“Grandpa was such a conventional, rigid man. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my grandfather, but he could be self-righteous as hell. Saw himself as a pillar of the community. Except, after the war, there wasn’t much community, but that didn’t stop him from trying. His son leading a riot? It would’ve broken his heart.”
The stoop of Grandpa’s shoulders. The way he’d always kept his distance from Tom, as though even looking at the boy’s face were a painful reminder of someone else.
“What about your mom? Would she have been on board with Kaz’s resistance activities?”
“Hardly. She idolized my grandfather. It must’ve horrified her that Kaz ended up getting involved with the shit disturbers.”
No sooner had she spoken than her certainty faded, however. The rare times Lily had broken her silence about Kaz, her face had frozen in a numb, blank expression that Rita had interpreted as disappointment, anger, hate. But might there have been a trace of something else — wistfulness, regret? A man who was good with the ladies. Had Lily been referring to herself, in the bloom of her youth? Perhaps she’d been drawn to his rebelliousness, his principles. Kaz, the biggest shit disturber of all. Her mind was a kaleidoscope of so many contradictory whims and desires, who could say what her true feelings about Kaz had been at all?
Mark was watching Rita brood, space out.
“Sorry,” said Rita.
“I lost you for a moment there.”
“It’s just … I don’t know. That whole period. How little I understand about what happened.”
“What are you curious about?”
“My mom’s feelings about my dad. How they got together in the first place. How they ended up in Toronto, of all places.” Whether they were ever in love. But she wasn’t going to say that aloud.
“Did you ever ask her about any of this?”
Rita shook her head and tried to let all the questions drift away. But it was impossible. Even basic things puzzled her. “I wonder if Kaz would have been released at the same time my mom and grandfather got out of Matanzas. Did they all move to Toronto together? Or did Kaz come on his own later?”
“From what I understand, people got out in waves, depending on whether they were deemed a security threat. So it’s entirely possible that Kaz wasn’t released until later.”
By the time of the riot Lily must have been pregnant since Tom was born in ’44. How horrible it must have been for her to be left all alone in the aftermath of that violence…. Who’d taken care of her? Had Grandpa stepped forward? Was that the origin of their peculiar closeness?
Twenty-Two
Going about her day was an elaborate game of connect-the-dots. There were certain things she needed to get done, and if she could just make it from one chore to the next, everything would be all right. Yet the minutes risked slipping away, so she had to work fast: wake Tom up, comb the knots from his hair, get dressed, avoid the silver flash of sunlight swooshing off the mirror….
It wasn’t that she was vain. She didn’t even wear makeup. No, no, she wasn’t that kind of woman.
Sometimes when she’d look at strangers on the street, she’d find herself entranced by the hue of their lips: poppy, magenta, a blackish-red so deep it made her think of dried blood. But when she went to the drugstore to examine the enamel tubes, her elation vanished, disgust sweeping over her.
The doctor’s wife was a clean-scrubbed, respectable woman.
Lil.
For some reason, ever since they’d moved to Toronto, she’d started to think of herself as “Lil” more often than “Lily.” A simple, no-nonsense name, better suited to a woman of her ilk, far better than the silliness of “Lily.” Lil dressed in boxy cream shirts and brown wool skirts that came down well past her knees, hair pulled up in a bun as tight as Aunt Haruko’s. Not making any attempt to conceal the scar on her cheekbone. People probably thought this was the reason she avoided mirrors, but only if she were vain could things be so simple. It looked like a birthmark, which it was, in a sense: she thought of it as a boundary that marked her second birth, like a wall in her brain that blocked all the unruly voices from crossing over. Sometimes she could hear them getting louder, and then the borders of her body were losing weight, shadows and blackness closing in….
So she had to be quick. Get dressed, pack Tom’s school bag, walk him down the street to school. This was the goal, the whole point of the morning rush, so why did every fibre of her being pull in the opposite direction?
