The Gardens of Kyoto

by Kate Walbert

  Randall turned to Mother and said something that made her laugh. She patted his shoulder and reached around to hug him. Then she let go and Randall turned to me. I smelled tobacco smoke in his red scarf and then the sharp, cold air as he pulled away and left to join the soldiers crowding into the narrow open spaces between the train compartments. Mother said she was freezing and that she would meet me in the station. I watched her part the thinning crowd, then turned back to the train. We were only women on the platform now: the mute women who had jostled out of Mother’s way, who now stood dumbly watching as the wheels of the train began to turn, as the whistle blew, because it did, in those days, blow, releasing a great scream of steam.

  It was then—just as the whistle blew—that Randall got off; then that he turned to wave to us and finding only me stepped down— the whistle blowing, the train slowly moving—to push his way to where I stood, my hands deep in my pockets. Perhaps his uniform made him brave, perhaps he understood more than I did what he was about to do: he pressed his hands on either side of my face as if to warm them and looked directly at me.

  “I’m switching allegiances,” he said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re it. My new audience. To hell with dead poets.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I didn’t know what else.

  He rolled his eyes.

  “In this my last confession, you’ll have to do better than that, sweetheart.”

  Where had this Randall come from? This young man in drab woolen pants, a tie, and a soldier’s coat—his knobby wrists, his long fingers, near enough to kiss?

  “Merci,” I said. It was a word I had been saving for my first letter to him.

  He laughed, I believe, though I could barely hear a thing, the sound of his sweetheart ringing loudly in my ears. “Good-bye, Ellen,” he said, staring at me as if he might be counting my bones. I looked down, then up, again, though he was already gone, already running for the train; the ending so predictable: the boy leaves for war; the boy dies.

  And I let him go. I might have pulled out my hands. I might have brought them up around him. I might have kept them that way until the train left the station. I could have easily done it. I could have simply held on, wrapping my arms so tightly no one would have dared pry him loose.

  epilogue

  I did, in fact, see Daphne again. Once, accidentally. It must have been ten or eleven years ago. She was sitting in a restaurant, at a table near the front plate-glass window, and I passed by, in the city for an education symposium or one of the endless teacher training sessions they required of us in those days. I’m sure I looked to her as I look to any stranger—a middle-aged woman, stern in carriage. Or this is how she would have seen me; how my students do, I’m afraid, though I have on more than one occasion led them in to the aspen grove, asking them to please, for a moment, take off their coats, their burdensome shoes, remove the gum from their mouths.

  I recognized her immediately. She sat at a table with a boy who looked to be about the age we were when we first met, a bit older. She did not see me. I was on the street and she was sitting inside, engaged in conversation with the boy. I’m not sure why I felt so determined to speak to her. Perhaps I should have simply passed by, glad for the chance to know she survived.

  Still, I entered the restaurant and walked toward her table. She must have felt my determination because she looked up before I was even halfway across the room. I wish I could say she seemed happy to see me, but it would be more accurate to say she looked at me as if I were an apparition from a past she wanted no part of.

  “Ellen?” she said. I had reached her table.

  “Daphne. You’re here. Daphne.”

  The boy looked from her to me and I could see now their extraordinary resemblance. He had his mother’s intensity, her full, gray eyes, and for an instant we both stared at him, as if he would somehow tell us what to do next.

  “This is my son,” Daphne said. “Alex.”

  “Oh,” I said. I believe we shook hands.

  “This is Ellen, an old friend,” Daphne said. “Alex is a graduate student at Penn.”

  The boy smiled and I saw he did not entirely resemble her; he had too great a calm about him.

  “I haven’t seen your mother in years,” I said. I felt I had to explain.

  “And she hasn’t aged a bit, right?”

  I looked at Daphne.

  “She’s a much better dresser,” I said. Daphne wore a dark blue cashmere suit with a silk blouse, and she had let her hair, cropped short, gray to a stark white, the beautiful white of an older intellectual. Her face looked even thinner than I remembered, more finely featured; she had on tiny copper-framed glasses that were just beginning to be popular.

