by Lee Langley
On the journey she remained silent, unreachable beyond an invisible wall, eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance. Pinkerton, clammy in the heat, a babel of unspoken words filling his head, just once attempted to break through.
‘Nance’ he began, ‘if you could just let me try and explain—’
She held up a hand, cutting him off.
At the cathedral she walked ahead of him, went to a pew and knelt, head on folded hands. He seated himself at the back, close to the open door, and prayed, not for forgiveness or a solution, but for a breeze to cool his feverish skin. Time passed. The angle of the sun on the stained-glass windows shifted, throwing moving patches of colour on to the floor. Outside, from nearby trees, the relentless creaking of cicadas filled the air, a sound like rusty scissors, stabbing into his head. Shifting his weight, his uniform trousers damp beneath his buttocks, he waited until at last she rose, gave a brisk nod to the altar, and walked back down the aisle, passing him without a glance.
Nancy no longer looked troubled; indeed she seemed radiant. She had reached a decision, though she did not yet share it with her fiancé; she was human enough to enjoy letting him suffer for a while. She simply asked him to see her back on board the liner. She would talk to him, she said, at noon the next day, in her uncle’s office.
In her cabin, brushing her hair, creaming her face, cleaning her teeth, she sifted through Pinkerton’s words, coming ever closer to the heart of it. She now understood how it had all happened. The way she saw it, a lonely and gullible man, stranded in a foreign port, had been battened on by a clever woman of ill repute who had managed to arouse his pity. From kindness had come something less honourable – Nancy did not flinch from the realities – and an innocent man had been trapped in a dangerous web of deceit. She liked the phrase and repeated it to herself: a dangerous web of deceit. She had heard similar stories from missionaries returning home from abroad. An American husband was the grail sought by women of this type. And what better way to trap a man than by presenting him with a child?
9
When Nancy arrived at the consulate early next morning she was dressed in a plain dark frock and a black hat with a veil. Her face was bare of powder or paint. Sharpless thought she looked as though she was on her way to a funeral. She strode into the office and requested that he take her to the house of ‘that person’.
‘Lieutenant Pinkerton’s not here yet.’
‘Ben will be along later. I mean to speak to her alone. With your help, uncle.’
Sharpless was startled: he demurred, he protested, he suggested that such a meeting would be not only irregular but embarrassing, indeed painful. Ten minutes later the two were on their way. Nancy, Sharpless realised, was as stubborn as her mother and had the force of youth on her side.
In the rickshaw she sat, eyes lowered, breathing deeply like someone preparing for a challenge. The rickshaw came to a halt some way short of the house, the slope too steep for them to be pulled further up the hill.
As they walked up the final stretch of road Sharpless saw Cho-Cho move away from the window. The shoji door slid open and she stood waiting, expressionless. Sharpless saw that she was studying with cat-like intentness the fair-haired stranger walking towards her. He called out,
‘Ohay gozaimasu, Cho-Cho-san!’
Her bow was tiny, just perceptible. She motioned them into the house and Sharpless made an awkward, brief introduction.
Inside, he automatically removed his shoes. Nancy, staring at Cho-Cho, failed to notice, and Sharpless for once decided to say nothing.
They stood by the door, the three of them, ill at ease, like models awaiting the arrival of an artist, a sculptor, to move them into a composition of harmony, of logic. Then the child ran into the room and buried his face in his mother’s dark cotton kimono.
Nancy stared down at the small creature, at the back of his head, the golden Pinkerton curls, the thin neck, pale legs. He was dressed in light, washed-out cotton. She swayed slightly. Sharpless thought she might be about to faint, but she drew herself up very straight and said in an unexpectedly firm tone, ‘Will you tell her I have come to discuss—’
‘You may speak to me in English,’ Cho-Cho cut in with her lapidary delivery. ‘I will understand.’
Nancy had not anticipated a direct confrontation; the mediation of a well-disposed interpreter, one she could trust, had been part of the scene she had envisaged. Suddenly she was on her own. Sharpless had withdrawn into himself, his gaze turned inward, though he appeared to be looking out at the dull blue of the sea beyond the window.
