The Gardens of Kyoto

by Kate Walbert

  What else? An elaborately carved letter opener made out of a sleek white wood that I now know is whale tusk, a certificate of accomplishment in the Great Books program, a children’s primer he had never shown me before. It must have been his first. I opened it and laughed at the unsteady letters he wrote, the Qs with their long cat tails, the Ks with shaky angles. It was difficult to imagine him as the child who wrote so clumsily. I suppose I must have always believed that Randall was born writing, or at least with a book in his hand. The sentences in the primer were elemental, Dick and Jane. It occurred to me then that he might have still had his mother at this time, and that she might have helped him trace these letters, holding his small hand in her own, fingering the alphabet.

  There was also a book, one with a soft, leather cover, its illegible title worn to nothing, though I knew: The Gardens of Kyoto. I may have cried, I don’t recall. What I remember is Mother’s hand on my back, and the way Betty seemed, for once, patient, waiting for me to examine everything before she looked herself.

  • • •

  Mother kept her hand on my back for some time. I opened the book and saw again the inscription— For Ruby and child, with affection— and the professor’s signature. X, Randall claimed. Professor X. Clear as day, he said. And in truth I could make no other name from it, the X scrawled across the stained rice paper of the cover page, behind which the ancient cherry woodprint, its thick limbs propped up by strange crutches, stood.

  “Look,” Betty said. Her patience had clearly worn out and she held in front of me a notebook. “It’s his diary.”

  “Oh my,” Mother said.

  I had the feeling of not wanting to set anything down, that these things might disappear as quickly as he did, and so I balanced the diary on The Gardens of Kyoto and opened it, first glaring at Betty.

  Indeed, it was a diary. His diary, though he had never mentioned keeping a diary to me before. He had written his full name on the flyleaf—Randall Jeremiah Jewell—along with a warning: All those who read these pages without an explicit, verbal invitation to do so risk their own lives and the lives of their loved ones! I smiled and closed the book. It sounded so much like him.

  “You’re not going to read it?” Betty said.

  “No,” I said.

  “But he sent it to you,” she said, swinging a leg up so her foot bumped hard on one of the kitchen chairs, nearly knocking it over.

  “Elizabeth Jane,” Mother said. “Go upstairs or outside.”

  “I’m comfortable,” Betty said.

  Mother looked at Betty and she reluctantly stood.

  “Just because he sent everything to you doesn’t mean you shouldn’t show us. He was my cousin, too,” she said, turning and storming out and up the stairs.

  “She’s just jealous,” Mother said, stroking my hair. “And she misses Rita.”

  “I know,” I said, because I did, and because I didn’t like Mother stroking my hair, or feeling sorry for me. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to be upstairs with Randall’s things so I could look at what else he had sent—I had just caught the spool of red thread from the slaves’ hiding place out of the corner of my eye—and reread my name, written in his hand, on the thin brown wrapping paper that had wrapped the whole package. But then I have always wanted to be alone during moments painful to me, and never understood certain social customs—wakes, shivas for the Jews—when neighbors, friends, and strangers alike crowd your house to keep you company after a death. I suppose other people find comfort in the presence of persons who have come to share their grief, though for me, grief is solitary. I wanted solitude then, to be alone with Randall. Randall was clearly there with me, in the presence of his things but moreover in the knowing, as he had known, that I would only see them if he were dead. I asked to be excused and gathered the package—the spectacles still in my pocket—his diary and The Gardens of Kyoto under my arm, and went outside, the screen door slamming behind me. I started down the long walk, not sure of where I should go but walking nonetheless. I didn’t want to stay inside. I walked toward the red slanting sun, and soon found myself in front of Springfield’s orchard. I climbed the fence easily, then ran as far as I could into the orchard, the world blocked out by hundreds of trees spreading in every direction, line upon line, evenly, like rows and rows of soldiers, gnarled beautiful fruit trees, as old, it seemed to me, as that woodcut cherry in Kyoto.

  4

  My understanding is that a decision was made to spare Kyoto, that there had been some discussion and that the decision was reached that, given the gardens and temples, the city of Kyoto should be taken off the list of possibilities of where to drop the bomb. Perhaps one of the generals in charge of such things had been to Ryoan-ji, or viewed it, I should say, since it is not a garden that can be entered. It has no benches, no paths, no ponds. It has no lawn, no trees, no flowers. I read about it in Randall’s book: how the Japanese garden was derived from the Shinto shrine and centers on the worship of kami, or spirits. Spirits dwell in specific places— Mount Fuji, for instance, or a particular pattern of rock you might find rising out of the sea. Ryoan-ji is one of these places.

  The Japanese believe that to meet kami there is no need to die and go to heaven. You can, quite simply, visit the garden.

  5

  I sat in the orchard a good long while. I can still see me there, a teenager, barely, still a girl as confused by Randall’s affections as I had been by his death. I imagine Mother sensed this about me and felt powerless in the face of it. She would have liked to have had something to say, something to give that went beyond her callused hand on my back. But what more could she have offered? I counted clouds, a trick I had developed for whenever I felt scared. I used it sparingly—when Rita banged out the screen door to Roger, who waited in his automobile, leaving home for good; when Daddy broke his arm roofing; when we got the first letter about Randall; now.

