Butterfly's Shadow

by Lee Langley

  ‘You’re sure about this?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure!’ Hearty.

  Well. What was it the preacher had said a couple of weeks ago? A problem is just another name for an opportunity.

  Ben said, ‘It’s an opportunity!’

  She was aware that the horizon had shrunk for both of them. It was goodbye to a teaching career: she had a child to care for now. One who was special. He could kick a ball around; at first sight no different from the other youngsters. But difference there was: older than his years, he looked at things mindfully, with a curious intensity, as if searching for something. One day, walking in the park, he stopped beside a flowering shrub. He smiled with delight and touched a pale bloom with his fingertips.

  ‘Ajisai flowers!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘No, Joey,’ Nancy corrected him. ‘Those are hydrangeas.’

  Then she realised they probably were whatever it was he had called them, but in another place, another language, another life.

  ‘Let’s go!’ she said brightly. ‘We don’t want to be late now.’

  But when she glanced back he was still beside the hydrangea bush, his small hand cupping a bloom. He looked up at her questioningly.

  ‘When can I see my mother?’

  She stared at the child, head suddenly emptied of words, excuses, possibilities.

  ‘Well now, Joey. We’ll talk about that.’

  She took his hand.

  She was a mother, a wife, a homemaker, and she worked at it, keeping the house shiny bright, her hair sleek and bouncy, and welcoming Ben home from work each day with a kiss.

  She was working at it right now, reaching for the cookie jar, setting out plates in the afternoon hush as the gingham curtains blew in a breeze that carried the sound of a creaking swing-seat from a neighbour’s garden: crik-crik . . . criik-crik. Saucers clattered on her new Formica worktop; the kitchen smelled of freshly baked cornmeal cake, and tears ran down her cheeks, dripping on to the golden crust as she took the cake from the oven. Oh, to turn back the clock. But to what hour and what day? And which decision?

  She cleared her throat and called up the stairs to Joey to come down for his tea.

  He heard her calling and stayed where he was, kneeling on the shag rug, rearranging the animals two by two outside his wooden Ark. Some of the animals had been new to him when he first got the Ark as a present for his sixth birthday – long-necked giraffes, stripy tigers, and there were others that Noah didn’t want on board that Joey decided should be included, so he had created a pair of tiny origami cranes, two jumping frogs and a couple of dragonflies and set them down alongside the horses and the monkeys.

  Shifting to reach for another animal he noticed that the strands of the rug had pressed into his knee, forming a pattern of deep lines. He ran his finger over the temporary scar, feeling ridges in his skin, almost like the tightly woven rushes of a tatami mat. He remembered walking along a seashore once long ago; he had stumbled on half-hidden rocks, their surface sharp as knives, but clinging to the rocks were tiny shells, satin-smooth, and seaweed like dark green lace. All those surfaces, those discoveries, were part of another way of life, like sleeping on a futon, not the soft American bed that sagged beneath him, softness he had now grown used to. Thick rugs instead of the tatami mat beneath his feet. What had seemed strange no longer surprised him.

  But sometimes his head rang with words that turned into an endless song, words that added up to minutes, hours, days of a life that was growing fainter as he grew more at home in this huge, flat land planted with crops that people were always comparing to the colour of his hair. Sometimes, to keep the old life alive in his head, he drew pictures of rocks and waterfalls, of mist curling round pine trees like a white scarf; he drew snow cranes with scarlet crowns, and funny-looking chickens, different shapes and sizes.

  Nancy kept chickens but they all looked the same, round, plump, as though they had been built in a factory. Not like the chickens he recalled, some with long feathers cascading over their shoulders like the paper streamers in street parades here, others black as tar and scrawny, stretched tall, menacing. And so many colours, the feathers glowing bronze, ivory, gold.

