‘They’re at least as relevant as your propaganda lecture,’ Ishmael’s mother replied. ‘If you’re going to remember something like that and connect it in some way to the defendant’s expression – well then, you’d better be remembering other things, too, just to keep yourself fair. Otherwise you’re being subjective in a way that is not at all fair to the accused. You’re allowing yourself an imbalance.’
‘The defendant’s expression isn’t part of it,’ said Ishmael. ‘Impressions aren’t part of it; feelings aren’t part of it. The facts are all that matter,’ said Ishmael, ‘and the facts weigh in against him.’
‘You said yourself the trial isn’t over,’ Ishmael’s mother pointed out. ‘The defense hasn’t made its case yet, but you’re all ready to convict. You’ve got the prosecutor’s set of facts, but that might not be the whole story – it never is, Ishmael. And besides, really, facts are so cold, so horribly cold – can we depend on facts by themselves?’
‘What else do we have?’ replied Ishmael. ‘Everything else is ambiguous. Everything else is emotions and hunches. At least the facts you can cling to; the emotions just float away.’
‘Float away with them,’ said his mother. ‘If you can remember how, Ishmael. If you can find them again. If you haven’t gone cold forever.’
She got up and went to the woodstove. He sat in silence with his forehead in his hand, breathing through his nose and suddenly empty – a great, airy space had blown up inside of him, a bubble of ether expanding against his rib cage – he was empty now, emptier than he had been just a moment earlier, before his mother had spoken. What did she know about the vast region of emptiness that inhabited him all of the time? What did she know about him anyway? It was one thing for her to have known him as a child; it was another for her to come to terms with the nature of his adult wounds. She didn’t know, finally; he couldn’t explain himself. He did not want to explain to her his coldness or reveal himself in any way. He had watched her, after all, mourn her husband’s death and it had been for her in part the discovery that grief could attach itself with permanence – something Ishmael had already discovered. It attached itself and then it burrowed inside and made a nest and stayed. It ate whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it.
His mother had gone cold when Arthur died; her grief for him was fixed. But this had not stopped her from taking pleasure in life, it now occurred to Ishmael. There she stood at the stove ladling soup with the calm ease of one who feels there is certainly such a thing as grace. She took pleasure in the soup’s smell, in the heat of the woodstove, in the shadow of herself the candlelight now cast against the kitchen wall. The room had gone dark and tranquil now, the one warm place in all the world, and he felt empty in it.
‘I’m unhappy,’ he said. ‘Tell me what to do.’
His mother made no reply at first. Instead she came to the table with his bowl of soup and set it down in front of him. She brought her own bowl to the table, too, and then a loaf of bread on a cutting board and a dish of creamery butter and spoons. ‘You’re unhappy,’ she said, seating herself. She put her elbows down on the table and rested her chin against her palms. ‘That you are unhappy, I have to say, is the most obvious thing in the world.’
‘Tell me what to do,’ repeated Ishmael.
‘Tell you what to do?’ his mother said. ‘I can’t tell you what to do, Ishmael. I’ve tried to understand what it’s been like for you -having gone to war, having lost your arm, not having married or had children. I’ve tried to make sense of it all, believe me, I have – how it must feel to be you. But I must confess that, no matter how I try, I can’t really understand you. There are other boys, after all, who went to war and came back home and pushed on with their lives. They found girls and married and had children and raised families despite whatever was behind them. But you – you went numb, Ishmael. And you’ve stayed numb all these years. And I haven’t known what to do or say about it or how I might help you in some way. I’ve prayed and I’ve talked to Pastor – ’
‘There were guys who prayed at Tarawa,’ said Ishmael. ‘They still got killed, Mother. Just like the guys who didn’t pray. It didn’t matter either way.’
‘But just the same I’ve prayed for you. I’ve wanted you to be happy, Ishmael. But I haven’t known what to do.’
