Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [63]
After Henry had gone she remained in the room without moving. All sensation seemed to have drained from her body and only her mind was alive. How long had she been here, lying, crumpled, breathing the grassy smell of the tatami mat? She became aware that the woven strands had pressed deeply into her cheek. The sun had dipped below the hillside. She sat up, smoothed her hair. She allowed herself very tentatively, as though touching a wounded place, to examine how she felt, and she realised that she was facing her real farewell to Pinkerton. Since she had returned to painful life in the hospital bed she had dwelt often on that last sight of him leaving the house with the American woman; she had begun to nurse the secret fantasy that one day he would reappear, holding Sachio’s hand, and that happiness would return.
She knew now that it could never be.
She forced herself to explore the area of pain; to think of him as he was: beautiful, golden, lazy. In the bath, his body contained by the watery tank like some pale creature from the deep, he wallowed, submerging himself, then surfacing, shaking water from the wet-darkened curls. His growing tenderness – with time he learned to undress her more gently, she learned how to respond. Small moments of sweetness – ‘Here you go, Mrs Butterfly, surprise for you,’ – Portuguese castella cakes from the market, a piece of fine silk, the cloisonné bracelet she had not worn since he left her . . . at those moments she had permitted herself to dream, to believe that one day he would return.
Now he had really left her, sinking, choking, lungs filled with green slime, and she too was choking, throat clotted with tears, lungs heaving, and though she knew that one day life would return to her limbs, she would walk and talk quite normally, still she sensed a withering. A part of her had died.
*
Some time later, when she could safely speak his name, she talked to Henry about Pinkerton, and wondered which of them could say they knew him, ‘What was he like, really?’ And Henry debated what to say: could he tell her Pinkerton was a selfish bastard without a sensitive bone in his body – but what did he know, in fact, about the man who died that night, fished out of the Anacostia river, his body laid on the earth alongside an ex-serviceman shot by a trigger-happy trooper?
Mary had written, ‘Nancy is devastated. There’s a rumor President Hoover never meant the operation to get out of hand to that extent but who can ever know the truth of these matters?
‘You should know, Henry,’ his sister wrote, ‘I was not happy about Nancy marrying Ben in the first place. What happened in Nagasaki, the child, it was not what I had hoped for my daughter. And this proves I was right to be anxious. Ben seems to have been of help to the men on that sad march, but he did not have to go, he had a family to consider. I do think he was a good father, in his way, but now Nancy is left alone to care for the child. We must all pray for him. God welcomes a repentant sinner.’
So what should he say to Cho-Cho, waiting now?
‘What was he really like? Well now, which of us ever knows the full picture? I can say one thing. He was a good father.’
He threw her a quick glance but her face was expressionless. He had no idea what she was thinking.
PART FOUR
28
‘Anthropology? Where will that take you? Louis asked. ‘Will anthropology give you a foot on the corporation ladder?’
Joey shrugged. ‘Probably not. But I don’t want to work for a corporation.’
‘Young people today, they think college is a game. Jobs don’t grow on trees, Joey.’
‘Well they do if it’s a mulberry tree and you’re into silk.’
‘Don’t get cute with me, kid!’
‘Okay. You’re asking why anthropology. Well, Margaret Mead said—’
‘And don’t give me what the smart-asses say. That