—
Frankie emerged one morning to glimpse a woman rowing the boat in the pond. Her fiery bright hair flew behind her as she circled the isle full of irises so perfectly in bloom they resembled a painting. He ran to the water’s edge. Kimono sleeves of shimmering purple—the same purple as the flowers—flapped about. Uri Slonemsky waved frantically at her.
“Hannah! My Hannah!” he was calling, all creased and undone. “Hannah, be careful!” The woman stood up to wave to her husband but turned her eyes to Frankie instead. Even from shore, he saw their bright green with a dark flame in their centres.
Frankie eagerly called to her, “Good morning, Mrs.—”
“Good morning!” she replied, waving recklessly in his direction.
Mr. Slonemsky was already kicking off his shoes and heading for the bank.
“Uri, come help me,” she shouted, just before she fell in.
* * *
—
It was a story told with laughter, a few tears, and jokes Frankie grasped only at their surface: Hannah’s rebirth following her baptism in the pond. Her Blue Period had turned purple.
“Japanese believe the iris protects and purifies,” Noriko told them.
“You kept them blooming for me, Frank,” Mrs. Slonemsky told him. “Don’t tell him but you outdid even Mr. Fujimoto.” Frankie was grateful Mrs. Slonemsky thought he’d helped her recover. He imagined telling this story someday to others.
Hannah had emerged from her cocoon, and everything was changed. With Uri joining her in the bedroom again, laughter and exclamations of delight escaped the window at all hours. Both Frankie and Noriko were invited to sit down to dinner with the couple. Uri was there for all three meals with an expanding waist to show for them. He even let his hair grow.
Despite the pleasure and pride Frankie took in the company of the Mr. and Mrs. Slonemsky—or rather, Uri and Hannah—what he witnessed between them made him wistful; he winced with loneliness. The words and looks for only each other, the touching: it was another way of living.
“You’ve joined the Hasidim, Uri!” Hannah laughed one morning as she tugged at a curl at Uri’s ear. “What will the neighbours think?”
“My lonely nights were taken up with only scripture until you came back to me.”
Frankie had forgotten his own wife’s face through his lonely nights. Reiko, his Rose Queen.
He came in from the yard one evening to find Hannah dancing with Bucky, who had just returned to lecture at the university. “Blue Skies” was playing on the hi-fi.
“Bucky!” Frankie burst out. He was in his usual musty dark suit and tie, swaying in those skies with his eyes shut.
“Do you foxtrot, Frank?” Bucky stepped onto numbered paper footprints he’d cut out and taped to the floor. He hummed, his foot sometimes landing where it should, and other times not.
“I taught myself,” Frankie said, remembering the dances in Tashme Town Hall. Of course, Augusta had taught him a bit. He ventured a step or two as Hannah placed a martini in his hand. The green flame in her eyes seemed to flare in his chest as he sipped it, then explode behind his eyes. She clapped her hands.
“What is it that puts a baby to sleep?” Bucky asked, eyes still shut. “Rhythm. A rocking cradle. It’s the melting point of the material and the spiritual.”
Frankie’s hand was grasped, Hannah taking the lead in a brief waltz. “This hand does not belong to a gardener,” she said. “Look at these blisters. Too soft. No calluses. Fujimoto’s hands had soil in every pore.”
“Tending the land is a worthy occupation,” said Bucky, eyes still closed as he sashayed. “Land, water, air, wherever you dare.”
It did not seem so worthy to Frankie. He’d dare elsewhere.
Bucky came and went these days without Frankie having a chance to speak with him alone. He was gone early in the morning and back to the tiny coach house late at night. Some nights he didn’t return at all. Frankie was receiving little letters from his sister, Augusta, who was almost grown up now. He was grateful to have something cheerful slipped under his basement bedroom door. He was her audience of one again.
Dear Frankie,
Are you enjoying life in the big city? Are you lonesome? When can we come?
She wrote of more people leaving Tashme, loading their suitcases and scrambling onto buses. Neighbours were taking trains to catch ships to Yokohama, or come east. Either way, to who knows what. She and her friends hugged and wept as they said goodbye. I’ll be seeing you, they sang to one another.
