?” I ask.
“He talked very little about his past before opening his shop. At one point I saw that some scientific journals had been delivered and asked about them,” Mr. Yamada remembers. “It seemed he was a scientist of some kind after the war.”
“Yes,” Isabel interjects, “we saw some of those journals at his apartment when we were cleaning it up. And lots of books.”
“Very odd, your great-uncle quitting his well-regarded and well-paid profession like that, wouldn’t you say?” asks Mr. Yamada, watching us.
Then he stops, turning to his tree.
Snip!
At this point, I would sell Caleb to the circus for another glass of ice water.
“Then again, as you get older, you tend to cut away those things that are not necessary. Like this tree, I suppose.” Mr. Yamada studies his little tree for a moment more. “Part of bonsai is to cut away everything that is not essential, leaving only the essence, the pure truth of the object. Perhaps your great-uncle was doing some pruning of his own.”
“Maybe,” I say, but then I remember the stacks of rice bags and futons and newspapers piled up in the apartment. “I’m not sure how good my great-uncle was at pruning things out of his life.”
“Yes, well…he was a good man, and did not deserve to go the way he did.”
I pull the lighter out of my pocket with a damp hand and hold it up. Time to get this show on the road.
“We found this when we were cleaning his apartment. We thought maybe you would want it, to remember him by.” Mr. Yamada’s eyes widen at the sight of the lighter. He seems genuinely surprised.
“You—you found it?”
“Yes,” I say, looking at him, thrown by his reaction. Why is he so surprised? “Is there something wrong?”
“No, not at all.” Mr. Yamada pulls himself together and is once again the model of composure. “It’s only that I haven’t seen it in some time….”
“I’m sure he would have wanted you to have it,” I continue.
Mr. Yamada reaches out and closes my hand around the lighter. It’s something of a shock to feel the coldness of his hands, even in this oven of a room. What did those winters in the camp as a child do to him?
“No, he would have wanted you to have it,” Mr. Yamada says gently. He stares at it for a moment. “You do know the significance of that figure, I hope?”
“No, actually, we were hoping you would be able to help us with that,” Caleb says.
“That’s the symbol for the Nisei brigade—the all–Japanese American unit that served bravely in World War Two,” Mr. Yamada says proudly. “Your great-uncle was in it, and served throughout the entire campaign.”
“What was the number of the unit?” Isabel asks suddenly, catching my eye.
“There was the 100th Battalion and the 442nd Regiment. You should learn about their history,” Mr. Yamada replies, turning to me. “People thought of us as dirty Japs after Pearl Harbor, and thought some of us could be spies. That’s why they started the internment camps. They said if there were any spies, the camps couldn’t do any harm. But when the call went out for volunteers to fight in Honolulu, they were looking for fifteen hundred men. Ten thousand showed up. Those were some of the finest soldiers in the army.”
And Great-Uncle Ted was one of them! Awesome!
“Did he ever talk about that time?”
“I’d ask him, but he’d always wave me away, telling me it was a long time ago and he wanted to just forget about the whole thing.”
“Did he ever show you any souvenirs from the war?” Isabel asks, holding her glass to her forehead. “Like a wooden box, maybe?”
“I don’t remember any wooden box,” Mr. Yamada says quickly. “The only thing I remember seeing that he brought back from the war was a Colt .45 automatic, which he always kept behind the counter.”
“For protection against robbers?” Caleb guesses.
“Maybe,” Mr. Yamada muses. “His store was in an area in downtown LA called Little Tokyo. Back then it was…less safe.”
I think back to the ransacked apartment. I look over at Caleb and know what he’s thinking. “Was he afraid of something?”
“Maybe. He would never say.”
“Did you ever visit him at his apartment?”
“I didn’t even know where he lived,” Mr. Yamada protests. “One day his shop was there, and then the next thing I knew, it was closed and no one knew where he had disappeared to. I was very sad, as he had the best selection of sake—rice wine,” he said, bowing slightly to Isabel, “that anyone had in the area. Also, he was such fun to talk to.”
“But you visited him in the hospital, didn’t you?” asks Isabel.
“Yes, it’s a funny thing. One of the parents in my daughter’s third-grade class was a nurse on his floor. She mentioned that there was an old Japanese man on the floor and happened to mention the name. My daughter remembered it and told me. I was so happy to have been able to see him before he passed.”
I feel the need to ask one more question. “What kinds of things would my great-uncle talk to you about when you would visit him?”
