An hour north of D.C., en route to New York, the train paused in Baltimore, and I got off. I hadn’t premeditated anything but the dead were much in mind, and I remembered Clifford’s address from all those letters. His parents occupied the second floor of a rowhouse on Saint Paul Street, nearly identical to the dozens of other rowhouses on the block. The rooms led one into another, living room first, then a dining room with a coal fire burning in the hearth, then a master bedroom, then the bathroom, and behind the bathroom, tacked on like a closet and not much bigger, was Clifford’s room. There was just enough space for a single bed and a bureau. The kitchen ran along the side of the house, narrow as a hallway, and that’s where his mother served me coffee. I had introduced myself as a friend of her son and I couldn’t tell if she was pleased to have me there or not. She was wearing a housedress and step-ins and she kept looking at me like I was trying to pull a fast one. She poured a splash of Irish whiskey into her coffee but offered none to me.
“So you were Clifford’s roommate?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Whatever happened to that motorcycle?”
Her question caught me off guard and it took a moment to regroup.
“He sold it, I think.”
“I thought it belonged to both of you.”
“That’s right,” I said. “It did.”
“For how much?”
I blinked and reddened.
“I don’t recall exactly. But that’s one reason why I’m here.” I reached for my wallet. “I found some money after. … I thought you should have it.” I had forty-seven dollars on me. The rest was in my duffel, tucked away in a locker at the station. I removed two tens and four fives and laid them on the table. A nice round number seemed best, most believable, but she was unsatisfied.
“You came all this way to bring me forty dollars?”
“No, ma’am.” I hesitated. The truth was I wasn’t sure why I’d come. I didn’t know what the army had revealed about the circumstances of his death. “I just wanted to tell you I was his friend. He had a lot of friends.”
“Of course he did. My Clifford was always good with people.”
“He was a good man.”
Her mouth twisted into a sour smile.
“He did a bad thing,” she said.
I said, “But—” and then I stopped because I couldn’t imagine how to finish the sentence. I didn’t want to complicate matters by telling her about Namiki, didn’t know if that would make her feel better or worse. I pushed my chair back, thanked her for the coffee.
“Wait,” she said.
She disappeared into the back of the house, and I walked into the next room to move myself closer to the door. The heat from the fireplace made it hard to breathe. When she returned, she was carrying a small black box. Inside, pinned onto a background of velvet, was a silver star for valor.
“He sent this home after the surrender,” she said. “It’s hard to …” Her voice trailed off and I thought she was going to cry, but she controlled herself. “Do you have a silver star?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I wasn’t as brave as Clifford.”
Two hours later, I was sitting on a bench in the station letting one train, then another, set off for New York without me. The high arched ceiling made echoes of footsteps and squealing brakes and bounced random snippets of conversation back down to the floor, and I had the sense of being poised outside of time, while the world was rushing by at twice its normal speed around me. I was trying to remember the most courageous thing I’d ever done and failing in that moment to think of anything. Just before the clock in the tower struck 2200 hours, I returned to the ticket window and bought a seat on the night’s last southbound train. Rode it through Virginia in the dark and the Carolinas and into Georgia, where I hoped to settle what remained between me and my wife.
My wife was raised in one of those sawmill towns in that part of the South, not quite big enough to be called a city but big enough to have a civil war monument on the courthouse lawn. A river with an Indian name runs along its fringe, and if you float the current downstream a little ways it will carry you to Fort Benning.
I arrived just after noon, downtown quiet at lunch hour. Winter sunlight made watery dapples on the street and on the grass of the courthouse square. I remembered how to find the house, and though it was several miles from the station I decided to walk. I wanted some time to think before I made my presence known. The road was walled with pines, broken occasionally by a red clay track leading back into the woods or by a clear-cut field, but there was nothing growing now. My wife lived with her family in a section of mill housing not far from the river. Her father was a foreman so they had three bedrooms and a parlor, but to get there you had to pass the one-room shacks occupied by the Negroes, then the two- and three-room places where the poor whites lived. The closer you got to the river, the more respectable the neighborhood appeared. All the way, I considered my options. My thoughts kept darting around behind my eyes. I’d been betrayed. That was at the bottom of all this. My wife had given birth to another man’s child. But those words rang hollow in my mind, and I couldn’t help feeling thrilled at the prospect of seeing her again.
