I had two stops to make before returning to my apartment in Kalihi. The first was up on Nuuanu Avenue, in the vicinity of number 1742—the Japanese consulate. I parked in front of a house a few hundred feet up the street and strolled into the yard. The place belonged to a former Navy man and he let us stop by whenever we wanted. I climbed the monkeypod tree in his backyard and picked up the field glasses we kept in a notch there. I watched the backyard of the consulate for a few minutes. Nothing going on, so I replaced the glasses and left.
All a charade.
We now had a tap on one of their telephone lines that got us more information in a week than all the hundreds and hundreds of man-hours we had spent in that tree getting bleary-eyed peering through those glasses. But we were afraid to stop watching them altogether. It was possible the Japs knew we used the tree; if we suddenly stopped, they might get suspicious that we had another source of information. So we took turns making short stops at the tree on Nuuanu Avenue.
On the way home I stopped in at The Bon Marché on North King. I didn't shop there as a rule but I’d spotted an ad in the Honolulu Advertiser about a sale on shirts. I needed to replace a couple of worn ones.
I passed the counter where a Japanese woman was working and it must have been a full minute before it struck me:
I know her.
I hurried back and watched her from across the aisle, stunned and speechless. It seemed as impossible as it was improbable. But I knew her.
Meiko.
Eight years had passed since I’d last seen her but I hadn't forgotten her. I'd find myself thinking about her, visualizing her face at the oddest times. And here she was in Honolulu.
And as I recognized her, I knew there had been a tragedy. What else could make her end up working as a Honolulu shop girl? Something awful must have happened.
I stepped up to the counter where she was rearranging the nylon stockings under the glass.
"Aloha," I said.
She looked up. "Aloha. Yes, sir. Can I help you?"
Close up, I could see how she had changed. Still hauntingly beautiful, her hair as black as the vault of the night and just as glossy as I remembered it. But she’d lost weight and looked drawn. Her almond eyes were still bright and deep, but so much life had gone out of her. A stranger wouldn't notice, but I was no stranger. It seemed as if someone had tapped her and drained off most of her vitality.
"Sir?" she said, looking at me strangely.
I guess I had been staring at her. I racked my brain for something infinitely clever to say, some brilliant quip that would bring a smile of instant recognition to her face. I settled for:
"Meiko, it's me, Frank Slater. From college."
She stepped back as if I had just said boo! I guess I had changed, too, in those eight years. For one thing, I was wearing a navy uniform; for another, years of carrying and paddling a ten-foot solid redwood surfboard through the waves off Kuhio had filled me out and left me almost as brown as a native. An unexpected benefit of the tan was that it made my Slater Stain almost invisible. I hardly thought about it anymore.
"Oh, Frank!" she said, reaching out to me. "It is you!"
I grabbed both her hands and squeezed. If the counter hadn't been between us, I would have hugged her.
"But what are you doing here?" we both said at once and laughed.
A floor manager strolled by with a sour look on his face. Meiko's smile evaporated.
"Maybe you'd better go. They hired me because a lot of Japanese shop here, but the department manager would love an excuse to get rid of me."
"Can we talk somewhere?"
Suddenly I could feel her withdraw. She didn't move away but I could sense doors and windows slamming shut all around her.
"I have to work," she said in a low voice, her eyes avoiding mine as she began realigning the boxes of stockings on the glass countertop.
"What about lunch?"
"They only give me half an hour."
"That's a start—"
"And I brought mine."
"Dinner then."
"I don't know."
"We've got a lot of years to cover."
She finally looked up at me. "All of them bad."
"Sometimes it's good to talk about bad things, especially with an old friend."
She suddenly became interested in those damn stockings again.
"I don't deserve any friends."
