The Gardens of Kyoto

by Kate Walbert

  “I wish you wouldn’t shout; I’ve been up for hours,” he said.

  “Here?” I said, my voice pitched lower, though I would no more shout than run nude down the center of Main Street. Everything had gone loud on him. A few nights earlier, he had insisted that I close the windows against the sound of the blinking yellow traffic light. Acutely disturbing, he said, the color yellow.

  “No. I never come here first.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I go elsewhere. Everywhere. Everywhere and nowhere specific. Just always here, eventually. Do you mind?”

  “No,” I said, waiting.

  “I’m reading Trollope. You’ll be pleased to learn that everyone is quite gay.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “No, I wouldn’t think you would. You’ve got other fish to fry.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Shakespeare and Shakespeare. Haven’t we had enough of him?”

  “Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived,” I said, feeling immediately ridiculous, as if it needed to be said at all, as if it needed to be said by someone like me, standing in her bathrobe in the middle of the night.

  “Yes, and General MacArthur a brilliant strategist.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “He could have taken us all the way to the goddamn moon. The Chinks didn’t get there already, did they?”

  In some time, I knew, we would come to the end of this conversation, if you could call it that, his words circling and swirling around like leaves in a wind tunnel, funneling up and then drifting down, rising and ebbing, impossibly random though at times wholly purposeful, furious. We would, eventually, find ourselves in my bedroom, in my bed, though at that point we would both stay terribly quiet.

  Still, once he said, “You are lovely, aren’t you?” I’m not sure whether it was this night or one of the others. They were the same, really. The nights. Beginning out of sleep, in the dead stillness of October, changing, as the season eventually changed, withering then disappearing altogether with the cold.

  I lay beside him, waiting for him to leave my bed, as he always would, for the sofa in the other room. “Lovely,” he repeated, perhaps because I said nothing in response; I was thinking of the beauty of that word, how lightly it drifted to the floor, how I remembered it from Randall’s poet—what had he said? Lovely and durable. I would think of a thousand things, lovely and durable, and taste them slowly. I may have repeated those words to your father, I may have simply repeated them to myself. I can’t recall; it is simply the word lovely that marks that time, and the hollow sound of the coffee spoon waking me from dreams.

  2

  But I’ve skipped ahead too suddenly. I should go back to that summer, the summer Sterling sent for me. A few days after my return the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese surrendered; the entire world on fire: the conquered and the conquerors.

  It was hot as blazes, so Mother said just this once we could go to Jacob’s Quarry, polio or no, this a celebration. She and Daddy joined us, everyone on holiday, and I remember how odd it felt to see the two of them in their bathing suits in the middle of the workday— Mother’s rounded, freckled shoulders softer than the rest of her, Daddy’s pale, thin legs whisped with black hair—dive and swim out past the point, where what seemed like years ago the boys too young for war had competed for Rita’s affections, balancing on the rock and repeatedly calling her name.

  It was only a few weeks later that Rita wrote to say that Roger would, at last, be on his way home, and that they would visit for Thanksgiving.

  He had risen in rank, an honor due in part for his bravery in the Battle of the Bulge that New Year’s, where, he wrote to Rita, he wined and dined on the Siegfried Line, visiting the Club Cologne on the Beautiful Rhine, enjoying the Big 88 band (direct fire artillery) and that famous singer Screaming Mimi (shells). All came, he wrote, the mortar the merrier, though too many of his buddies didn’t make it. As the French say, “C’est la guerre.”

  She had quoted his letter word for word in one of her own to us, and from the way Mother and Daddy talked about it, you would have thought that Roger had singlehandedly wrestled Hitler to the ground.

  We’ll give Hitler what he wants, he signed off. A CRATER Germany.

  I don’t remember where else Roger served, exactly, though I do know that after that he spent some months in a hospital near London—Screaming Mimi, as he put it, under his skin—and that during his stay there Rita had a premonition he would fall madly in love with a British chippy, someone with an accent, she wrote, and terrible teeth and a tiny, turned-up nose and moles, and he would condemn—this her word—her to this godforsaken outback where she would be forced to marry a cowboy with the hideous habit of chewing and spitting tobacco.

