Ichiro had indeed been hoping for tears—but these were born of anger and rebellion. Since they were not at all of the variety he expected, he was at a loss as to what to do in such bizarre circumstances. Frantically he searched for a model. In the Kabuki he would probably have dismissed the creature with strong words advising suicide. In the Noh he could have come back as a ghost and made life miserable for her. Or perhaps she would have come back and made life miserable for him—you could never tell about the Noh. What would Yoshitsune—one of his heroes—have done in the un-likely event he'd ever faced such circumstances?
Failing to find a model among Japanese sources, he thought abroad. Now what would Emma Bovary's husband have done? But, finding he could remember nothing whatever about Mr. Emma and very little about Emma herself, he decided, like Daruma, to put stones from the garden in his mouth, that he might never speak again. But at that moment he remembered Demosthenes had put pebbles from the beach into his mouth that he might speak the better. Momentarily torn between the rigid opposites of East and West, Ichiro did something he practically never did, something indeed which he virtuously fought against ever doing—he acted as he felt, said what he thought:
"There is nothing wrong in kissing, I'm sure. You should feel no shame. I feel no humiliation. You are, however, presented with a choice between us. It is otherwise of no importance, and you merely waste your tears."
Haruko raised her head, tears clinging to her lashes. "You are not angry with me, then?"
Ichiro decided he had gone too far. This is what always happened when you spoke as you felt—you were taken advantage of. "I don't say that," he said, attempting to regain some of the dignity he had so foolishly cast away, "but I will say that if you have done nothing that wrongs either your honor or mine, or that of our families, then the problem is simplified rather than complicated."
"But what of tonight?" asked Haruko, her underlip trembling.
"What of it?"
"We're to be meeting for the first time. The go-between will be there to introduce us. The fact that we meet proves that we have intentions, that our parents approve. It is all but an announcement to the world."
"Oh, not at all. Why, many times parents take their sons or daughters to the theater, or to view the cherry blossoms at Ueno, or to Enoshima, simply to meet someone eligible who will be there too. And if the boy isn't interested, he simply doesn't make any further move, makes no attempt to see her again; then their go-between says the boy has pneumonia or has gone to Kyushu or something of the sort. You know all this as well as I do."
"But they know better—these girls and their families—about Kyushu?"
"To be sure, but they aren't going to have a public disagreement. And, when next they see each other on the street, the son and daughter simply pretend the other doesn't exist. It's very simple. In the same way this meeting tonight need have no great meaning."
This information irritated Haruko: she had been quite certain of Ichiro's affections. Besides, how could he treat so lightly this meeting which was to be the turning point of her life? Their lives had been so designed that it was mathematically impossible for them not to meet tonight, and if nothing came of it, it would be she who had disturbed the pattern, not he.
"Well," she. said, "if the meeting makes so little difference to you, perhaps we could well dispense with it entirely. I could get pneumonia and you could go to Kyushu, or the other way about if you happen to have a preference."
Ichiro looked at her with real annoyance. Her refusal to play her traditional role, the one already indicated for her, the one exemplified in all of her female relatives and friends, wounded him considerably. But, at the same time, he seemed to detect in her a disinclination for the meeting, the success of which he had for years taken for granted. And as soon as he realized that it might be possible that she did not wish the marriage, he began to want it more than he ever had before.
"My statement, if you will remember, was not that it made little difference to me, but that it did not necessarily compromise either of us. I think our parents would be most upset if we didn't meet this evening. Besides it's the opera about Madame Butterfly, and you like that."
Haruko smiled. So he remembered that, after all these years. She had had a phonograph record of the part about the one fine day, and had played it over and over again until poor Chocho-san sank, struggling, beneath the needle scratch. "Yes, I still like it," she said.
"Well, then," said Ichiro, "it's all settled. We'll meet this evening as planned and be introduced, which will be amusing, and then—about the other—we shall see."
