A Gesture Life

by Chang-Rae Lee

  It particularly heartens me, in light of this, to see how well Veronica has grown up. As we read quietly together here in this sterile, unpapered gray room, me with a gardening magazine and Veronica a pocket murder mystery with gruesome, drippy, raised lettering on its tattered cover, I have to wonder what might have come of her had just one thing turned differently then—say, had her father survived the shooting, or her mother not found a job.

  So much of the public debate and discussion these days is about the alarming fragility of a person’s early years, how critically the times and circumstances can affect one’s character and outlook and even actions. So the abiding philosophy is to help a wayward child develop into a productive member of the community, or if ignored, risk allowing someone of essentially decent nature to become an adult whose social interactions are fraught and difficult, or even pathological, criminal. How did Veronica, from the start fatherless, her family stigmatized, grow into her own fine self? What did her mother, Officer Como, do to enlist the native grace and good in her daughter’s heart? Or did it all happen by ordination, by the slight chance of Being, that Veronica and the rest of us have actually one strain of life, and one strain only, and that the seeming variations are but particular contours, the everyday adornments?

  Such as, I’m considering now, my being here in the hospital, suffering complications in the aftermath of the smoke inhalation. The fire in the family room was two days ago, and Liv Crawford has called more than a few times to let me know that “her boys” are just about finished with the renovations of the damage, so that the property will be fully “restored” and “secure.” No doubt pristine and purchaser-ready. But then there is my situation. Dr. Weil is sure that I’m recovered, but from what I know and feel, I’m almost certain that I’m pleuritic, as my lungs don’t seem to be improving the way they should. My chest still feels leaden and straitjacketed and generally out of sorts. I’m breathing well enough, but even the light activity of talking with Veronica (as well as my stolen wanderings last night in the corridors) seems to be taking a deep toll on my energy. And then there is the other, unrelated complication that has arisen, one far worse in my mind (and spirit-sapping), which is that I suddenly have an onset of the shingles. There is an almost caustic discomfort in my lower chest and then down my right arm and right leg, what feels like lines of internal burns that sharply prickle and itch and ache. There is no expression as yet, no outward sign of rashes or blisters, which I wouldn’t be concerned about either way, except that I wouldn’t want Veronica to see them and think it was better to leave me alone, to let me rest.

  For being alone is the last thing I would wish for now, which is probably strange, given how I’ve conducted most all the days of my life. Save the time that Sunny spent with me, I’ve known myself best as a solitary person, and although I’ve always been able to enjoy the company of others, I’ve seen myself most clearly when I’m off on my own, without others in the mix. This may seem an obvious mode for most, but I think a surprising number of people prefer to imagine themselves through a filter of associations and links, perhaps Mary Burns being an example of a person who predominantly identified herself in this manner, through the lives of her daughters and her late husband, her country club and her charities, and then, possibly, through her attempted relations with Sunny, and with me. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Indeed, there was a time when I held my own associations quite close to who I was, in the years leading up to and during the Pacific war, when in the course of events one naturally accepted the wartime culture of shared sacrifice and military codes of conduct. But then I eventually relinquished those ties for the relative freedoms of everyday, civilian life, and then finally decided to leave Japan altogether, for the relative—though very different—liberties of America.

  Though here, in my town and every town, especially when you reach my age, you sadly find that the most available freedom is to live alone. There is an alarming surplus of the right. And though everyone accepts this, it’s unclear to me whether anyone truly prefers it so. Few seem satisfied with the familial character of their latter years. Even Mary Burns, who no doubt taught her daughters the value of family, found that they honored her training of them by keeping to themselves, as if her involvement would be an adulteration. They didn’t visit as often as she wished, nor of course did they ever ask if she would like to come live with them after Dr. Burns died, and even after her friendship with me came to its abrupt, unpleasant end. They let her be. Her daughters’ distance was an ever-deepening disappointment to her (even if she never really expected them to be perfectly embracing and filial), and though she rarely spoke of it, I know now it was one of the reasons why she was so willing to spend time with Sunny, and why any time was still better than none.