This was worse than I could have thought. The old Meiko who had loved life and liked herself had been replaced by a different Meiko, defensive, defeated, a stranger. But I wasn't giving up. I sensed the old Meiko still in there somewhere. The one who used to sit on the hill overlooking San Francisco Bay and gaze out on the water and smile with such inner peace and tranquillity that you'd have thought she had the world on a string. If she was, how sweet it would be to find her and lead her out.
"Dinner," I said as if it had been decided. "And we'll talk about the weather and nothing more if that's what you want."
She said nothing and I waited. I wasn't going to be put off.
Finally she shrugged. "If you wish."
She didn't want to be picked up at her home so I arranged to meet her in front of the store. Seven o'clock sharp. I was already planning what I would wear. I had seen a white tropical worsted suit on sale at The Hub. I'd splurge $27.50 on that and then make reservations at the Royal Hawaiian. This was no routine date. I was going to make this a big night.
I looked at her and wondered if anyone could make Meiko happy again. I had to try. As I left her there, aligning and realigning the nylons, my heart ached. What had happened?
* * *
Tense and jittery, Meiko stood in front of The Bon Marché and waited. She berated herself for letting Frank talk her into dinner, but he had been so persistent. She had tried to cancel out, tried to call him. She found the number of a Slater, F. X. in the phone book and called from the phone down the hall from her room, but there had been no answer. That had left her with two choices: Keep the date or simply not show up. Frank didn't know where she lived…
…but he knew where she worked and would come by tomorrow to find out why she had broken their date. She could not face that, and she couldn't quit the job. She needed the paltry wage The Bon Marché paid her. She had no choice.
So now she stood in the waning light, dressed in the only good dress she had. She hoped Frank didn't plan to take her anywhere fancy.
As the clock hurried toward seven, she wondered at the vagaries of fate. The one American in the world who knew her well enough to recognize her turning up on this very island.
And yet: Why didn't she want to see him? Meiko knew the answer: Because Frank had known her before. He knew the old Meiko, the Meiko who no longer existed, the Meiko she would have to pretend to be tonight. Frank was from the past.
And the past was gone.
Or so she had thought that morning three years ago when she awakened to bright light and pain, with every muscle fiber in her body afire, every movement a knife thrust of agony.
She was in a hammock in a tiny room. Sunlight streamed through a round window—a porthole. The smell of steamed fish filled the air.
A sweaty, portly man in a stained kimono with a thick Osaka accent leaned over her and told her she was aboard the Tsuru Maru and how sorry they were for striking her little boat last night, and how she shouldn't have been out sailing in the dark without at least a lantern. As it was, if he hadn't been on deck having a smoke at that moment and heard the collision, she would have been left behind to drown. By lucky chance the searchlight found her as she was going down.
The gods had saved her. Why?
The man had said the freighter could not take her back to Japan. She would have to sail with them to their first port of call and make arrangements for a trip back.
Meiko decided that must be the way the gods wanted it. Perhaps they wished her to live but not in Japan. They had sent her away. If so, she would go wherever they wished. Japan offered only d
isgrace for her. And grief.
The first port of call was Honolulu. And here Meiko had decided to stay.
She did not want Frank to see her dingy little one-room apartment in a run-down tenement off Hotel Street. So tiny and cluttered she would have been humiliated to have him call for her there. Yet it was all she could afford on what she earned, so why be embarrassed? None of her acquaintances—and she had no real friends on Oahu, only acquaintances—found anything wrong with her apartment.
Why did I agree to this? she asked herself for the hundredth time.
If she hadn't been so shocked to see him, she would have been able to think up some excuse that would save him face and allow her the solitude she craved.
She suddenly felt very tired. She didn't want to be the old Meiko tonight—she didn't even know if she could be. She just wanted to be left alone in the new life she had made for herself without her family, without Japan . . . and without Matsuo.
Her heart sank when the car pulled in to the curb and Frank jumped out, smiling and holding a hyacinth corsage in his hand. Seven o'clock sharp. Not a minute early, not a minute late.