They ate their soup and bread in silence while the kettle on the wood-stove hissed. The candle on the table cast an arc of light across their food, and outside, through the misty windowpane, the snow on the ground caught the moonlight beyond the clouds and held it so that it suffused everything. Ishmael tried to enjoy the small pleasures of warmth and light and bread. He did not want to tell his mother about Hatsue Miyamoto and how he had, many years ago, felt certain they would be married. He did not want to tell her about the hollow cedar tree where they’d met so many times. He had never told anybody about those days; he had worked hard to forget them. Now the trial had brought all of that back.
‘Your father fought at Belleau Wood,’ his mother told him suddenly. ‘It took him years to get over it. He had nightmares and he suffered just as you do. But it didn’t stop him from living.’
‘He didn’t get over it,’ said Ishmael. ‘Getting over it isn’t possible.’
‘It didn’t stop him from living,’ his mother insisted. ‘He went right on with his life. He didn’t let self-pity overwhelm him – he just kept on with things.’
‘I’ve kept on,’ said Ishmael. ‘I’ve kept his newspaper going, haven’t I? I – ’
‘That isn’t what I mean,’ his mother said. ‘That isn’t what I’m getting at. You know as well as I do what I’m trying to say. Why on earth don’t you go out with someone? How can you stand your loneliness? You’re an attractive man, there are a lot of women who – ’
‘Let’s not go over all of this again,’ said Ishmael, putting down his spoon. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’
‘For you, what else is there?’ said his mother. ‘When it comes down to it – to answer your question – here’s what you should do about being unhappy: you should get married and have some children.’
‘That isn’t going to happen,’ said Ishmael. ‘That’s not the answer to the question.’
‘Yes, it is,’ said his mother, ‘It genuinely, surely is.’
After dinner he lit the kerosene heater and put it in her bedroom. His parents’ grandfather clock still ticked away after all these years with a maniacal endurance. It reminded him now of Saturday mornings when his father would read to him under the sheets with the clock thundering in the background. They’d read Ivanhoe together, taking turns, and then David Copperfield. Now, he saw in his flashlight beam, his mother slept under eiderdown quilts that were just beginning to yellow. He was surprised to find beside her bed the antique RCA turntable that had, until recently, resided in his father’s old study. She’d been listening to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony as performed by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in 1947, and Ishmael, seeing it on the turntable, imagined her in bed with that melancholy music playing and a cup of tea beside her. He imagined her with the Mozart on at nine o’clock at night.
He opened the taps in the sink and bathtub and went out to check on her chickens. There were twelve of them, all Rhode Island Reds, huddled into a ball at one end of the chicken house his father had built years before. For a moment Ishmael caught them in the beam of his flashlight, then he reached in and took up a nearby egg left untended in the cold. It was hard to the touch and he knew that inside the embryo was solidly frozen. He warmed it for a moment in the palm of his hand, then rolled it gently in the direction of the chickens. They rearranged themselves in the face of this, panicking and fluttering just a little.
He went back in and, still wearing his coat and hat, wandered through the rooms of the cold house. His breath came forth in jets of fog and disappeared into the darkness. Ishmael put his hand on the newel post at the bottom of the stairway, then removed it and shone the
flashlight beam upward. Shallow moons had been worn into the risers; the bannister, he saw, had lost its luster. Upstairs, the room he’d slept in as a boy had been converted by his mother into a place to sew and iron and to store her clothes. Ishmael went up and, sitting on his old bed, tried to remember how it had once been. He recollected that on a good day in winter, when the maple trees stood bare, he could look through his dormer window out beyond the trees and see the green salt water to the southwest.
He’d had a button and a pennant collection, a thousand pennies in a large mason jar, a fishbowl, and a model tin lizzie hung from a strand of wire in one corner. They were all gone now, he didn’t know where. He’d kept his glass underwater box in the corner of the closet, his mitt on top of it. On certain nights the moonlight had flooded through his dormer window and bathed everything in blue, beguiling shadows that prevented him from sleeping. He’d sit up listening to crickets and frogs and on some nights to the radio at his bedside. He’d listened mostly to baseball games – the Seattle Rainiers of the Pacific Coast League – and he could still remember the voice of Leo Lassen barely audible beyond a field of static: ‘White leads off first, dancing, dancing, ready to break, he’s driving Gittelsohn ab-so-lute-ly crazy. . . . Strange is at the plate now after taking his practice cuts … hum, baby, hear this fine crowd on hand at Side’s Stadium greet Strange as he digs in, he’s a real favorite, isn’t he? Oh, you should be here tonight! Mount Rainier is out beyond the rightfield fence looming up like a great big ice cream cone. Gittelsohn is into his windup now and … there goes White no time for a throw White is standing up safe at second base hoooo boy! White is safe! He’s stolen second base! White is safe at second base!’
