The Gardens of Kyoto

by Kate Walbert

  She startles a bit at his touch. He is next to her now, her friend from the night before, Professor something. She can’t remember his name.

  “You seem far away,” he says.

  “Millions of miles.”

  “It’s beautiful.” He has turned to face the sea, his profile quite sad, really.

  “Yes.”

  “Last time I was here we were packed in like sardines. I won’t even describe for you the stench.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. That’s right,” he says, facing her again.

  “No,” she says. “I didn’t mean.” It is awkward, of course; she has stupidly told him too much. What had she been thinking? “May I see?” she says, pointing to the sketchbook beneath his arm.

  “Oh, well,” he says. “I’m what they call a minor talent. More of a minor, minor, really. You don’t want to bother.”

  “Please,” she says.

  He wipes the lead from his fingers and flips back the cover: the lines of her coat, its shoulder seam, the hat the wind has blown to loop around her neck though he has exaggerated the ribbon.

  “I don’t do figures, generally. But there’s nothing green in this blasted sea. Except some of our fellow passengers’ faces, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m flattered,” she says, immediately hearing the wrongness of the word, flattered. She is embarrassed by the right word— touched?—and quickly excuses herself.

  He watches her go, watches her coat, hat, sink down the metal stairway to the cabins. He would like to take her something, a pot of tea, a whiskey, but he rightly guesses she would rather be alone. He turns to the water, again, squeezing out of his memory that earlier sea, the froth and anger of it, how the boys lay retching, unaware that what awaited them would be far, far worse. He thinks of her instead, the whiteness of her hands, the blush as she held his sketchbook.

  • • •

  She sees him again, here and there on the crossing, at times, even, believing he might be following her. But he is a harmless man. One of the damaged, as Sterling would say. He has clearly been in the war, has mentioned it a few times. He is not a particularly good conversationalist, but that’s fine. She’s had enough of conversation. And the company of men. She would rather now sit and read. Still, he assuages her loneliness. He has told her of a good hotel in Paris, one little known and thoroughly charming. They will share a taxi and he will help her with her bags. He continues on from there to Amsterdam and then takes the Trans-Siberian railroad east. His journey will end in Japan, he tells her. Europe holds few pleasant memories. America he no longer understands. Best to leave all that is familiar.

  Still, he insists upon showing her the hotel. Insists that she will love it: the corner room, the one with the yellow tiles in the bath.

  She allows him to accompany her. She is so tired, and he is certainly harmless. Paris has newly awakened, everyone returned from their holidays. The poplars have shed and the children collect their brittle red leaves as they would seashells. They take a taxi together and he points out cathedrals, the names of which she already knows and yet she humors him. The taxi turns, takes a last bridge into a tiny square. Cupid, he says, pointing to a small fountain in the center of it. He’s everywhere here in Paris.

  She still has her sea legs, she tells him. She needs a rest.

  Of course, he says.

  They stand under the blue-painted arch of the hotel doorway. Window boxes trail vines to the street. Good-bye, she says. Thank you.

  Good-bye, he says. He takes her hand and feels the softness there. Good-bye, he says, again.

  He steps back into the taxi and asks the driver to wait until she is safely inside, though it is the middle of a bright day.

  • • •

  She does not unpack her bag until much later. She is terribly tired, and she wishes simply to soak her feet and rest. The yellow tiles are as yellow as he promised, as delicious. She looks out her corner window to the fountain below. What had he said? Cupid? She wishes him back now, though he has already boarded the train for Amsterdam. She might have convinced him otherwise. She might have offered to take him to dinner. She feels suddenly, desperately lonely; she would attempt to telephone Sterling if she knew how. She turns from the window and lies down. This feeling will pass, she knows; it’s a feeling that inevitably comes with traveling, and, in this condition, at certain hours of the day. She would like to be home, though she knows that home is not the room she rents month to month in the Gramercy Park Residence for Ladies, it’s somewhere in Virginia, somewhere she’s never even been—the place on the other side of the woods, the place she and Jeannette were always trying to find. She falls asleep thinking of this, imagining Jeannette and herself as children, hiding from their parents, running away with every intention of going, sitting cross-legged in the woods, imagining everyone looking for them.

  When she wakes she feels better. The late afternoon light warms the room. She is certainly glad for the room, glad for Paris, after all; she’s in her favorite city and she has days to explore. She will set her attention on work; she will consider the problem on her return, find a solution the next time over the Atlantic.

  She steps out of bed and begins to run a bath and while running the bath unstraps the belts that lock her suitcase. There she finds it exactly as he left it, tucked among her clothing. He had meant to surprise her, had found her cabin empty, her suitcase nearly packed. He had placed it there with a note and then, halfway down the hallway to his own cabin, had decided better, had returned to remove the note, to simply leave the book, his name scrawled beneath an inscription he had spent too long composing: For Ruby and child, with affection.

