by Ellis Avery
I bowed, I smiled. Yes, indeed, it was.
WHEN I SAW Miss Starkweather, she blinked at me. “You never told me you could dress properly,” she huffed. When I tendered my resignation and asked if she knew of anyone in New York who might need my services, she sputtered; she flustered; she said a sour thing or two about my not giving notice, and then she wrote down a few addresses. I stiffened with surprise when she and Miss Parmalee embraced me and kissed my cheeks, but I softened inside as well.
I paused at a fancy new milk bar, all brass and red velvet, and tried a glass. Was I really going to New York? I could not really believe a place outside Japan existed, and yet here was milk, evidence of my childhood, of a whole milk-drinking world abroad. It had a faint undertaste of chestnuts, the way milk in New York would taste faintly of blueberries when it was about to turn. It made my throat close with the old grief for my mother and the new grief of exile. It gave me a stomachache.
I stopped at a rice-ball stand and bought a few. I ate one right there, and the woman gave me a cup of cold barley tea and a hard look. “Your Japanese is good,” she said.
The rust-colored frock Koito had given me was the first grown-up Western dress I’d ever worn, made for a woman with a long torso and a small chest. Even ill-fitting, it gave me a sense of invulnerability as I left the stand. No one had recognized me at the girls’ school until I had spoken to them; I saw myself diminish in Miss Starkweather’s eyes the moment she realized it was me. And so it was with a certain reckless, evil pleasure that I let myself into a nearby jinrikisha-puller’s home, took a pair of yellow-thonged sandals out of the shoe box in the cloakroom, and made my way to the bathhouse.
I UNTIED THE BOOTS Koito had given me around the corner, so no one could stop me in the entrance. I stepped out of my shoes, set my money on the absent attendant’s stand, took a new bran bag and towel, and had my dress off before any of the three ancient afternoon bathers knew what had happened. I soaped and scrubbed, noting that alongside the portrait of the Emperor hung a whimsically tinted woodblock print in which His Majesty faced a company of young soldiers, the crowd spiny with green rifles, their uniforms lush violet and rose.
“Don’t come in here,” said one of the old ladies.
“It’s not for you.”
“Akahen,” said the third. Bad.
Of course I went in, and of course they got out. I sank into the exquisite steaming water and stared back at them, towels on their heads, their arms akimbo. I soaked as long as I dared, while the old ladies went to find the attendant. She lumbered over to the tub and spat invective at me, pulling the plug.
I felt hot triumph, listening to the water suck away: it was the sound of all the charcoal they were willing to waste on hating me. I looked them each in the eye. Everything was still for a moment and then they started talking together about summoning more people to remove me. I climbed out. “Please give my best to Little Hazu,” I said, and tossed her pretty yellow sandals into the tub behind me. They circled in the draining water, dirt swirling in their wake.
Then I hurried into my dress. I’d been more than bold enough. The first empty jinrikisha I saw, I hailed.
“Take Migawa Street,” I said, still damp, pulling up the awning to hide.
“Your Japanese is so good,” the runner said.
AND SO I CHOSE TO PASS the Shin house that afternoon, in the glow of my last trip to the bathhouse, my pleasure no less real for being juvenile. My giddy mood crumbled as soon as we approached Cloud House: the little Migawa, high and swollen ever since Kato’s canal had opened, was lined with buckets, the street abuzz with people. I gagged; the scent was a knife in the air, ineluctable and acrid. The night before, when I’d remembered the long-ago fire, I was breathing real smoke.
The smell was enough. “Please turn off here,” I pointed, sinking deeper under the jinrikisha awning, and we pulled away. It would not do to be seen, and there was really nothing to see: Baishian had never been visible from the street. My last glimpse of the Shins was their long low wall in the yellowing afternoon light, broken by the great thatched gate.
