The Teahouse Fire

by Ellis Avery

  AT UNCLE CHARLES’S little-used table, me in my tartan and my mother in her good dress, we leaned forward, fidgeting through the long blessing. Then Uncle Charles began eating with a bachelor’s silent, methodical speed, and my mother followed suit, leaving me to rock in my chair with frustrated curiosity. The two of them locked into what could have been called a contest if it weren’t for my uncle’s tonsured dignity and my mother’s wry grace. When Uncle Charles had emptied his bowl, he set down his spoon with a rap, which my mother answered instantly, and the two of them surveyed each other with arms crossed over their bellies. “Well, that was fun, Charles; I don’t see how you can bear to eat alone every night,” said my mother.

  My uncle offered a sniff of acknowledgment and began speaking in his preaching voice. “As you know, I have for some time sought permission to serve our Lord in a capacity commensurate with the gifts He has seen fit to bestow upon His creature.”

  “For this I speak four languages?” my mother mocked. “I haven’t forgotten.”

  My uncle took a deep breath to continue in this vein, but then his joy burst forth in a shuddering exhale. “This morning I received a letter,” he announced simply.

  “You beat out Brother Michael, didn’t you?” my mother needled.

  “I have been chosen,” Uncle Charles said, reddening, “to follow in the footsteps of the Blessed Saint Francis Xavier. To minister to a lost flock. To convert the heathen in a land that has finally opened her doors to the West.” He leaned back in his chair and sighed. “It’s not for me to say why Brother Michael’s prayer went unheard while mine has been granted.” As he looked heavenward, my mother flashed me a knowing smirk, which drained out of her face as she began to realize he was serious. “This afternoon I booked passage for all three of us,” he said. “We leave for Japan in six weeks.”

  I DROPPED MY SPOON. Japan? My mother went white. What would she do, my mother, who could not serve a Sunday meal on a Thursday? Scream at him, curse him? Fling her glass of wine in his face? But instead she slowly pouted out her lip and rocked her head to the side, as if gauging her store of flour—as if to say, We can stretch it. And with uncharacteristic hesitation, she asked, “Do you think it’s good? For the girl?”

  “What could be better than to serve our Lord? Aurelia has the gift of languages, and you have”—he paused, groping—“the gift of the hearth.” My mother, irritated, closed her eyes and pressed her lips together, and Uncle Charles chastised, “It is a blessing to be called to do God’s work.” His ruddy face shone, and then he looked down at me. “Now, the world is full of people who can speak French and English, but if Aurelia can learn Japanese as readily—”

  “You could support yourself as a translator,” my mother said. I saw relief for me in her face, and something gentler than envy.

  “The Church has a place for all Her daughters, even the most unfortunate,” said Uncle Charles, looking at her pointedly. My mother’s nostrils flared. “Any order that Aurelia felt called to would be the richer for her learning.”

  “Or you could marry an ambassador,” she daydreamed.

  “In any case,” said Uncle Charles, “the Order, at my request, has given us a second copy of the grammar with which they have provided me. Learn what you can,” he said, passing me a black and gilt book stamped with the word Nippongo.

  “Aurelia, thank your uncle and go upstairs,” said my mother. “I’m going to talk with him for a while. Here, take a candle.”

  I PRESSED MY EAR to my uncle’s closed door, almost falling in as someone opened it. “Go,” said my mother, standing over me. “Now.”

  I LAY IN MY BED by candlelight with Mr. Nippongo’s book. The blocks of text were sprinkled with drawings of parasols, pagodas, men in dresses called kimono, singular and plural, women in kimono and sashes called obi. The ladies were pretty as painted china plates: when I closed my eyes, I could see them in blue and white. In our pagoda, Uncle Charles would live on the ground floor and my mother and I would live upstairs, sleeping each night under our little tiered roof. Oh, to live up only one flight of stairs—and to never see Maggie Phelan again! I clutched the book to me, lighthearted and fierce.

  I woke again halfway when my mother came in. She rustled in the room, kissed me, and blew out my candle. I heard her cough in her bed and spit into a handkerchief; it fell to the floor with a soft wet slap.

  SIX WEEKS LATER I stood by her bedside. “Look, I wore my dress,” I said.

