Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [64]
Joey found it difficult to explain to Louis why the study of difference and similarity, social systems, alien cultures and faraway countries held a certain appeal. And in any case that was not the whole of it
‘Gramps, anthropology tries to show us what makes us human; the world’s full of people killing each other . . . Maybe that would be just a bit more difficult if we didn’t think of it as Us and Them all the time. If there could be another word, a word for the whole mix. What we have in common.’
He stopped. Inside his head, there was nuance and complexity. He was aware that what emerged was too simple, naïve.
Long ago, when he was a kid, Nancy had read aloud to him a story about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole and had adventures. But she fell very slowly, so that she could take a look at what she was passing. Anthropology was a bit like that: falling into the past, but slowly, so that you could reach out and pluck things off the shelf of time and study them as you progressed. You immersed yourself in a strange world; you couldn’t change what you saw, but you could learn from it.
He shrugged helplessly.
‘You know: if you prick us do we not bleed? If you poison us do we not die—’
‘Oh, right,’ Louis said. ‘If we’re getting into that, I’ll tell you what I think of anthropology: Much Ado About Nothing!’
He punched his grandson affectionately on the shoulder. ‘Just kidding.’
From her rocker by the window, engaged on a seemingly endless piece of patchwork, Mary said mildly to Joey, ‘I remember, at the beginning, you didn’t know what it meant to squeeze a lemon. What a baseball mitt was. What I find fascinating is the way people can change.’ She glanced at Joey over her glasses. ‘But I’m not an anthropologist.’
Despite the growls and cartoon harrumphing, Louis was enormously proud of the boy, secretly supposing him the brightest kid at Oregon State – even if he was studying a load of hooey.
‘What I’m thinking about,’ he remarked when Joey had left the room, ‘is the war. I know the action’s a long way off, and there’s an ocean between us, but FDR’s cosying up to Winston Churchill like a long-lost cousin, which I personally find worrying.’
‘Nancy’s working for the Democrats and she thinks he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread—’
‘And that may yet turn out to be a flash in the pan. Well I don’t trust Roosevelt, the mealy-mouthed bastard, and I certainly don’t trust Churchill: it’s not enough to have an American mother.’
Mary picked up a new hexagonal patch and slipped a template into position.
‘If we’re drawn into this war,’ she murmured, ‘Joey could be drafted.’
‘You think I don’t know that? You think I want to see our boy brought home in a coffin?’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Roosevelt’s a smart guy.’
‘That’s what worries me.’
29
Cho-Cho had retained her slenderness. The body once childlike and weightless, later bony and undernourished, now flowed gracefully from nape to ankle, though her skin had lost its milk-white gleam and was shadowed with an ivory pallor. She was in her mid-thirties, but the ironic half-smile, the knowing look and fine lines around the eyes, gave an impression of someone older. Experience is an ageing process.
Today she was engaged in an argument with Henry. They argued frequently and amicably; it was a conversation that had been going on for years, sometimes with fierce disagreement, usually breaking up in shared laughter.
Cho-Cho no longer covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed. As Henry said, ‘Those women have ruined your traditional charms.’
‘My dear, you are so nihonjin desu-ne.’ She shifted into Japanese.
‘“Traditional” is simply another way of saying “handed down”. And who does the handing down? The men. Confucianism told us a woman should obey her father as a good daughter, her husband as a good wife, his parents as a good daughter-in-law and her son as a good mother. Why should women be controlled by something so obviously against their interests?’ She added, in English, ‘Give me one reason!’
He threw