by Kate Walbert
At this point the greenhouse went terribly quiet and it seemed as if even the drip, drip, drip of moisture dropping from the glass roof paused to let the professor finish his story. The students knew about corpses; they knew about Germans and war. Many had brothers, cousins, who were there now. But the men they knew who had returned—even their fellow students, the soldiers who came to classes on the GI Bill and sat in the back, their stubble beards and dirty fingernails a testament to the quonset huts erected for their living quarters—kept to themselves; they never spoke about bloody letters.
Some of the boys would tear off the blood-stained edges, he said. But others wouldn’t. They’d toss the letters at me. Here you go, Leonardo, they’d say. For your collection.
Professor X wiped his eyes. A few students, the newer ones, looked away; he was their professor, after all.
I used all the paper. I felt it was the right thing to do. I never read the letters, though. Ever. I just drew a big X through the writing so I wouldn’t be tempted, and then, on whatever blank space I could find, I documented my flora, keeping records of where and when I had first observed it.
Mind you, he always added, these were terrible, terrible days.
It was around this time he would straighten up and clap his hands, as if to bring himself, the plants, indeed the entire landscape, out of a trance. Back to work, he’d say, and the students would scatter to their individual duties, taking with them the professor’s story to tell again at dinner, or in their dormitory rooms—to anyone who might not have already heard. They knew the rest of it from other sources: how the professor had returned to the States and been hospitalized for depression, how he had published his drawings as The Silent Victim: Flora in Wartime and been made a minor celebrity by the women who were leading the postwar pacifist movement, how one of them, a suffragist whose name was known in every household, held his book high in the air at an international disarmament conference in Amsterdam and shouted that if this book couldn’t end the manmade institution of war then nothing, nothing could, how all that attention had only frazzled his nerves to another breakdown, delaying his plan to take the Trans-Siberian railroad, to continue east to view the gardens of a certain city in Japan where he was sure, he had told particular classes, peace resided—he had seen it once or twice, in a combination of stone and bough. And he had found it there, he said. Peace. And he would have stayed forever had the monks not been evacuated and interned during the early days of the war preparation. He had left on the advice of an elderly teacher. Sailed home just in time to read the news of Pearl Harbor.
Of course there were also those students who suspected Professor X of being a quack, a phony in their midst. Flora of northern France? It was out of print, wasn’t it? Even the library had lost its copy.
• • •
But I’ve strayed from the point. The point is that the city of Kyoto had declared itself open during the war years, which meant that the Japanese promised, and promises were sometimes listened to during wartime, that there were no military facilities within its walls. During most of the war, this meant that there would be absolutely no reason to destroy it; with the atomic bomb, however, all bets were off.
Professor X found himself privy to this—that deliberations were being held on where to drop a bomb more powerful than any other—and, worried that the government might target his beloved Kyoto, he managed to request, and secure, an audience with the men deciding such actions in Washington.
I imagine he had several sleepless nights preparing for what, exactly, he could say to convince them. These nights, when he shut his eyes, he saw again the famous suffragist shouting at the gathering of pacifists, women, primarily, in hats and woolly coats, applauding her, applauding his little book. It shamed him. Simple drawings sketched in the margins of stories he’d never read, words of men long dead, forgotten by the persons they’d addressed so passionately, because if nothing else there was passion there, in the muck and mud of that terrible place. He’d saved the letters. This he’d told no one. He had every one, his own graveyard in a simple sailor’s chest. But he’d never read them; he was too afraid.
