by Dean Hughes
She nodded her understanding.
“They have a lot of the same problems—dreams and bad memories, all of that. And they went through some of the same kind of stuff.”
She only nodded again.
“Where’s Gene?”
“He’s down for his nap.”
Alex was the one nodding now, waiting, wondering what he could say to her. “Anna, I’ll be okay. I’ve told you that before. But I’m going back to that doctor this time. And I’m going to talk more with Wally and Richard. I thought it would make things worse to talk about everything, but it seemed to help.”
“Peter needs help too, Alex. Mama is so worried about him.”
“I’ll talk to him. We talked in Germany a little but not since then—not much.”
“That would be so good. I don’t think he would say anything to anyone else, but he might with you.” She moved a little closer and touched his hand. He took hold of her and pulled her closer, wrapped his arms around her.
“Anna, why do some men come home and not have all these problems? That’s how I wanted to be. I didn’t want to act like a baby about all this.”
“Alex, no one who went through as much as you did can come home and just go back to normal. But you’re all so much the same. You try to hide what you’re feeling—think that’s the manly thing to do.”
“Anna, I thought I’d be all right once I had you and Gene—and look what I’ve been doing to the two of you.”
She had her arms around him, gripped against his back. He felt her squeeze tighter. “Alex, we’ve all asked too much of you. You’ve asked too much of yourself. But you are a good husband and a good father. And you’ll be even better. You’re going to be okay.”
He took a long breath, wanting to believe that the struggle was almost over, that the air around him would be easier now. “I love you,” he told Anna. “Thanks for not giving up on me.”
“Alex, you know me better than that. I never will. And God won’t either. He knows your heart. He knows what you tried to do.”
“The war must have broken God’s heart, Anna. How could he stand to watch what we did to each other?”
Chapter 28
One day in April Wally left the dealership in the hands of his salesmen, and he drove to Mat Nakashima’s farm. He had known for a long time that he needed to talk to Mat, but he just hadn’t been able to get himself to do it. He was not surprised when he found Ike there, with Mat. Wally had heard that Ike was back in Utah and that he was working with his brother. They had even bought more land and were increasing the size of their farm.
Wally found the two of them in front of the barn. They were leaning over a tractor, peering at the engine. “Are you two trying to use the power of prayer on that tractor?” Wally asked as he walked toward them.
Mat turned around and smiled when he saw Wally. They had seen each other a couple of times since Wally had come home, but they had never had a chance to talk at any length. “That’s actually not a bad idea,” Mat said. “Nothing else we’ve tried has worked.” He pulled a glove off and reached toward Wally, shook his hand. “Do you know my brother Ike?”
“Yes. I met him a long time ago—before the war.” He shook hands with Ike, too.
“You look good, Wally,” Mat said. “You’ve filled out. The last time I saw you, you were still awfully thin.”
But Wally felt a little strange talking about that with these two. “Yeah, I’m pretty much back to normal,” he said.
Mat leaned against the tractor and pulled off his other glove, as though he were relieved to forget about the engine trouble for the moment. “President Thomas told me that you’re working for him. He said you’re doing a great job.”
“Really?” Wally asked. “Did he say that?”
“I’ll tell you what he told me, exactly. He said, ‘Wally’s not the same boy he was before the war. He’s the best man I’ve got working for me now.’”
Wally liked that, actually, but he laughed and said, “I sure hope I’m doing a better job for him than I did for you.”
Mat smiled and tucked his hands into the pockets of his overalls. It was a nice afternoon, after a couple of showery days, and the sun on Wally’s back felt good. Mat seemed content, relaxed, more so than Wally remembered. “You were young back then,” Mat said. “Just a kid.”
“Wally,” Ike said, “I heard you got some pretty rough treatment in the Philippines. How’d you get through all that?” Ike was a little taller than his brother, bigger through the neck and shoulders, but the two sounded just alike, even had the same mannerisms. And neither of them seemed self-conscious about Ike’s question.
“I don’t know. A guy just does what he has to do. But it sure wasn’t easy.” Wally had thought ahead of time what he wanted to say, at least to Mat, but he had trouble now thinking of a way to introduce the topic. So he only said, “I’m just trying to get on with my life now.”
“That’s good, Wally,” Mat said. “It could have made you bitter.”
Again Wally hesitated. He had left his suit coat in the car and was wearing a dark pair of slacks with a white shirt and tie. He took hold of his suspenders, grasped them a little too tight, set his feet a little wider apart, and then said, “Mat and Ike, I just want you to know I don’t hold any sort of grudge.”
“Grudge?”
“I don’t just mean against those guards who put us through so much. I’m saying I don’t hold any hard feelings against anyone. I don’t connect you two with any of that. Some guys came home from the war hating all Japanese, but I don’t feel that way at all. I feel kind of bad that I’ve never stopped by to say hello or anything, but it wasn’t out of hard feelings. It was just that I’ve been . . .” He had come close to saying something
that wasn’t true, that he had been too busy. He stopped himself and said instead, “What I mean is, I’ve tried not to think about the war and the prison camps since I got back, and maybe I avoided you some—just because it seemed like it might be a little awkward.”
