The Gardens of Kyoto

by Kate Walbert

  But I knew none of this at the time, I simply knew that the spot would be special. I crossed the field toward it and cleared my way through the maples, my hard, teacherly shoes crunching dead leaves, sinking in the softer ground, my coat, one of Rita’s, actually, pulled tightly around me, wrapped, with my hands, like a shawl. The grove began at a point and was a somewhat irregular triangular shape; still, a human spirit thrived within it. The teacher must have known this, known that when her pupils—grandfathers and grandmothers long past the age of learning—returned, they would remember her, that she would be what they thought of while wandering through, or simply leaning, the aspens narrow-trunked, impossibly straight, their leaves small, the size of half-dollars, and ringed with serrated edges. The aspens were full grown but still appeared young, coltish; there is a delicacy about the tree, a grace you don’t find in ornamental or fussy species. Out among oak, maple, sycamore, they seem regal, aloof. Or at least these did. You should have seen how beautiful they were.

  I walked within them, a figure eight, kicking their fallen yellow leaves into a great pile on which I lay down, feeling silly but entirely hidden, safe. I had lately begun to talk to Randall, and I found myself once again addressing him. I suppose, with all the classroom preparation, I had found myself transported back to the time when Randall and I would pace his room declaiming, or Randall would read something to me that had a great significance, the like of which I couldn’t see until he emphasized a word, a phrase. He was my first teacher, truth be told. So no doubt I spoke to him of Othello, or Iago, my favorite character from the play, something banal and obvious, something he would have understood from a first reading but perhaps I had just come upon, having recited the entire thing that morning, before dawn, in the front room of my tiny apartment, a blanket wrapped around my knees. The point is, I might have heard your father had I not been talking, his steps too loud to be mistaken for squirrels. He had looked for me in the teachers’ lounge and been told that I often ate my lunch on the bleachers; he had seen me there and called, but I had already made up my mind to explore the aspen grove and, with a determination he would later tease me for, set out across the field. He was, by his estimate, several yards behind me the entire time, though he claimed not to have been spying, that he did, indeed, honestly attempt to get my attention.

  I lay in the aspen leaves, my eyes closed, thinking of Randall.

  “Ellen?” your father said, and I startled. It was as if it were the first time I had ever heard my name. I stood up too quickly and stumbled; he caught my arm.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, laughing, and I shook my head and laughed as well.

  Oh, your father then! He wore his Eisenhower jacket and trousers, a dark wool cape draped around his shoulders. He stood like a prince in the wood; I must have blushed the color of the maples, my coat stuck with aspen leaves.

  “Henry,” he said, holding out his hand. “Henry Rock,” he said, as if I’d forget.

  “I remember,” I said, shaking it. His hand felt cold, dry, as if this were already the dead of winter. I held it too long, still unsteady. The truth is my knees shook.

  “So, you’ve come back,” I said.

  “You spoke to Daphne?” he said.

  He knew nothing about it. I suddenly understood this: he knew nothing about what I knew of him.

  “Yes,” I said. “Well, no, not lately. Would you like a cup of coffee? It’s cold, isn’t it?”

  He blinked awake from somewhere else, his face regaining its familiarity and still, he looked older than I remembered. “My God, I’m being rude,” he said. Then, “It’s just, I’ve been looking a long time, you know?”

  “Yes,” I said, though I had no idea.

  9

  That night I invited your father upstairs to my tiny apartment above the Woolworth’s. I should say that Mother and Daddy thought this somehow low-class, to live above the Woolworth’s, but I found it oddly liberating, bohemian. You’ll laugh, but in those days there were so few ways for a good girl to stretch her wings, and to be able to slip downstairs on a Saturday morning and have a coffee and a cigarette at the Woolworth counter, my hair still unbrushed, my shoes halfway on my bare feet. I felt the closest I would come to leading a different life, one where I would be strong enough to go farther from home. It was not in my character to truly break away, as Betty had, but those Saturday mornings were glorious. I knew a few of the regulars and they knew me. We’d share the newspaper and they’d ask about my students. I liked to talk those mornings. I felt happy. My cigarette would burn down in one of the green-glass ashtrays set in the cluster of salt and pepper shakers, napkin dispensers, ketchup bottles, and I would often let my fried eggs get cold.