She plunged: ‘I want to speak plainly. I am not here as an enemy. I understand that at some time in the past you entered into certain . . . arrangements with Lieutenant Pinkerton—’
‘He became my husband.’
‘Well. Perhaps there were misunderstandings. I am his fiancée. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the word.’
‘I know the word. It – means’ – a calmly disdainful inflection – ‘at some time you hope to become his wife.’
‘We will be married in the eyes of God. And the State. There will be a wedding ceremony.’
What ceremony else? Sharpless recalled with a pang Cho-Cho’s wedding: that graceless moment, Pinkerton impatiently draining his bourbon, ‘Bottoms up! Tell her it’s the American way.’
He listened as Nancy talked on, her light voice carrying words through the air, words innocuous in themselves but deadly in their implications; she was laying out the route for a journey, and who was to embark on it: a father, a child and a destination. America.
Cho-Cho bent down and whispered to the boy. He looked at the visitors and wandered away, out through the door. A moment later they heard the alarmed squawk of a chicken and the sound of childish giggles.
His mother gazed incredulously at the pale woman.
‘You want me to give you my son?’
‘It is for his sake.’
Sharpless listened to his niece’s voice: the words rehearsed, dead; lines from some social science textbook.
‘In America he will have a better life. An education. Opportunities. What can you offer him here?’
For a moment he saw the room through Nancy’s eyes: a bare, stark box, a place constructed of wood and paper. Straw matting on the floor, no furniture, no trace of comfort. Money clearly in short supply.
‘With us, he will have a room of his own in a nice house, attend a fine school, go to college, make a career, be happy. I will be a mother to him—’
Cho-Cho’s apparent calm cracked. She said harshly, ‘You will not . . . be a mother to him. I am a mother to him.’
Nancy nodded, conceding the point.
‘But he would be with his father. Can you deprive him of that? Can you condemn a father never to see his child?’
Sharpless thought Cho-Cho might well point out that in fact Pinkerton had never seen his son till yesterday, that he could hardly be wrenched apart from a child he had just encountered for the first time. She might reasonably add that he should make his future with his Japanese wife, his son’s real mother; the three of them were already a family.
Cho-Cho remained silent. Then she made a small sideways movement of her head, as though checking for a half-heard sound. She said, barely above a whisper,
‘Please. Go now.’
Nancy’s hands were tightly clenched, as though in prayer.
She whispered, ‘I beg you.’
Cho-Cho had turned away, smoothing a lock of hair behind an ear. Nancy watched and waited.
There was bargaining to be done here. Dare she offer money? Maybe later. There must be a way; some weakness to be found, used. Her thoughts whirled.
She moved to the door. ‘We will come again tomorrow. Ben wants to see his son.’
Looking back later, trying to detach the possible from the achieved, separate what he witnessed from what he heard, Sharpless became confused; he saw that Nancy had changed; was no longer the fun-loving girl he remembered. And the
following day, when she strode into his office, it became clear that from being a guiding figure he had been relegated to the role of onlooker.
She looked gaunt, sharp-featured. In her arms, his cheeks smeared with tears, was the child.
‘We’ve come to say goodbye.’ She sounded rushed.
He was startled. ‘We?’
‘I’m taking Joey with me.’
Sharpless said incredulously, ‘Cho-Cho agreed?’
She gave a quick nod, and turned to the door: ‘We haven’t got much time; the ship’s due to sail.’
It was as she turned that he noticed a dark red stain on the side of her dress, where Joey’s sleeve had rested, a sleeve whose edge was dark with wet blood.
PART TWO
10
Nancy was the product of a good Methodist home: educated to obey her parents, fear God and do the right thing. The right thing on this occasion had surely been to rescue Ben’s child from an immoral woman and an alien environment, restore him to his father and give him a good home.
