Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [22]
My mother arranged activities for Nancy and me. She found Toshiko, a lovely woman in her mid-thirties, to teach us Japanese dance and music. Toshiko had trained intensively to be a geisha, and before going to Tokyo to begin her esteemed career, she returned home for a last visit with her family—in Hiroshima. While she was home the atomic bomb fell on her town. Seventy thousand were killed that day, her chest was blown off, and her life was blown apart.
No longer a vision of perfection, she could not be a geisha. Instead here she was, in our living room, imparting her life’s learning to two awkward American girls, the daughters of a Navy pilot, the symbolic daughters of the men who had taken away her chance to practice it herself. She dressed in a yukata, a plain cotton kimono, and a woven obi, and at the V of her neckline we could see the scars on her chest. Each week she would show me where to put my hands, how to angle my legs for the most grace, how, with a single touch, to close a fan. She sat with me, a samisen in my lap and the oversize ivory pick in my hand, and taught me the notes to the songs that, because they had no written music, could only be handed down from a mistress to an initiate. She would wrap her small scarred arms around me as I knelt with the instrument across my lap, showing me just where my fingers should be for each note and where they should be when I rested.
Although there was never a moment of unguarded laughter or joy during the lessons, there also was never a moment of resentment in the two years that she came every week. She was not resigned in any way that was marked by bitterness or defeat. She had realigned her expectations, a sad moment undoubtedly, and from that time on, she moved with all the grace and serenity that her new station would allow. There was a part of that serenity that could break your heart, but in it, too, was the indomitable: some things cannot be taken away.
Serene Sundays were spent on the sacred island of Miyajima. It was much changed from a century before, when—because they could not walk on the holy soil—Japanese worshippers would enter on boats through the huge torii that appeared to be floating in the water and make their way on docks and bridges to the temples. By the 1950s, American children could and did hike in the foothills around Mt. Misen, climb wizened trees, and hope to catch sight of the sacred god-deer. We would roam and play while my mother sketched, and when she was through, we would pull her to the red-painted stall outside the five-story pagoda where we would buy oats for what we believed was the Emperor’s white horse, and maybe it even was. I have seen a picture of that stall as it stands today, in which a statue commemorating the white horse now stands. If you had had the good fortune to feed the stout, square-muzzled horse we knew as children, you would be hard-pressed—even in that same stall—to recognize the sleek rendition. I hope to be remembered as favorably.
We would add new places to our list of weekend haunts as Mother would discover them, and she discovered many as she drove throughout southern Honshu. Mother had a secret list of junk stores and antique stores where she knew all the shopkeepers, their wives, and their children by name. And in those shops she spent her time and her money, shopping for herself and for the Red Door.
The Red Door had been a charity project of the base wives. They collected and sold used children’s clothing, but once, when my mother was back in the States at my grandfather’s funeral, the wives donated the entire inventory to local Japanese families who had been devastated by a typhoon.