“What on earth is this?” Isaac asked the day a skeleton wearing a top hat appeared on his bedside table.
“Baron Samedi. I had it sent here from New Orleans. He’s the god of death and also of good health,” Lillian told him.
Isaac’s initial impulse was to sweep away all these fetishes that had invaded his room, but love for his wife won out. He could easily overlook them if they prevented Lillian from sliding any further down the slope of fear. He had no other means of comforting her. He was aghast at his own physical collapse, since he had always been strong and healthy, and considered himself indestructible. He was bone-weary, and only his determination allowed him to fulfill the obligations he had imposed on himself. Among them was that of remaining alive so as not to betray his wife.
Alma’s arrival gave him a burst of energy. He had never been one for displays of sentiment, but his poor health had made him vulnerable, and he had to be very careful to avoid the flood of feelings he felt inside from overflowing. It was only Lillian in their most intimate moments who glimpsed this side of her husband’s character. Isaac turned to his son, Nathaniel, for support: he was his best friend, associate, and confidant, but he had never needed to make that explicit, because both of them took it for granted and would have been embarrassed to do so. He treated his daughters, Martha and Sarah, with a benevolent patriarch’s affection, and yet in secret he had confessed to Lillian that he didn’t really like his daughters, because he found them mean-spirited. Although she would never have admitted it, Lillian did not much like them either. Isaac celebrated his grandchildren from a prudent distance. “Let’s wait for them to grow a little, they’re not human beings yet,” he would say jokingly to excuse his behavior, but deep down this was what he really felt. However, he had always had a soft spot for Alma.
When, back in 1939, this niece arrived from Poland to live at Sea Cliff, Isaac was so smitten with her that he later came to feel a guilty pleasure that her parents never appeared, as this gave him the chance to replace them in the little girl’s heart. He did not want to mold her as he did his own children, simply to protect her, and that allowed him the freedom to love her. He left it to Lillian to look after her female needs, and instead had fun challenging her intellectually and sharing with her his passion for botany and geography. It was when he was showing her his gardening books that the idea of creating the Belasco Foundation occurred to him. They spent months going through different possibilities together until the idea took shape, and it was Alma, who by then was thirteen, who thought of creating gardens in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Isaac admired her and watched fascinated as her mind developed; he understood her loneliness and was moved when she turned to him for company. She would sit beside him, one hand on his knee, to watch television or study gardening books, and the weight and warmth of that hand was a precious gift to him. He in turn would pat her on the head when he passed by and the others were not looking, and would buy her sweets that he left under her pillow.
However, the young woman who returned from Boston, with her geometrical hairstyle, red lips, and confident stride, was a far cry from the timid Alma of the past, the little girl who had slept clutching her cat because she was afraid of sleeping alone. Still, once they had overcome the initial awkwardness, they soon resumed the sensitive relationship they had enjoyed for more than a decade.
“Do you remember the Fukuda family?” Isaac asked his niece a few days after her arrival.
“Of course I do!” Alma replied, startled.
“One of the sons called me yesterday.”
“Ichimei?”
“Yes, he’s the youngest, isn’t he? He asked if he could come to see me; he has something he needs to talk about. They are living in Arizona.”
“Uncle, Ichimei is my friend, and I haven’t seen him since his family was interned. Can I be there when he talks to you, please?”
“He gave me to understand it was a private matter.”
“When is he coming?”
“I’ll let you know.”
A fortnight later, Ichimei appeared at Sea Cliff, dressed in a cheap dark suit and black tie. Alma had been waiting for him with a racing heart, and before he could even ring the bell she opened the door and flung herself into his arms. She was still taller than he was and almost knocked him to the ground. Ichimei, amazed at seeing her and taken aback because public demonstrations of affection were not made among the Japanese, did not know how to respond to such effusiveness. A moist-eyed Alma gave him no time to think about it. She grabbed his hand and dragged him inside, repeating his name over and over, and as soon as they had crossed the threshold she planted a kiss squarely on his mouth. Isaac Belasco was in the library in his favorite armchair, with Ichimei’s cat, Neko, who by now was sixteen years old, sitting on his lap. Shocked at what he was witnessing, he hid behind his newspaper until Alma finally brought Ichimei to him. Then she left them together and closed the door.
