by Kate Walbert
• • •
At the appointed hour Professor X stood before the men in a suit jacket and tie, his socks pulled high to his kneecaps, his shoes, ear lier, polished by a Russian refugee at Union Station. He kept a handkerchief in his pocket and too frequently pulled it out to wipe his hands. At times like this, his nerves showed in his hands, and he felt grateful, at least, that this was not an overhead projector presentation, where his tremor would have been illuminated.
He delivered the words he had prepared and the generals took notes. Or at least pretended to take notes. The professor’s nerves had gotten the better of him; he stammered. The men tried to make him comfortable, asking if he would prefer to sit, or would like a glass of water. They humored him the best they could, their decision already clear. It had to do with topography, with the fact that Kyoto was a city ringed by mountains, a perfect bowl, a perfect valley. What better place to test their weapon? What better place to contain its effects? Kyoto had been chosen months ago: the natural target, really, the site almost expectant: a pair of hands cupped and held open to the sky.
• • •
The professor soon lost his place. He spoke of a particular pond in a particular garden of Kyoto, how this pond he knew well, would often visit in the late afternoons. He told them how the pond had been created over a thousand years ago, designed in the form of the character that means heart, or spirit, and how the emperor who had ordered the construction of the garden took his tea in the temple adjacent to the garden and kept his concubines in rooms off the temple he would visit at midnight, believing that the moonlight on his spirit, his heart, kept him virile, and that if he were to visit any of them in the middle of the day, in the stark sunlight, the women would see him as an old man and turn away from him disgusted, though he was an emperor and they were his concubines. This was a story repeated to show how generous the emperor was, the professor told them; to show how sentimental. And it was this same emperor who stocked the pond with beautiful goldfish, one for every year of his life, believing, since goldfish were fabled to live forever, that he might too, though of course he died as all men die, even emperors.
Here the professor cleared his throat. Perhaps he waited for the men’s comments, though of course they had none. He went on. He told them that the carp still lived in the spirit of that garden; he told them that we, in this country, could not understand the beauty of such a legend, since we had no legends, really, except parochial ones: George Washington cutting down his cherry tree; Betsy Ross stitching her flag. None of our legends spoke to our spirits, he said; they simply spoke to our good deeds. At this, the man in charge interrupted the professor, thanking him for his comments and concerns. The professor looked down and gathered his papers into a brown leather valise. He shook the hands of the other men on his way out, first wiping his own with the handkerchief.
• • •
It is spring in Washington as Professor X leaves the meeting, though still winter back on campus; he walks slowly. In truth, they gave him little time, and he has come so far; what else is he to do? He thinks of all the notes, all the points he didn’t make, and sits for a while on one of the benches in one of the parks that city is known for, shuffling through the papers from his valise, trying to persuade himself that in fact he might have actually articulated his position clearly, he might have stood with poise, his hands steady; he might have, yes, persuaded them. Around him soldiers back from Europe walk with girls in cardigans and wool skirts, arms linked; it looks like a painting of a time that might have been, earlier, a Sunday afternoon, a picnic day: a painting of a time before.
He shuts his eyes and takes a deep breath; he tries to clear his mind. He does not want to think of the hospital in Brooklyn; he does not want to think of the dogs in France. He thinks, instead, of his old teacher, and the teacher’s granddaughter, a young girl—sixteen, perhaps seventeen—who cared for her grandfather as a supplicant might care for an idol on the altar. When he visited his teacher, the granddaughter, Suki, would serve tea wordlessly then slip behind the rice paper door; he watched her shadow, always, and he once, even, dared to adjust her obi, the wide-ribboned bow that cinched the waist of her kimono. They lived on a narrow street of peach trees; one of the rivers flowed behind their small wooden house, and his teacher would often suggest that they take a walk, after tea, along the river, where he would tell him that he was so old he could remember the days when dyes from the silks washed and cured in the cold river water turned the river the color of dragonflies—green, red, yellow. Sometimes he would step out of his house and believe that the river had disappeared entirely, replaced by bolts of silk, the kind you could still see drying in the winds, he said, gesturing up and out toward the mountains.