He wrote back of his plans—his big plans in the big city. To own property, to build them a house that was warm in winter and cool in summer; with a toilet that flushed, all to themselves. They’d each get their own room. A big living room where Augusta could tap dance for him and sing “On the Good Ship Lollipop” all day long if she wanted. He’d plant purple irises in front for their mother. They could own a view to the water, but not have to live on it.
By the time his letters travelled across the country, back through forests, prairies, badlands scrub, through mountain tunnels and back up their little dirt street in Tashme, her next had reached him in Rosedale.
A few letters on, she’d changed. Her handwriting slanted gracefully forward.
A room all to myself? For Julia too? How grand! They couldn’t wait to visit. Especially once their mother, Taiji and Aki were living with him in Toronto as well.
You must visit us too, Frankie! The prime minister gave us the house in Tashme which we are fixing up!
Visit? He must visit?
No! Her home was to be here, with him and the rest of the family. Why else was he here, alone, working, scrimping—making plans? He wrote to tell her so. He tapped his foot impatiently for the weeks it took for his letter to reach her, and for her reply to come. Didn’t she believe in him anymore?
Augusta hadn’t let the grass grow under her feet; she’d mowed it. She’d taken the government’s offer of their shack. She and Julia would transform the Tashme Talent Theatre into the High Hope’s Theatre. Maybe even Miss Hawks and Miss McCracken would stay on to help.
Augusta’s first play would be something called Our Town, the story of practically everyone in America, if not in Canada too. No one would mind that the narrator was Julia instead of an American gentleman, that Hope was to be Grover’s Corners. There would be no Tashme. Augusta would play Emily, the girl next door. She still had to figure out who would play George, Emily’s intended, since the satin-sleeved boy, all grown up, was now in Hollywood. The shows would be sold out, standing room only in the old hall turned new theatre. Augusta even changed the ending so that her character lives on, instead of falling sick and dying.
She told Frankie all of this, how excited and proud she was of herself and of Julia. And proud of Frankie. He was, and always would be, Man of the House.
Frankie ripped the letter in two and threw it away. The truth was, his little sister had no faith in him. The tap-dancing Augusta had built her own house and made herself the head of it. Broken up the family.
She and Julia could stay forever in Hope for all he cared.
* * *
—
The day after Frankie received Augusta’s letter he noticed the first withering of an iris petal. After weeks and weeks of nothing but blossoms. It wasn’t apparent to anyone but him, least of all Hannah. The isle of irises no longer preoccupied her. He clipped one dying blossom, then the next and the next and the next. Soon the isle had turned to green. Gone was the glorious purple. The magic was seeping away. One morning, Hannah noticed the change, simply held a hand to her breast, sighed and went on.
In his room, Frankie considered himself. The face in the mirror had become even more swarthy; his forearms were deeply tanned. He examined his hands: now they were calloused; now his palms were stained with dirt. Now, like Mr. Fujimoto, he had the hands of a gardener. He washed up and set out on his bicycle.
Frankie joined a line-up at Honest Ed’s thrift store. Once inside,
he pulled a plain dark suit off the rack, tried on the jacket and then paid for it. Back at the Kidney, Noriko pinned up the pants for him.
“How dashing you look, Frank!” Hannah said when she came in. He was still wearing the suit jacket but had put on his old pants. She cast an up-down glance at Frankie, her gaze snagging on a loose thread. She bit it off.
After Noriko left, they sat down before the fireplace. Uri was upstairs in his study. Frankie sat opposite Hannah, listening. She never posed a question to which she expected a response, so he was free to absorb his lessons without fear of being tested; her fluttering hand trailed cigarette smoke as she alighted on subjects he knew little or nothing of: the sad delusion of communism or the democratic beauty of Modernist art.
“Uri,” she said, “has no delusions. He sees the future clearly, but only after it’s passed. He’s Mister Knew-It-All.” She laughed. “You knew that, didn’t you, Frank?” At birth and through boyhood, Uri Slonemsky had a patch of white hair at his temple. A glimmer of wisdom, of what was to come. Arriving in Canada, Uri Slonemsky’s father had been urged to drop the last part from his name. The father had chafed; no -msky would amount to cutting off the nose to spite the face. He looked to his son Uri, who shrugged. The father shook his head no and there followed much grief: closed doors, failed businesses.
