by Leslie Helm
The Charles Helm family now lived in the large house Julius had built for himself on The Bluff. They had a cook, a downstairs maid to clean and serve the table, an upstairs maid to clean the bedrooms and bathrooms and to build fires in the fireplaces in each room. There was also a governess to take care of the children, and a seamstress for the family.
On Sunday afternoons, the girls would look at magazines to select their favorite fashions. When the seamstress could not handle something, a tailor was brought in. The shoemaker came to the house to measure the children’s feet for shoes. On Mondays, the kids would be bundled into a buggy that would take them to Sakuragicho Station. From there, they took the train to Tokyo. When the girls reached Tokyo, there would be a dozen rickshaws lined up and men wearing large straw hats waiting to take them, each on a separate rickshaw, on the forty-five-minute ride to the convent school. In 1913, their father Charles was among the first in Japan to purchase a Model T Ford, but he was so uncomfortable riding in the contraption that he often walked to work, having his driver meet him with the car at the office.
When Armistice Day was announced in November 1918, marking the end of World War I, there was a big parade in downtown Yokohama. Fifteen months later, on a cold January night, a thin, sickly looking man with a bad cough showed up at the Helm house. Charles looked at him quizzically and then gave him a hearty handshake.
“Willie! By Jove, it really is you,” he cried, Charles’s daughter Trudy would later recall. Willie had been imprisoned for more than five years.
Not long after Willie’s return, Julius, now eighty, came home to Yokohama with Alma and his daughters, Louisa and Elsie. They settled into Julius’s large summer home in Honmoku. Julius was not the same man. His exile in Germany during the war had taken a toll on his health and crushed his spirit. He spent his days sitting in the garden of his villa on Helm Hill from where he could see the sun play across the sparkling sea.
When Willie asked his father for an advance on his inheritance to start a business in Manchuria, the next frontier, Julius thought of his own pioneering days and readily agreed. Soon after Willie’s departure, Julius died in his sleep on May 16, 1922. Willie, struggling to make his way in Manchuria, never made it back for his father’s funeral, which took place at the Foreigners’ Cemetery where Hiro had been buried. Perhaps because Julius’s second wife, Alma, could not stand to see Julius buried beside his Japanese wife, she took his ashes back to Germany where they were buried next to his mother. Ironically, Alma, who hated Japan, was buried in Kobe, while Julius, who loved Yokohama, was buried in distant Germany. Hiro, who had left her community to marry Julius, was left all alone in the Foreigners’ Cemetery far from her kin.
Before dying, Julius put his estate into a partnership that was equally owned by each of his children and which was virtually impossible to dissolve. He hoped to preserve his legacy by keeping his family united and in control of Helm Brothers. As it turned out, that was too much to ask of a family whose members were citizens of three powerful countries, each increasingly at odds with the other two.
ABOUT FIVE MONTHS AFTER OUR adoption orientation at Tokyo City Hall, I flew to Seattle to spend a month with Marie, who was teaching at the University of Washington. The Los Angeles Times had agreed to let me work in Seattle during Marie’s three-month teaching stint. One evening near the end of my stay, we received a telephone call from Maruoka-san, our social worker in Tokyo. A girl almost three was available for adoption. Were we interested?
Three? The child was far older than we had hoped, but we knew we might never get another chance, and so we quickly said yes. Maruoka-san mailed a photo not much larger than a postage stamp. The girl looked like a Japanese doll with big rosy cheeks and short black hair. Marie was thrilled; I was uneasy. Since Marie wouldn’t be able to return to Tokyo for a few weeks, we agreed I would go to the orphanage alone to meet the child.
On the flight back to Tokyo, I read a small paperback book called Your Three-Year Old that Marie had bought. A child’s character is fully developed by the age of three, the book explained. This was unsettling. What was the joy of parenting a child whose character was fully formed? I thought. Besides she looked nothing like me. Adoption books were filled with nightmarish stories of adopted children who never bonded to their parents.