But now Kyoto stood still, windless. Suki rolled out tatami rugs, laid the fans by the pots of inks, the brushes.
He felt the old teacher’s hand on his own and tried to remember, tried to focus, on what the teacher said. Suki, he knew, sat in the corner. Perhaps she watched; perhaps she stitched, embroidering the scroll he had admired on the first day he had met her. She would be very steady, and if she watched she watched in a way that would reveal little interest. She kept her head down, her needle moving. If she spoke, she covered her mouth; if she laughed, as she had when he adjusted her obi, she blushed. She was a child, after all, sixteen, perhaps seventeen.
He concentrated, feeling the teacher’s skin, its papery dryness, on his own; in front of him arcs of ink, still wet, were slowly absorbed into the grainy paper. It was not necessary, the old teacher said, to keep his eyes open; everything could be seen in the dark. He listened to his teacher’s words; they were unlike any teacher’s words he had ever known, or perhaps, because he was now an adult, but still, a student, he could hear his teacher in a way he could never hear a teacher before. The teacher wanted to show him how to thread together the lines in a pattern that already existed here, in this darkness, or in all things. A priori. His task was to recall, simply. To pull the knowledge from the hunch. He let his breath out slowly; this required enormous effort and he could smell Suki nearby, the powdery smell of her hands serving tea, her milky breath.
• • •
The professor shakes his head and opens his eyes. They are there, still: his old teacher, Suki in the corner. Is there time to warn them? Letters are forbidden, packages returned. He has tried. He sent paints and brushes, a tin of sugary almonds at Christmas. Perhaps his teacher is already dead, his ashes cupped in an alabaster bowl, the ancestor’s bowl, and placed on an altar where Suki, a mother now, offers tea in the same jade cup from which he drank his tea those afternoons.
She will burn, of course. They will all burn, the wooden houses dry as dead twigs; the water as if material, silk.
• • •
The professor gathers his papers back into his valise and snaps it shut, disgusted, oblivious to the stares that the Secretary of War, Stimpson, draws, out for his customary stroll after lunch, walking, though a civilian, with a cadet’s purposeful gait. Is this, then, when they meet? Does Stimpson choose, just at the moment the professor gathers his papers, to join him on the bench, to make small talk, eager for a distraction from the enormous tasks at hand? Or does he meet the professor later, in the lobby bar at the small hotel where the professor secures a room, too tired to take the night train back as had been his original plan. Is it here, then, that the two speak, here where Stimpson seeks the company of other civilians, men who do not recognize him, who talk to him honestly of things other than war, their travels, for instance; the places they long to return to.
6
I went back to McCalister that night after graduation and reread your father’s letters. Most of the other girls were gone, the underclassmen having left soon after their exams the week before, and the seniors driven by their parents, or fiancés, other places after the ceremonies. Mother and Daddy wanted me to return with them, but I said I had too much to do and couldn’t possibly. I assume they knew I was lying, but t
hey were gracious and said they understood. I told them I would telephone as soon as I was ready.
I ate dinner by myself in the dining hall, refusing the offers of some of the friendlier faculty to join them. There were pockets of foreign students and other girls I vaguely knew who were staying on for the summer program, but my friends were all gone. I had said good-bye to them hours ago. Returning to my dormitory, I let myself in to the empty house with my key—even Pickles Smith was elsewhere, visiting her sister in Milwaukee.
Upstairs in my room I continued to pack, halfheartedly. I kept composing letters to your father in my mind; long, beautifully written letters. I pictured him reading them, his cold fingers on the thin airmail paper I had bought weeks ago at the school store. He would read them quickly, as I read his, and then read them again, more slowly, as I read his: everything about him mirrored me, except, of course, everything about him. He too had become an intimate stranger, one I would frequently, wordlessly address; one who watched me cross the stage to get my diploma, who sat next to me in classes, impressed by what I knew. He stretched his long legs from time to time, uncomfortable in the small chairs, his chin on his hand, mildly cynical, mildly bemused by all this classroom learning. He walked me out and we slowly crossed the quad together, lingering before the next class. This is how I thought of him: picturing me even now packing in the half dark.