He knew his father should have packed up the family sooner than he had, sold everything in Poland instead of reinvesting. He knew not to trust the neighbour downstairs and the dog who barked at their comings and goings. By then, it was almost too late.
“Young Uri knew it all.” Hannah smiled. “He tells me so every day.” Yet here they were now, Slonemskys side by side with Smiths, in Rosedale.
“Of course, Uri knew the atomic bomb was coming,” Hannah went on. “Would they ever have dropped it on the white race?” she said, exhaling. “No, not even the Germans.”
Of course. Frankie choked, and Hannah’s cigarette smoke swarmed him.
Hannah reached for her martini glass, then paused, stricken by what she saw on Frankie’s face. “You know that’s true, Frank, don’t you?”
He burned with shame, all of him, to his bones. Hadn’t he known what ugly yellow insects Japanese were to the rest of the world? Worse than Germans, than Nazis. Of course. He was lucky, despite everything, to have been in Tashme instead of Hiroshima. Lucky to be alive. He pushed his martini glass away, stubbed his cigarette.
Just then, Hannah glanced beyond him, stood up, and with arms flung wide, cried, “Annie! My Annie!” She scurried over to a girl standing in the living room doorway. Uri emerged from his study above and leaned over the banister. “My Anne,” he said, his voice lifting. He came quickly down the stairs.
Hannah held on to the girl tightly, cocooning her in purple silk. She beckoned from across the room. “Come, come, Frank.”
“Of course, Mrs. Slonemsky.”
“This is our Anne, our daughter. Frank Hanesaka.”
A daughter? A girl in trousers, with hair as full and wild as her mother’s, but left dark and loose. Small and thin. Hazel eyes.
“I can’t stay,” she said. “I have to get back.” Her voice was not a girl’s at all.
“Why not stay?”
She shook her head.
No, she wasn’t thin, not quite. Her blouse draped over full breasts. There was a slight sway as she held up her hands against her mother’s tide.
She was Anne. A plain name, like his own. Sometimes Annie, it seemed.
She was returning by train from some kind of conference in Vancouver en route back to Montreal. Such a long journey, she had to get off.
“Yes, it’s a long ways,” said Frankie.
She turned abruptly to face him. “How long were you there?”
He was confused for a moment.
“Lemon Creek? Slocan?”
“Tashme.” The first time he’d said the word to anyone who hadn’t lived there or in another camp. That amalgam of a name that sounded, in a bitter irony, Japanese.
“Four years,” he said, though it was more than five. He shrugged and glanced away. But she—Anne—would not stop looking at him.
“They couldn’t hold you there. You had rights. You could’ve left.”
Frankie shrugged again. It was true: others left long before war’s end to join road crews, to work on the railroad so long as it was east and not west. It had never occurred to him to just leave; not until war was over, not until his mother sent him east.
Hannah stepped between them. She clamped their hands together in her pillowy palms. “What a treat to have you with us,” she said, seemingly to both of them. He felt her hand pull away. He was something washed ashore with her mother’s tide.
“Come, Anne,” Uri beckoned, taking her other hand. “I want to show you something.”
“You should call her Hannah,” she called over her shoulder as she made her way up the stairs with her father. “And he’s Uri.”
“Frank knows that,” Hannah called back, then whispered, “Now careful she doesn’t make you a socialist.”
* * *
—
When he took off his jacket, he noticed the price tag had been dangling down his back. All evening, they must’ve seen it but said nothing. He threw it to the back of his closet. Maybe Bucky was right about how a suit could make you invisible enough to fit in, to be respected like anyone else. But not a cheap Honest Ed’s suit.