Yet, multiracial adoptions had become relatively common in the United States by 1992. So why the anxiety? As a child, my mother took me on her annual trip to the orphanage a few minutes from our home to drop off old clothes. I didn’t like to visit that place, which always seemed to me filled with sad-eyed, sickly looking children, often the offspring of American soldiers and Japanese prostitutes. My mother and great-aunt did various “good works” for the orphanage, but I had never heard of anyone actually adopting a child. Adoption was part of a shadowy realm that I could not easily equate with my idealized notion of what a family should be.
Was it this dark view of adoption that troubled me or was it really about race? I couldn’t sort it out. I thought of the deep insecurities my father and his Uncle Willie seemed to feel, in part, from being half Japanese. Didn’t a mixed-race family present many of the same challenges? Nobody would ever mistake this girl for my biological child. The issue hadn’t come up when Marie and I had visited the orphanage in Tokyo and I had held the young boy. Yet now that a child was available, I couldn’t help but feel a strange foreboding.
A few days later, I was sitting on a couch covered with doilies in the waiting room of an orphanage on the outskirts of Tokyo. It was not just jet lag that made my mind fuzzy as the director of the orphanage, a small, elderly woman, walked into the room and introduced herself. I felt something cold and hard at the pit of my stomach.
As she led me down the dark hallway, I trembled. A door opened at the end of the hallway. At about knee height, a little round face peered through the crack. My heart lurched.
Mariko’s black bangs were cut short across her forehead. She had big, dark eyes that seemed filled with life, yet were also a little sad. She was beautiful. And yet, I felt myself hesitate. Could I learn to love this child who looked so different from me?
Mariko stretched out her arms asking to be picked up. She guided me to a basket of toys and picked out her favorite doll. Then she told me to walk to the window.
I looked out the window at the small dirt playground with a jungle gym. Mariko nudged me and pointed to a colony of ants milling about on the window sill. I knelt down so we could both get a better look. Our heads touched as we watched the ants going about their busy lives. I was totally unprepared for it when Mariko looked up and suddenly burst into song in Japanese: Mr. Ant meets Mr. Ant walking down the way. They face THIS way and nod. They face THAT way and nod. Mariko’s voice, so filled with intensity and the sheer joy of being, seized my heart and tugged at it until I thought it was going to tear.
Mariko, two, celebrates children’s day at orphanage.
When she had finished singing, I gave Mariko a hug, and she looked at me and smiled. I felt lightheaded. Then a surge of warmth spread through my chest. It was as if something was beginning to heal. Looking back now to that summer day in 1992, I wonder if I wasn’t choosing, at that moment, to affirm life and embrace Japan in a way that my father never would.
Mariko now pointed to the railing that separated the toddlers from the older kids. “Be careful,” I said as I lifted her onto the railing. I held her left hand in my right hand as she walked slowly, perfectly balanced, along the narrow wood rail.
From where she stood, balanced on that railing, she was not much shorter than me. And as we walked side by side, our arms outstretched, we might have been dancing.
WHEN MARIE RETURNED TO TOKYO from Seattle a couple of weeks later, we visited Mariko together. The orphanage director showed us Mariko’s photo album. It contained a dozen or so pictures that recorded Mariko’s two years at the orphanage: blowing out the candles of a birthday cake; hanging upside down on the jungle gym. One picture showed Mariko at two, wading
in the water on her first visit to the seashore. “She ran fearlessly into the water and began to sing a song about the sea,” read the caption underneath.
Then we were taken to the nursery where we got a chance to watch as the children played, ate and then all took their turns on the little potties. When it was playtime, the director encouraged us to take Mariko on a walk, which we did on our daily visits. Each time, we learned something new and wonderful about Mariko. Once she stopped to stare intently at a spider spinning its web. Without hesitation, she reached out and picked the hairy spider off its web with her bare hands so she could look at it more closely. Marie had taken to Mariko immediately and wanted to bring her home as soon as possible, but we sensed reluctance on Mariko’s part. Usually, after twenty or thirty minutes, Mariko would want to return to the orphanage. We were told we had six months to let Mariko get accustomed to us, but we couldn’t imagine waiting that long. Every day apart seemed to us another precious day lost.