  • • •

  The train departs on time, unusual for this season. He sits alone in a compartment, his legs stretched out in front of him. He has tried to keep his eyes focused on his sketchbook, no bigger than his hand. He carries it in his pocket. He draws from memory now: the look of cupid rising out of the dry fountain, the weight of the stone. He would rather not see Belgium and yet, they approach Bruges, the conductor has just called it out, and he remembers this city, remembers the mist rising from the canals, the nunnery, where the nuns wear the habits that look like great, white cones, the men and women on their bicycles. Bicycles! He hasn’t ridden one since the war. He would have liked to have suggested they rent a bicycle. He would have liked to have seen her perched on the handlebars as he pedaled the two of them out into the countryside. What was it, September? There would be no more poppies, no more cornflowers. But daisies and lupine, yes. They might have brought a picnic in a basket, taken the cover bedsheet from her hotel room as a blanket. They might have left the bicycle in a ditch, its wheels turned in, its wide leather seat still warm. From the air it might cast a glint as hard as a helmet’s spike, but no. This was a bicycle. Perfectly harmless. Perfectly simple. Intended for nothing more than a day in the country, for delivering them to this spot in this sunny pasture, for this picnic.

  Picnic, he thinks. Certain words ludicrously innocent. Picnic, he says, allowing himself to turn toward the window. They pass now through a field studded with hay mounds, the mounds the size of dwarfs’ homes, all of it out of a fairy tale. Even now, oddly, the war.

  Picnic, he says again, the word fanning out to steam the glass.

  9

  Sterling passed away several years after that last visit, during a particularly fierce January. Mother had received notes from him from time to time, when Rita died, of course, and on certain holidays. In them he would ask after the family, the kind of questions asked in a note, unintended to be answered.

  After his death Mother sent me the obituary—I was already at Saint Mary’s—that appeared in the Baltimore Sun, as well as a longer article published in one of the local newspapers. He had been in the library that evening as was his custom, apparently, though for hours the librarian had been attempting to close the doors and go home. Judge Sterling Jewell was not a man to be kicked out, and so
she permitted him to stay, simply giving him the keys. It will be my life’s heartache, she was quoted as saying, that I was not there to help that man.

  Sterling suffered a stroke, or what was then called a brain attack, as he locked the door. They found him the next morning half-frozen, though they were without a doubt that he had died instantly.

  The reporter did not note what books Sterling carried. I don’t imagine it would have been of interest to most readers, yet that was what I most wanted to know. I have always pictured him carrying the black-spined notebook under one arm, some local histories under the other. Books that might, on a careful read, reveal more about the skirmish that took place at King of Prussia, mention in a footnote James A. Smith, or the story of Eliza, or the fugitive rogue Captain D, or even Romulus Box Perkins; something he would eventually write to me of. I have told you that he wrote me often. Well, that is not entirely the case. He wrote me only once after that visit. A brief note on a small piece of paper intended, it seemed, for other uses than a letter, a grocery list, perhaps. The note said simply, Thank you for your company, and was signed, as was his habit, with his full name.

  He never mentioned the diary. He simply knocked on my door that morning at seven o’clock, as we had agreed, and escorted me downstairs, where we ate our breakfast in collective silence, the salesmen all around us obscured by their newspapers. He wore his usual cardigan and, oddly, his brace outside his trousers. The pilot arrived soon after not in his biplane but in Sterling’s automobile, and drove us as far as the ferry dock, where my parents collected me, believing we had all made the crossing on the ferry. I never told them we did not. I don’t quite know why. Of course, Mother was curious and Betty as well, though she pretended not to be. Still, I felt the transfer of secrets from Randall and me to Sterling and me, or perhaps, to Sterling and Randall and me.

  • • •

  Sterling Jeremiah Jewell requested no mourners, no service, no eulogy, the obituary read. He simply wanted to go into the ground next to his beloved wife, Jeannette Olive Jewell, formerly of Shenandoah, Virginia. This I remember and the business I have already mentioned—that he was a good cook, a master bridge player. That he had somehow been instrumental in influencing the Supreme Court on the state’s first desegregation laws, filing a friend-of-the-court brief that was credited in the decision that followed, and that he was considered an expert on Jonathan Edwards, a biography of whom he had been researching up to the day of his untimely death. As you might imagine, Sterling was not the type of scholar to ever believe anything actually finished, though several of his former clerks culled his notes and the first, or perhaps, second draft of his manuscript, publishing it with an introduction explaining that Sterling’s devotion to pure truth, to fact, his utter refusal to give up on any sniff of a rumor of inaccuracy, had led to several decades pursuing Edwards’s life as a bloodhound would pursue a rabbit. He had even tracked down several of Edwards’s ancestors, including a great-great-granddaughter, now in her nineties, who had started a commune in Canada between the wars.

  What led this biographer to pursue Edwards so doggedly? the clerks wrote. What leads any biographer to choose a life, any life, over his own? For surely the writing of a life takes precedence over the living of a life, and the biographer must subsume his own self to wear the cloak of his subject.

  It was all a bit dramatic, and I’m sure Sterling would have heartily disapproved. Whether he ever intended his study to be published at all remains unclear, though among his papers his clerks had found what they assumed had been intended as an epigram—a scrap of paper that bore Sterling’s signature scrawl: For my son, Randall.