Ichimei briefly outlined for Isaac Belasco the fate that had befallen his family: the old man was already aware of most of it, because following the telephone call he had investigated as much as he could about the Fukudas. He not only knew about the deaths of Takao and Charles, how James had been deported, and the poverty the widow and her two children found themselves in, but had done something about it. The only novelty Ichimei provided was Takao’s message regarding the sword.
“I am truly sorry about Takao’s passing, he was my friend and teacher. I’m also sorry about Charles and James. No one has touched the spot where your family katana is buried, Ichimei. You may take it whenever you wish, but it was buried ceremoniously, and I think your father would like it to be dug up with equal solemnity.”
“That’s true, sir. And at the moment, I have nowhere to put it. Could I leave it here? It won’t be for much longer, I hope.”
“That sword honors this house, Ichimei. What’s the hurry to remove it?”
“Its place is on my ancestors’ altar, but for now we have no house or altar. My mother, sister, and I live in lodgings.”
“How old are you, Ichimei?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Then you are an adult, and head of your family. It is for you to take on the business I started with your father.”
So Isaac Belasco explained to the astonished Ichimei that in 1941 he had set up a partnership with Takao Fukuda for a flower and decorative plant nursery. The war had prevented the business from going ahead, but neither of them had ended their verbal agreement, and so it still existed. There was a suitable plot of land in Martinez, to the east of San Francisco Bay, which he had bought at a very good price. It was five acres of level, fertile, and well-watered soil, and there was a modest but decent house on the property that the Fukudas could live in until they found something better. Ichimei would have to work very hard to make the business a success, as had been the agreement with Takao.
“We already own the land, Ichimei. I’ll put in the initial capital to prepare the soil and plant; the rest is up to you. As you make sales you can pay off your part as best you can, without having to hurry or pay interest. When the time is ripe, we’ll put the business in your name. For now the land is in the name of Belasco, Fukuda, and Sons.”
What he did not say was that this company and the land purchase had gone through less than a week earlier. Ichimei only discovered this four years later, when he went to transfer the business to his own name.
* * *
The Fukudas returned to California and established themselves in Martinez, forty-five minutes from San Francisco. By working side by side from dawn till dusk, Ichimei, Megumi, and Heideko succeeded in producing a first crop of flowers. They found that the soil and the climate were among the best they could have hoped for; all that was needed was to place their product on the market. Heideko had shown she had more guts and muscle than anyone else in the family. At Topaz she had developed her fighting spirit and her talent for organization; in Arizona she kept the family going when Takao could scarcely
breathe for all his cigarettes and coughing fits. She had loved her husband with the fierce loyalty of someone who does not question her destiny as a wife, but becoming a widow was a liberation for her. When she returned to California and discovered five acres full of possibilities, she took charge of the business without hesitation. At first, Megumi had to obey her mother and wield the spade and rake on the land, but her mind was set on a future far from agriculture. Ichimei loved botany and had an iron will for heavy work, and yet he was not good at practicalities and had no eye for money. He was an idealist, a dreamer, with a taste for drawing and poetry, more inclined toward meditation than commerce. He did not go to sell his spectacular crop of flowers in San Francisco until his mother told him to go and wash the dirt from under his nails and put on a suit, a white shirt, and a colored tie (no hint of mourning); load up the van; and drive it into the city.
Megumi had made a list of all the most elegant florists, and Heideko visited them one by one, list in hand. However, she would wait in the van, because she realized she looked like a Japanese peasant and spoke dreadful English, while Ichimei, his ears red with embarrassment, went in to sell their wares. Anything that involved money made him uncomfortable. Megumi thought her brother was not made to live in America: he was discreet, austere, passive, and humble; if it were up to him, he would go around dressed in a loincloth begging for food with a bowl, just like the holy men and prophets in India.