  The waitress I knew from the time I was a little girl, when certain special weekend mornings Daddy would escort his three brides, he called us, to this same Woolworth’s for pancakes. She remembered Rita best from that time. Shirley Temple, she called her, and pulled at the curls Rita had spent hours perfecting in front of the mirror. Rita humored her, said she felt sorry. Anyone who ends up behind the Woolworth’s counter ought to be pitied, she announced one day, somewhat out of the blue. From time to time, when the regulars had left and I had no one but that old waitress to talk to, I’d wonder whether Rita would have said the same about someone ending up on the other side of the counter. But in those days, at least, I tried my best not to think of Rita.

  Anyway, your father had suggested he pick me up after school. I had some meetings to attend directly after classes, so it was already almost dark, the playing fields abandoned, when he pulled into the circular drive and parked at the front entryway. I had been waiting just behind the big glass doors, hoping he would arrive before all the other faculty had gone home. They knew the story of Rita, of course; these were small towns. And they most likely understood that I sent some portion of my paycheck to Mother and Daddy each month. I wanted to surprise them, to let them in on my secret life, and so when your father drove up in his wide convertible, the top down, his arm casually draped across the back of the white leather front seat, I bounded out the door far more cheerfully than what is generally in my nature, laughing as if someone had just told me something I still found amusing, entirely convinced that, despite the emptiness of the building behind me, people watched from the windows, wide-eyed, curious, impressed by your father’s military uniform—his face still clearly handsome in the near dark—and the way his hand held the white polished steering wheel.

  • • •

  We drove to the most exotic place I could think of, an Italian restaurant with red-and-white checkered tablecloths, candles stuck into bottlenecks, and cheaply framed prints of the Amalfi coast on the walls. Ropes of dusty garlic, crisscrossing the ceiling, threw off strange shadows, and I remember thinking how the couples at the other tables might look at us and imagine us just like them, in love, or even, married. We sat close, the tables small, and your father listened to me with the acute concentration I believed at the time was common between husbands and wives. I was talking about Daphne, telling him everything I could remember that I knew, answering all his questions, trying, as best I could, to please him. He told me he had written her several letters. One a week. And had never had a reply. Did I know, he asked, whether she had in fact written, whether her letters were, in fact, lost? This is what he suspected, he said. Well, he said, this is what they all suspected. The mail, if you thought about it, not only had to travel across several oceans and seas, but through a damn war zone.

  “Maybe she didn’t even get my letters,” he said, and I kept my eyebrows raised, still listening. “She might have had no idea I wrote every week. For all I know they were burning the paper for fuel somewhere and we were the dupes writing and writing.”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I doubt it. They wouldn’t do that, would they?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, as if he truly did not. “You see things, hear things. You get so paranoid you thi
nk there’s somebody standing behind you making monkey ears. We had a reporter come from Life magazine—”

  “Really?”

  “—to the front. You know. That kind of story. Well, we sat there with him for weeks and nothing happened. Not one thing. We stared at the Chinese and the Chinese stared at us and that goddamn, excuse me, woman on the loudspeaker—we had named her Veronica for reasons I can’t even remember—this woman told us all day long we were stupid, that we should go back to our wives and our families, that we would never win. She called us her idiot American boys. And all the while this reporter sat and scribbled in his notebook. Then he shook our hands and left. A few months later somebody gets an issue of Life in the mail and the reporter’s made up some story and put us in the center of it. Tilsie, most of all, just a guy like the rest, he turns into a hero and nobody, none of the brass deny the story, they just let it alone and what could Tilsie do? I heard he got some kind of parade thrown in his honor when he went back home, somewhere on Long Island. Tilsie, of all people. Just like the rest of us.”

  Your father looked around the restaurant.

  “Nice place,” he said. “I’m boring you.”

  “No.”