  I understand that at a certain point in his lifetime Jonathan Edwards was as popular as one of our actors today. His sermons drew great crowds and people quoted his comings and goings, his style of dress. A Calvinist, true, yet one of the first men to speak out against slavery, to call into question the hypocrisy of what he called the greatest irony of our country: that our Founding Fathers, our “sons of liberty,” were so passionate in their cause for freedom as thousands of slaves were bought and sold every day. This I remember from what Sterling told me. Little else, though Sterling repeatedly mentioned Edwards over the course of that dinner at the Dew Drop Inn as he read from his black-spined notebook and I rearranged the bones of my half-eaten fish against the patterned china. I’m not entirely sure what I took from those Edwards lessons, though I remember at some point wondering whether it in fact was for him, Sterling, that the slave ghosts had returned; whether they stood in the various rooms of the big brick house—the father with his hands reflexively tied, the shoeless children—not for Randall at all but for Sterling to walk in, to see for himself a portrait of great irony.

  · Book Four ·

  1

  What was it you were asking then? About your father? I haven’t, quite truthfully, forgotten. The point is, I seem to remember Randall most when I think of him, your father. He was not handsome in the way Randall was handsome—Randall had more delicate looks, the kind of boy with light, long lashes, cheeks that flushed easily, burned red. He put my hand there once, to feel them, but then I already knew. I had the same. It is why I could no more imagine him as a soldier than I could imagine myself. He didn’t fit. Literally. When Mother and I met him at the train he stood tall above the other boys in uniform, though he must have been one of the youngest, there in his regulation wool coat, too big, of course, although that seemed to be the style for all of the boys, their shoulders and arms lost within those hideous dark cloaks; coats that belonged on older men.

  • • •

  I woke to find your father gone. Is this what you wanted? He was, as I’ve said, skittish, skittish in the way some boys were after war. They pretended to be fine, but if you looked you’d see that they were not fine at all.

  We weren’t supposed to look. We were supposed to welcome them home, pretending, as they pretended, that they had just been on some great holiday; we were supposed to parade down Main Street in our cheerleading uniforms, twirling our batons, the Veteran band honking along as we jumped up and down as if at a pep rally. And we did; we did as we were supposed to do.

  Still. I remember one, Jack Wenzel, who returned in the fall of 1945 when so many of them did. His parents had a house in town, near the corner where we’d turn on our walk to school. Jack had always been a friendly boy; I believe Rita dated him once or twice, then decided he seemed too much of a loosey-goosey for her, too flighty, she said, in the way Rita could say things like this and be completely understood. I have no idea what she didn’t like about him; I thought he was dreamy and smart. He had curly black hair and wore thick glasses. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, even in winter, and once, I remember, we were the only two in the lunchroom, studying long after the lunch bell had rung. He asked me what I was doing and when I told him, he smiled and said I seemed more serious than my sisters, but that was fine. Serious girls are a pleasure, he said.

  Anyway, Jack had enlisted soon after graduation, leaving in a bus that had been brought into town for recruitment. I have no idea where he ended up, whether he served in Europe, North Africa, or the Pacific front. We never said a word to one another. Well, Jack said not a word to anyone. Everyone in town knew the story: as soon as he returned, stepped off the boat, the train, what have you, he kissed his mother, kissed his father, shook his head, and stopped speaking. Everyone speculated this meant “I’m sorry,” but I’m not sure. It might have meant anything. It might have meant he was disgusted with his parents—or baffled—for allowing him to go in the first place. He was, what? Seventeen when he enlisted? Eighteen?

  Betty and I would see him on our way to school, sitting on the front porch, staring out toward the street sign as if he’d never seen it before. He grew a beard, or, more accurately, his beard grew. He looked much older than a boy of twenty. He no longer rolled up his shirtsleeves; even if it were warm he wore a heavy sweater and sat with an afghan, the kind knitted by grandmothers for babies
, across his knees. Someone dared Trudy Johnson to run up the porch steps and kiss Jack on the mouth, which she did—Trudy Johnson not the type of girl to turn down any dare. Cold as stone, she said. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t even blink. He’s dead, she said. They just propped him up.

  • • •

  I only gradually understood that your father wasn’t well. Throughout that October, he would return to my apartment above the Woolworth’s in the dead of night—I never locked the door—and I’d wake to the sound of him tapping on the kitchen counter with a spoon, or what sounded like a spoon, and find him waiting for the kettle to boil, impatient. He might be reading a magazine, or some pocketsize paperback, and he would barely look up when I entered the room, wrapping my robe around me.

  “Good evening,” he would say, as if this were six o’clock on a street corner, and we two neighbors whose paths had just happened to cross.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He set the spoon down and leaned with one elbow on the counter, his eyes so heavy with sleep, or lack of it, that they seemed to belong to a different Henry, one much smaller, and scared, than the Henry I knew or believed I knew.

  “I’m glad you’ve decided to join me,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “Now you’re making fun.”

  “No,” I said.

  He slouched on one hand, and I had the sudden urge to do a schoolgirl’s trick, to press my knees hard against the back of his legs so he would fold to the floor and perhaps laugh. I wanted to see him laugh, again. He hadn’t since the night of our dinner.