That night, Heideko and Ichimei returned from San Francisco with an empty van. “That’s the first and last time I’m going with you, son. You’re responsible for this family. We can’t eat flowers, you’ll have to learn how to sell them,” Heideko told him. Ichimei tried to delegate this role to his sister, but Megumi was already halfway out the door. They realized how easy it was to get a good price for their flowers and calculated they would be able to pay for the land in four or five years, providing they lived frugally and did not meet up with any disasters. In addition, when he saw what they had produced, Isaac promised he could get a contract with the Fairmont Hotel for them to maintain the spectacular floral arrangements in the reception hall and lounges that gave the place its fame.
After thirteen years of bad luck, the Fukuda family was finally taking off. It was then that Megumi announced that she was thirty years old and thought it was time she set off on her own. In the intervening years Boyd had married and divorced; he was the father of two children and had yet again asked Megumi to join him in Hawaii, where he was doing well with his garage and a fleet of trucks. “Forget Hawaii, if you want to be with me, it will have to be in San Francisco,” she told him. She had decided to study nursing. At Topaz she had attended several births, and each time she held a newborn baby she experienced the same ecstatic feeling, the closest thing to a divine revelation she could imagine. This area of obstetrics, until then dominated by male doctors and surgeons, was just beginning to open up to midwives, and she wanted to be in the vanguard of the profession. She was accepted in a nursing program specializing in female health, which had the advantage of being free. Over the following three years, Boyd went on wooing her discreetly from afar, convinced that once she had her diploma she would marry him and come to Hawaii.
November 27, 2005
It seems incredible, Alma: Megumi has decided to retire. She had such a struggle to get her diploma, and loves her profession so much that we thought she would never do so. We’ve calculated that in forty-five years she has brought some five thousand five hundred babies into the world. As she says, it’s her contribution to the population explosion. She is eighty, a widow for ten years now, and has five grandchildren. It is high time she took a rest, but she’s got it into her head to open a food business. No one in the family can understand it, because my sister can’t even fry an egg. I have had a few free hours to paint in. This time I am not going to re-create the Topaz landscape, as I have done so often in the past. I’m painting a path in the mountains of southern Japan, near a very ancient, isolated temple. You should come with me to Japan, I’d love to show you that temple.
Ichi
LOVE
That year, 1955, was not just one of effort and sweat for Ichimei. It was the year of his great love. Alma abandoned her project of going back to Boston, becoming a second Vera Neumann, and traveling around the world. Instead, her only aim in life was to be with Ichimei. They met almost every day at nightfall, once his work in the fields was done, at a motel six miles from Martinez. Alma always arrived first and paid for the room to a Pakistani clerk, who looked her up and down with deep disdain. Proud and haughty, she stared him in the eye until he was forced to lower his gaze and hand over the key. The same scene was repeated most every weekday.
At home, Alma had announced she was taking evening classes at the University of Berkeley. Isaac, who prided himself on having progressive ideas and who could do business with or be a friend to his gardener, would have been unable to accept the idea that someone from his family had intimate relations with one of the Fukudas. As for Lillian, she took it for granted that Alma would marry a mensch from the Jewish community, just as Martha and Sarah had done. The only one who knew Alma’s secret was Nathaniel, and he did not approve either. Alma had not told him about the motel, and he had not asked, because he preferred not to know the details. He could no longer dismiss Ichimei as a childish whim of his cousin’s that she would get over as soon as she saw him again, but he still hoped that at some point Alma would understand they had nothing in common. He no longer remembered his boyhood friendship with Ichimei, except for the martial arts classes at Pine Street. Once Nathaniel had gone to secondary school and the theatrical performances in the attic were over, he had seen little of Ichimei, even though Ichimei often came to Sea Cliff to play with Alma.