  Veronica, who is now nibbling on her fingernails, one by one, as she flips the pages of her book, has already told me that she wants to live at home as long as possible, through college and beyond, at least until she gets married. She waits in my room for her mother, who will come to pick her up. Veronica’s future husband, who Veronica is certain will be a sculptor or a policeman or both, will have to love Officer Como as much as she does. Veronica herself will be a travel agent and murder mystery writer and the proud mother of seven bright-eyed, immeasurably happy girls. She doesn’t care if they’re not beautiful, in fact hopes that they aren’t, for she has seen already how some of the prettiest girls in her class have become distant and superior and wholly ungenerous, and particularly how the blond, slim, protuberantly endowed Brittany, the self-appointed head of the shrinking cadre of candy stripers, will hardly even look at her, as if doing so would be to invite certain personal doom.

  My initial impulse is to tell Veronica how she’s absolutely right, how in this world (or the one we’ve made) beauty is the scantest blessing, and how, despite the appearance of ever-bestowed glory and celebration, it is mostly malice and misery that are returned to the bearer. I know this now, not from my own appearance, but from dealing with Sunny when she reached a certain maturity. She was beautiful, and in all the complicated ways I’ve already mentioned; Sunny thus educated me. In regard to myself, I’ve often been told I have a youthful, genial appearance, and am even a bit handsome. I remember what Mary Burns once remarked, after the first whole night we spent together. We were in my bedroom, and her spirit was ebullient with the clear light of the morning. She rose on her elbow and stretched, her exposed back still lithe and impressively athletic, and then she lay down and gazed at me from close range, as if she were tracing with her eyes the shape of my lips and nose and brow. I cleared my throat and sat up.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, blushing. “I’m being terribly rude. I don’t mean to be odd. You must be wondering.”

  So I said, “You’re making sure I’m the man you met last night?”

  “No,” she said, smiling easily. “I’m not. It’s just that your face is so unlike my late husband’s, I can’t tell you. Bradley had such severe features, a long, narrow nose and deep-set eyes and a jutting chin. He was aggressive, in appearance. You have a wonderful gentleness to your face. A softer line to everything.” She smiled and lightly kissed my shoulder. “Goodness, listen to me. I’m sorry I’m talking like this. I’m going to scare you away.”

  I didn’t, or couldn’t, reply, which wasn’t my intention, as I didn’t mind in the least what she’d said, but I had the urge to get up and dress and begin that Sunday like any other, although I had already slept through my swim time. Sunny had been downstairs for some time, warming up her hands with minor scales, up and down, in the dizzying series. I pulled on a robe and told Mary that I was going down to put the water on for our tea. I suggested she take a hot, soaking bath. She nodded, and from her weakened expression I could tell she wanted me to stay just a moment longer, that we might complete the conversation. But Sunny had begun playing intently and the night was done, and it seemed clear I should go downstairs and be present for her.

  There had been indicat
ions that Mary’s ever-increasing presence was disturbing to Sunny, as she had seemed to be practicing more fervently in the preceding weeks, particularly when Mary was over at the house. She took her warm-up exercises at an incredibly fast measure, running through them as though she were attempting to twist up her fingers. The pieces themselves she performed quite rudely, as if she would trounce them. She didn’t miss a note, but the feeling in the playing was utterly perverse to what it should have been, as though she were critiquing rather than exploring the compositions. Mary would comment again how talented and skilled Sunny was, how dexterous and precocious, and I never thought to correct her appraisals, even though the performances were in fact maudlin and probably insulting to her, as they certainly were to me. I found them quite shaming. And as much as I tried, I couldn’t inculcate the same sense in Sunny, as she pretended not to know what I was talking about.

  “I’m trying my very best, Poppa,” she’d say innocently, with her dark brown eyes gazing steadfastly up into mine. “You see that I am, don’t you?”