His father, too, had liked baseball. Ishmael had sat with him by the Bendix in the living room, and they had both been mesmerized by the urgency Leo Lassen imparted to a battle so many miles away in Seattle, Portland, or Sacramento. The voice from the radio – it had dropped an octave, altered pitch, slowed and lengthened measurably – was now that of someone’s wayward uncle confiding the secrets of his golf game; now it miraculously glided through a tongue twister; now it suddenly sensed great depths of meaning in an ordinary double play. Arthur would slam the armrest of his chair in satisfaction at a fortunate turn of events; he was saddened when errors in judgment or carelessness cast the team into a hole. At lulls in the game he would stretch his legs out, twine his hands across his lap, and stare at the radio as it spoke to him. Eventually he slept with his head lolled forward and stayed that way until Leo Lassen went shrill again in ecstasy about the game. Freddy Mueller had hit a double.
Ishmael remembered his father half-asleep, the crescent of warm light thrown by the table lamp containing only his figure, that of the radio, and the turned-back pages of a magazine in his lap – Harper’s or Scientific Agriculture. By the late innings of the game the rest of the room – a few laggard coals glowed orange beneath the fireplace grate – lay sleeping in soft, quiescent shadows. Coats hung from polished brass hooks in the foyer, and his father’s books, arranged by size, stood neatly along the glassed-in shelves of two vaultlike oak bookcases. When something momentous came to pass – a home run, a stolen base, a double play, a run batted in – his father would stir, blink two or three times, and by dint of habit bring his hand to rest on the spectacles sitting atop his magazine. His hair lay close to his skull in gray twists, and his chin tilted slightly heavenward. Gray hairs sprouted from his ears and nostrils, and more straggled forth from his eyebrows. When the game was over he would shut off the radio and fix his spectacles carefully in place by curling their , stems behind his ears. They were antique steel full moons, and when he put them on he invariably underwent a quiet transformation, becoming suddenly professorial, handsome in the way that some outdoorsmen are yet scholarly at the same time. He would pick up his magazine and begin to read as if the game had never happened.
Ishmael’s father had died in Seattle at the Veterans Administration Hospital. He’d had cancer of the pancreas and in the end of the liver, and Ishmael had not been there at the final moment. One hundred and seventy islanders turned out for Arthur’s funeral, which was held on a warm, cloudless day in June at the San Piedro Memorial Cemetery. Masato Nagaishi, Ishmael recalled, had presented himself in the funeral’s aftermath to offer condolences on behalf of the Japanese-American Citizens’ League and the Japanese Community Center. ‘I wish to say,’ said Masato Nagaishi, ‘that the Japanese people of San Piedro Island are saddened by the death of your father. We have always had great respect for him as a newspaperman and as a neighbor, a man of great fairness and compassion for others, a friend to us and to all people.’ Masato Nagaishi took Ishmael’s hand and gripped it in his own tightly. He was a large man with a broad face and no hair on his head, and he blinked often behind his spectacles. ‘We know you will follow in your father’s footsteps,’ Mr. Nagaishi said forcefully, shaking Ishmael’s hand. ‘We are certain you will honor his legacy. For now, like you, we are all sad. We mourn with you and honor your father. We think of you in your grief.’
Ishmael opened the closet door and looked in at the boxes stacked there. He had not gone through the things he’d packed in them in more than eight years’ time. He was no longer very interested in what they contained – his books, his arrowheads, his essays from high school, his pennant collection, his penny jar, his buttons and sea glass and beach stones; they were the things of another time. He had it in mind, though, to dig out the letter Hatsue had written him from Manzanar and read it again after all these years in the spirit of an indulgence. Ever since he’d stopped to pick her up in the snowstorm he’d been indulging himself foolishly. Beneath the surface of everything else he’d been thinking about her with pleasure.