I lay down on my twin bed and fell asleep for a time. When I woke, I was still in the clothes I had changed into after graduation, the room entirely black, the house still. For an instant I thought I might be back home in the attic room and then my eyes cleared and I saw my suitcases, my old desk still stacked with books.
• • •
Long past midnight I let myself out of the house, the key on a piece of yarn around my wrist. No lights burned in the other houses; everyone already elsewhere. Hours earlier this empty space had been filled with parents and girls and music from radios and shouts of greeting, good-byes. How quickly we were gone.
I crossed the Great Lawn, the long buffet tables a giant maze to negotiate. I don’t remember any stars, nor the crickets that had, a few weeks prior, begun their incessant chirping. It seemed a dream, almost, the empty campus, the white-cloaked tables, the crisp shorn grass wetting my ankles. I climbed the steps to McCalister as I had done so many other nights and entered the reading room. Someone had left a light on, one of the floor lamps, but I was alone this time. I pulled the letters from my pocket. I had most of them in memory, but still. I liked to hear the sound of your father in my ears, even if the voice was mine. I tried to picture him though his image had long ago faded into that of the entire day, the game, Daphne sitting at the Comfy Couch, the boys driving us home. Often I pictured him as Randall. I know this will sound silly, but it’s the truth. I did.
I knew I would never write: how could I take part in such a game? But I found that I had, oddly, come to believe that he meant for only me to read his letters, not Daphne, that he wrote to me, not Daphne, that I was, indeed, his intimate stranger.
• • •
Are these the questions you asked? I can’t remember. You need to know about your father, I understand, and I imagine I’ve disappointed you. Suffice it to say that that evening in McCalister I came to the end of something, trying, as I had promised Daphne I would try, to compose a letter back to him. I gave up, and in a fury took your father’s letters and cut them with one of Sister Pat’s sharpened scissors, cut them as a schoolgirl might to make dolls, with a kind of a precision, first scissoring out Daphne’s address as if I were removing the heart and then slicing lengthwise ribbons, pale blue regulation paper ribbons that fluttered down to Sister Pat’s desk. It all seemed horribly violent and appropriate. Daring in a way I was not, nor have ever been. I knew I’d regret the action, though perhaps I did not fully comprehend how much. I cut line after line: words from sentences, letters from words. The all of it severed, forever mute but for what I might now remember.
Eventually I found myself scissoring air, the scissors making the metallic sound of blade against blade. I put my finger there and sliced some dead skin from my cuticle and then, moving my finger closer, cut the skin, once, twice, the wounds superficial, yet still, they bled in a satisfying way. Or simply, they bled: drops of fresh, red blood on Sister Pat’s oiled desk, on the tissuey remains of your father’s letters.
I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and with the same arm brushed the scraps of letters into my good hand and dumped them into the trash can. I bent down and found a few ribbons that had wafted to the floor and held them against my finger to staunch the bleeding. The blood soaked through, darkened, and then I did something for which I have absolutely no explanation: I walked to my favorite chair next to the cold fireplace and pressed my finger—your father’s letter stuck, still wet, to the skin—to the corner of The Pursuit, near to the fox but not so close as to cover him. In truth, it looked, when I pulled my finger away, as if another, smaller fox, as red-orange as the original, had suddenly appeared in the scene, one that perhaps, before this, had been hidden by the brush grass or one of the fallen logs that littered the field.