Lying in bed, he couldn’t help but contemplate the Slonemskys’ daughter—Anne, Annie: that thicket of hair, the deep angles of her face, her eyes set far back, almost another species. Her hand, strong, warm and dry. He was ashamed of the sticky dampness of his own. The way she’d spoken up for him as if he were a kowtowing house boy. It was his own doing, presenting himself that way. He’d never met such a girl: a woman. She was younger than him, for certain. She was a modern woman. His thoughts wandered to the breasts that had unmistakably swayed under her blouse; he now realized she hadn’t been wearing a brassiere. He could tell her breasts were not at all like Reiko’s, small and tight with brown crimped nipples. They’d be soft and white with pink tips, enough to spill out of his palms. He began to soothe himself, then felt ashamed of his dirt-stained hand under the sheet. He couldn’t sleep.
He saw in his mind how she’d kept him at bay. She was at some institute of higher learning; he was an underling, not even a young one. He’d barely finished high school, if you could call the classes they’d cobbled together in Tashme school. He was forever lower, without institution; without the gumption to get out from under.
Waiting as always, was Reiko: his wife, his Rose Queen to lift them both out of dreariness. She was returning to him in bits rather than the whole: her small, widened eyes and the red in her cheeks when she’d first spoken to him. She’d seen him make a fool of himself in a grass skirt and face paint, and she’d wanted him. They’d made a baby in a graveyard of miners where it could be laid to rest. He didn’t even know if it had been a boy or a girl, what had become of the body. Reiko hadn’t said and he hadn’t asked.
He smoked a cigarette by his window and was about to close it when he heard the shuffle of feet along the path, then saw a pair of slender ankles in mannish loafers; the shoes were scuffed and worn. He drew back but then her face appeared—Anne’s. She squatted down, looking in on him, her hair falling across her eyes. She shoved it back and inhaled from her cigarette; the smoke rose like a veil between them.
“Frank?”
“Yes.”
“Would you say goodbye to my parents for me? I’m taking the night train back.”
“Why don’t you?”
“They’re asleep.” She threw the cigarette into the darkness. He’d pick that up in the morning.
“You could wait till tomorrow,” Frankie said.
“I know,” she said. She left his window. After a moment, he heard the plink of stones tossed into the pond. She shuffled back past his window without stopping; seconds later he heard the glass door to th
e house slide open and close.
In the morning, Hannah and Uri were quiet over breakfast.
“That’s all she said?” Hannah asked. “She had to leave?”
* * *
—
Later that day, Frankie met up with a family of new arrivals at Union Station. He found them on Front Street: husband and wife and three teenaged daughters with two battered suitcases and two boxes. There was the same wide-eyed look, scaling the tall buildings across the busy streets. They lit up when they spotted him.
“Thank you, Frankie,” the man said, casting his eyes down. “So good to see you.” The wife clasped her hands and bowed. “Thank you, thank you.” The daughters stood shyly by.
They rode the streetcar into Cabbagetown and made their way to the Fujimotos’ home. As the door opened, a whiff of soya sauce and fish and pickles took him back to his mother’s kitchen. Mr. Fujimoto bowed emphatically, smiling: a warmer welcome than he’d given Frankie.
Just as he turned to leave them, the man held out a packet of bills neatly tied with the same twine that bound up their boxes. “Thank you again.”
Frankie’s hand burned reaching for the money in front of Mr. Fujimoto. He felt the man’s glare on his back as he walked away.
In his pocket, the bills were light as air—lighter than the coins he’d amassed before, yet they weighed him down, made his walk crooked. He knew Mr. Fujimoto would not understand. It was money he’d earned. No one had met him in the dead of night in a city he knew nothing of, when he and the others were still, if no longer enemy aliens, then non-citizens. He’d walked the dark streets alone, found his way alone, waited on the street not knowing what awaited him. No, Frankie Hanesaka had earned his pay.
* * *
—
The next day’s work seemed more tedious than ever. The weeding, sweeping, trimming. Even with Bucky’s rake and the potency of Miracle-Gro, the energy he expended on the task felt more wasted than ever: wasting himself. Shrubs straggling: clip them back. Leaves fallen, twigs gnawed off: rake them up. Sprouted weeds: pull them up. When he looked out at the Slonemsky property, it was endless. Whereas the money he earned grew so slowly, even with his extra business.
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