He could tell them about this, but he doubted the men’s interest in such stories. They wouldn’t see the point and, truth be told, neither did he, exactly. No. He had to speak as an academic, as someone who had studied a culture for nearly twenty years, as a horticulturalist and published author, as a former resident of a city, a place they had no knowledge of: Kyoto. Even the name was beautiful. He could tell them of the narrow back streets, the arched bridges, the cherry trees. He could tell them of the artisan’s shop where the paint pigment, brighter than any color he had seen here in the Midwest, glistened when wetted in thousand-year-old wooden bowls, and of the brushes whittled from ebony and jade, their bristles stiff pig hairs bound with leather cured on mountaintops. That everything had a reason: vegetables wrapped in brown paper; apples kissed; children rouged. Bare-footed monks in, yes, saffron robes, plucked weeds from the gardens of moss, simply moss, before the sun rose, and poems of one, two stanzas were composed over lifetimes and the graves of unborn children were as honored as those of grandfathers.
He could tell them of the Imperial Palace, built during Charlemagne’s rule; how just south of the ceremonial hall the garden sits, a field of raked gravel empty but for the two gnarled trees that flank the stairs of the hall, pine, he believed, older than the palace itself. Or the other, the garden of Ryoan-ji near the Dragon Peace Temple, composed of fifteen rocks, one rock hidden when the garden is viewed from any point along the veranda. Why? No one understands, though the Zen priests believe it invites contemplation, the viewer left to fill in the landscape.
Thinking of what to say to the men, he grows sleepy. He remembers walking through the gardens at Toji-in late in the afternoon, the shadows deep, the camellias and azaleas in bloom. He carries his sketchbook—the brushes he had bought earlier at the artisan’s store and the pot of black ink in his wicker basket—and stops near the pond that forms the Chinese character shin, heart or spirit. He has been studying with an elderly teacher who, just yesterday, complimented his progress; this has encouraged him and though he cannot afford them, he has bought new supplies at the artisan’s store. Now he allows himself to imagine that he too might draw as well as his teacher, that he might, as his teacher assured him, find the gesture in quiet places.
He unwraps the pot of black ink, unwraps the brushes, tickling the back of his hand with the pig-hair bristles, breaking them out of their stiffness. He uncorks the pot of black ink, its color so rich, so entirely without light, he imagines he might slip into the ink and find it bottomless, a well toward the center of, what? He shrugs as if someone else has asked him the question and looks out toward the pond; beneath its surface carp lay like carved wooden things against the mud, their small fins fluttering in the currentless water, their gills, panting, their tiny eyes colorless among the copper coins. Carp clogging the shin—the heart, the spirit. He must remember to tell his teacher this, the irony of it, though he is unsure whether his teacher appreciates irony. He is far from home, he knows. Far from Boston, far from France, far from the Brooklyn hospital where boys younger than he were put in straitjackets, their gaunt faces twisted into expressions impossible to forget.
He dips the brush into the black ink, blotting it on the cork. Positioning the sketchpad against his legs, knees up, he leans against a pine, the smell of its resin striking him as something familiar: hiking expeditions in the White Mountains with his father, a man as shy as he, as cautious, who never got over Woodrow Wilson’s betrayal. He kept us out of war, his father would say, as if words, alone, were culpable.
The professor wakes just as he is dreaming that he quells his hand to pass the brush over the paper. It is always this way: the anticipation, so real in the dream, that he might steady his tremor to draw as well as his teacher, and the inability to see, before waking, whether he has succeeded. In life, of course, he did not; he left Japan before he coul
d even imagine it.
• • •
In the morning the professor boards his train. The journey will take several days and he has packed plenty of papers to keep him occupied; still, he finds that as soon as he sits he becomes far more interested in looking out the window, in thinking, than he is in the work in his valise. Because of his deafness, he does not hear the conductor knock on the door to his compartment, nor does he hear him slide it back. He simply feels a tap on his shoulder and understands that he has been daydreaming. He gives the conductor his ticket as they pass through Indiana.