  I counted to God knows what until my heart settled down. There were storm clouds and thunder much farther west, toward the Springfield house. We were forbidden to enter the orchard. Mr. Springfield was as mean as a snake, even Mother said it, and the rumors were that if he caught you on his property, or stealing even the fallen fruit, he would twist your finger so hard it would snap in two. I wished for this, wished for Old Man Springfield to come charging down the high hill, thunder over his shoulder, and snap all ten fingers one-two-three until they hung like broken things from my hands. Why should I be alive and Randall dead? I felt like climbing the highest apple and waiting, arms outstretched, for the lightning.

  I turned over and lay on my stomach, Randall’s things in his handkerchief on the stubble of grass next to me. I opened his diary. Randall Jeremiah Jewell. I traced the letters with my finger, nowhere near broken, and turned to the first page. It was dated December 25, 1938; Randall would have been eleven years old. His handwriting looked different than the handwriting I had grown accustomed to seeing in his letters: smaller, cramped, as if he had composed the entry under a blanket in the dead of night, hunched as small as he could go, his eyes blurry. Perhaps this was his way of assuring that nobody would read it. I had a difficult time, and anyone else, I imagine, would have been so daunted at the prospect they would have let Randall’s secret thoughts remain secret. I leaned closer to the page, forgetting where I was, forgetting the approaching thunder, the chill that had suddenly sprung into the air from the ground up, as if the roots of the fruit trees had collectively exhaled their moldy, wet breath. It was early May 1945, just weeks after we’d received the news, and yet in that time it felt as if the world had shifted some, tilted off its orbit. Mother and Daddy walked more carefully around us, wrote often to Rita and once, even, drove us to Capetown to make the telephone call, the four of us screaming into the receiver, Rita? as if just by yelling we might better the connection.

  Anyway, it would not have surprised me if winter had come before summer that year. If the apples had never changed from green to red. If Mr. Springfield had put on a jester’s h
at and run like Ebenezer Scrooge through the neighborhood shouting Happy day! Everything had gone out of sync. The cold I barely noticed; instead, I read, pretending that Randall lay right there next to me, reading along, pointing out the passages he wanted me to note for their genius.

  My life, it began, by Randall Jeremiah Jewell.

  Mother has just given me this for a Christmas present, he wrote. I don’t play enough outside. And I’m too thin. I will make a New Year’s resolution to eat more. I will write every day. I am reading Gulliver’s Travels and Bleak House and enjoying both tremendously. I also continue to peruse the Encyclopedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature. Mother bought me the set before I could talk. Eleventh Edition. I have read most of C. Did you know, he wrote, and I felt a shiver of some kind of recognition, as if he were speaking directly to me and not, simply, to the diary, that the Romans invented cement and then lost the recipe for thousands of years? Remarkable. Tomorrow the library reopens. Good-bye. Your friend, Randall.

  How odd, I remember thinking, Randall writing as if he were speaking to someone he knew. And a friend, no less.

  The rain had begun, though I didn’t notice it until it wet the next page of Randall’s diary. He wrote of the library in town, where he went after school. How he had become acquainted with a certain Miss Thomas, the librarian, and how together they had composed a reading list. Miss Thomas, he wrote, unfortunately resembles a frog. She seems to have too many chins and her eyes have that pointy shape that indicates ill health in childhood—

  Yes, these were his words. Give or take. You will find that certain words stay with you.

  And they are very green, he added—this about Miss Thomas’s eyes—frog green, which I find pretty. Some day I will build the courage to tell her so.

  Raindrops splattered the page and I shut the diary quickly, tucking it beneath my shirt. I gathered the rest of Randall’s things and ran back the way I came, now terrified that Old Man Springfield had seen me and was closing in. I scaled the fence easily and turned around. But there was no one there, only the rows upon rows of fruit trees, their gnarled limbs curling like so many corkscrews. In the now-dark late afternoon, clouds bunched, bruised across the low sky, a flock of starlings suddenly lifted up from several trees, swooped then rose in a synchronized pack out of range. The thunder cracked directly overhead and I ran, already soaked, toward home.

  • • •

  Mother waited for me. She hadn’t yet changed out of her factory uniform and I remember how, entering the kitchen, I was struck by the smallness of her life. I don’t mean to be cruel. I have told you she was a handsome woman, which she was, and kind and hardworking, but I suppose at that age I believed that largeness in life depended on other things.

  “You’re wet,” she said. She may have been preparing supper; I don’t know.

  “Good deduction,” I said. I’m sure I passed through rather quickly on my way up the stairs to my bedroom. It was a room I had, until Rita moved out, shared with Betty, though Betty had moved into the third-floor attic where Rita had previously lugged a cot and a desk lamp and the stacks and stacks of her movie star magazines I would steal when she was visiting Roger. I passed the door, where Betty had tacked a sign that usually read Keep Out. I saw now she had flipped it to the other side: Visitors Welcome, it read. A rare invitation, so I went without knocking.