That inevitable moment of parting. Her lips lingered on her son’s cheek as she tightened her grip, mesmerized by how the baby fat was falling away, revealing the blueprint of a face that was going to be strikingly handsome. Tom didn’t look like the doctor, whose wrinkled face curled inward, and it wasn’t possible she’d known him way back in that boyish phase of his life anyway — though she often had an unsettling feeling that she had. Some days, she was haunted by an image of the doctor as a young man: filled with laughter, something teasing about his lips, his face wavering like a lake hit by a skipping pebble. That murmur of terror and loss she didn’t understand gathered force all over.
It was just the house making her jumpy. Bricks crumbling, porch sagging like a waterlogged hammock. She sensed it was a fair bit larger than anywhere she’d lived before, but for all the space — the dark corridors and boarded up rooms on the third floor, where the only sign of life was the rustle of mice — it didn’t feel anything like home. It swallowed her up. All the battered, unloved furniture had been left behind by the previous owner: upholstery dotted by moth holes and cigarette burns, wooden arms carved up with graffiti, lampshades with ratty fringes, wallpaper faded to the ghosts of peacocks and palm trees.
Best not to think too much about how she’d ended up here, in this damp, decrepit house on Margueretta Street.
Today wasn’t a day to sulk. Save your tears, time to get moving. People were coming to supper tonight. Dr. Chong and his wife. She’d never met them before, and nervousness nipped at her fingertips. Somehow, in the course of his excursions, the doctor had managed to befriend the Chongs, and maybe Dr. Chong would help him re-establish his medical practice. She tried to remember why the doctor didn’t have a practice of his own anymore. He must have explained it to her ten thousand times.
Trudging upstairs, she sighed. At the top of the stairs, the latest vagabond could be heard snoring. With all these strangers living here, how was she supposed to turn the ground floor into a proper doctor’s office? But the doctor seemed content just running this flophouse, where no one paid a cent of rent.
She wandered to the end of the hall and shook her son by the shoulder. He squirmed and scrunched up between the eyes, trying to get away from her even in his sleep, and a blurry impression of someone else edged into her thoughts.
“Rise and shine, handsome.”
The boy blinked and looked up, as if she were part of his dream. “It’s already morning, Mommy?”
“Get up, Tom.”
“Can I have pancakes?”
“No. You’ll be late for school.”
Some afternoons, she’d go on long walks. Shoe repair counters, little hardware stores. East along College, street life became busier: portly men sat outside the cafés smoking; storefronts showed off shiny pots and pans, sensible, clunky shoes that could support a two-hundred-pound matriarch, bolts of jewel tone fabric bursting across the glass. But the way the shopkeepers looked at her was enough to keep her at bay. Maybe they’d never seen an Oriental before. Often, there’d be two of them, a mother and daughter, chatting behind the cash register in some undulating language, and how surprised they’d look when English words sprung from Lil’s lips. According to the doctor, they were a hodgepodge of Italians, Portuguese, Jews, Greeks. If they were all strangers from different countries, why did they appear to get on so well together, their tanned, Caucasian faces set against her?
Men were anot
her matter, of course. The single ones lived in boarding houses with large verandas out front, where they’d lounge on the steps drinking beer in the late afternoon after the day’s work of laying bricks and spreading tar. They were coarse, oxen-like guys who always managed to look dirty. When it came to a pretty girl, though, a softer side took over. They’d smile and call out “Konnichiwa,” followed by sweet, semi-obscene things that she tried to shut her ears to as she rushed by, her bad cheek turned away.
Yet if the experience were so unpleasant, why did she keep walking past? Why did a tremble of a swagger overtake her hips, a faint melody ribboning through her brain?
Perhaps there was a hint of something nice in all their coarseness — something that evoked a shadow of a memory. The limberness of her sapling limbs. Her cheeks blossoming, under the heat of an audience’s gaze, every fibre and nerve in her body twitching to life.
