by Rain, David
I asked the boy, ‘So what’s he like, this prince of yours?’
‘But don’t you know – you, the American?’
‘I’m an American. The place is crawling with us.’
‘I watch you come with lady – great American lady.’
‘You’ve heard of Mrs Pinkerton?’
‘In Japan long ago. Only young lady then. She take what she want.’
I had eaten nothing all day, and the cigarette – strong, Turkish – made me feel dizzy. Behind the boy’s mask, his eyes were deep and dark. ‘You seem to know something about Mrs Pinkerton.’
‘Lady, I think, no friend of Uncle.’
I had guessed, of course, the identity of the boy. With a plunge half of envy, half of fear, I thought of Trouble bearing him back across the ice. ‘You’re Prince Yamadori’s nephew.’
‘Funny, hah?’ He flicked away his cigarette. It fell into the pool, sizzling into lifelessness. ‘I, Isamu, never meet American lady, but I, Isamu, know things about her you not.’
‘What do you know? Tell me.’
I expected him to draw back, as if I had gone too far, but he said, matter-of-factly: ‘Uncle sad man. Long ago in Nagasaki, he in love – ah, so in love. But his love, she die. Poor Uncle! He travel far, far across seas. There he find crowds, music, laughter, but none of it make up for lady he lost.’
‘What’s this to do with Mrs Pinkerton?’ I said.
‘Hah! Is everything!’ Isamu leaped up on the edge of the pool. Pacing, he slipped a little, almost fell, then steadied himself with airplane arms. ‘Lady, Japanese lady, love man from America. American go away. Lady have baby, baby with hair yellow as sun. American say he come back to Nagasaki. For him, she drive dagger into belly and die.’
‘Because this man left her – this American?’
‘Uncle, he angry, so angry! Never forgive American who sail away.’
These were my first inklings of a story I felt, paradoxically, I had always known: Nagasaki, the American lover, the promise that he would come back one day. Something stirred in me, something great and terrible. I rubbed my hands against my icy upper arms.
Isamu said, ‘American and new wife take boy away.’
‘To America? This can’t be true. It can’t.’
Laughingly, he swept towards me. ‘But is, is! And Uncle is sad man.’
I gripped Isamu’s arm. ‘You’re saying Mrs Pinkerton took this boy? Her husband’s bastard son?’
‘Uncle would have raise boy as own. Love him.’
‘Because he loved the lady?’
‘Come, I show you.’
‘Show me?’ I was confused, but Isamu tugged me to my feet.
Across the garden wall, the lights of New York were a sinister bright sea, a violation of nature like an enchanter’s spell. Snow shuddered from the air, and I felt as if the world would never be warm again, as if day would never come.
The boy led me below. I could barely keep up with him, dragging myself down a different staircase from the one I had ascended. We passed along a corridor. The party noises were louder, but they still came from beneath us; we were somewhere on the upper floor, the highest level reached by the grand imperial staircase that led up from the ballroom.
Through a servants’ entrance, a low door in a corner, we entered what appeared to be a Renaissance library. The room was long and narrow. At one end, through mullions of wide windows, snowy pallor illumined a desk, a Persian carpet that curled up at the edges, and a zigzagging screen pushed back against the wall; what lay beyond was dark, but I was aware of serried books rising to the ceiling and smells of leather, mould, and dust.
Isamu crossed to the desk. He flicked on a green-shaded lamp, reached into his pocket, and took out a key. Lamplight disclosed more clearly the lineaments of the room: a carved stone fireplace; a portrait of some bearded worthy in a ruff; clustered leather library chairs; little low tables. The screen (Japanese, painted with reeds and pools and flying cranes) seemed at first the only Oriental touch, but I saw a teacup on the edge of a shelf, a vase on a mantelpiece, and a little golden figure of the Buddha in a windowsill. At the far end of the room, massive doors stood between pillared columns.
Below, frenetic jazz had replaced the stately waltzes.
Isamu unlocked a drawer of the desk and produced two items. The first was a heavy, leather-bound album. With reverence that surprised me, he spread it beneath the lamp.
The second item was a dagger.
‘The dagger,’ I said, ‘that she killed herself with?’
