The Moonflower

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  “Good evening, Minato-san,” she said, trying to sound casual and confident.

  He bowed courteously enough. Then he took a step closer to her. “You come, okusama. You come.”

  “No,” she said firmly. “I must go home now, home to Talbot-san.”

  Minato shook his head. “No Tarbot-san. You come.”

  And now he stepped so close that she could smell the odor of liquor and hear his heavy breathing. There was nothing to do but move quickly or be trapped in this deserted spot. She put out her hands and shoved him off balance, ran past him up the lane toward Nan’s house. If she could reach Nan’s she would be safe and Nan would come out and deal with Chiyo’s drunken husband. She could not tell whether he followed or not because of the beat of her own running steps on the earth and the pounding of her heart in her ears.

  Someone opened Nan’s gate just as she reached it and she ran into the arms of Alan Cobb.

  “Hello!” he said. “What’s all this? Somebody chasing you?” He held her gently, his eyes kind and sympathetic. For a moment she was sharply aware of his breadth and height, and of the clean smell of good health that was a part of him. Then she drew away and looked over her shoulder in apprehension.

  “It was that Minato who lives in the other half of our house. I think he followed me when I came out. He’d been drinking and …”

  “There’s no one coming now,” Alan said. “Would you like me to look?”

  “No,” she said, and put up her hand to thrust back the pins in the loosened knot of her hair. “I don’t want to make any trouble. Perhaps—perhaps I only imagined that he meant me some harm.”

  He fell into step beside her, transferring the books he carried to the other arm. “I have to confess that this soldier of Japan still disturbs me a little. Your friend Nan Horner has been lecturing me on the subject.”

  “What do you mean?” Marcia asked, glad to escape to a plane of casual conversation.

  “Nan’s a bit sorry for Minato-san. And I must say she gave me a new slant on the returning soldier. After the surrender he didn’t come home a hero after all. He came home loathing himself for being alive, and expecting rejection and disgrace for being conquered. But his reception was even worse than he expected because by that time the Japanese people knew more about what had been perpetrated by their own soldiers and they were pretty sick about it. So a good many soldiers who had gone off expecting to die for Emperor and country, came home alive and found themselves scorned and repudiated.”

  “But that was so many years ago,” Marcia said.

  “Yes, and I suppose most of them have been absorbed into the community by now. But Minato’s kind carries the mark of war. And I don’t mean just that ugly scar down his forehead. I wonder how that happened? Did he get the other fellow—the one who almost got him?”

  They had reached the house and Marcia wished she could keep him talking a while longer. The very casualness of his manner was something to bring her back to an everyday world.

  “Won’t you come in?” she invited. “Laurie would love to see you.”

  He shook his head. “Thanks. I’d like to. But I think I’d better come by appointment when I do. I’ve tried to call your husband at the lab a couple of times, but haven’t been able to reach him. Nan says he’s not often there.”

  “You wanted to talk to him about material for your book, didn’t you?” she said, brushing quickly past the matter of the lab.

  Once more his eyes seemed to question her in some way. “That’s the reason I’ve given him and I suppose it’s true enough. In part, at least.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, puzzled. There had always been something odd about Alan’s attitude toward Jerome.

  It was as if he measured her for a moment. “I hate to see waste,” he said. “I hate it as much as Mark Brewster does. Waste in particular of a man like Jerome Talbot.”

  Marcia was silent. Who knew better the waste of a man like Jerome than she?

  Alan went on almost angrily. “There are so few qualified and so many needed. Why isn’t he doing what needs to be done? What right has he to throw his genius away when it’s wanted so desperately? Knowing that he’s here, knowing what he has to give and that he’s not giving it, is something I find hard to swallow. I can’t sit back and say this is none of my business. The future is every man’s business these days.”

  Everything he said was true and she could only agree soberly. “Sometimes I’m frightened,” she confessed. “There’s some torment driving him that I don’t understand.”