It confused and frightened her when she felt this other side of herself awakening. And yet, how invigorating to know that girl was still alive.
Lil didn’t remember much about where they’d lived before Toronto, beyond some discontinuous scenes of another cold, unfamiliar city. The jagged grey skyline. Snow was beautiful and ethereal if you watched it falling from indoors, but she hadn’t been prepared for the acid sting against her cheekbones. They’d been staying at a rooming house full of other Japanese folks. While the doctor slept down the hall in the men’s quarters, she and Aunt Haruko shared a room with two other women, who were surprisingly good-natured about the colicky baby. “We’re lucky to be here. We’re lucky Chicago would take us.” They rubbed their chapped hands above steaming bowls of udon at night. Most of these folks were used to a warmer clime, yet going back home wasn’t an option. It had something to do with the fact that the west coast wasn’t part of the clearance zone, whatever that meant.
The doctor was looking for work. How much easier things would be if he were a butler or chauffeur. Not many people these days were willing to put their health in the hands of a Jap doctor. Yet he kept going to interviews and job-placement meetings run by church groups that had taken it upon themselves to help the Japanese. That was how he met Father Hughes, who put him in touch with Mother Saint John in Toronto. She had piercing blue eyes and a small, pale face, so pale that her skin appeared translucent, like the inner layers of an onion. Lil still couldn’t quite grasp what it was they were trying to accomplish. It had something to do with helping people who’d been released with nothing from some place called “camp,” and the doctor insisted that Lil had lived there, too, though none of the people who came to stay looked the least bit familiar. The doctor said they’d lived in different camps. It didn’t matter, he soothed her, the important thing was that they were here in Toronto now, helping Mother Saint John make everyone’s path a bit easier.
Initially, the plan had been for him to work at a church-run medical clinic, but it turned out he needed to take an exam to practice medicine in Ontario, and he never seemed to have time to get around to it, thanks to all the other important things he and Mother Saint John were up to.
Whenever some lost soul couldn’t find work or got evicted, there was no shortage of spare rooms here. They were old, single men, who didn’t have anyone. According to Mother Saint John, some of them did have families, but they’d fallen out of touch during the war, or were so ashamed of having been left with nothing that they preferred to live the rest of their lives in exile. Some were bitter, their lined faces flushed with booze, as they paced around the house, muttering under their breath in Japanese. Others seemed confused, having succumbed to a childlike helplessness. Lil felt sorry for them and wondered if this was how she’d end up, too, if she didn’t have the doctor. So she and Aunt Haruko prepared big vats of Japanese curry that filled the house with savoury, nostalgic smells and at least made the men smile in anticipation of a good meal.
Why did it have to be so hard to get a little boy into his snowsuit? Jammed zipper, sweater bunched up, endless squirming. Boots on the wrong feet — Tom kicked them off angrily.
“Why do I have to wear all this? Look at you!”
He was right. She was still in her thin, flowered nightgown, which trailed down below her taupe wool coat (a real find — who’d believe what was at the Salvation Army?). She shoved her bare feet into her boots, still damp from yesterday. It was all wrong: she didn’t feel like Lil at these moments, forehead sweating, limpness taking over. Why did Tom keep staring at her as though she weren’t up to the task of being his mother? Something crossed over in her, and that current of maternal anger and strength surged back. She’d teach him who was in charge here.
Before they could have it out, however, the doctor came sailing down the stairs, headed for the door with a sense of purpose. Time, for him, always progressed at a steady clip.
“You’re cooking something nice for the Chongs tonight?”
“Yes, the Chongs.” She searched his face distractedly, suddenly struck by how he’d aged, the lines around his eyes like rivulets leading up to some unknown territory.
“You won’t forget the Chongs are coming to dinner? What are you making?”
“I was thinking Japanese food. Tempura, chawanmushi, rice, pickles?”