Mat didn’t respond for a moment. He looked back at Wally, studying him, as though he were a little confused. “Well, it was good of you to come by,” he said. He stood straight, leaned away from the tractor, and Wally felt the tension, felt as though he were being dismissed.
“That’s right, Wally,” Ike said. “It was good of you to come over here. You’re a nice guy. You’re not like Mat’s dentist.”
“What?”
Ike stepped forward a little and pulled his hands out of his pockets. “During the war,” he said, “Mat couldn’t find anyone to fix his teeth. Him, nor his kids.”
Wally saw what was coming, and he had no idea how to respond.
“Don’t get into that all that,” Mat told his brother. “Let’s just—”
“This dentist told him he wouldn’t put his hands into a Jap’s mouth. Our family had gone to that same dentist since we were little kids. Our money had always been as good as anyone else’s—until the war broke out.”
“Look,” Wally said, “I know how things have been. I didn’t mean to . . . you know . . .” But he couldn’t think what to say.
“There were signs in store windows—all over this country: ‘Japs, stay out.’”
“I know. I’ve heard about that.”
“I spent the war in an internment camp, Wally.”
“Look, Ike, I’m sorry. I said the wrong thing. I just didn’t know quite what to say. All I wanted to do was put the war in the past and tell you that I hope we’re still friends.”
Ike chuckled and was about to say something else, but Mat said, “Wally, I do appreciate it. Thanks for stopping by.” But the words were terse, almost hard. Once again, Wally was being dismissed.
“Hey, don’t mind me,” Ike said. “I don’t mean to be like that. Your dad worked hard to get me out of that camp. He’s one of the best men I know—and I’m sure you’re just like him. But I’ll tell you what. You ought to drive down to Delta some time before the Topaz camp to
tally disappears. You ought to have a look at that desert land out there, see where Japanese families had to live. We’re Americans, Wally—the same as you. And a lot of us were held like prisoners, guarded by men with rifles.”
Wally was trying not to be defensive, but his impulse was to describe some of the conditions he had lived in, to tell Ike what his guards had done.
“Sometimes, in those camps, eight or ten families would end up in one barracks, and there were no partitions. People would hang up blankets if they had any. But there was no privacy. If a man and his wife wanted to be together, you can imagine what it was like.”
“It must have been humiliating,” Wally said. It was something he hadn’t known, and he sensed how deeply Ike still felt the shame of it.
“I’ll tell you something else most people still don’t know. Our people weren’t given a proper diet, weren’t fed enough. A lot of them got sick. And these were people who could have been home on their farms, feeding this country.”
“It was wrong, Ike. There’s no doubt about it.”
“What do you think it did to our children, Wally? How would you like to be told, as a kid, that because your ancestors came from a certain country, you had to be placed in a camp like that? No one stuck Germans in those places. Or Italians.”
“I know.”
“The people who mistreated you were enemies—soldiers from another country. The ones who rounded us up and stuck us away were our own neighbors.”
“Ike, that’s enough,” Mat said. “What good does it do to talk about all this now?” He turned halfway around, toward the tractor.
“That’s fine,” Ike said, “I only brought it up because there’s something I want to say to Wally.”
Wally nodded. “What’s that?” he asked.
“We don’t hold a grudge.”
Wally looked at the ground. “I see what you mean,” he said. “I’m sorry I said it that way.”
But Mat said, “Wally, the war is over. Let’s just forget about all of that.”
“That’s what I did want to say,” Wally told him.
***
LaRue had the letter in her hand. She had been accepted to Radcliffe College in Massachusetts, and she had been awarded a scholarship that would cover her tuition. What the scholarship didn’t cover was her living expenses. She believed she could earn enough money to add to her savings, at least to get by the first year, but that was not her biggest worry. The problem was, she didn’t know what her dad was going to say. She planned to go, even if he told her she couldn’t, but she didn’t want a fight. She had fought with her father enough in her life. If she was going to leave home this fall, she wanted to go in peace and feel that she could come back in the same way.
She had walked the few blocks down to the dealership and asked Dad’s secretary whether it would be all right to see him. “Just wait about five minutes,” Gloria had told her. “He’s in with a customer, but they’ve been ‘almost finished’ for about half an hour.”
Actually, nearly fifteen minutes passed before Dad finally walked out, shook hands, and said good-bye to a big bald-headed man in a gray suit. But then Dad looked at LaRue and said, “My goodness, what are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” she told him.
“All right,” he said, but he sounded concerned, as though he expected a problem. He held the door for LaRue and let her into his office ahead of him. He had her sit in a chair in front of his desk, but he turned it before he motioned for her to sit down, and then he pulled another chair close, facing hers. All this unnerved LaRue a little. In a way, it was easier to deal with his power with the expanse of his big desk between them.
“Read this,” she said, and she pulled her letter from the envelope and handed it to him.
He unfolded the letter and read it very slowly. She had the feeling that he was delaying a little, probably preparing his response. Finally, he said, “And I suppose you want to accept this?”
