Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [52]
He said, ‘She never wrote to ask how I was, never asked for a picture. She has her life, I have mine. Let it rest. It’s all in the past.’
Later, when the others were busy in the kitchen, he went downstairs, treading carefully. The letter lay on the table, the snapshot next to it. He picked it up and looked closely at the family group: the thin, pale man, the comfortably plump wife and the three small daughters, all dressed formally in kimonos, hands folded, looking into the camera.
These girls were family; cousins, just as Jack, who dreamed of a life in the navy, was his cousin. Caught in the mirror above the fireplace he saw himself: a younger Jack. But within him lay buried seeds that were part of another family tree.
‘It’s all in the past,’ he had told Nancy. But the past is a movable continent.
*
The old town at Portland’s North End connected Burnside and the park blocks. Between there and the Willamette river lay territory new to Joey, a foreign country: the neighbourhood known as Japantown – Nihonmachi to its own people. Threading his way through its streets, he found it baffling, with its enigmatic street signs, its posters and placards in exotic characters that looked more like angular drawings than writing. Everything was unfamiliar, odd: the grid of streets that stretched to the waterfront, old shops shaded by narrow canopies, tall windows filled with strange goods; unrecognisable food; drifting from doorways, smells that repelled him because they, too, were unrecognisable. And then, on a corner, a surprisingly grand building with rows of arched windows: the Merchant Hotel, looking out of place, like a beached whale.
As he crossed and turned into narrower streets there were old posters for unfathomable events illustrated by bloated wrestlers, masked fencing couples, lantern parades. The streets were filled with figures moving quietly but purposefully. And they too were ‘different’, small and dark and dressed with unnatural neatness. Swerving, sidestepping, they overtook him as he wandered: these people had work to do.
He had done his best to be ordinary in a new world: troubling threads trailing from a lost life had been severed one by one. Home. Mother. Language . . . Wrenched away, transplanted, he had behaved correctly, kept his thoughts to himself. He had tried to hold on to fragments, moments, but gradually they faded, dimmed. The American flag was big and bright. Slowly he became part of the new landscape. He played baseball, read the funnies on Sunday; went to the movies, learned the words of popular songs on the Hit Parade, thumping along with Fats, using a shoebox for a keyboard. Early on, when Bing crooned his soft, blurry syllables from the radio speaker Ben would sing along, humming, attempting a scat, following the master, ‘Where the blue of the night meets the gold of the day . . . b’b’booo . . .’ Joey had learned to do that, copying his dad. Ben was gone but Bing was still around, still warbling.
There had been moments, the curve of a neck, a pale kimono, a puzzled question – ‘Your mom was called what?’ – but for years now the situation had not arisen. His mother’s name was Nancy, his father was Ben and once upon a time Ben had been a swimming champ and a sailor but then he died. Serious faces. Sympathy. It must be real tough to lose your dad. Safe territory.
He looked around him: the streets seethed like an anthill and he had no part in it. He was an outsider here, an American.