The Women

by T. C. Boyle

  Wrieto-San wrote me from time to time. My fellow apprentices, many of whom enlisted and went off to fight despite Wrieto-San’s disapproval, sent me books and foodstuffs and for Christmas that first year a quart bottle of Canadian Club reserve whiskey that smelled, tasted and went down like the pure distillate of freedom itself. Still, for long stretches of time that seemed as vast as the desert scrub that fell away from the two knobs of desiccated rock that were all we had to stare at, I didn’t care what became of me. I’d lost Taliesin. Lost Wrieto-San. Lost my dignity and status as a human being. If I’d known then how long the war would go on or that the scene in the courtyard would be the last time I’d lay eyes on Wrieto-San till after it was over, I don’t think I would have been able to endure.

  But of course I did endure—that is what we are put on this earth to do. We Japanese have a saying, Ame futte ji katamaru: the ground that is rained upon hardens. Or, if you like, adversity builds character. So it was with me. I read, learned to cook, worked the vegetable patches we planted that first spring, helped to insulate and fortify the barracks, putting to use everything I’d learned at Taliesin, from my farming skills to the hands-on construction techniques that Wrieto-San, in his casual way, expected us to develop sui generis. And I drew—drew a whole lifetime’s worth of work. Plans for houses, industrial buildings, imaginary cities every bit as bold as Wrieto-San’s Broadacre City (the model of which I had the honor and privilege of working on at Taliesin), anything to bank the fires of creation against the bleakness and destruction that was my life during those years.

  After the war, radicalized by my treatment and fearful of the raw accumulation of racial hatred blistering the heartland, I didn’t return to Taliesin as I’d initially hoped, but instead went back home from California to the devastation of my own country. There I met my wife, Setsuko, and worked on various projects—imagine an ancient and venerable civilization in ruins so hopeless and extensive they swallow the horizons like some nightmare vision out of the Book of Revelation—until the accumulated sorrow became too much to bear (Hiroshima! Nagasaki!) and my father arranged for me to go to Paris, where I spent ten productive years with the firm of Borchardt et fils, rehabilitating structures damaged during the war and designing a whole array of apartments, town houses and maisons du pays.

  I mention my Parisian sojourn only as it relates to the story of Wrieto-San, which, I must keep reminding myself, is the object of these prefatory remarks. The connection resides in tragedy, a shared experience of a great and inconsolable loss, because here, I confess, O’Flaherty-San and I are somewhat out of our depth. Wrieto-San’s first encounter with Mamah Borthwick Cheney occurred before I was born, and I was just seven years old when the cataclysm to which it ultimately gave rise occurred. And while this is hardly the place for apologies of any sort, I should say that O’Flaherty-San knows the material solely in an abstract way, though he is a marvel of imaginative re-creation—I can only thank the gods or the fates or whatever you want to call them that he has never had to experience a loss of this magnitude, and I hope, for his sake and my granddaughter’s, that he never does.

  But Wrieto-San did, and I believe it was the formative experience of his life, the deep well of sadness out of which all his later triumphs had to be drawn, and thus I warn you that the tone of the ensuing pages must necessarily grow more somber and reflective. I wasn’t there. I didn’t meet him until eighteen years after the murders at Taliesin. And yet, strangely, terribly, his tragedy echoed down the years in the sudden unfolding of my own, in the hammer blow of fate that struck me down as surely as any madman’s axe, and my heart and spirit are with him, even now, two long decades after he has passed from this world.

  Picture a rainy November evening, the streets gray against the accumulation of darkness and the thousand honeyed lights of the shops and cafés along the rue du Montparnasse, the soft hiss of the automobile tires, the sadness of the skies. I am at work still, head bent over a tricolored rendering and the graceful flowing lines of my soft pencils, thinking of dinner, Setsuko, my infant daughter asleep in the next room and my son, Seiji, a quiet night at home, agedashi tofu, soba, a cup of sake. Seiji is four years old. He wants a cat—a kitten—but the propriétaire will not allow it. Unless I make it worth her while. And I will—I will make it worth her while. This is what I am thinking as my hands and eyes work independently of my brain, bringing three dimensions to life in two—until the phone rings, that is. And the picture darkens: a young wife in kimono and clogs, one hand gripped tightly to her son’s and an umbrella thrust over her head, running in the rain to catch her bus, and the taximan, whose breath reeks of vin rouge, and who is late in applying the brake of his automobile. Late. Very late. Too late.