  “You look very pretty,” my mother said drowsily. “Do you like the velvet?”

  “It’s soft.” I nodded.

  “Do you have a name for your doll?”

  “Clara,” I said, holding her up for my mother to see.

  “Hello, Clara,” she said in English.

  I remember the attic, the wind in the sycamores, the vagrant bolts of light from the garret windows, the bright air buzzing with dust. A patchwork quilt from the nuns’ box: red squares spreading in diagonal stripes on a field of soft white cotton. Under it: my mother. “I’ll take the next ship out,” she promised. “I’ll be there before you know it.” Her face was hot and flushed; her body seemed so flattened, so small in the sea of Irish Chain.

  “But I could go later, with you,” I insisted.

  She looked pained for a moment, then merry. “I think your uncle needs you to come with him,” she said. “He’ll never say it, but I think he’d be afraid to try learning Japanese without you.” I laughed. “No, it’s true: you’re younger; it’ll be easier for you.”

  “If you’d come to New York when you were younger…” I said tentatively.

  “I wouldn’t have had you, ma blonde.” She reached with effort to finger my black hair. “You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said. “My bel accident.” She was always tender with me, but never solemn like this. I scratched my nose uncomfortably.

  “Uncle Charles did the right thing by both of us,” she said, out of nowhere. “Did you know, he booked two cabins on board? The cheaper thing would be to put us in the front of the ship, where all the servants room together. That’s how I came to New York. It can be trying, for a woman alone; I imagine your uncle didn’t want any more accidents.” Because she laughed, I laughed, too, uncertainly. “So you’ll get the cabin we’d have shared. What do you think of that, having a room to yourself?” she asked.

  She closed her eyes and lay quietly, and I cuddled under the red-and-white quilt. “I’d rather stay here with you,” I said.

  “My precious child,” my mother began softly, and then she seemed to gather force; her black eyes flew open and she broke off, hissing, “If anything ever happened to me, you’d be at the mercy of the nuns. I can’t have that on my conscience.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, burrowing my face into her neck.

  “You will,” she sighed. And then, very seriously, pushing me back a little to look at me, she said, “Is there anything you ever wanted to ask me?”

  I looked her in the eye. I couldn’t think of anything. And then I wriggled closer and whispered a question, and my mother laughed and hacked. “Oh, God, my Aurélie. Because he drinks coffee, darling,” she said, brushing tears of laughter from her eyes and blood from the corner of her mouth.

  When we had both caught our breath, she patted her shoulder for me to rest my head while she told her story. “When I came to this country,” she said, “I got sick off the side of the boat so many times. All the adults did. You’d feel your stomach start to swoosh around inside you and—quick—you’d make a run for the railing. Meanwhile all the children raced around like it was Carnival. Hurrah!” she said, in a piping little voice. “The boat’s rocking like a pony, and our parents are too sick to keep us in line!” We laughed again; she coughed and said, “It’s better this way. If we were sailing together, I’d be so jealous—you prancing around, me throwing up—but this way I’ll get to hear all about your adventures when I can enjoy them properly.” We heard Uncle Charles’s impatient tread up the
stairs; she hauled her thin arms around me and clasped me so hard I gasped. “Now, va-t’en, shoo,” she said, pushing me out of the bed. “I’m going to let your uncle say a prayer for me and I know you’ll fidget.” I shooed.

  SO MANY FIRSTS all at once! My first trunk. My first ship, the Lafayette, just like the street in our neighborhood. My first telegram, before we even steamed away—Uncle Charles’s, actually, but I had never seen a messenger boy up close, or his little leather satchel. My first view from the water of the pillared city where I was born. My first view, on all sides, of the sea.

  My first room to myself, as my mother had promised: a tiny, windowless cell containing a stacked pair of bunks with high walls like the sides of a crib. I named the top my bedroom—my first ladder!—and the bottom one my parlor, like a fancy lady.