“Of course I do.”
He nodded and then seemed to consider for a time. “Could you explain just a little of your thinking?” he said. “Why would you rather go back to Massachusetts than stay here at the University?”
“It’s a really good school, Dad. One of the best. It’s an honor to get in.”
“I’m not sure I understand who decides those kinds of things, but I still wonder why you would rather go to school back east than around here.”
“Dad, we’ve been talking about this for almost two years. I think it’ll be good for me. I want to meet other people and have a chance to be on my own.”
“You could do that down at the Y, couldn’t you?”
“No. I don’t think so. People in Provo are exactly the same as here in Salt Lake. I want to know how other people live—the way Bobbi had a chance to do when she lived in Hawaii all that time.”
“Bobbi was a lot older when she left.”
LaRue could see what was coming. He was going to force her to justify everything, and she didn’t want to do that. She had made her choice, she was almost eighteen, and she had won the scholarship on her own. She had earned her right to make this decision. “Dad, I’m planning to go.”
“I know,” he said, and he was surprisingly quick to respond. LaRue had the feeling that he had accepted that she was leaving whether he liked it or not. That was something; it just wasn’t what she wanted. Why couldn’t he trust her for once, just assume that she could make a wise decision?
“I only asked what you’re thinking—why you want to go away.” His voice was calm, but she saw how stiff he was, his chin set, his breath drawn in.
“Dad, I’ve talked to Wally a lot about this. It seems like, living here with my family all around me, and surrounded by people who believe the same things I do, I can’t really find out how deep my faith is—or what the other choices are. I feel like I need to get away to really get my own testimony.”
“So is that what you’re going away to look for—a deeper testimony?”
“In a way. That’s one of the things.” But that didn’t ring true, not even to LaRue, and she knew it.
“It seems to me that you want to get out from under my thumb as much as anything.” He laughed, and a little more ease seemed to come over him. He put his elbows on the arms of his chair and leaned forward a bit.
“Dad, you’re so strong. You’re so clear about everything. Half of what I do is to please you, and the other half is to get your goat. Do you know what I mean?”
“Oh, yes.”
“It’s like I’m not me. I’m just a reaction to you.”
“Is that what you think? Or has someone said that to you?”
“Dad, why do you—”
“It’s just that I think your friend Cecil felt that way, and he said a lot of those things to you. I’m not sure you’d feel the need to run off if he hadn’t pushed that idea.”
In the old days LaRue would have erupted. She would have denied the accusation, announced what she was going to do, and stomped out of the office. But she knew, in fact, that Cecil had had a big influence on her. So she took a breath and said, “Dad, Cecil got me thinking seriously about myself and what I believed. I’d never worried about those kinds of things until the two of us started talking. So in a way, he was a help to me. But I didn’t like the way he acted when he came home for Christmas. He had his nose in the air, and he was saying all kinds of negative things about the Church. I won’t ever be like that—I promise you. But I still want this experience. I’ve worked hard for it.”
“But I still don’t understand. Why is it you want to go? So you can think for yourself?”
“Yes. And experience something new. I want to know other people and live in another place. Don’t you ever feel like you want to do that?”
“No, I guess I don’t. The Saints struggled too hard to get to this valley and to build this city. I want to stay right here and try to protect it. It’s becoming way too much like other towns.”
“But
when you were younger, didn’t you feel like you wanted to get away for a while?”
“No. It never even occurred to me.”
“But Dad, the world has changed. It’s gotten smaller.”
“I don’t know what that means, LaRue.”
She didn’t either, and she knew it. It was just something she heard people saying lately. She sat back in her chair and tried to sort her thoughts out for real. “Dad, when did you first know that you believed in the Church?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember ever doubting it. But I didn’t just ‘go along’ with it, if that’s what you’re thinking. The Spirit has borne testimony to me many times, very powerfully. I have no reason to doubt.”
“But I’m not like that. I doubt everything. I know I want the excitement of going away, and I guess I like the idea of being on my own. But I really do want to see what happens when no one else does my thinking for me.”
“Will you do that? Or will you let a bunch of eastern professors make fun of everything you’ve been taught?” He stopped and stared into her eyes. “And lead you carefully down to hell?”
LaRue was the one becoming nervous. She looked away. “I don’t want anyone to lead me. I want to find my own path.”
“Well, fine. I know it’s what you feel you have to do, and if I tried to stop you, it would be a big mistake. But I’m scared to death, LaRue. I don’t know whether you’re as strong as you think you are. I do believe you’re a good person, and you’ve grown up about ten years in the last two, but there’s something defiant in you, and that could be your downfall. It’s entirely possible that you’ll resist everyone else’s guidance—and make some very poor decisions on your own.”
She looked at the carpet, calmed herself a little, and then looked back up and smiled. “This is where I’m supposed to start yelling, ‘See, you still don’t trust me.’”
“Aren’t you going to do that?”
“No. I haven’t given you many reasons to trust me, and I’m not sure you’re wrong. Maybe I will mess everything up.”