  Alan opened the gate and came with her through the garden to her own entryway. As light from the house fell upon them, he saw her face and put out a finger to trace the smudges on her cheeks.

  “Tears? Did Minato frighten you as much as that?”

  “No,” she said quickly. “That was nothing. I—I was anxious about Laurie. But what you said just now concerning waste—is there anything I could do? I want to help, Alan, if only I can find a way. So far I’ve failed at every turn.”

  “Perhaps it’s too late,” Alan said, “though I hate to accept that. Perhaps it’s something you couldn’t affect anyway. Don’t eat your heart out over it.” He smiled and held out his hand.

  She gave her own into his and felt once more the warmth and strength that seemed to flow from the clasp of his fingers.

  “I worry about you,” he said surprisingly as he turned away.

  She looked after him as he walked to the gate. How much did he know? How much had Nan told him of her personal problem? Somehow she would not mind his knowing.

  As she went into the house to face Jerome, she felt less alone than she had been only a short while before.

  She would tell Jerome about Minato at once, she decided, and let him determine what to do about what had happened. But when she tapped at Jerome’s door there was no answer. Sumie-san came into the hall to say that she had stayed with Laurie when danna-san had gone out and Laurie was now asleep.

  Marcia thanked her and went into her room. Laurie lay on her stomach, her braids flung over the coverlet. How vulnerable a sleeping child looked, Marcia thought, and bent to kiss one warm, flushed cheek.

  A book Laurie had been looking at lay open on the blanket. Picking it up, Marcia saw that it was a collection of Japanese fairy tales which Jerome had given the child. The stories were probably too difficult for her, though she had started to read when she was six.

  Marcia sat down beside a lamp and began to skim idly through the book. What strange tales they were! One was of a beautifully gowned woman who appeared on the street like any woman, but when a man approached her she would turn toward him, faceless and horrible. It semed that Japanese ghosts had neither faces nor feet, and by that means you could identify them. Another story was a melancholy tale of Yuki-onna, the white lady of the snows, who represented death to all who beheld her. There was also the usual sprinkling of demons and foxes, and the whole concoction was probably no worse than the Brothers Grimm, whose stories Laurie already adored. But with Laurie’s new tendency toward nervousness, this sort of thing might just as well be put out of her reach for the time being.

  Next door the playing of the samisen began again, and Marcia stiffened at the sound. She had grown to dread the music and the singing. The melancholy, monotonous strains wore upon her nerves, made the evil in this house, centered in that mask in Jerome’s room, seem to come closer about the bed of her sleeping child.

  When a light clatter sounded against the window pane of her room, she almost cried out in alarm. It wasn’t raining. Had the wind blown a branch against the pane? But she did not think any tree stood close enough for that. She sat, utterly still and shivering, listening to the sounds of the night. Were those footsteps she heard in the garden? Had the meeting with Minato and these eerie Japanese tales disturbed her to the point of weird imaginings?

  The spatter against the window sounded again and she sprang up and turned off the light. She recognized the sound now.
Someone in the garden had thrown a handful of fine gravel at the window pane. Shielded by darkness, she pulled aside the curtain and peered into the night. She could see no one, nothing, yet she knew someone stood there waiting in the dark garden.

  If it was Minato again, she surely need not fear him when a shout would bring help from his house as well as her own. Perhaps it was better to face him and try to find out what it was he wanted. Since her meeting with Alan she felt less afraid of Chiyo’s husband, less lost in the loneliness into which the afternoon at Kiyomizu had plunged her. She slipped into her jacket and went to the entryway, where light threw a faint radiance into the garden.

  “Who is there?” she called softly.

  The sound of geta on stepping stones reached her and Minato, in his usual western slacks and shirt, but with his bare feet thrust into wooden clogs, stepped to the edge of the radiance and bowed to her.

  This time he did not approach her and he fitted a stiff smile over the mask of his face, as if to be reassuring. The scar that ran down from his black hair to one eyebrow shone livid in the pale light.