  We all knew, of course, that she couldn’t wait for his return.

  • • •

  They arrived the day before Thanksgiving in their new white Chevy, red with the desert clay Rita had complained she could not clean from her shoes for all the tea in China. We were a frenzy of greeting, so perhaps I might be forgiven for not immediately recognizing the change in her. It was only later that night, as she sat with Betty and me, Mother, Daddy, and Roger at the kitchen table, that I began to feel what I can only call her absence. She stayed unusually quiet, seemed distracted, always. Whenever Roger spoke, she held herself at an odd, unnatural angle, so still I kept thinking of a baby bird I had once found and tried to save in Springfield’s orchard—a newborn sparrow, its breast feathers still wet, its black eyes frightened. It had fallen from its nest and lay petrified in the deep thrush beneath a particularly ancient apple, and though I climbed the tree and placed it back there within the tufts of milkweed and whatnot, I knew it wouldn’t survive. They never do.

  • • •

  We spent the next day helping Mother prepare the meal, which we devoured, Daddy said, as if we, too, had been at the Battle of the Bulge; after dessert, Roger stood and excused himself. His sister Missy had married and settled down in the next town, and he explained that he had promised to stop by before his nephew was put to bed. It must have been just before sunset when he left. The late afternoon sun lit the windows of the dining room a deep orange, distracting to all of us, so that at first Rita’s weeping seemed not a part of our company, though we immediately turned to see it came from her, here, in her usual chair, this desperate sound from Rita with her head bowed.

  We watched her for a moment—it seemed deliberate this way, a synchronized motion—then looked to Daddy. He sat stiff in the shirt Rita had sewed for him, his full name, William Theodore, stitched in purple thread along the collar. Who knows what he was thinking? Until that visit Rita had appeared to be fine; her letters filled with the mundane news of the ladies she socialized with wherever she was stationed. They had various clubs and goodwill committees and this one or that one was pregnant, and so all the ladies pitched in to care for the babies, since the husbands were still overseas, though every letter brought one or another back home. With Roger’s recent return, she had written about his new job as a salesman for an insurance company, his hope to become division manager. Daddy was the one who read Rita’s letters. He read them after dinner before we left the table, against the sound of crickets, the hum of the new refrigerator Daddy had surprised Mother with for their last anniversary, the radio reciting war news or playing organ music, his deep voice giving a grave importance to Rita’s words. She was our soldier cast abroad, reporting from towns we’d never heard of: privy, somehow, to the national effort, invaluable to the cause. Had there been a star for the wives of soldiers we would have hung it in our parlor window.

  Still, the letters rarely contained a shred of information about her; about her friends, yes. About Roger, of course. But nothing about her. Strange, now, to remember. She had been such a chatterbox when she lived at home, always keeping us up-to-date on whatever crossed her mind at a given moment—whether she might join the flag-tw
irling squad or agree to go to the farm show with Johnny DeNardio. Mundane details, true, yet Rita had a way of making everything glamorous; she held the throne in our family, sat smack in the center of us. That she was fine must have been our assumption—given Daddy’s voice, I suppose, the timbre he gave to her sentences.

  • • •

  Now he didn’t say a word. It was Mother who at last leaned over and held Rita’s hand.

  Tell us, sweetheart, she said.

  Rita shook her head and pulled her hand away, her face now buried in one of the linen napkins Mother brought down from the attic for holidays. Roger’s lay on his plate at the seat beside her. We had, truth be told, smiled when he excused himself, watching him leave the room with something close to envy. He had traded in his soldier’s uniform for the one worn by salesmen at the time, a light gray suit, a thin tie, a fedora. He cut the trim figure of a man out of a cigarette advertisement.