When we clattered past the shrine, I saw a group of players rehearsing a piece called Nonomiya, about the ghost of a woman who cannot forgive her enemy, and who therefore cannot pass out of this life and be reborn. I saw the actor-ghost at the spirit gate lift a white-socked foot to leave and set it down, unable. In my heart I paused at the nearby Kannon altar. This time I did not ask for anything to happen. I bowed my head twice—forcing myself not to look back and see if Yukako was among the others on Migawa Street—and I made the simplest prayer I had ever heard: to be happy.
I WAS FOOLHARDY, going to the bathhouse and the Shins’. Everyone was looking for me, Aki said when I stopped at the convent. She wore a white cloth mask over half her face now, but it gave me such joy to see her good eye and unbruised skin. “I can’t believe you’re here,” she whispered anxiously. “Why did you do it? You, of all people? The teahouse? The money?”
It was a comfort to know she didn’t want to believe it of me. “Okusama told me to take what I needed, and I took all of it. I heard the teahouse burned, but that’s all I know. Really.”
Her narrowed eye widened, and she took a step closer.
“So, I guess you talk to Kenji when he visits now?” I asked.
“He writes to me,” she said, looking a little abashed. “Usually he waits around outside all day and I burn the letters. What could they say, really? A dog just walked by. Your Mother Superior looks cross today, doesn’t she? Oh, now I smell you’re having lunch. But today he only came and left a letter, so I worried.” he took an embarrassed look back at the convent house. “It’s worldly of me, but I read it.”
So. Arsonist and thief. I knew where I stood with the Shins. “What did he say about your father?”
“They’re holding him for questioning,” she said, her voice dropping as she looked down.
“You won’t believe me if I say he burned the teahouse, but he was there last night. I heard him talking with Okusama and he said a few things about your mother. I came to tell you what I heard.”
Her gaze had slowly lifted as I spoke; now she looked me full in the eye. She leaned forward and took one of the bars of the gate. I told her what I knew, if not how I’d come to learn it.
Aki’s face worked behind her mask when I finished. “Un,” she said. “I guessed as much. I even wrote to Kenji like I knew it was so, to make him stop coming around, but he said he didn’t care. Well, now I know.” She stood still for a moment, thinking. “There’s still so much I don’t know,” she said. I wished so many good things for her just then, this clear, bright young woman, this new penny shining through mud.
I WAITED FOR KOITO on Third Bridge that evening. The Kamo River was swift and glassy, its rocky spits peopled with egrets. I could see the eastern mountains so clearly in the last pink light: great brooding Hiei, Daimonji with the great dai character carved into the bald patch on its flank, tame Maruyama, low and green, decked with temple spires. I had not been past the mountains cupping this city in twenty-five years.
There was so much I didn’t know, either. What had happened at Baishian after I left? Had Nao come back to burn Baishian for spite? I didn’t think so: bedding his master’s daughter on the tearoom floor seemed like triumph enough for him. And it wasn’t clear to me precisely what had happened when: for Nao to burn the teahouse and shoot at the Minister might have required him to be in two different places at once.
Could Yukako have fallen asleep in the teahouse and started a fire from neglect? Teahouses were designed to allow two fires to burn untended, one in the tearoom and one in the mizuya backstage. I tried to remember if there had been any earthquake tremors that might have jostled the charcoal or thrown sparks. I was upset then; I can’t say for certain, but I remember none.
And Yukako had not seemed likely to fall asleep in the teahouse, or to wander off from a charcoal fire. I winced at my last image of her; it was not what I wou
ld have wanted. I tried to remember her in my arms, or even in her robe of leaves, grave and regal as she sent me away. But no, the last time I saw my mistress, she was bent over in Baishian with the knot of her obi poking in the air like a housemaid’s, wiping down the tatami with a cloth. Watching her scrub and swab was like hearing a favorite song on an instrument left slack; it was hard to see all that briskness and purpose flattened into nervous energy. I made a sound or two in the doorway, to show I was leaving. I bowed. She did not look up.