  “Prease, you come my house,” he said and bowed to her again.

  “But why?” she asked. “What do you want?”

  He made a quick gesture, as if to hush her, and beckoned. Then he hurried away as if he expected her to follow, and moved toward the front gate. She was no longer afraid, but suddenly curious. She slipped on her shoes and followed him into the dim lane in front of the house.

  He did not let her come near him this time, as if by the very distance between them he would reassure her. He moved ahead, picking up his geta lightly without scuffing the ground. At his own gate he paused and looked back to make sure she was following. Then he went through and out of sight, leaving the gate open behind him.

  For a moment uncertainty held her and she wondered about the wisdom of following him as far as his own house. But the samisen still played. Upstairs lights burned. There were people there. At the far corner of the house, Minato waited for her and did not move until she stepped toward him. Then his shadowy figure flitted around the corner.

  The gentle, singing voice upstairs seemed to draw her on. Was it Chiyo who sang so sadly?

  Marcia followed Minato into the rear garden, and he beckoned her close to the side of the house, where the upper gallery made an overhang, and they were lost in shadow. By his gesture she knew she was meant to stop here and listen to whatever was going on upstairs.

  As she realized his intention, distaste filled her. She had no wish to eavesdrop upon the affairs of those who lived in this part of the house. Not even if their affairs concerned her, as they very well might. But before she could escape, a woman laughed softly—a light splintering of sound. The music ceased and she heard Chiyo’s voice speaking in Japanese, swiftly, sweetly. Marcia turned away, wanting to hear no more, but now Minato stepped into her path as he had done earlier that evening and there was a look of angry insistence on his face. Clearly he meant her to remain.

  A man’s voice answered Chiyo and while the language was Japanese the voice was Jerome’s. She stood for a frozen moment listening and knew that this was the thing Minato intended her to hear. Then she pushed past Chiyo’s husband and ran toward the front of the house and the open gate that led toward home. Minato made no effort to stop her or to follow. When she hurried through the gate and back to her own part of the house, he was nowhere in sight. Whatever his purpose, he had succeeded in his effort.

  She went to her own room and undressed for bed in the quiet dark. Only the whisper of Laurie’s breathing broke the silence. Now no sound of samisen drifted from the other house, but Marcia crept beneath the covers and put her hands over her ears as if to shut out the very memory of that music. Its melancholy notes were a part of her now, an aching sorrow of realization that ran through her body like physical pain. Now she was sure of the thing that until now had only tantalized her. It was Chiyo who held Jerome to Japan. Not merely in the past, but in the present. The happiness Marcia had felt at Kiyomizu, the feeling that Jerome had been, however briefly, hers again, had all been an illusion. Perhaps an illusion which he had built in her deliberately before he as deliberately destroyed it with his words to Laurie.

  From the mantelpiece the Japanese doll watched her in the gloom, its rosy cheeks hidden behind the demon mask that Laurie had placed over the face.

  14.

  In the days that followed, Marcia did not find it easy to come to a decision. It seemed a simple solution to go to Jerome and say, “You’ve won—I’m going home.” Yet something held her back. There was a soreness, an aching in her that would not let her be, yet it was not wholly pain for her own loss and defeat. It was also because of Jerome himself. He too was suffering in some strange way, and over something she did not understand.

  This feeling was increased one day when Jerome came through the house unexpectedly and found her in the garden, laughing out loud with Laurie over a game they were playing with a ball. It was not laughter that came from her heart, but Jerome could not know that. He stood on the veranda ledge watching, and Marcia turned to see the change in his face.

  Laurie chased her ball across the garden and had to hunt for it in the bushes. Slowly Marcia went toward him, drawn by the sudden gentleness in him.

  “I remember the way you used to laugh,” he said. “It was the thing that most appealed to me about you. You don’t laugh as much as you used to.”

  “No,” she said, and looked up into his eyes.