When the Fukuda family returned to San Francisco, Nathaniel met him briefly once or twice, sent by his father to give him money for the plant nursery. He could not understand what on earth his cousin saw in him: he was an insubstantial figure who floated by without leaving a trace, the opposite of the kind of strong, self-confident man needed to handle a woman as complex as Alma. Nathaniel was sure his opinion of Ichimei would be the same even if he weren’t Japanese; it was a question of character, not of race. Ichimei was lacking that quota of ambition and aggression all men need, and which he himself had developed through sheer willpower. He recalled very clearly his years of fear, the torment at school, and the superhuman effort he had made to study a profession that required an evil streak completely missing in him. He was grateful to his father for making him follow in his footsteps, because working as a lawyer had toughened him; he had acquired an alligator’s hide that allowed him to manage on his own and to succeed.
“That’s what you think, Nat, but you don’t know Ichimei, and you don’t know yourself,” Alma told him when he explained his theory of masculinity to her.
* * *
The memory of those blessed months when she and Ichimei met at the motel, where they couldn’t switch off the light because of the cockroaches that emerged at night from the corners of the room, was able to sustain Alma in later years, when she sternly tried to drive out love and desire and replace them with the penance of fidelity. With Ichimei she discovered the multiple subtleties of love and pleasure, from frantic, urgent passion to those sacred moments when they were lifted by emotion and lay still in bed side by side, staring endlessly into each other’s eyes, content and sated, abashed at having touched their souls’ deepest levels, purified from having stripped away all pretense and lying together totally vulnerable, in such a state of ecstasy they could no longer distinguish between joy and sadness, the elation of life or the sweet temptation of dying there and then so that they would never be apart. Isolated from the world through the magic of love, Alma could ignore the voices inside her head calling her back, crying out for her to be careful, warning her of the consequences. They lived only for the day’s encounter; there was no tomorrow or yesterday. All that mattered was the grimy room with its jammed wi
ndow; the smell of damp, worn-out sheets; and the endless wheezing of the air-conditioning. Only the two of them existed, from the first longing kiss as they crossed the threshold and before they even locked the door; their caresses standing up; flinging off their clothing, which lay where it fell; their naked, quivering bodies; each drinking in the heat, savor, and smell of the other; the texture of skin and hair; the marvel of losing themselves in desire until they were exhausted, of dozing in one another’s arms for a moment, only to renew their pleasure; the jokes, laughter, and whispered secrets; the wonderful universe of intimacy. Ichimei’s fingers, capable of returning a dying plant to life or repairing a watch without looking, revealed to Alma her own rebellious, hungry nature. She enjoyed shocking him, challenging him, seeing him blush with embarrassment and delight. She was daring, he was restrained; she was noisy during her orgasms, he covered her mouth. She dreamed up a rosary of romantic, passionate, flattering, and filthy phrases to whisper in his ear or write to him in urgent missives; he maintained the reserve typical of his character and culture.
Alma gave herself to the unconscious joy of love. She wondered how nobody noticed the bloom on her skin, the bottomless dark of her eyes, the lightness of her footsteps, the languor in her voice, the burning energy she could not and would not control. She wrote in her diary that she was floating and felt bubbles of mineral water on her skin, making the down on her body bristle with pleasure; that her heart had blown up like a balloon and was sure to burst, although there was no room for anyone but Ichimei in that huge, inflated heart because the rest of the world had become distant and hazy; that she studied herself in the mirror, imagining it was Ichimei observing her from the far side of the glass, admiring her long legs, her strong hands, her firm breasts with their dark nipples, her flat stomach with its faint line of black hair from navel to pubis, her lipstick-red lips, and her bedouin skin; that she slept with her face buried in one of his T-shirts soaked with his gardener’s smell of earth and sweat; that she covered her ears to imagine Ichimei’s slow, gentle voice, his hesitant laugh that was the opposite of her own exaggerated guffaws, his warnings to take care, his explanations about plants, the words of love he whispered in Japanese because in English they seemed unreal, his astonished exclamations at the designs she showed him and at her plans to imitate Vera Neumann, without pausing even for an instant to bemoan the fact that he himself, who had real talent, had only been able to paint when he could find a couple of hours after his incessant work on the land, before she came into his life, took up all his free time, and sucked out all the air. The need for her to know she was loved was insatiable.