The handle and scabbard were made of gold and silver, inlaid with precious stones. Isamu pulled forth the blade; it flashed in the light. ‘Dagger, it belong to lady’s father. Words on blade in Japanese,’ he said.
I peered at the etched characters, a web of meaning with no meaning for me. Isamu translated: ‘When cannot live with honour, die with honour. Sad words, very sad.’
I agreed they were. I imagined the dagger, dark with blood, as it slipped from the lady’s hand. Isamu sheathed the blade again.
He turned a page of the album. ‘And here is lady’s picture.’
Our shoulders touched as we gazed at the photograph. Fixed in sepia was a Japanese girl, young, almost a child, in traditional dress, posed against tatami mats and papery walls. With her dark hair heaped high and dressed elaborately, and with her expressionless pale face, she seemed at first a creature wholly alien to me, and yet when I looked in her eyes they were eyes I knew too well.
‘Her name,’ said Isamu, ‘is Cho-Cho-San. They call her Madame Butterfly.’
A key clunked in the doors.
‘Quick!’ In a flash, Isamu slapped off the lamp and drew me, with a suppressed laugh, behind the screen.
We had just concealed ourselves when the brighter lights of a chandelier filled the library. Then came voices: one low, one high and pealing. My heart hammered and, peering through a crack in the screen, I saw one of Yamadori’s servants urging Kate Pinkerton to take a seat, to make herself at home, while Kate Pinkerton, fingers interlaced, demanded to know how much longer she must endure these games. She had removed her mask and flung it down contemptuously as the doors parted again, opening the way to a squat, bulky personage in magnificent scarlet robes patterned with curlicues of interlacing gold. Oil-black hair, swept into a topknot, surmounted a toad-like face with bulging eyes lined heavily in kohl, and thick purplish lips like chunks of liver. I was startled: I had pictured Yamadori as a fey creature, a man made of gossamer.
The servant withdrew at a flick of his master’s fingers to a station by the wall. In all that followed, I was aware of this masked boy, a second Isamu, watching what happened from another angle.
‘My lady.’ The prince bowed deeply.
Kate Pinkerton inclined her head. I wished I could see her face.
‘Prince,’ she began, ‘I’ve come to plead with you.’
‘My lady, so hasty? This is not our way.’
‘What time have we for ways? I’m only asking you not to destroy all that I’ve built over these many years.’ Carefully, she toured the room, tracing a finger over shelves, the back of a chair, a big varnished globe of the world, like a lady of the house checking for dust. Then, quietly, she turned and said, in a voice soaked in sorrow:
‘Oh, Yamadori! How can you be so cruel?’
‘Was I the one who promised a tender girl my life, then left her?’ His voice was soft too. ‘You think of that girl as some meaningless dalliance of your husband’s youth. Madam, I would not like to judge a woman harshly, but you know nothing of love.’
‘Am I incapable of the feelings of a mother?’
‘You are barren, I believe – barren all through! I saw it in you from the first. Did you not see yourself as the spirit of compassion, forgiving your husband the sins of his past, taking in his bastard to bring up as your own? Yes, you would be the embodiment of all your Christian virtues! Some would praise you, but I saw a woman determined to control all around her. Can you
deny it? Your husband you work like a puppet master, tethered to you by strings of guilt; his son you keep captive in a web of lies. Is he to know nothing of the girl who bore him into the world, the girl from whom you stole him?’
‘You don’t understand! The girl was a prostitute.’
‘And who made her one? Madam, you speak of the lady I would have married had your husband not intervened.’
‘Oh, Yamadori! I know all about your ridiculous wooing.’ Kate Pinkerton’s voice was pitying. ‘We all did. Even the girl’s servant used to laugh about you. You were a joke, a buffoon.’
‘You think I don’t know it? I was barely more than a boy. But never can I flee from the sorrow that gripped me then. Listen, hear the music welling up the stairs! Gay, is it not? But what light can it bring to the blackness I carry within me no matter where I go?’
I might have been watching a scene onstage. Kate Pinkerton had met her match, a performer every bit as grandiloquent as she. Neither, I suspected, was really listening to the other. Their words were arias they knew too well, honed by the resentments of decades. While Yamadori’s words spooled out, Kate Pinkerton shook her head as if to say no and no and no; I thought she would stop her ears, but she swung back to him. She went to him like a lover. She clutched his robes.