  “You’ve changed your glasses,” I said.

  She smiled at me.

  “Sit down, Ellen. Join us, please. I would love to hear your news.”

  It seemed so formal, all of it: the way Daphne spoke and her cashmere suit, the restaurant with its silver bowls of breadsticks and large, full wineglasses and tuxedoed waiters, even her son, so composed for a boy, a student, as if he had nothing left to learn.

  I looked at my watch, or pretended to do so. “I really can’t,” I said. “I’m expected at an education panel.”

  “You teach?” she said.

  I nodded. “High school. Literature.”

  “Mother’s the chairman of the history department at Wellesley,” Alex said.

  “That must be gratifying,” I said.

  “No, not really. Mostly committee work. I have very little time for my own research.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  It seemed to be all we were.

  “Well,” I said. “It was wonderful to see you.”

  “And you,” Daphne said. They both stood up.

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  “Good-bye,” they said.

  • • •

  I was close to Liberty Park when I heard her call my name. I turned and saw her walking briskly toward me, her coat unbuttoned; she waved.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said when she reached me. “Really.”

  “For what?” I said.

  She shrugged and looked around her. “Let’s sit,” she said, and so we sat on one of the cold metal benches that outline the park, barren after the lunch hour. Before us stood the Liberty Bell, surrounded by a fence covered in graffiti. Daphne shivered and reached into her coat pocket for a package of cigarettes. I declined and she lit hers.

  “This is exactly what I have wanted to do,” she said. She took a long drag on her cigarette and let the smoke out. “Sit in this ugly little park and smoke cigarette after cigarette and talk about, what? God knows where to begin. Nothing. Let’s just sit and talk about absolutely nothing. Can we do that? Can we talk about absolutely nothing? Would you mind, terribly, missing your engagement so you could sit here with me?”

  “No,” I said.

  People passing by may have thought us sisters, or old, old friends. We sat for a good long while. It began to snow, the snow that looks like rain at first, then takes on weight and drift; the snow soon covered the Liberty Bell and the graffitied rails of the fence and the ground and our own bench.

  “He’s a beautiful boy, Daphne,” I said after a time.

  “Yes,” she said. “Isn’t he?”

  acknowledgments

  Two books were invaluable to me in my research: A Guide to the Gardens of Kyoto by Marc Treib and Ron Herman; and The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, etc. Narrating the Hardships Hair-breadth Escapes and Death Strug gles of the Slaves in their efforts for Freedom as related By Them selves and Others or Witnessed by the Author by William Still. I have quoted directly from Still’s book: the list of names in book three, chapter 4, as well as many of the details from the harrowing escape of William Box Peel Jones for the character of Romulus Box Perkins.

  I’m thankful for the use of the collection of slave narratives at
the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and to the exhibit organized by Elisabeth Fairman at the Yale Center for British Art entitled Doomed Youth: The Poetry and Pity of the First World War. Sara Bader at the History Channel generously shared with me a selection of letters written by men stationed in the Pacific and Europe. Certain lines from the letter of Frank J. Conwell, sent from the Western Front February 6, 1945, are quoted as Roger’s in book four, chapter 2.

  I would also like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts for their support during the writing of this book, and Maria Massie, Gillian Blake, and Nan Graham for their guidance.

  A special thanks to Rafael, to Delia, to Polly, and to my family, especially my mother and father.

  Turn the page for a preview of Kate Walbert’s novel

  The Sunken Cathedral

  Available June 2015 from Scribner

  III

  The mothers, dressed for exercise, gather on the steps of Progressive K–8—Stephanie G. at the center, forty-five, give or take, her hair in short braids, dandelions woven into the bands—Elizabeth sees her and sidesteps but too late.

  “Elizabeth!” Stephanie G. calls. “Elizabeth!”