"Yes," she said, smiling through her tears, "it's all settled."
He then realized that, indeed, it was. This was the ostensible reason he had come to see her—to arrange the evening. It was now all arranged, and he had no further excuse for prolonging the interrogation. There was no recourse but to stand and go. He began to understand how his father must have felt with the Colonel.
As he opened the fusuma, Haruko bowing low beside him in a sudden return to Japanese etiquette, he almost caught the old servant with her ear pressed to the door. She instantly began dusting the floor with her handkerchief, but not before he realized she had heard everything, had seen him come like a samurai and depart like a ronin. She would doubtless lose no time in running to the telephone and pouring out the news to the servant at his house.
The old woman bowed, but not so low as before. She was no longer so certain how the wind blew. If the soldier came back, thought Ichiro, he'd probably receive a bow equally low.
"Until tonight," said Haruko from the tatami.
"Until tonight," said Ichiro, bowing stiffly from the waist.
Then there was nothing left for him to do but leave the house, in a much different frame of mind from that in which he had entered it. He saw the husks of his determination scattered about his departing feet, and could only wonder, in chastened awe, at the inconsistency of life and the appalling fact that it was now he himself who was contrite.
A single leaf fell artistically from the maple tree. This was too much. A large tear rolled down his cheek.
After Ichiro left, Haruko remained alone, kneeling in the center of the room before the red-lacquer table. The cup, half-filled with cold tea, was on one corner, and in the alcove beyond, the untended chrysanthemums were gracefully dying, their leaves curling, their petals falling away from the closely packed heart of the flower.
She was presented with a dilemma. Her problem was so classically correct, so very Japanese that—had she not been so unhappy—she might have smiled. Since no one was watching, she slid sidewise from her knees and stretched her legs before her, the bottom of her kimono falling open. If her mother had entered at that moment and found her daughter sprawled on the floor, her legs open, she would have believed her quite demented. She would have thought Haruko had been very poorly trained.
But, of course, that was part of the problem. Haruko knew just what she ought to do, just as she knew, from years of training, that the well-bred Japanese girl did not sit otherwise than securely upon her feet. A good girl would not question her parents' wishes in the matter of marriage, but would willingly comply, would bow before her husband and be the perfect wife with unquestioning devotion and unswerving loyalty. In this many girls had succeeded before her and many would after her.
But, for Haruko, this was not enough. She had been to girls' school and had learned Civics and Home Economics and Biology. She spoke English a little and read it rather considerably better. No, she was plainly an individual, and must treat herself as one, particularly since no one else seemed likely to.
She did wish, however, that her problem were a bit more unique. To have achieved a problem was in itself no small triumph—lots of girls didn't even do that. But it was insulting to realize that the problem was the same old dilemma that had faced every Japanese girl from Townsend Harris's Okichi to the war brides she'd been hearing so much about. It was the classic choice between
the Japanese way—self-abnegating, compliant, serene—and the new way—adventuresome, bold, romantic, the very selfish and quite American way.
She had often seen this problem in the movies and been moved to tears. In the Kabuki the problem was actually the same, though abstracted, and the unfortunate lady nearly always killed herself. In Western novels it was the same, and if the girl didn't end like Madame Bovary, she ended like Sister Carrie, and to Haruko there didn't seem much choice between the two.
What one didn't read about or see in the films was what eventually happened to the many young Japanese ladies who had chosen the romantic way. Presumably nothing too violent occurred, or else the papers would carry it. Lacking information, Haruko had no clear idea of what to expect if she married the soldier. The only hint she could think of from literature was that she would be relatively unhappy—as in Madame Butterfly, that most beautiful of all operas, through which she was sure to weep tonight, seeing herself on the stage, feeling the dagger in her own vitals. The thought thrilled her most pleasantly. Still, whatever the fate of the expatriated Japanese maidens, nothing could be as bad as what she saw occurring to them in Japan.