‘Then you understand! Then we’re alike! For hasn’t the blackness been in me too, since those days in Nagasaki? Call me a foolish woman, call me weak, for what did I see when that girl proved her love in death, but a passion that would always be denied me? You say I thought her an inferior, a thing of no consequence. Never! From the moment I saw her stricken and bloodied, I knew that any love I had ever felt had been a rattling empty shell. The girl triumphed in death. Call her cruel. With the cruelty of a passion that would not be appeased, she left the rest of us ruined: you, me, my husband.’
‘Your husband?’ Yamadori flung her off. ‘You dare speak of that viper in my presence?’
‘Viper? No viper! What was he but a foolish young man, as you were?’
‘You go too far. Had he any goodness in his heart, could he ever have left that girl? Very well, dispute the word viper. I offer you another: murderer.’
‘Yes, a murderer, and I married him!’ cried Kate Pinkerton. ‘You say he made your beloved girl into a whore, but whores were what he wanted. And since then, all the time pretending to love me, he has flitted from whore to whore. This, the man who would be President of the United States! Prince, I am sorry you have suffered, but can’t you see that I have suffered too, and not for a matter of months, not for a few youthful years, but for a lifetime? He has abused me as deeply as a woman can be abused! I’ve withered inside! Pluck out this heart, fling it to the floor, and what would you find but dust and ash? Yet you would take from me my son, the one glimmering of love that redeems my emptiness.’
She broke off, sobbing. Yamadori’s next words were resolute.
‘Madam, I claim no virtue. In these empty years I have consoled myself with many a lady – seeking, always fruitlessly, the shadow of that perfection I could not value fully until it was lost. Do you think I don’t understand the wiles of common women? If you have felt all you claim to feel, you could not dispute that you – in comparison to the girl I loved – are of a piece with the most worthless of your sex. You plead with me for compassion. Your tears flow. But your heart is ruled by selfishness. It is you who are cruel. You have built a kingdom based on lies, and now, when your kingdom must crumble, you beg me to let you keep on lying.’
‘What a fool I was to come here.’ Kate Pinkerton spun the globe of the world. ‘I thought I was speaking to a man of feeling, but I wasted my words on a whited sepulchre. Don’t talk to me about truth! This is vengeance, the vengeance of a heart incapable of love.’
‘It is you who cannot love.’ The words came from the masked servant, who strode away from the wall, stretched a finger towards Kate Pinkerton, pointed, and intoned like a mantra, ‘Liar. Liar.’
Then this servant, who was no servant at all, discarded his mask and his dark wig. Kate Pinkerton shook, almost convulsed, and I longed to comfort her as everything slipped from her, the edifice of years crumbling like a sandcastle at the inundations of the tide.
Yamadori’s lips curled. ‘Now, madam, you understand. Already, the crisis has come to pass.’
‘Why did you do it?’ Trouble said coldly. ‘Why, Mama?’
Her voice cracked. ‘Would you be an Oriental, and a bastard? Can’t you see, I’ve saved you from shame!’
‘You’ve saved the senator. You’ve saved yourself.’
I staggered, and the screen crashed to the floor.
‘Mr Sharpless!’ Kate Pinkerton shook her head. ‘You disappoint me gravely.’
Her words stabbed me, killed me.
‘Sharpless! So now you know,’ Trouble was saying. Yamadori was upbraiding his grinning nephew. But all was not yet over. Violent hands flung back the doors and there, in a crimson opera cloak, stood Senator Pinkerton. He was drunk. No mask concealed his flushed face, and his hair, dislodged from its customary grooves, hung dishevelled over his heavy forehead.
‘Pinkerton! What is the meaning of this?’ Yamadori said.
The senator made no answer. He strode towards his son. ‘Bastard. Ungrateful bastard. What do you think you’re going to do, swan around the world with this filthy Jap?’
Trouble’s words were icy. ‘Why not? It’ll get me away from you.’
‘Ben, no.’ The senator reached for him. Trouble flinched. Loathing flashed in his face, but fear too, as if his father, at a drunken touch, could drag him back to his old life. ‘You’re my son.’