She had to admit he looked dashing in his white suit. With little ado, he handed her the corsage, presented his arm, and led her to the car.
"Any place in particular you'd like to eat?" he said once they were moving through the traffic.
Alone in my apartment, she thought, but said, "Anywhere you choose will be fine with me, Frank."
"Ever eaten at the Royal Hawaiian?"
"No." And even if she’d had the desire to eat there, she never could have afforded it.
"I think you'll like it."
"I don't think I'm dressed properly."
"You're beautiful."
As they drove on in silence, Meiko studied Frank. How he had changed. He seemed bigger physically. His shoulders were broader and the sun had lightened his hair and darkened his skin so that his blue eyes seemed to shine from his face. She sensed he had changed within as well. No longer the timid college boy, he was a man now, one who held himself erect and looked the world in the eye as if he were no longer afraid of it.
He parked in front of a huge pink stucco structure with a vaguely caravanserai look and guided her through the lobby to a terrace that led down to the beach. They leaned against the rail and gazed out at the surf for a moment, then Frank looked to their left.
"Diamond Head's pretty with the setting sun shining on it, don't you think?"
"Where's Diamond Head?" she said. "I've never seen it."
He gaped at her. "How long have you been here?"
"Three years." Three interminable years! "Is something wrong?"
"You mean to tell me you've been here that long and you're still a malihini who hasn't seen Diamond Head?"
"I'm sorry. Is that wrong?"
"No, not at all," he said quickly. "It's just… surprising, that's all." He pointed to the dark brown mountain of volcanic rock towering over the far end of the beach. "That's it."
"It doesn't look like a diamond to me."
"You're right. Looks more like Gibraltar. Actually, it got its name from the calcite crystals sailors found there in the last century and mistook for diamonds."
He led her to the dining room where she learned they had reservations. The room seemed too formal for what she was wearing. She was glad the lighting was low, but she felt awkward until safely seated behind a table in one of the booths.
She hesitated when the waiter inquired about cocktails. Frank suggested a mai-tai and ordered a Kirin beer for himself.
"In honor of you," he said with a smile.
He made valiant attempts at small talk, rambling on about the islands, about how the biggest and best hotels on Waikiki were owned by someone named Matson who also owned the steamship line that brought the vacationers here from the States. Frank seemed to envy Matson.
She noticed a tension in him, as if he were skirting a subject. Meiko tried to hold up her end, but despite her best efforts, the conversation ended with their first drink.
Finally, silence.
It stretched out uncomfortably until Frank said, "Something happened between you and Matsuo, didn't it?"
The question so startled Meiko that she knocked over her drink. As a wet splotch darkened the pink of the tablecloth to red, she felt panic clutch at her throat. How could he know? How could anyone know? She couldn't breathe! She had to get out where she could get some air!
She struggled out from behind the table and ran across the empty dance floor toward the entrance, and from there toward the beach. The fresh salty night air quelled her gasping, but she ran on, tripping, losing her shoes in the sand as she passed another hotel. Finally she stopped under a huge banyan tree. She leaned against the massive trunk and began to sob.
She heard the soft scuff of shoes on the sand behind her, then Frank's voice.
"I'm sorry. That was stupid. I was desperate for something to say, and desperate to know. I'm sorry."
She turned and saw him standing there with her shoes in his hand. "But how did you know?"
"I knew how he felt about you, how you felt about him. I could see from your face this morning that something awful has happened in your life." He shrugged his shoulders. "Put all that together with the fact that you're living alone three thousand miles from home, and it can mean only one thing."
"You knew he loved me?" Meiko was shocked. "Did he tell you?"
Frank smiled—ruefully, she thought. "No. We didn't talk much. But anyone who saw you together, or heard you talk about him…" His voice trailed off.
Were we so transparent? she thought. Did everybody know?
"I'm sorry," he said after a long silence. "Let's finish dinner and I promise I won't mention it again."
"I'm not hungry."