• • •
I imagine that the professor slept soundly on that journey in the way he did not, could not, the days and weeks before leaving; he was on his way, the first leg of his mission, and he realized, finally, that the preparation for his statement to the men had been made, that he could stand before them and tell them things that might convince them to spare Kyoto: the carp in the pond at the center of Toji-in, how in late afternoon the monks who rake the moss with their bamboo rakes come to the edge of the pond and whistle, and how the carp, perhaps because they believe they are to be fed, or perhaps because they too want company, rise to the water’s surface in great seething packs, like the stray dogs in France who fed off the poisonous corpses of men. Poor pups, the Frenchmen said. They were good pups. The monks lean on their bamboo rakes and watch as the carp boil to the water’s surface, open-mouthed, their scaly, thousand-year-old tails beating the water to froth; the shin, the soul, whipped into a torment. Is this the reason the monks call to them? To see for themselves the misery, the carp-froth, of other men’s souls? But, no. He will not tell the generals this, nor will he tell them of the letters he keeps in his sailor’s chest, nor how a certain student once led him, breathless, to a plant left in her care, the blighted one given up for good that had suddenly, miraculously, grown a new shoot—a leaf of pure, brilliant green.
3
It was getting close to graduation. Mother and Daddy seemed to write every day, something about needing to double-check the details, confirm the plans. But there was little to do. I would wear the long white dress that all the girls wore, or my variation of it. Mother had fitted me the summer before, draping the material over my shoulder so that I looked like a latter-day Greek statue standing on our old ottoman in nothing but shorts and a T-shirt, a heavy swath of white cotton, poplin, across my shoulder.
She turned me this way and that, pins in her mouth; she asked about spaghetti straps, was I interested? I shrugged. “Sure,” I might have said, or some other lackluster variation. I wasn’t interested. In spaghetti straps, or pleats, or a tea-length, or a Grace Kelly bodice. I kept trying to picture myself among all the other girls processing down the campus green the way I had seen the seniors the spring before, their hands gripping single red roses, their smiles stiff against the squeak of the bagpipes. This was a Saint Mary’s tradition. A trio of bagpipers leading the girls, the girls walking single file across the stage, the nuns arranged in chairs according to rank, their crinkled faces barely discernible within the round black cinch of their habits. I tried to see myself among them, not the nuns, of course, but the other girls. I could not. It all seemed so pointless, suddenly. The diploma, the handshake, Mother and Daddy watching from their folding chairs, programs accordion-creased, fanning themselves during the long-winded commencement speech delivered by one of the career-girl’s spinster aunts.
I had absolutely no idea what I would do next, whether I would return to Chester and teach at a local high school, as Mother hoped, or whether I would go on to secretarial school in Philadelphia. Either option dispirited me.
Anyway, I stood there as Mother pinned, looking at myself in the mirror from time to time, watching Mother. She might have sensed my lack of enthusiasm because she said little, simply worked. Or she might have fallen back to her own thoughts. It was an expression she used more and more these days. “I’ve fallen into my thoughts,” she’d say, as if her thoughts were quicksand, difficult to step out of once she’d stepped in. In truth, since Rita’s death, Mother said little; she had lost her job at the factory soon after the war, replaced by one of the returning boys, and though at first she pretended she would welcome the break, the time in the garden and the house, I often found her sitting in the rocker in the front hallway, staring vacantly, as if half expecting a visitor, or waiting for the sun to drop. She said she never knew time could move so slowly, that she had so much more to do when we girls were little. I tried to get her interested in the books I was reading, or to pick up another hobby. Cross-stitch, I remember suggesting. But she seemed too distracted to concentrate on anything new. I’m too stupid, she’d say when I pushed her.
• • •
She and Daddy had been looking forward to my graduation for months. With Rita dead and Betty doing God knows what, they turned to me, to my life, for conversation. Sometimes it felt a burden too heavy; I wanted to run away, to escape their long looks the few times I went home my senior year, taking the trolley to Chester, waiting on the cold platform for Daddy to pick me up, my books held tightly against me as if for warmth. To their incessant questions I often gave quick answers, pretending not to see that I deflated them. Daddy would suggest we three take a walk after supper. Old Man Springfield had passed away and nobody seemed interested in purchasing his orchard. A family of osprey had somehow found themselves off course, he said, because they nested in one of the far pastures, in a particularly old pear tree he’d like to show me.