‘Then why do you hate me?’
‘I love you. Don’t you know that? From the moment I first held you in my arms, I loved you.’
‘Enough.’ Yamadori’s great sleeve rose, glittering, as if to sweep the senator from the room.
‘Filthy Jap!’ Reeling, the senator pushed him in the chest. They grappled; Yamadori called for his servants, but his opponent’s attention was distracted: Trouble had rushed for the great doors.
‘Ben, wait!’ The senator lumbered after him.
It was time for the fireworks. A fanfare surged from below; lights plunged to blackness, and, through the great windows of the high palazzo, explosions in every shade of red flared around the building. The phosphorescence, flowering and fading, plunged the scene into visionary strangeness, as the senator and Trouble faced each other at the top of the imperial stairs.
Crowds held me back and I could not reach them; nor, over the explosions, could I hear their words. I could only watch the anguished tableau – flung arms, flung-back heads – that seemed to be enacted not just in the silence but with the deliberation of mime, and all its inevitability: inevitable, that clutching hand, slapped away, then returning; inevitable, those words from bared teeth, from corded neck, that denunciation that might sever everything, or, instead, in the fury that it raised, tighten every bond it sought to break; inevitable, that hand that struck out, sending the smaller figure tumbling down the stairs.
And there at the bottom of the stairs, crashing through the crowd, was Aunt Toolie. Her words were lost to me also, but I knew them: ‘Darling!’ – yes, first ‘Darling!’, as she fought her way towards the sprawled, inert form; then, as her gaze travelled upwards to the caped figure at the top of the stairs: ‘You’ve killed him – you’ve killed him!’
Sparks, the colour of blood, cascaded across the sky.
Between the Acts
Stories are strange. Nothing is stranger than stories.
Years passed before this one was clear to me – I pieced it together from fragments, like a shattered ancient relic, and not until after Senator Pinkerton’s death did I believe I had it complete – but in memory it seems that everything was revealed to me on that night of the Blood Red Ball. Later I saw the story as a succession of scenes unfolding, vivid with the passions, but not quite real, like Japanese woodblocks come weirdly to life.
The place is Nagasaki: a house on Higashi Hill, overlooking the harbour. White screens slide back and a dark polished terrace juts into lush gardens. Goro, the nakodo – the marriage broker – shows his latest client the house. Exotic, is it not? So very Japanese! The perfect love nest for Pinkerton-san!
Lieutenant Pinkerton is a dashing fellow, big and handsome, filled with bonhomie and bent on pleasure. A local geisha girl has bewitched him with her charms. The Abraham Lincoln is becalmed in port. Why should he not contract a marriage with the girl? Sailors in these waters know all about such marriages. What Goro offers is prostitution, though the word, or any word like it, does not pass his lips. Unctuously, he offers a contract for the bridal bower: a lease of nine hundred and ninety-nine years, no less, with the option to cancel at the end of every month.
Wedding festivities begin. The first guest is Sharpless, the American consul. But does he display a wedding day demeanour? No: Pinkerton is his friend; he admires his friend, but cannot approve this marriage. The girl, says Sharpless, is young, too young; loving her American with a credulous passion, she cannot see how lightly he will treat her devotion. Must Pinkerton, to gratify a passing fancy, bruise the wings of this little Butterfly? But Pinkerton has no time for his grave friend. Guests are milling in earnest, and here, radiant among them, comes the Butterfly herself! Has there ever been so charming a girl? No photograph does her justice. This is no waxwork fixed in sepia but a fluttering gay creature, at once child and woman.
She tells the Americans her story. I fifteen years old. Noble family fall in world. Father, dishonoured, commit ritual suicide. Mother, left in poverty, not provide for me. Had no choice but to become geisha. But now, what change of fortune! How happy am I to enter upon honourable marriage!
Watching her, Goro the nakodo smacks his lips. He thinks her the most accomplished of all his charges: a harlot of genius! But Goro’s heart is too corrupted to know the truth. For everything the girl has said is sincere, and, as if to show this, she reveals that she has renounced her religion. At the Christian mission house in Nagasaki, the girl has been received into her husband’s faith. If her family knew, they would disown her. But she cares only for the new life that awaits her.