  How had she agreed to the idea at all? Now Stephanie G. blocks her path, clearly determined to see the vision fulfilled: Who We Are stories line the hallways of Progressive K–8 like so many snowflake cutouts in winter, each sincere and beautiful and excruciatingly heartbreaking for reasons Elizabeth cannot name and does not want to examine. The idea had grown out of the school’s pledge for better communication by way of stronger community, dialoguing through dialogue, something like that, one of those tautologically challenged declarations beloved by their new interim head of school—Dr. Constantine—an elderly woman whose early advocacy of sexual education in pre-K put her on the academic map. If everyone could share their roots, or dig down to their roots, or expose their roots the school might come together in a grand way, or at least in a way that would increase the parent participation in the annual fund drive.

  It had all been outlined in an e-mail: IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FROM DR. CONSTANTINE, which Elizabeth opened expecting to read of another outbreak of nits on a fifth grader’s scalp or an additional plea for vigilance when patrolling the City blocks after pickup. This, Elizabeth’s favorite parental responsibility: mothers and the occasional bemused father wandering Bleecker Street in pairs regardless the weather, dressed in bright orange vests and carrying heavy walkie-talkies, a bit over the top, yet still: vigilance must be maintained, Dr. Constantine stressed, especially in the event of a What If.*

  Last month Elizabeth had patrol duty with a woman whose son was in first grade, a woman tall and thin with dark, New York hair and glasses suggesting a love of books or at least a graduate degree in the humanities. The two had wandered the block greeting other mothers they knew, nodding to clusters of students and telling them to get along, eyeing any stray man who seemed not to have a destination in mind, their hands gripping the walkie-talkies just in case they needed to call back in to, whom? Dr. Constantine? Central control? The crackle of static had felt comforting, as was the idea of a direct link to someone who might allay her more general fears: Dirty bomb a hoax, the voice would whisper; organic beef as good as grass fed.

  But this e-mail had a different message:

  What’s Your Story? it read. We’re asking the Progressive K–8 Community to participate in a 3-E endeavor to Enliven, Engage, and Enlighten with Who We Are stories. Everyone has one: Great-Uncle Vic worked as a tailor for Chiang Kai-shek; Grandmother Sanchez escaped from Castro’s Cuba. Whatever it is, we want to know! And please, include pictures!

  • • •

  “So, who are we?” Ben asked that night at the dinner table.

  “What?” Elizabeth said, distracted by the amount of cheese he had stuffed in his taco.

  “Dr. Constantine said we were supposed to remind you,” Ben said, negotiating a bite. “I’m reminding you.”

  “Oh, that,” she said, turning to her husband, who scooped the meat with a spoon and whose pale, delicate fingers, long and tapered, looked as if he should be playing a musical instrument.

  “What?” Pete said. “What are we talking about?”

  “We’re supposed to write a Who We Are story,” Elizabeth said. “You know, where we come from, how we ended up here. They’re asking everyone to do it. One of those community things.”

  Pete looked at her as if not comprehending. She had noticed this more and more about him, these brief synapses—hamster trances, Ben called them—and wondered if it had to do with his not sleeping, or maybe the hours he spent sitting at a desk staring at small numbers moving across a computer screen or on the device held in his palm. Perhaps he was waiting for his wife and son to morph into something else, for the trading feed to begin its loop across the bottom of the page: information, statistics, the rise and fall of the stock exchange; or possibly he hoped the text might offer links to other sites, sites that would explicate his family’s deeper, troubling mysteries—his wife’s increasing restlessness, his son’s unpredictable moods.

  “My ancestors were Welsh,” Pete said. “You could write about that. The Welsh are interesting.”

  “I thought Holland,” Elizabeth says.

  Pete shrugs. “Somebody sailed from Rotterdam before the Revolution, but then there was also something about Wales. Nobody really knows.”

  “If you were a girl you could be a member of the DAR,” Elizabeth says to Ben. “That’s kinda cool.”