  Will you forgive me if I find my fingers trembling over these pages as I struggle to close out this scene once and for all? I merely want to communicate something, some deep knowledge that twists in my hara with an edge as sharp as any sword’s, and, in a way, to present my bona fides, as morbid as that may sound. I’ve suffered. Wrieto-San suffered. We all have suffered. Even O’Flaherty-San, in his own way. But I simply cannot leave Wrieto-San here as if on some charnel heap of memory—I still hear his voice in my dreams, I continue to revere him and the recollection of him and all that he gave me in his supreme mathematics of addition, only addition. And so I present one final moment, my last memory of him.

  It was in the late forties, after the war at any rate, and I was on my way to Paris. I got it in my head that I should show my wife the country where I’d spent so many years, the invincible land of the two-fisted giants who’d conquered us with their can-do spirit, their hot dogs and baseball, and the grand cities arising out of the plains and the factories that were like cities in themselves and all the wide-open untenanted reach of the lone prairie that could have swallowed our humble island country ten times over. And Taliesin, of course. Taliesin, above all. If I was honest with myself (and I was, or began to be, somewhere between Utah and Wyoming, as the night closed down over the lunar crags of the Uinta Mountains and Setsuko huddled beside me in terror of the gaijin porters and for the first and last time in my life I hoped people would take me for a Chinaman), I would have admitted that it was Wrieto-San and Wrieto-San alone who was drawing me all the way across the Pacific to his side as if he were the magnet and I the needle. I had to see him. Had to show him that I’d survived Tule Lake and the grisly business of rebuilding Japan. And more: I wanted him to admire Setsuko, wanted to trumpet my connection with Borchardt et fils, wanted him to pat me on the back and reassure me and tell me what a fine figure I’d made of myself.

  I remember feeling overwhelmed as the train began to brake for the station at Spring Green, the hills dipping away to release us to the flatland where the town presented its forlorn cluster of buildings, everything different and somehow the same. My wife was watching me, her shoulders pressed so close to mine we might have been one flesh, though we had the entire compartment to ourselves. “Are you all right?” she asked, tilting her head to study me all the more closely. Were there tears in my eyes? Tears of joy, recollection, nostalgia, pain? I don’t know. I suppose there were. And when the platform hove into view and I saw him standing there—Wrieto-San, come to greet us in person, in the midst of a knot of fresh-faced apprentices—I could barely hold myself back. I’d been half-afraid he would forget me or send an apprentice in his stead. But here he was, in the flesh, honoring me with his presence, reminding me of the indissoluble bond between Master and apprentice. “Yes,” I said, struggling for control. “Yes, I’m fine.”

  The train lurched. There was the metallic wheeze of the brakes. My wife looked away from me to the platform and back again. “Is that him?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I could see that he was holding forth on one subject or another, his chin cocked back, the cane in motion, his cape fluttering with the quick chop of his advancing steps and the beret adhering to his brow as if by some force of its own. People gave way to him. Pigeons erupted.
The apprentices scurried to keep up.

  The moment we emerged from the train he came striding up the platform, barking out commands to the apprentices in his wake, his face easing into his open natural emollient smile, the smile that had beguiled a legion of reluctant clients round the world and every woman he’d ever met. My first impression? That he looked old, reduced, the hair gone white against the great riven monument of his head. But he was old, in his eighties now, as best I could calculate. “Tadashi,” he called out when he was still ten feet from me, his voice as effervescent and youthful as ever, “you’ve gone gray!”