  He turned away and went into the house. Knowing only that this moment of emotion must not be allowed to slip away, she stepped out of her shoes and ran after him in her stocking feet. There was no pretense in him now, as there had been at Kiyomizu.

  He went into his room and sat down at his desk, leaned his head in his hands, and she followed him there. Long ago he had suffered from severe headaches and her fingers rubbing over his temples and at the back of his neck had semed to ease the pain. She came up behind him and put her hands gently over his forehead, pressing her fingers at the places where the pain used to come. He reached up and caught her hands in his, held them against his cheek, then turned the palms to kiss them lightly.

  “Tell me how I can help,” she pleaded. “You know that’s all I want—to help you.”

  He let her hands go abruptly. “There’s nothing you can do,” he said and the stamp of the stranger was back upon him.

  But she could not give up at once.

  “Have you deserted your work completely?” she asked. “What has happened to all the things you meant to do?”

  “What happens to the things most of us mean to do?” he said. “What, for instance, are you getting out of life?”

  “I’m not sure what I want any more,” she said. “Except to help you.”

  There was no gentleness in him now. “You take too much upon yourself. When will you learn that I prefer my own way? No one can help anyone else.”

  There was nothing more she could say, and she left him sitting there. Yet she had not reached the moment of complete defeat. As these times of softening, of indecision, of inner struggle were revealed, she felt increasingly that something in him still reached out toward her and she could not bring herself to give up and turn away for the last time.

  Kyoto seemed filled with Americans these days, here for the cherry festival and dances, and tourists poured in from all over Japan. The Japanese were great travelers and loved nothing better than to visit the noted places of their country. Sometimes it appeared to Marcia that they moved according to an established pattern, rather than out of any individual desire to satisfy a personal interest. A place, a sight, was known as “famous.” Therefore one visited it and looked upon it at the prescribed moment of day or season. But one did not go wandering off in idle search of the unexpected beauty that might become peculiarly the possession of the beholder. Even in the enjoyment of beauty, ritual played an important part.

  Jerome took time now to bear Laurie off wi
th him and introduce her to the cherry festival sights. Marcia began to dread these excursions because as often as not Laurie came home in a nervous, high-strung mood that made her unlike herself.

  Now and then Marcia wondered about Ichiro Minato and what he had hoped for in bringing her into his garden to listen that night. She had seen him only a few times since then and he had looked away as if he did not recognize her. How did he feel about what was happening? Did the Japanese take such matters differently? Or had Minato reached so wretched a depth of existence that he could no longer manage his own life in any way? Had he hoped that Jerome’s wife might take stronger action than he had been able to take?

  Jerome seemed to have no fear of him. He spoke to Minato curtly at times and in a tone he used to no other Japanese. Plainly he disliked the man and had only impatience for him, as if he were a buzzing fly that could not be brushed away. How much did Jerome underrate Minato? Marcia wondered. It might astonish her husband to know that the Japanese was sufficiently concerned with what was going on to have betrayed Jerome’s presence in his house to Jerome’s wife.

  For a brief space of time the cherry blossoms brightened all Kyoto, shining white and pale pink among the gray tile roofs. They were at their most glorious, with enormous double blooms, in Maruyama Park. Then they dropped at their peak of splendor and were gone for another year. May brought azaleas, bright pink and flaming red; wisteria, lavender and sweetly scented, dripped from arbors; and great iris blooms opened. The moon waned and darkened and grew full again.

  One afternoon Marcia took the Japanese copy of Alan’s book out of her drawer and carried it up the hill to show Nan. But in the end it was not Alan’s book they talked about that day. The time of the dinner Nan had mentioned was approaching; the dinner she was giving to honor publication of Haruka Setsu’s book. Nan and Alan Cobb had struck up a friendship and Alan wanted to meet Yamada-san, so he was to be there, Nan said. But when she indicated that Ichiro and Chiyo Minato were being invited too, Marcia rebelled. How could she endure an evening of being polite to Chiyo, of pretending friendship toward her? How could Nan, who surely knew the truth, expect this of her?