Too tired, I said.
Mother and Daddy exchanged looks. I say exchanged because it really did seem this way, as if one held a look out for the other to take, to consider, to return. If I had been a child they would have shrugged over my shoulders. But I wasn’t a child, nor was I a teenager. I was a selfish young woman, and if I could have it to do over again I’d like to be back there with the two of them, sitting in the dining room at the good table Mother liked to set for my infrequent dinners at home, the linen napkins and tablecloth she had spent the morning starching and ironing folded across the oiled oval, its leaf removed so the table, once expected to seat five, sat three. If I could have it to do over, I’d be animated, gracious. I’d tell them about the books I had read that semester, the papers I had written. I’d tell them about the girls I lived with and our housemother, Pickle Smith, whose nickname was a constant source of mystery and amusement to all of us. She swore she’d never reveal its origin, though she seemed proud of it and would, in introductions, pronounce the Pickle with a kind of a twist. We knew her real name to be Beatrice, and those among us more daring than I would sometimes address her as Miss Bea, to which they’d get a raised eyebrow—a raised eyebrow, I could have added in the telling, that the more daring could imitate with perfect precision. This would have amused Daddy, I’m sure. I can imagine him laughing and asking me to do an imitation; my sorry attempt would have amused him even more. Mother might have at first disapproved; Pickle Smith was our housemother, after all, and we owed her the respect we owed any of our mothers. Still, I would have won her over with my imitation and the three of us might have laughed in the way we used to laugh as a family, when Rita was alive, and Betty still at home.
I don’t believe I ever told them a thing about her, Pickle Smith; I can’t even remember introducing them at graduation.
• • •
Graduation turned out to be a beautiful day, though there had been weeks of rain beforehand, and the crocuses and early spring bulbs looked like fossils in the mud. The girls stood around in their white dresses, boyfriends, fiancés at their sides, smiling for their parents’ cameras and the cameras of their friends’ parents, everyone posed for a portrait, clustered too close. After the procession there was a picnic on the freshly mowed Great Lawn, all the greener from the rain. Long tables with white paper tablecloths were set around the perimeter, and waitresses— the junior class girls in black skirts and white blouses—served plates of roast beef with horseradish, potato salad, sliced tomat
oes. I remember how embarrassed I felt that Daddy tucked his paper napkin into his collar and that Mother said Good for you! every time she met one of my friends. I wanted them to be like all the other parents, men and women from the Main Line whose children were not the first in the family to receive a college diploma. We were poor, as I’ve told you, and though I am sure in retrospect I was not the poorest student, I certainly believed that I was, believed that everyone noticed Mother’s twenty-year-old suit, her hands, still callused from her years in the factory, her standard-issue stockings, as they noticed Daddy’s napkin tucked into his collar waving like a flag of difference.
• • •
We were halfway through lunch when Betty, too abruptly, arrived, saying that her train had been derailed or some such thing, though I am sure she simply wanted to miss the procession.
She looked around at the scene: the white paper tablecloths, the bagpipe trio in the center of the Great Lawn, the girls and their families. “How quaint,” she said, and sat down hard.
Mother held out her handkerchief, the one she had no doubt earlier cried into as I crossed the stage and accepted my diploma from the president’s outstretched hand.
“Wipe some of that off, young lady,” she said.
Betty took the handkerchief from Mother and dabbed at the thick red lipstick outlining her lips. She looked garish in the broad daylight, and I wondered whether she had done this for my benefit or whether she in fact believed she looked beautiful.
“And your cheeks,” Mother said.
Betty rubbed her cheeks, though this just made them redder.
“For the love of Pete,” she said. She slipped off her gloves and motioned to one of the juniors to bring her a plate. “I’m famished, and the last thing I need is an etiquette lesson. What’d I miss, anyway?”
“My graduation,” I said.