  And then he was there and we were bowing, Setsuko and I, and he bowed first to me and then to her, a dip of his head only, and repeated the greeting I’d given him the first time we met all those years ago beside the still-hissing frame of my Bearcat: “Hajimemashite.”

  “And you, Wrieto-San,” I said, feeling as light as if I were filled with helium—“you’ve gone white.” (I meant no disrespect, of course, but was simply playing off his mood, injecting a bit of the banter he was so fond of, though I could imagine his terrorizing the household staff all morning over the arrangements at Taliesin.) Despite the tidal wash of emotion I was experiencing—or perhaps because of it—I found that I was grinning.

  “Ah, so you’ve noticed? Well, this is the color of venerability, Sato-San.” His eyes were coruscating, flecks of glass incinerated under the sun. “No matter how soft your pencils nor how often you add tired to tired, that gray I see at your temples will fade on you so that you’ll wake up one morning, look into the mirror and see an Oriental sage staring back at you.” He seized a lock of his hair in one hand and laughed aloud.

  On the way out to Taliesin, he hardly had a word for me—it was my wife to whom he devoted himself, Wrieto-San at his most impish and charming. She was young and pretty and she was an angel on the violin, a combination that must have proved irresistible to him. Though my wife’s English was limited, Wrieto-San was very gentle with her, bathing her in the full glow of his charm, as I imagine he must have done with Nobu Tsuchiura and Takako Hayashi before her.

  I stared out the window of the car, filled with such longing and nostalgia I thought my heart would break, a hundred questions for Wrieto-San on my lips—How was Wes? Had he heard from Yen? And Herbert was married, could that be true?—and then Taliesin separated itself from the hillside before us, as golden and sustaining as the picture I’d held of it in my mind’s eye through the gray accumulation of weeks, months and years in the camps. Or no, deeper, richer even. The effect it had on me is hard to explain. It was, I suppose, like the feeling of wonder and revelation most people experienced when they first saw the images of the earth from the terra incognita of the moon’s surface—only this wasn’t terra incognita. Not for me. This was my home, my ideal home, if the world were a holier place and aesthetics ruled rather than necessity. And cruelty.

  Wrieto-San was going on about the violin and music in general, how Iovanna had mastered that most subtle of instruments, the harp, and wondering if Setsuko would be so kind—so exquisitely thoughtful and indulgent—as to give him and Olgivanna a sample of her skills later on that evening, when we pulled into the courtyard and my wife turned to me, looking utterly bewildered, for a translation. I’m afraid I failed her there, at least for the moment, because suddenly a mélange of all-but-forgotten odors washed over me and triggered my olfactory memory—the cold ashes of the fire, the farthest corner of the hogpen, cabbage soup, sweet Wisconsin air and a trace of the poison bait the cook sprinkled round for the rats—and I was overcome all over again.

  There followed a long and loving tour of the house, the late-afternoon sun awakening all its sacral nooks and corners, its dramatic dialogue of light and texture, the magical confluence of the horizontal and vertical, Wrieto-San reminding us of Lao-Tse’s observation that architecture exists not for the sake of the structure but for the space it encloses, among other echoes of the past, and pausing to lecture most charmingly over each of his new acquisitions of Asian art. Then there was tea with Mrs. Wright, who perched formally on the edge of a chair and regarded me out of her Gurdjieffian eyes as if she couldn’t quite place me, her face as drawn and mournful as these eight or nine accumulated years could make it. She was in the midst of grilling Setsuko over her musical tastes—were there Japanese composers she was interested in or was she strictly attuned to the Western canon?—when Wrieto-San set down his cup and clapped his hands like an impresario hovering over his audience. “Well, what do you think about taking in a little of the outdoors, Tadashi?” he said, rising to his feet. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” And he paused to give me a wink. “Just about perfect for a picnic, wouldn’t you say?”

  “A picnic?” I echoed, rising in concert with the Master, as if it were a tic.

  “Yes, like in the old days.”