  The waitress brought us plates of pasta. I could barely taste mine; my leg shook in the way it always has when I tell a lie. I didn’t know where to begin, or whether to begin at all. What was the point? I felt like Tilsie in the middle of his parade, the crowds throwing confetti, applauding, the high school band leading the way. What could Tilsie do?

  “I’m sorry, really. She’s just a girl I knew, not even very well,” I said.

  “They told me she didn’t stay for graduation. They gave me her aunt’s address, but her aunt said she didn’t know where she’d gone and if I found her to let her know. I guess she’s always been a free spirit.”

  “I guess,” I said. Pasta slipped off my fork. I put my hands in my lap and kneaded my napkin.

  “I just wish I knew about the letters. You feel like such a fool— you know?—to think you wrote nobody.”

  I tried my pasta again and chewed. I had earlier eaten an olive and now kept the pit tucked in the corner of my mouth, feeling it there from time to time, ridged, hard as a little pebble.

  “Oh, but this Veronica. We came to love her, really. Sometimes, God knows why, she took a break, and the silence would be unbearable. We’d shout out, ‘Where’s our girl? Where’s our girlfriend?’ Trying to drive them as crazy as they were trying to drive us. And when she’d come back on she’d say, ‘Stupid boys,’ and we’d applaud and applaud and whistle, cat calls, like she was some beauty who’d just shown up in, I don’t know, black lace.”

  Your father had stopped eating, his focus backward. “I’m sorry.” He put his fork down. “I talk too much.”

  “No, not at all.”

  “These were all the things I was going to tell her,” he said. “I wrote to her that I would take her out to dinner and we would share a bottle of wine. And you, what about you?”

  “I like wine,” I said. I felt the olive pit like a little stone I might carry with me all the time, tucked there in the side of my mouth, a reminder of other things.

  • • •

  I’m not sure whether either one of us finished our dinner. I know I coughed the olive pit into my napkin before we left the restaurant; I know he guided me out by my elbow and that all the warmth of him, of the candles on the restaurant tables, seemed focused there on that hard bone. When we got into his convertible, he asked if I were cold and I shook my head no, though I was, and crossed my arms over my legs and pulled a scarf over my head in a way faintly glamorous, or I believed so, and turned my face into the wind. We drove the back way to town. He wanted to show me something in the constellations, he said. We found the stars in no time, in those days you could, and he pulled to the side of the road.

  “Cassiopeia,” he said. “My favorite.”

  I closed my eyes and nodded. The truth is, I wasn’t interested in learning; I simply wanted to listen.

  “Thirteen stars, and the five brightest—look—form a chair.”

  “Yes,” I said, my eyes closed.

  “I used to imagine I was sitting in that chair. Way above everything. The Chinese. The Ethiopians—we had an Ethiopian platoon behind us, nasty sons of bitches—believe Cassiopeia ravaged Ethiopia, or Poseidon did, because of Cassiopeia’s vanity. A sea monster or a typhoon. It didn’t matter to me as long as she washed my feet. She did, is the funny thing. Sometimes you think you’re crazy. I would just take myself there whenever things got too god-awful and sit looking down at the fireworks, at the fires, at the poor sons of bitches who had to stay below at the goddamn thirty-eighth parallel.”

  I opened my eyes then and saw that your father wasn’t looking, either. I mean at the sky, the stars. He focused straight ahead, his hands still holding onto the steering wheel as if he were steering us somewhere, the headlights flooding nothing but the side of the road, the ragweed and goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace that grew in the drainage ditches, the moths in white light. I heard cicadas, the last of them, and other night sounds, but now your father had gone quiet. I waited a moment for him to begin, again. I had thought I might tell him about the rats of Nagasaki; thought it might make him laugh, as it did Randall, ‘Then another rat cried chu chu, and jumped over with a splash,’ I’d say, but when I looked over I saw that it would be best to not, best to simply suggest we go.