  Ben looks from one to the other then takes a tremendous bite of his taco, tomatoes and cheese and lettuce shreds raining down on his plate, and to the side of the plate onto the good tablecloth.

  “Promise me you won’t take your first date out for tacos,” Elizabeth says.

  “I promise I won’t take my first date out for tacos,” Ben says, his mouth full. When did he get so large, so ungainly, so hairy? He is all arms and legs, as if he can’t even fit into his chair. They sit on the chairs she and Pete bought in Mexico, right after their wedding. The chairs have rattan seats the cat has destroyed and are grease-stained and worn but when she looks at them she thinks of Pete speaking broken Spanish, attempting to bribe someone at the post office in Oaxaca to mail them freight.

  “We could write how we had tacos on our first date,” Elizabeth says to Pete, feeling suddenly expansive, young; she might be twenty-eight; she might be walking on that beach in Mexico, the one where they stayed before leaving for Oaxaca, where the chickens and seagulls followed them for crumbs. They were eating galletas; they were leaving a trail in case they got lost. “We could write that when I took the first bite he wondered if he could have a second date, much less spend the rest of his life with me.”

  “I did wonder that,” Pete says.

  “First date?” Elizabeth says.

  “What did we do?” Pete says.

  “Chinese,” Elizabeth says.

  “Right,” Pete says. “I was thinking egg roll.”

  “Chinatown,” Elizabeth says.

  “Right, right. You had the spicy braised fish,” he says, though she didn’t—at the time she refused to eat anything with scales.

  “And then we went to hear music,” she says.

  “Muddy Waters,” Pete says.

  “Willie Dixon,” Elizabeth says. “And ate those little balls with the toothpicks for dessert. They were too sweet. They’re always too sweet.”

  “I moved into your mother’s apartment. It was above Sherm’s—” Pete says to Ben.

  “Sherman’s was an upscale diner and all day Sunday you smelled all the delicious—” says Elizabeth.

  “Sausage.”

  “Your father didn’t have a dime. We never ate out again,” Elizabeth says.

  “One time your mother found this stray dog and asked the waiters if they had any leftover sausage—”

  “Oh God!”

  “For the dog,” Pete says. He smiles, remembering.

 
; Ben has his eyes covered, head on the table, or the pretty tablecloth. “Should I be writing this down?” he says.

  • • •

  Two fathers sprint past Stephanie G., their jacket tails flying as if they can’t wait to get the hell to their jobs. Certain days the fathers turn out in impressive numbers, walking their young children to school, looking handsome and freshly showered, many in well-cut suits and a few in jeans and bomber jackets, good shoes, and one or two in grungy clothes. The fathers must exercise at different times, maybe earlier in the morning before they have showered, or possibly at night or possibly not at all, though in general the fathers look more physically fit than the mothers and, truth be told, Elizabeth thinks, younger. How could you account for this? How can you possibly reconcile the great inequities of gender—coupled with the perversions of age and the general randomness of everything? Who could you call to complain? Or is it whom?

  “Elizabeth?” Stephanie G. is saying. “Are you with me?”

  “Oh, sorry,” Elizabeth says, too quickly. “Yes, of course. Absolutely. What?”

  “I was saying we’re trying to get one hundred percent participation. It’s part of the General Mandate. I saw you signed up for the Environmental Committee, too,” she says. “Of course there’s no saying you can’t do both.” Stephanie G. cocks her head to one side. She actually looks cute in braids, Elizabeth thinks. Maybe how she looked as a child, eager, happy, always ready to include the third girl or stand up to the bully. She clerked for a Supreme Court justice until she had her second son—now there are four—worked as the editor of the law review, supported her alcoholic mother, et cetera, et cetera. When she had started putting dandelions in her hair Elizabeth can’t quite remember, though it may have been right around the time Stephanie G. cochaired the third-grade flower drive. Those days you would never see her without a potted plant in her hands or a sprig of something behind her ear.