  I bowed by way of hiding my emotions. I was deeply moved. Not only had Wrieto-San come to the station for me and taken the time to show off the house and its treasures for my bride, but here he’d arranged a picnic in our honor as well. And of course Wrieto-San was a great champion of the outdoors, as sensitive to nature and its changes as the hermetic monks of my country who sit for days in contemplation of the cherry blossoms or the winged seeds of the maples, which made the gesture even more special and exquisite. In my years at Taliesin we’d picnicked up and down the fields and hillsides on dozens of occasions and in far-flung locations too, a group of apprentices going on ahead to make arrangements and the rest of us piling into the Taliesin cars and heading off to some locale Wrieto-San had chosen in advance for its beauty and serenity, a joy to us all—and now he was offering to rekindle the spirit. For me.

  We were all on our feet now, apprentices darting about, the cars standing in the courtyard and Setsuko looking to me for assurance. I went to her, took her by the arm. Embraced the warmth of her.

  “Oh, Tadashi,” Wrieto-San said, as if the thought had just occurred to him, “you do remember Stuffy’s Tavern”—and here a hint of slyness invaded his voice—“don’t you?”

  “Yes, Wrieto-San,” I said, bowing again. “How could I forget it?”

  “You might not know that Stuffy Vale is no longer involved in that particular establishment. It seems I’m the proprietor there now.” He gave me a knowing look. “I seem to recall a certain adventure you had there in your first year—or was it the second? Excessive consumption of alcohol, eh? You’ve conquered that tendency, I can see.” He glanced at Setsuko. “Well, bully for you. And for all my apprentices who’ve been tempted by the Demon Rum. But today’s a special day. And this is to be a very special picnic indeed, as you’ll see.”

  And so it was. In the intervening years, Wrieto-San had resolutely gone about buying up all the surrounding property, as I’ve indicated, and he was in the habit of removing any structures that impeded the view from his windows or preyed on his mind in any way, however insignificant, rather like the warlords of the Shōgunate or the hermit heiress in the American poem who “buys up all / the eyesores facing her shore, / and lets them fall.” Many have criticized him for this, as if wanting to live in purity were some sort of sin, but I’ve always defended him. Still, even I was taken aback by what ensued.

  It was a fine summer evening, the air soft on our faces as we rode in a caravan over the short distance to where the tavern stood in its lot of weed and gently nodding trees. The apprentices had set out blankets and pillows for us and there was a table laden with salads and sliced meats, beans and bread and corn on the cob and great green bellies of watermelon, even as smoke rose from the fire of the barbecue pit. Wes was there—he’d suffered his own tragedy three years earlier when Svetlana and their young son were killed in an auto accident not five miles from Taliesin—and we embraced like brothers, no bows, no handshakes, but a kind of American bear hug that spoke volumes for what we’d meant to each other. I introduced Setsuko all round in a flurry of smiles and bows. When the spareribs, hot dogs and hamburgers were
cooked through and piled high as a sacrificial offering on the table, we were led to a seat on the dais, in the place of honor beside Wrieto-San and Mrs. Wright. The sun made a painting of the clouds and settled in the treetops. We ate. I was as happy as I’d ever been in my life.

  And then, at Wrieto-San’s signal, one of the apprentices rose and began playing a jig on his violin, even as Wes and some of the others burst through the door of the tavern, great jerry cans of liquid clutched in their arms, and for a moment—naïve, forgetful, thirsty—I thought they were bringing beer. But it wasn’t beer. It was kerosene. And I watched in astonishment as they tipped the cans and pooled the shimmering liquid round the foundation, the work already finished inside. We all caught the scent of it then, noxious, chemical, anticipatory.

  The violin keened, every note singing at the high end of the frets. People had begun to tap their feet, a knee bouncing here, fingers tapping there, but no one rose till Wrieto-San did. Very slowly, with a nod to Mrs. Wright, he got to his feet and made his way to the barbecue pit. He bent for a moment to extract a flaming brand, then, in the most leisurely way, as if he were heading off for a stroll through the knee-high grass, he crossed the yard and dropped the brand where the kerosene had pooled on the front steps.