  • • •

  Here are some of the things I would rather not tell you. It was considered common, or bad behavior, to invite a boy you hardly knew, a man, to come upstairs. But he had nowhere to stay. He said he might find a motel off the highway and I said nonsense in a voice that sounded nothing like my own. We stood at the door just to the side of the Woolworth’s window. We had, for a time, looked at the window display, jack-o-lanterns and orange and black crepe paper and skeletons draped across cardboard tombstones. He stood with his hands in his pockets, his face pressed, almost pressed, to the glass, the weak light from the lighted store pooled at our feet. This was a small town. One traffic light blinked yellow as it would at this time of night. No cars passed, no one looked out the window. It might have been snowing for the deathly quiet.

  “Nonsense,” I said in the voice not my own. “You’ll stay with me.”

  He might have said yes, or he might have said nothing. I couldn’t hear for the buzz in my ears, my heart, quite literally, pounding. He followed me up the rickety wooden stairs that led to my apartment door. I held on to the banister as if I’d never bounded up these same stairs before, hands full of books, groceries. I opened the door to my rooms with somewhat of a flourish. I had never even had a friend visit.

  “Voilá!” I said, turning on one of the lamps, aware, quite suddenly, of the dead daisies in the crystal vase that had been my great-grandmother’s, of the books scattered over the floor and the way the radiator clanked. I pulled the drapes to shut out the yellow blinking light, and offered tea, which he accepted. My kitchen, a range and a tiny refrigerator crammed in what had once been a coat closet, seemed a great relief. I took more time than I should have preparing, reassuring myself that here was a veteran with no place to stay, a friend, after all, so what did I have to be afraid of?

  Picture me walking back in, my coat still on, my scarf. I set down the tray with the teapot, sugar bowl, cups, and laughed. Are you cold?—he had asked. He sat on my threadbare sofa, one I’d recently found at the Salvation Army. It seemed fitting, somehow, to see him there, his legs crossed, his jacket unzipped. He had picked up The Gardens of Kyoto from the end table, where I kept it as one would keep, I don’t know, a Bible, or an album of family photographs. He smiled when I said, no. I was, in fact, warm. Tea?

  “Thank you.” We were suddenly polite, self-conscious in a way we had not been in the car, or the restaurant.

  “An interest?” he said, holding up the book.

  “It belonged to my cousin,” I said. “He’s dead, actually.”


  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, no. It’s not. He was killed.”

  Your father looked at me strangely.

  “I mean, I didn’t know him well. He was killed on Iwo Jima.”

  I poured him a cup of tea and one for myself, then sat, awkwardly, across from him, first slipping off my coat.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes,” I said, standing, too suddenly, to hang up my coat, forgetting the teacup balanced on the arm of the chair, spilling it onto the floor. It shattered into what seemed like a thousand white shards.

  “Damn it,” I said. “Goddamn it.” He quickly helped, brushing the shards into a pile with his hand. I squatted next to him and when he started to laugh, I laughed, too. “Poor little teacup,” he said, still laughing. “Poor little thing.”

  “It was so helpful,” I said. “It was only trying to do its job.”

  “Poor thing,” he said. “Poor little thing.”

  • • •

  I watched him sleeping, I’m ashamed to admit. I couldn’t sleep myself and so I slipped out of my bedroom, ostensibly for some milk, or a glass of juice. This I thought I would say if he woke up, if he found me there, standing next to the Salvation Army sofa. I had brought out a pillow and one of the quilts Mother had made for me after losing her factory job. He slept in his clothes, or most of them, his Eisenhower jacket folded into a square, no doubt regulation, and placed to the side of the sofa. I pulled back the curtain a bit so I could see him in the flashing yellow light. He seemed peaceful enough. I sat across from him, suddenly sleepy though not, somehow straddling the waking-dreaming line. Did I sleep at all? I don’t know. I dreamt a Daphne story, I know. I saw her walking on a strange street, alone. She found a place to stay as she had said she would. I’ll be fine, she had said that last day I saw her, don’t be so goddamned frightened of the world. We stood on the steps of McCalister, Daphne leaning against the big stone urn that held Sister Pat’s collection of impatiens and geraniums.