  “It’s too terrible,” Rita said from behind her hands. It was difficult to understand what she said next.

  “He’s what?” Mother said.

  Rita looked up, her eyes blackened by wet mascara. She looked ugly then; this is the only way to put it.

  “Mean,” she said. “He’s turned mean.”

  Mother stroked Rita’s hair and tucked it behind her ears in the way she used to do when we were children. Betty and I looked on from our seats across the table: Mother had moved to Roger’s empty chair.

  “He’s just back,” she said. “Give him time to get used to being home.”

  “It’s not that,” Rita said. “Anyway, I’m sick of that. Sick of everyone saying exactly that. Jesus Christ, why can’t anyone say something new?”

  Then she began to cry, again.

  Mother looked at Daddy and they passed her between them as one runner might pass a baton to the next.

  “I don’t want to hear that language at the dinner table,” Daddy said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She made her weeping sound and rocked and Mother stroked her hair some more and Betty and I sat, unable to think of anything more to say, unable to even ask a question.

  “What am I going to do?” she said, but she did not intend to be answered. She rocked and moaned, her face pressed to her hands, and I remember being struck by how different we were from her, Betty and I; how grown-up Rita had become, the square diamond wedding ring on her finger, the newly platinum color of her hair, even the dramatic way in which she cried.

  “Rita,” Daddy said sternly. “Rita, please. Tell us calmly what’s going on.”

  She wept a bit longer, wept until the hysteria had passed. Then she wiped her eyes and fell silent for a time.

  “He hits me,” she said. “When he’s been drinking. When he’s not been drinking. In the mornings. Sometimes he wakes me up to.”

  Daddy pressed his fork into a whole pecan.

  “Do you make him angry?” Daddy said. “He’s got a lot of responsibility at this new job.”

  “He calls me a stupid bitch. He talks nonsense. He says you’ve dug your hole now lie in it. I don’t understand and when I say I don’t understand he calls me a stupid—”

  “It’s a difficult time.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think a wife can ever truly appreciate the pressures on a husband.”

  “No sir.”

  “Enormous pressures.”

  Rita started to laugh; she continued as she wiped her eyes again with Mother’s linen napkin. It was difficult to look. This I remember: She wore a tiny, gold cross around her neck, a wedding present from her bridesmaids. Her hands went there first, briefly, passed over the cross, touching it as Randall and I had passed over, touched, the horsehead andirons, without special thought, simply as habit to bring us good luck for what we were about to do. She did this and then she began to unbutton her blouse.

  • • •

  As you can imagine, we were a modest family. Even with one another, my sisters and I were private about our bodies. I have been in other households where sisters walk from bathroom to bedroom in brassieres and panties, entirely oblivious to brothers or fathers, where daughters change their underclothes in front of mothers. We were not cut from that cloth. We ducked behind doors. We politely asked one another to leave the room. Even in bathing suits we lay on our stomachs, or quickly got out of the quarry and grabbed our coverup.

  To sit at the Thanksgiving table and watch Rita undress should have been all it took to truly understand: who needed the proof of her bruises? She pulled the collar of her blouse over one shoulder, pulled one arm free and then another, shrinking before us in nothing more than a brassiere, the style popular then, stiff, pointy cups, impossibly white and trimmed with lace. I watched her fingers return to the gold cross, finding it too difficult to look at what she intended us to see: the bruises that ringed her elbows, stamped the soft flesh of her upper arms. Some were older than others, faded to yellow; some were still a bright magenta.

  “C’est la guerre,” she said.

  We had just finished our Thanksgiving meal, understand; we were in our good clothes, Mother’s holiday linen on the table. And Roger had cut such a handsome figure, standing, as he did, before leaving, bowing, slightly, in a gentlemanly manner, donning his fedora and walking out the front door.

  The point is, we were not used to this kind of display, this bare truth. And so we kept quiet, waiting for Daddy to say something more, and when he did not, we waited for Rita to button herself back in, which she did quickly before she left the table.