She now acknowledged that to achieve those ends she had found herself capable of duplicity; she had been drawn into dark places of the soul. In the cause of the greater good she saw that she had been sucked into wickedness. It did not come easily to her, she had no experience of deception and – vulnerable – she succumbed to the long sickness that follows a fall from grace. Where she had secretly hoped for a sense of purpose, the moral glow of a sacrificial act – to care for another woman’s child – she found that words could be more dangerous than blows, that nightmares can be experienced in waking hours, that one damn thing leads to another, though her mother would have told her to wash out her mouth for using such a word. She learned that guilt does not lessen with time.
Caring for the child was easy; giving him all the affection she could muster was more difficult. She told herself he was part of Ben, and she loved Ben, so she must also love his son, though there were moments when Joey turned his head to one side, when he flicked his eyes or turned down his mouth in a certain way that had nothing to do with Ben, when Nancy found herself fighting off disloyal thoughts.
But that was the least of it. The worm at the heart of her happiness, the barrier to her finding peace was the fact from which all the rest sprang: Nancy had lied. She watched herself as she talked and talked, spinning a lie that had seemed necessary at the time, a small transgression for the greater good. And then, faced with a situation beyond her imagining, she had lied to Ben.
Inside her head, over and over, she saw the paper house, the figure in a white robe, the child screaming. In true Methodist tradition she had felt herself to be embracing a good deed; words were her means to achieve the necessary end. But words led to action, and nothing was the way she had planned.
As a child she modelled herself on the good girls in Little Women but here she was, all grown, and she found she was living a story that was closer to Nathaniel Hawthorne. She was suffused with guilt.
Her parents met her at the dockside. Waving, smiling, they looked with interest at the child in her arms, a child who presumably belonged to someone on the boat. And then Nancy, reaching for words she had rehearsed, rewritten, reshaped, could find nothing more satisfactory than, ‘Ma, Pa, this is Joey, Ben’s boy.’ She set him down on the dockside and took his hand.
A handful of everyday words which in one breath smashed the pretty picture – fairytale romance, white wedding, honeymoon – with the finality of a boot on a beetle. Her mother stared at the blue-eyed, blond child, silenced, bewildered. Her father was quicker off the mark.
‘You taking him on?’
She nodded.
Louis looked down at the boy. ‘So. You’re Joey, right? Well, kid, I’m called Louis, but to you, I’m Gramps.’
He picked up the boy and turned to his wife: ‘Mary, let’s get these people home.’
What’s done is done.
When Nancy was out of earshot he shook his head and told his wife that Ben had clearly got himself into a pretty mess.
‘I hadn’t figured that young man for a fool, but—’
‘We can’t be sure what happened.’
Louis tilted his head. ‘Mark Twain said some circumstantial evidence is pretty strong, like for instance when you find a trout in the milk.’ He looked out at Nancy introducing Joey to the unknown territory of an American yard.
‘I guess we have the trout here.’
Mary called to the boy, ‘Joey! D’you like lemonade?’
He looked up at her consideringly with blue eyes that were, and were not, the same as Ben’s.
‘I don’t know. What is it?’
‘You’ll find out, I’m about to make some. You can help me squeeze the lemons.’
‘What is s-ukweeze?’
Louis murmured, ‘Oh boy, this is gonna take a miracle.’
‘No,’ Mary said, ‘just time.’ She beckoned the boy. ‘Okay, let’s you and me squeeze.’
To Nancy’s relief, her parents asked few questions. With old friends it was more difficult; there was the need to explain the presence of a child who looked too much like Ben for there to be any way around the fact of fatherhood. A story was devised – a tale of a faraway, long-ago romance, a marriage cut tragically short by death. ‘Poor child!’ people would murmur, looking at the boy with curiosity, such a serious child, and so silent. They would look again at Nancy, with pity: poor girl, taking on a widower, with a kid.
After a while she became incapable of reciting the ‘facts’ and left it to her parents to dress it up in whatever clothes fitted the occasion. The story varied, creating occasional social awkwardness. Meanwhile she waited for Ben to return from his tour of duty.