It was buried in a box, just where he’d left it, between the pages of a book on boatmanship he’d been given on his thirteenth birthday. The return address on the envelope was Kenny Yamashita’s, and the stamp, curiously, was upside down. The envelope, now brittle with age, felt dry and cold to the touch. Ishmael tucked the flashlight under his armpit and sat down again on the edge of the bed with the envelope held between his fingers. The letter inside had been written on rice paper that after all these years was fast deteriorating, and he held it with the care he felt it deserved, moving it now into the flashlight beam, where he saw her delicate handwriting.
Dear Ishmael,
These things are very difficult to say – I can’t think of anything more painful to me than uniting this letter to you. I am now more than five hundred miles away, and everything appears to me different from what it was when I was with you last on San Piedro. I have been trying to think clearly about everything and to use all this distance to advantage. And here is what I’ve discovered.
I don’t love you, Ishmael. I can think of no more honest way to say it. From the very beginning, when we were little children, it seemed to me something was wrong. Whenever we were together I knew it. I felt it inside of me. I loved you and I didn’t love you at the very same moment, and I felt troubled and confused. Now, everything is obvious to me and I feel I have to tell you the truth. When we met that last time in the cedar tree and I felt your body move against mine, I knew with certainty that everything was wrong. I knew we could never be right together and that soon I would have to tell you so. And now, with this letter, I’m telling you. This is the last time I will write to you. I am not yours anymore.
I wish you the very best, Ishmael. Your heart is large and you are gentle and kind, and I know you will do great things in this world, but now I must say good-bye to you. I am going to move on with my life as best I can, and I hope that you will too.
Sincerely,
Hatsue Imada
He read it over a second time, and then a third, and then he turned off the flashlight. He thought of how she’d had her revelation at the very moment he’d entered her, how the invasion of his penis had brought with it a truth she could discover in no other way. Ishmael shut his eyes and thought bac
k to that moment in the cedar tree when he had moved, briefly, inside of her and how he had not been able to predict how pleasurable that would feel. He had no way of knowing what it would feel like to be inside, all the way in where he could feel the heat of her, and his surprise at the sensation had been overwhelming, and then she had suddenly pulled away. He had not come, he had been there for less than three seconds altogether, and in that time – if her letter was right – she’d discovered she didn’t love him anymore while he’d come to love her even more. Wasn’t that the strangest part? That by entering her he’d granted her the means to understand the truth? He’d wanted to be inside of her again, and he’d wanted her to ask him to be there again, and on the next day she’d gone away.
In his Seattle years he’d slept with three different women, two of whom he felt briefly hopeful about, wondering if he might in fact fall in love with them, but this had never happened. The women he slept with asked often about his arm, and he told them about his war experiences, and he decided before long that he didn’t respect them and a kind of disgust developed. He was a war veteran with a missing arm, and this fascinated a certain type of woman in her early twenties who fancied herself mature beyond her years and was serious about herself. He slept with each for a few more weeks after deciding he wanted nothing to do with them – he slept with them angrily and unhappily and because he was lonely and selfish. He came inside them hard and often, keeping each up until the middle of the night, and in the late afternoons, too, before dinner. He knew that when he asked them to walk out of his life he would be even lonelier than he’d been before, and so he waited for a few weeks, both times, just to have someone around at night, just to come inside someone, just to hear someone breathing under him while he moved his hips with his eyes shut. Then his father came down to the city because he was dying, and Ishmael forgot about women. His father died one afternoon while Ishmael was in the newsroom at the Seattle Times banging away with his five fingers at a typewriter. Ishmael went back to San Piedro for the funeral and to tie up his father’s business affairs; he stayed to run his father’s paper. He lived in an apartment in Amity Harbor and kept to himself insofar as that was possible for a newspaperman on a small island. Once every two weeks or so he masturbated into the folds of his handkerchief, and that was the extent of his sex life.