  There had been fishing trips by the shore, watching for the fish that hid themselves without concealment, taking on the colour of the water they swam in. He missed the smell of fish, and he missed the rain, sometimes no more than a fine spray that washed the leaves, then turning angry, hammering the hillside with such force it cut off the view like a curtain of steel rods.

  Words and phrases filled his head, the past and the present jostling, the old familiar and the newly learned – baseball, ikebana, popcorn, kamishibai, movies, onsen, bubble gum, sento, Coca-Cola, miso, taffy, radio, steak, hot dogs, steak, hamburgers, steak . . . Meat. So much meat. In that fading, shadowy place inside his head he used to eat bean curd, rice, wild nettles, grass-shoots and dark arame harvested from the sea. Chopsticks transferred morsels from bowl to mouth. Here, meat covered the plate. People held a fork in their right hand and stabbed it into their food as though digging up plants from earth.

  But beneath all the rest – the animals, the birds, the sound of the temple gong, the kamishibai man with his bicycle, handing out candies and telling stories of dragons and princes and demons who spirited children away from their homes – he endlessly circled the thing unmentioned, always unmentioned. He bunched the memories up close, tight, squeezing them together, and at the centre there was a blank, a hole, a gap, a nothingness where comfort and love and softness had been. He could draw this emptiness, this shape: a kimono, smooth hair, curved neck, but he kept the drawings in a box in the closet. Sometimes he took them out and held one up close to his face, trying to breathe in something, some hint of life, and then another sound took over – the sound of screaming – and he dropped the drawing and pressed his hands to his ears to shut out the noise, but of course it was there inside his head.

  He tries, now, to remember how, long ago, in that shadow-time, he had been taken on to a big boat and told he was going on a visit to a place called America, to see his father. He thinks he remembers crying, but more and more he forgets – had he cried?

  He recalls being pulled this way and that, to look at new things –

  ‘Isn’t this great? Isn’t this fun?’

  He would have fun in America, Nancy kept telling him, life was great in America. There was everything you could want. But when he got to America – look, Joey, ice cream, look, cookies and roller skates – what was missing was his mother. His dad arrived, and soon they were living in a house with an upstairs and a couch and a yard. But when he asked when he was going home they told him this was home now, his mother was dead. His dad didn’t wear a white uniform any more, and they saw Charlie Chaplin at the movies, but nobody wanted to talk about a place called Nagasaki and the woman who took him walking by the shore.

  It was the first time a friend from school had stayed overnight. Nancy brought in a folding cot and made up a bed for Frank, and they pestered Ben until he showed them how to calculate depth and distance on a sea chart, for Joey’s school geography project. Frank was impressed with Joey’s father and with Joey’s train set, and the medal that had belonged to Ben’s big brother Charlie who didn’t come home from the war. They were allowed to stay up and listen to a broadcast on the new radio.

  Later, in the bedroom, when Frank was looking at Joey’s toys he picked up the red and yellow wooden spinning top – the paint now chipped and worn – and asked why Joey kept such a shabby old thing.

  ‘It’s from Japan,’ Joey said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A place. The other side of the ocean.’

  ‘So, what, your dad brought it home for you?’

  ‘No. I was there with him.’

  ‘You went to Japan?’

  ‘I was there already. That’s where my mom was.’ He could tell Frank was losing his way and added helpfully, ‘Nancy isn’t my real mom, she brought me back here from Nagasa
ki – from Japan.’

  Nobody in Frank’s family had been outside the state, let alone the country; the idea of some place the other side of the ocean and an extra mother was beyond his understanding.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘So the spinning top came from this . . .’

  ‘Japan.’

  ‘From there. Right.’ A pause. ‘So where’s your real mom now?’

  ‘She died,’ Joey said. That’s what they told him. He began suddenly to feel anxious. ‘I think I’m going to sleep now.’

  Next day in the playground Frank and some of the class clustered in a corner, whispering. Joey, kicking a ball around, saw that the others were looking his way. Then Frank called him over.

  ‘You know you told me that stuff about your mom being dead and all . . .’