All this thought had inspired her. She decided to write in her diary. Like all her friends, Haruko too kept a diary, very elaborately locked up and filled with her most precious thoughts. She often stole away to the corner of her room to read it, for it was better than a novel—which it greatly resembled.
She could always cry at the entries she'd written upon receiving word that her elder brother had been killed at Saipan, and there was one beautiful page devoted to the death of their old cat. She shed tears indiscrimately over both—not the events but the extreme beauty of her style caused her to weep. Her diary was in English, and that was what helped make it so beautiful
She stood up, for now she had enough material for a long and beautifully pathetic entry. Quickly she went to her room, opened the bottom drawer of the chest, and after feeling through her folded summer kimono, discovered the volume. Fountain pen in hand, she composed herself; then, one hand shading her eyes, she began to write, giving voice to all the beautiful thoughts which were welling up from within her.
"O, horrid dillema of Japanese girl," she wrote. "O, immortal confrict of will and idea. My head grows numm at thought. Can I choice wise between my true Japanese way and new American way? Yes. I can wisely choice. But. How? When He (Private Michael Richardson, US Army at Shinjuku, Tokyo) kiss my heart burn with love and admiration. My breast pulpitate. My blood rush in mighty river and my sense grow dumm."
She stopped and reread the paragraph. Of course that last part was not quite true, but it was not truth that made her diary so interesting. Now she must have a contrast to that.
"But, when the Other (Ichiro Ohara, student only) touch my hand nothing happen my heart, my breast, my blood, my sense. I do not reaction to him. Therefore I have fatal love—like Romeo and Juliet, like Tristan and Isolde, like Miss Greer Garson in Dusty Blossoms. Soon I must decide my mind. If not I die. I fade away."
She decided the latter was not becoming and crossed out "fade away," substituting "linger slow like autumnal flower, perish like Japan's lovely clisanthemum." That was very poetic—and also very true. In the next room the flowers were slowly dying.
"But action is expected from heroine (Myself) and soon comes time for eternal and important choose. Which shall I be? O, horrid dillema of Japanese girl. O, that I was ever born to suffer sharp tooth of sorrow so much."
Haruko quickly placed a blotter on the words lest her falling tears blur them. Then, shielding the diary from the falling drops with her hand, she read the entire entry. It was very beautiful.
At the end she suddenly jotted down, in hurried Japanese, a poem which had just occurred to her:
Tokyo's windy sky
Bears the aspect of winter
And the radio
Is intermittently heard
Through the noises of the wind.
To be sure, this was not nearly so beautiful, just a perfectly traditional waka. The Japanese characters looked all crabbed when compared with the easy-flowing, open, and friendly English letters. Besides, her American thought was so much more satisfying than her Japanese.
She was about to cross out the waka, when it occurred to her that the idea of a radio in a waka was nicely anomalous—and very modern sounding. She closed the
THE OFFICE CLOSED AT NOON ON SATURDAYS, AND Gloria occupied herself with a copy of Vogue she had in the desk until time for the Major, who had returned to his quarters to change, to pick her up. After half an hour Gloria looked at the clock, examined her teeth in the mirror, combed her hair, pulled on her coat, and walked down the corridor.
At the bottom of the stairs she turned to the MP's and said appealingly: "Look, you both know me. Do I have to dig out that stupid pass?"
"I'm sorry, lady—we got to see it."
With a gesture of exaggerated impatience she opened a large suede purse and began pushing about the contents. From time to time she threw objects onto the floor—half a stick of gum, a name card, an empty book of matches, and, inadvertently, two hairpins. These last she picked up. Eventually she found the pass, ran it under the MP's noses, and flounced through the doors.
One MP turned to the other: "And who the hell was that?"
"Her name's Gloria and she works in one of the offices here for some colonel or other. She's a secretary—a sexatary, if you get me."
"Christ, I thought she was the Queen of Sheba. What ya mean—sexatary?"
"Well, she's the Queen of Special Services—distributes her favors right royally."