It would be their first meeting since that last day, racing down the hill in the rickshaw, they had shouted at one another over the head of the child, Ben puzzled, then alarmed.
‘What in hell—’
‘I’ll explain. Later.’
Nancy urged the rickshaw on. But it was already too late to explain, just as it was too late to go back.
11
The ship nosed into the Oregon coastline, Ben came ashore and a brief ceremony replaced more ambitious wedding plans.
It was a subdued affair. The preacher took Nancy to one side and said in the low, convinced voice people use to comfort the afflicted, that the boy would be a blessing to her, an opportunity.
‘The Lord tests us, Nancy, and like tempered steel we come through stronger for the testing.’
Amen, she said silently, adding a quick, secret prayer of her own that had become a companion.
From across the room a Pinkerton uncle was heading her way with a child; tall for his age, blond, blue-eyed: a boy with the Pinkerton looks.
‘Nancy. This here’s our youngest, Jack. I brought him along to keep Joey company.’
The two children stared at each other, Joey with his considering, sideways look, Jack without interest. Aged seven, he was already a world away from the toddler. He tugged his hand free of the paternal grip and pushed through the knot of adults until he found himself next to Ben, his grown-up cousin. He gazed at the naval uniform.
‘How big is your ship?’
‘Pretty big.’
‘Do you drive it yourself ?’
‘Not exactly, Jack. But I help.’
‘And do you always wear your uniform?’
‘Oh, sure. That’s how people know who we are.’
‘When I grow up, I want to join the navy and go to sea.’
‘Well why not? The wide blue ocean. Nothing but sky around you. Beats an office any day. Welcome aboard, Jack!’
He shook the boy’s hand, smiling, unaware he was participating in a commitment ritual.
Ben’s parents did not attend the wedding. Where Louis and Mary had seen the boy as an unexpected grandchild, the Pinkertons saw only an alien offspring. On the one occasion they met him, they watched Joey for signs of otherness. Okay, he had the Pinkerton colouring, but wasn’t there something about
the boy’s eyes? Something different. Something . . . foreign? They noted his politeness, his graceful movements: he could sit cross-legged on the floor without difficulty. All these were signs of his Japanese blood, they told each other. Without drama, they withdrew. And in any case, Ben and Nancy were relocating, further away.
A new home in a new town meant making new friends. Neighbours were welcoming but Nancy felt alone. Here, it was taken for granted that Joey was her son. When tricky questions came up she grew skilled at covering the moment of hesitation, the beat while she reached for the ‘right’ answer. Nothing was simple any more.
This was brought home to her one morning over breakfast. As she poured the coffee she asked Ben if he had heard yet when he was due back on board for the next tour of duty.
Carefully he ladled maple syrup over a waffle. He said, ‘Well now: you’ll be seeing more of me in the future, Nance.’
He concentrated on chewing and swallowing. He picked up his coffee cup, studied it for a moment, and put it down.
‘Here’s the thing.’
It was difficult not to have it sound like a rehearsed speech: how he had realised it would be tricky for her to be alone, now. How it seemed like the right time for a change, what with the kid . . .
The kid. The problem. The burden. When he saw Nancy washing Joey’s clothes, tidying away toys, cooking special stuff, he was swept with guilt. Here she was, stuck with the kid. His kid. At some future point they’d produce their own, of course, but at the right time, not now. The kid had changed everything. He said none of this to Nancy.
He said, ‘I’m looking at a garage, showroom attached.’
‘Can we afford that?’
‘I’ll get some help from the bank. You know what they say: the automobile is the future of America.’ He laughed self-consciously.
‘Ben, that’s wonderful.’
She tried to make her voice sound as it should, but it came out breathless, not quite the genuine article. Because she recalled how Ben used to talk about the navy, the freedom, the unbroken horizon, the moment when a hint of land blurred the rim, the way the sky blended into the sea at night, the darkness seeming to turn the water to ink. It had stirred her, it was part of why she fell in love with him. Now it seemed he was brushing all that to one side.