Mr. Yamada looks puzzled.
“Well…he was in a lot of pain. But sometimes he actually would talk of the war. And he would joke about how his luck had finally caught up with him.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“I guess he’d had some close calls, and lost more than a few friends. And he’d been able to live a long, healthy life up to that point. But being put on the thirteenth floor, he felt, was an omen.”
“So he was superstitious?” asks Isabel.
“I think he just felt it was one more sign that he wasn’t going to get better. Soon after, they moved him into the ICU, and I never saw him again.”
Mr. Yamada turns back to his little tree.
Caleb coughs. He looks like he’s having trouble breathing.
“I gotta get out of here,” he whispers to me. “I think I’m allergic to something.”
“Well, thank you very much for your time, Mr. Yamada,” I say.
Donna meets us in the hallway, where the cold air is like a welcome slap in the face. I’m so grateful she has paper towels for us, which Caleb and I happily use to dry our faces and sopping-wet hair.
Isabel, on the other hand…
“You’re a very…dry…girl,” Donna remarks.
“Thank you,” Isabel answers with a small smile. “I get my sense of humor from my father’s side of the family. I think it’s kind of a New England thing—”
“Actually, I was referring to the fact that you don’t sweat much,” says Donna.
“Oh…right….I guess that’s an East Coast thing too…,” Isabel says quickly.
Yeah, right. An East Coast thing. I think of my uncle Morty, back in Brooklyn. If the temperature goes above seventy, sweat stains the size of grapefruits sprout under each armpit. We head outside to wait for my mom.
“Well, other than finding out that sitting in a sauna makes you lose about ten pounds of water weight, I don’t know what we learned in there,” Caleb grouses.
“I thought all that stuff about bonsai trees was fascinating,” says Isabel.
“Wait a minute,” I say.
“What?” asks Isabel.
“He said my great-uncle thought it was a bad omen that he was on the thirteenth floor, right?”
“Yeah, so what?” says Caleb.
“La Purisma General Hospital doesn’t have a thirteenth floor.”
“What are you saying?” asks Isabel. “It only has twelve floors?”
“No,” I answer. “It has sixteen floors.”
Caleb looks at me like I’m from another planet. “Dude, I don’t know how to tell you this, but if it has sixteen floors…it’s gotta have a thirteenth floor.”
Before I can say anything, Isabel breaks in. “I stayed at a hotel where they skipped from the twelfth floor right to the fourteenth floor. No one wanted to stay on the thirteenth floor because it was bad luck. Is that what you mean?”<
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“Exactly. Lots of hospitals don’t have thirteenth floors. My dad teases my mom about it all the time. ‘All those rational scientists, believing in superstition.’ Of course, it’s really for the patients.”
“So why would Mr. Yamada say that about your great-uncle?” says Isabel.
“Maybe what he meant was that your great-uncle would have been on the thirteenth floor if there was one,” Caleb suggests.
“Which means he would have been on the—”
“Fourteenth floor!” we all say at the same time.
I take out the lighter and turn it over. 1405.
“So you think that was his room number?” says Caleb slowly.
“Only one way to find out,” I say.
At this point Donna bounces out and joins us.
“Your mother called,” she announces. “She should be here any minute.”
“Thank you for all your help,” I say, trying my best to sound like Isabel in her “talking to grown-ups” mode.
“It was my pleasure, Ted,” Donna answers. “It isn’t often we get visitors. It makes me feel so good to hear Dad talking with people.”
“He doesn’t have friends?” asks Isabel.
“Most of them have moved away to live nearer their children…or died…,” Donna responds. I notice that her smile is pasted in place, but her eyes have turned sad.
Then her cheerful demeanor returns.
“That’s why it was so nice when he could visit your great-uncle. It gave him something to do, somewhere to go. And just talking about him seems to, I don’t know, revive my father somehow.”
“I’m glad,” I say.
“It’s so funny…he hasn’t spoken of Ted since his passing, and here he is today, having two whole conversations about him.”
“There was someone else asking questions about Ted’s great-uncle?” Isabel asks.
“Right before you came, actually. I thought you knew him.”
“Why would you think that we knew him?” I ask.
“It was that man who’s writing an article about your great-uncle for the paper in Hawaii. He said he had gotten my dad’s name from your mother, so I assumed he’d talked to you already.”
My mind is spinning. I’m a terrible liar, but I still manage to say, “Oh, right. He must have talked to my parents when we were at Great-Uncle Ted’s apartment cleaning up.”
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