Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [72]
‘My son has a friend whose mother was Japanese . . . Could this affect the family?’
‘I hope not, but I have to tell you it doesn’t look good; they’re running around like headless chickens in Washington spouting stuff about the enemy within and alien spawn of a fiendish empire.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s fear.’
She went back to her office and closed the door.
Later, she called Joey.
‘Can you get home for a few days? Something’s come up.’
The line crackled but his voice was clear. ‘Ma? Is this about Order 9066?’
‘How d’you know about that?’
‘Are you kidding? They’ve been all over the campus, picking up people. They took someone out of the dorm yesterday.’
‘Come home, Joey. Right now. We’ll go down to the registration place together and clear this up.’
He was home by nightfall, and went straight up to Mary’s room. He bent down and hugged her gently, feeling the weightlessness, the twig-like bones beneath her knitted bed-jacket, breathing in the familiar lavender and talc smell of her.
‘Joey dear . . .’
‘How’s my best grandma?’
My only grandma, he added silently. How grateful the Pinkertons must be that they had rejected this alien child right from the start. No chance they might find themselves tarnished by association, now.
After Louis had said goodnight Nancy and Joey stayed up, talking quietly. There were ways of getting round the exclusion order: people who could find a sponsor were allowed to move out of the area, to the east. She knew someone who knew someone –
He reached over and took her hand. ‘Have you read the newspapers? The Fifth Column traitors? The Yellow Peril. Walter Lippmann in the New York Herald Trib said a million Japs are poised ready to take over the whole Pacific coast.’
‘Where is this million-strong Japanese horde?’
‘Search me. But apparently I could be one of them.’
‘Anyway,’ she said dismissively. ‘Lippmann? A man who’s warning us sabotage is about to explode because there’s no sign of it? Please.’
Joey said, gently, ‘A couple of department heads at college did some calling around last week, to see if they could fix relocating their students outside the zone. They got some interesting reactions: nothing personal, but the message was, if these people are too dangerous for the West Coast, we don’t want them moving in on us.’ He shrugged. ‘And you want to go down there and tell them your son is different. The problem is he’s not actually your son, is he? His mother’s a Jap.’
She was crying now, filled with a guilt he would never understand. How could she have failed to see where things were going? She could have quit her job, moved east, out of reach of West Coast panic. And now it was too late; her mother bedridden, her father frail. She was stuck.
‘I’ll come to the interview with you,’ she repeated. ‘I can talk tough. They’ll listen.’
He grinned. ‘You’re about as tough as baked custard. I’m a big boy, I’ll go alone. Anyway, they’ll probably take one look at me and decide somebody’s pen slipped.’
She rubbed her cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘Exactly. Who ever heard of a blue-eyed, blond enemy alien?’
‘Unless you’re talking Germans, of course.’
At least he could still make her smile. But they weren’t rounding up Germans.
*
Next day, trying to get his bearings in this subtly changed world where the ground was shaky underfoot, he went back to the old town, hoping to learn how others were dealing with the situation.
The whole neighbourhood had become a ghost town; shops shuttered and locked, blinds drawn, some with signs in English: ‘Evacuation Sale’.
The streets were empty; a few elderly locals hurried past with bowed heads, stepping out of his way. As before, he was a foreigner here, but a word on a piece of paper had locked him into confraternity with these outsiders.
He returned home in a dark mood, long-forgotten images clouding his mind, an echo of distant voices inside his head, words whose meaning he no longer understood. In the mirror an all-American face looked back at him, but it belonged to a stranger.