Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [23]
‘Well. Perhaps there were misunderstandings. I am his fiancée. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the word.’
‘I know the word. It – means’ – a calmly disdainful inflection – ‘at some time you hope to become his wife.’
‘We will be married in the eyes of God. And the State. There will be a wedding ceremony.’
What ceremony else? Sharpless recalled with a pang Cho-Cho’s wedding: that graceless moment, Pinkerton impatiently draining his bourbon, ‘Bottoms up! Tell her it’s the American way.’
He listened as Nancy talked on, her light voice carrying words through the air, words innocuous in themselves but deadly in their implications; she was laying out the route for a journey, and who was to embark on it: a father, a child and a destination. America.
Cho-Cho bent down and whispered to the boy. He looked at the visitors and wandered away, out through the door. A moment later they heard the alarmed squawk of a chicken and the sound of childish giggles.
His mother gazed incredulously at the pale woman.
‘You want me to give you my son?’
‘It is for his sake.’
Sharpless listened to his niece’s voice: the words rehearsed, dead; lines from some social science textbook.
‘In America he will have a better life. An education. Opportunities. What can you offer him here?’
For a moment he saw the room through Nancy’s eyes: a bare, stark box, a place constructed of wood and paper. Straw matting on the floor, no furniture, no trace of comfort. Money clearly in short supply.
‘With us, he will have a room of his own in a nice house, attend a fine school, go to college, make a career, be happy. I will be a mother to him—’
Cho-Cho’s apparent calm cracked. She said harshly, ‘You will not . . . be a mother to him. I am a mother to him.’
Nancy nodded, conceding the point.
‘But he would be with his father. Can you deprive him of that? Can you condemn a father never to see his child?’
Sharpless thought Cho-Cho might well point out that in fact Pinkerton had never seen his son till yesterday, that he could hardly be wrenched apart from a child he had just encountered for the first time. She might reasonably add that he should make his future with his Japanese wife, his son’s real mother; the three of them were already a family.
Cho-Cho remained silent. Then she made a small sideways movement of her head, as though checking for a half-heard sound. She said, barely above a whisper,
‘Please. Go now.’
Nancy’s hands were tightly clenched, as though in prayer.
She whispered, ‘I beg you.’
Cho-Cho had turned away, smoothing a lock of hair behind an ear. Nancy watched and waited.
There was bargaining to be done here. Dare she offer money? Maybe later. There must be a way; some weakness to be found, used. Her thoughts whirled.
She moved to the door. ‘We will come again tomorrow. Ben wants to see his son.’
Looking back later, trying to detach the possible from the achieved, separate what he witnessed from what he heard, Sharpless became confused; he saw that Nancy had changed; was no longer the fun-loving girl he remembered. And the following day, when she strode into his office, it became clear that from being a guiding figure he had been relegated to the role of onlooker.
She looked gaunt, sharp-featured. In her arms, his cheeks smeared with tears, was the child.
‘We’ve come to say goodbye.’ She sounded rushed.
He was startled. ‘We?’
‘I’m taking Joey with me.’
Sharpless said incredulously, ‘Cho-Cho agreed?’
She gave a quick nod, and turned to the door: ‘We haven’t got much time; the ship’s due to sail.’
It was as she turned that he noticed a dark red stain on the side of her dress, where Joey’s sleeve had rested, a sleeve whose edge was dark with wet blood.
PART TWO
10
Nancy was the product of a good Methodist home: educated to obey her parents, fear God and do the right thing. The right thing on this occasion had surely been to rescue Ben’s child from an immoral woman and an alien environment, restore him to his father and give him a good home.
She now acknowledged that to achieve those ends she had found herself capable