Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [122]
Henry’s house lay beyond iron gates, square, solid.
‘This was the American side of town,’ Suzuki told him. ‘These houses stood firm on strong foundations.’
She showed him into a large room and disappeared to prepare his refreshment while Joe stood, looking around him at the room, where Nancy’s uncle had lived and raised a family and died peacefully before the bombs fell. There was a view over the bay and surrounding hills.
As he turned away from the window he was startled to find a young girl standing in the doorway, watching him.
‘You must be Joey.’
‘Yes. And you are?’
He spoke in Japanese; she responded in English.
‘Mayu. We talked many times about you.’
Of course, she was Henry’s daughter, it would be natural for her to speak English, yet there was something ungiving about the tone.
‘We?’ he asked.
‘My mother and I. And Cho-Cho.’
He felt a strange constriction around his heart, not a pain, more an intimation of pain. This child had talked about him with his mother.
‘She used to tell us stories. About when she was young.’
He found he was pressing a hand to his chest, easing the not-pain, trying to breathe normally.
He said, ‘You know more than I do.’
She nodded. ‘Of course. She told us everything.’
Suzuki, pausing in the door with a tray, heard the last phrases. She said rapidly, ‘Mayu was a favourite of your mother’s. Cho-Cho used to say that when Mayu grew up she would be an example of the Japanese New Woman. Free to control her own life. She would have been so happy that women will have the vote now.’
Suzuki knelt to place the tray on a low table.
‘When you have rested after your journey, we will go to your mother’s house—’
‘What’s left of it,’ Mayu murmured.
Suzuki, embarrassed, said rapidly, ‘Well of course, like everything else, the damage . . .’
This girl was his cousin. He wondered at the chill he sensed, and set out to win her round.
‘So my mother must have told you about how she and my father met and got married,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ Mayu said tranquilly. ‘So desu ne. She told us how he rented her. For a while.’
From Suzuki, a small cry as she folded into herself, bowing over the tray of green tea and plate of sweet bean paste dumplings. The girl held Joe in her level glance for a moment, smiled, and left the room.
So here it was, the dirty little secret that was his patrimony. He was descended from a hooker and a sailor looking for a good time in a foreign port. As so often in the past, Joe waited for some spontaneous emotion to seize him. And as in the past he remained empty.
He did not feel betrayed: his life had been built on hypocrisy to maintain a semblance of family respectability, but also with kindness, to protect him. But he could not endure further protection; he wanted information, he wanted the truth. He saw that Suzuki could not be trusted here.
‘Is there someone I could talk to, someone else who knew her?’
Suzuki thought for a moment, shaking her head doubtfully.
‘So many are no longer with us . . .’
Then she clapped her hands, remembering.
‘Isha!’
‘Doctor? Her doctor?’
‘Yes, yes. For many years.’
‘Where do I find him?’
The building was no more than a wreck; but broken windows had been patched, the door repaired and, inside, the lobby was clean and polished. The waiting room seethed with distress. People perched cautiously on stools, huddled in chairs; some had only the floor. They held themselves carefully, arms bandaged, some with faces swathed in gauze covering. Joe glimpsed skin marked with burns, unhealed sores. The patients made no noise, their pain taken for granted.
Among them, as at Tule, he loomed. But worse, he stood out in his health, his lack of scabs and surgical dressings. Through gaps in the boarded-up window he could see melted metal, blasted walls and a burnt city; the truth that bore out Oppenheimer’s words when he witnessed the first explosion of