  I heard a scuffle at the top of the stairs.

  “Betty?” I called.

  “For the love of Pete,” she said. “Why didn’t you say something? I thought you were Mother.”

  I smelled now the cigarette smoke and, reaching the top stair where I could step onto the floor landing, saw Betty relighting the bent end of a half-smoked cigarette.

  “Got another?” I said.

  “I’ll share,” she said.

  I stood on the wide-plank floor looking around. Betty hadn’t changed anything, really. Rita had shellacked black-and-white photographs of her favorite movie stars to the walls and they were still there, a chorus of men smiling out at me. William Powell, I remember. Clark Gable, of course. Frank Sinatra. Some of them were inscribed to Rita. She paid close to a dollar for these, and waited weeks after sending off her mail-order form for the stiff manila envelopes to arrive. I can still see her, kissing the flap she swore had been kissed, licked, by the movie star himself, though Mother told her they had stupid girls such as herself to do that kind of work. When Rita met Roger she said he was the spitting image of Errol Flynn, that if he hadn’t joined the Army he could have had a brilliant career on stage. That’s the way she would say it. On stage. As if it were the same as, In Heaven, or On the Throne.

  Anyway, I hadn’t been in her room since she left and saw now that Rita had shellacked some pictures of Roger and herself near the movie stars. I looked at a photograph of the two of them taken in one of those booths they used to have at county fairs and in the bigger tourist restaurants: four frames of Rita and Roger, and in the last they were kissing, Rita’s big fat curls obscuring most of her face though I could see well enough Roger’s look of concentration.

  “He doesn’t look a thing like Errol Flynn,” I said.

  “Here,” Betty said, holding out the cigarette. I took a puff. I was just starting, and hadn’t yet learned how to inhale.

  Betty held out her hand for the cigarette and I passed it back to her.

  “So?” she said. She sat cross-legged on the cot, the stub of the cigarette between two fingers. “What’d he have to say?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Your boyfriend, cousin Randall.”

  “Leave him alone.”

  Betty frowned. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Really. It’s just sad, really. I mean, it’s just sad.” She had smoked the cigarette down to the nub and I saw now that the flame was out.

  I sat next to her and looked around. I had left Randall’s things at the base of the stairs, next to the door to my room. Now I wished I had brought them up. I would have liked to have shown Betty the spool of red thread and told her of the slaves’ hiding place and how we had found the walls covered in numbers. But I didn’t say a word.

  Out the small attic window the last of the smoke drifted up to the rain. It was raining hard, the sound amplified there, in the attic room, that close to the roof. It’s a lonely, comforting sound: rain in an attic room. We must have sat there for some time listening to it before Daddy came home, before Mother called us down for supper.

  6

  What a character your aunt Rita was. She had what they called sparkle: the first to go skinny-dipping, for instance, and once she spent the afternoon at Jacob’s Creek pond catching bullfrogs until she had so many in her burlap potato bag she said it practically hopped its way home. She’s the one, too, who took a knife to their legs, first stunning them on the head and then slicing clean through until she had more than three dozen.

  I wish I could have bottled the look on Mother’s face when she came home to the kitchen white with flour, a mound of frog legs keeping warm in the oven. Of course, it was Daddy who had to go to the Jacobs to apologize for his daughter’s actions. He did this again and again, at various times, and though he always put on a stern look and once, even, threatened with his belt, I think he loved the spirit his first-born showed, a consolation prize for having had no son.

  On the day she married Roger he came down the stairs red-eyed and Rita teased him, saying, was she being given away by Mother or by him?

  • • •

  Who could have known? Roger was handsome enough. He had the regulation haircut and sharp blue eyes. He wore a uniform and could fly a plane. She met him at a school dance—he was Missy Goodall’s older brother home from the Army for Christmas. Rita, immediately smitten, asked him to come for lunch the next afternoon, and I remember how the house nearly quivered when he walked through the door in that uniform, this before Randall’s leaving, when going to war seemed nothing short of suddenly winning a ticket to living. You won’t understand w
hat I mean by this, but any young boy in a uniform seemed larger in stature, heroic somehow. Daddy rose from his chair as if meeting an adult. He shook Roger’s hand. Mother blushed. And Betty and I could barely contain ourselves, seeing our older sister standing there next to a living, breathing man. In uniform, no less.

  She married him that summer, after graduation. The summer of 1943. In those days it didn’t take much time. Besides, Rita had always seemed too old for the boys her age, boys who were now heading into their father’s businesses, or college, or talking about enlisting. Here was someone who had already completed his preliminary training, who waited for the orders that would give him an officer’s standing. Rita imagined they might be stationed somewhere exotic, possibly Hawaii. She said that Hawaii had been Roger’s first choice, and given his record and his general level of intelligence, why wouldn’t they grant his request?