Frank exhaled loudly. "I'm glad you said that. I've lost my appetite, too." He pointed to the street that paralleled the beach. "Want to walk?"
"I want to tell you what happened." The words surprised her even as she spoke them.
"You don't have to. It can wait."
"No. It has to be now."
Suddenly she was bursting to unload the burden of what had happened. She had been holding it tight within her for so long, three years that felt like forever, walling it off like a festering sore. And now it screamed for release, as if it had been waiting for the right person to come along, someone who knew Matsuo, someone who might share the pain with her.
They walked along a narrow street lined with stately ironwood trees, he with his hands in his pockets, she with her arms folded tightly across her chest. The story gushed out of her. She felt she was not so much telling it as setting it free.
* * *
Good Lord, I thought as I held Meiko against me and let her sob. What she's been through.
We had circled around and started back on the sand above the surf line when she broke down. I pulled her against me and told her to let it go. She was so small and frail in the circle of my arms, and there seemed to be no end to her tears. 1 tried to absorb her pain. She had years of unexpressed grief stored up and I would hold her until it was all cried out—even if it took all night.
I tried to avoid the thought of Matsuo killing himself but could not. Seppuku—the horror of jabbing a knife into his belly and ripping it across, then up toward his chest—made my intestines coil with revulsion. But it was so like him to do something so Japanese. I could almost sense his feeling that he would be ripping the last traces of America out of him with that final act and would thereby go to his beyond as a true Son of Japan.
A useless death. And the worst part of it for me was knowing he had gone to his grave thinking as he did of me. I had always hoped deep inside that someday I'd get the chance to square myself with Matsuo. That hope was gone now. I held Meiko tighter, trying to release my pain with hers.
I thought about what could have happened to her—she would have drowned out there if that freighter hadn't hit her sailboat. A few yards to the le
ft or right …
I pressed her more tightly against me, thinking how the strange turns of life were decided by seconds and minutes, by feet and inches. I'd been in Honolulu two and a half years, Meiko for three; I must have passed The Bon Marché dozens of times during the year she had been working there, yet only today had I stopped in and passed the stocking counter when she was there. If she had been bending down behind the counter or if I had borne left instead of right upon entering the store, I'd have missed her.
Seconds and inches…
Meiko pushed herself away and I let her go, reluctantly.
"I am so sorry," she said, turning away.
"Don't be. You never have to apologize to me." I had a thought. I hesitated, then plunged on. "Did Matsuo ever tell you what happened between us?"
I saw her shake her head in the moonlight. "No."
"Well then I guess it's time for me to do a little soul baring myself." I held my hand out to her, hoping she'd take it. "I’ll tell you on the way back to the parking lot."
She placed her hand in mine and suddenly I felt light-headed. Touching her made me realize how deep my emotions ran where Meiko was concerned. I had written them off as youthful infatuation with a girl I could never have, a romanticizing of the unattainable.
Yet here, now, on the Waikiki beach, she no longer seemed an impossible dream.
SEPTEMBER
TOKYO
Hiroki stood in an upper chamber of the Diet Building and surveyed the gathering. Most of the men here would be part of the Imperial Conference, due to begin within the hour. The excitement and anticipation was palpable. Hiroki shared it. This might well be the most important Imperial Conference in the history of the Empire.
"Where is your brother?" Koki Hirota said as he stood next to Hiroki.
"My brother? Matsuo is home. Why do you ask?"
Hirota's face was bland. "I am thinking that it is best for our plans that he not be present at the Imperial Conference. He might voice sentiments similar to those he expressed when the Crown Prince was born."
Hiroki nodded. "Yes. I quite agree."
Matsuo certainly had no place here. Hiroki wondered if he still bore his brother ill will. No. No longer. Such equanimity might not have been possible had Meiko lived on as a constant reminder of the incident; but with her dead, it became merely an unfortunate episode to be overlooked and forgotten in the interest of family harmony.
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