  He could have just said he didn’t want to talk about it. But one of the girls told him it was sad, and he began to feel maybe he did want to talk about it. And then one of them said if his real mother came from a foreign place –

  ‘Japan,’ Joey said.

  – then what was she called?

  He should never have told them her name.

  ‘Butterfly? Butterfly? What kind of a name is that? Nobody’s mom is called Butterfly.’

  In a moment everything changed: they stared at him, boredom pricked into alertness; indifference sharpened into curiosity.

  Often he had dreamed of arousing their interest, finding himself at the centre of the group. Now it had happened and he wished himself elsewhere. He could have simply said his mother was dead, played the orphan. Too late now.

  Perhaps if he had looked foreign, if he had exhibited signs of otherness, they would have been prepared, but here he was with the blue eyes, the yellow hair. American. It threw them.

  They clustered round him, wanting to know more about this mother, about this woman with a name like no other, but what was there to tell? She was a girl. And then she married his dad.

  And then?

  The school bell rang, saving him.

  She married my dad. And then?

  He could have said her name was Cho-Cho, but something told him these kids would find that wasn’t even a word, let alone a name. He knew one or two of the others had families who came from faraway places: Germany, Sweden – there was a boy from France called John who had started out spelling his name Jean when he arrived, but at least Jean didn’t sound freakish when the teacher read it off the register; there were Americans called Gene. So Joey translated Cho-Cho into Butterfly. But nobody’s mom was called Butterfly.

  He pressed his hands over his ears now, but through the roaring in his head he could hear Nancy calling from below: ‘Joey! Come down now. It’s your favourite cornmeal cake.’

  He was seven and had disliked cornmeal cake for years.

  12

  Nancy’s father asked Ben, from time to time, how he was doing and he always replied, ‘I’m doing okay, Louis.’

  He felt he had arrived at a precise and accurate assessment: he was keeping up the payments on the house; the business was building, slowly. Automobiles were the future, so his own future, and Nancy’s and the boy’s, would be secure. They were doing okay; they should be happy. He wished she smiled more; she used to smile easily and laugh, wrinkling her nose in a way he found sweetly arousing. But life rubs away at a person and after a while it seems harder to laugh. Harder to talk.

  ‘Maybe it’s time we had a kid,’ he said one day.

  They were on the porch, half asleep, while below them Joey squatted with a drawing pad, sketching fat bees homing in on the huckleberry bushes.

  ‘We could do with a little brother. Or sister. For Joey.’

  ‘Why not,’ Nancy said, after a pause.

  He sensed tension. ‘We’ll work at it,’ he said and brought out a little laugh.

  His parents had never laughed much. They plodded along, expressionless. They had cared for their children dutifully, never neglected any aspect of their material needs; but Joe and Martha Pinkerton went through their days at a steady pace, no spring in their step. As a boy Ben had felt disloyal to have these thoughts but there was no tender place in his heart that the two of them occupied.

  One day a lifetime ago they took him to the State Fair. In a daze of pleasure he wandered through the crowd, the music, breathing in the smell of sugar and vanilla. He gazed up at the twirling carousel, but his father declared it to be an unseemly extravagance and walked him towards the cyclorama of the Civil War. Then they went home.

  They took his hand when necessary, to guide him safely across city streets. Hugging did not take place. And when Charlie was killed in action, Ben got the feeling that between him and his parents a sheet of glass had grown: they could see one another, but not touch.

  Later, when Joey appeared on the scene, they had effectively disowned Ben.

  There were moments in his life when he longed for something different: for excess. For freezing cold, driving winds, blinding rain. Fierceness. The sea. Within the house, confined by the yard, he sometimes found difficulty in breathing, needed more air, felt an urge to hit out without having any particular object he wished to punish. Occasionally he snapped at Nancy. He wondered now: were he and Nancy turning into his parents?