7
There is a Japanese folktale Randall told me a few times; he found it amusing. He had read it in some book and then copied it over in his diary under the heading What to Remember. It was odd, and never made that much sense to me, though I laughed along with Randall when he told it. It’s called an endless story, and begins with the rats of Nagasaki, who get together and decide, since there is nothing left to eat in Nagasaki, to board a ship and set out for Satsuma, the city across the bay. On the way over, they meet the rats of Satsuma on board their own ship and on course for Nagasaki. The two ships of rats exchange greetings and ask how things are, only to discover that there is nothing left to eat in either Satsuma or Nagasaki. Since there is no use in going to either city, they decide to jump into the sea and drown.
Now this is the way it went exactly: The first rat began to cry chu chu, and jumped over with a splash. Then another rat cried chu chu, and jumped over with a splash. Then another cried chu chu, and jumped over with a splash . . .
Randall would repeat the ending, well, endlessly. Don’t you find that curious? In the middle of something he’d suddenly say, “Then another rat began to cry chu chu, and jumped over with a splash.” I always found it strange, though I pretended, as girls would at the time, to understand.
8
The summer passed quickly enough. Despite Mother and Daddy’s objections I moved to Clarksburg, near Chester, and took a few rooms in town. My job teaching at the high school would begin in September, and I needed, I told them, to study, to write lesson plans, to think. Of course, it was far quieter out on the farm than in town, which they knew, but they accepted my decision in the way they had come to accept most of the decisions of their girls, with a resignation that I viewed as their weakness but which, I have come to understand, was their strength.
It must have been October when your father finally found me. School had started and the days never seemed long enough. I would wake before light to review my lesson plan, prepared so carefully in the summer months and now worthless. The routine I had anticipated did not run as smoothly as I had imagined, comedies did not always follow tragedies, and so forth. We were in the middle of Othello. I had imagined the class acting out certain scenes and had assigned parts, unknowingly giving the role of Desdemona (she offered) to a young woman who had a less than stellar reputation. You’ll find this amusing, of course, but I was mortified; she had decided a modern interpretation of losing the handkerchief would be to lose her panties and so she brought in several pairs and left them hanging in obvious places, draped over locker doors, balled underneath desks. The other faculty found it quaint and, I believe, rather creative, but I found it disrespectful and for those early months, at least, I was most concerned about respect.
Anyway, I got up before dawn and never went to bed until midnight. I kept anticipating the students asking me a question I
couldn’t answer; I kept imagining myself, blushing, sitting in the front of the classroom, the student’s question hanging in the air. What would I have done?
But, October. The days had begun to get a bit better. Far less often would I find myself in tears in the teachers’ lounge, pretending to stare out the window to where the boys’ soccer team practiced. Sometimes I went to that field to sit in the bleachers and watch them, or rather, to be alone. I had made no real friends among the faculty. They were all older than myself, tired of teaching, tired of life, it seemed, drained of curiosity. Many knew the years and months remaining until their retirement.
Lunchtime I would sit outside, the soccer boys in the cafeteria, their coaches elsewhere; the school had been built on the edge of the town, its playing fields carved out of cornfields and woods. In the near distance an aspen grove among the ubiquitous oak and maples had just turned a bright yellow; a splash of pure color within the mottled browns and reds in a way entirely magical. Light appeared to be drawn to it, but I knew this was just an optical trick in the way that light seems to seek water. I go into such detail because this is the day I first walked into the grove, and it was magical, somehow—as if by passing through my real life suddenly began.
• • •
I would later learn that the aspen grove had not sprung up on its own but in fact had been planted by a biology teacher and amateur landscape gardener, a woman who had taught at the high school most of her life, who had never married, who was, by all accounts, beloved by her students. She had become something of an eccentric and had read about a recently rediscovered checkerboard forest in Belgium, planted by the squire of something or other in the late sixteenth century. What a find that must have been! To walk through great blocks of color. She would talk about it all the time and eventually decided that her students should try something similar; it was even better, she told them, that they wouldn’t be able to enjoy it for years. She would be long gone, she said, but they could return, if they were so inclined, to look in, to see. And every once in a while a student would. You’d spot him tromping around the aspens, wistful, his hands deep in his pockets, an old man; others, the old women, mostly, leaned against a particular tree and stayed longer.