We soon learned that Maruoka-san had persuaded the authorities that Mariko should be placed with us rather than a Japanese family. Mariko craved physical affection like a morning glory craves the sun. Yet most Japanese mothers avoid hugging their children once they pass their toddler years. Mariko was stubborn and independent, traits many Japanese parents considered to be tragic flaws in a girl. Maruoka-san told us she thought Mariko’s strong spirit would have a better chance of surviving with a foreign family.
June 18, 1992. I do not remember how that fateful day began, but I will never forget how it ended. I do recall that we believed we were fully prepared. The spare bedroom in our Tokyo apartment was furnished with the large white baby crib we had purchased when we had expected an infant, its mattress encased in pink-flowered sheets. A mobile of tropical fish hung over it, pinned to the ceiling. The closet was filled with dresses of every color and pattern: orange polka dots, blue stripes and red roses. All were for size one hundred centimeters. Mariko was three foot three.
The living room was scattered with stuffed animals, the most prominent of which was a shaggy brown teddy bear, about Mariko’s height, with shiny black eyes and a black felt nose that a Japanese friend had sent us. A rubber ball the color of the ocean sat on our cream-colored couch. On the far side of the living room was a shiny new red plastic desk so low we had to be careful not to trip on it. There was a high chair in the dining room and a birthday cake in the fridge. It was the day before Mariko’s third birthday.
Only a few weeks had passed since we had first met Mariko, and she still seemed hesitant about coming home with us. Although the adoption process was supposed to take as long as a year, since Mariko was already turning three, the orphanage director decided it was time for Mariko to leave. It was a cool, overcast day when we arrived at the orphanage to pick up Mariko. The glass door rattled loudly as we slid it open. We entered and announced ourselves. “Gomenkudasai!”
Inside, the wooden floors seemed cold and the hallways dark. I shivered. There were whispers and the sounds of shuffling slippers. The orphanage director invited us into her waiting room. She was polite but all business.
“Tell Okuyama-san to bring Mariko,” the director told the lady who was serving us green tea. Okuyama-san, an attractive young woman with a warm smile, came into the room. She had always been Mariko’s favorite nanny at the orphanage. Mariko, wearing a straw hat with an aqua blue band around it, was hiding behind Okuyama-san’s skirt.
“Why don’t you take Mariko on a short walk and talk to her,” the director said to us. We crossed the small street to the park. Mariko squatted beside a drain in the gravel path. She picked up little pieces of gravel and dropped them through the slots of the wrought iron grate, one by one. Plop. Plop. Plop.
“You are going to leave the orphanage today. You are coming home with us,” I explained to her.
Plop. Plop.
“We will be your mother and father. Would you like that?”
Plop. Plop.
“We have a special room for you with lots of toys.”
Plop. Plop.
She would not look at us. “You shouldn’t throw stones down the drain,” I finally told Mariko.
I had grown impatient. I didn’t understand why she had been so warm a week ago and now was so cool. I wondered if the orphanage had already told her we would be bringing her home and she had been unhappy about the news.
Mariko stopped dropping stones for a second and looked at me briefly. Her eyes darkened. Then she ran into the nearby cemetery, her tiny body immediately hidden by the black gravestones. Marie and I separated and went after her. We ran all around the cemetery but couldn’t find her. We were in a panic. Should we go to the orphanage and tell the director we had already lost her? What would they think? What kind of incompetent parents were we? We decided to look a little more. Finally, we spotted her next to a huge urn filled with ash just outside a temple. Mariko was squatting, scraping the packed dirt on the ground with a little stick.
“Let’s go back,” I said softly. She shook her head. I squatted down beside her. Marie stood patiently by. After a while, Mariko stood and headed back to the orphanage. We followed. She would not hold our hands.
Mariko slipped off her shoes in the genkan and ran down the hallway. She had spotted Okuyama-san and hid behind her skirt. The orphanage director came out of her office. “You must pick her up and take her. Delay will do no good,” she said firmly.
I hesitated, confused. I felt like a child ordered to do something he knew was wrong. I knew the delay would make it more difficult for Mariko to bond with us. She was about to turn three. Every day she remained at the orphanage was a precious day of her childhood lost to us. Also I knew that Mariko would soon have to leave the orphanage in any case. The orphanage only kept children up to the age of three. But in my gut I also knew that it was not right to force Mariko to leave the orphanage against her will. That was no way to start a relationship with a child.