They were finishing lunch when I arrived. The dining room curtains were open. I stood in the yard and watched. Her mother was clearing the dishes and her father was drinking coffee while he read the paper, making an effort, I thought, to ignore my wife nursing her child across the table. A blanket was draped over her chest so I couldn’t see the boy but I couldn’t take my eyes off her, chin tipped down, hair swept behind her ear. Eventually, she looked up and said something to her father and her gaze fell on the window and she noticed me standing there outside. For a moment, she registered nothing at all. Then she recognized me, and to my surprise what I saw on her face was fear, so thorough and unmistakable I glanced over my shoulder in case something terrible was behind me. When I turned back to the window, she was gone. I assumed she was coming out to greet me but it was her father who appeared on the porch. Arms crossed. Balding.
“What do you want?” he said.
“I’d like to speak to my wife.”
He pulled a funny scrunched-up face. It was clear he didn’t know how to treat me. I was the man who’d married his daughter without permission but that wasn’t so bad as the man who’d gotten her pregnant and left her to raise the child alone. He puffed his cheeks with air, and when he released the breath it was as if he were deflating head to toe.
My wife stepped out of the shadows and touched his arm.
“It’s all right, Daddy.”
Her father looked relieved. “I’ll be inside if you need me,” he said, and he left her on the porch, and my wife stood there appraising me, getting her bearings, feet apart as if for balance, both hands cupped atop her head.
“Hey,” I said, and after a moment, she said, “Hey,” and then she waved me inside and introduced me to her son. He was a year old by then, no longer an infant but not quite a little boy. There was no great jolt of affection at our first meeting. I directed the usual compliments to his grandparents and gave the boy a handful of 10-sen coins I’d been carrying around, the ones with the hole in the middle and flowers on both sides, and asked my wife if we might have a minute or two alone.
In a quiet voice, after everyone else had left us, she said, “I’m not scolding, but you can’t give change to a baby. He’ll put it in his mouth.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think.”
“He’ll be fine. Mother’s with him.”
“I should have brought a better present.”
“That’s not necessary,” she said.
“I should have brought something for you.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said, and so it went.
After half an hour, I asked if it would be all right for me to stick around a few days and she said, “If that’s what you want,” and I took my leave and hunted up a room in a boardinghouse downtown.
Morn
ings, after her father had left for work, we’d stroll young Francis in the park or sit on the porch swing while he dozed in her arms or played at our feet. Nights, after he was asleep, I would escort her to the movies or dinner or down to the river to watch the stars. This town was small enough that my presence made for good gossip, and I took a kind of pleasure in the scandal that we caused. We were allied by it, and the pressure of the outside world made me want to assert myself in opposition. All the while, my wife was lovely and strong and I understood that she was no longer the girl I’d proposed to on a whim. She told me about waking up in the middle of the night sometimes, paralyzed with fear for Francis, and I told her how things had ended for Clifford and Namiki. I didn’t tell her that I sometimes wondered if I’d ever be so desperate, so possessed by love. We never spoke of divorce. The subject loomed on the periphery of our time together and I kept waiting for it to intrude, but then my wife let me lead her to my bed, and I knew I’d made a promise to her.
“Do you know the Bible?” my wife said.
A curious question, I thought, given she was at that moment sprawled beside me in the dark, her dress and stockings draped over a chair. I remembered those nights typing scripture with my mother. I remembered the day I learned Clifford was dead.
“I guess,” I said.
My wife made her voice pious and grave. “Let not sin reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. Do not yield your members to sin as instruments of wickedness but yield yourselves to God as something something something and your members as instruments of righteousness. My mother read that to me while I was on bedrest. Romans, 6:13. I told her she’d missed the boat.”
A bubble of laughter was rising from my belly. I tried to hold it down but the laugh came barking out of me and my wife laughed too and rolled toward me and rested her cheek on my chest. Her hair tickled my nose.
“Righteous members,” I said, and we laughed again.
My wife said, “We’re so wicked,” but I didn’t feel wicked at all.
Now Tojo is dead and I assume Eguchi is still in prison and I’m ashamed to admit I don’t know what’s become of Arthur. Of Fumiko. More than two hundred thousand servicemen were stationed in Japan. The vast majority of them, like me, returned alive. A man must be overpoweringly dense, his sense of self girded by ignorance and blindness, to spend so many months in such an alien place and emerge indifferent, but I have the idea nevertheless that very few of my fellow soldiers would point to their time in Japan as particularly profound. They would, if pressed, name wilder days instead, when the world was still aflame, when fate hung still in the balance. Those days in Japan were too peaceful by and large, proof that all those lives were not taken in vain and that what we wanted to believe about the better nature of humanity was true. This impression is not false. I share it on occasion. Even so, what I’ve been trying to explain for all these pages is how what happened there led me here—to this night in this bright kitchen ticking out these words.