  Japanese fathers are famously overgenerous to their children (quite the opposite of what most Westerners would presume and wish to think), extremely permissive and obliging with their little ones, and so it was quite normal that I should be as well; though with a girl like Sunny, I should probably have exercised more rigor and sternness. But as it often was, I let the issue go in favor of moving forward, to the next hour and day. My hope was that she would change as she grew into a young woman, and that the minor indications of willfulness would gradually fall from her like any child’s clutch upon a security blanket.

  I, too, had been a difficult child. For me, it was the heady time of adolescence that unmasked and clarified my sense of obligations, so much so that I now view that period as the true beginning of “my life.” This was when I first appreciated the comforts of real personhood, and its attendant secrets, among which is the harmonious relation between a self and his society. There is a mutualism that at its ideal is both powerful and liberating. For me, it was readily leaving the narrow existence of my family and our ghetto of hide tanners and renderers. Most all of us were ethnic Koreans, though we spoke and lived as Japanese, if ones in twilight. Of course, I didn’t leave on my own. No one of my family’s circumstance could expect to change his station, at least without a lifetime of struggle. But I was fortunate to score exceptionally high on several achievement tests, and was one of a few boys of my kind to be identified and enrolled in a special school in the nearby large city.

  I lived with a well-to-do childless couple, a gear factory owner and his wife, who treated me as well as a son, providing me with every material need and advantage. I remember being accompanied by them on the first day of school, in my new serge uniform with brass buttons that they had fitted just for me, and how the other boys had let us pass without even a murmur, this prominent family Kurohata (a name, as is self-evident, I’ve since shortened). I think of them most warmly, as I do my natural parents, but to neither would I ascribe the business of having reared me, for it seems clear that it was the purposeful society that did so, and really nothing and no one else. I was more than grateful. And I knew even then as a boy of twelve how I should always give myself over to its vigilance, entrusting to its care everything I could know or ever hope for.

  My Sunny, I thought, would do much the same. Not be so thankful or beholden to me, necessarily, but at least she’d be somewhat appreciative of the providence of institutions that brought her from the squalor of the orphanage—the best of which can be only so happy—to an orderly, welcoming suburban home in America, with a hopeful father of like-enough race and sufficient means. But now, sitting with Veronica, I realize the obvious mistakes that were made in regard to Sunny. Firstly, I shouldn’t have made my desire for a child so paramount as to cloud my good judgment, which is what happened when I was interviewed by the woman at the agency. She had warned me on the telephone that it was exceedingly rare for a single man to be granted an adoption, that in fact there was no precedent for it and so really no reason for a meeting. I insisted, and when we met face-to-face she was able to understand the earnestness of my desire for a child, though of course earnestness should never be solely enough. I brought along a large donation to the agency, this beyond the regular expenses, as well as a like sum for the woman, which I explained as a most proper gift in my former homeland, and which would be followed by another. This wasn’t actually proper, however, but she stopped talking and discreetly slipped the rice paper–wrapped package into her desk drawer, and on my way out she said she would see what was possible for a man in my special situation.

  My second error was insisting on a female infant or child, when I should have known that a girl would likely do best with a maternal presence. But I wanted a girl, a daughter—I was (as I think of it now) strangely unmovable on the issue—and in the end the agency woman called to say they had found one, without any further explanation. My desire for a girl was unknown to me right up to the moment the agency woman spoke of locating a boy for me, but I interrupted her immediately and explained how I’d always hoped for a daughter, the words suddenly streaming from my mouth as though I’d long practiced the speech. I found myself speaking of a completeness, the unitary bond of a daughter and father. Of harmony and balance. The woman seemed impressed, or pretended to be, and when she called several weeks later with news of a suitable orphan, a girl from the city of Pusan, in Korea, I was overcome with a feeling that I can only describe as relief. There were no Japanese children available, but it didn’t matter to me anymore. I thought only of the moment of her arrival, which I had hoped would serve to mark the recommencement of my days.