  As though sensing his thoughts she suddenly stood up and called out,

  ‘Joey? How about some ice cream? I’ll fix you a fudge sundae, wouldn’t that be fun?’

  Sometimes in the early hours, after lying awake for too long, Ben went through the house from room to room, as though checking, like some watchman marking the boundaries of security: doors locked, windows secured. Everything safe. But then again, what did the Good Book say? Forget treasures on earth, store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

  Tonight, hot and sticky, he got out of bed, moving quietly, leaving Nancy sleeping. She lay, as always, on her right side with one knee bent, the fingers of her left arm lightly clenched on her cheek.

  Earlier they had spent a while attempting to produce a kid sister or brother for Joey; nice work as Ben said, and he was grateful for the soft, accommodating body lying beneath him. But afterwards they had disengaged quietly, moved apart, seeking cool, uncrumpled sheets.

  He went to the window and stared down at the dark street. He had a sense of other streets, those that ran parallel, those that crossed, stretching out, further and further until the tarmac and the houses stopped and the fields took over, roads heading out into a flat landscape; Oregon all around him, land on three sides that led across borders and mountains to more land, and one border that defined itself in cliffs and sandy dunes and a seashore, the curling lip of an ocean stretching out to the horizon, beyond which lay the rest of the world.

  They used to have picnics, family gatherings on the beach; Nancy in her bright pink sundress, lying back, eyes closed, face raised to the warmth, while he padded across the sand to the surf frothing between his toes, tiny mouths sucking at his skin, waiting to engulf him.

  He recalled the moment: the racing dive into the water, the cool tingle as it washed over him, the salt catching on the fine hairs of his skin. He would head out, a steady crawl, each arm in turn curving in a beckoning movement as though encouraging a swimmer lagging behind, because he was always out front, turning his head every so often to draw breath, then down, knifing through the waves like the prow of a boat . . .

  In Nagasaki he had swum in cold green sea, a small figure in a blue and white kimono watching him, seated on the rocks, waving when he looked back, the sun glittering on her silver bracelet.

  At the far end of the market, in tiny roadside stalls he passed as he came and went, he had been offered intricate tortoiseshell work and fancy jewellery. In one shop he had noticed a bracelet, the metal surface inlaid with linked silver and gold butterflies and brilliantly coloured enamel. He bought it; he had learned by then that Cho-Cho meant butterfly.<
br />
  When he got to the house he pulled the bracelet from his pocket and threw it across to her. ‘Here you go, Mrs Butterfly. Surprise. A little something for you.’

  ‘Ah! Cloisonné,’ she exclaimed, which meant nothing to Pinkerton, who thought it was a Japanese word to express thanks. She held out the bracelet and waited for him to fasten it round her small wrist. Then she led him to the futon.

  He stared down at the street, at the pools of light, the shadows, the houses opposite, lined up side by side, identical. There were differences, of course. One had a swing-seat on the porch that creaked when it moved in the breeze like the sound of cicadas, another, a tree the neighbours considered too tall, liable to come down one day in a storm. The people next to them kept a dog, that barked; one household kept the dog, Ben commented testily, and everyone shared the barking. A little further down the street, new owners had painted the front door yellow. He couldn’t figure out why a man would want a yellow front door. It was an unsettling colour – thunderstorm, headache colour. He could feel a headache coming on now, and headed for the kitchen.

  The wooden banister was smooth to his touch. From below, the rugs gave off a smell of warm wool, not unpleasant, though there was something stale about it, something heavy. Light came through the windows, slanting on to the walls. The darkness was soft; he felt it brush his skin and he walked through it almost like moving through water. If he raised his head, he would breathe in air from above the surface, though there was no surface here, the darkness filled the room to the ceiling, and he was a drowned man resting on the bottom.

  The image shocked him; he loved water, always had, he was a swimmer, wasn’t he? No risk of drowning. He was as safe in water as he was here in his home.

  And he was doing okay.