“Do it now!” said the orphanage director, a little louder.
Was it because I had been the first one to meet Mariko and spoke better Japanese, or was it simply a question of physical strength? I don’t know, but Marie and I instantly agreed that Marie would get the car, while I carried Mariko out of the orphanage. I walked down the hallway toward Okuyama-san. There was fear in Mariko’s eyes.
“You must go with them,” Okuyama-san said to Mariko. “Everything will be okay.”
“No. No! I don’t want to go!” Mariko said. There was steel in her voice.
Okuyama-san looked pained. She knelt down and, holding Mariko’s shoulders, firmly pushed her out from behind her skirt. Mariko’s body was stiff.
“Quickly!” commanded the director.
I scooped up Mariko and held her in my arms as I did that first day when we saw the ants, but this time her body was unyielding. She turned her head and called out in a plaintive voice, “Okuyama-san! Okuyama-san!”
Okuyama-san handed Mariko a little doll with a straw hat identical to Mariko’s. Mariko took the doll and pressed it to her breast. It was the only toy she had ever owned. Okuyama-san turned and left. Tears welled in Mariko’s eyes as her nanny disappeared down the dark hallway. I headed for the front door. As I walked out the open door, Mariko cried out, “I don’t want to go! I don’t want to go!”
I felt like a kidnapper as I slid into the back seat of the car trying to ignore her screams. I took off her straw hat and put it on the seat beside me. Marie drove us through Tokyo traffic while I held Mariko against my chest. I could feel her heart beat fast like a bird’s, tapping out a Morse code of fear.
“Okuyama-san! Okuyama-san! Okuyama-san!” Mariko started to cry again. Her small body was wracked with sobs, and soon, I was crying too. I gave Mariko a hug, but even though my tears fell on her shoulders and her tears wet my shirt, we might as well have been on opposite shores of a great ocean. There was nothing I could do or say to console her on that first ride home.
When we finally reached our apartment comp
lex, Marie parked the car and walked ahead of me to open the door. I carried Mariko into the apartment and put her down.
“This is your new home,” Marie said, kneeling down next to her. Mariko was quiet for a moment. Her eyes were still glistening with tears, but she was curious. Her eyes widened as she walked farther into the living room and saw all the toys.
“What is this?” she said, pointing to the large teddy bear.
“It’s a present for you.” She grabbed Teddy’s arm and dragged it behind her.
“How about this?” she asked, pointing at a blue ball.
“Yours,” I said. She picked it up and clumsily cradled it in her left arm.
She nodded to the red desk. “What about that?”
“It’s Mariko’s.”
Mariko leaned the teddy bear carefully against the desk and placed her doll from the orphanage and the rubber ball next to the teddy. Then she went about the room pointing at other toys. “And this. Is this mine too? And that?”
Each time, Marie and I nodded, then Mariko picked up the toy and took it to her desk. Soon all the toys were in small piles next to her desk.
“Are these all mine?” she asked.
We nodded.
Mariko pulled out the little red seat tucked under the desk and sat down. She leaned over, put her arm on the table and rested her cheek on it. Soon her body was trembling. At the orphanage, all toys were communal. I wondered if it suddenly struck her as terribly lonely to have so many toys and no other children to share them with. But no, it was something far more disturbing, for soon she was moaning. It was a wretched, mournful sound. Tears poured from her eyes like a mountain spring, and I wondered, How can a girl of three possibly hold within her so much pain?
It was unbearable to watch Mariko’s grief. Marie and I each started crying too. We hugged, wondering what we had done to this poor girl. Then Marie went to the kitchen. I picked up Mariko and put her in her high chair. Looking for a way to distract her, I took a silver one-hundred-yen coin and flicked it so it started spinning across the dining room table. Mariko looked up. She was enchanted by the flashing, spinning coin. Her tears stopped. Soon I had emptied my pockets of change and I was sending dozens of coins spinning across the table. I tried to show Mariko how to do it, but it was difficult with her little fingers. Soon she was crying again.