As the doctor shook his head, worry deepened the wrinkles. “Let’s not rub it in their faces that we’re Japanese, all right? The Japanese did some pretty nasty things to the Chinese during the war.”
The war? Hot air stirred at the back of her brain, a dust cloud gathering force. What was the doctor saying? Did he expect her to make Chinese food? She didn’t know how to — she didn’t even like Chinese food, with all its greasy, brown sauces — and there certainly wasn’t time to learn. Time. Why was it always slipping away from her, conspiring against her? And why did she feel in the queasy depths of her bowels that something had happened to them during the war, despite the doctor’s insistence that it was the Chinese who’d suffered mercilessly?
He was talking about other dishes she could make, but his words skimmed the surface of her consciousness, registering nothing.
“The war,” she blurted. “What happened to us during the war?”
“I don’t have time for this now, Lily. Just remember: don’t bring up the war at dinner. Please.”
Tom had seized her leg. “Mommy, I’m gonna be late for school.”
“Say goodbye to your father, Tom.”
“Grandfather. You mean grandfather, of course.” An exasperated sigh.
“Grandfather — yes, of course.” Of course nothing. Her mind frantically traced a pattern that followed a dark, contorted maze, never arriving anywhere. It wasn’t the first time they’d reached this impasse. This humiliating act he expected her to put on. Why? Why was it so important to keep the true nature of their relationship secret? (Did it have something to do with eluding the authorities? Was it one of the conditions the church people had imposed upon helping them to move here?)
The doctor was Tom’s father; he had to be, she felt sure of it. He’d always been there for her, taking care of her, bandaging her wounds. She knew they couldn’t have known each other all their lives, yet that was how their relationship felt, like a long, dark road that sprang out of nowhere and faded in both directions into the horizon. It didn’t matter that her face had been marred. The doctor had stood by her throughout that long stretch she could only remember as endless night. And things were better now: they had each other; they had this leaky, tumbledown house; they had their son, and he was everything.
It came and went, his desire for her, like a fluttering, frightened moth. Sometimes he’d creep into her bedroom, night after night, stealthy as the shadow he cast over the blankets. There was love and comfort in his smooth palms cupping her flesh and there was a wellspring of healing power in his body, which, although no longer sinewy, was still warm and inviting. She thought of tender ocean colours at sunset: orange, mauve, pink, blue, purple.
And then, quite some time ago, the visits at night stopped abruptly. His behaviour toward her became jumpy and guilt-ridden; he avoided her eyes at breakfast and addressed her in such cool tones she might have been the housekeeper.
He was Tom’s grandfather, he insisted, which didn’t make sense at all. For how could the seed of life skip a generation?
If only he’d let go of this silly charade. If only he’d give in to the pounding of his blood, which she felt all the more strongly whenever he’d push her away — hands trembling, eyes downcast, cords of his neck taut as kite strings about to snap…. One of these days, he was going to give in to her.
“Are you listening to me?”
She blinked. The doctor’s face appeared flat, devoid of passion. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”
“Just cook some nice Canadian food, all right?”
She nodded.
“Now run along, you two. See you tonight.”
Canadian food.
What on earth was that?
The schoolyard was empty. Snow swirled across the asphalt, a red candy wrapper caught in the upsurge. The two-storey brick building loomed behind, its windows laundromat bright. The place appeared about as welcoming as a prison. Still, Lil ought to be setting a better example for her son, teaching him to get where he needed to be on time. Tom’ll be just as messed up as you are. She squeezed the little mittened hand as she imagined a good mother ought to.
“I’m late. I’ll get in trouble if I go in now.”
“We’ll just have to face the music, won’t we?” Icy wind crept under her coat and nightgown.
“Can’t I just stay home with you today?”
“No, Tom. You have to go to school.”
“Why?”
“Is something the matter?” She knelt down so they were eye level. Recently, she’d become worried that boys in his class were picking on him. He was the only Oriental child.
After the Bloom Page 22