When I was a boy, my mother used to take me down to the docks to watch my father’s tugboat pulling out. I remember coins of light reflected on the water and seagulls turning circles in the air. I remember the smell of mud and brine. I remember the sight of my father in the wheelhouse, my mother and me waving until our arms were tired. A decade later, I boarded a ship with a thousand other men and it bore me into the rest of my life. That’s not the whole story by a longshot. I know that. The rest of my life was unspooling even as I watched my father’s tugboat motor out of sight and it unspools right this minute, while my wife and namesake are sleeping down the hall. But on nights like tonight, when the house is quiet and the moon is full and the world outside this kitchen is a half-remembered dream, it feels like the whole story. I don’t know if I have chosen this life or it has chosen me.
One morning, a few days after we moved away from my wife’s hometown, she suggested that I take Francis for a picnic in the park. She wanted to finish unpacking, she said, and she couldn’t do so properly with the two of us underfoot. In those days, I was uneasy alone with Francis, but how could I refuse? We fed the ducks. We ate the sandwiches my wife had prepared. Francis watched me skip rocks on the pond. I carried him on my shoulders as we walked home. I was a matriculating student at the time, riding Truman’s GI Bill, and no one in that new place was aware that he is not my son. About halfway home, we had to stop at an intersection to let a funeral procession pass, a patrol car out in front, the hearse, the mourners with their headlights on, fenders glinting in a way that seemed at odds with the occasion. A negro woman was waiting on the curb, a basket of laundry on her hip. She hardly noticed us, just shook her head and tisk ed her tongue as the cars rolled slowly by.
“This a sad world,” she said, and I said, “Sometimes,” and she turned to see who had replied. Looked us up and down. Smiled, first at Francis, then at me. “He got your eyes,” she said.
I blushed and said, “Most people think he looks like his mother,” which is how I always respond to that sort of courteous mistake.
Then Francis reached down and covered my eyes with his hands. He was making a little joke, I thought—he got your eyes—but it’s hard to know for sure with kids. His hands were wrinkly and sweet-smelling, small as paws but big enough to block out the sun.
Acknowledgments
In his prefatory note to A Quiet American, Graham Greene wrote, “This is a story, not a piece of history.” If I could think of a better way to say it, I would do so here. While The Typist does feature several real life historical figures, and while there are plenty of story elements based on actual events, I want to be clear that I have exercised loads of creative license regarding all of the above. This is a work of fiction, plain and simple. I have relied on a number of texts in this endeavor, in particular Embracing Defeat, John Dower’s remarkable account of the occupation from the Japanese perspective; American Caesar, William Manchester’s biography of MacArthur; MacArthur’s Japan, Russell Brines’s famous history of the occupation; and Gaijin Shogun by David Valley, a former member of MacArthur’s Honor Guard. I need also to acknowledge George Garrett’s military fiction, collected in The Old Army Game. Nobody does the texture of army life like George Garrett. As is the case with most of my work, the final draft turned out quite different from my initial conception, but I should add that I had the first inklings of this story after reading an article headlined, “Football: In 1946, a Search for Relief on a Desolate Nagasaki Field” in The New York Times (December 29, 2005). The article sketched the details of an actual football game played by American marines in Nagasaki. Readers will note that I have taken great liberties with this event, including relocating it to Hiroshima. This basic notion germinated until the summer of 2007, when I had the good fortune to meet Richard Waller at the Writing the Region conference in Gainesville, Florida. Mr. Waller was a typist in MacArthur’s command and not only has he lent my protagonist a profession, he was kind enough to let me pester him about the life of an enlisted man in Tokyo during the occupation.
As usual, I owe an unpayable debt to my agent, Warren Frazier, and my editor, Elisabeth Schmitz and all the early readers of this manuscript—Jim Mclaughlin, Murray Dunlap, Jessica Weintraub, B. J. Leggett, Tom Franklin, Beth Anne Fennelly and Shannon Burke. I need to thank Professor Jon LaCure, my colleague at the University of Tennessee, and Charles Schmitz for double-checking my Japanese. Most of all, I need to thank my wife, Jill, and my daughters, Mary and Helen. For everything.
Thank you, thank you, thank you all.
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