  • • •

  Her letters after Thanksgiving took on a more cheerful tone. Daddy would read them as before, at the dinner table, down to the Love and Kisses Rita, smiling as he folded the paper back into its envelope, nodding to each one of us as if to say, See? Rita’s fine.

  I think of this now as I tell you of your father. They were all the damaged, weren’t they? Who remained whole? It was that spring that Rita fell down the basement stairs, cracking her skull on the concrete floor.

  I don’t believe that we ever discussed it; instead we allowed that her fall had been an accident, that she must have tripped on the ties of her robe, it being so early in the morning, as Roger explained, his voice strangely high, excited. He asked to speak to each one of us on the telephone, and when it was my turn, he told me that Rita had always believed I would go far, and that he hoped I wouldn’t disappoint her. I thanked him. That’s what I said. Thank you, I said, as if I weren’t on the telephone to my sister’s killer, as if what Rita had said about me to him, the compliment, was far more important than my sister’s life.

  Not long after Rita’s death, Daddy collected all the pictures of her scattered about the house. She had wanted to be a movie star, remember, and so there was no shortage. She always seemed to be tacking some photograph to a wall saying the bright light in the kitchen suited her coloring, or that she looked fine at a distance on the mantel. One in particular we liked the most, a charcoal sketch of Rita’s face drawn in a matter of minutes by an artist at one of those stands along the boardwalk in Atlantic City. This had been a rare family vacation, and I can still see the five of us sunburned and exhausted, Daddy walking with his arms around Rita and Betty, flirting with them as if he were one of the teenage boys hawking tickets to the whirling saucers. I believe it was his idea to stop at the artist’s stand; or it may have been Rita’s after all. Regardless, she sat with her hands in her lap, her head cocked at an awkward angle, instructed to look toward the top rider of the Ferris wheel. Behind her waves broke against the wide beach, the surf lit with the rare pink it takes on at dusk; but the artist didn’t sketch this. He simply drew Rita’s face and the line of her collar, his hand moving as if drawn by an invisible string.

  The portrait hung in the hallway: Rita wearing the expression she reserved for artists and photographers, her gaze strangely heavenward—I couldn’t see a gosh darn soul on the Ferris wheel, she said later, and now I’ve got a crick in my neck. D
addy took this one down, too, and put it with all the others in the trunk of the car.

  Where he drove them I’m not sure, though we never saw those pictures again. Betty swore he’d burned them, that he couldn’t bear to be reminded, but it seems to me that he probably just wanted to take Rita somewhere no one else could find, out of the light, perhaps, her portrait rolled into a scroll, its charcoal lines slightly smeared by the trace of his fingers.

  3

  Your father left before I waked the last morning. I shouldn’t have been surprised. He was looking for Daphne, after all, not me. I have mentioned that he would sleep on my sofa, and that he had more than once noticed The Gardens of Kyoto. Indeed, he had held it for a long time that first night I invited him up to my apartment above the Woolworth’s, turning from page to page, studying the illustrations. This after I’d attempted to serve the tea, broken the teacup, left to wash my hands and dump the shards of china into the wastebasket.

  “What was your cousin’s name?” he said. I had walked back into the living room carrying a fresh cup.

  “Randall,” I said. “He was seventeen years old.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I shrugged; it had become a habit after Rita’s death. Whenever people apologized to me, I simply gestured with my shoulders, as if this could deflect the truth of it somehow, or as if the truth of it meant nothing to me. “I didn’t know him well,” I repeated.

  “A terrible battle.”

  “Yes.”

  “What division was he in?” he said.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “It happened after the end of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When it was already over.”

  “I see,” he said, though I’m not sure he understood.

  “He wanted to be a writer,” I said, “a poet,” as if your father had inquired further.

  “We had a platoon of psychiatrists,” he said. “Everyone wanted to be a shrink. One fellow had already been to school for it. Some goddamn place in Boston. He used to practice on us. Very elemental. Could have used some poets.”