  * * *

  IT IS HALF PAST SIX, and Veronica’s shift is all but done. Too soon, I think, her mother will curl the blue-and-white police cruiser around the parking circle and let the siren whoop sharply just once, to let her know she’s there. I’m to be discharged by Dr. Weil in the morning, and as Veronica’s shift doesn’t start until mid-afternoon, I won’t see her again unless I make a special trip, which I will consider, for I know, too, that Mrs. Hickey’s son, Patrick, is in the children’s ICU. Mrs. Hickey called early this morning to the nurses’ station to check on my condition, and though I was fine to talk I asked Nurse Dolly to tell her I was still sleeping. We’d made tentative plans to meet here at the hospital, and of course my unexpected stay would seem good timing (of a sort) for a visit, but a part of me doesn’t want to talk to Mrs. Hickey just now, or even see her face.

  Last night at three, while Nurse Dolly was napping, I unhooked myself from the monitors and rose from my bed. I crept past the nurses’ station to the elevator bank, and though I wasn’t intending it, when the doors opened I pressed the button for the sixth floor, to the unit where Patrick Hickey lay.

  I remembered the room number from Mrs. Hickey, which was easy for me to note because it was also the name of an anti-bacterial treatment we often used during the war, a solution of Salvarsan that was known as “606,” the number of its compound denotation. It’s one of those queer numbers that can appear with inexplicable frequency in one’s life. In any case, the door to the room was ajar, and I slipped in without a sound, not having to trip the latch. I was breathing with some labor, though, from the exertion of walking quickly and perhaps the oddness of what I was doing, which in retrospect was completely silly. With flowers or a stuffed animal in hand, I could have asked one of the nurses if I could enter and look at him, and they would have simply waved me in. Instead I stole inside the half-lighted room, padding breathlessly in my slippers toward his bed. He was taking oxygen, which wasn’t what made him appear so beset and wan; it was that he was amazingly slight and small, as though he were four or five years old instead of eight. With his weakened heart, he’d never grown as he should have, his wrists too delicate, it seemed, even to lift the tiny hands. But it was the features of his face that I could not look away from, his brush of hair, his nose, his tender, scant mouth. The sheer lid
s of his eyes. He looked like his mother, if his mother were boyish and unformed. He lay with a sheet pulled up to his neck, and I had a strong impulse to draw it back so that I might see his chest, where they would open him if they could find a suitable heart.

  Once, during the war, I witnessed our outpost’s doctor pull apart the ribs of a man in order to hand-massage his heart. It’s a strange technique to see, the procedure at once God-like and lowly animal. The patient was a Burmese man, a cobbler who was found stealing from the supply tent and who was condemned to death by beheading. But the doctor, a Captain Ono, asked the commanding officer if he would commute the sentence and give the man over to him, for purposes of instruction. So the morning of his execution, the cobbler was brought to the medical tent instead of the killing yard, where Captain Ono gathered us medics and interested others, including the commander, and put him into a half-sleep with a rag soaked in ether. The doctor, gloveless, maskless, as were the rest of us, quickly cut down his chest with a scalpel and then used the bone saw and the spreader and pushed aside the man’s lungs to reveal his slowly beating, slowly galloping heart. It was all most unreal. Captain Ono himself seemed nonplussed. He took a paddle connected to a modified field telephone with a crank, which he turned quickly several times, and then asked us to give room. He flipped on a switch and then touched the paddle to the heart. It leaped into a faster rhythm, and then it stopped. He stood there for what seemed too long a moment, and then with his hand roughly grabbed the cobbler’s heart and began squeezing. He did this rhythmically and with great purpose until it began beating again. It was nearly magical. He wished to show us a possible emergency maneuver in the field, in instances of the most grievous trauma. Though to me it seemed more academic than anything else. He repeated the exercise three or four times, which surprised him enough that he commented upon the vitality of the particular organ, until the last time, when his hand massage didn’t work. He touched the heart with the paddle but nothing happened, and he attempted another manipulation, making a final remark on the importance of consistent, vigorous action. Then the instruction was over. Captain Ono wiped his hands with the etherizing rag, and the cobbler, solemnly agape, was carted away.