I COULD NOT IMAGINE Baishian aflame, and yet I could think of nothing else. The tatami smoking from young green to black to red, the delicate basketwork of the ceiling dropping to the floor in blackened curls. The shoji gone in quick puffs, the lattice shining red and sinking gray. And fire does not wait for us to pack up our homes before it takes them: the tea boxes surely burned, with their hundred coats of sanded lacquer. The whisks would burn like feathers. The shelves backstage must have burned, collapsing, all their precious vessels in shards. Even the stems and blooms of hagi would have curled, wobbled, and burned, right up to the water still in the vase. And burning slowest of all, the fine wood that framed all my years with Yukako: the satiny moiré of the floorboard, the clean planes of the low square door and the alcove post. The night-black alcove floor, with its white lightning blaze. I heard the rending dull heave of the thatched roof as it crashed, the whinny and groan of timber, the tinkling pop of Nao’s windows. I covered my ears.
And then I knew what had happened. I wept on that bridge for Yukako. Not for Yukako, as I had all day, because she had sent me away, because she was lost to me. No. For Yukako. For what the fire must have meant to her.
I HAD NOT YET asked Koito the thing I most wanted to know. When she came, she had her runner bring us downtown on a street that followed the Takase, a canal fed by the Kamo River a short block away. The stream shimmered in the lantern light; I’d first entered the city by this narrow route, poled on a flat-bottomed boat. Before I could ask, Koito pointed to the street beyond. “Pontocho,” she said, “where I first worked.”
“Did you meet your husband there?” I inquired politely. “Or in Tokyo?”
“We couldn’t have met in Pontocho,” Koito chuckled, her voice a rich purr. “We tried, once or twice, but all the Emperor’s men went across the river to Gion; Pontocho was for the Shogun’s people. I’d never seen him before that big tea at Cloud House, actually, the night I first met your Okusama. If I’d known she and Lord Ii’s son were engaged, I would never have gone. But you know how things turned out. I’ll never forget that angry young girl, the way she tried to tear the robe right off me.”
She looked out, lost in thought. I wanted to hear more, so I didn’t interrupt with my question. Above each river-light hung a darkened lantern; a high row of them lined the canal. I wondered what they were for. Koito continued, “And then the imperial guards at the end of the block wouldn’t let me leave! I just sat in my palanquin, with the bearers smoking and the evening dribbling away. I was supposed to work three parties that night, but I knew it would be so long before I saw the young lord again. Remember how sick he was? I couldn’t resist the chance to visit him when I could blend in with the other geiko at Cloud House. But there I was, in a torn kimono, embarrassed and upset and losing money. And then this handsome young man looked into my box and said, “I don’t remember you with the others; who are you?” And it was the Emperor’s nephew—my Minister. He made the guards wave me through. It was love at first sight,” she said in English. “But then the war made everything difficult.”
I had never heard Koito like this before, relaxed and chatty and confessional. It was a delight. “I had to make my own way,” she said. “The other geiko kept getting younger and younger. I learned tea as Rikyu taught it, I learned French, I traded my lead paint for Western white. Anything to make me stand out,” she sighed. “And then we met again, by accident, when his wife was dying.” She looked at me, her smile both frank and shy. “I’m so lucky,” she said. She was.
After a pause, she added, “Mizushi just got married too; remember my little sister? To Baron Sono’s son Kazuo.”
The boy Sumie wanted for her daughter. I gasped. How small this world was. It occurred to me just then that the Mountain might never have known why his adoptive father had wanted to call a teahouse Baishian, and that I might know now. “What was your grandmother’s name?” I asked suddenly. “Your mother’s mother?”
“Why, it was Baishi,” Koito said, a little embarrassed as the name of the teahouse floated unspoken between us.
“I thought so,” I said. The moment passed, and then it felt easy, by the flickering water, to ask the most important thing.
No sooner had I opened my mouth, however, but there came a sound I’d never heard before. A tingle of metal on metal, a crackling whir. The delicate pop of one era in a city’s life ending, a new one taking hold.