  My first meals my mother hadn’t cooked. I remember how exotic it was my first day of school, how sophisticated I felt, in my plaid uniform and Saint Claire medal, eating the apple and bread and cheese my mother had sent down with me. (She did not want me eating the nuns’ food, she said. I was grateful; what I saw—and smelled—of the other students eating at the Saint Patrick’s refectory was one long nightmare of soggy boiled greens.) Even so, how much more grown up I felt eating roast chicken on a tray by lamplight in my parlor bunk with Clara, while Uncle Charles ate with the other Jesuits in the dining room. So this is how it is for him. The food appears, the dishes vanish. So easy. Auprès de ma blonde, I sang to my kerchiefed doll. Later, my stomach hurt.

  Maybe there was some truth to my mother’s idea that children could learn languages faster. When the seven Brothers met each morning to study Japanese, I was always the first to raise my hand—this, that, the other; here, there, over there; yesterday, today, tomorrow—until Uncle Charles asked me to stop joining them for class. “The presence of a child distracts us from our labor,” he explained, and so I studied on my own in the gloomy ship library, quizzing Clara—I gave the book to the teacher; the teacher gave the book to me—as Uncle Charles, daily, quizzed me.

  After seven days, and seven letters to my mother on French Line stationery, we changed ships in Southampton, England, for the P&O Line. We took the Poonah bound for Alexandria—the very ship, the captain told us, on which the great acrobat Blondin had trained for his Niagara Falls feat by walking a tightrope strung between the main and mizzen masts. A framed engraving of the event hung in the ship’s library: Blondin, blindfolded and barefoot midway, smoking a pipe. In place of the solemn volumes of French philosophy on the Lafayette, the British ship library had Shakespeare and fairy tales. I remember thinking, that first afternoon as we bobbed in the harbor, how lucky I was, sitting with my doll and all those books in that sunny window, savoring the promise of a letter from my mother when they passed out the Southampton mail the next morning.

  At the end of the day, when I lay in my new compartment, this one even smaller than the last, Uncle Charles came in with a lamp to say good night. “There’s only one bed this time,” I said, rocking experimentally against the narrow sides of the new crib-bunk. “Where would Maman sleep?” I yawned.

  Uncle Charles blinked in the darkness. Something in his face woke me up.

  “What?” I asked, sitting up to see him in the light. Some unsaid anger—or panic?—scuttled across his features.

  He composed himself. “The Sisters in New York sent a message,” he said. “One of the Southampton Brothers told me.”

  My stomach twisted inside me. Of course I knew, but I wanted to make not knowing last longer. “She can’t come on the next ship, either?” I squeaked. Say nothing, Uncle Charles, I thought.

  “God took her just after we left.”

  I pulled the covers to my chin, and pressed my fists to my ears.

  “The Sisters buried her in the churchyard at Saint Patrick’s.”

  “No.”

  “God will purge His handmaiden of her sins,” he said, “and draw her to His side in heaven.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I know you mourn, but you must rejoice for her immortal soul.”

  “Good night,” I said, choking, and shut my eyes tight. I did not open them when he blessed me.

  I KNOW I READ and ate and studied and slept on the Poonah, but I remember very little. I know we crossed the Mediterranean, took a nightlong train across the desert to Suez, and steamed off again on a new ship, but those numb winter months are lost to me. All I see is the engraving, the tightrope, the blindfold. We did not mention her, neither Uncle Charles nor I.

  I began to thaw a little on the new ship, the Singapore, steaming the long warm weeks from one fragrant port to the next: Aden, Galle, Madras, Calcutta, Penang. There was one Japanese person on board: a skinny young cook, Mr. Ohara, who wore his ship’s uniform stiffly ironed and sharpened his cleavers each day. It was easy enough to learn from him because he said the same things every morning when he brought food up from the larder: It’s dirty. It smells bad. It’s not fresh. He kept a cat, Maneki-san, a one-eyed mouser I was forbidden to feed. He gave me tiny cups of pale green tea and let me practice my new words in the early part of the day, then chased me away when he set to work on the noon meal in earnest. I read fairy tales then, or played School in my narrow chamber, teaching Clara Nippongo from my gilt leather grammar. There was no Mr. Nippongo. The word meant Japanese.

  My name is Clara. I am a doll. I am a foreigner. I come from New York. I came by ship. My mother is French. My mother is in New York. My mother is sick. I don’t speak Japanese. I don’t understand. I don’t know.