"And how do you know—she ever distribute in your direction?"
"Nah—she's the officer type. Nothing lower than looies."
"Is there anything lower?"
They both looked out of the window at Gloria, who was standing by the curb gazing affectionately at a small child playing on the sidewalk. She picked it up, tickled it under the chin, and set it against the building, out of harm's way. A sedan drove up, the driver in front; the rear door opened.
"Hop right in, Miss Wilson. Hope I didn't keep you waiting long."
"Not long, Major—just waiting." She climbed in, carrying the end of her coat over one arm, then waved to the child before closing the door.
"O. K., Joe—American Club."
The driver turned around and looked inquiring.
"American Club! American Club!" shouted the Major, loudly.
The driver frowned apologetically.
"Tokyo Kaikan," said Gloria quickly and pleasantly.
"Gee," said the Major, shaking his head with admiration. "I didn't know you could talk Jap."
"Why, Major, I talked Jap since but a child."
"Well, is that so, Miss Wilson? What d'ya know! And here I thought you were just another DAC. Born here, I guess?"
"Yes, I'm part Formosan, you know."
"No, I didn't."
"Oh, heavens, yes. You see, my father was from Tierra del Fuego and my mother was Laplandish, but they settled in the Pacific. Both so disliked the cold, of course."
"I guess I can understand that, being from Texas and all. Why, we—"
"Oh, no, it's not the same at all. You can never realize the intense cold of a good old Lapland winter. Even the Laplanders have difficulty believing it. So a Texan . .."
"I guess that's so .... Gee, I never knew that. Makes me think I'm out with somebody real important."
"What an extraordinarily sweet thing to say."
She turned and looked at the approaching park, green in the distance. The Major, always cordial in the office, became positively overpowering on their "dates." On each one he behaved precisely as though he had never met her before.
This was what he called "not letting the office get in the way." In this way he was able to forget how Gloria often glared at him and always took Private Richardson's side during any of their many arguments. The Major had his eye on Gloria. He was constantly on
what he called his "good behavior" with her, even when he sometimes half-suspected she was making fun of him.
Now he said: "Well, it's Saturday again. What'd you do last Saturday night? Really live it up?"
"Me? Heavens, what on earth makes you think that? I hope I don't appear to be that kind of girl, Major. Why, I stayed in my room and wrote my dear old mother, and then I washed my hair, and then I went to bed."
"It's a shame more people don't follow your example, Miss Wilson," the Major said seriously.
"I suppose there's always a great deal of drinking and such—Saturday and all."
"Altogether uncalled for, I must say." He paused, then quickly added: "But I was out Tachikawa way last Saturday—business, you know. Us PIO's got to keep good contacts with all the boys. . . and, well, I won't sully your ears, Miss Wilson, but the things I saw weren't fit for no American woman to see."
"I can just imagine.... Were many there?"
"Women? Oh, lots."
"And... the others?"
"Men? Oh, yeah, lots of men, all drunk and lying around, just not caring what happened to them. Like Babylon in the movies. I bet I saw a regiment stretched out."
Gloria turned and looked out of the window. "Well, it's doubtless not loyal of me," she went on after a minute, "but I've noticed that the morals of some Americans over here seem rather low."
The Major turned to her and leaned forward. "You know, Miss Wilson, I feel exactly the same way. You and I agree on that."
Gloria skilfully slid her hand across the seat, out of reach of the Major's.
"Isn't it beautiful?" said the Major, indicating the park, though at the moment they were again in the midst of blackened ruins.
"Gorgeous," murmured Gloria. She waved her hand toward the window. "Particularly that portion." A woman had come from one of the board huts nearby and was squatting on the ground, her bagging trousers around her ankles.
The Major quickly averted his eyes, then caught a glimpse of distant green. "Oh, yes, the trees you mean. Isn't that a nice shade of green though? You know, I just love nature. Nature in everything."
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