And then the lake waters that lapped Akio’s home in Hikone coursed down the Biwa Canal and fell through a turbine in East Kyoto; the force of their falling shocked the strung wires overhead, and the dark lanterns over the canal were seized with light. It was like a loud sound, a deafening brilliance, as the electric lights behind me, then the ones overhead, and then each one before me, came on, on, on, on, on.
THE JINRIKISHA MAN dropped his poles and covered his face with both hands. I clung to Koito in terror and she laughed. “This must be Kato’s surprise for my husband! I’d guessed as much. Look! It’s like Tokyo!”
Hearing her, the jinrikisha-puller nodded, took a long look down the shining canal, and dabbed the sweat off his forehead. “Un,” he said. He took up his poles again and drew us down the row of lights. I stared at the Takase water, the illuminated sheets of it, like a dazzling road.
KOITO BROUGHT ME to the hotel and sat with me in the bar a few moments before leaving. I finally asked her what I most longed to know. Among the few things I had brought from the Shins’ were five black pearls of incense, a small white cup. “What happened to Miss Inko?”
“She really took a shine to you, didn’t she? My favorite maid ever. You know she married in Tokyo?”
“A man from a sweet-shop family,” I said, a little impatiently.
“He died young, ten years ago, maybe,” Koito said. “They had three boys and a girl, all recently married. I saw her not too long ago; she’s the same as ever. Loud, funny. You remember.”
Inko, a mother! Almost a grandmother! I set down my plum wine. “Is she happy?” I pressed.
“Life hasn’t been good to her, to be honest. Her husband dying. All those sons, and her in-laws still make her sleep in the entrance like a new bride. I thought when her boys got married, she’d have a houseful of daughters-in-law to serve her hand and foot, but it sounds like her husband’s parents have taken them over for themselves. And they’re in their fifties, you know. They’re going to live forever.”
In case I somehow lost the pillow-box, I was also carrying a few gold coins in the reticule Koito had given me. Each was worth a fortune, she’d said. “Give Miss Inko these, when you see her,” I told her. “And ask her to come visit me in New York someday.”
Koito’s eyes widened. She hailed the barman for a writing brush, and he produced an inkwell and a pen with a metal nib. By the electric light falling in from the street outside, I wrote the only address in New York I’d ever learned. And with painstaking Roman letters, I spelled out a name: Aurelia Corneille.
Epilogue
1891–1929
I TRAVELED A GRUELING three-week route, first by sea to San Francisco, then by train to New York. A red brick wall, a yard of stones, the last green leaves of the sycamores: I had come so far for this, a name and two dates. I took fierce pleasure in pulling up the weeds and rough grass that covered my mother’s small marker. In all this world, it was mine. “Claire,” I whispered, crying a little as I swabbed out the dirt from the cut grooves of her name. My mother had died when I was young and I knew where her grave was: I w
as surprised by how much comfort this gave me.
While I was gone, Lafayette Street had been widened, the Brooklyn Bridge hung, Broadway strung with electric lights. The church on Mott Street had burned and been rebuilt. Maggie Phelan had died young, of cholera.
I FIRST LIVED just a few doors down from the very building where I’d been raised, in the nuns’ Residence for Women Travelers. More so than my mother could afford to be, I was grateful for their hospitality. I picked up translation work quickly, and at night gathered with my fellow Women Travelers at the nuns’ long refectory tables, watching my neighbors to learn again how Western people ate. “I don’t like the way she stares,” I heard a girl tell her mother. But how did a body bring soup to the mouth without lifting the bowl? English was a rough glass wall each woman raised around her: I could see through it, but not as well as I could before she’d spoken.
THE NEW FACE at dinner one night was a female rake. After tumbling all the young girls who would have her, by the end of the week, she reached me. She talked nonsense, but I followed her to bed and found in my own body a storehouse of delight. I looked in the washstand mirror the next morning and saw that I would have been a reasonably pretty girl had I grown up in New York, a black-and-pale gamine. At thirty-five, I was a handsome woman.