  I remember the soft arms of the ship rocking me at night as I prayed for my mother: sometimes that God might hold her as the ship held me, sometimes that she would get well and come soon. That her passage might be safe. That she might be, secretly, an elfin princess, and come to me across the water on gauzy wings. And every day I woke still farther from her, to umi, tori: the vast blinding sea, flecked with gulls.

  2

  1866

  WE REACHED YOKOHAMA that spring, after days of sailing north from Shanghai, the sea growing colder. I remember lurching on the dock, unsteady on my land legs, waving good-bye to Mr. Ohara, though he could not see me. Japanese people were forbidden to leave Japan, he had told me, trusting me with his secret, so he didn’t want to go above deck until they reached Edo, where he could slip off the boat unseen. We had said our farewells in the kitchen; I remember calling him Ohara-san and bowing, him bowing back, pleased. While the other monks awaited their orders, a buttery French Brother, Joaquin, his pate above his tonsure beaming, met me and Uncle Charles amid a quiet crowd of pointy round hats and bare brown legs. “Welcome, welcome,” he said. “You are now in Japan and it’s February twenty-fourth.”

  “Why, it’s the end of March,” protested Uncle Charles.

  “Of course it is. But the natives are still on a lunar calendar here,” the monk chuckled. “The trick for us is keeping both dates in our heads at once. When in Rome, n’est-ce pas?” He laughed at his own wit as Uncle Charles fumbled with his valise. “Welcome to Japan,” the monk repeated, his gaze falling on me, “though they told me to expect an adult servant, not a child, mademoiselle,” he said merrily. He arranged to have most of our other things sent on to the next ship, and two Japanese men wearing straw hats and wooden sandals—and not much more—carried our smallest trunk together on poles behind us. Brother Joaquin led the way down a little gray street of little gray tiled roofs—he and Uncle Charles looked enormous—past gray doorways tucked behind billowing strips of indigo cloth painted with fluid white characters. We passed a bright red trellis twice the height of a man: two red tree trunks topped with two red beams. “That’s a torii,” he said. “The heathens think of it as a kind of spirit gate. You’ll see it in front of all their shrines.” The red torii commanded one side of the street, while a great wooden gate framed the other: beyond each of them I saw a garden, a tall building, a fat braided rope bellpull. “Buddhist temple,” said Brother Joaquin, nodding toward
the wooden gate. “Shinto shrine,” he said, glancing at the torii. “Reincarnation and nature worship, respectively,” he sighed. “It seems the natives follow both religions and believe in neither.” I looked through the torii gate as we passed it and saw a wedge of bright colors, no, a dainty woman swathed in brocade, reaching for the bell-rope at a little gilded altar. Brother Joaquin continued, “One of them had the cheek to ‘teach’ me how to ‘pray’ at their shrines once: toss a coin, ring the bell, bow twice, clap twice, make a wish, bow again.” As we walked up from the bay, the heavy, frail blocks of tile-and-wood gray houses became less tightly packed; new brick buildings, like the ones on Mott Street, appeared here and there, still under construction. “‘And why is it you call this nonsense prayer?’” Brother Joaquin continued. “‘Two-two-one system,’ said the little fellow. He sounded so very pleased with himself.” He chuckled.

  “‘Two-two-one system,’” Uncle Charles said with a shudder. “Tarting up idolatry in the finery of science.”

  A man in a black kimono strode past us with a look of bland distaste. He wore his hair in a horsetail queue slicked stiff with oil and pinned at the end to his crown, so that it looked as if he were wearing a tobacco pipe on the back of his head. He wore what looked like two sticks at his belt, one long, one short. “Those are swords,” said Brother Joaquin. “He’s a samurai. You’ll see five castes here: warriors, or samurai, at the top, then farmers, craftsmen, merchants, and the unclean. They all have to follow the caste laws about every little thing: what kind of clothing you can wear, what kind of roof you can put on your house. Pay attention to the merchants; they’re hungry for change. Officially they’re low caste, which means they have pots of money and aren’t allowed to spend it on anything. ‘All men are brothers in Christ’ appeals to them, because it puts them on equal footing with the samurai. Not a lot of samurai converts; they’re the toughest nuts to crack.”