Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [70]
In her bureau drawer lay a letter stamped Nagasaki, but America was at war with Japan. There would be no further clandestine correspondence between two mothers. With war, life was put on hold.
As for Joey, he had wiped Cho-Cho, his uncaring, unnatural natural mother from his mind after the first letter arrived. Or so he told Nancy.
In her accustomed chair beneath the reading light she took a sip of bourbon and thought about the page she had just read: a long-dead French aristocrat suggesting that fear does strange things to a man. Sometimes, he said, it gives wings to his heels, sometimes it nails them to the ground. And – she would have underlined the words but for the respect she had for the printed page – there is no other passion which sooner carries away our judgement. Nancy took another sip.Well Pearl Harbor had certainly proved his point.
First came the reality: America was at war. Next the panic, the questions: would cities be blitzed? Would firebombs rain from the skies, shells be launched from the surrounding seas? Fire drills were practised, gas masks demonstrated, though not distributed, barrage balloons assembled, blackouts proposed, rationing discussed. She had seen the newspaper pictures, the wrecked ships that sat in the foreground of the nation’s vision, evidence of an unimaginable vulnerability. Paranoia whispered that the enemy was everywhere.
Nine years earlier, when Nancy’s hero was sworn in as President of the United States, in her careful copperplate she wrote out the words of his inaugural address and pinned it to the kitchen wall. Like most people she was unaware at the time that Roosevelt, a great borrower, was paraphrasing Thoreau. She knew now, from the page before her, that Montaigne had said it first: The thing I fear most is fear.
The knock came as Nancy was about to carry her mother’s breakfast tray up the stairs.
She opened the front door, balancing the tray precariously on her arm. A man in a dark suit, carrying a sheaf of papers, raised his hat.
‘Ma’am? I’m looking for someone in the name of Pinkerton.’
‘I’m Mrs Pinkerton.’
‘Ma’am, we understand you have an alien resident as part of your household.’
Nancy stared at the man in puzzlement. She had no idea what he was talking about. Alien resident? Did he mean a foreign visitor? They had no foreign visitor. She shook her head.
‘You must have the wrong house.’ Holding the tray, she was closing the door with her knee.
‘Ma’am, we have the documentation—’
‘Well then, there must be some mistake. This is my parents’ home. There’s just the two of them, and me and my son.’
‘Your son.’ His pen hovered. ‘Would that be a Joseph Theodore Pinkerton?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Ma’am, our records show that Joseph Pinkerton was born in the town of Nagasaki, Japan, maternal parent Japanese. That makes him a resident alien—’
She stopped him. ‘Wait here, please. My mother needs her breakfast.’
She left the door open, and went cautiously up the narrow stairs, taking care not to knock the tray against the wall. Two minutes later she was back in the hall, confronting the dark-suited man with his weasel features, his sharp eyes, his claw-like hands . . . She realised she was demonizing an innocent messenger.
‘You were saying?’
He talked on, in a flat, expressionless voice, his words blanked out by the noise invading Nancy’s head; a roaring that came like a pain.
She broke in. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that. Could you say it again?’
He seemed to be repeating everything word for word, like a record when the needle jumps, steel skidding on shellac, and this time she held on to the sense of it, the almost incomprehensible fact that because her son had a Japanese maternal parent he was required to register at a neighbourhood civil control station –
‘He should have registered already, like the others. West Coast Defense Command notices are up all over town.’
Nancy said, ‘Notices? I’m not aware of any notices. And why does he have to register?’
‘So